They're doozies

Saturday

Erika had figured out the basic stair specs on paper earlier in the week. The plan was to build new wooden steps over, but independent of, the crumbling concrete monolith that came with the house. The hard part was figuring out how to draw the first two lines on the 2x12x16 planks from which we would cut our stringers (the end pieces that form the frame of the steps). See exhibit 1A:



But we did figure it out. And once you make the first two marks, it's repetition the whole way down the board. This was something that I would have preferred to cut with a guide, but because of various problems in positioning the saw, we just decided to go free hand circular saw. I made the cuts leaving a small bit in the corner of each one, and Sarah and Seth would complete the cuts with the hand saw.





We carried our stringers to the existing stairs to make sure that they measured up - and they did. We fitted a 2x6 plank to the face of the face of the porch at the top step - this is what we screwed the top of the stringers to. Next, we cut two risers to length, and nailed one on about half way up the steps and nailed the other closer to the bottom of the steps. This was done to hold the stringers square. Some sledgehammering was necessary to knock down some of the existing steps that were interfering with the new risers. Now we knew exactly where they would end up. Next, we set the posts at the bottom of the stairs into their holes, made sure they were plumb, and clamped them to the stringers.




Last, concrete was mixed in the wheelbarrow and shoveled into the post holes. We left them to cure overnight, and went inside to where Mom had been cooking an early Thanksgiving dinner for us all. We feasted and celebrated into the night!





Sunday



As Erika mentioned, we got a late start on working, but an early start on enjoying the clear, crisp November morning.

Many ideas were tossed around trying to figure out the best way to engineer supports for the stair treads. If we didn't have the existing concrete steps in the way, a staircase of this width would require two additional stringers distributed between the outer ones to support the steps. We needed to put some blocks in there instead, but as usual, we're not dealing with consistent sizes. Every block would be different. The idea that stuck was to use 2x4s cut to length. To obtain the correct height, we would mix up some mortar and make a pile underneath each 2x4 block before setting them in, pushing each one down until it was flush with the riser. Then, we would screw them in place through the face of the risers.

It took a while to measure and cut all these blocks - 24 in all. Sarah got to be good with the mitre saw. Once these were all layed out, Dad mixed up the mortar and we began making piles. Erika would make a pile, I would set the block in place, Dad would pack the mortar in, I would set the screws.




Mom had spent most of the day cutting down the ailanthus trees around the front of the house. The front edge of the yard looks so much better! As it grew dark, Sarah hauled the downed trees out to the woods.




We were getting close and didn't want to stop there. Time for the treads! Since we were facing the task of cutting 24 planks the exact same length, Dad and Erika attempted to make a jig of sorts for the mitre saw which entailed securing the saw to the table and positioning the table with the concrete base of the old stairs. This wasn't going to be accurate enough, so we stuck with measuring each cut individually. We got pretty quick with this - measure/cut/unload/load/repeat.



One by one, on went the treads. We designed it to be two planks per step, split down the length to allow water to drain. Inch and a half hanging over the ends, one inch overhang in the front. We used screws as spacing gauges. Erika and I screwed 'em down. Before really getting a good look at what we had done, everyone bustled around clearing tools and putting things away.

Then, we all stood around on the porch, looking down at our new steps. We toasted our hard work, then carved our names into the cement piles at the top of the steps.





We're not completely done, of course. We left the first and last steps off because they will require a couple of fancier cuts which we wanted to save for when we were better rested. Also, we've got to add the hand rails. No problem though, we'll take care of that stuff this week.

It was great, as usual, to have everyone here. And, as usual, we accomplished a tremendous amount of work, ate an enormous amount of food, and had a super time.

Thanks so much!

- John

Trimming windows is hard

Old story: We thought it would be easy.

We live in an old house, and our efforts while building our bathroom were, as you know, our maiden voyage into the world of construction. As such, we made some mistakes. One of those was to install drywall around the bathroom window without taking into account the way it would "interface" with the window trim. (See the vocabulary we're picking up around here?) At the other window, the one in the corner,
we built a diagonal wall so as to include the window in the bathroom, but didn't leave quite enough room for the trim.

Also, we salvaged all our trim so it comes with old nails, dents,marks from former curtain rod brackets, and other signifiers of wisdom. Long story short, we have our bathroom windows trimmed but they are superfunk. We will be relying on paintable caulk to cover some of our sins.





