Author: Matt

Second Floor Framing

March 9, 2019 / / 7 Comments

Wow. So, we’re working on the loan to finish the house, but we also didn’t want to lose a month or more while that happens and the builder had a crew available, so we moved forward with framing. We signed the contract on a Thursday, I cleared all of the debris and tools out of the second floor and attic over the weekend, the crew started on Monday, and they finished the following week Tuesday.

What I’m saying is that, in seven days of work, the framing of the second floor and attic was completed. This included the structural work of putting in beams and columns and adding blocking to the outside walls to support the new lowered joists, replacing the subfloor on the second floor, framing the second floor interior walls, the attic subfloor, building stairs up to the attic, adding the collar ties that make the ceiling of the attic rooms, and finally, framing the interior walls in the attic.

I took a video because photos of framed walls are difficult to make sense of

If I had done this work myself, with assistance from friends and family, a rough guess is that it would have taken about a year. That actually makes sense, given that a crew of eight carpenters working for seven days is 56 days worth of work, and a generous estimate is that, on average, I find time to work on the house one day a week.

There are a couple of things that they either didn’t do or did differently than I’d prefer that I intend to simply fix myself, like adding exterior wall fire blocking to the second floor and tweaking a couple of closet walls in the attic where the slope of the roof didn’t exactly align with the drawings. Hopefully I’ll get that done in the next few weeks while we’re working on the loan. That’s a whole other story that I’ll put into its own post.

Can’t Someone Else Do It?

January 29, 2019 / / 2 Comments

It’s been a couple of months since my last post. Sometimes work is diligently continuing even as I don’t update the blog, but in this case, not much has changed. We still don’t have a new roof. We still don’t have siding. We do, however, have a new plan. Whether or not we can bring that plan about and how long it will take, is a separate question.

When we started looking at siding, we got a few quotes. With the two inches of exterior rigid foam, we wound up choosing Hardie board, a cement fiber clapboard siding. I spent a lot of time reviewing other options, but there are a lot of products that will not warranty an installation over more than an inch of foam. In the case of Hardie Board, we’ll need to put up furring strips over the foam that are screwed through the foam and cladding into structure.

When we did the research on siding, we found that there was a big range when it came to cost, so we weren’t sure what to expect in terms of quotes. Without exception, the quotes came back at the top of the range. That means that siding is turning out to be a very big ticket item. So big, in fact, that paying for it out of pocket isn’t really feasible, and getting a loan or floating it on credit cards would put us in the position of paying it back over perhaps three years.

The problem with that is we are tired of living in the basement. It’s been two-and-a-half years already (time flies) and we’d really like to live in our house. If we take out a loan that we have to pay off for even a couple years, it means we aren’t taking out the loan to finish the house until that’s paid off, and that is a very unappealing idea at this point.

What we’re left with is putting the siding into the same loan that we need to get to finish the house. One option is to forestall siding until we’ve finished all of the remaining projects left before we take out the loan, which mostly includes re-framing the second floor and attic: subfloor, walls, and stairs. It’s hard to accurately estimate how long all that would take, but given the rate things have been going, I’d guess it would take another year.

The other option, and the one we’ve decided to go with, is taking out the loan now, and letting professionals finish the job. We’ve been working on this house for seven and a half years now. We’ve put in an awful lot of sweat equity, and we’re ready to have a house that we can live in. The kids are ready to have their own bedrooms.

With that decision reached, we’ve been working with contractors to put together proposals, working with banks on loans, and working with an architect to revise our plans to match what we actually built and what we’re actually building, given some of the necessary and elected drift that’s taken place in the last several years since we got our original prints.

This wasn’t an easy decision for us to reach, and we’re faced with all the same concerns (and experience) we’ve had with contractors up to this point, but we simply don’t have the free time needed to get the house done ourselves the way we want it done in a reasonable amount of time. We’ll still have to finish the basement ourselves, since we’re living in it,
and probably some of the back yard work like the patio and pergola, but the rest of it we’ll get done in one fell swoop.

More to come. Even with this change in direction, we will continue to chronicle the progress in the blog and perhaps (perhaps!) the end is actually in sight.

Roof Penetrations

November 16, 2018 / / 1 Comment

I went back and forth and hemmed and hawed when it came to how to vent the bathrooms. I was concerned that on the second floor, if I went out the side it would be right underneath the gutters, and picturing steamy air in the middle of winter was just not a good mental picture. At the same time, going straight up is yet another roof penetration, places that can leak if not today then eventually. I was committed to the roof to the point of ordering some roof caps, only to briefly plan to run PVC pipe and then finally going back to out the side.

It came down to the slope of the pipe. When water condenses in the exhaust pipe, I want it to drain out not back into the bathroom. Since I plan to run the venting in PVC, which will never rust or leak and doesn’t require nearly as much insulation to prevent condensing on the wrong side, angling it down to the outside is a nice, short run. I made my peace with the vent under the gutter by buying the downward-sloping metal vents rather than the flat louvered plastic things.

