Year: 2014

Stair Planning Redux

May 12, 2014 / / 2 Comments

Almost exactly a year ago I spent some time working out where the stairs would go and how exactly they would be configured. This was because the original design work I did had overlooked some issues that the architect caught, but in so doing he caused a lot of other problems. For example, in the approved drawings we have there’s only 5′ 10″ of headroom on the first floor landing. So I recalculated everything last year and had worked out a plan that was pretty good. I used that plan to position and size the basement stair opening.

However, since then I have leveled the first floor subfloor, which means the height from the first floor to the second is slightly different than it was when I made my calculations. Not only that, but if I plan to level the second floor as well I need to consider its height when it’s done rather than its height now.

Stair Planning

Stair planning with minimum required headroom

Another factor is that I read up on load and span limits for the stair stringers. Since the opening for the basement stairs prevents me from having any intermediate support for the first floor stairs, they need to be able to span the whole distance to the first landing, which is nearly ten feet. That means I need to use 1 ¾” x 14″ thick, 1.55E stringers, which are bigger than I planned. That affects the headroom in the landing going down to the basement. Finally, the rise for each step must be equal and no more than 7¾”. The current rise floor-to-floor  averages about 10’11” (131″). I can’t fit more than 17 steps, so the closest rise match is 7 ¾” for a total rise of 131 ¾”. I guess I’ll just level the second floor to that height.

So, I went back to my model in Sketchup and started re-working the plans. I got a bit frustrated because I was spending a lot of time drawing things out just to figure out it wouldn’t work. I finally realized I need to draw the required headroom and clearance, so I could see how much space I needed.

Second floor stairs

Second floor stairs

Once I did that, it started to come together. It’s a tight fit between the multiple stories, roof slope, and other available space restrictions. There are a couple of things that are less than ideal. In the picture above you can see that the second floor landing will need to be notched so there’s enough headroom coming up from the first floor, but structurally it will be fine. There’s also the roof pitch clipping a triangle of headroom above that landing, and the stringers which are notched onto the edge of the landings rather than completely on top to provide enough space to meet code.

The good news is that I can figure this out on the computer and that it will all meet code requirements and I should be able to get a queen-size mattress up the stairs (and not bonk my head on the underside of the landing). Now I can get my LSL stringers on order and start framing the first floor landing.

Back Yard Cleanup

May 1, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Our back yard has been collecting material from the house. First we excavated the new footings in the basement, which resulted in a large mound of clay. Then, between the chimney removal and removing the brick fire blocking during subfloor install we added a giant pile of bricks and mortar. We removed the mortar from all of the good bricks and stacked them in a neat cube, but the broken and crumbling bits we just piled next to it.

Clay, bricks, mortar (and Derek)

Clay, bricks, mortar (and Derek)

In addition, we had an old raised garden along one side of the yard. It wasn’t the lovely cinder blocks that made us want to get rid of it now so much as the dirt itself: full of shredded plastic bags from rats nests, broken glass, bottle caps, an oil filter, bullet slugs, you-name-it. Sarah wouldn’t plant vegetables in it, so we used separate planters. She was planning to put a shovel-full of dirt into our garbage toters every week, but that was going to take forever. Instead we decided to get another dumpster (#4 if you’re counting).

Our beautiful garden

Our beautiful garden (and Derek)

An added incentive to take out the garden sooner rather than later was that the wooden fence was bent into the neighbors yard because the dirt was piled directly against it. The small suspended fence you see above was screwed to the posts of the larger fence behind it.

Piles cleanup up

Piles cleanup up

In addition to cleaning out all the clay, mortar, and broken bricks I shrink-wrapped the stack of bricks to make it a bit safer for Derek to be around. I don’t want anything to fall on him if he tries to climb on it. We were supposed to get a 10 yard dumpster for heavy debris, which is fairly short. I was hoping to make a simple ramp so that I could dump wheelbarrow-fulls into it. Instead they brought a 15 yard dumpster and said not to fill it up all the way. That meant it was too tall for a ramp and I had to instead carry three or four buckets in the wheelbarrow and then empty them over the side one by one.

Garden removed and fence fixed

Garden removed and fence fixed

The dumpster was delivered midday Thursday. By midday Friday I was exhausted, so Sarah came down and filled the buckets while I carried them out. The work went faster and it was a lot easier than doing all of it (not counting Derek’s assistance). We finished up Saturday morning, though the dumpster was blocked by a car and they wound up not picking it up until Monday. I’m interested to find out how many tons it wound up being.

