Category: Basement Demo

Gutting the horror movie set of a basement apartment

Getting a Footing

April 9, 2012 / / 3 Comments

Rotary Hammer

Between the basement, the patio in the back yard, and potentially even the garage pad, we have a lot of concrete that we may dig up at some point. Enter my newest toy: a rotary hammer. This thing drills through concrete the way a normal drill goes through wood. I also got a chisel bit for it (see the photo), which works like a miniature jack hammer.

Corner in the Basement

The first task for this new kit was to find out how deep our footings are. I’ve been meaning to do this for a few months and it will answer the pressing question of how high our basement ceiling would be if we excavated the floor. I picked the Southeast corner, mostly because our convoluted, multi-phase plan to live in the house while we renovate it will lower this section of the basement first because it will become the utility room. That complicates other initiatives like moving the washer and dryer to the basement, but we’re taking some things a step at a time.

Perimeter holes

With minimal fuss I drilled enough holes through the floor to start chipping away the hunk of concrete. I’ve since gotten a good circular saw and a masonry blade so that this can be done more cleanly, but this way works too. The one advantage this method enjoys over using a saw is that there was very little airborne dust. Instead I got neat little piles like ant hills.

Chiseled Edge

The next step was to use the chisel bit on the hammer-only setting to connect the dots and separate the section from the rest of the floor. As soon as that was one done I reached for my trusty sledgehammer. Wait, I don’t have a sledgehammer. Ok, so I went to the hardware store and bought a sledgehammer, along with the previously mentioned circular saw and blade (just in case). A few good whacks and some prybar work freed the hunk of concrete and the result was dirt.

Hole. Also pictured: trusty sledgehammer

Then the fun of digging out the dirt began. Fortunately, Sarah offered to take this task and quickly excavated the footings all the way to their base. When she was done I went down and used a tape measure to see what we had.

Checking Depth

The result? An unsurprising 12″ of footings under 2″ of concrete floor. That’s a total of 14″ we can dig down, but then we need to fill back up 2″ of gravel and then 4″ of new concrete. That means we’d gain 8″ of height for a total of 7’4″ ceilings. Unfortunately, we need 7’6″ by Chicago code to consider it finished space.

That gives us three options: don’t finish the basement (at least on paper), underpin the foundation (massively expensive), or just skip the 2″ of gravel. My inclination is the third option, though the first might save on property taxes. On the other hand, the gravel may be superfluous given the age of the house and where the water table is. We’ll bring back our foundation guys to give us a quote and discuss the options with them.

Basement Demo: Are We Done Yet?

February 23, 2012 / / 0 Comments

New debris pile

Last post I was proud to display the empty section of the basement that was previously filled with drywall debris. Well, there’s crap in it again, mostly due to moving an existing pile from one room to another in order to  consolidate. Then we added some more debris from the bedroom ceilings, from around the windows, and from the ceiling above the gas lines and steam pipes. Oh well, back to bagging.

Almost no bags

On a more positive note, the last two weeks have gotten most of the room full of already-bagged debris out to the curb. While that just means we need to get to work bagging the stuff in the first photo, it’s still progress and means things are looking a bit better overall.

Basement lighting

Ugh. Sorry these pictures are so blurry. I should really use the camera instead of my phone, but when I use my phone I tend to actually post to the blog, whereas when I take them with the camera they sit on the camera for a long time before I upload them to my computer, and then sit on the computer until I upload them to Flickr, and finally sit on Flickr until I pick some out to put into posts.

Anyway, I re-routed the electrical in the basement so that instead of having separate rooms each with a light switch located in the center wall, there’s a single switch by the basement door that turns on all the lights. In addition, the boiler and the freezer are now on their own circuit, which simplifies future changes. This was especially important since the center wall will be going away once we get the structural work done.

Drywall!

On a separate note, this past weekend we got our previously mentioned two tons of drywall. It’s in a neat not-so-little pile in the garage. Rob and sons arrived with the trailer Saturday morning and we quickly unloaded it. We’re probably not going to be installing new drywall in the near future, but when we do, we’ll be ready.

Basement Demo: Cleanup

February 7, 2012 / / 2 Comments

Debris bagged

There’s still a lot of work to be done in the basement, but it’s definitely over the hump. Sarah and I got the remaining debris bagged up, ready to be taken out to the curb. I pulled down all the studs left on the South wall. There’s still drywall on some of the ceiling, mostly in areas that have gas lines and electrical in the way. I’ve decided to leave the crazy gas lines for the time being, since hopefully we can just run a new line when the new HVAC equipment goes in and skip consolidating and re-routing the five existing lines.

Lumber pile

I’ve been piling up the lumber in one of the rooms. We’ll go through it and remove screws and nails so we can use some of it for forms and temporary supports. A lot of it is moldy, rotten, and/or chewed through, plus Sarah is convinced they’ll spawn cockroaches if we try to reuse them permanently.

