Month: April 2012

De-Trimming

April 27, 2012 / / 0 Comments

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.

Math Time

April 20, 2012 / / 1 Comment

In addition to meeting with the architect and getting quotes from the structural engineers, we’re getting ready to demo the first floor. We started by removing the plaster and lath from one wall in the living room. The purpose was two-fold. It gave us our first peek at the inside of the exterior sheathing, which told us it may be in good enough shape to leave in place. We were concerned it might be rotted and if we had to replace it that would complicate our plan to use spray foam insulation.

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 multiply 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.

Easy Problems

April 18, 2012 / / 1 Comment

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

The Underside

April 10, 2012 / / 2 Comments

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!

Getting a Footing

April 9, 2012 / / 3 Comments

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.