It's happened before in my lifetime.  It's just a pita because I have outdoor stuff that needs done.

In fact, it's been much WORSE in my lifetime because that precip could have all been snow and ice. (Yep, I've seen it, up to the end of April)

Every year is different, and there is no reason for us to expect any one year to fit any certain pattern.

Weather happens in cycles with the earth's warming and cooling cycles (and this, in my view, is within LARGER warming and cooling cycles.  Yes, Global Warming is real, cuz it..you know...melted the ice age.  But we are not changing it, nor should we.  The warming is FAR better than the cooling, cuz...glaciers.)

Tag for actual spring.

someday.

maybe.

Bump.  Finally a warm, dry day.  Now if I can get a few more in a row, I can dig my trailer out of the back yard. so I can cut the grass and get some work done.

It has another flat.

Weather is calling for frost tonight.  Light frost, but still.  Jeez.  Frost two days from the first of May.  

Looking forward to this thread getting some new content.

And a free bump for Kitties.

Thank you @dryflash3  

I'm dealing with a family issue at the moment, and I've got to get my dad's tractor down here.  Have two weeks to do that.  Had planned to wait and bring it after I had the building finished and a shed roof for the tractor to sit under, but the timing has been taken out of my hands and I'm going to have to just cover the tractor best I can once I get it here, until I get the space set up for it.

I hate that this has had to be set aside for real life.  Hopefully by the middle of June I will be able to begin again.

Sorry about your family issues. Real life always comes first.

Yes.  Life happens to us all.

Not fun sometimes, but it is what it is.

Drive by bump.

Hope to be done with all of this unfortunate life stuff in about two weeks.

About to start work on the building again!

Yeah, I thought that, then the life drama extended for a full month. Apologies all around.

Things are moving on the rehab, cuz I'm hiring a lot of help.

My  own building, not so much.

Pics inbounc of the rehab.

If I'm still allowed in Homestead/Garden.

Life happens to us all at some point.

Update as you can.

Back to front page.

Thank you so much for asking.  It has been a difficult year at the Kitties/uxb homestead.   I thought, two months ago, that I had my head above water, but I was wrong.  About to post photos of the rehab, though, and update everyone.

A lot has happened in the past two months.

I was away dealing with family stuff for all the spring and summer.  Missed my whole summer, basically.    But I had a crew still working a lot of the time, and fortunately we were at a stage that they could carry on to some extent, without me there.

Early in the summer I said, "I can't tell whether I'm coming or going.  Can you get that scrap plywood out of the basement and make me a desk?"

Ta-Da!!! Desk.

This will be the utility room at some point.  Right now it's my office.

I have exactly three feet between the counter and the boxes of tile at my back.  But hey, there is a coffeemaker, so the basics are covered.



This was the kitchen.

The walls to the left of the chimney and the one extending to the right in the photo (the cooler is in the present hallway) are both going away.

The wall to the left of the chimney is not load bearing.  The other wall..yeah. It is.  That will be of interest later.



BUT...see that hole in the flue?

Yeah...Nobody knew that was there.

I mentioned it to the owner and he said, "Is that why that wall was warm in the winter?"  

Uhm...maybe?

So this flue..

It has two caps on top, but it's ONE flue.

So the furnace in the basement vented out the flue.  Aaaand....the woodburning fireplace vented out the same flue.

More on this later.

I said to the owner, "you have a very busy guardian angel watching over this house."    Anyway, add "get the flue patched" onto the list of stuff to do.

Past time for bed for me, but more soon. Lots more photos loaded.  Just no brain power to post.



Kitties, back from the dead.  Sort of.

That's a good question, and yes, as far as I know, they did..

Let me qualify that by saying I've taken down several hardwired smoke/fire detectors, and I believed at the time that they were CO detectors as well, but maybe not.  I'd have to dig those out and look more closely.

The one positive thing about an old house is that it's leaky enough to keep enough fresh air moving through, that you can more easily survive a bit of CO.  Not sayin' it's a good idea to bank on it, but modern, tightly sealed houses have some associated issues that go with it. SOMETHING was fuctioning somehow to move furnace gases out effectively enough that nobody died from it.  At least there were not acute issues.  Whether it contributed to long-term illnesses...???? Yeah, I dunno.