I also need to get the light switches for the lights we’re keeping out of the center wall. I’m not sure exactly where I’ll put them, but there’s definitely more electrical to be done in preparation for the structural work. Focus will probably shift for the next week or so to getting a space in the garage cleared out for some drywall we’re getting from Sarah’s sister and brother-in-law. They scored a couple tons of it from Freecycle and don’t need all of it for their house, so we just need to make room for it, since it’s all 4×12 sheets.

Basement Demo: Visible Progress

January 20, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Wall removed

Having a baby definitely makes it more difficult to do rehab, but bad habits are even worse. I can say with certainty that we haven’t made as much progress as we could have, to say nothing of how much progress I’d like to have made by now. Last night Sarah and I tackled the last remaining walls in the basement and vowed to get back into good habits of working on the house regularly. Without good habits this project will never get done.

Missing insulation

Any good session of demo in the house features the usual discoveries of obviously wrong work. In this case we found a couple of gems. Above is a prime example of how insulation was installed throughout the basement. Notice the cavity on the left has none whatsoever, and the cavity on the right has it kind of shoved in. I estimate about 40% of the walls had insulation and about 3% had it installed reasonably well.

Sarah demos

This blurry picture is of Sarah prying the wall off the back of the chimney. The rest of the wall came down as well. This is in what used to be the kitchen, and the other side of the wall is the utility room with the boiler and hot water heaters.

Hole in the chimney

Here’s what we found underneath: a gaping hole in the chimney. This may partly explain the ghastly fumes in the basement that cause us to always wear masks, even now that most of the mold is removed. We blocked it temporarily with a piece of patio block, but we’ll need to improve it to be safe. I was already concerned about carbon monoxide and particulates in the air down there, and this certainly doesn’t help.

We of course have more mess to clean up after our progress, but having a sense of accomplishment is important in trying to establish new habits. With some effort and diligence we’ll get into the rehab groove and it will become automatic.

Basement Demo: Plumbing

January 13, 2012 / / 3 Comments

Hot Water Line

We’ve been tending to a sick baby, so there hasn’t been much time to work on the house. The time I have found has been split among a number of things which makes for small progress. The ever present basement demolition makes the top of the list. I gave my friend Dean a tour of the basement and he lent his sweat soldering tools and skills to a pressing problem: disconnecting the basement supply plumbing. The plumbing runs through the center wall which will be take out to replace the main beam and columns. Getting it disconnected is the first step in removing it.

The basement supply plumbing is copper, while most of the rest is galvanized steel pipe. The hot water had been tapped off of a line that was originally for the laundry. Because we’ll be putting the laundry back in the basement at some point, we needed to disconnect the branches to the basement kitchen and bathroom while leaving the laundry connected. There was a cutoff valve that should have made this easy, but even closed all the way, water was still coming through. I wound up shutting off the whole water heater, which services the second floor. Once that was done, Dean was able to cap these two branches.

Cold Water Line

The cold water line looked simpler but was quite a bit more problematic. Again there was a shutoff valve, and again it didn’t completely stop the water. I vowed to use nothing but quarter-turn valves when I install the new plumbing. The next step was to turn off the water main to the house. Even so, there was still pressure. So we opened some faucets to drain the lines. Surely, now it should be fine? Of course not. This water line was tapped off the supply line to the steam boiler, which meant the low water cutoff valve on the boiler water feeder was opening and allowing water to flow back into the pipe! At this point Dean had a great idea: remove the whole valve. The other side of the cutoff valve we were capping was galvanized, which is threaded pipe. Some twists of the wrench later and we had removed the whole thing. Now, completely free, we were able to solder on the cap. A little plumber’s putty put the valve back on and we were done. The next step will be to pull all the now loose copper pipes out of the basement. I have a bit more electrical to pull out of the ceiling, and then I need to tackle the gas lines. Once that’s consolidated and re-routed I can finally take down the remaining drywall.

Floor Joists

The next thing I worked on was a bit of scouting and measuring, to ensure my floor plans are accurate. While the inspector had told me the floor joists supporting the second floor were 2×6, and the ones in the attic definitely were, I had acquired some doubts. A couple weeks ago I jumped up and down and judged the floor to be fairly stable considering that assumption. The only way to confirm was to rip a whole in the ceiling of the first floor and measure it. We already have a number of holes in the wall, so it was a pretty minor thing. The result was good news: the joists are 2×10! That means all of my concerns about sistering and reinforcing are for nothing. We can just add some better blocking.

Wall studs

I also measured the exterior wall studs. They’re 1 3/4″ thick and 3 3/4″ wide, which is thicker than today’s 2x4s, but not as big as I originally thought. Regardless, I’ve gone back to my floor plans to calculate accurate measurements once we add extra thickness to the exterior walls for better insulation. That work is still in progress, but I’ll share my revised floor plans when they’re ready. My house model is also coming along, in all its 3D fanciness. We’ve been looking at the extravagant examples on Houzz for inspiration on some of the details, and it’s coming along well.