Year: 2012

Back in the Basement

November 18, 2012 / / 0 Comments

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Sarah is almost done with her semester of school which means she’ll be on break for a bit and we can try and get some work done. We were trying to get an inch of spray foam in the first floor, but the more I look at it the less feasible that seems right now.

We have one of the many order of operations problems. We need a dumpster to clear out the rest of the piles on the first floor, but we don’t want to get it until we demo the foyer. We don’t want to demo the foyer until we get our permits, and who knows how long that will be.

The other thing we can work on, which should really be done before we get another dumpster, is finally replace the beam in the basement. I’ve been slowly working toward that goal for the last year, but I’ve been putting it off due to cost, time, and the non-trivial apprehension about the project.

So with a five week window and the holidays mixed in, I’m cleaning out the basement and putting together the plans, starting with digging new footings and building a temporary support wall.

Today I swept up the debris that’s been raining through the floor boards from the first floor, moved the lumber and scrap metal piles to the outside wall, and picked up the mess of tools and junk that had accumulated over the course of several other projects.

We ordered a laser level and a distance measurer. When they arrive in a few days we’ll do some measuring, get the steel beam and columns ordered, and start work on the footings.

Time is the Missing Ingredient

November 15, 2012 / / 1 Comment

When we started this project we had an idea of how much work was involved and how much time it would take to do it. The plan was this would be a part time second job. We would work on the house in the evenings and hopefully keep our weekends mostly free. With this approach we’d spend 15-20 hours a week on the house, ideally both of us. With that kind of time commitment, we projected we could have the first floor refinished in about a year. Today, seventeen months later, the first floor is mostly demoed but a long way from finished.

Looking back, I still believe our time estimates were fairly reasonable, but they completely failed to account for a double whammy: having a baby and Sarah going to grad school. If it was one or the other, one of us could still work on the house while the other was occupied with school or the baby. Both means that while Sarah is writing papers and attending class, someone has to watch the baby. Both means there’s not much time to spend on the house.

While the time available to work on the house has plummeted and progress has ground to a near-standstill, we have gotten a few things done. I got the first floor bathroom window removed, the last of the hardwood floor is up, we’re sorting through the room full of lath, and we’ve filled the garbage toters with debris at least a few times. The problem is this progress has been over the course of the last several weeks. I wish I had a solution, but short of paying someone to do the work the only solution has been my mom coming once a week to watch the baby while I go downstairs and work for an hour or two and getting some work done on the weekends.

Things are slow on the permit side, too. We’re still waiting for Zoning to decide if we can have a front porch across the front of the house. We got them the new plat of survey with the neighbor’s building setbacks, more recently I sent them color photos of the front and back of our house and the neighbor’s (the two houses to the North and two to the South). Even though Green permits are supposed to be “expedited” they’re apparently backed up. The way things are shaping up, we won’t be done with the first floor for a very long time, and that’s just the first part of the project.

Window Removal

October 20, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Winter is fast approaching (I’m intentionally avoiding the Game of Thrones reference) and the house is cold. Actually, it’s especially cold because the boiler isn’t working, but that’s a separate issue. We’re planning to put spray foam into our exterior walls to give us a great insulation value as well as air seal to prevent leaks, but we can’t do that until we’ve run our new electrical and plumbing. Or can we? It occurred to me that we could put 1″ of spray foam in first, and then after we have all the mechanicals installed, put in the remaining 2-3/4″. Not only would that give us better insulation in the short term, it would prevent any insulation gaps due to not being able to spray behind electrical boxes.

Considering this plan led us to a stumbling block: we’re planning to remove the windows on the North side of the house. We don’t get much sunlight from the North, the view is entirely of our neighbors house less than three feet away, and with our plan to move the stairs and put a coat closet on the wall, there isn’t a great place for a window in the finished plan. If we spray foam without removing them, we’d be missing the worst offenders of heat loss. There are several inches of vinyl siding visible above the windows from the inside, because when the windows were replaced with smaller ones, they left gaps in the exterior sheathing.

This put us on the path to start work on removing the three or four windows on the North side of the first floor. I say three or four, because it’s hard to say whether the fourth window that we found covered up in the wall technically counts. We’re going to remove it, so it probably does.

Window removed

My Green credibility took a hit on my trip to Home Depot for supplies. The only pressure treated plywood they had that was rated for exterior sheathing was not formaldehyde-free, and was additionally stamped with warnings that the State of California had found the wood dust to be cancer-causing. With only a one-day window of Eriq and Will over to help, I went ahead and got it, along with over-priced Tyvek house wrap, stainless steel staples, and a bunch of coated exterior screws. Next time, I’ll plan far enough ahead to make sure I can get better materials.

