Every time we start working on something in the house, we discover a new example of how not to do things. Yesterday I spent a lot of time on the previously discussed basement demolition. One of the things that slowed me down was the maze of the steam pipes, gas lines, plumbing, and electrical that festoon the basement like spaghetti scattered by a baby. The basement apartment was built recently, in the last five or ten years. Because they framed and drywalled without first addressing water issues, whole stretches of wall are rotted and moldy. In the above picture (sorry it’s a bit grainy), you can see the conduit come down to a junction box, then flexible conduit (BX) comes out, goes behind the adjacent studs, back up, back behind the studs, across the conduit, and finally terminates in an electrical box. The outlet covers were screwed in with drywall screws, and the whole thing is rusting from all the moisture that was trapped in the wall. The lower junction box was completely hidden behind drywall. I have no idea why they have a big unnecessary loop, but it’s just one of many ways they messed things up.
This is a minor example. The real fun started with the light fixtures in the bedrooms. I wanted to shut off the circuits and ideally remove all of the conduit so I could get all of the drywall down. The wiring contortions I discovered required videos to truly explain. The first one covers the bedroom light fixture and its branches.
The second video is an electrical line servicing the first floor.
The third video shows off the gas lines that were added in the basement.
So that’s the most recent brilliance of the previous owner. We’ll share more as we come across it.
Our current big project is the basement. We brought in two companies to give us quotes on the repairs to the structural columns. Both of them said they could give us a quote, but it would be more accurate if we removed the drywall so they could see what was hiding underneath. The support beam in particular was mostly obscured, and knowing if we need to replace it or not is rather pivotal. As a result, we started demolition of the basement. Initially we were only going to remove the drywall from the central wall that runs in line with the beam that supports the first floor, but with all of the mold and the desire to know if we have any foundation issues, we opted to just gut the whole thing now instead of waiting.
Basement Hallway
If you haven’t seen the basement, allow me to share the “Hostel” styling and the not-at-all-creepy vibe it gives off. The beam travels down the wall you see on the left of this picture, which looks toward the back of the house. Two of the three bedrooms down here didn’t have windows, and the tiles area on the right was part of the kitchen. Here’s a better shot of it.
Basement kitchen
I’m not sure what the people that lived in this apartment were paying per month, but I’m definitely sure it was too much. Just to round out the house of horrors, here’s one of the bathroom, or as I often called it, “the rape scene”.
Basement bathroom
Unfortunately, I have to take credit for the brown crud in the tub. I dumped out a bucket of water only to find it has a thick layer of sludgy sediment at the bottom. In any case, we started the basement demolition several weeks ago, and have been bagging up the drywall and throwing it out as we go. It’s a slow process since we’re wearing masks that make breathing a chore and have mostly been working on it a couple hours at a time after dinner during the week.
Basement hallway demo
Things are coming along, but there’s a lot left to do. The drywall along the North side has been removed, as well as from the center wall. We’ve made progress on the ceiling and are working around to the walls on the South side. So far we’ve been leaving most of the framing in place, especially from the center wall since it’s helping hold up the house. The columns are largely rotted out, so only the exterior decking 4x4s they incorporated into the wall are keeping things from sagging even worse.
Basement room demo
We found that the sill plate had completely rotted under the window, and that the rats had chewed through every single stud so they could travel through the walls. We’ll be bagging debris up tonight. Sarah’s been getting deals on contractor bags at Menards and with four garbage toters we can put out a fair amount per week. I’ll post again when it’s done so you can see the basement looking like a basement and not like the set from a horror movie.
One of the challenges I’ve been mulling over in my brain for quite some time is how we’ll tackle the floor joists. The good news is that we’re not there yet, so we have time to figure it out. First, let me explain a bit how the floors are built and why I’m thinking about it.
Balloon Framing
The house is balloon construction. If you don’t know what that is, check out the link for details, but in short we have studs running the entire height of the house. A ribbon is notched into the inside perimeter of the studs at the height of the floor joists, which then rest on top of it and are nailed to the studs. The floor joists for the first floor are 2x10s, so they’re decently strong and the floor is nice and stable. The second floor, on the other hand, has 2x6s. Being so much smaller means two things: the floor has a lot of bounce (known in engineering terms as deflection) and it can’t span as far. Both of those are issues because we want to make the floor plan on the first floor more open and we want to have stable floors upstairs, especially since we’re planning a second floor laundry.
So what to do about it? Well there are a few options. The simplest option is to sister additional 2×6 joists to the existing ones. That means we can’t increase any spans, though, so we’d need to define a floor plans that is either more enclosed or has support beams below the joists to carry the load. I’m not a fan of support beams visually, but we could integrate them into a coffered ceiling or archways between rooms.
A more involved option is to add new joists that are either I Joists or Open Web Trusses. These could be installed throughout the floor or only in areas with larger spans. They would lower the ceiling by at least six inches. The I Joists in particular are capable of spanning the full width of the house with minimal deflection. Installing these isn’t a simple matter, though. For one, we’d have to do a lot of load calculations to ensure the structure was stable. More importantly, we’d have to cut out the walls that were still holding up the existing floor joists in order to fit the new, taller joists in. We’d also have to build new framing structure into the outside walls to carry the increased load to the foundation. All of this gets very complicated and guarantees we have to bring in a structural engineer.
