While the earlier posts were full of questions, this post is full of the decisions we’ve reached and why we made them. There are a lot of factors to consider, like the insulating value, the ability of the wall to dry so it doesn’t trap moisture and grow mold, the thickness (both on the outside where we’re close to neighbors and the inside where we don’t want to lose square footage), and of course the cost.

The animation below shows the spray foam and drywall added on the inside, and then the house wrap, rigid foam, furring strips, and finally the siding.

Let’s walk through what this means. On the inside we’ll fill the wall cavity (3 3/4″ thick) with closed cell spray foam (applying directly to the existing wood plank sheathing). The foam insulation has an R-value of a bit over 6 per inch, giving us about R-23. Unfortunately, the studs are only about R-5 and comprise 10% of the wall, so our actual rating is about R-21. Then we add drywall and paint.

On the outside, once we’ve removed the existing vinyl and cement siding, we install house wrap over the plank sheathing (performing proper flashing on window edges) then add 2″ of XPS rigid foam. The rigid foam adds R-10 and functions as a thermal break. Then we add furring strips (steel, not wood) which act as a capillary gap behind the siding so it doesn’t overheat in the summer and doesn’t wick moisture, and finally the new cement fiber siding (which doesn’t contain asbestos). Adding the minimal R values of the sheathing and drywall brings our total wall insulation to about R-32, slightly above the minimum R-30 recommended for our region.

Our challenge will be finding good prices on all of these materials. Rough calculations put our costs for this assembly at $6.92 per square foot, which I’m hoping we can bring down considerably. The good news is that I’m done thinking about walls for a while. I can focus on HVAC, which is a whole other can of worms.

Fence Before

I’m not a big fan of fenced-in front yards. I think they make a home seem unwelcoming, and a street of them feels closed off. However, there are some good reasons to keep it and for now at least it’s going to stay. Given that, I needed to do something about the white finials. Maybe this is a personal preference thing, but I think they look terrible. Maybe if they were painted well it would be another matter, but they’re rusty and crappy.

I started by sanding down all of the bubbling paint on the fence with steel wool. I used a wet rag to remove dirt, cobwebs, wind-blown seeds and all the other detritus that had accumulated. Then, wearing a black shirt and goggles, with a piece of cardboard as a shield, I spray painted everything that wasn’t black.

Fence After

I think the end product looks a lot better. While I was at it I also painted the railing on the porch. This was one of the rare aesthetic improvements we’ve made to the exterior of the house and I’m glad I finally found a warm, dry day to do it.

Living Room

While things crank along with the architect, we’re continuing to prepare for first floor demolition. We decided that taking off all of the trim first would allow us to remove the plaster and lath more quickly, which will be important because when that happens we’ll need to rent a dumpster and they charge by the day. The pile of wood in the above picture is some of what we’ve gotten so far, which includes the baseboards from the living room and dining room, the crown molding from the dining room, and some door trim.

Under the door trim

Speaking of door trim, I decided against the “large” size for this picture. Inside the door frame are mass graves for roaches. We found similar if worse buildup when we were working on the second floor. On that topic, we haven’t seen any sign of cockroaches in a long time. We continue to bring out the exterminator every few months to make sure it stays that way. We’ve come an incredibly long way from seeing them every day or so and a light year from the absolute infestation that we started with. We’re confident that when the house is done there won’t be any evidence that they were ever here.

Dining Room

I’ve been reluctant to remove the trim from around the windows. I’m concerned the windows may actually be held in place by the trim in some cases. Some exploratory removal will be necessary to ensure we can pull it down without the windows falling out of the walls. We’ll also need to adjust our fancy “curtains” by taping them to the windows themselves rather than the trim.

Beadboard Closet Wall

As I was removing baseboard from the first bedroom I realized that the closet wall (which always looked a bit odd) was actually made of beadboard with some backing nailed together that had later been drywalled over. Here you can see the beadboard where the drywall broke off. It’s painted a lovely gold color, though the work light casts a yellow hue on everything anyway so it’s a bit hard to make out.

