Tag: leveling

Basement Bathroom Ceiling

July 1, 2016 / / 0 Comments

We’ve been so busy that I’m falling behind on blogging! With the inspection behind us, the next order of business was to install the bathroom exhaust fan ventilation. I had done some reading and decided that the best way to do this was to use PVC pipe, as opposed to the galvanized metal ducting that is typically used. The ducting can leak if there’s a lot of moisture condensing unless the mastic and taping are perfect. Even if they are, if it isn’t perfectly wrapped in insulation water can condense on the outside of the duct. On top of that, all the moisture can mean that even the galvanized metal will start to corrode and rust over time. PVC pipe, however, is impervious to these problems. You slope the pipe to the outside, so that any condensing moisture drains out. Since this is in the basement ceiling, it’s a straight shot between two joists to the outside wall, at least until it gets to the rim joist.

Cutting through 8″ of solid wood
Silicone caulk is your friend
Connection to fan
Pipe installed and secured

In most houses, a rim joist is 2x dimensional lumber, the same size as the joists, running around the outside perimeter. Cutting a 4½” hole is just a matter of a hole saw. However we have a balloon-framed house where the rim “joist” is more of a rim “beam”: a 6″ high, 8″ thick wooden sill that sits on top of the brick foundation. The floor joists are notched into it and the wall studs sit on top of it. Getting through this was going to take more than a hole saw that would bottom out in less than 2″, and specialty bits were very expensive.

Instead I pulled out my cheap, trusty Harbor Freight reciprocating saw. Instead of a nice round hole, I cut out a 4½”-wide block, then cut a round hole through the sheathing and siding. It took a long time, and I actually took a few breaks to keep the saw from overheating. It would have gone faster but I only had one dull blade that was long enough. The rest was easy: I cut the pipe to length, used silicone caulk to seal it to the bathroom fan, and put a cap on the outside. We need to use some canned foam to seal around the hole in the wall.

Leveling with sistered 2x4s
Crazy leveling in corner
Bathroom ceiling leveling

Next up was leveling the ceiling. The floor joists were of various heights, partially because they’re old and partially because in this section I was still working out the best way to level the floor above. I screwed 2x4s to the sides of the joists at the lowest level. I wound u having to add blocking along the top of one wall, because the ceiling was now lower than the top plate. I ran into some further challenges on the other side, having to cut down 2x4s on the table saw so they’d fit in some confined spaces and adding some ½” plywood in another spot, but at the end I could put a level to it that didn’t wiggle, so I knew drywall would work.

One bay
Two bays
Three bays
Four bays full

After that was done I was on to insulation. We’re insulating between floors for a few reasons: sound proofing, fire resistance, and to keep the in-floor radiant heating in the floor above instead of in between the floors. I picked up a bunch of Roxul Safe’n Sound insulation and installed it in the area above the bathroom. For the time being we’re not installing it in the rest of the basement ceiling because we will still need to run plumbing and electrical up to the other floors, but the bathroom ceiling is getting drywalled, so this is the only opportunity. With that done, Sarah and I put up moisture-resistant fire-code drywall.

Bathroom ceiling drywall
Bulkhead drywall

Once the shower surround is in and the rest of the drywall is done we’ll start mudding and taping. We got some more water in the basement, so we also have some additional downspout modifications to perform along the side of the house. It feels good to be back at it and getting things done!

Basement Dig Out – Part Forever

September 3, 2015 / / 0 Comments

My last basement dig out post was June 3rd. With the dumpsters and excavator gone we stalled out and decided just to hire the rest out. The concrete contractors we talked to gave us some very reasonable quotes and we were just waiting for the plumbers to get back to us. We finally got a couple plumbing quotes, but they’re really, really expensive.

We’re basically looking for three things from the plumbers: (1) replace the old clay sewer line under the basement floor with an overhead system plus rough-in for the basement bathroom and floor drains to an ejector pit, (2) replace the old lead water service with a new copper line, and (3) install an interior weeping system (aka drain tile) with a sump pit. The new water line in particular involves either excavating pits and horizontal boring or a trench across the yard and the street, so it’s the biggest line item, but the sewer work is pretty pricey too.

We’re going to try and get another couple quotes in hopes of a less expensive option, but time is getting short to get this work done before the cold weather sets in. In the mean time, we’re going to tackle the weeping system ourselves. While it’s the least expensive item on the list, it’s the only one we can realistically do. Even though it  won’t bring the plumbing costs down by a lot, we’ve got to do everything we can if we want to move forward.

Before we can put in the weeping system we need to level the subsoil in the basement. When we dug out the basement with the mini-excavator, our limited experience meant the end result wasn’t what you’d call perfectly smooth. Because it’s all clay, making it flat is extremely labor intensive. We’d held off leveling it until we’d talked to the plumbers because we weren’t sure if they were going to have to dig up the existing sewer and water lines. Now we know that’s not the case and we can get started. They’ll only need to dig a hole in the front corner, and over by the soil stack.

