Year: 2012

First Floor Demo Prep

July 9, 2012 / / 1 Comment

We’ve continued making progress on the first floor. The biggest step was moving the washer and dryer down to the basement. After clearing a few remaining odds and ends, the first floor kitchen is finally starting to look a little empty.

First floor kitchen

We ran out and bought a dolly to get the washer and dryer downstairs. We wound up going out the front door, down the steps, out the gate onto the front sidewalk, over to the other gate, back along the length of the house, down the back steps and into the basement. Somehow, that was easier than going down the back steps, mostly because there wasn’t any room to turn on the landings. Let me tell you, that washer is heavy.

Washer and dryer

After installing the vent through the boarded up window we got everything hooked up and working. It’s an extra flight of steps to do laundry, but it works. We’ll need to cut a tarp from our giant roll of plastic to protect them during demo.

Electric removal

With that out of the way I started removing all of the wiring from the first floor. Most of it was already disconnected, but there were still switches, outlets and light fixtures. I thought I’d gotten most of it a week or so ago, but there were several outlets hiding behind our piles of debris. Some of the flexible conduit is still in the walls, but all of it is disconnected. There’s quite the mess to clean up, and we still have trim to remove in the kitchen and back bedroom, but we’re getting closer!

Scattershot

June 24, 2012 / / 0 Comments

We’re on to the forms and paperwork stage with our architect, which means that applying for permits isn’t too far off. We’ve identified all of our contractors, but we still need to get letters from them acknowledging they’ll be completing work on our property. The electrician needs to fill out a whole form as well. We’re meeting with him on Monday, as well as another structural contractor. I have to transfer my work on our Chicago Green Homes checklist to the official application and sign on several dotted lines.

Sarah planted some marigolds in the front yard, not because we particularly like them but because they supposedly will keep the neighbors dog from sticking his snout through the fence and trying to bite us. In any case it looks better than the weeds that had previously occupied the space. There are some hostas, rose bushes and a couple of other plants to put in so that it doesn’t look completely bad.

Bathroom Light Fixture

I took down the drop ceiling in the first floor bathroom. This means the “light below a light” has finally been removed. I also took out the sink and disconnected the toilet. At some point a couple months ago I ripped the medicine cabinet off the wall, so that was already gone. Still a lot to be done in there, but bit by bit we’re making progress.

We got our shelves up in the basement and moved the boxes and bins we’d been storing in the back bedroom of the first floor to the basement. We need to clean up some of the mess down there before we can get everything else relocated, though. There’s a deadline on that now, though, but I’ll get to that.

Basement light switch

I also started working on the latest basement electrical project. First, I removed a lingering light switch from the “kitchen” area. I added an outlet where the laundry will be and removed a bunch of conduit and wiring from the first floor panel. It is now completely empty except for the garage and the one circuit we’re using on that floor for the current laundry and lights. Of course, now I’m contemplating moving all of the circuits from the second floor box over to it, because it’s bigger, newer and doesn’t have a scary spliced main connecting it to the meter. I’ll talk to the electrician about that on Monday.

The larger basement electrical project is moving the conduit away from the beam. That will be involved, since they actually used some rigid conduit down there. The one place flexible would have been really convenient is the one place they didn’t use it. There are also a couple of junction boxes with countless circuits snaking through them mounted to the beam. That will all need to move, the ease of which depends on how much slack there is in the wires. I’m guessing not much.

Finally, in order to remove a couple of the old flexible lines from the first floor panel, we ripped out the back wall of the first floor bedroom, which is directly above the panels. Demo is so much fun. I pulled the disconnected lines out, leaving one circuit that goes up to the second floor through that wall. We made a huge mess, and also discovered a window hidden in the wall, glass panes still in it. It makes sense; the space used to be a pantry off the kitchen and pantries usually had a window on the end. We’ll probably find one in the same place on the second floor.

Gas Line Re-Route

June 15, 2012 / / 4 Comments

Gas line

The gas lines in the basement are predictably terrible. Like everything in the house they were done right at some point and then redone wrong later. Like so much that we’ve done, we’re doing them less wrong temporarily and we’ll do them brand new later.

Let’s see if I can describe the situation. The gas main comes in at the front of the house and goes to the meter. There used to be two meters, but one of them was removed at some point. From the one meter, three lines branch off and go to the same general area at the back of the house: one for the boiler, one for the dryer, and one that feeds the hot water heater and stove for the second floor. From where the other meter used to be, a line goes back and connects to the hot water heater and stove for the first floor, as well as a line that feeds the long-disconnected gas lamps that predate electricity in the house. Since the second meter is disconnected, that line is tied into the line that services the second floor, but they left the whole thing connected. Finally, from one of the water heaters a line branches off to provide gas to where the basement stove used to be as well as a capped line to the basement living room where we guess there may have been a space heater. The boiler line is 1″ pipe that reduces to 3/4″. The rest is all 3/4″ except for the basement apartment lines that are done in 1/2″.