We’re consolidating all of the stuff we have stored on the first floor to the back bedroom so we can cordon off the back two rooms and demo everything else. To do that we have some more recycling pickups to get the rest of the broken down cardboard unloaded as well as taking down the moldy drywall in the back bedroom before moving all of our boxes and bins in. Sarah treated the mold with bleach last year so it should all be dead, but I really don’t want to take any chances.

The second purpose was to estimate how much plaster we’ll need to get hauled away. When you rent a dumpster you want to know how many yards, how many tons, and how many days. So, I filled a bucket with plaster from the wall and weighed it, getting roughly 25 lbs. Then I bagged the plaster from the one wall in contractor bags, two buckets per bag. When it was all done, there were five bags, one of which had more like two and a half buckets worth. In other words, the one wall had something like 275 lbs of plaster on it.

Here’s where it gets fun, assuming you like math. The wall is 11′ 5″ × 10′, so dividing we get about 2.4 lbs / sq ft. The ceiling is fairly easy if we fudge on interior walls, 20′ × 45′ × 2.4 lbs = ~1 ton. All of the walls are 10′, so instead of doing lots of calculations I’ll just work out linear feet and multiple the result. Front and back walls 20′ × 2. Side walls plus center wall (both sides) = 45′ × 4. For interior walls we need to add both sides of all walls, so on the larger side we have 12 × 4 + 7 × 2 and on the smaller side there are 3 walls separating the bedrooms and foyer, so roughly 8 × 6, then there’s one more wall along the bathroom that’s 7′ long, and again we have both sides. I think that’s 344.

Pure Excitement

344′ × 10′ × 2.4 lbs = ~4 tons. We had 1 ton for the ceiling, so we’re up to 5. Unfortunately, there’s also drywall on top of the plaster in a lot of the rooms, plus we’ve got all of the trim, floors, subfloor, some cement board left from the basement, and a random assortment of other crap that I honestly can’t estimate with any accuracy (how accurate any of these measurements are is questionable). Obviously we need more than 5 tons. The question is how much? It’s at least 6 tons, it’s probably 7 but is it 8? Doing the math gives us a starting point but there’s a lot of unknown.

The good news is that as long as we have an idea, we can order a dumpster for the approximate amount and they’ll charge us for the overage. As long as we have a number to start with we’re not going in blind. The fun part is that we want to have the dumpster for as short a period as possible to save money, so we have to figure out the fastest way to remove 6 tons of plaster and drywall. We’re thinking Demolition Party.

Loose riser

One day a few weeks ago a riser on the front porch steps fell off. We’re not sure what prompted this, but looking at the board there was no visible screws or nails for attaching it, so the real surprise was that it hadn’t fallen off a long time ago. Also pictured is one of the greatest power tools you can buy: an impact driver. If you ever do any level of home improvement, buy one of these. If you think your cordless drill or electric screwdriver is good enough, you’ve never used one of these. It has an amazing amount of torque and it can screw in or unscrew just about anything. Combine it with square head or Torx screws and maybe a screw guide and it becomes nearly effortless. Anyway, back to the porch.

After tipping the riser board back into place only to have it fall off again for a couple of weeks, I finally got around to screwing it back into place. This is obviously about the easiest repair ever, but sometimes in the midst of all the complicated problems we’re trying to tackle with this house, the little, easily-solved problems have a certain charm.

Speaking of our more complicated problems, we found out that we likely won’t need to underpin our foundation after all. It turns out that the basement floor and possibly the first floor joists are not exactly level (shocking!). Measuring the height of the ceiling in the corner of the basement instead of the center resulted in a free extra few inches, enough that we can probably excavate to the bottom of the footing and still have enough height to meet code requirements. That little measurement difference will probably save us from spending thousands of dollars on new concrete!

