Year: 2015

Plan Revision

August 18, 2015 / / 0 Comments

When we switched to doing things The Right Way™ a big part of the reasoning was that it would simplify the project and save time. By moving into the basement we would be able to completely demo the second floor in one step, and nearly all the work done by contractors could be done at the same time. That last part will translate into some cost and time savings, but it has the unfortunate side effect of putting all the big-ticket items into one big chunk. We’ve paid for the project out-of-pocket so far, but we’re looking at a rapid succession of plumbing, electrical, HVAC, spray foam, new roof, drywall, hardwood floors, cabinets, and appliances. Simply put, it’s not in the budget. At the same time, we’re at the point where we want to get the project finished and not spend the next twelve years picking away at it.

The other option is to take out a loan. While these big-ticket items are a year or more out, we’re also looking at some big expenses with the basement, so I figured if we’re going to have to take out a loan anyway, why not just get it now? I looked into a Home Equity Line of Credit (HELOC), but after talking to lenders it seems the only way to borrow against the house is if it doesn’t need any work done. So I found a second option, a HomeStyle loan (which sounds like a breakfast side), where they appraise the house based on the completed state and pay out as inspections verify the work. That sounds like it would work for us, but there’s a couple catches. While it’s possible to get a HomeStyle loan that allows you to do the work yourself, most of them want contractors lined up and ready to go. Because it’s based on the completed state, the house has to actually be complete when they’re done, and finally, the process can’t take more than seven months. With all the work we’re still planning to do ourselves, there’s no way we could get the whole house done in that time.

Instead we came up with a modified approach. We’ll pay for the basement work out-of-pocket, as well as the demo, framing, and windows on the second floor. When that’s all done and we’re to the point where all those previously mentioned big-ticket items are looming, we take out the loan and get everything else done. We’d leave the attic and basement unfinished, as well as a lot of the trim and finishing work, but the rest of the house would need to be livable, meaning drywall, bathrooms, and kitchen. In fact, while we’re at it we’re hoping to get a few other big-ticket things done too, like the front and back porches, the siding, and the garage. The result is that the project gets put on fast forward.

We have a lot of things to figure out to make this happen, and a lot of work to do before, during, and after this process, but the idea that we might be able to get the house so much further along so quickly (relatively) is exciting, even if it means we’ll have a bigger loan to pay back. If everything goes to plan (caveat: it almost certainly won’t) then we could be living on both floors of the house in just eighteen months. Since we’ve been living in the house for four years already, that’s pretty amazing. Now if I could just get some plumbing quotes, we’ll be on our way!

Contractor Wrangling

August 12, 2015 / / 0 Comments

For the first part of the year, almost the whole first half, we were going like gangbusters on the house. After we returned the mini-excavator and the last dumpster was hauled away, we kind of ran out of steam. We’d go down to the basement and putter about for a little while, digging up the rest of the disconnected sewer pipe to the catch basin, hauling out some of the remaining dirt piles, breaking up the landing outside the back door, but for the most part, a sense of dread and just being overwhelmed took hold. Digging by hand in the clay soil is just terrible and with our dumpsters gone we didn’t really have anywhere to put it. A series of over-tonnage charges came through on the dumpsters that added up to a lot of extra money. We basically got screwed on the dumpsters and should have gone straight to the hauler instead of using a service.

There were some also simple realities of life going on: our son Derek is going to speech therapy twice a week in the evenings, which occupies a decent chunk of our work time. Until she got a new job a few weeks ago, Sarah was working at a temp job that put a lot of uncertainty into our house budget. As for me, I was just sick of the basement. It’s summer, there are all kinds of things to do, and our weekends were more often than not full of fun activities with friends and family. In short, not much got done on the house.

Now that Sarah’s permanently employed, we’re back to hoping we can move into the basement before winter sets in. The only way that’s happening is if we hire out a big chunk of the work: namely finishing the dig out and pouring the new concrete floor, and the sewer plumbing. So over the last month or so we’ve been in contact with a few concrete contractors, a GC, and a couple of plumbers. We got a couple quotes on the dig out and the floor, as well as the new exterior back steps, but getting a plumbing quote has proven elusive. The GC we met with first said he would give us a quote but he never did, plus a lot of what he said really didn’t align with what I understand code to be, even though he said he knows all the inspectors and does it all the time.