I was covered when it came to framing, since we’d salvaged and de-nailed all the lumber I removed from the first floor. Working with the old-growth, hundred-year-old wood is amazing. All my framing up to this point has been with the warped, thin, junk pine they sell at the big box hardware stores. These old boards are incredible, all straight, strong, and not a single split no matter how close to the end we put a screw. It’s just a shame they had to clear cut the Northwest to produce them. When these trees were cut down, the Conservation movement was just starting in the United States, and there wasn’t a single Forestry school in the country. At least they’re seeing good service. Our hope is that by restoring this house the wood will see another hundred and sixteen years of service.

Windows removed

For some reason the first window took us a long time and we only finished the one after working on it all day. Eriq offered to return the following weekend and we made much better progress, finishing two more windows in less time than the one took the previous weekend.

Basement Electric Redux

October 15, 2012 / / 0 Comments

After we finished the demo of the basement I re-wired the basement lighting to function on a single light switch, removed the outlets and switches from the center wall, and configured the circuits to separate the lighting from the outlets and boiler. However, the electric was still running through a rigid conduit and routed through a junction box that were both mounted to the main beam in the basement. Since we’re planning to replace this with a steel beam, we needed to remove the electric.

Beam junction box

I’ve collected a large pile of old flexible and rigid conduit from the demo of the basement and first floors, so I have plenty of material to re-use as long as it isn’t permanent. The basement wiring all falls into the “temporary” category. When we moved the laundry to the basement, I wired up an outlet using a separate conduit that ran along the back wall that had originally serviced the first floor. Since it had more than one circuit running through it, I was able to branch from this point with flexible conduit to connect a light fixture in the laundry area and the two storage areas toward the front of the house. I spent a lot of time switching between active circuits so I could always have at least some lights turned on while I worked.

Basement beam

I was able to disconnect three conduits that ran to the first floor, leaving only one outlet for that floor still active for lights and power tools. The junction box was eliminated by running the conduits directly into the panel, and I was able to eliminate a second junction box once I had finished moving all of the lighting from the conduit along the beam. Finally, I ran one more light by the electrical panel to give some additional light. The result is fewer lights in the basement, so some of the areas are not as bright, but we have light where it’s needed and the beam is now clear.

Permit Process

October 5, 2012 / / 2 Comments

I haven’t spent a lot of time talking about the permit process, maybe because it happens mostly via email and I can’t take pictures of it. However, it’s an important facet of our project and it’s been going on in parallel to what I’ll call the “actual work” on the house, so I’ll go into some details now.

After I developed floor plans that we liked, we went through a process of selecting an architect. We asked several to come to the house, see the plans we’d drawn up, and provide a quote. We even went to visit the home of one of the architects, since he’d done his own remodeling project similar to ours, and it was a good example of his design. In the end, we selected Jesse McGrath, of McGrath Architects due to the right combination of flexibility in working with us and our “phased” remodel, his experience with Chicago Green Homes and the green permit process, as well as being “self-certified” with the City of Chicago and quoting us a price that didn’t make our jaws drop.

Jesse met with us once a week, converting my Sketchup drawings into plans. He (like all of the architects we talked to) pushed us toward using spray foam and rigid exterior insulation in lieu of a double wall to achieve our high insulation values. While he worked on the plan details, we met with contractors to find the ones we’ll need. Even though we’re going to do most of the work ourselves, the City of Chicago requires certain things to be done by licensed professionals, including plumbing, electrical, and HVAC. We needed to get a “letter of intent” from each contractor as well as an electrical application, complete a bunch of other forms, and sent it all over to Jesse so he could in turn submit it to the City.

Unfortunately I didn’t get a concrete mason lined up, so I had to scramble to find one. We got some outrageously high quotes to lower the basement floor, but finally got a reasonable price from one. Now I just need to get the letter of intent from him, which for some reason is taking far longer than expected.

Site Plan (I don’t know why it calls for Japanese Yew Shrubs)

We’re now in the byzantine workings of the permit review process. Currently we’re held up on Zoning. Our plat of survey is from closing last year, and the City requires a survey no more than 60 days old, so I’m getting a new one done in the next few days. Because we’re putting on a new front porch, and Zoning wants houses to all be roughly the same distance from the street, the survey also needs to include the “setbacks” of the two properties in either direction to determine the average. If our plans put the porch ahead of the average, then we’ll have to go through additional hurdles to try and get approved. I went out last night with a tape measure. The houses to either side of us are about the same as ours, but the house two down and the apartment building two up are both closer to the street, depending on how it gets calculated. I guess we’ll see.

Once we’re through Zoning, the plans will be reviewed for structure, electrical, plumbing, mechanical, as well as all of the green elements. This process can take a couple of months, but assuming we don’t need to redesign the front porch, hopefully we’ll go through quickly.