We’re still working out how to do some of the next few steps from an order-of-operations perspective. First we need to repair the structure in the basement by installing a new steel beam, steel columns, and new footings. Once that’s done we can move the laundry and storage from the first floor to the basement so we can start gutting the first floor. The tricky part is the basement floor itself. We’d like to hold off lowering the basement floor for now because spending a ton of money making the basement nice when we don’t need it for years is unappealing. We want to finish the first and second floors, the exterior, and maybe even the garage before tackling the basement.

Unfortunately, if we don’t lower the basement floor now, we’ll have to install the new HVAC equipment on the current floor. When we lower the floor later, we’ll have to also lower all the equipment despite ducts, pipes, and wiring installed where they are now. We talked about just lowering the floor where the utility room will be now and doing the rest later, but that complicates the weeping system and the radiant tubing that will need to go under/into the new floor. Another possibility is trying to mount the equipment in such a way that we can lower the floor around it. Whenever the floor is redone we’ll also need to replace the sewer line and possibly the water supply line, and both are expensive.

The architects and contractors we’ve talked to are used to everything being done at once, so the “simple” answer is for us to get a construction loan, move out, have the whole house remodeled, and move back in. Obviously, that’s not really what we have in mind. Working through challenges like this makes me appreciate it when I have a nice, easy problem, like fixing a riser on the front porch.

All better

Siding under siding

A couple posts ago I removed the plaster and lath from one wall on the first floor in order to expose the sheathing from the inside. That in turn led to the question, what’s on the other side? If the sheathing is in good enough shape to keep and spray foam, we’ll also want to put rigid foam on the exterior to reach the desired R-value for our wall assembly.

Closed cell foam is about R-6.0 per inch, give or take. We have a wall cavity that is 3 3/4″ thick. Doing the math, 6 x 3.75 = R-22.5, which isn’t bad, but it’s not as high as we’d like. Even granting that we’d get an extra couple for sheathing and drywall, we’ll want two inches of rigid insulation on the outside. Using either rock wool or XPS would give us an additional R-10, bringing our total to around R-34, which is excellent. The advantage to rock wool on the exterior is that bugs don’t burrow through it as they can with XPS, plus it allows easier drying to the outside, preventing moisture from building up against the sheathing. Of course, it costs more.

So here’s the problem: under our vinyl siding is old siding. We knew this, but it turns out we didn’t know what we had. Inside the back porch is old wood siding, and we assumed the worst we’d have to deal with in removing old siding was lead paint. Unfortunately, it looks like the house was re-sided sometime after the porch was enclosed and before the vinyl siding was put on. That siding is made of cement, which almost certainly contains asbestos. You can see this siding in the photo above, where there’s a gap in the vinyl siding. We can also see it under the bottom edge of the siding along the sides of the house, and probably the front as well.

What’s under that remains a mystery. It could be the original sheathing, or new sheathing, or the old wood siding, or some combination thereof, since they didn’t necessarily do everything the same way. In any case, what to do with asbestos-laden siding? The good news is that this isn’t pressing. We’re not planning to do the exterior right away.

Our options are three-fold. The first is to leave it in place, put the insulation over it, and the siding over that. Encapsulation is a common way to deal with asbestos. I don’t like this option because our house is already so close to the neighbors (see the above photo) and I don’t think the end result will be even and look right. However, these aren’t very strong arguments. The second option is to pay an asbestos abatement company to remove the siding, probably at great expense. One rough estimate using a price per square foot I found online was $11,000. The final option is to remove it ourselves, following proper procedures to prevent any dust from spreading and disposing of it properly. That may be a good way to go, but it will depend on how much asbestos is in the siding. To figure that out, before we do anything we’ll have the siding tested. How much or how little asbestos it contains will determine our course of action.

I came up with a fourth option, but Sarah wasn’t thrilled with it: sell the house and buy one that doesn’t have asbestos siding!

Rotary Hammer

Between the basement, the patio in the back yard, and potentially even the garage pad, we have a lot of concrete that we may dig up at some point. Enter my newest toy: a rotary hammer. This thing drills through concrete the way a normal drill goes through wood. I also got a chisel bit for it (see the photo), which works like a miniature jack hammer.