I won't be so gleeful about pulling off window trim anymore--I fancied myself talented at this task but now knowing how tough it is to properly install, I have a new respect for it.

But they are trimmed! Yes, they are. Our framing hammer, a beautiful Dead On tool, saved our asses I think, as John was able to get finishing nails into our rock-hard studs against all odds. We only had a few nails bend. We also put together a sill for the corner window using part of an old sill, which had broken when we removed it, plus a scrap piece we had. We're telling ourselves it'll look much better
when it's all painted.




Meanwhile, we've been planning our porch stairs this week, since John's parents and sister are coming this weekend. My dad and brother are coming too and we'll finish the shed project. We're ordering insulation also, since it's becoming clear that although our radiant heating is functioning nicely, we're losing lots of heat through our naked kitchen roof. 25 degrees this morning!

- Erika

A New Shape

Earlier in the week, Erika had taken some measurements and concluded that the rear dormer that we've got planned for the future should not interfere with our latest idea of vaulting the kitchen ceiling. We also spec'd out the drywall job that we'll be left with and that checks out too. The trick won't be getting the old 2x4 ceiling nailers out and the perimeter cleaned up - the trick will be in cleaning up the framing at the ends and high front wall.

I had already removed all light and fan fixtures from the kitchen ceiling on Saturday. So come Sunday, all we had to do was empty the kitchen and move in the demolition gear. I went around with the Sawzall and would cut each 2x4 close to the outer wall. Erika or Rachael would catch it, then Erika would knock the other side free of its nails using the mallet while Rachael piled the wood up outside. Once all the 2x4s were out, I spent a great deal of time cutting the overhanging joist ends that protruded from the tool room and dining room. These need to be flush with where the wall will extend up over the cabinets. Once those were cut, I made sure they were nailed to the top plate and beam. We shimmed studs and joists where it was needed, and pounded new blocking in between them.



Now we can start to see what this new ceiling idea will do to that room. It's going to look great, we're really excited about it. The kitchen is already feeling much more open.





Also of note: Erika and Rachael moved all of our pex scraps to their new home in the crawl space. Rachael now holds the distinction of being the first guest at our home to ever enter that part of the house. With the heat system performing wonderfully, it feels great to be moving these heat project related construction surplus items out of the house. On Saturday, I cleaned up the basement table, which had become flooded with tools and scraps and trash resulting from months spent on the heating. Slowly, we're putting it behind us.

We hit our stride with the furnace over the weekend - we're getting complete burns (all white ash), our combustion stages are hot enough to burn the smoke (clear emissions from the chimney), and we've got a nice bed of coals established (all we need to do is rake them a bit and pile some more wood on and we're done loadin'). It was in the thirties when we woke up this morning but the house was very cozy. I was surpised to see the ambient temperature was only 58 degrees. I need to get used to the new insignificance of ambient temperature in the house.

- John

Little things

We continue to do small jobs right now: planning for our last few big projects, loose ends of past projects, etc. It feels good. Thursday night we got the Heatmor fired up again, which was good timing since that gave us the whole weekend to keep an eye on it. John also started re-routing the kitchen wiring, which has been turned off since we put in our first beam (we do have a light on our stove plus a few live outlets), and I started collecting and marking trim pieces for our bathroom windows. We've saved all the trim as we've taken it off, but it needs to be altered in some cases and was also scattered all over the house from months of absentminded pawing-through. Our tool room, where we keep all this kind of stuff, is a complete disaster.

Friday I was home and kept a close watch on the Heatmor--as it gets that hot bed of coals established, you have to periodically rebuild the fire. It's a matter of tuning up the heat system and, at the same time, tuning myself up. Like learning to make a good pot of coffee, it takes some practice. I like going in the basement and putting my ear up to the radiant pump, which makes a very quiet swishing noise: the sound of a warm house.

Between heat checks, I buzzed around and did some insulating, priming of exterior trim, cleaning up, and my big project: putting the stair treads back on the attic steps. They'd come off when we put in our second beam. I cut a new notch in one tread to fit around the post, got them nailed down, and barreled on through to the trim.

When we'd taken off the trim here, I noticed that one little piece of quarter-round had a date written on it, presumably from when these stairs were put in: 4/21/200 (last digit missing). Well, at least we can narrow it down to the millennium. I put Friday's date on below that and glued the little piece back in.




