Tag: demo

Back Yard Concrete Demo

July 2, 2024 / / 0 Comments

I’m going to skip over all the things that I haven’t kept the blog updated about and go straight into covering various projects. So, I apologize that they won’t be posted in chronological order, since we’ve done a ton of projects since I fell off the posting timeline and the effort involved in getting caught up on everything is a big reason I haven’t bothered.

So, concrete demo. Let’s back up a step. When we bought the house, there was a two car garage in the back (we have an alley). It was probably a 1.5 car garage when it was built but they poured a three foot concrete pad next to the garage and literally moved the wall over, increasing the door size in the process and adding a single car door to the yard (maybe the original door? I don’t know) and extending the roof to reach the wall in its new location. So the garage was in bad shape, none of it was done well, and we tore it down years ago. In addition, the back yard had a concrete patio covering most of the area in back.

In addition to wanting a new garage, we wanted to get rid of the concrete patio. We plan to eventually put in a smaller paver patio. When we started getting quotes on the garage, we asked for removal of the patio concrete at the same time. When we took out the loan to finish the house, we wound up removing the garage because the overall price tag was just too much.

In hindsight, it may have been better to just do it, since the prices have not come down in the subsequent years. The garage quotes were really high and we started looking for any way to bring the price down. One of the ways to do that was demo the concrete ourselves.

So, we got a hand-me-down barely-used electric jackhammer from Sarah’s dad and set to work. As with most of these projects, it was harder and took longer than expected, but three heavy-debris dumpsters later, we’d completely cleared the back yard of concrete. The hardest bits were reinforced with steel mesh, and 4-8 inches thick throughout, with most of the patio being 6 inches thick.

The kids helped too, using the jackhammer (with supervision), hauling concrete chunks, and raking and shoveling the tinier bits. The neighbors did not really appreciate us using the loud jackhammer on and off for a couple months. We tried to limit how long we went and which days to be less annoying, but I’m sure we tried their patience. When we got to the back of the yard, we needed to remove and re-build the fence which was a project in and of itself.

In the end, all this was probably not worth it. If I’d known the patio was six inches thick with re-mesh, I may have just paid to have it done since while it absolutely saved us a couple-few thousands of dollars, it wasn’t so much that it felt truly worth the time and effort.

With the concrete removed, we still have a few steps before we’re ready to build a garage, but I’ll cover that in the next post.

Lopping Off the Bump-Out: Planning

March 10, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Bump-out

One of the things we decided to do early on in our project was to remove the second floor bump-out. This is a cantilevered overhang above the sidewalk along the side of our house. It’s about ten feet long, extends about two feet out, and currently has four windows. It’s not an unattractive house feature, and because it’s on the South side of the house and the neighboring house is only a story and a half, it brings in a lot of natural light. It’s also original to the house, meaning that the floor structure is the same joists extended out past the end of the wall, rather than a poorly tacked on expansion as we thought originally. So why are we getting rid of it?

There’s a few reasons we don’t want the bump-out. First is the location from an interior perspective. The wet wall of the house hasn’t moved, despite our complete overhaul of the floor plan. Because of this, the second floor bathrooms are located in a specific place (right where the old one was, and where the kitchen was). The old bathroom was fairly small, about as wide as a bathtub and about as deep as a tub, a toilet, and a pedestal sink. We’d like a bigger bathroom since it’s the main bathroom in the house and it will also be incorporating the laundry room. Given where the stairs and hall are, the bathroom has to extend into the part of the house where the bump-out is. While the bump-out was well suited to being a dining room, it’s less suited to be part of a bathroom. When I was designing the second floor layout, I tried a number of configurations to incorporate the bump-out into a bedroom, but it just doesn’t fit.

From the back

From an exterior point of view, it’s mere inches from the neighbor’s roof. We actually had hail break a bump-out window because it ricocheted off their roof. It makes the already dark sidewalk along the house even darker. It complicates the roof line on the side of the house we want to install solar panels. From a building envelope point of view, it makes insulation and water management more difficult. In short, it doesn’t fit our our design, and we’re taking it off.

