Month: November 2016

Second Floor Demo Floor Demo

November 28, 2016 / / 2 Comments

Our demo party filled the first dumpster, so we swapped it for another one the same size and we filled it up too. In addition to all of the remaining plaster and lath debris, of which there was plenty, we took up the flooring down to the subfloor. This was an involved process, mostly because there wasn’t anywhere that had only one layer of flooring. The living room and dining room had a floated Pergo-style laminted pressboard floor that looked like hardwood. It, like most of the work done to the house shortly before we bought it, was cheap and installed badly. Despite being less than ten years old, it was in bad shape and we pitched it. Under that was peel-and-stick tiles, under that was a thin veneer hardwood, under that was the original hardwood floors, and under that was an inch-thick layer of plaster, mud, and general crud from when the house was built.

Under-floor Crud

As with the first floor, we didn’t save the hardwood floors. For one, there wasn’t enough of it. We’re completely changing the floor plan which would complicate any effort to save it, we’re installing radiant heated floors, and they were in really rough shape from all of the nails.

Bathroom floor removal in progress

Living room done, dining room in progress

Because our subfloor is planks that are spaced apart by a quarter inch or more, we couldn’t use a broom to sweep up all the debris without pushing cascades of crud through the cracks and down into the first floor where all of our stuff is in storage. Now granted, we covered everything with tarps and it’s all pretty dirty already anyway from the dust of the demo party and unavoidable debris that comes down anyway, including through various holes in the floors and walls. Even so, we wanted to do what we could to prevent it from being any worse than it had to be. Sarah spent several hours a day over the better part of two weeks sucking up all the crap with the shopvac. We hauled out about eight contractor bags of the stuff and filled our toters a few times, since the dumpster was gone.

Of course, then I went around de-nailing studs and joists and leaving nails and random other bits of crud all over the floors she had just vacuumed, but this is kind of how it goes. I’ll get it cleaned up again after we’ve pulled out the rest of the interior walls and the plumbing and are ready to start putting things back together. It’s already starting to look like the kind of space we can start building things in, but it will really start looking promising once we get the whole floor completely cleared out.

Second Floor Demo Party

November 18, 2016 / / 0 Comments

For the third and final time, we held a demo party. Saturday, with the help of a great many friends and family members, the entire second floor was demolished. We managed to fill the 30 yard dumpster and we still have a fair amount of debris waiting its turn to go down the chute and fill the next one, which arrived Tuesday. Everything that’s left should fit into this second one, and at that point the gutting of the interior will be complete. We were so bent on wrecking things that we didn’t get in-progress photos, but we did get before and after!

Kitchen before (with chute)
Bedroom before
Living room before (ceiling demoed)

I didn’t get the ceiling demo done until Saturday morning because I spent some time improving the chute by adding a wider hopper and putting a ramp upstairs to enable full wheelbarrows to be emptied. I wasn’t able to put the top of the chute at floor level because the downspout cuts across the door, but using a chunk of the ramp I built for the basement dig-out solved the problem.

Part of the demo crew

Part of the demo crew

Friday evening, Sarah dropped off the kids at her parents and picked up two of her nephews, Colin and David, and two of their friends, Dylan and Dustin. I picked up Will, in from Iowa City, and they spent the night. Saturday morning they were joined by Dean and Siobhan and Matt B. We got to work and Sarah’s brother, Matt, and his girlfriend, Amy, joined us in the afternoon.

Kitchen after (with chute ramp and hopper)
Bedroom after (with bonus hidden window)
Living room after

Prybars, sledgehammers, 2x4s, regular hammers, shovels, buckets and wheelbarrows were put into action and the second floor came apart quickly. The plaster and lath, drywall and lath, random fiberglass insulation, and old trim all got ripped down, loaded into wheelbarrows or simply carried to the back, and chucked down the chute, while a rotating dumpster crew with shovels and rakes moved debris to the far end of the dumpster. Dust masks, goggles, gloves, boots, coveralls, bandanas, and hard hats all proved their worth and those cases where people didn’t avail themselves of them demonstrated their importance.

Bump out after
Bathroom after
Kitchen after
Living room after

When she wasn’t doing demo herself, Sarah kept everyone going with sandwiches, water, Gatorade, Coca-cola, coffee, beer, and cider, and when we finished there was lasagna, shepherd’s pie, more beer and cider, wine, and scotch. Sarah’s also been working on clearing out the remaining debris this week into the second dumpster and we’re hoping to wrap that up and get the flooring out this weekend. A huge thanks from Sarah and I go out to everyone that made it!

