Tag: framing

Window Installation Planning

July 24, 2013 / Matt / 0 Comments

A couple months ago we ordered our new windows for the first floor. Since then I’ve been mulling over how we’ll install them. One of the challenges of our house remodel is the order we chose to do it. Rather than do it the “right” way, we complicated things in two ways. First, we’re living in the house while we’re rehabbing, which complicates things like our plumbing and HVAC. Second, we’re doing the inside first, the outside second, and the basement last, which complicates things like our mechanical room in the basement and the windows.

Existing window framing

When our house was built, they put up the stud walls, put on the sheathing, then came back and cut holes in the wall and put windows into them. This is a strange way to go about things. It means that there is no structural support that carries the load around the windows. In order to put in new windows we have to re-build the opening with proper modern framing. That means a header, king studs, jack studs, the whole works.

Window framing (new framing in white)

In addition, we’re planning to put two inches of rigid foam insulation on the outside of the house, which means we’re building out plywood window boxes to align with that future edge. In order to install the window properly and make it weather-tight, we need to flash it properly by adding a sill pan and taping it to the foam (that isn’t there yet) then installing the window and taping that to the foam. In short, there needs to be foam.

This means in addition to removing and re-framing the window opening, we need to remove six inches to a foot of siding around the windows, add house wrap and two inches of foam, then install the sill pan and window and flash it all properly. In a few years when we re-side the outside, we’ll tape the house wrap and foam around the windows to the rest as we go.

Rigid insulation and house wrap around window opening (existing siding not shown)

We’ll be picking up the windows this Saturday, along with some of the materials we need. We’ll probably be sitting on them for a little bit while we work on the mechanical room, but we do want to get them in while the weather is still nice.

Mechanical Room Preparation

July 10, 2013 / Matt / 0 Comments

With the hot water heater question sorted, I need to get the area of the basement that the water heater and boiler are going into ready. Eventually this will be the mechanical room… when we frame out the basement, after we lower the basement floor, after we finish the rest of the house. We already ran gas line, but there are still a few things to be done.

Mechanical room wall

The boiler will be hung on the wall, and since the basement isn’t framed out that means it’s going on an outside wall. We don’t want to mount it directly on the brick because we want our house insulated and air sealed. That means we need to frame the outside wall where the boiler and panel will go. However, because we’re going to eventually lower the basement floor, we can’t just put a sill plate of the wall on the floor, we need to attach the studs to the brick wall. To ensure air and moisture management, we’ll use sill gasket behind the studs and fill the holes with caulk. The area between the studs we’ll fill with closed-cell spray foam.

Before any of that can happen, I need to prepare the wall. As is typical of our house, years ago someone saw a problem and went out about fixing it the wrong way. In this case, moisture problems with the brick foundation wall were not corrected by fixing gutters, redirecting storm water, or repointing the brick, they were “fixed” by slathering (parging) mortar or cement all over the brick wall on both sides in an effort to water seal it. This is generally a terrible idea because it traps water in the brick, rotting it from within. The ineffectiveness of this strategy is revealed by the coat of paint they put over the finished product which is now bubbled up and crumbling off.

So I’ve been removing the parging with my rotary hammer in chisel mode and a pry bar. It doesn’t need to be perfect, but the wall does need to be plumb. While the brick itself is pretty straight, the parging is thick enough in places to make for a wonky wall. Removing it is tricky because the parging doesn’t want to come off and it’s easy to damage the brick itself.

I also need to run electrical from the panel to the mechanical room. Chicago code requires EMT conduit, and in this case it’ll be ¾” because I need to run several circuits (lighting, hot water heater, boiler and pump, smoke detector, and eventually the air handler and HRV). I’m hoping to get both the wall prep and the electrical done by this Monday. With that out of the way we can get the hot water heater installed and focus on the remaining tasks for the boiler prep.

Basement Stair Opening

May 29, 2013 / Matt / 2 Comments

We’re probably not going to have a finished basement for a long time. When we do finish the basement we’re going to lower the basement floor in order to gain some additional headroom. That will be after we finish the first floor, the second floor, and the outside. In short, we probably won’t have stairs going down into the basement for years. However, we do need to frame out the opening for the eventual stairs in order to finish the first floor. This is just one small piece of the massive 3D jigsaw puzzle we’re working on. Framing the opening for the stairs comes before we put down new subfloor comes before we build a stair landing comes before we build new stairs to the second floor.

Original opening

My friend Matt B offered to spend a couple days of his week off down from Milwaukee to work on our house, so I wanted to tackle a two-person project and with the beam mostly done it seemed as good a time as any to start framing the first floor. I finished the stair planning so I knew where we were putting things and I picked up the necessary lumber and some joist hangers. The floor is framed with 2x10s that span the width of the house. Four had been cut at some point to make an access door down to the basement that had then been covered over with hardwood floor. The hole wasn’t properly reinforced and the joists were patched with 2x4s to provide a nailing edge for drywall in the basement.

Floorboards removed

We removed the 2x4s and cut back the floorboards where we’d be working. Since the new stairs are further back in the house, the cut joists only partially coincided with the joists that needed to be cut for the new opening. To conserve lumber we did a swap, cutting the joists back to the beam and replacing the cut joists with full pieces and vice-versa. We used mending straps to join together the cut joists at the beam.