So...I'm probably going to get stoned by the armchair quarterbacks for what I'm about to post.  (And it's long.  So if you aren't into long, just quit now.)

This came down to a decision, and I'll tell y'all the reasons I chose this, knowing full well the options, weak points of my choice, and yes, the potentials for failure.

First, some background...

I filled up this 22' dumpster three times.  The first two and a half times  was all just the ruined STUFF out of the main floor, attic, and basement.  The last half dumpster was actually construction materials.



Basically, all this time, I hadn't pulled a permit on this house because I couldn't see the freaking house so I didn't know what to put on the permit as far as changes I would make.  I needed to get all the sh*t out of the place (the useful stuff the owner wants to keep, I packed and moved to storage, the rest I tossed or donated) before I could see the house and determine what it needed.

PLUS... this house does not have drywall.



It has plaster over sheetrock.  That's some of it on the floor in the kitchen.    So these are 2 X 4ish sheets of cement board (more like durock than drywall) coated with a thick covering of real plaster.  Not as thick as a plaster/lath combo, but damn near.

Here's what happens at every corner...  This metal mesh gets wrapped around the corner to hold the plaster.



It's strong as hell, and it's QUIET like plaster.  If I'd had the option, I would have left it, but it had cracked in too many spots, and I know that renters will destroy it by trying to hang stuff on walls.

Anyway...That's a LOT of weight.  Example:  In the bedroom the windows did not work. When we took down the plaster/rock, the windows worked just fine, because the weight on the walls was causing enough sag to jam the windows up.   So...things became more apparent the more we uncovered, and the more weight we took out of the house.

The carpet stayed in place while we took down the ceilings and plaster-over-rock on the walls because the floors under the carpet are hardwood, and the plaster coming down would have destroyed them.  So....even once the stuff was out, I was sorta kinda guessing about  the level and shape of the floors from the top side.

Well...there was a lot to be learned once the carpet started coming out.  The carpet was three inches deep in some places (with extra padding) and it hid a lot of unpardonable sins.

Every interior loadbearing wall was sagging.  Significantly.

So once I realized that, I still had to get the basement emptied, so I could see WHY those walls were sagging.  I brought in a Master Carpenter (friend, but I paid him) to get him to look at it with me so I could say, "Am I seeing what I think I'm seeing?"  And "Am I missing something here?"

The guy who built this house was actually the builder for much of this lovely old neighborhood.  All the stone houses around here (you will see some of the exterior in these photos), apparently he built.  Then he...wait for it...used the leftovers from those houses to build his own.  BUT...he built a MUCH larger house for himself than he did for the other folks who hired him to build. But did he buy longer joists? Or larger joists?

No.  He did not.

He used undersized joists for the spans he was building, and if they weren't long enough, he scabbed them together wherever.

AND....those interior loadbearing walls?  He doubled the joists underneath them (undersized joists, remember?) but they were unsupported across the spans they covered.

So as an example, the joists under the kitchen are only 2 X 8,  (SORT OF 16" centers....none of them are consistent,like most olde houses) and they span 15 feet.   BUT they are oak and poplar.  Not the weak-ass pine we build with today.  Still, when you double that 2 X 8  and set a loadbearing wall on it, with no support in the middle, you've got a recipe for sag.  BUT...there's another part to the equation.  About a quarter of the way through that 15' span, he scabbed them together to continue on to the foundation wall, because they weren't long enough to reach.  He didn't buy any new joists for his big house.  He used the leftover joists from the smaller ones.

That scab is a hinge.  Hinges bend.  Ta-da!  More recipe for sag.

Now listen...

I can't rag on this guy too much.  This house has stood strong since 1938. I cannot stand here and tell you that a house I built today with my hands, out of yellow pine, would do the same.

This house has a tank of a foundation, and as far as I can tell, it's had no more issues than most houses this old.  Yeah, the doors have sagged and been cut off at funky angles to get them to open and close easily.   You know what?   I can throw a rock in any direction and hit a house with the same issues.  The REASON for the issues though...yeah that's new for me.  The fact that this builder fudged on his own house kind of surprised me.

So here we are, 80 years later,

We have more, heavier appliances, and a lot more CRAP  than they had back then.

The house is old. It's sagging a little, sorta like the skin on an older person starts to give a little.I really need to draw the floorplan so you can understand but I'm making no promises

Here's a photo of how I'm taking some load off of the interior of the house, and hopefully letting the house breathe a deep sigh of relief.



