Tag: roof

Finally, the Loan

September 27, 2020 / / 6 Comments

After several months, Thursday we closed on our construction loan! This was a long, drawn-out process, and I haven’t been making updates because it’s been frustrating paperwork and contractor wrangling and not worth sharing. We’re working on new permits, but we’re expecting that will be done in as little as a few weeks. Things are about to get pretty crazy, so I figured I should get back on the update wagon and keep everyone appraised. If you’re interested, we went with US Bank for their loan program. It lets us start from an unfinished state, and it converts to a traditional mortgage at the end.

We have most of the drain plumbing done, save some odds and ends. I have a list of things that I need to get wrapped up that is collecting new items faster than I’m getting things checked off. The top priority is the remaining roof and wall penetrations, which need to be in before the new roof and the siding.

The roof will be Owens Corning Duration Flex shingles, which should last through hail and wind and all the rest so I don’t have to get back onto that stupid ladder and the death trap of a roof again (except for the aforementioned penetrations).

Siding Samples – stay tuned to see which color we picked

Unfortunately, all of the house wrap will need to come off since it’s been exposed for too long. The windows that I installed I used the clips they gave me, which are apparently the wrong clips, and as a result all of the windows are at the wrong depth. They’ll put on Blueskin instead, which is a better product anyway. On top of that will go the two inches of rigid polyisocyanurate insulation and furring strips. If I had it to do over, I’d probably have stepped down to one inch, because we’d have a lot more siding options. As it is, with two inches of foam we basically have to use Hardie Plank cement fiber siding if we want it to be covered by warranty.

I wish the house wrap and the windows were the only thing that needs to be re-done, but they’re also going to redo some of the front porch structure as well because the wood we bought twisted and warped after we installed it. Our builder doesn’t recommend buying lumber from Menards, and now I can see why.

With the pandemic dragging on, we’re still working from home and the kids are at home for school. We’re not sure how this will work with construction taking place and we’re considering our options for vacating by the hour, day, week, and month. So, there’s a lot of exciting work about to start, and I need to go add a couple more things to my to do list!

Back Gable Peak

November 17, 2017 / / 0 Comments

We haven’t gotten a ton done on the house recently. Part of this is because we didn’t order our second floor windows soon enough to have them ready when we needed them, and part of it is because the windows are taking much longer than expected. I’ll get into that in another post. For now, we tackled the back gable peak, just as we did the front.

Getting started – hipped roof from the inside

The process for this was largely similar to the front, except that we didn’t have the advantage of the front porch serving as a platform and we didn’t have the advantage of Mike’s help. Instead, Sarah and I did it by ourselves, which meant that we made more mistakes and took a lot longer, even with the example of the front to help. First up, I put a piece of plywood on the joists at the back of the attic under the existing hip roof to serve as a platform and got the ladder onto it.

Roof removed

I cut through the roof from the inside and pulled in a section, from there the removal process was just time consuming, to get the shingles pulled back to a clean point, remove the soffit, and then cut back the plywood at right angles,s o we could cut and fit rectangles rather than triangles. We sistered up new attic rafters to the existing ones to extend the peak, and this is where we made our first mistake. I tried to match the angle of the existing rafter, which is good, but I neglected to make sure that the roof was flat one rafter to the next. As a result, there were dips and rises across only three rafters that I had to remove and re-cut. Because the existing roof has 1×6 boards across the rafters with plywood on top of the boards, I had to shim up on the new rafters to match the level.

Fitting new rafters

Before I put the roof on I needed to finish the new gable wall sheathing. On the front of the house, where we could put ladders on the porch, we fit one big triangle. Since the back doesn’t have a porch and even my 28′ extension ladder isn’t tall enough to reach the peak, I had to fit two smaller triangles from the inside. I nailed down toe boards on either side so that I could finish the exterior work in “safety”. I lifted out all the sections of plywood, test fit them, and then went out on the roof to screw them all down.