This is pushing me back toward the simpler option, but there’s an added wrinkle: HVAC. Even if we have radiant floor heating, we still need ducts for air conditioning or even just air circulation. We want to have a whole house air filter, especially once we’ve sealed all the walls, windows, and doors up tight. Without forced air heat, there still needs to be a system to bring in fresh air from outside or at least filter the indoor air. How we run the duct work depends on the system we get. One of the reasons we’re looking at high velocity forced air is that it uses smaller diameter ducts, but even so we need a main trunk, plus we can’t exactly cut big holes through the 2x6s when they’re already so small.
The plan is to run the HVAC from above and below, meaning the first floor ducts will be in the basement and the second floor ducts will be in the attic. Unfortunately, with the ceiling in the basement being so low I can’t help but think this isn’t the best plan. We hope to lower the basement floor to gain some inches, but even so it won’t be all that high. I’m wondering if some creative ceiling designs might solve these problems. If we can use a combination of coffers in the living room and strategically placed bulkheads in the kitchen and dining room, we may be able to work out a solution that lets us keep the joist height as it is and still reinforce the floor.
We’ve been making some little improvements to our living space as the larger projects continue. Sarah and I’ve been ripping down drywall in the basement, and I’m sure I’ll have a post about that before long. For now, though, here’s some things we’ve been doing upstairs to improve the amount of storage.
There’s basically two closets on the whole floor. There’s a big one in our bedroom, that’s taken the role of pantry and general storage. We got some shelves for that closet and loaded them up. Even so we wound up taking a lot of stuff downstairs to store in one of the empty rooms. The other closet is in the front bedroom (if you can call it that; it’s not very big). We put in a couple of rods and some shelves for our clothes.
Pot Rack
The pot racks were a clear need early on. We don’t have a ton of cabinet space but we do have a ton of kitchen stuff. That helped a lot, especially after we learned the trick of putting the lids on the handles, which freed up a bit more space in the cupboard. We picked them up in a couple sizes from IKEA.
The kitchen was still a problem, so another trip to IKEA and some screwing and gluing later we had a new kitchen cart to hold some of the overflow and give us a bit more counter space that doubles as a cutting board.
Kitchen Cart
With the kitchen under control, the next project was putting up a coat rack by the front door, since our clothes closet in the front bedroom is doing double duty. I used the folded post-it note trick to catch the dust as I drilled the holes.
Drilling Holes
The coat racks were from the same trip to IKEA as the kitchen cart. We also got a big box of screws and wall anchors that went along with it. That place is great when you just need something cheap to get the job done. I used a level to space them properly and keep the height the same, but rather than use a pencil I just drilled against it. It seemed to turn out all right.
Wall Anchors
Of course, the last step was putting them up and trying them out.
Coat Rack
I think it turned out pretty well. Of course, if all the projects were this easy and straightforward the house wouldn’t be quite so daunting.
The weather has been especially fickle as of late. After my initial test firing of the boiler it promptly got warm again and stayed that way for a couple of weeks. When it got colder again, I went to fire up the boiler. Since it worked fine the first time, I didn’t anticipate any problems. Unfortunately, the initial success was not reproducible. I suspected the gas control knob since it had been –shall we say– sticky. In order to find out I had to get a multimeter so I could trace back the electrical connections.
Things seemed to be good. I was getting current, though it seemed a bit erratic, and there wasn’t a clear reason that the burner wouldn’t light. I redo all of the wiring because it was a mess, with old cracked wire and lots of places that could be shorting. Even so, nothing was working. A few days went by and I was running out of things to check and the house was getting cold. Then, Sarah sends me a video while I’m at work.
I ask her to disconnect the thermostat and when I get home I can no longer get any signal from the transformer. So I ordered a new transformer. The house gets colder and colder until we can see our breath while watching TV. Have I mentioned there’s no insulation in this house? Despite paying for rush shipping, the part takes almost a week to arrive.
I install the new transformer and sure enough, the weather suddenly gets warm and then hot. With it eighty degrees in the house, I can’t easily test the system, so I move on to other things. Then this past week, it starts to get cold again. I flipped the switch on the thermostat, went downstairs… and nothing was happening. Incidentally, somewhere in this process I learned that the system is steam, not hot water, so while there is a cold water feeder, it isn’t powered. Everything just runs low voltage.
I break out the multimeter again and test voltage at each connection. Nothing. No juice at all, even out of the new transformer. I test the power coming into the transformer, and the line tester beeps affirmative. It doesn’t make sense. I test resistance between the terminals of the transformer and confirm it isn’t shorted. Finally, I disconnect the new transformer to inspect it and make sure I’m not missing something. Everything looks fine.
Unsure what else to try, I hook the transformer back up. I’m not sure what I did differently, but this time the transformer was live. I connected the wires, testing at each point with the multimeter. Signal is getting through the pressure cutoff, but when it gets to the low water cutoff switch, it stops. It’s in alarm state. The strange thing is that I know the low water cutoff works. If I drain water from the system, it fills it back up. There seems to be a problem with the mechanism that connects the switch to the actual water feeder. According to the documentation, it could be several things, with different parts to replace. Since I know the low water feed is working, I take the chance and simply bypass the switch.
The last stop for the wire is the gas control valve. I turn off the thermostat and reconnect the valve. I relight the pilot. I run back upstairs and switch on the thermostat. As I come back down the stairs I can hear it: the boiler is firing. Finally.
Sarah and I went back upstairs and watched tv. In about half an hour we started hearing noises from the radiators. They started getting warm. They hissed a little. The pipes banged. Most importantly, the house got warm. I checked pressure, made sure it shut off when it reached the right temperature, and it’s continued to work beautifully –if noisily– the last few days. It just needs to make it through this winter. Next year we’ll start work on our massive HVAC undertaking. For now, we have heat. All it cost me was time and about twelve dollars for the transformer.