Not level

Not level

The first step was to dig out the corners where we couldn’t get the excavator in close, then go around with a pressure washer and clean up the stone footings. Once everything was cleaned up I used the laser level to measure how close to level the subsoil is. I started working from the front bay window toward the back of the house, focusing on one four foot square at a time. I quickly discovered there’s a gradient of clay consistency from one side of the house to the other, requiring different techniques to level out.

Level line

Level line

On the North side of the house the hard-packed clay is the consistency of old, dried fudge. It’s so dense you can’t slice a shovel through it and I have to use the mattock to chip it away. As I move to the other side, it gets gradually softer, which is why a lot of that side is actually dug too deep. So, I take all the clay shavings from the one side and dump them on the other, then use a block of wood and a hand-held sledge hammer to pound it flat. I thought about using a plate compactor or a lawn roller, but everywhere I need to compact the clay it’s sticky and would make a huge mess. As much as I don’t want to do it all by hand, it’s probably the only way. I drew a line on both the shovel and my block of wood to check my progress as I went, as well as a longer board that I could use to check larger areas. Basically, everything needs to be 6″ below the laser line.

Progress is very slow. I often find myself adding up square footage in my head and breaking it down into percentages, since while the digging is physically hard and time consuming, it’s also mind numbing. Each 4×4 section is averaging me nearly half an hour. I’ve only done about 300 square feet so far, to the back of the first column footing, but just that has been a huge pain over several days.

I’m planning to get the leveling finished over the long weekend, but there’s a lot more work to the weeping system. My hope is that by doing this portion ourselves, we can save enough money to still move forward with the basement this year. After getting excited about our reinvigorated timeline, I don’t want to get derailed out of the gate.

Learning Lessons

March 21, 2014 / / 2 Comments

It goes without saying that in a project like this, having never done anything like it before, that we’re going to make mistakes. As they say, the important thing about making mistakes is what we learn from them. I’m trying to learn from what we’ve done so far, both to help inform us on how to do things in the future, but also just as advice to anyone thinking about doing the same types of things.

Fortunately, most of the things that I would do differently have been small: I would use the “Q” column caps with the “SDS” screws for the LVL beam so I didn’t have the stupid through-bolts sticking out. Drilling those bolt holes was an unbelievable pain and furring and drywalling over them will suck. I would have checked for square when re-framing the bay, and done the rigid foam around the bay differently, since I’m not thrilled with the angled corners. However, these are small enough things that I don’t worry about them too much.

The damn subfloor, though. No project has offered so much “learning” as this. If I could go back in time, the steel beam in the basement needed to be about ¾” higher than we put it. When I was jacking up the old beam, I ran into a lot of resistance trying to get it any higher so I made it level where it was. If we had gotten it up a bit higher, the whole joist leveling project would have been considerably easier. Failing that, I needed to shim under all of the joists at the beam (Method 3). I should have held off making the stair opening down to the basement until the leveling was done. I should have brought all of the OSB in right away instead of letting it sit outside under a tarp all winter.

OSB in the snow

OSB in the snow

I needed to plan out the subfloor courses first, since the joists aren’t exactly 16″ on center. I needed to put down chalk lines for each course instead of assuming the outside wall was reasonably straight, or at least use the laser. I should have taken up all of the old floor right away, instead of a section at a time. That way I could have repositioned the joists that were just a bit off in the middle by using blocking. I should have checked the joists for being out of square, so I could plane down high edges.

I should have ripped the tongue off the first course and left the groove exposed instead of putting the groove against the wall and leaving the tongue exposed. Jamming the groove over the tongue when it’s already screwed down is a bad way to do it.  I needed to put glue into the groove before putting the next panel in.

Slow progress

Subfloor

More than anything else, though, I should have hired it out. It would have cost thousands of dollars, but it would be finished by now, probably a couple of months ago. Instead the subfloor isn’t finished, it’s not done as well as it could have been, and most likely we won’t finish the first floor this year as a result. Well, lesson learned. I’ll definitely be hiring out some things going forward to try and get this project back on track.

Bay Leveling

February 27, 2014 / / 3 Comments
Removing floor boards

Removing floor boards

The pre-subfloor leveling isn’t quite done yet, and the bay window on the front of the house brought its own set of challenges. For starters, the joist running across the very front of the house (and across the widest part of the bay) is embedded in brick, meaning I couldn’t jack it up the way I did most of the others. There’s also a gap of nearly two feet between that joist and the joist in the center of the bay, which is considerably wider than the 16″ that most of the joists are spaced. Finally, the old floorboards rested directly on top of the brick foundation and extended under the bay walls, whereas in most of the balloon-framed house, it only reaches the edge of the wall.

Level? ish?

