How to Replace Sills (Part 1 of ?)

Horrid news to report... We’ve been having problems with the digital camera. Somewhere between Mom’s and our house the connector cord has vanished. So there are some great pictures on it even now, but I can’t show them to you. Sigh...

Fortunately, the sills we replaced last week are for the second two-thirds of the house. So I have pictures of the ones we did back in March/April and the process is the same.

While some of this came from our favorite book, a lot was Shawn’s own invention. (He’s humble; he says he probably saw a picture somewhere.) If you recall our drawing of a balloon frame, you’ll remember that the foundation supports everything. But our foundation is crap, so that doesn’t help us. The sills support everything except the foundation. But replacing the sills is what this is all about, so that doesn’t help either. The wall studs support everything except the foundation and sills. Bingo! So how do you support and lift all the studs on a house but leave the sill just dangling loosely so it can be removed and replaced?

2 x 12s (or 2 x 10s) and bolts!

First we removed enough of the siding to expose the studs from about two feet above the sills on down. Then Shawn screwed two 2 x 12s horizontally against the studs. Next, he bolted them into the studs (two 8 inch, ½ inch wide wood bolts per stud). Those little chunks of lopsided wood just take up a bit of space and work as a washer. We didn’t want the bolt going through our interior drywall, which was still up in some areas.

Now, these bolted on 2 x 12s should do the job of a sill—if we lift it, all the studs will arise evenly and in unison. So, how do you lift this without touching the sill? Screw jacks!

We own two hydraulic jacks, which are on either end. They’re wonderful, but expensive. So we rented several screw jacks (an older, heavier, more cumbersome invention) from the Dover Rent-All. We’re the only people who have rented these in years, apparently. We placed a railroad tie on the ground right next to the old foundation then used the two hydraulic jacks simultaneously to lift the 2x12s. We placed the screw jack underneath in the middle to hold the 2 x 12s in placed, removed our hydraulic jacks and repeated several times over the length of the sill.

We did have to break down and use the car jack occasionally.

Check out that space between the stud and the foundation!

Now we just slide out the old sill and pop in the new one. Easy, right? Right...

NEW SILLS!

Today was a day of glory!!! Our house has all new sills! Yay!

We put in eight this week and I haven't been able to post, but I'll put up pictures this weekend. Tomorrow shall be a day of rejoicing and celebration at the Delaware State Fair (I'm gonna pet the baby goats!) and... a secret surprise for my awesome builder at the Grandstand at 8:oo pm. That's enough info for anyone who cares to Google it.

Most of the advice for our work came from George Nash, author of Renovating Old Houses. Besides the construction advice (400 glorious pages of it) comes this piece of personal advice that I think is fantastic:

"Remember that the house is a means, not the end. There are times when you should put the hammer down, say “to hell with it” and go out to dinner. Listen to your partner. Keep your sense of humor well oiled. Listen to yourself, know when you need to stop. And stop. Do not ignore this advice. There is nothing sadder than a house that has devoured the souls of its people, or than the emptiness of waking up at night and seeing a stranger lying beside you.”

A little foreboding, I know. But his frank acknowledgement of the emtional aspects that come with doing the kind of work we're doing is actually reassuring. Sanity can prevail! Huzzah! Baby goats! Huzzah! Okay...clearly, my mind is not on the project anymore this week, so...

Have a great weekend!

(Not my goat. This fine, fine goat lives in Bridgeville, DE and likes to come to the fair. www.delwareboergoats.com)

Siding...

Yesterday, I talked a little bit about siding. Well, oddly enough, the subject came up quite a bit today when two unrelated visitors stopped by the check us out. We're on a pretty busy road, so we actually get a lot of notice from folks, mostly guys who have done similar work, driving by and wondering what our plans are.

First, our neighbor from through the back field (Hi, Mr. Murray!) stopped by. He's known a few of the folks who have lived in our house over the years and often has some insights on the "repairs" they had done before. Apparently, the whole house used to be a cranberry color that we can still see in some patches on our shed. We showed him some of our ripped up cranberry painted flooring and mentioned that the color had been inside too. Someone must have loved it! We chatted siding (as yesterday's pictures showed, we had to remove some from around the bottom to do our work) and he asked if we planned on keeping up the old farmhouse look with the original wood plank siding.

As much as I like the look of wood plank siding, as you can see the house only has that on some walls. Elsewhere it has asbestos shingles. Asbestos, you're probably aware, is kind of a dirty word. However, there IS a difference between working with and inhaling asbestos 40 hrs a week versus living next to stable asbestos shingle that don't break, crack, or dust up the place. Just like there' s a difference between living at the bottom of the ocean versus living on the beach. One will kill you, the other ain't so bad (my dad's metaphor.) We told our neighbor that while we hadn't decided, we were pretty sure that eventually ALL the siding would go and we'd get something new. (By the way, ALL the foliage touching the house in that picture is g.o.n.e. Yay!)

