Bugbane or Cohosh, Cimicifuga racemosa.
The Truth About Gardening
home renovation
Job One
There is an entry door in the back, off the utility room, that went completely unused. My idea was to seal it up, put a wall, or at best a window, in its place. Yet it's hard to remove a door that is already there -it's like giving up some power. Before we could decide fully what to do with the space, we had to excavate the situation -a situation that anyone with experience in these kinds of things could see wasn't going to be good.
The heart of the problem is a landing at entry level. It sits directly beneath an expansive roof valley that channels falling moisture from two roofs onto the landing at high speed, leaping over the gutter and dropping 8 feet, then splashing up onto a door situated on the cool, wet side of the house. The rust at the bottom of the door is clear, so is the rotting door jamb. The deck boards didn't look so hot and the railings were simply pushed over.
This is what it looked like behind the landing's framing. Not good. Moisture from rain and melting snow was channeled through the wall via lag screws anchoring the landing deck ledger board to the house. Well-designed homes do not do this anymore, particularly where construction methods make use of rim boards made of oriented strand board-like materials as was done at our place. They still penetrate the rim board, but more than a lag is required, but I digress.
"Engineered" lumber is extremely common, but it doesn't hold up to constant moisture and insects. Only the sill plate is made of a durable material -aluminum. The siding, joists, rim, and sheathing are all "engineered" products.
From above you can see that the rot extended under the sill and into the plywood underlayment, subfloor, and joists. On the right is the door framing that shows water penetrating from above the door -probably due to ice damming on the roof in winter.
The door removed, it then became necessary to remove the basement window. We never opened it and its light would not be missed. I also do not like the soil "framing" necessitated by below grade windows. It too was under the same valley that dumps water onto the landing. Removing this window was one of the easiest decisions we've had to make.
The window removed and the void studded and sheathed with treated plywood, we then set to remove the rot, what I consider the cancer of wood frame homes. Some carpenters leave rot if it will be covered by dry siding, but even these guys would remove this rot -it's too far gone.
We cut out the subfloor rot, the sheathing rot, the rim rot, leaving only the 2x6 wall plate and joist ends that, although blackened, appeared sound or that removing them would have been more problematic than their soft wood. I applied a bleach solution to all blackened areas. Underneath the cantilevered wall plates and the future door sill I installed supporting 2x10 cuts. To the left is a natural gas inlet pipe that had to be cut to remove and replace the rim joist. That is when we started hanging our laundry.
It was here that I confirmed what had already proved obvious -underneath the staircase to the left is a void with no insulation. The room above the garage had its heating vents closed and the stairwell uninsulated. We learned this when we stored water and my garlic supply there in January. Both froze overnight -the garlic never recovered.
We installed the new rim using a similar strand board lumber -at one and a quarter inches it is thinner than framing lumber, so necessary for the proper fit. We then removed the soil "framing" around the old window, filled the hole, and replaced the treated ply kick plate that surrounds the house.
We sheathed the framing with 1/2 inch treated plywood- possibly overkill, but then we had the material. The subfloor, under the door sill, was also replaced with treated ply.
For a month we went without a door, just a plastic tarp and flimsy plywood covering. This is when the cat learned about the outside. Time was running out, as I was nearing time for my trip to NYC, Vermont, and Boston. The evening before I was to leave, we crammed the new door into its pocket.
When I returned, over three weeks later, I began framing the landing. The 4x4 posts are ground contact treated and anchored to piers just below soil grade. I graded the soil along the house to drain water away from the building and so that no soil comes into contact with the posts where coarse gravel fills the void. The deck framing is treated as well, but the cedar tone stuff common to the box stores these days. The ledger is mounted so that the new deck boards rest a full step below the door sill and the lower level allowed me to lag directly into the foundation wall. I framed parallel to the house so that the deck boards would run perpendicular, allowing for easier flow of rain away from the house. The deck landing slopes away from the house at an eighth inch per foot.
Stair cuts are always a hassle. Here we decided to have a deeper tread than previous, although the rise is a common seven and one quarter inches. The stringer plate rests on a bed of coarse gravel.
I custom flashed the ledger with galvanized sheet metal after adding a layer of protecto-wrap tape. Flashing is one of the more complicated applications at door sills. The best way to think of it is like siding -work from the bottom up. I made sure our lowest flashing element protected the ledger lag bolts. I then installed the cedar riser trim and tread planks. The landing planks, posts and handrails had to wait until the siding was replaced and the gas line restored.
To the right of the landing I replaced the penetrations through the strand board siding with a scarf-jointed cedar plank, flashed above and drip-rabbeted below. The penetrations include the sump pump over-flow (black), the fresh air replacement vent (hooded) and the one inch hose sillcock which has yet to be soldered in.
