Year: 2011

Basement Demo: One Fire Hazard at a Time

December 30, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Several posts ago I shared some videos of the, er, shall we say imaginative electrical “planning” in the basement. Last night I worked to dismantle the festooned conduits. The lines I took down yesterday mostly serviced the first floor outlets, but they were all run along the ceiling of the basement, preventing me from taking down drywall. Surprises were in store from the outset as the first junction box I opened rained roach carcasses down.

Roach-filled Junction Box

Fortunately they weren’t all that way. Most of them were so full of wires they couldn’t really accommodate a roach oasis. I had to cut power to one of the basement lights, which unfortunately was the living room where the debris pile is located. I’ll be using work lights for the time being. One of these lines was a particularly scary bit of electrical-taped wire segments strewn across the laundry room plumbing, so I was glad to get that removed as it seemed more than a little bit of a fire hazard.

Wire Bonanza

Getting this out will make it a lot easier to remove the rest of the ceiling drywall, though the discovery that there are actually five gas lines running from the meter at the front of the house to the utility room in the back will complicate things. I knew there were at least three, but five? Almost all of them are going to be in the way when the center beam is replaced because they run down either side. Most are mounted to the drywall, so I’ll either need to disconnect them or work around them. Let me tell you, shutting off the gas for extended periods in winter while I remove and re-route lines sounds like a lot of fun.

In any case, I’ll at least be able to report progress to my insurance agent the next time they call asking for an update on the three issues they had with the house: the roof, the garage, and the electrical.

Floor Plan Update

December 28, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Floor Plans

I’ve made progress on the floor plans. I haven’t made a fancy 3D model of all of them like I did for the first floor, but here they are in a rough model of the house. I’ll get around to a more comprehensive version eventually, but  having the floor plans themselves is the more important part. It incorporates some minor changes to the first floor plan, including pushing the stairs back toward the center of the house and adding a landing to the stairs with a 90° turn. That puts the hallway into the center of the house so that it takes up as little space as possible.

The second floor gets two good-size bedrooms at the front, a full bath in the middle with a laundry closet off of the hallway, and a large master suite at the back with vaulted ceilings and a big walk-in closet. Up in the attic is another bedroom and a large storage closet. The basement gets an open area for pool table and bar, a theater room, a half-bath, utility closet, and space for storage and a workout area.

With the exception of a possible sink in the bar, all of the water supply and drain will use the existing wet wall, which will simplify plumbing since we’re living in the house and can’t take it all out at once. The plan also calls for removing the overhang on the second floor. It’s a nice way to bring in sunlight but we’re concerned about it’s structural integrity as well as properly weather sealing it. Instead we’ll incorporate tube-style skylights into the second floor to bring natural light into the interior of the house. There are a number of other details that aren’t revealed or included. We’ll probably need to have a lower ceiling in the office on the first floor to accommodate some of the drainage from the master bathroom, there will be some bulkheads along the south wall of the first floor for HVAC, the existing load bearing walls will be replaced by structural beams, with columns integrated into walls carrying the load to the new footings we’ll put in the basement.

Despite doing all of this work, I’ll still need an architect. I’ve been doing some “light reading” of the Chicago Building Code. While I think with enough time and energy (and more than a few flashbacks to Drafting class in high school) I could learn all of the requirements for a proper set of plans , ultimately the plans need to be signed by a licensed architect anyway. Given that, why not take advantage of the fact they already know the code and requirements far better than I ever will, plus can bring new ideas to the table that we may not have considered? Cost is the only reason I’ve avoided it so far, but realistically it’s a bad place to try to scrimp. Having scale drawings showing what we’re looking to do will hopefully make it less expensive if nothing else.

Odds and Ends

December 21, 2011 / / 1 Comment

Bathroom Light

Despite the newborn, I’ve been finding time to spend on the house, mostly thanks to Sarah handling the lion’s share of babying. While work continues on the seemingly-unending basement demolition, I also did some odds and ends that needed doing. For starters, I finally fixed the bathroom light fixture that I’ve been meaning to rewire since before we moved in. Yes, we need another light bulb, but more importantly it lights up and works with the switch.

Insulation

Next on the list was getting the house a bit better prepared for the winter. For starters, I added some weather stripping to the front door so the foyer wasn’t so drafty (I’m pretty sure it would have snowed in the foyer otherwise). I can’t say it’s great, but it’s at least an improvement. Then I wrapped the steam pipes from the boiler in foil-faced insulation, so that more of the heat would make it to the radiators upstairs and less would be dispensed into the stifling basement.