Mending straps

At the ends of the opening we doubled up the joists, gluing together the 2x10s and putting in two rows of screws every 12″. We had to remove the top courses of brick to expose the 6×8 wood sill on top of the foundation. The joists were notched into the sill, so we had to enlarge the notches to fit the doubled joists. Once the ends were in place we attached joist hangers and dropped in the doubled up joist along the length of the opening. This was glued and screwed the same way as the ends.

Notched rim board

At this point we ran into trouble with the joist hangers. The existing 2×10 floor joists are rough-sawn, meaning they are much thicker than the “nominal” 2x10s they make today. Joist hangers are designed to accommodate the 1½” modern 2x10s. It turns out they make joist hangers for rough-sawn 2x10s, but I didn’t know that when I first exchanged the hangers for LVL hangers only to discover they were now too tall, then exchanged them back for the original hangers and bent them into shape with a hammer. Oh well, they’re installed and not going anywhere. The new structure is very solid, though I still need to repair the brick between the joists.

Hangers installed

In order to get everything straight I used a jack post in the basement to push the joists into position before installing the hangers. I’ll still have a lot of shimming to get the subfloor level thanks to the wonky nature of the joists, but everything here is straight. Thanks to Matt B for all his assistance!

Stair Planning

May 15, 2013 / Matt / 0 Comments

We’ve got two parallel tracks for the next little while: framing the first floor and the mechanical room plumbing. For now I’m working on the framing. My friend Matt B. will be down tomorrow and Friday to help work on the house, so we’ll be tackling the opening for the stairs in the first floor. In order to be ready I had to go back over the stair calculations, re-measure everything and come up with the final plan and position of the stairs. The stairs are extremely complicated because everything has ripple effects and there are some tight constraints.

Stair planning

For example, the first floor stairs will go straight up to a landing, turn right 90° and go up the remainder. The bottom of that landing needs to be more than 80″ above the floor so that we can put the stairs down to the basement underneath it. The stairs from the second floor to the attic are above the first floor stairs. Those stairs have a landing directly above the first floor stair landing. We need at least 80″ from the top of the first floor landing to the bottom of the second floor landing plus another 80″ from the top of that landing up to the roofline, and there needs to be a consistent rise and run to the stairs to allow them to get to the correct height at the correct place.

To further complicate things, the brick foundation is thicker than the frame walls, so the finished first floor wall will be 9″ from the finished basement wall. In order to have the minimum 36″ stair width going down to the basement, the stairs above them must be wider, which means the landing must be wider and deeper, and the stairs from the landing to the second floor have that much less space to go up the remaining distance because they can’t go through the LVL beam we just put in. Despite all of that, we did have some play in where the stairs could go front-to-back. Moving them back makes the front bedroom on the second floor bigger, but the coat closet, pantry, and walk-in closet in the master suite smaller. We eventually figured it out.

First floor stair opening

Despite the stick drawing of the stairs, I did account for the head room under the stairs after stringers and drywall. Everything checks out, but it’s very close to the 6′ 8″ minimum height. I’d really like to have more clearance, not just for tall people but for moving furniture, but unfortunately there’s no good way to fit more in without building a dormer in the attic above the stairwell, something we really don’t want to do.

The stairs from the first floor to the second will be 42″ wide with 11″ treads (including a 1″ bullnose). From the floor to the landing they’ll rise 7 ⅝” per step, and from the landing to the second floor they’ll rise 8″. The stairs to the attic and basement will have an 8″ rise and a 10″ tread. We’ll build the stairs from framing lumber (rimboard for the stringers, OSB for the risers and treads), and eventually cover them with finishing treads and risers that match our floors.

Final Window Removal

April 18, 2013 / Matt / 0 Comments

Last window

Dean came over and helped me take the last window out of the first floor North wall. Because our house sits so close to our neighbor (less than two feet in places), we decided early on to take out the windows on the North side. Eventually we’ll have a sliding glass door with transom in the back, an entry door with sidelights and transom in the front, and a large solar tube in the kitchen to bring in natural light. For now it’s gotten a bit dark.

Window removed

While the windows on the North wall did bring in some light they had no view to speak of (as you can see) and are a major source of heat loss in the winter. Even new, Low-E windows would lose a lot more heat and air than a solid wall filled with foam. Eriq helped me remove the other three windows on the North wall last year. At the time I was hoping to get an inch of spray foam into the first floor before winter, but for a variety of reasons that didn’t happen.

Frame assembly

Taking lessons from the previous effort, we assembled the new piece of wall with the sheathing already attached and then fit the complete piece into the wall. The hope was to eliminate the step where I’m hanging from the side of the house trying to jam a piece of sheathing that doesn’t fit into a hole that isn’t quite square. Unfortunately we wound up still honoring that tradition due to a section of sheathing above the window. After we put in the assembled section there was a large gap, so we wound up taking it off and cutting a new one, which of course didn’t fit properly until we’d both spent time trimming it and then pounding it with a mallet at the top of a ladder. Eventually we got it fitted and the result is a solid wall on the North side, at least on the first floor.

Closed up window

With it closed up we then stapled house wrap to it ship-lap style and taped the seams. Since it doesn’t have siding for now I want to make sure it’s weatherproofed. We’ll have more of these to do when it comes time to remodel the second floor, but that’s a ways off. In that case, though, we’ll have to get it right from the inside, because I don’t want to be on a ladder ten feet higher up, trying to jam in sheathing.

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