Dumpster nearing the "two-thirds full" line

Dumpster approaching the “two-thirds” limit

We’re excited to have our back yard opened up a bit. With all the crap we’re doing to the house, the back yard —ugly as it is— is one of our favorite places. We didn’t have much of an outdoor space of our own at our condo. Having room for a table and chairs, a fire pit, a sandbox, and room for some small garden beds and compost bins still feels like a treat. Our other impending cleanup activity is the scrap metal pile in the basement. That won’t entail a dumpster, but like this will be a lot of work. Our house has more tons of material to disgorge before everything’s said and done.

Expected Plumbing

April 30, 2014 / / 0 Comments

We’ve encountered several plumbing projects since buying the house that were not part of our planned renovations but rather part and parcel of living in an old house. We had the pinhole leak in our hot water pipe, the replacement of our bathroom faucet, and the abrupt collapse of part of our kitchen drain, and I didn’t bother chronicling the recent kitchen faucet swap (the cheap faucet we bought when we moved in started leaking and we got a less cheap replacement). All of these were sudden and unexpected, but the basement drain problem was not. It had been progressively worsening for some time and we had been progressively ignoring it. Well, no longer.

Emily

Emily

Almost two weeks ago our daughter Emily was born (explaining the brief gap in new posts). We’re very excited to have her with us, but it means we’re back on the cloth diaper regimen, which brings me back to the basement drain. Let me explain how our sewer is set up. Our house has two sewer systems: the black water sewer that serves the toilet, tub, and bathroom sink and drains via 4″ cast iron pipe into the city sewer, and a gray water sewer for the kitchen sink and laundry that drains via a 2″ cast iron pipe, increasing to a 6″ clay pipe under the basement floor where it picks up a couple of floor drains before heading into the catch basin in the back yard, where it is joined by gutters and the patio drain. From there it can drain into the city sewer as well. Chicago is one of the bastion cities of combined storm and sanitary sewers. The catch basin is a combination grease trap and local water reservoir to help the city handle the water volume during heavy rains. So we have a manhole behind the back porch (under our grill) and a big brick vault about seven feet deep.

Starting at some point several (six?) months ago, when we ran the dishwasher or the washing machine, water would violently spray out of the top of the drain for the washing machine in the basement. To prevent this, I removed a small pvc screw plug from the basement floor. Now water didn’t spray out, it simply welled up out of the floor and drained to the other floor drain in front of the washing machine. This, in turn, also eventually filled and backed up. Then, during the melt from all the snow this past winter, water started to fill the landing at the bottom of the basement steps, about 6″ deep. Sarah put some bricks into the water to use as stepping stones to get into the basement. It was getting pretty bad.

Removed plug: better than spraying water

Removed plug: better than spraying water

I bought a drain snake, and then I bought a bigger one. As if the problems hadn’t been bad enough, because we’d now be washing cloth diapers, I really didn’t want the water backing up anymore. The water was also pooling at the base of our (very expensive) new hot water heater and I didn’t want it to start rusting.

Previously repaired connection

Previously repaired connection

I bought a cheap USB camera on a 45′ cable to try and figure out what was under the floor. I researched old Chicago sewer systems online. After running snakes down various pipes and floor drains for two days straight, Sarah cut off the already broken PVC fitting just above the floor while I rented a power drain snake from Home Depot. Having direct access to the clay pipe meant that I could now confirm my fear: the snake was pulling up thick, goopy, mud. That’s a fairly sure sign that the clay pipe under the floor has either separated or outright collapsed. Since I wasn’t prepared to start jack hammering the basement floor, I just snaked all the drains as well as I could, put together new PVC connections (including a clean out) at the base of the drain pipe, and called it a day.

New and improved connection

New and improved connection

So far, nothing has backed up since then, so our efforts were not entirely in vain. I still need to clean up all the mud down there. However, I’m not convinced that our current state will last as long as we were hoping. We’re planning to dig down the whole basement floor and replace all of the underground plumbing at the same time. My current timeline put that a ways out (aka years). It may turn out that we can’t wait that long.

Blocking Installation

April 30, 2014 / / 0 Comments
South wall blocking

South wall blocking

Dean came over one Saturday and we tackled blocking installation. Blocking (wood blocks installed between the wall studs) is required by fire code and also adds structural strength and drywall nailing edges. Using 2x4s we salvaged during first floor demo, we measured each stud bay along the North wall and cut separate pieces for the bottom, the middle, and the top behind the ribbon. We need the middle piece because we have 10′ ceilings. I wasn’t sure how fast or slow it was going to go, but we made pretty good progress. With Dean taking measurements and nailing, and me working the saw, we managed to get the entire North wall done and about a third of the South wall.