See that beam?  That's an engineered beam.  Yup. It's engineered by ME.

I'm going to outline the (easily available) choices I had and why I made the one I did.  I'm totally open to any of you saying you might have made a different choice, and telling me why.  That's good education.  Lot of y'all know more than I do.  But don't be mean.  I'm just not up for that.  If you're mean, hey, I'll just delete it. POOF.  Life is too short.

So...My choices were as follows:

1-a 4 X 4 or 6 X 6.
~~Solid timbers are awesome.  But they also bend.  They crown and flex with heating and cooling, moisture and time. (I place them as my third or fourth choice for this long-term placement.)

2-LVL--This would have been my second choice, and I might decide, somewhere down the road, that it would have been better.  
~~To order LVLs, I would have had to know right off exactly what I wanted to do under the floor, with no room for saying, "crap, I think we need to do it differently because of what's happening over here."  I liked that flexibility that allowed me to say, "that needs to be longer"  Or shorter.  ALSO....LVLs are as stiff as it gets, unless you go with metal.    In this instance, I wanted stable, but less stiff...more in item 3.

3-Beams I built out of 2 X stock and plywood.  Basically 2 X glued and nailed together with plywood between.  In this case it was 2 X 6 because the spans are not that great for any one beam.
~~What I wanted was the stability of an LVL, without the complete stiffness.  I wanted MORE flexibility than an LVL, but less than I would get with a single timber.

THE REASON I wanted this...is because like the olde house, the homemade beam is a little forgiving.  If I put in three jacks under a 16' beam, I can actually raise the middle jack, and the beam will flex SOME.  Not as much as a solid timber, but way more than an LVL.  Over time, the beam will let that middle be higher, and the ends will settle into it a bit without being too high.   I hope.  Everything with the foundation and structure of an olde house is..."let's try this and see if the house will do it."  It requires some subtlety.  Ain't sayin I'm good at it.  Just sayin' I understand.

4-Stick a jack under the low point and call it good.
~~This is what most people do.  This is what the previous owners had done (or their hired minions had done)

In my experience, when you're dealing with an old house, you can take a framing member..a girder, let's say...and stick a jack under the low point and lift.  It looks great.

But four weeks from now, the house will have a hump where the jack is and will sag on either side of it.  Doesn't matter if it shouldn't.  It does, and to hell with what you want.

Olde houses are like old people.  They're crotchety.  They settle into their ways and if you shove them one direction, they'll sag back in the other with a sort of "f*ck you and your daggone jack".   My awesome handyman guy has trouble with this.  Me:  "If we jack there, it's probably going to sag over there."  Him:  "It shouldn't."  Me:  "No, it shouldn't. But it will. I know it will."  Him:*disgruntled* "Harumph."   Awesome Handyman (AH) lives in a new house.  Just sayin.

Here's another beam, that is perpendicular to, and intersects with, the one in the first pic.



Not all of these jacks will stay.  Some of them are "moving stuff around" jacks.  Those will go away when the walls are stable and as they should be.

One point to note...this basement is dry. Mostly anyway.  It's bone dry in the crawlspace areas.  I'm correcting drainage issues around the foundation to dry out other parts.  But that "dry basement" is important here. You don't want the ground under the blocks where the jacks are placed to be swelling and shrinking with moisture every few days.  This ground is really stable.  (She says, and crosses herself, though she is not Catholic.)

So that's WAY enough for one post.

More later.

Wait.  Are you saying the steel beam would have been 18" wide? (I don't understand the nomenclature for sizing steel beams.)

And are you throwing math at me?


Just kidding.  I was good at math.  A long time ago when I had to design and implement experiments and the statistics involved.  Now I don't have to do that so I run away.

I appreciate the vote of support on the home-engineered beams.  I still look at them and go, "God I hope those don't bend over four seasons."  They will be in a partially climate controlled space once I'm done.  But still...

Now the question will be whether my choice was right for the beam in the attic.

ETA:  I actually looked at the possibility of the steel/wood Flitch beams.  I didn't know what those were called, but the possibility came up that my attic beam might require a layer of steel.  It did not.  Honestly I might have been able to make the attic beam smaller that way, and I bet it wouldn't be much different in weight.  That dang thing is stupid heavy.  I have pics of that coming.