Level? ish?

When we rebuilt the bay windows, I noticed the floorboard situation and debated replacing it then, but between doing only one window at a time and the corner studs not being replaced, I decided against it. That meant the first step was to use an oscillating multi tool to cut the floorboards back at the wall edge. Then I glued shims to the top of the existing joists and added some blocking joists to better support the gap between joists.

Shimmed, Reinforced, Re-mortared

Shimmed, Reinforced, Re-mortared

Questions sprang to mind of how to control air and vapor infiltration through the foundation and through the gaps in the wood, and how to insulate the bay properly. We’ll be spray-foaming the cavities in the wall, and on the sides of the house we’ll spray foam the top of the foundation wall to air seal it to the wood, but here that isn’t an option because the brick comes all the way up to the underside of the floor. The exterior rigid insulation doesn’t help either because it doesn’t extend over the brick.

Front shim and spray foam

Front shim and spray foam

I decided to attach an inch-thick shim to the inside edge of the brick wall (on top of sill gasket) that will support the subfloor. In front of the shim, and along the top of the brick on the sides of the bay, we’ll fill with spray foam. I’ll also glue the outside edges of the subfloor to the framing to further seal everything. Hopefully that will be sufficient, since it will be damn difficult to do anything about it with the subfloor in place.

When I initially test fit the shim I realized that the brick was —perhaps unsurprisingly— uneven. In order to properly support the shim I had to mix up some mortar and straighten out the top of the foundation. That meant waiting a couple of days for the mortar to set up, but then I was able to drill some holes into the brick and secure the shim with Tapcon screws.

First piece of OSB

First piece of OSB

I went through a few cans of “big gap” Great Stuff, since the real spray foam won’t be for a bit. Fortunately it’s so cold that it cures slowly, giving me ample time to even it out. I got the first of three pieces of OSB down that go into the bay. I took my time and worked out the dimensions exactly, accounting for all of the unevenness of the studs. There’s still a small gap along the edge of the angle, but I’ll fill that with caulk. The important part is it’s secure, level, and insulated. I’m considering whether I should exchange the one piece of blocking in the center with two, since that would be a more proper 16″ spacing, plus there’s a good chance I’ll wind up putting an electrical outlet in the floor there. One of the reasons to use screws instead of nails is you can change your mind without too much hassle.

Subfloor Frustrations

February 13, 2014 / / 0 Comments
Leveling joists

Leveling joists

I spent nearly all of this past weekend leveling the joists in the first floor. That effort was largely successful, with the nine remaining 12′ spans all adjusted to within a sixteenth of an inch using Method 3. I also leveled five other joists that required the tapered shimming method and got a few more sheets glued and screwed down. My hope, and in fact my expectation was that having done that I would then be able to start putting down full, 8′ sheets of OSB, allowing me to finally finish up this project.

Using the shimming method

Using the shimming method

Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened. In addition to not being level, the joists are not evenly spaced. They employ a generous “sixteen” inches on center alignment that means the 8′ sheets don’t line up in the middle of a joist at either end, sometimes coming short of one joist entirely. I tried planning ahead, measuring out to the next sheet and seeing if I could make one sheet stretch, but it just didn’t work. Instead I’m finding myself cutting sheets at roughly 32″, 48″, or 64″, plus or minus an inch or so.

Slow progress

Slow progress

On top of this, I’m finding that the walls aren’t exactly even either, so that I’m having difficulty getting the panels to align evenly down a joist and one panel to the next. After putting down an 8′ panel that left a gap at one corner and was snug at the other, I decided I needed to do better. As a result, instead of cutting my panels square at say 48″, I cut an edge that tapers back a ½” or so from the tongue to the groove, so that panels meet in the center of the joist and the tongues fits snugly into the grooves. This is precise and thus time consuming work. Tonight I spent two hours putting two small panels down, incrementally increasing the completed area by a whopping thirty-six square feet.

Cutting tapered ends

Cutting tapered ends

When I finished carefully scribing, cutting, and fitting the second of these panels I discovered that the joist was torqued and the shim I glued down was sticking up on the exposed side. Because of this, the second panel is raised up higher than the first. It’s a slight difference, but after the inordinate amount of time I’m spending to make everything level, it’s extremely frustrating. I’ll probably have to go back around with the power planer and even at least a few seams.

Argh! Not even!

Argh! Not even!

I keep reminding myself how I wanted to hire this project out, and thinking I really should have done that, high cost or no. At this point it’s starting to feel like it would have been worth it, assuming they would have done as good a job. It’s hard to even estimate at this point how long it will take me to finish. I’d like to think I’ve figured out my methods now and it should go faster, but who knows. The bay will bring its own set of challenges and I still have some of the shorter joist spans to level. After that I need to fill in the narrow, 5″ gap all along the North wall. Needless to say, I’m really looking forward to this project being done.