I also spent a lot of time figuring out the exhaust fan for the kitchen. This time, the roof was pretty much the only option. Because we plan to have a, ahem, large range, we need a big exhaust fan (plus some kind of makeup air). The required 6″ ducting could easily go straight out the side, but it would spew greasy smoke directly across from the neighbor’s window, about three feet away. Dean suggested I go out the side in the other direction, so we took a gander at the other neighbor, and sure enough they have a window there too. So, up it is. I debated the style of roof exhaust too, concerning myself with snow accumulation, grease on my shingles, you name it, but ultimately I decided to just put the damn thing I’d already ordered in the roof and commit.

Sarah in the attic
Cutting the hole
Kitchen exhaust cap

That still left some big projects. We vented the water heater out the side of the house, and every winter it frosts over because it’s right next to the exhaust for the boiler, and every summer Sarah complains that it smells between the houses when it runs, most likely because it’s condensing, so the exhaust isn’t hot enough to float away right away. The solution: run it up and out the roof. The challenge was there wasn’t a particularly direct way to do that. Exceeding a handful of elbows meant I needed to step up from 2″ to 3″ PVC for both the intake and exhaust lines, which had to run parallel the whole way until the combine in a concentric vent just before going out the roof.

Fun parallel bends
Concentric cap on roof

Dean saved the day, throwing ideas at me on how to route it until we finally coalesced into a plan. We spent most of the day in the basement, cutting holes in the joists (center third vertically, outer third horizontally) to run the pipes along the outside wall to get to the wet wall, so they could then run up to the attic before jogging over about six feet to get enough clearance from the other vents. I got the flashing boot onto the pipe, managing to knock the cap of the concentric vent off in the process. It bounced off the neighbor’s roof before it fell to the ground and cracked. I glued the thing back together with PVC cement, so it now has purple primer crack lines, but it’s installed.

Template for cutting
Then there was light!
Base installed

Finally, the largest holes of all were the two solar tubes. We’d trimmed down our original plans to one solar tube in the master bedroom closet and one big solar tube that goes through the attic and second floor to bring light all the way to the kitchen and living room on the first floor. We cut the holes from the inside, then Sarah tied a rope around the flashing base so I could hoist them up and put them in position. It wasn’t the cleanest of jobs, but since the roof is about to be replaced, they’re mostly there so the roofer know where they go. They can attach them more permanently. Sorry I don’t have completed pictures of the solar tubes, I was more concerned about getting down safely.

Back of House Progress

November 12, 2018 / / 0 Comments

House wrap is a good start, but there’s a few more things to finish on the back of the house. First, we needed an actual door, since I was using a sheet of rigid foam to block the opening we had cut. As with the other doors and windows, we needed a 2″ jam extension to position the door to the outside of the rigid foam that will clad the exterior over the house wrap. I made this out of 2x4s, with a 1/2″ of foam on the back side, punctuated by squares of 1/2″ plywood where I was putting screws through it. At the bottom, rather than just a 2×4, I built the ledger that the landing will be attached to. This is the same basic design, though, with a 2x board over plywood and foam, only using much bigger screws to attach into the wall studs.

Wrapping jamb extension
Jamb extension assembly
Jamb extension
Not plumb
Door installed

After applying all sorts of tape to flash the thing to the house wrap and allow water to travel around the wood, I ran into trouble when I went to position the door. I swear I measure these things, but somehow the opening was slightly too short. Fortunately, I was able to remedy this by swapping the original rough-sawn 2×4 at the top of the opening with a new 2×4, since it’s only 1-1/2″ thick. Now I was set, right? Of course not. I made the same classic mistake I’ve made before: trusting the house. One side of the door opening is against an existing stud, and like a fool I assumed it was approximately vertical. Since that turned out to be laughably wrong, I wound up having to again swap an old stud for a new one, then add a piece of plywood at the bottom of one side to get the opening a bit closer to an actual rectangle rather than a parallelogram. Ultimately, I did get the door installed and taped.

As with the front of the house, I needed to build the gable soffit, or rake. I had help in the form of Aaron, Dylan, Rob, and Mike. While Dylan trimmed back the original boards, we assembled the new rake in sections, including the angled bottom end that aligns with the side of the house. Despite the heights, wobbly platform, and ladder, we managed to successfully attach it without anyone falling.

Rake installed, housewrap taped

The last step in the process was to tape all the vertical seams in the house wrap, which I did while lowering the platform back to ground level. An additional trip up the ladder similarly finished the right edge of the back, and the whole thing is looking pretty much ready for siding, with the exception of the ledgers, which I have yet to finish.