Pipe wrap

I wasn’t entirely convinced this would pay for itself in only one winter, since we’re planning on ripping out the boiler and radiators in the spring, but it’s definitely made a difference and once the gas bill comes around we’ll see. It only cost about $40, so the return on investment won’t be too hard to find.

Dwindling Debris

Finally, as I said I’ve been working on the basement demolition. The massive pile of drywall is gradually getting smaller, though there’s still more to rip down. I need to get the old plumbing and electrical removed before I can get to some of it, so that’s my next focus. I haven’t filled up the garbage toters every week, but I’ve lost count of how many times I have.

Garbage Bags

Here’s last weeks allotment. I’ll be filling them up again this week since they collected today. I need to clear out room for some drywall that Sarah’s sister found and get the plumbing out so that we can finally bring back the structural guys to re-quote and then hopefully start work. Oh, I’ve also been continuing to work on the floor plans. I came up with a second floor plan that I like, as well as the attic. It may need some tweaking, but it’s getting close. Once that’s done I need to work out where how the electrical and HVAC will run. Suffice it to say that we’re keeping busy!

Baby Time

December 6, 2011 / / 0 Comments

On November 29th, 2011, our son Derek was born. We’re thrilled to have a little bundle in the house but it may mean the next couple of months are a bit slower on progress. I’m going to work on the plans for the other floors so that we can get started on our permits, but the basement may not see a ton of activity. It’s not quite to the point that we can bring in the structural guys yet, though it’s close.

Floor Planning

November 26, 2011 / / 2 Comments

I’ve been working on the first floor plan. Getting a floor plan that we like is the first step toward getting our permits, estimating what all this will cost, and even determining how we do the structural repair in the basement. After the post I made about floor joists, we decided to come up with a floor plan that keeps the existing load bearing wall in place, but replaces the full stud wall with long span beams to support the existing 2×6 floor joists. We’ll reinforce those either by sistering or adding cross bracing. Because of this, we need a floor plan that keeps the span lengths short enough to use LVL headers or wooden I-Joists. Every four feet in span increase cuts the load bearing ability in half, so I came up with a floor plan that keeps the spans less than sixteen feet.

The next design constraint was keeping the existing wet wall, where the plumbing lines, drains, and vents are. This is important for a couple of reasons. One, keeping the plumbing consolidated will lower costs and simplify the project. More importantly, though, is the fact that we’re living on the second floor, so the wet wall needs to stay where it is so that we can keep flushing the toilet, taking showers, and washing dishes while the first floor remodel is ongoing.

The house is very narrow, with an interior width of only twenty feet. The load bearing wall runs along the length, but instead of being in the center it’s about eight feet from one wall. Right now the rooms on the small side of that wall are only 7 1/2 feet wide, which is pretty small by today’s standards. In order to work around that we’ll wind up having a beam sticking down from the ceiling, but since the ceilings are ten feet high, it shouldn’t be too bad.

Sarah loves to cook, and most entertaining these days winds up in the kitchen. Because of that we decided to make the kitchen big, and to forgo a formal dining room that would probably only be used a few times a year. Instead the plan calls for a big, counter-height table in the kitchen that serves as both work space and dining table. While meals are being prepared or just during parties, people can congregate in the kitchen with plenty of room to move around and sit without getting in the way of the cooking. We’re going to splurge on the stove. Instead of getting a cooktop or a range with a double wall oven, we’re going to get a big 48″ range with griddle, grill, and two ovens. That will be the centerpiece of the kitchen with the rest of the prep area to either side and a big buffet counter on the far side of the table.

We also wanted to fit an office onto the first floor, partly because we spend a lot of time by the computers and partly because we’ll need a bedroom to sleep in while we’re redoing the second floor. The plan calls for a powder room instead of a full bath. That was a tricky point, because as I said, we’re going to be redoing the second floor once this is all finished. Without a full bath on the first floor we’ll need to redo the second floor in stages, keeping the existing bathroom until we’ve finished the master bathroom. Finally, there’s a small den at the back of the house to connect the entertaining space to the screened deck we’ll eventually be building on the back.

The plan is still subject to further revision, especially once we start going through permitting and have to get all of this approved. There may be structural and code requirements I haven’t accounted for. However, this is the direction we’re looking at.