Demo
New rafters
Sheathing going on

Somewhere in this process we left it overnight with a gaping hole in the roof, and the next morning while I was re-doing the rafters it rained on us (inside), but we finally managed to get the sheathing attached and covered with ice and water shield. Getting it shingled took another few tries, mostly due to time constraints. I didn’t think to put the bundle of shingles out on the toe board when I had a nice big hole in the roof, so I had to carry it up the ladder on the front, then shimmy down the length of the house at the peak (several times). Sarah harvested roofing nails from the existing scrap and I got it all water tight.

Adding ice and water shield

The last piece was removing the toe boards. I wound up prying up an edge while still standing on it, tying a rope around it, then pulling it up while perched on the peak of the roof. Then, with the other one still tied up in rope, do the same thing to the other one. I was worried my hammer would slip out of my hand, since I could barely reach the toe board from the peak, so I tied the rope around that too. Fortunately, that part went to plan and I got everything down safely, myself included. Another project is completed without a trip to the hospital and I didn’t have to put a ladder up against the back of the house to do it.

New peak

One of these days I’ll take down that satellite dish… and get the new windows in, redo the soffits, and take down the siding and finish house wrap, exterior insulation, siding, gutters, downspouts, the shingles I just put up are temporary until we’re ready to redo the whole roof… one of these days.

Back Porch Demo

March 30, 2015 / / 2 Comments

We want to dig out the basement, and the only door is at the back. To be able to get a dumpster into the back yard and haul loads of dirt straight out, we need to tear down the back porch and the garage. We’re planning to replace both anyway, so doing it now makes sense. The back porch is a fully enclosed, two-story, vinyl-siding-clad beast. We took out the stairs from the first floor to the second a while back so we could put in the back sliding door, so it just has steps down to the back door and to the basement.

The first step was to move all of our accumulated stuff off the porch, including the old radiators. Fortunately I found a used radiator company to come and take them and even pay me a bit for the trouble. I disconnected and removed all the old electrical and moved the phone line box from the outside of the porch to the outside of the house.

Windows and doors removed

Windows and doors removed

Saturday morning I started work removing the doors and windows and was soon joined most of by Sarah’s family. We discovered that because the porch was enclosed after it was built, the walls weren’t integral to the structure. The walls consisted of some horizontal 2x4s attached to vertical beadboard, some of which was twenty feet long, and vinyl siding on top of that. While not very strong it held together remarkably well. The big challenge was the right side, where there was no landing or stairs to work from, just a big open space.

Walls coming down

Walls coming down (with Mike and Matt L)

We managed to rip down the right side of the wall in one giant piece. You can see from this photo how the floor only extends to the door in the middle of the house. With that piece down, the rest of the back wall was pretty straightforward.  The right side wall was a bit interesting. We wound up pulling the pieces of beadboard off individually and then the vinyl siding, which at that point was just hanging from itself.

Walls removed

Walls removed (with David and Matt L)

By that point is was evening and we wrapped up for the day. The next day we had a bunch of friends over to start working on the structure. The roof was an open question, since there wasn’t a great way to reach most of it. In hindsight, it may have been better to tear the porch down back when we took out the stairs, since having the landing would have made this process easier, plus we wouldn’t have had to worry about breaking the new sliding door with a piece of falling debris.

Roof removal

Roof removal

We used the ladders and a piece of fencing we bought to fill in the gap to shield the sliding door from the chunks of falling roof. We used a rope on the right column to pull it down after cutting it near the base with a chain saw. At first we tried the pictured system of pulleys to pull it down, but the angle was wrong so we wound up not using them. Unfortunately the porch beams were pocketed into the sheathing, so I have to go back and patch the holes in the outside wall before birds start nesting in the walls. I ordered an extension ladder as well, something that probably would have come in handy for this project, since the folding Werner ladders aren’t quite long enough.

Roof removed

Removing the last section of roof (with Dean, Matt B, and Drew)

We had a bit of a scare pulling down the last section of roof because the left column started to lean out, not only getting close to our power line, but pulling away from the beam that held up the second floor of the porch! After we got the roof section off things went quickly and we got the second floor structure removed. I also screwed the second floor door shut so we won’t have any accidents.