Later this afternoon, a guy who lives in Harrington (20 miles south) and occasionally drives by stopped in. Guess what he wanted to ask us about? Siding! Apparently, he had some asbestos shingles from his own home and was wondering if we could use them, seeing as we were doing construction and already had them up over 60-70% of the house. We said 'no, thanks' and shared our strip-it-redo-it plan and then asked how exactly he had removed his own siding. We had heard that since asbestos causes cancer (just like nickel, talc, the sun, sawdust, diet coke, vinyl, glass...), we would need to pay some certified dudes thousands of dollars to remove it. Not so, said our new best friend. Apparently, if you are the homeowner, and you follow very specific (but totally doable) instructions that he has at home and could drop by, you are allowed to remove them, wrap them, and dispose of them at the local dump. Yay!

My dad says it's like having a lawyer: you can pay a pro or do it yourself legally, but you can't pay a non-pro. So we could pay the pros or take these down ourselves for a teeny fraction of the cost. With what we're saving, we can afford to wear dust masks...

Inspired, I flipped through my issues of House Beautiful to find the examples of siding on Newell Turner's Twilight Field. And there it was! May '08! He used board-and-batten vinyl siding from CertainTeed. The same fine folks whose insulation is in our walls! Of course, squirrels made nests in the insulation which attracted a snake who we've caught and released at least half-a-dozen times, but that's another story for another day...

Dude...Where's my wall?

Poof! No more siding! Well, not 'poof' exactly. It actually involved a crowbar, sawzall, shovel, and other nasty implements. But it had to be done. You may notice the siding is different: the front of the house (with my mama standing in front, above, and the first pic below) has asbestos shingles; the side of the house (that Shawn was ripping down in the second picture below) has what we believe was original wood siding. The asbestos shingles we're keeping to place back over the completed wall.


Also, in that picture above of the original wood siding Shawn's removing, you may notice a grey concrete foundation. Look carefully in Shawn's shadow. It's not a concrete foundation, it's a 1-2 foot deep brick foundation with a 1/4-1/2 inch thick layer of concrete "painted" (like stucco) over it. W. T. F....?

While I have many complaints with the people who tried to fix the house up over the years (many....), I'd like to take a moment to point out some rather impressive original work. Take a look at the following picture.



At this point (after a century of hard work by termites, mold, and other forces of nature), it's a little hard to find the beauty in this. The sill, is outlined in green, and the corner stud in yellow. That oak sill was shaped with an ax (we could still see the marks) and the corner stud had a square knob hand carved into its base. The sill had a corresponding notch cut into it so the two pieces would fit firmly together. Can you imagine doing all that work?

Speaking of work, today we began to talk about siding. This asbestos can't stick around forever and, let's face it, the formerly nice wood siding is crap. Right now, I'm loving Newell Turner's siding on Twilight Field. It's vinyl (super easy to care for) and the look of vertical lines gives it a real farmhouse look. Well, we'll see. We have plenty of other work to do first. :-)

Goodbye, Mr. Subfloor!

Bye-bye, floor!! Shawn finished ripping it up today. The first two pictures are one room, the third picture is the other room. The fourh is an explanation. Remember the importance of foundations and sills from yesterday's lesson? Well, that little pile of bricks IS our foundation, and to it's left a concrete block IS our foundation, and to the right there's, well..., very little. Our busted house needs some help.

Oh, and in the picture down below... Those two purple lines outline the sill. Or at least they outline where a sill ought to be. It appears to have partially rotted away. Again, note also the little brick foundation to the left and the utter lack of foundation to the right. Yeah, that wall moves when you grab it and shake it with one hand. Looks like we have a little work to do.

Just What are we Doing, Anyway?

Pretty light day today. We took several field trips: twice to the dump, which is this nice big barn-looking building with a Pennsylvania Dutch hex sign on it, and once to the millwork to pick up four new sills. I figured I'd take this opportunity to explain what exactly it is we're working on here. For anyone who's done this kind of construction before, please forgive the "baby talk." I, however, am learning many of these terms for the very first time (thanks to Shawn and his massive amounts of research) so I'm going to start with the very, very, v-e-r-y basics.