So tomorrow is a big day at the rehab.  One I've been aiming for for nearly two years.

First year and a half don't count.  Those were spent cleaning out the house so I could see the structure.  Only the last few months have been demo and work on the house itself.  (That's right...a very costly year and a half taken up by the crap that people accumulate, and that must be addressed by somebody after those people die.  Seeing that is more than enough to make me a minimalist.)

Anyway I'll get to what is happening tomorrow.

Here are some photos of what happened once we started actual demo.

I forgot to take a pic of the mondo vacuum that sucked the insulation out of the attic.  It was hard, hot, miserable work, the vac was $250 per day, PLUS the expensive bags (necessary for it to work).  But trying to get the insulation out any other way, when it's 100 degrees outside, was beyond awful.  Awesome Handyman (AH) and I both itched for days.



The vac looked like this.



That bag is as tall as I am when it's fully inflated.  We made a plywood ramp up, over and into the dumpster, and put some scrap plastic, fake-tile wallcovering on it once we realized that once the bag is full, there ain't no movin' it. (The wallcovering was slippery so the bags would slide on it. ) The bags tear, so unless they're on pallets and you own a forklift, they stay where you fill them.  As the front of the dumpster filled, we extended the ramp.

AH had to get down there and just shove to get the bags on down the ramp, once I had pushed them as far as I could.  It would've been funny if it hadn't been so dang itchy.



Once the insulation was out, the ceilings came down, then the walls.







Oh, looky there....the main stack and guts of the bathroom wall.

Ten internets if you find what's particularly troublesome in this photo.



Houses look so big with no walls.



I can't even tell you how badly I want to vault this ceiling.   I know how to shift the roof load to a beam and transfer it to the ground.  But I can't figure out how to hold these particular exterior walls together if I do it.  (Kitties, though expending MASSIVE amounts of effort to learn everything about anything interesting, is forced to stop and contemplate the inconceivably VAST amount of stuff she still does not know.   One lifetime is not enough.    )



All the while that's been going on, we've been putting more beams in the basement, jacking on the walls one turn every two days or so (giving the house a chance to shift and decide where it's going to be after each adjustment) and correcting foundation drainage.  We had water in the concrete finished parts of the basement last winter.  A lot of water.  The gutters had failed.  We bootstrapped those together until we get to the replacement phase on the exterior.  But the drainage around the foundation was wrong.  Big puddles next to the foundation walls.

Ten yards of topsoil, some hard labor, and some straw later....the basement is dry, so far, even with leaky gutters.



The hole in the flue got fixed by a very cool chimney guy.  That stuff he shoved in there?  He says one inch of it is equivalent to five fire bricks.  

He also repaired the concrete "top" of the chimney where the caps are, and painted it all pretty.    More work to do up there, but later.



Meanwhile, I was on a search for a framing gun that did not make me cuss.

I found one.  



So there's lots more that's happened, but it's late.

And about tomorrow and the cool thing that's happening...

This is shot from the kitchen.



That first wall is between kitchen and a useless, nearly-7-foot-wide hallway.  That wall needs to go away. But I don't want a ginormous beam hanging down in the kitchen.  See that 2 X 12 in the attic?  That and two more like it have morphed into something entirely different--it's now part of a big homemade beam, and tomorrow it will finally, FINALLY, after nearly two years of planning, take the load off of that wall, so the wall can go away.

I'm ridiculously excited.  

Ah.  Way better than 18" wide.  But still much heavier than I could have handled, I'm guessing.

I hired minions to help AH with the beams he and I built, but when nobody was available, I hefted one end and held it in place til it was strapped (plumber's strapping for temporary safety) and we got it jacked in place.

Any heavier and I would have been useless.

As to cost, I didn't realize a steel beam would be that expensive.  (Never bought one.)

A 2 X 6 beam probably cost $30, including plywood and a tube of adhesive.

I'd have been hesitant to use an lvl anyway on a dirt basement. They do not like moisture.

I would have done treated 2x with treated plywood. Treated not just for obvious reasons, but it's the best way to get southern yellow pine around here, which is better for stuff like that than regular stud grade stuff.

I have lumber span tables, should you need them, let me know.

Thank you!  I might bump you with questions about some of these spans.  I wish I could get clear and easily readable "how to do it" tables here.  I think I just don't understand their code.  Anyway....