Finishing up

Finishing up (Dean and Matt B)

The first floor went pretty quickly too. We left the section by the stairs so we can still get in and out. We moved all of the drywall out of the garage and the freezer out of the basement and into the first floor, and then Dean and Matt built a new railing while I put up some house wrap over the sheathing and patched the lower two holes in the wall.

All done!

All done! (With Dean, Drew, and Hector)

We now have a massive pile of debris in the back yard (scroll back through the pictures to watch it grow). We’ll need to live with it until we get the garage torn down and a dumpster into the yard, but that should just be a few weeks. I plan to salvage some scrap material to build a ramp that we can use to get wheelbarrows of dirt into the dumpsters when we dig out the basement. This was a big two-day project and we couldn’t have done it without tons of help from family and friends.

A huge thanks go out to the Saturday crew: Mike, Lee, Matt L, Amy, Rob, Nicole, David, Collin, Dylan, and Dustin, as well as the Sunday crew: Dean, Hector, Drew, Anna, and Matt B. Thanks everyone!

Chimney Removal, Part 1

November 22, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Prominently located in the center of the house is the chimney. For the last hundred and sixteen years it served boilers, hot water heaters, and at some point stoves on each floor. One by one these things have been removed and replaced with direct vent appliances. Direct vent appliances are not only more energy efficient, they’re also necessary when the house is air tight, as we hope ours will be once everything is spray foamed, taped, and caulked. Air tight houses can experience negative air pressure, which on a regular flue can cause backdrafts that force exhaust into the house. In a direct vent appliance, the combustion air and exhaust are piped in and out with PVC through the wall. As a result, the chimney becomes superfluous.

Chimney on first floor

Back when I developed the floor plans, I realized that the chimney needed to go. It’s central location was handy for all of the things that used it, but now it’s smack in the middle of what will be our new kitchen. Since we’re starting work on the subfloor, with all the rest of the framing to follow, it’s time to take it out. That means we start at the top and work our way down.

The top is obviously up on the roof. I’m very fond of climbing, and starting from an early age I’ve been going onto roofs. Not long after we bought our house I got up on the roof of the back porch, and that’s when I realized how steep our roof is. It’s also very high up. With a half-exposed basement and ten-foot ceilings in both floors, the eaves of the roof are more than 25 feet up and the pitch is 12/12, also known as 45°. As a result, I hadn’t been on the roof until recently. I figured out I could climb up the edge, using the old DirectTV dish as a foothold to get to the hip where the roof slopes down at the center of the gable. From there I could get up to the peak and scoot along it to the chimney.

I realized that while I could get up there, I obviously couldn’t do it carrying shingles and bricks. Not only that, between the roof activity, the attic, and even the second floor portions of the project, we’d need a way to shuttle bricks down and materials and tools up. The old window counterweights and the accompanying pulleys struck me as the perfect solution. I built a double bucket pulley system so that there would always be one bucket down and one bucket up, reducing idle time for both the person up top and the person down below.

Bucket pulley

Bucket pulley

Sunday, Sarah, her dad Mike, and I took out the portion of the chimney above the roof, starting with the large blocks and working down with a hammer and brick chisel until it was below the roof line, then patching up the hole with boards, plywood, tar paper, and shingles. The shingles were leftovers from when the roof was redone, sometime before we bought the house. As a result they were brittle and hard to work with. That combined with my inexperience and the nature of patch work meant it was an ugly job, but it should be water tight until we properly redo the roof.

Loosened chimney block
Chimney below roof line
Framing the roof hole
Sloppy shingles

Yesterday evening, with the bucket pulley moved indoors, we got to work removing the angled section of bricks in the attic. Not surprisingly it went much faster than the roof work, with the whole thing removed in a few hours. The bucket pulley continued to work well, taking down about six bricks per load, with Mike breaking off chunks of mortar and stacking them in the first floor until we can get it hauled out to the back yard.

Tall chimney
Medium chimney
Short chimney
No chimney

As we continue to move down, the second floor is next. That will be a bit more involved, since we’ll have to work around living space and not make too much mess, plus repair things when we’re done. We’ve managed to avoid having to work in the second floor for the most part, but it can’t be completely avoided. That work is slated for next weekend.