Category: Plans and Permits

Developing floor plans, getting permits, working with our architect, and figuring out timelines

Progress Report

June 1, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Squirrel Access Corridor

We’ve worked on a number of smaller projects the past few weeks. We finished removing trim from all of the front rooms of the first floor as well as the two layers of hardwood flooring in the front bedroom. We also moved the stuff being stored in the middle bedroom to the back so we could take down the drop ceiling, and did some cleanup of the resulting giant piles of wood and debris.

I got the mulch spread on the front easement, leaving only some small tufts of grass in the back yard to be dealt with. We put up a locking mailbox to hopefully resolve our missing mail issues. We set up a cheap swimming pool in the back yard since we don’t have air conditioning, but the weather immediately dropped into the forties.

We met with an HVAC contractor that we like and got some new ideas on how to do the radiant. We also met with our architect and discussed plan revisions, including the back deck and more recently the garage. One potential challenge with the deck is a section of code requiring the second floor deck to be no more than 12′ above grade, when our second floor is 15′ 6″ above grade.

Yesterday Sarah heard some kind of animal in the walls. An inspection of the attic revealed that my hole patching was effective in preventing anything from getting into the attic, but the rot on our top plate was allowing squirrels to get into the wall without even getting into the attic. I spent the better part of two hours getting metal mesh and brick into position to block it out, reaching out the tiny hole in the soffit and sliding it back and forth, using a makeup mirror to see what I was doing. So far today they haven’t returned, so that’s a good sign.

I’m contemplating how to re-run the gas lines in the basement so they don’t run along the support beam, since they’ll be in the way when we replace the beam. We have a gas inspection on Monday that may provide additional to-dos. I turned off the boiler since the weather was in the nineties, but with the temperature shift the house was sixty-three degrees this morning.

Our next step is to buy some more shelving and move everything being stored on the first floor into the basement. We’ll cover it with tarps to shield it from some of the dust and once the gas lines are re-configured we can move the laundry down there too.

Near-term we’re planning to get a permit to start demo of the first floor, before we’ve gotten the final blueprints and construction permits. That will let us get some work done, since the whole process is taking longer than we initially hoped.

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.

The Underside

April 10, 2012 / / 2 Comments

Siding under siding

A couple posts ago I removed the plaster and lath from one wall on the first floor in order to expose the sheathing from the inside. That in turn led to the question, what’s on the other side? If the sheathing is in good enough shape to keep and spray foam, we’ll also want to put rigid foam on the exterior to reach the desired R-value for our wall assembly.

Closed cell foam is about R-6.0 per inch, give or take. We have a wall cavity that is 3 3/4″ thick. Doing the math, 6 x 3.75 = R-22.5, which isn’t bad, but it’s not as high as we’d like. Even granting that we’d get an extra couple for sheathing and drywall, we’ll want two inches of rigid insulation on the outside. Using either rock wool or XPS would give us an additional R-10, bringing our total to around R-34, which is excellent. The advantage to rock wool on the exterior is that bugs don’t burrow through it as they can with XPS, plus it allows easier drying to the outside, preventing moisture from building up against the sheathing. Of course, it costs more.

So here’s the problem: under our vinyl siding is old siding. We knew this, but it turns out we didn’t know what we had. Inside the back porch is old wood siding, and we assumed the worst we’d have to deal with in removing old siding was lead paint. Unfortunately, it looks like the house was re-sided sometime after the porch was enclosed and before the vinyl siding was put on. That siding is made of cement, which almost certainly contains asbestos. You can see this siding in the photo above, where there’s a gap in the vinyl siding. We can also see it under the bottom edge of the siding along the sides of the house, and probably the front as well.

What’s under that remains a mystery. It could be the original sheathing, or new sheathing, or the old wood siding, or some combination thereof, since they didn’t necessarily do everything the same way. In any case, what to do with asbestos-laden siding? The good news is that this isn’t pressing. We’re not planning to do the exterior right away.

Our options are three-fold. The first is to leave it in place, put the insulation over it, and the siding over that. Encapsulation is a common way to deal with asbestos. I don’t like this option because our house is already so close to the neighbors (see the above photo) and I don’t think the end result will be even and look right. However, these aren’t very strong arguments. The second option is to pay an asbestos abatement company to remove the siding, probably at great expense. One rough estimate using a price per square foot I found online was $11,000. The final option is to remove it ourselves, following proper procedures to prevent any dust from spreading and disposing of it properly. That may be a good way to go, but it will depend on how much asbestos is in the siding. To figure that out, before we do anything we’ll have the siding tested. How much or how little asbestos it contains will determine our course of action.

I came up with a fourth option, but Sarah wasn’t thrilled with it: sell the house and buy one that doesn’t have asbestos siding!

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.

Wall Dis-assembly

April 5, 2012 / / 6 Comments

The Before

We decided the best way to find out whether we needed to replace the exterior sheathing was to take down a wall and have a look. Back when we were getting rid of the cockroaches, I went through the first floor and hammered holes in the walls so the exterminator could spray into the wall cavities. We’ve been using the first floor living room to store empty boxes in various states of being broken down, along with the packing material that was in them. The first step was to clear all that stuff out.

Picked Up

Wouldn’t it be nice if it was as easy to pick up as just looking at the next picture in a series? But I digress. After things were picked up I put down heavy plastic so that cleaning up the ensuing mess would be easier. Our friend Mike gave us two huge rolls of leftover plastic and we’ve been using it for a variety of things, including temporary window shades, floor runners over the sticky floor (we pulled up the peel and stick tiles on the first floor), and now clean-up tarps. Who knows, we may actually use it for its intended purpose as a vapor barrier!

Plastic Sheeting

Now it was time to get to the meat of it: removing the wall. Almost immediately I discovered this was one of the walls that had been drywalled over. I tried to pull everything down at once, but quickly decided it was better to take it down in layers, if for no other reason then to take photos along the way.

Drywall Removed

It became clear that the reason for the drywall was a huge section of missing plaster in the center of the wall. In fact, the plaster across the whole middle area was incredibly brittle and fell off with the slightest touch. Toward the sides it was a bit more solid and required some prying and pounding with the crowbar. However, that’s only necessary if you’re taking it off in layers. Subsequent walls will use the 2×4 lever method that I used to remove the lath. The plaster is yellow because it has a couple layers of old wallpaper on it. It wasn’t clear what the original pattern was since it was all fairly deteriorated.

De-Plastered

Removing the plaster left a giant cloud of dust in the room and I had to wait until morning to take the final picture with the lath removed. Taking down the lath started with me pulling off individual strips and trying to get them off in one piece. I quickly tired of this since it was slow and tedious. I remembered reading about a technique to remove plaster lath where you put a short 2×4 board into the wall behind the lath and then pry it forward, pulling all the lath free as you go. The spray of plaster bits and dust wasn’t the greatest, and I had to shampoo twice to get it all out of my hair, but it was effective at getting the lath off the wall.

Down to the Studs

The result of my work was a huge mess that I’ll have to clean up. I want to save the lath for burning in the fire pit, so I need to get the nails out of it. That will be fun. The drywall is already de-nailed and I just need to bag it up and throw it out as we did with the basement. I have plans in store for the plaster though. I’m going to fill a five gallon bucket and weigh it, then figure out how many five gallon buckets I have. Then I’ll use the size of this wall to extrapolate approximately how many tons of dumpster we’ll need.