Bump-out interior

With that decided, how to do it? Since our basement is three feet out of the ground and our floors are ten feet tall, even the bottom of the bump-out is pretty high off the ground, to say nothing of the roof. Because it’s on the narrow side of the house, we can barely put the extension ladder up if it’s against the house, though we can put it against the sides of the bump-out. I came up with a plan for not only removing the bump out from the inside, but putting in the replacement exterior wall from the inside as well. Reality may intervene with this approach, but at the outset at least, and with a fresh pack of reciprocating saw blades we’re going to find out!

Second Floor Demo Partition Walls

January 9, 2017 / / 3 Comments

I was back upstairs this week, removing the interior walls. I left the center wall for the time being. It’s not really a bearing wall, but it probably helps stabilize things and we’re not ready to start on the structure yet. I’ve got some ideas on how I’m going to tackle subfloor leveling as well as the attic floor upgrade, since it’s all 2x6s right now.

South wall, looking East

I’ve also been working on de-nailing all of the exterior walls, which is a tedious bit of business. I’ve made it about 25% around the perimeter. I was able to remove the remainder of the old gas lines for lighting and the last bits of old supply plumbing, plus a portion of the old drain and vent pipe, but there’s still some work to be done to get the rest out, which means the wet wall can’t be removed quite yet.

North wall, looking East

I’ve accumulated a rather sizeable pile of both lumber to be saved and scrap to be pitched. The lumber, much like the outside walls, needs to be de-nailed. I’m also planning out the next steps, which include closing up the windows on the North wall as well as the back door, and putting in the new drain and vent stack. That requires some forethought to get all of the proper junctions and fittings in place for the eventual toilets, sinks, and tubs that will connect to it.

Electrical Cleanse

December 19, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Original panels

We finally have no old electrical in our house! When we bought the house, there were two panels for separate electrical service between the two floors. The whole thing was spliced and festooned with a mixture of wiring from various electrical epochs, like the strata of some ancient city. Much of the house was run with cloth-wrapped cable inside the flexible, coiled “BX” metal conduit. Our house inspector, and later our insurance inspector called it out as a risk. We knew from the start that we’d have to replace it all, but it’s been a long, gradual process. This process started with the basement demo, where I removed all manner of fire hazards. It continued with the first floor demo, then went back to the basement when we started our structural work, and jumped ahead with our new electrical service. It didn’t make a lot of progress for quite a while, but finally early last year we put in new electrical in the basement, got rid of more of the old stuff when we did the back porch demo, and most recently when we started on the second floor.

New panel and old panel

I disconnected the second floor electrical before we did demo, pulled out the majority of the BX cabling during demo, and finished shortly afterward, but there was still more to do. There were three BX cables and one conduit running up to the second floor, including two that ran up the back of the house (on the outside), requiring me to use the extension ladder to get them down. I had also left one BX cable with one outlet in place to service the first floor, but since that was fed off the old electrical panel box, it had to go too. There are now three separate extension cords running into the first floor from separate circuits, servicing the freezer, washer and dryer, as well as lighting/surge strip outlets.

New panel alone

This past weekend I got everything removed but the old electrical panel itself, which included several random junction boxes mounted around the panel and short lengths of BX cable connecting them all. The old electrical panel was itself only functioning as a junction box, since Percy had moved all the breakers to the new panel when he put it in, but that meant I still needed to pull out all the breakers from the circuits I’d removed. Saturday morning I shut off the power on the main breaker and moved quickly to get the remaining wires disconnected, the old breakers out, the remaining breakers consolidated at the top of the panel, and the old panel finally pulled off. The old electrical is finally, officially, gone! I printed some nice new labels to replace the masking tape and sharpie that had served to date. I still need to put some blanks in to cover up the removed breakers (there’s always got to be some little remaining task), and I want to remove the boards that the old panel was mounted on, but I’m still happy that, at least with the electrical, everything we have is new. I’ll be able to say the same about the plumbing just as soon as we get the rest of the old stack replaced.

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.