Corner in the Basement

The first task for this new kit was to find out how deep our footings are. I’ve been meaning to do this for a few months and it will answer the pressing question of how high our basement ceiling would be if we excavated the floor. I picked the Southeast corner, mostly because our convoluted, multi-phase plan to live in the house while we renovate it will lower this section of the basement first because it will become the utility room. That complicates other initiatives like moving the washer and dryer to the basement, but we’re taking some things a step at a time.

Perimeter holes

With minimal fuss I drilled enough holes through the floor to start chipping away the hunk of concrete. I’ve since gotten a good circular saw and a masonry blade so that this can be done more cleanly, but this way works too. The one advantage this method enjoys over using a saw is that there was very little airborne dust. Instead I got neat little piles like ant hills.

Chiseled Edge

The next step was to use the chisel bit on the hammer-only setting to connect the dots and separate the section from the rest of the floor. As soon as that was one done I reached for my trusty sledgehammer. Wait, I don’t have a sledgehammer. Ok, so I went to the hardware store and bought a sledgehammer, along with the previously mentioned circular saw and blade (just in case). A few good whacks and some prybar work freed the hunk of concrete and the result was dirt.

Hole. Also pictured: trusty sledgehammer

Then the fun of digging out the dirt began. Fortunately, Sarah offered to take this task and quickly excavated the footings all the way to their base. When she was done I went down and used a tape measure to see what we had.

Checking Depth

The result? An unsurprising 12″ of footings under 2″ of concrete floor. That’s a total of 14″ we can dig down, but then we need to fill back up 2″ of gravel and then 4″ of new concrete. That means we’d gain 8″ of height for a total of 7’4″ ceilings. Unfortunately, we need 7’6″ by Chicago code to consider it finished space.

That gives us three options: don’t finish the basement (at least on paper), underpin the foundation (massively expensive), or just skip the 2″ of gravel. My inclination is the third option, though the first might save on property taxes. On the other hand, the gravel may be superfluous given the age of the house and where the water table is. We’ll bring back our foundation guys to give us a quote and discuss the options with them.

The Before

We decided the best way to find out whether we needed to replace the exterior sheathing was to take down a wall and have a look. Back when we were getting rid of the cockroaches, I went through the first floor and hammered holes in the walls so the exterminator could spray into the wall cavities. We’ve been using the first floor living room to store empty boxes in various states of being broken down, along with the packing material that was in them. The first step was to clear all that stuff out.

Picked Up

Wouldn’t it be nice if it was as easy to pick up as just looking at the next picture in a series? But I digress. After things were picked up I put down heavy plastic so that cleaning up the ensuing mess would be easier. Our friend Mike gave us two huge rolls of leftover plastic and we’ve been using it for a variety of things, including temporary window shades, floor runners over the sticky floor (we pulled up the peel and stick tiles on the first floor), and now clean-up tarps. Who knows, we may actually use it for its intended purpose as a vapor barrier!

Plastic Sheeting

Now it was time to get to the meat of it: removing the wall. Almost immediately I discovered this was one of the walls that had been drywalled over. I tried to pull everything down at once, but quickly decided it was better to take it down in layers, if for no other reason then to take photos along the way.

Drywall Removed

It became clear that the reason for the drywall was a huge section of missing plaster in the center of the wall. In fact, the plaster across the whole middle area was incredibly brittle and fell off with the slightest touch. Toward the sides it was a bit more solid and required some prying and pounding with the crowbar. However, that’s only necessary if you’re taking it off in layers. Subsequent walls will use the 2×4 lever method that I used to remove the lath. The plaster is yellow because it has a couple layers of old wallpaper on it. It wasn’t clear what the original pattern was since it was all fairly deteriorated.

De-Plastered

Removing the plaster left a giant cloud of dust in the room and I had to wait until morning to take the final picture with the lath removed. Taking down the lath started with me pulling off individual strips and trying to get them off in one piece. I quickly tired of this since it was slow and tedious. I remembered reading about a technique to remove plaster lath where you put a short 2×4 board into the wall behind the lath and then pry it forward, pulling all the lath free as you go. The spray of plaster bits and dust wasn’t the greatest, and I had to shampoo twice to get it all out of my hair, but it was effective at getting the lath off the wall.