The house is a 104-year-old balloon-frame structure. Actually, part of it is. We're not positive which part, but we think it's the front. See, before building permits and codes enforcement inspectors came along, people added whatever they wanted wherever they wanted. So what we're really doing is an archaeological dig. Let's start with what a balloon frame structure even is:

First, a basement or crawl space is dug and a concrete/concrete block/red brick/stone foundation is built. In our case, some parts of the house had a red brick foundation (not very deep) some have a poured cement foundation, some had NO foundation anymore. If all the metaphors about good foundations being important to relationships, businesses, and society are right, you'd better believe a literal founDAtion is imPORtant to a HOUSE!! It's where all the weight rests! Anyhoo....

Then the mud sills (good, thick solid oak 6x6s or 4x6s, in our case) are placed on the foundation. These should be bolted down--ours weren't. Furthermore, termites can do a lot of work, even to oak, in 104 years. Some of our sills looked okay at first, come to find out that they were hollowed out like manicotti. A good, new foundation's no good if it's holding up rotted out sills. Also, to we need to lift this house up in midair (as the guys at Brothers Builders in Ontario did) while we replace the foundation under it. Can't hold it up with rotted sills. So solid mud sills are a major part of this job.

The wall studs should be a familiar part of the house to anyone who's tried to hang a heavy picture. In a balloon frame, these studs hold up the interior walls, the exterior walls and siding, the second story, the attic, and the entire roof. They don't hold up the floors, nor does the floor hold up the walls. So we can rip out all our flooring, including the floor joists, in any first floor room and not bother the structure of the rest of the house. The walls we have to be careful of.

We're lucky here: these sturdy oak studs, despite being over a century old, are what make the house worth saving. If we can fix the foundation below them, they'll hold the house up for a century longer. Everything else becomes relatively minor if this skeleton is good. Someday we'll rip down the rest of the interior walls, re-drywall, and paint them. Someday, we'll rip off the roofing (some metal, some asphalt) and replace it with new shingles. Someday, we'll take out the bathtub and...well... I could "someday" this house all night.

Tomorrow (or Wednesday), we'll see what condition our sills are really in. And then we'll begin!

Some Pictures...

This is our one room cabin, like Laura Ingalls Wilder grew up in except with more electronics and other 21st century crap. The stove and fridge are behind the photographer (me) and the kitchen sink is to our right. The bedroom and bath are upstairs but beyond that we have nothing for now as the doorway to the left in the back is blocked off. It's so cozy that the part of me that longs for the simple life sometimes wonders why we're working on the front two rooms anyway. But I suppose sawing them right off the house would be more difficult anyway.

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The matched set of cats (mama and son) enjoyed their last nap on the cat-stained rug this morning before we blocked off the room and starting ripping it apart. The "kitten" (one year old last week) has spent his life surrounded by construction. His mother came into our lives in June of '08 while we were demolishing the old back laundry room roof. We put her inside the house to protect her from the shingles that were flying off the roof and she curled up under our dining room table and hasn't left yet. I guess that makes her our cat. (Her kiddo was born under the same table a few weeks later.)

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There's Shawn, the guy of the house, terrorizing the bottom two feet of the wall. We need to do that to see the wall studs if we intend to replace the floor, floor joists, sills, foundation, and anything else that might be below our feet. We're not improving the walls this year (though we'll need to someday) so we'll just replace the bottom two feet of drywall when we're done with the foundation and floors. Not pretty, but at least it'll be an ugly wall on a solid foundation...a vast improvement indeed.

Welcome to our Busted House

Today we ripped up 427 sq. feet of flooring down to the bare, rotten studs. This included tearing up two smelly wall-to-wall carpets (two rooms), finding a plywood floor underneath, ripping that up, finding a hardwood floor underneath, and ripping that up.

Well, anyway, it was a busy day but so is every day at "This Busted House." This beautiful July day we are, if you haven't noticed, in the middle of a recession and I and my chap are, if you don't know us, young, poor, and trying to start our lives. Altogether, it's one of the best places to be during a recession--we have nothing ergo we have nothing to lose.

So, while we have no money to start our lives, we have time. We're living in a fixer-upper that shows us, each week, a new horrid flaw. My dad owns it, and we plan to buy it from him at below market value (but not terribly below) and hope to take advantage of the First-Time Home Buyer Tax Credit if we can get a foundation under it, make it insurable, get a mortgage (at incredible recession rates) and buy it before December 1, 2009.

If we can, we get enough money from Uncle Obama to pay our mortgage for a year. If not.... well... the future will still be there when we get there.

We've done a lot in the past year, so over the next few days as I get used to this medium, I'll post what we have so far and continue forward. Perhaps we'll provide hope for other young homeowners, perhaps horror to professional home-builders who think we're insane, perhaps humour to our loved ones who read this, perhaps none of the above. But I think it'll be fun.

Until next time....