Saturday morning, after we loaded the Heatmor and laid around on the grass for a while, our friend Rachael showed up! She had driven down from DC in a rental car, braving UVA football traffic and my sadly incorrect directions. We showed her around and she declared that we don't actually need to put in ceilings. Apparently the joist-and-insulation look is more appealing than we thought.

While John cleaned out the basement and took down lighting fixtures in the kitchen, Rachael and I scraped and painted the trim pieces I'd collected. All nice and white. Then we all made pizza and ate brownies and had a grand old time.

- Erika

Civilization

We put our bathroom window in!

The bathroom has two windows but since we bought the house, one of them has been missing. Instead, there was a storm window kind of tacked into the opening. As the weather's gotten colder, and chilly air streams in around it, it's gotten more urgent to get that fixed up.



Since we swapped out that window in the kitchen earlier this week, we now had a window, original to the house, that fit right into that bathroom opening and matches the existing window in the bathroom. Isn't that awesome? We think it's awesome.

Because it was, well, made for that opening, the window didn't give us too much trouble going in. We ended up removing most of the exterior trim that we'd carefully scraped and painted this summer, but we can put it back and it'll be fine. Had to lose the sill permanently since the new window came with its own, and we didn't want to pry it off for fear of destroying the window frame. So John Sawzalled that baby right out. We only put one good scratch into the green paint on our bathroom wall. Where's that leftover paint?



We lifted the new window into place and voila! Some tapping, shimming, screwing and there it was. Ready to trim out, caulk and enjoy.



It's great to be doing small projects right now. Just feels rewarding and fun.

Meanwhile, we've been working on starting the radiant heat back up (and relying on our big kerosene space heater to take the edge off). Flushed some air out of the tubing on Tuesday, and tried to get a good fire going in the Heatmor last night without success. It'll all take some getting used to. We'll try again tonight and I'm betting that by the time we resurface on Monday, we'll be radiant and toasty.

Final note: On Halloween, driving home, I saw an albino deer!

- Erika

Window swap

Our attention was split roughly in half Monday evening. There was the kitchen window to install, and there was the afternoon discovery that our radiant system was reading zero psi. After getting the furnace lit (it burned out over night) and shepherding it on to a brisk flame, we got down to the kitchen window replacement. Throughout the evening, we checked on the radiant to see if we were getting any flow. We weren't, as it turned out. They say that trapped air is usually the cause of problems in these systems and we'd have to repeat the isolate/purge sequence of flushing the system, but what worries me is this zero pressure thing.

Back upstairs to the window project. With some prying and some sawzall work on the nails and caulk, we removed the window, frame and all. It was already in the 40s and with this huge hole in the side of our house where once there was a window, things were cooling off rapidly in there. Erika stapled up some plastic to keep the wind out.

The replacement window is a good deal smaller than the original window, so we knew that we would need to frame in the rough opening a bit. We measured up the replacement window and rough opening and split the work: Erika took to assembling the vertical framing members and I took to the horizontal.

It felt good to be doing something that we know how to do (and, we couldn't have said that 6 or 7 months ago). No instructions, and barely any pausing. One two three, we were nailing in our frame and trying to fit the window in place. We did have to trim about 5/16 of an inch off the bottom spacers but after that, the window went in, we leveled and plumbed it, and nailed it in place. Done. Well, for the night. We need to caulk it up and trim it out, but that's nothin'.






Erika also stapled some plastic to the outside of the house, over the (basically non-existent) bathroom window that we're about to replace, and also hung a wool blanket over the inside of it. At least now the bathroom isn't 20 degrees colder than the rest of the house!

Before calling it a night, we went outside to check on the furnace, which we planned to just let burn out since we couldn't circulate that heat through the house. Since we had the circulating pump for the furnace turned off, the furnace had reached a very high temp and shut itself down. It brought to light something I hadn't noticed in the manual, and that's that the high/low setting is controlled by one box with two dials, and what I thought was the high temperature aquastat is actually a high temperature safety cutoff aquastat. Good to know. We turned its pump back on and cooled the water a bit. It returned to a normal temp and restored power to itself and we let it burn out.

Now, to figure out what's going on with the rest of the system...