The two lines that connect to the hot water heaters and stoves run along either side of the beam in the basement. Since we’re replacing the beam we need to remove these gas lines. That was the project for last Sunday. I asked Dean for assistance, since every time I went into the basement to look at the gas lines I just got overwhelmed and did something else. I bought a bunch of fittings and some metal cutting blades for the angle grinder and reciprocating saw and we got started.

Undaunted

Dean was decidedly not overwhelmed and in no time we had the gas shut off and were using my angle grinder to cut out the old sections of pipe. Once cut, we used some pipe wrenches to disconnect the either side. I had a rough plan that we used to tap off the line servicing the boiler and connect it to the water heater and stoves.

Dean had borrowed a pipe threader that we used to make the appropriate lengths from the pipe we had removed.   With some elbows, thread compound and valves I had bought, we assembled the new connections. We also removed the gas line that went to the basement living room and disconnected the line supplying the old gas lamps.

New connections

The result fed gas to all the same appliances with a minimum of new pipe. I removed the two lines that ran along the beam and everything worked without any leaks. As an added bonus, the new line had valves that can shut off individual segments without having to turn off the gas at the meter.

 

Gas line-free Beam

I still have an electrical conduit to move that also runs along the beam, but other than that we’re looking pretty good for getting our structural work done. On top of that the basement actually smells better!

Progress Report

June 1, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Squirrel Access Corridor

We’ve worked on a number of smaller projects the past few weeks. We finished removing trim from all of the front rooms of the first floor as well as the two layers of hardwood flooring in the front bedroom. We also moved the stuff being stored in the middle bedroom to the back so we could take down the drop ceiling, and did some cleanup of the resulting giant piles of wood and debris.

I got the mulch spread on the front easement, leaving only some small tufts of grass in the back yard to be dealt with. We put up a locking mailbox to hopefully resolve our missing mail issues. We set up a cheap swimming pool in the back yard since we don’t have air conditioning, but the weather immediately dropped into the forties.

We met with an HVAC contractor that we like and got some new ideas on how to do the radiant. We also met with our architect and discussed plan revisions, including the back deck and more recently the garage. One potential challenge with the deck is a section of code requiring the second floor deck to be no more than 12′ above grade, when our second floor is 15′ 6″ above grade.

Yesterday Sarah heard some kind of animal in the walls. An inspection of the attic revealed that my hole patching was effective in preventing anything from getting into the attic, but the rot on our top plate was allowing squirrels to get into the wall without even getting into the attic. I spent the better part of two hours getting metal mesh and brick into position to block it out, reaching out the tiny hole in the soffit and sliding it back and forth, using a makeup mirror to see what I was doing. So far today they haven’t returned, so that’s a good sign.

I’m contemplating how to re-run the gas lines in the basement so they don’t run along the support beam, since they’ll be in the way when we replace the beam. We have a gas inspection on Monday that may provide additional to-dos. I turned off the boiler since the weather was in the nineties, but with the temperature shift the house was sixty-three degrees this morning.

Our next step is to buy some more shelving and move everything being stored on the first floor into the basement. We’ll cover it with tarps to shield it from some of the dust and once the gas lines are re-configured we can move the laundry down there too.

Near-term we’re planning to get a permit to start demo of the first floor, before we’ve gotten the final blueprints and construction permits. That will let us get some work done, since the whole process is taking longer than we initially hoped.

Final Assembly

May 10, 2012 / / 0 Comments

I’ve talked about the wall assembly before when we were deciding whether to build a double wall or go with spray foam (we decided to go with spray foam). I even had an elaborate post written about it that I never published since it didn’t really go anywhere. Then I talked about it some more when we were considering redoing the exterior first (nope). Finally, I talked about it when we demoed a wall on the first floor to get a look at the sheathing and again when when we found out we have old asbestos-laden siding. So I’m apparently obsessed about it, and so as not to dwell on it any longer I’m making a final post about it, never to drone on the topic again (at least until we reside the exterior in a few years).

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 about 7 per inch, giving us about R-26. Unfortunately, the studs are only about R-5 and comprise 10% of the wall, so our actual rating is about R-24. 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 polyiso rigid foam. The rigid foam adds R-12 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-36, well 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.