Bottom blocking

Bottom blocking

We used the nail gun to make fast work of the installation, and employed a couple techniques to avoid toe-nailing. Because the top of the floor joist terminates between the studs (a feature of balloon-frame construction) we were able to nail one end of the bottom blocking down into the joist and then nail into other end from the next stud over and work our way down. For the middle blocks we staggered so we could end nail from both sides. At window edges we nailed a small block to the stud and then nailed the blocking down into it. Finally, for the top we cut down the blocking on the table saw so it would fit behind the ribbon and then face-nailed them. We had to individually measure each piece because of the unevenness of the stud spacing, but it went fairly quickly.

Middle blocking

Middle blocking

The East and West walls we had to hold off on for the time being because the floor joists run parallel to the walls, meaning once we install the bottom blocking it will seal off a cavity below the floor. We’ll wait until the spray foam installation to put in the blocking so that everything gets insulated properly. There’s more blocking to do, but it requires  me to once again rearrange my tools and all the other stuff we have leaning against the walls. I started on it this week, and hope to get through most of it. As always, a big thanks to Dean for his help!

Top blocking (behind ribbon)

Top blocking (behind ribbon)

Purpose

April 8, 2014 / / 2 Comments

When we’re growing up, we’re given the impression that as we get older we will discover what we are truly good at, what we’re really interested in, and then go off and make ourselves a career of that. We’ll do that thing until we retire, and while retirement means different things to different people, we generally view it as a time of leisure, to enjoy ourselves and live off our accumulated work, spend time with family, that sort of thing.

As we reach adulthood, we usually come to discover that the world is vastly more complex than we thought. Our own interests more nuanced, challenges are not so easy as they seemed, and simply diving into a fascinating lifetime career isn’t always the way forward. Some people find themselves doing things that they’re good at, things that may even pay fairly well, but don’t fulfill them in the ways that they thought life was supposed to. Maybe it’s not as exciting or glamorous as we envisioned, maybe we thought we were “special”. We end up searching for a purpose, something more meaningful.

Along the way, we may start families, build friendships, move to new cities, come up with dreams and plans and new ambitions. Sometimes we simply cling to ambitions we held as children, convincing ourselves they will yet come to pass, that we’ll conquer the world… next year. Maybe we’ll start a business, earn passive income online, invest in real estate, win the lottery, travel the world and eventually get the glamorous life we know must be in store for us. In the meantime we watch television, play games, and read books.

Sarah and I decided to buy a crappy house and fix it up ourselves. This was our dream and our plan. Maybe it wasn’t going to give meaning to our lives, but it was a way to stretch ourselves and do something more than just watch TV. We both knew what we were getting into and we both didn’t. I think what we didn’t know was that we were going to have less than half as much time to work on the house as we planned, and that everything would be twice as much work as we imagined, meaning it will take four times as long to finish.

Part of the reason we bought the house was that our condo was small, and Sarah was pregnant with our first child, Derek. He’s two now and our second is due in the next few weeks, maybe sooner. The upstairs unit of our house where we’re living is smaller than our condo. I tried for a while to really push, working on the house every day, as much as I could. The result was that it didn’t seem to go much faster, I was more worn out, and we weren’t as happy. It seems the regular pace is the one that works for us, no matter how long it takes.

Working on the house is frustrating, time consuming, and expensive, but I do derive satisfaction from it, and imagining what it will be like when it’s done keeps me going and makes me smile. The house presents challenges and problems to solve, mental far more than physical. I know that I’m getting better at the work, day by day. I may not attain the level of craftsmanship that I aspire to, but I keep trying. I just hope that by the time we get to trim work I’ll be good enough to make it look nice.

We envisioned working on the house together, but between pregnancies, kids, and graduate school, Sarah hasn’t been as hands-on as she’d hoped. Instead we’ve been overwhelmed by family and friends who have volunteered their time to help us with this crazy project. It’s made us feel very grateful for the people around us.

I’m still dreaming of winning the lottery or stumbling upon the amazing idea that changes the world. Until that happens I’m going to keep working on this house. It’s more than something to do, more than just a hobby. It’s building a home for myself and my family. It’s a purpose.