Author: Matt

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.

Front Fence

May 7, 2012 / / 1 Comment

Fence Before

I’m not a big fan of fenced-in front yards. I think they make a home seem unwelcoming, and a street of them feels closed off. However, there are some good reasons to keep it and for now at least it’s going to stay. Given that, I needed to do something about the white finials. Maybe this is a personal preference thing, but I think they look terrible. Maybe if they were painted well it would be another matter, but they’re rusty and crappy.

I started by sanding down all of the bubbling paint on the fence with steel wool. I used a wet rag to remove dirt, cobwebs, wind-blown seeds and all the other detritus that had accumulated. Then, wearing a black shirt and goggles, with a piece of cardboard as a shield, I spray painted everything that wasn’t black.

Fence After

I think the end product looks a lot better. While I was at it I also painted the railing on the porch. This was one of the rare aesthetic improvements we’ve made to the exterior of the house and I’m glad I finally found a warm, dry day to do it.

De-Trimming

April 27, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Living Room

While things crank along with the architect, we’re continuing to prepare for first floor demolition. We decided that taking off all of the trim first would allow us to remove the plaster and lath more quickly, which will be important because when that happens we’ll need to rent a dumpster and they charge by the day. The pile of wood in the above picture is some of what we’ve gotten so far, which includes the baseboards from the living room and dining room, the crown molding from the dining room, and some door trim.

Under the door trim

Speaking of door trim, I decided against the “large” size for this picture. Inside the door frame are mass graves for roaches. We found similar if worse buildup when we were working on the second floor. On that topic, we haven’t seen any sign of cockroaches in a long time. We continue to bring out the exterminator every few months to make sure it stays that way. We’ve come an incredibly long way from seeing them every day or so and a light year from the absolute infestation that we started with. We’re confident that when the house is done there won’t be any evidence that they were ever here.

Dining Room

I’ve been reluctant to remove the trim from around the windows. I’m concerned the windows may actually be held in place by the trim in some cases. Some exploratory removal will be necessary to ensure we can pull it down without the windows falling out of the walls. We’ll also need to adjust our fancy “curtains” by taping them to the windows themselves rather than the trim.

Beadboard Closet Wall

As I was removing baseboard from the first bedroom I realized that the closet wall (which always looked a bit odd) was actually made of beadboard with some backing nailed together that had later been drywalled over. Here you can see the beadboard where the drywall broke off. It’s painted a lovely gold color, though the work light casts a yellow hue on everything anyway so it’s a bit hard to make out.

We’re consolidating all of the stuff we have stored on the first floor to the back bedroom so we can cordon off the back two rooms and demo everything else. To do that we have some more recycling pickups to get the rest of the broken down cardboard unloaded as well as taking down the moldy drywall in the back bedroom before moving all of our boxes and bins in. Sarah treated the mold with bleach last year so it should all be dead, but I really don’t want to take any chances.

Math Time

April 20, 2012 / / 1 Comment

In addition to meeting with the architect and getting quotes from the structural engineers, we’re getting ready to demo the first floor. We started by removing the plaster and lath from one wall in the living room. The purpose was two-fold. It gave us our first peek at the inside of the exterior sheathing, which told us it may be in good enough shape to leave in place. We were concerned it might be rotted and if we had to replace it that would complicate our plan to use spray foam insulation.

The second purpose was to estimate how much plaster we’ll need to get hauled away. When you rent a dumpster you want to know how many yards, how many tons, and how many days. So, I filled a bucket with plaster from the wall and weighed it, getting roughly 25 lbs. Then I bagged the plaster from the one wall in contractor bags, two buckets per bag. When it was all done, there were five bags, one of which had more like two and a half buckets worth. In other words, the one wall had something like 275 lbs of plaster on it.