To the left I have been stymied by the utility meters attached both to the sheathing and to the siding. It will cost a few hundred bucks to get an electrician to remove them so I can build a similar cedar plank plate for those to rest on. The lower four boards are Hardie cementitious siding because no matter what all the contractors say, I have a hard time, given the evidence all around me, that the LP brand strand board product can hold up to the moisture. Our siding hasn't lasted 20 years in places, so where it counts, where there is contact with other materials, I've put in Hardie.
This shirtless, burly guy was sent over by our trash hauler to take away our project waste.
Then a Craigslist ad provided a family to haul away the old playhouse. It took 4 hours, but now their chickens have a swanky bunk.
I removed a ton of horseradish that was growing along the wall, fully expecting it to return next year.
And the lilac I posted about weeks ago has been finally cut out of the soil near the foundation. I can only hope I got it all and I never realized what a weed they could be! In its stead will likely go the New Dawn climbing rose I brought from Brooklyn this August.
There is much more to do, including the front porch and door opposite the one shown here, rotting brick mould on several windows, siding replacement, and the house (and this new door) will need to be painted. The fleshy pink has got to go, but its replacement is daily in question.
The Lilac
We have an aging lilac, probably twenty years old, in the path of some house repair. My hard edged assessment is removal. After all, it's running along the foundation, suckering as it goes. At some point it is a weed that is very hard, nearly impossible really, to yank. For what? Two or three weeks of lightly scented flowers?
I am not a fan of shrubs up against a wooden house, if for nothing other than the inconvenience to repair and the humid environment they create near all that wood. So what is slowing me down? Shouldn't have this old, rangy lilac been cut down months ago?
What would you do?
More information: the tree has a pretty sizable knot of 4" stems at its base. On the left is the septic electrical and the right the gas line. The septic electric wire definitely crosses the lilac without proper protection as I found when digging for the landing piers just a few feet away. Digging will be treacherous. Hmmm. I may transplant one of the many suckers and take it out without removing the roots. Too bad this has to play itself out with nearly all of the foundation plantings.
Day at a Time
Art Project: Chapter 2.5
This is the horse run -named for that possible prior use back in olden days. The horse run served up several new problems, the least of which was its dirt floor. Remember how the rubble foundation was crying whenever it rained? That was partly because all the rain falling on the neighbor's concrete back yard flowed into this space.
This is the new central beam in the basement, located directly beneath the main hall walls on the first and second floor. We supported the new beam with pole jacks until permanent columns could be installed. Whatever played a supporting role in the past had long since been removed. However, there was a flimsy partition wall towards the back 50% of the basement.
Which could explain why the joists in front of that location were sagging nearly 2 inches more than those behind. What does this beam have to do with the horse run you ask? Good question. In the end, not much, but we were trying to tackle all the structural sagging at the same time.
The western foundation wall lies not at the boundary of the home, but set in about four feet. The horse run and what else above occupies this 4 feet. Above the horse run is an unused space running the length of the home and above that, on the 2nd floor, is the stairwell, a closet, part of the bath and another closet. The home's western wall, then, extends from roof to ground where it met a brick knee-wall, a quasi-foundation. That knee wall had long ago crumbled and we were loath to replace it. The years of unsupported weight caused the western wall to sag, and it needed some kind of support. Fortunately, the joists that connected the western wall to the rest of the house were mortised in and only four feet long -as opposed to running the width of the house. So it was that the western wall sag didn't take the rest of the house with it.
In conference with the owner, we decided to simply arrest the sagging, not jack the wall back to its original location. In order to avoid digging four feet down the length of the house, major form work, and ordering yards of concrete, I devised a series of concrete piers and treated lumber header-type beams that would support the western wall.
Sorry, no photos of the formwork, but plenty of the results. This is the concrete pier, about 12 inches across, and 8 or 9 inches deep. We needed to be mindful of both building on the neighbor's property and skinned shins in the horse run, necessitating thinner, rectangular, piers. They, of course, extend well into the ground, on a footing, over a gravel bed. Galvanized tabs were inserted to connect the beam to the pier.
As soon as the piers were complete, we dug out the horse run floor, which was a heavy yellow clay (that I later fired in a kiln!), and poured a new concrete floor. That sopping wet clay was holding water and sending it through the rubble foundation. I graded the new floor to send the water out to the street. Then, I threw a mason line along the stud wall to mark the line were the top of the new treated beam would be.
The studs and corner posts were cut to the height of the new treated beam.
The new treated beam was inserted, tabs nailed. The old studs were "sistered" with adhesive and nails, then toe nailed to the new beam.