Then we met with a plumber that gave us a whole different idea for how to do the sewer plumbing. We were planning on having our sewer pipe run underground, gravity-fed, with a backflow preventer (since Chicago has a combined storm system and high rain can lead to sewer backups). The plumber told us that the city now has additional requirements for backflow preventers that makes them difficult and expensive, and to instead use an overhead sewer line from the main stack to the front of the house. The basement fixtures would drain into an ejector pit that pumps up to the overhead line. The advantage is that it’s unlikely there would ever be a backup because it’s much higher up, and even if it did it would just back up to the ejector pit. Better still, we could run the whole thing in PVC instead of cast iron (which the City requires for below grade sewer). As a result it would be cheaper as well as a performing better. The disadvantage is we would have a bulkhead along the outside wall, but I think we can make that work. Unfortunately, he also said we’d have to have a trench for the new water main, since the city inspectors want to be able to see that it’s one contiguous pipe.

Unfortunately they still haven’t gotten us a quote, and now they want to come back out next week since their “outside guy” missed the last appointment. Needless to say I haven’t gotten a quote yet. We have another plumber coming out on Saturday morning. Hopefully they’ll both get us quotes; after wasting most of the summer, now we need to get moving on this project, but without quotes we can’t plan or budget.

Marking Time

June 26, 2015 / / 1 Comment
Sarah and Matt at Closing
Changing locks

Four years ago, on a sunny day in June 2011, Sarah and I bought our house. She was three months pregnant with our son Derek. I changed the locks still wearing my dress shirt and pants. We had just sunk a large portion of our savings into a moldy two flat that smelled so bad that just walking through it made you want to take a shower. Everything was sticky, as in everything. You couldn’t touch a door knob, a wall, a bit of trim, or the floor without feeling like you were contaminated by roach droppings and a pervasive, cloying, humid funk.

Our inspector had told us that he would normally recommend not to buy this house, but we seemed like we knew what we were getting into. Before we bought this house, I had never seen an actual rats nest. I’d never used a shop vac to suck them out of wall cavities, or dug them out of the dirt under a concrete floor or had to dispose of a rat carcass. I’d never pulled back a piece of trim and had to stand back so I didn’t breath in the shower of dead roaches that fell out. In that sense, I’m not sure that we did know what we were getting into. We didn’t know how much having two kids would complicate home improvement. Most importantly, we didn’t understand that knowing what needs to be done is not the same things as knowing how long it takes to do it.

Sarah 2011
Christmas 2012
Dean, Mike, Matt B, Eriq 2013
Matt and Derek 2014
Sarah and Derek 2015
Emily 2015

The past four years we’ve learned a lot, done a lot, spent a lot, and we have a long way yet to go. Going in we hoped this would be roughly a five-year project, but I think we’re only about 25% done. If we want the remaining three-quarters to take less than twelve years, we’ll have to hire out a fair bit of what’s left. Even so I’m sure we’ll be working on this thing for a long time yet, but I also hope that our current basement plan helps us get the inside of the house to a (mostly) completed state in the next couple years. As daunting as what’s ahead is, keeping the goal in mind keeps us going. It also helps to remind ourselves how much we’ve already done.

We’ve removed about 75 tons of material from the house, no small part of which was rats nests, roach bodies, and layers on layers of laminate flooring. By weight, most of it was concrete and dirt with a fair amount of plaster, but in there was a purging of all the awfulness that the house embodied when we bought it. The house was cleansed, not just in the literal sense, but in a spiritual sense. While it’s still ugly on the outside, with its cheap vinyl siding (over cement-asbestos siding over wood siding), Picasso-inspired window flashing and comically bad roof, it’s slowly become ours. We demoed the whole basement and first floor, ripped out the raised cinder block garden in the back yard, took down the chimney brick by brick, tore down the old back porch and garage are gone, and dug down the basement.

Painted living room
Basement demo
First floor demo
Mike welding steel beam
LVL beam installation
Iron door installed
Leveling joists
Stringers installed
Porch coming down
Derek on the digger

 

Structurally, we have a new steel support beam and columns in the basement on new concrete footings and we have a new LVL beam and columns in the first floor. The first floor has a new level subfloor and is completely framed, including new doors and windows and a front staircase. Mechanically, we have a new high-efficiency water heater and boiler and the start of a new hydronic heating system. We have new electrical service and panel and new wiring and lighting in the basement.

The next big step is new sewer and supply and an interior weeping system so we can get the new basement floor poured. Once that’s done we’ll focus on getting the basement livable: bathroom, temporary kitchen, stairs, and walls. We can move down to the basement and demo the whole second floor. This is our goal for the next six months. It’s ambitious, and historically we haven’t made our deadlines, especially the ambitious ones. Worse, we haven’t gotten much done the last few weeks; it’s so easy to lose momentum. We’re going to try just the same, and I really hope we can do it. We wouldn’t have gotten this far without the extraordinary help of our family and friends, and knowing how much effort they’ve put into our project, how much they’ve given us, makes me all the more committed to seeing it done.