Here, we are no longer allowed to use treated lumber "inside" which includes the basement/crawl space.

So...I admit that I did one beam out of (old) treated lumber because I had it.

But the rest are out of nontreated.

We are dry enough that I am not even a little bit worried about  the moisture intrusion into these beams unless we have some kind of significant event, and then all bets are off.

On a side note, I'm mad at my lumber yard (new to me lumber yard) and I'm having to take some time to decide to just let it be.

Ordered a small lot of lumber. Several wide 2 X stock in different widths and lengths, (yellow pine) and about 30 2 X 4s.

Of the 30, eight are what I consider decent stock to use for framing.

I don't care whether it's pretty, but if it's so f***ed up that it's a weak board, why the blazes would I stick it in a house I want to hold up?

I'm pissed off and I need to let it go.  Just. Let. It. Go.

This is small beans, and not that much money, but...****breathes in, breathes out.****

I'll go somewhere else and buy what I need to do this.

I really like them there but what they call #2s...Yeah I wouldn't even call them #3s.



They can smile at me all they want while they take my money, but I ain't goin' back there for lumber.

Yeah, they try to pass off junk as decent lumber, although not as bad as pre '08.

At Menards (like a Home Depot), all the lumber is generally picked through. They take all the rejects and stack them back up. Very common to have 1/2 or better of a pallet of junk they keep trying to sell.

That junk goes to contractors and those who order by the pallet/large load, or otherwise have it delivered where they have no say. Of course, you can reject it, but most don't take that time to inspect it that much, especially what is in the middle of the pallet.

They aren't exactly simple tables...

You need to know the species of the wood and then get the design specs for that wood.

Example: For Southern Yellow Pine, you get design specs like this: LINKY
You get the Fb, which is needed for the tables I have.
Then you look up your span, find the beam size you want to use, and get the rated weight at that span.
You would then get on a 9' span with a single 2x10, a weight rating of 1742 pounds uniformly distributed, or 193 pounds per linear foot.

Jeezzzus.  That's what I ran into with the online calculators too.   The bigger problem, though, was that they are ALL geared to new lumber.  No possibility that the width is not 1.5 actual on a 2 x nominal, for instance, and no possibility that it's solid oak.  Although the studs in the walls are 3.5 for a 4" wall, they are 2" actual. The JOISTS, however, are 5.5 ish actual ( Old houses always include the "ish" factor" which I'm sure you find familiar, cuz of the old house you just moved out of.)  But the joists are 2" ish actual.

Of course, with those calculators, there's also no possibility that the joists are scabbed together in the freaking middle of the room.  So there's that.

I've gotta learn to read these things.  I do.  But I must say, I want to ignore all that and just do the fun stuff that does not hurt my brain.

Edited cuz of fatigue and bad typing.

It really aggravates me that I'm going to have to go pick out each effing 2 X 4.

They do good on the yellow pine stock.  But that's almost never scuzzy.

The 2 X 4s?  Oh. My. Lord.

I'm using them.  I'm finding creative ways.  I'm sistering a lot of studs and joists because of spacing, bowing, ugly cutouts made by electricians years back, etc... (and an interesting thing I haven't seen too often.  These guys put up the walls, and if a stud was crowned one way or the other, they sawed across it more than half way to basically break its back, and shoved it into line.  That'll teach a board to break out of the pack, now won't it? ).

Anyway, I'm over it,  and the scuzzy studs will do fine for those purposes.

But I'm not looking forward to having to do this the homeowner way and actually go to Lowes, or piss off the yard guys by pulling my trailer in and sorting through their bundles of crappy 2 X 4s to get 40 decent ones.  

I don't have the time, and I hate to be "that chick."

Although...even as I type that, I realize that the older I get, the less I effing care about being "that chick."

At least I didn't go there and struggle through the door, carrying the one with all the cracks, that was more than half bark, with no square corners and half the end chewed off by some piece of equipment, slap it down on the counter and get all bitchy.

Goooooooosfabra.  GOOOOOOSfabra....

THANK YOU!

This is awesome!

ETA:  Having some trouble reading their graphs, as I can't see the difference between inches and feet on the diagrams, even when I blow it up on my screen.  I'll figure it out, but wow, my eyes are older than I thought.

Glad to see this thread back alive.

Good luck with your repairs.

Thanks!