Second Floor Demo Prep

November 11, 2016 / / 0 Comments

With the drainage project finally wrapped up, we’re getting ready to demo the second floor! As in the past, we’re having a demo party where friends come over to smash the hell out of the walls and tear everything down. To make sure this process goes smoothly, safely, and makes as little mess as possible, we have some work to do up front. First, we need to clean up the first floor. With us living in the basement, and the second floor empty, we’re using the first floor as storage. Between all of our projects, moving to the basement, and life in general, it has a tendency to get away from us and turn into a cluttered, disorganized mess. When we demo the floor above, dust and debris are going to rain down between the floorboards, so everything needs to be as contained and protected as we can make it.

Empty kitchen

Empty kitchen awaiting destruction

I tackled the back (everything behind the wet wall) since this is my de facto workshop where all the tools are kept. After we rushed to finish the basement, I wound up bringing them back up in boxes and not putting them away. I re-organized and cleared out the worst of it, but honestly, I still have a lot more cleanup to do. However, the critical part was I made a space big enough to put all of the kitchen cabinets from upstairs. When we bought the house, we got a bunch of free kitchen cabinets from Sarah’s grandmother (who in turn had gotten them from a friend of Sarah’s parents when they remodeled their kitchen). We’re done with them now, so we’re giving them to Sarah’s parents, since they’ve bought rental property in Florida and want to redo a kitchen down there. Until they pick them up, we needed them off the walls and in the first floor. Sarah cleared up the front of the first floor, which was a bigger process since it involved not just organizing, but throwing away what we don’t want, donating what we don’t use, moving some of what we want into the basement (and finding homes for it all down there), organizing the rest of it into bins and boxes, and finally, covering it all with tarps and drop cloths.

I disconnected the water, which was complicated by the fact we still have the washer and dryer on the first floor and by the way the plumbers replaced a perfectly good dielectric union with a brass female adapter and my side-drain valve with a regular valve (both for no apparent reason other than to piss me off). That meant to disconnect the hot water I had to cut the copper pipe past the valve (which was full of water) and drain it that way. I still need to solder a cap on the pipe. For the cold water (which is all we have for the washer) I was able to reconfigure my press-fit PEX fittings (so easy!). I also disconnected the gas line that went to the stove upstairs. That was made more difficult by the fact it was one 12′ pipe going from the basement to the second floor. Disconnecting it was easy, getting it out of the wet wall was a bit more difficult. We had Lester, our radiant contractor, disconnect and drain the radiators a couple of months ago, so I was able to just lift those off the wall and move them downstairs. I unscrewed the thermostatic valves and fancy stainless steel fittings and saved them in a bag. These radiators will eventually be in the attic bedrooms, since the other stories will have radiant floor heating.

I turned off the electrical circuits for the second floor and took down the ceiling fans and light fixtures, but I still need to remove the actual BX wire cables strewn through the attic. I reclaimed the outlets (few that there were), which we’d installed new when we bought the house. The whole upstairs only had one light switch (in the bathroom) since everything else was on pull chains and a couple of fan remotes. Honestly, one of the nicest parts of the basement is the normal complement of outlets and switches, since they were in short supply upstairs.

Debris chute

Debris chute

Sarah ordered a big dumpster and it was dropped off in the back yard on Friday. Monday I built a chute out of the extension ladder and some 2x4s and plywood to go from the back door of the second floor down to the dumpster that will make the demo process go much faster. We discovered when we demoed the first floor that balloon frame houses lend themselves to a particular order of deconstruction if you want to contain all the plaster dust and mess. By demoing the ceiling first, all the debris falls into the still-enclosed rooms rather than into the wall cavities and into the floor below. By saving the flooring for last, we prevent (some of) the mess raining down between the subfloor boards. Also, by demoing the ceiling before the demo party, we prevent some of the more dangerous aspects of wanton destruction with large groups of people.

Chute close-up

Chute close-up

I got underway with ceiling demo, starting in the back bedroom and kitchen and working forward. We insulated the attic with blown-in cellulose a few years ago, so there was a lot of fluff shoveling, but the chute is working as hoped. The top of the chute is slightly higher than I’d planned, so I need to lower it a bit, but otherwise it’s a vast time saver over hauling everything down by hand. When we prepped for demo of the first floor we took down all the trim, but in the second floor, at least for the windows, I’m concerned the trim is actually holding the windows in place. They’re all cheap replacement windows and they’re less than professionally installed. We may take it easy on those until we’re ready to replace them. The weather is getting cooler and we don’t want any gaping holes in the exterior walls, let alone the possibility of broken glass and injured people.