Here’s where it gets fun, assuming you like math. The wall is 11′ 5″ × 10′, so dividing we get about 2.4 lbs / sq ft. The ceiling is fairly easy if we fudge on interior walls, 20′ × 45′ × 2.4 lbs = ~1 ton. All of the walls are 10′, so instead of doing lots of calculations I’ll just work out linear feet and multiply the result. Front and back walls 20′ × 2. Side walls plus center wall (both sides) = 45′ × 4. For interior walls we need to add both sides of all walls, so on the larger side we have 12 × 4 + 7 × 2 and on the smaller side there are 3 walls separating the bedrooms and foyer, so roughly 8 × 6, then there’s one more wall along the bathroom that’s 7′ long, and again we have both sides. I think that’s 344.

Pure Excitement

344′ × 10′ × 2.4 lbs = ~4 tons. We had 1 ton for the ceiling, so we’re up to 5. Unfortunately, there’s also drywall on top of the plaster in a lot of the rooms, plus we’ve got all of the trim, floors, subfloor, some cement board left from the basement, and a random assortment of other crap that I honestly can’t estimate with any accuracy (how accurate any of these measurements are is questionable). Obviously we need more than 5 tons. The question is how much? It’s at least 6 tons, it’s probably 7 but is it 8? Doing the math gives us a starting point but there’s a lot of unknown.

The good news is that as long as we have an idea, we can order a dumpster for the approximate amount and they’ll charge us for the overage. As long as we have a number to start with we’re not going in blind. The fun part is that we want to have the dumpster for as short a period as possible to save money, so we have to figure out the fastest way to remove 6 tons of plaster and drywall. We’re thinking Demolition Party.

Easy Problems

April 18, 2012 / / 1 Comment

Loose riser

One day a few weeks ago a riser on the front porch steps fell off. We’re not sure what prompted this, but looking at the board there was no visible screws or nails for attaching it, so the real surprise was that it hadn’t fallen off a long time ago. Also pictured is one of the greatest power tools you can buy: an impact driver. If you ever do any level of home improvement, buy one of these. If you think your cordless drill or electric screwdriver is good enough, you’ve never used one of these. It has an amazing amount of torque and it can screw in or unscrew just about anything. Combine it with square head or Torx screws and maybe a screw guide and it becomes nearly effortless. Anyway, back to the porch.

After tipping the riser board back into place only to have it fall off again for a couple of weeks, I finally got around to screwing it back into place. This is obviously about the easiest repair ever, but sometimes in the midst of all the complicated problems we’re trying to tackle with this house, the little, easily-solved problems have a certain charm.

Speaking of our more complicated problems, we found out that we likely won’t need to underpin our foundation after all. It turns out that the basement floor and possibly the first floor joists are not exactly level (shocking!). Measuring the height of the ceiling in the corner of the basement instead of the center resulted in a free extra few inches, enough that we can probably excavate to the bottom of the footing and still have enough height to meet code requirements. That little measurement difference will probably save us from spending thousands of dollars on new concrete!

We’re still working out how to do some of the next few steps from an order-of-operations perspective. First we need to repair the structure in the basement by installing a new steel beam, steel columns, and new footings. Once that’s done we can move the laundry and storage from the first floor to the basement so we can start gutting the first floor. The tricky part is the basement floor itself. We’d like to hold off lowering the basement floor for now because spending a ton of money making the basement nice when we don’t need it for years is unappealing. We want to finish the first and second floors, the exterior, and maybe even the garage before tackling the basement.

Unfortunately, if we don’t lower the basement floor now, we’ll have to install the new HVAC equipment on the current floor. When we lower the floor later, we’ll have to also lower all the equipment despite ducts, pipes, and wiring installed where they are now. We talked about just lowering the floor where the utility room will be now and doing the rest later, but that complicates the weeping system and the radiant tubing that will need to go under/into the new floor. Another possibility is trying to mount the equipment in such a way that we can lower the floor around it. Whenever the floor is redone we’ll also need to replace the sewer line and possibly the water supply line, and both are expensive.

The architects and contractors we’ve talked to are used to everything being done at once, so the “simple” answer is for us to get a construction loan, move out, have the whole house remodeled, and move back in. Obviously, that’s not really what we have in mind. Working through challenges like this makes me appreciate it when I have a nice, easy problem, like fixing a riser on the front porch.

All better