Thank you!  These are awesome!

Bump for Kitties.

Thanks @dryflash3

So last I left off, lots was happening with the rehab, and it still is....

This house moves.  A lot.  I live in a house built in 1849.  It moves, but not much.

This damn house built in 1938?  It's a freaking hula dancer.

So.....

This is partially the journey to reduce the effects of movement within the structure.  



I don't know if I said that there were no actual "to modern code" headers in the house.   Let me say right here....in 1938, the codes, if they existed, were very different,  and the exterior walls have not moved that much, so I can't bitch a lot about how the windows and doors were done. (Interior walls...that's a different thing entirely)

[If you hate details, skip this part]
Anyway, there were what I call "pseudo headers" which is a structure made with jack studs, cripples and king studs, and it would be okay except...in every instance, the jack studs (which would hold up the header) were interrupted by the 2 X 4 saddle that is supposed to hold up the window, and there were NO  (what I call) jack studs for support below the saddle.  Usually there was a cripple below the center of the saddle, but sometimes it was 2 or 3 inches shy of actually meeting the saddle.   So basically, the transfer of load from top plate to mudsill around the windows was really f***ed up.

[/ If you hate details skip this part]

So sometimes the window sill/saddles were WAY lower (2 or 3 inches) on one side than the other, cuz the whole thing had shifted over time.



Lemme just say...I am NO kind of engineer, and though I kind of understand the forces acting on a structure, I try to mind my Ps and Qs and do my research, ask a lot of questions and I HAPPILY pay experts to look at what I'm doing so I don't screw up, and yeah, I sometimes overbuild because I understand that old houses tend to say "fuck what you want me to do, Ima do what I want!" and part of the time I'm good with that obstinance, but other times I'm skeerd.    So Old Houses and Me...we have a give-and-take, love-you-mean-it sort of relationship.

Anyway....there are headers now..  Ones you could park a freaking CAR on top of.  Cuz I really want to minimize the effect of movement in this house.

The exterior wall openings got huge headers.  It's a craftsman-style house, so there are only two "single" window units in the structure.  All the others are double or triple window units so the spans are relatively wide.    We will be getting all new windows for this job (not what I would do normally, cuz I like to preserve the old windows if I can, but I think new windows are the best choice here).  The house may move, but the framing will not bind the new windows.  Just sayin.

Here's the crew, with the temporary wall to support the structure at the front of the house, taking out the old framing and replacing it with giant headers and correcting the framing so everything is supported directly all the way to the foundation, with no interruptions.

Basically putting legs under the corners of the table, yaknow?



You can see a header in the rebuilt window to the right.  Way too big for a gable end, but I had the extra lumber so we used it.

Sooooo....the kitchen.

Y'all may remember that I had that beam sitting up in the attic, waiting.  Waiting......waiting...

The point was to take out a loadbearing wall, and incorporate a useless, seven-foot-wide hallway into the kitchen space.

I had been speaking to the inspector.  He hemmed and hawed..and hemmed...and hawed.....

I had a conversation with my (awesome) electrician, who looked at my kitchen wall and said, "You know, sometimes it's better to ask forgiveness than ask permission." (Words I have lived by in past years.)

Okey dokey then.  I decided to fo.

Here we are, jacking up the wall to meet the beam.



My part of this was in the attic, swinging the hammer, nailing the joists to the beam.


f
Yeah, I was sore the next day. That's a lot of hammering on very expensive, (and frighteningly short) joist-hanger-specific nails.  Fourteen nails per side of each hanger. Times twelve hangers.  

I was assured by awesome lumber yard sales guy, that the length of the (frighteningly short) nails was designed by a pencil-pushing engineer who knew about these things, and I should not worry, because my joist hangers would not fail, and anyway, they were overkill.

I'm good with overkill when it concerns very short nails.  Even a LOT of very short nails.  So...I believed him, and I hammered those nails into the beam.

Yes, there are scabbed pieces of plywood as filler in the (very expensive) joist hanger thingies.  I did not want the (scabbed-together) joists bending the hangers because I put all the weight in the middle of something that was meant to hold a wider object.    (NOT an engineer, remember?)

As soon as I installed the second joist hanger, I realized I needed to alternate the hangers, so all the torque was not on one side of the beam.  So sometimes the scabbed-together ceiling joists would not allow room for a hanger, but on about half of them, we could switch sides, so we did.