I expect to finish ceiling demo tonight, the kids will be out of the house with grandparents for the whole weekend to avoid any noxious dust contamination, and we’ll get this, quite literally, knocked out!

Drainage Project Construction

November 8, 2016 / / 3 Comments
Rob installing plastic
Front yard landscape fabric

With the excavation complete, it’s time to put everything back together. We enlisted the help of my brother-in-law, Rob, to attach the 6-mil plastic sheeting to the houses on either side of the walk. The plastic lines the trench and ensures that water is only going where we want it to. Given the heavy clay soil we’re dealing with, we were concerned that water would find an easier time coming through the cracks in the brick than draining in the clay, so putting down plastic and gluing it to the houses makes sure there’s no other way for it to go. The plastic wraps across the front of the house as well, terminating in the small trench we dug across the front, which connects to the main trench along the side. Sarah and her sister, Nicole, put down a landscaping fabric in the front yard. Since we spent so much time digging up weeds, we wanted to do what we could to prevent their immediate return.

The next step was to run the pipes. Sarah’s dad, Mike, helped me get all the pipe from Menards and installed. We have a sock-wrapped perforated rigid pipe (holes down) that follows the trench across the front of the house, turns 90°, and then runs the length of the house in the bottom of the trench. This pipe will pick up water and channel it to the cancelled catch basin. Eventually it will go to a water feature/rain garden, but that will have to wait until we have the back yard done. There’s a second solid, rigid pipe that runs parallel to the first along the side of the house down the trench that picks up the downspouts. There’s a port for the (currently nonexistent) porch roof, a clean-out that could be re-purposed for a downspout if we end up having downspouts both front and back, and a port at the back of the house for the roof downspout. This pipe Y’s into the corrugated pipe and they both go to the catch basin. Because (a) we don’t have the rain garden set up yet and (b) we haven’t redone the roof and gutters yet, this pipe isn’t currently in use.

Front trench
Porch downspout and cleanout
Back downspout and trench
Y to catch basin

 

With the pipes in place we back-filled the trench and the front of the house with ¾” crushed limestone. This allows rain water to drain through to the pipes. We also continued the crushed stone as a base through the rest of the path that runs across the front yard to meet the front walk. I originally estimate this would be about 2 yards of stone, but it wound up being 5. We managed to do this in the most expensive way possible, because we wound up buying the first load of stone, followed by the pavers, followed by the second load of stone, followed by the load of fine-crushed stone (from a different company), and paying delivery fees every time. Better planning and estimating would have saved us probably $250. On top of that, we’d been looking at both the 24×24 and the 18×24 pavers. The 18×24 pavers were cheaper, but we’d need more of them, so they wound up being pretty much the same price. I decided on the 24×24, but instead the clerk sold me the 18×24 in the quantity of the 24×24, which we didn’t realize until they’d been delivered, so we didn’t have enough pavers. We decided to keep the 18×24, but had to go back and pick up 9 more pavers to finish the project.

Backfilling
Derek and Emily helping
Making progress
All done (also Derek)

Either way, we got the stone down and then put down the pavers. I wanted a large paver so that they wouldn’t move around even though they don’t have the typical sand underneath and they aren’t in direct contact with one another. The pavers are 18″x24″ Unilock “Rivenstone” bluestone. We’re hoping this means we’ll be able to buy more of them in a few years when it’s time to do the patio and continue the walkway through the back yard. I put the pavers into place using a 2×4 to space them and then Sarah fine-tuned with a string line on stakes to get them straight.

Installing pavers (also Derek)
Installing pavers (also Sarah)
Making progress, need more pavers

The last step was to spread fine-crushed stone around the pavers. This will still allow water to drain through, but holds the pavers in place and makes for an even walkway. We got a couple of yards of the finer stone and wound up with a wheelbarrow leftover that we’ll use to fill any low spots after a rain or two. We had looked at some chipped blue stone or other matching option and the price was horrifying, so we opted for the fine-crush and it looks nice, in my opinion. We also spread mulch around the front yard.

Front yard path complete
Side and front apron complete
Path complete

We haven’t had any water in the basement since we took up the old sidewalk, and I’m hoping it stays that way. I really think this will make a big difference, though I’m not thrilled with how quickly the cancelled catch basin fills up. Obviously, it’s cancelled, so it’s not expected to hold anything, but I was hoping it would handle a bit more rain than we’ve gotten. Once we’ve finished the house and can take up the concrete patio in the back yard, we can put in the water feature and hopefully solve it completely, but either way it should keep the basement dry. This was a big project, and as usual, we had a lot of help. A big thanks to Rob, Nicole, Sarah’s parents, my mom, plus Derek and Emily.