In this photo, the finished work. Not so good looking, eh? I put it in because you can see the sag in the building at the top of the doorway. Every home owner wants a different set of results. By this time, my friend, the home owner, was hoping the structural repairs were coming to an end and, I think, he was happy to have me accept this compromise solution. What's a little sag after a hundred years anyway. At the very least, it wasn't going to sag anymore. Incidentally, that pile of wood in the back of the horse run is the pine flooring, "acclimating."
Pine flooring and sticks to facilitate air flow.
Coming next: The Kitchen
It's amazing to me how shady the front garden is at 3 pm these days. What's funny is that I don't recall it being this shady, but then, there it is in pictures.Today I was planning on hitting the beach farm, but yesterday changed all that and I must be at work. Grrr. I've got planting and planning to do, and harvesting too. So many seed packets sitting on my desk!
Saturday I am going up to Nyack, NY to look at a contracting job. Hopefully the last. I have been writing the story of my last big job -ha! when I was 34. After the first post I started to grow weary at the thought of writing out the full 8 months. Where was I going? Hmm.
In the studio on Monday, I came to some sudden awareness, you've felt this, an "ah-ha" to some, but really that sense of well being when you let something go that's been eating you up. And it's been eating me up.
There's something I want to do in the studio, something to a painting that's been languishing for too long, something exciting to me, the painter.
And then I thought, as I had for weeks, about the three contracting jobs slid toward me across the table. About the temptation to take them to ease the money problems that support the table which jobs like these so easily slide across. But the painting resonates, it moves across boundaries and time, it goes somewhere.
The Art Project: Chapter Two
As I mentioned previously, the house had a rubble foundation, with a front and rear wall of brick mounted atop a rubble footing. At the rear of the house, a pit as deep as the basement was tall and about 4 feet wide. There was a door and a window opening to the pit from the basement, but the door had been sealed up with some wood framing long ago. The pit had a concrete staircase leading to the back yard.
Looking into the pit.
The old doorway and window leading to the pit.The front brick wall had two caged windows and a steel door, no doubt necessary during Williamsburg's rougher days. A small staircase to the basement lie next to a brick wall, with the adjacent rubble foundation wall jutting out 10 or 12 inches at the 2nd to last step. The floor was concrete, but how thick was any one's guess. The fireplaces belonging to the two chimneys were located in the basement as well. Underneath the small kitchen extension at the rear of the house was a boiler room with gas furnace and hot water heater.
The staircase, brick and rubble foundation wall during re-pointing.My first task was to begin the process of re-pointing the foundation. I began in early June, doing the outside first so that I could wrap it up before it got too hot. I used a 4-inch grinder with a masonry disc to excavate any hard old mortar, although much of it had turned to sand. In the rear wall, the brick walls had de-laminated, so that the outer layers were pulling away from the inner course of bricks. Where necessary, I removed bricks and re-lay them with fresh mortar.
Rear brick wall coming apart.So it is with old brick that you must make your own mortar! Older bricks are often softer bricks and modern mortars are fairly hard. Hard mortars shoved in between soft bricks can crack them. I used lime to soften my mix, using a recipe from a book in order to approximate an older, softer mortar.
The west facing rubble wall cried every time it rained. I needed to tackle that from the inside and outside (more on that in another post). The hardest part of re-pointing the rubble foundation was excavating the sand from the irregular gaps between the field stones and then replacing it satisfactorily with wet mortar. The challenge was greater towards the back where the wall was painted white and even more so behind the tangle of 4-inch waste pipes in the northwest corner of the basement.
Tangle of waste and gas pipes and worse -expandable foam.I re-pointed the entire exterior of the foundation and parts of the interior -at which point I needed to move onto other problems. I hired a young guy that I worked with at the summer art program in Maine who thought he'd like to try construction work over kitchen work. I was hesitant, though softened by his earnest confidence, gave him a pointing trowel, and asked him to finish the interior. I needed to keep on him like a dog, which he disliked, especially when I popped out his "re-pointed" lines and told him to do it again, this time packing it in. Matt was always way smarter than his skill-set was capable, and learned to hate pointing real fast. I, on the other hand, felt satisfied knowing that this foundation was becoming sound. It was about this time that Ben, with whom I worked on the previous 4-story, came on board to help with the carpentry.
The rear wall after some re-pointing.The back foundation wall had serious problems. Not only was it coming apart, it was leaning inward. We removed the window and the doorway framing, deciding then to tear out the brick wall to the left of the window and replace it with 2 x 8 treated lumber. Before we could tackle this, however, we needed to shore up the rear wall of the house. Two truck-sized hydraulic bottle jacks replaced the support of the demolished brick wall.