So here we are, taking out the first stud of that load-bearing wall.

It's stupid that we've been planning and waiting for a year and a half to do this, but...we have.  I let Awesome Handyman take out the first  stud, because he's been with me the whole way, and sometimes when he's on other jobs, he calls to check on me, to be sure I'm okay.  He's that awesome.



So the wall came down, and the ceiling did NOT fall.  It's been about a month, so I expect it will NOT fall.  I'm kinda proud of that

Here is a view from the previous hallway, across the (now much larger) kitchen, to the front door.  You can see, in the floor, where the old wall was.



It's a bigger, open room, interrupted only by the fireplace in the center.

In tearing out this wall, we encountered a couple of things that touch my heart.

First was this drill bit, embedded in the wall plate.   They got it stuck, we think, so they left it there, inside the wall, for 80 years.



We tried to get it out, and could not.  We used vise grips and we used pipe wrenches.  We could not get the damn bit out of the wall plate.

,

For months we've been looking at it, wondering whether we'd be able to get it out without destroying it.  Once we took apart the bottom wall plate, here it was...just sticking in the subfloor.  (the subfloor is one-inch-thick poplar and/or oak).   While we were worrying about something else, Fernando, one of the crew, decided to worry about the drill bit.  He wiggled it.  And wiggled it.  And worried it. And wiggled it.

And when I came back into the kitchen, he was holding it up, and saying, "KITTIES!!!  I got it!!!"

And he did get it.

Now I have to figure out how to fit it into a shadowbox for the house history.

Second thing that touched my heart was this mark, on the top plate of the wall we removed.

That pencil mark was made by a carpenter/framer in 1938.

I just tore out the wall he built.

I can't help but take a moment as I think about that.

Great update!

My patience has payed off.

There's a lot more, but the time loading and editing the photos is what's keeping me from more frequent updates.  

So we tore out part of the ONE bathroom in this four-bedroom house.  The sink is still there, cuz I didn't have any glue to cap off the cpvc incoming lines, and they also feed the toilet so I can't shut them off.

Because....toilet.

Tore out this old handicapped shower, which was still sound, but I couldn't find anybody who needed/wanted it so it went to the dump instead of donation. Our local habitat Re-store was overwhelmed with fixtures, I guess, and so quit taking them.



Here is the bathroom with that torn out.

Oh look!

A window!



Yep, they just slapped a piece of osb over it and set the shower wall panel pieces in.

I saw it from outside of course, but weird to have natural light in that room after so long.

Dunno if I'll do glass blocks there or some kind of wavy/seeded glass in a normal window.  I will install a bathroom fan capable of venting the seventh layer of hell, so I'm not worried about ventilation.  Never tiled around a window before....  ***mulling****

Oh and just when I think surely I've run out of reasons to be annoyed, I find another.  The people who made this house handicapped accessible, also widened the bathroom door.



The wall was open, after all.  And yet they couldn't manage to muster enough sh*ts to actually cut a 2 X 4 to the correct length and place it solidly as a door jamb.

Hmmm...I'm cussin' a lot lately.   I might need to go find some water and a sailboat.

I saw the check that got written to the "contractor".  There were a lot of digits before the decimal point.  Enough digits to have afforded one more 2 X 4 x 8 and the nails to place it.  Even enough to fix that shower and leave the window uncovered.  Yep.  Plenty enough for that.   (though maybe they did me a favor, by NOT exposing the window, which means they did not rot out the wall and mudsill beneath it, when they didn't waterproof around the window. So I should quit bitching.

I am almost never put off by the crazy findings in old houses. (like the interior walls that were sagging, and why they were sagging. ) To me that's just part of the fun puzzle that is an olde house.

But work that is just shoddy, done in the past ten or twenty years, and done NOT by the homeowner?  That stops me and I have to take a moment.



Okay, bitch session over.

Cool things have happened in other parts of the house.

The back wall had a bank of three windows (separated by 11" wide poplar trim boards, in true Craftsman fashion though this house is not a true Craftsman).

(Sorry for my chopsaw in the shot. )



But see how dark everything feels in this photo?  Even with the plaster on the walls, the house did feel sort of dark and "heavy" in spite of having a lot of windows for a house its size.

Well, I thought it needed some more light.

So...