Down to the Studs

The result of my work was a huge mess that I’ll have to clean up. I want to save the lath for burning in the fire pit, so I need to get the nails out of it. That will be fun. The drywall is already de-nailed and I just need to bag it up and throw it out as we did with the basement. I have plans in store for the plaster though. I’m going to fill a five gallon bucket and weigh it, then figure out how many five gallon buckets I have. Then I’ll use the size of this wall to extrapolate approximately how many tons of dumpster we’ll need.

According to our architect, normally the exterior is done first.  We would replace all of the planks with plywood and then spray foam onto the new sheathing. It means everything seals nice and tight, plus we can install the new windows and flash them properly. However, it raises some problems. In order to re-sheath and re-side the exterior, some other things need to happen first. We’re planning to remove the second floor bump out, eliminate and move some windows on both floors, add sliding doors on both floors where the deck will eventually be, as well as remove the enclosed back porch and put on a front porch. We’d rather not make a mess of the second floor while we’re living in it, but even allowing for that we need to keep the back porch because it will have the only set of stairs once we’ve ripped out the front stairs, and we can’t replace the sheathing and siding while there’s a porch in the way.

That leads us to think it would be better to gut and finish the first floor first, followed by the second floor, and then redo the exterior. That’s been our intention all along since it gets us into the first floor sooner and pushes back the cost of residing for a few years. Unfortunately, if we spray foam first it will bond to the existing planks, making it impossible to remove theme and re-sheath later. I spent a lot of time thinking about the logistics of trying to do the exterior first. Maybe we could replace the sheathing and siding one floor at a time? That doesn’t address the problem with the back porch. Finally I gave up and went back to the original plan.

When we demo the interior walls we’ll be able to inspect the planks and see what shape they’re in. If they don’t need to be replaced, then we don’t have anything to worry about and we can spray foam the interior. If they do need to be replaced,  we’ll put 1″ thick sheets of rigid foam insulation into the wall cavities against the planks, and then spray foam over them. That way the spray foam will bond to the rigid insulation instead of the planks, so we can still replace them later. It may not be a perfect solution, but it’s the best one we’ve come up with.

Newspaper

Today’s project was the front yard. Long term we plan to put in some nice shrubs, flowers, and native grasses, but we don’t want to do that while there’s still years of work to be done on the house that would doubtless result in many trampled plants. At the same time, we don’t really care for grass. We don’t currently own a lawn mower and since ultimately we won’t have any grass, buying one for our little patch seems like a bit of a waste.

Instead we’re putting down mulch as a low maintenance temporary solution. We may put in some inexpensive ground cover if we come across it, otherwise this is pretty much it. It’s not the most attractive option, but it’s better than out of control grass and it doesn’t cost very much.

In order to kill the grass and make sure it doesn’t just grow up through the mulch, we first put down a thick layer of newspaper. Sarah started couponing a while back, and as a result we’d accumulated quite the stack of papers to use. As it turns out we need a lot more, since I went through the whole thing just doing the front yard and I didn’t get to the easement in front of the sidewalk yet.

Mulch!

Sarah saw that Menards had a sale on Mulch this weekend so I enlisted Dean’s help to go get forty bags of the stuff since he’s got a pickup truck. Sarah and I continue to consider a more practical vehicle, but in the mean time we’ve been mooching off friends and family with trucks and trailers.

As I went I ripped up our bumper crop of dandelions, but I didn’t get all roots so I’m sure I’ll have to spend more time out there getting them out properly. I left a gap in the front along the fence that we can plant some flowers or something. That area at least will probably not be trampled too badly.

Mulched

You can see our weed  flower bed along the front, as well as the two shrub/tree things. Those probably aren’t long for this world, but I left them for now since I don’t have anything better to put there yet. So in a nutshell, not the best looking yard on the street, but at least now I don’t have to mow it.