Two 10 ton hydraulic jacks, 1/2-inch steel plates, and 4x4 posts support the rear wall.
The view out of the basement into the pit. Where the door used to be, now a knee-wall of concrete.
In the image above you can see the inside of the basement, the cast iron waste pipes, and the wooden sill at the rear of the house. This sill had been partially replaced sometime in the past, made obvious by the newer dimensional lumber on the right.
The corner was well rotted.
The new sill and the mess above it.
Once the sill was installed, we could then frame out the back basement wall with treated lumber and plywood.Next: Chapter 3, The Horse Run
The Art Project
I cannot be entirely sure of the reason, but I want to tell the story of a house renovation project in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. Of late I have been collecting requests to re-enter this line of work after what has been essentially a 5 year hiatus. Maybe it's worth rehashing my experience so that I simply do not trip over what's been forgotten. Perhaps you will gain something from it, or, at the least, live vicariously through it should you have ever dreamed of this work.
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An art project is the carpenter's epithet for creative, but often complicated, solutions to carpentry problems. I don't remember when I first heard it, although I hear echoes bouncing off teenage precipices. The last time I heard it applied to my work was at the age of 33 on a job building out a yoga studio. Soon after I left that job, given too much masculine exceptionalism amongst the other hires to ever really find my place. I felt pretty certain, then, that this was it for me, but one last opportunity was pushed across the table before I left it for good. This is that story.
In late 2002, the same friend who brought me onto that yoga job, asked me to finish up a job for him at a 4 story building in Williamsburg. I was hesitant to get involved, having had some carpentry experience, mostly building garden structures, but certainly not as much as I deemed necessary. He assured me it would be a piece of cake -all I would be doing was the easy finish work of tacking the shoe moulding on each floor's baseboard. Easy -done in a month, or less.
What I didn't know was that he wanted out, and by bringing me in, he could do it guilt-free. What was supposed to be a one month job turned out to be 5 months long, and by the end, I was leading our motley crew of an ex-con, artists, druggie(s), theatre set designer, and Ben -from Iowa. I knew that something was wrong my first day on the job -I was to start on the fourth floor, the uppermost. This, even I understood, was inverted. When rehabbing an old building, it's best to start from the foundation and work your way up. It, then, should be no surprise to you that that building has since been completely demolished, an identical building of cinderblock in its place. Why this, despite all that work, time, money, was still financially agreeable to the owner, is beyond me. But the truth is, when we revealed to her the lack of structural integrity, she asked only, "How long do we got?" Less than 5 years later that building was up for sale. And now its gone.
After the short stint at the yoga studio, I moved onto something else. Honestly, I cannot remember all the things I have done for money between the memorable jobs. I might have built a concrete and cinderblock folly for a garden I built in Park Slope. I think that's it, because Ben helped me with that project. By winter time, I have no idea where I was getting my cash from. No idea. No doubt then, that I was eager to sign on to a friend's home renovation as the lead carpenter. The deal was that he, the owner, would be the GC ,or general contractor, responsible for managing the job site, all contractors, expediting projects like trash removal or ordering things like siding, finding a plumber. All else was left to me. I became a mason, an electrician, rough carpenter, finish carpenter, occasional sheetrocker (but no mud man am I), tile setter, and my least favorite -demolition man. I was all these things on the previous jobs, but this time, for a friend's home, it mattered -my name would be all over it and the relationship would be at stake.
Part I
The House
It was old, and owned by people without much money for repairs over Williamsburg's last hundred years. In fact, like so many in this neighborhood, it wasn't a patrician brownstone, or even working-class brick. No, it was wood-framed with a rubble foundation -the cheapest methods at the time, reworked over the years to accommodate the multiple families living in this modest two story with basement. Each successive repair was laid right over the last, each new window was smaller and junkier than the last. The home's original siding was its sheathing, and like so many in working class neighborhoods, the owner opted for the first wave of asphalt shingle replacement siding, and then the second wave of aluminum. These were laid directly over the previous siding -after all, who had money for demolition and removal? No insulation was ever present to help keep the hot water heating in. Patchwork fixes and awkward additions created conditions for deterioration and concealment. The electricity? Don't even ask.
Nothing would be left untouched. In preparation, I bought a couple of books on carpentry before we started, thinking that experienced practitioners willing to write would point me in the right direction before I went off the side of a cliff. Ninety nine percent of that reading was worth every minute, with only a few misteps on product recommendations along the way. If you ever want to renovate an old house or just know what your carpenter is doing, buy this reference book by George Nash. Another book, which shamefully I cannot find or remember the title or author, was extremely helpful minus those product recommendations.
The rear.