I ordered these, which will obviously NOT fit where those windows are.



The outside of the rehab house is stone, and it was stacked all up to and around, and above, the windows.  (That part of the stone is not original construction, but that's a whole nuther story).

Remember Awesome Foundation Contractor from WAAAAAY back in the beginning of this thread?

Way back at the beginning of the summer, I texted him (and waited a month or four) and he sent some of his guys over.  They brought my favoriite saw....a freaking awesome little battery operated masonry saw, and a Hilti Rotary hammer that is my new best friend.

The masonry saw looked a lot like this, though I think it was a beefier version.  They used it last fall to cut the joints in the newly poured concrete for my building's foundation.



So they cut the stone out and made the opening big enough for patio doors, that will open to a deck (eventually).



I and Awesome Handyman took the stone out above the opening after they took out what's below on the first day, but they came back the next day, smoothed out the stone "sill"  and re-set some stones that came loose in the process.

The door unit is heavy. STUPID heavy.  I'm not a weak chick, but I cannot lift one end of it.  There is no way anybody can lift it nearly overhead into the opening to a-dry fit and b-actually place it after caulk, waterproofing, etc.  So we built a platform for working on the opening and later, the doors.



The next day, Awesome Handyman used my little Harbor Freight hammer to release the metal railing from the concrete steps outside the existing back door (this back door will go away) and then he removed the railing.
I was very happy with my first ever rotary hammer since it was an inexpensive Harbor Freight experiment, and the destructo-bits I purchased were also Harbor Freight. I greased the shaft of the bit, seated it, set the thing on hammer, and because I had to be on the phone, I handed it to Awesome Handyman.

And this happened....





I'm keeping that railing because I think I can use it to make something cool for the "new" version of the old house.  More on that later.

LISTEN...all y'all....

I'm going to have insulation questions immediately,  so if any of y'all are experts, or know experts who would be willing to help, please direct them here. I'll be asking in the next couple of days.   This is not a simple insulation problem, from all I can discern.

Kitties Rots Down Olde House: Film at 11

Yeah, I'm hoping to avoid that.

Wow at that extreme fail on the bathroom door framing.

Okay here's my insulation question.

Anybody who understands insulation, moisture/vapor barriers, and the passing of vapor/moisture through layers of a home, please chime in.  I may glaze over  but I promise to read everything you type and try my best to understand, so I make good decisions as I try to create a decent insulation envelope for This Olde House.

This is not quite a standard insulation situation, based on everything I have found to read.

So this house was not originally stone all the way to the roofline.

It was stone foundation, with a (probably) clapboard siding above.

But somebody decided to rip off the clapboards and stack stone to the eaves.

1-They DID wrap the house with asphalt paper, which I'm pretty sure was a good thing.

2-They DID make some attempt to keep the stone off of the sheathing, but in many places it's touching a LOT.  It's really tight to the house as compared to, say, a modern brick layer, according to my mason.

3-The sheathing is 3/4" or better, and is hardwood.

4-The walls are 2 X 4 actual, mostly. Also either oak or poplar.

5-The stone was stacked all the way to the roof decking overhangs.  There are soffits, but there is ZERO air passage from soffit to attic.  None. Zip.  Nada.  They walled it off.

6-At some point, blown-in insulation was added in the attic, but in the walls there is nothing.  Just rock, slight air space in some places, then asphalt paper, then hardwood sheathing, then framing, then vacant space, then it was plaster over sheetrock (true sheetrock, not modern drywall...the old stuff from the 1930s with holes in it for the plaster to poke through and gain purchase)  I removed the blown-in insulation from the attic so I could take the ceilings down and put up modern drywall.   So this house no has NO insulation anywhere.

What else do you need to know to help me understand this envelope and make a good decision?

Here are some photos of the situation (I have put these in the thread earlier, but not with this specific question.)

Here is a corner that shows some of the interior plaster over rock still in place.  But you can see the exterior sheathing here, and the wall cavities.



Here are more examples of the typical wall construction (though I have added modern, properly constructed and bigger headers over all exterior openings)



Here is the stone on the outside, and hopefully you can see how it interacts with the walls.



Any help y'all can give in this situation will be much appreciated.  Even if it's just a "read this" link, I'll absolutely do it, and appreciate it.

Thanks in Advance..

Kitties

Thanks!

I will look at all of this!