Basement Dig Out – Part 3

June 3, 2015 / / 0 Comments
Sarah using the digger

Sarah using the digger

I’ll be honest; I’m not sure how many “parts” to the dig out there are, but this is Part 3. It kind of feels like it’ll go on forever. We filled our fifth heavy debris dumpster in a row and took back the mini-excavator. I’d like to say that means we’re done, but instead I’m saying that “principle excavation” is complete, which is just another way of saying that we’re not done. What remains to do is finish clearing the dirt from the footings, remove a few piles of loose dirt including the dirt ramp we used to get the digger out the back door, and level everything, probably by renting one of those heavy rollers you fill with water. The bottom line is there’s more than a few wheelbarrows of dirt yet to haul out, and a lot more work to do.

Digging for new back steps

Digging for new back steps

The last thing we used the digger for was to excavate a pit behind the house. This is where the new outside basement steps will go. Having the steps go up to the left makes more sense since it’s toward the sidewalk that runs along the side of the house and to the currently nonexistent garage, but it requires some reconfiguration, by which I mean busting out the existing concrete retaining walls and stairs and then putting in a new one. With the steps going to the left, we can eventually put a deck on the right side of the house.

In addition to the final clearing and leveling, we also need to clean up the inside edge of the footings so that it’s even enough to finish the walls down the road. Exactly how we do that “clean up” remains to be seen, but it’s stone, so probably hammer and chisel, concrete saw, and angle grinder. Of course after everything is nice  and clean and level we have to dig trenches for the plumbing and weeping system, so we’ll be busy for a while yet.

Because we have to take out the concrete walls and there’s undoubtedly more dirt to clear for the stairs, there’s a strong likelihood we’ll need yet another dumpster in the not-too-distant future. Also, just a heads up to anyone planning an extended rental from Home Depot: a “month” is four weeks, so if you bring it back in thirty days it costs extra.

Plumbing Move

May 22, 2015 / / 0 Comments

There are a few drawbacks to living in a house while you remodel it. It takes longer, it’s more complicated, and you often have to spend time on temporary solutions to keep things operational. In this case, the water heater and laundry in the basement needed to be moved up to the first floor so the basement dig out can continue.

Basement water heater and laundry

Basement water heater and laundry

We installed the water heater back in August of 2013. At the time we were getting everything disconnected from the chimney so we could redo the subfloor on the first floor. When we decided to do things the right way and do the basement first, we had to reshuffle things. We considered disconnecting everything and moving out for a few months, but instead we just moved the water heater to the first floor temporarily and rerouted the plumbing. I even managed to hook up the laundry, so we don’t have to go to the laundromat for the next several months.

Relocated to first floor

Relocated to first floor

Getting gas, electric, water, and venting run was a task, but I simplified it by using PEX tubing and quick connect fittings for the plumbing. PEX isn’t code in Chicago, but this isn’t permanent so I’m not too worried about it. Once the new basement floor is done we can move it all back into the basement. I took off a few days from work this week and got everything set up on the first floor for about $150 in materials. The whole house water filter had to get disconnected, but because of how we plumbed it we were able to just bypass it with a few valve turns.

Old sewer connection
Sewer connection repaired
Kitchen drain connected

The next step was to fix the drainage. The long-gone basement bathroom had been badly spliced in where the cast iron stack connected to the vitrified clay sewer line. I repaired that connection with a section of PVC and a rubber gasket. I had to cut out the cast iron and the broken clay. I did both with a diamond grit reciprocating saw bit. Don’t waste your time on the carbide bit. That thing is crap, just spend the extra few dollars. Once that connection was made, I redirected the drain from the kitchen (and laundry) into the main sewer instead of the collapsed line that goes to the catch basin and backs up all the time. When we replace the underground sewer line this will get changed again, but for the time being we don’t have water all over the floor and noxious sewer gas leaking in the basement, which is nice.

Everything removed

Everything relocated

Finally, with everything moved and rerouted, I took up the last section of concrete floor.

Concrete removed

Concrete removed

Now we can finish the dig out! We have nine days left with the mini-excavator before our month is up and we have to return it, so we’ve got to press on and get this thing done! It’s looking like one more dumpster after this one should finish things up, or roughly 2 concrete dumpsters and 4 dirt dumpsters total (plus the 2 debris dumpsters from the garage and back porch demo). It’s been a busy Spring.