Before we put siding on the house, we’re going to replace the roof. The existing roof is terrifically old, maybe 10-15 years, but it’s the cheapest shingle on the market, it’s not adhered very well, there are now multiple —and in some cases poor— patch jobs, plus the new front porch and the bay peak, it’s due. That means we have a few more projects to wrap up to get ready for that. Hopefully the weather will cooperate!

Completing House Wrap

October 12, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Portions of the house have had house wrap for a while, far longer than it’s meant to be exposed. Because I started out buying the small three-foot rolls, before graduating to the larger 9′ rolls, and because we’ve done it a bit at a time using different types and brands, our house wrap job has a definite patchwork quilt vibe going on. There are some lessons learned, to be sure. First, I wish I’d known how much better Typar was when I started. I never would have bought all that Tyvek. Second, taping is critical, especially vertical seams, to keep the house wrap from leaking and ripping off in the wind. Third, house wrap is always a pain in the ass, but it’s far worse when you’re doing it by yourself.

Fortunately, last Saturday I had some help in the form of Rob, Dylan, Aaron, and Kelsey. Rob helped me get the first course of house wrap on the narrow North side of the house. I was up on the ladder while he held the roll up on a long wooden pole. For the second and third courses, I was further up the ladder while Dylan was holding the roll on a second ladder. Every time we needed to move the ladders, I’d hold the roll while he moved, then he’d hold it while I moved. It took most of the day, but we got the whole side done. I didn’t get any in-progress shots of this process, so you’ll have to use your imagination. As with the South wall, we left the bottom edge un-stapled to allow for the drip edge install. That proved an annoyance as we could hear it flapping in the wind all night.

That left only two sections still to wrap: the back attic gable wall and the corner of the South wall behind the electrical service. I took off a week of work and Monday Aaron, Dylan, and Kelsey came back to assist. Before we could put house wrap on the back gable, I needed to remove the rest of the gable trim and the rake, as well as frame the back attic door opening. Due to fire code requirements, we need a second form of egress from the attic, meaning a back door and stairs on the currently nonexistent back deck.

The first step was getting the pump jack into position. Unfortunately, it really couldn’t get high enough to reach everything. I started removing the friezes, but I realized it would be easier to reach everything if I cut the door opening. so there was some cutting, some prying, and some cursing, but eventually I got the trim removed. I’d positioned a piece of OSB in the attic where the floor will eventually be, so I knew where the bottom of the door would go, from there, I just measured the rough opening and started cutting. I managed to cut out the center stud from the wall and re-purpose it to the side of the door to get everything exactly where it needed to be, along with a 2×4 header. With the door framed and the trim removed, we were basically done for the day.

Trim and rake
Cutting the door opening
From the inside
Door opening almost done
Removing top frieze
Only rakes left
Trim and rakes removed, door framed

The week I took off proved to be rainy, which made working outside a challenge. I got the drip edge installed around the bottom edge of the wall all the way around the house. This directs water away from the foundation and will protect the rigid foam from damage or bugs. I caulked it down the entire length and attached it with nails before taping down the edge of the housewrap. I’ve become paranoid about allowing a path for water to drain out, even at the expense of air sealing. There are too many ways for water to get behind the house wrap for me to tape any bottom edges.

Drip edge corner
Cutting back house wrap and fitting edge
Drip edge installed
Other side done

I worked my way up the South corner behind the electrical, which meant removing and reattaching one bracket at a time and cutting out slots and holes in the wrap to position it behind the electrical service. I used a lot of tape to get everything solid. Finally, today I got the top corner in and started on the back gable. I cut each side separately because of the awkwardness and the angles. The best part was disconnecting and reconnecting the pump jack brackets from the wall while I was standing on the platform, one at a time, so I could get the house wrap behind them.

Pump jack brackets
One bracket
Both brackets

With the sides and the section under the door done, I just had the top of the peak above the door opening left. I couldn’t reach all the way to the peak from the doorway and the pump jack was even lower, so I ended up putting a ladder inside, leaning against the inside of the wall with it’s feet against a rafter so it couldn’t move, then hanging on that out of the house to get the last few staples in. I’m happy to report my ongoing efforts to get things done on the house while not dying have continued to be successful.

House wrap done

The house wrap is up, but I have some taping and flashing left, and I need to add the jamb extension for the attic door, plus the new rake. I also need to install ledgers for the back deck. We’ve been reaching out to contractors about siding, and we’re hoping that’s not too far around the corner. Finding someone willing to tackle the rigid foam and furring strips is non-trivial. I can put up the rigid foam myself if I have to, but it would be a hell of a lot faster to hire it out. We bought most of the foam we need on sale and we have a nine-foot tall pile of it in the first floor now. Sadly, we’re no strangers to giant piles of on-sale insulation littering up the house. Hopefully we make use of this one sooner than the other one.