- John

Snoopy takes a ride

It was another epic weekend at our house. John's post recounts the fact that our heat system is now up and running, which is a milestone as big as when we finished the bathroom and moved into the house. It's huge and wonderful. As if that weren't enough, this weekend my dad came to help and we moved our shed!

A little background: One of the many items on our work writeup, which is the to-do list we agreed to so the bank would finance our renovation, is to tear down this shed that sat several feet behind the back corner of the house. We're not sure how old it is, but it's a nice little frame structure with a high metal roof, wooden siding, and a picture of Snoopy gone fishin' painted on one side. Its rock foundation that had gotten very wobbly, and all the wood around the bottom (floor and the lower parts of the walls) was in very bad shape. Because of that and its proximity to the house, the bank required for safety reasons that we tear it down.





Well, we didn't want to. We know we're going to need a shed, so if we tore this one down we'd just be building or buying another one within a year. Other than the floor and foundation, it's in good shape. We decided to build new foundation posts for it in a different spot, up the hill at the edge of our yard, and move it.

And so we did.

Friday

It was raining, raining, raining. We could hardly complain, since this rain ended a 6- or 8-week drought and got our creek flowing again, but it did make it interesting to dig the holes at the four corners of the new shed location. I was home from work that day and procrastinated most of the morning in the dry house, but eventually had to put on the rain gear and get out there with the shovel and do it.

I'd found out that the frostline locally is 16 inches, so I was aiming to dig 20-inch holes so that our foundation posts won't move around when the ground freezes and thaws. It felt really good to dig into our soil--made the idea of gardening on this property much less abstract. We do have many rocks, but the soil is nice. I used the fork to loosen and the shovel, until it wouldn't fit down in the holes anymore, then got on my knees and scooped dirt out with plastic containers. Pretty messy.




After a couple of hours I had three nice holes. In the fourth spot, there is a giant rock that I couldn't move, or even find the edges of. Probably fine just to leave it and let the shed sit right on it.

Saturday and Sunday

Saturday started out grey, but soon became a warm, sunny day with rain glistening on the trees. What a gift for this outdoor project. Dad and I got to work on what would be a long couple of days' worth of shed wrangling.

I won't recount this whole project step-by-step, which I can't reconstruct in my memory anyway. How do you move a shed? The basic idea was to first reinforce the structure with some nice big planks nailed like a band around the bottom of the building, plus some diagonals for stiffness. We dragged out all the old boards and other stuff that was in there, including big rocks that may have been part of the foundation at some point, but were now totally loose. Then Dad used a couple of floor jacks and the yellow hydraulic jack (familiar from our beam weekends) to levitate the shed all the way off its bumpy foundation. Then we inserted skids (2x4s and other random pieces of lumber) under the two side walls, then rollers (lengths of iron pipe) under those, then more skids under those. Now the shed was, literally, ready to roll.







Of course, it had to roll uphill, so we ran chains between a couple of the wall studs and up to a point on the middle of the uphill wall, then hooked two big come-alongs between the chain and Dad's truck, which he parked up at the edge of the yard. This would be the mechanism for dragging the shed up to its new spot.

Sounds fairly simple, but we fought for every inch of ground we gained. The shed is funky and the ground slopes diagonally across our intended path. So nothing happened in straight lines. Many, many times the shed fell off its rollers. Continually, as it moved uphill, it turned toward the downhill side. It also tended to drag its back end on the ground, making the pulling harder and causing more turning. So the pattern was basically this: get the rollers and skids all set up--hoping nothing crashes down on you while your hands are under the jacked-up walls--then let the jacks down and winch the shed uphill 8 or 12 inches until it falls off the rollers again. Then start over. Dad's considerable experience with engineering this kind of ridiculous project was much in evidence--I did a lot of just watching and handing tools while he buzzed around at light speed, digging and winching and jacking and putting in rollers and skids.













Long story short, we got about halfway up to the new site on Saturday. That put us off the old foundation and onto the grass, which was an improvement. Sunday, we moved the truck and hooked the come-alongs to a couple of trees instead, and got the shed to the point where one back corner is right over its final resting point. The other three corners will have to pivot into their correct positions, though, and we left that for another time. It was 3pm and Dad had to start driving home, plus we were exhausted. So it was best to just stabilize the shed where it was and call it a weekend.



The journey of Snoopy left a wake behind it: small pieces of wood used as shims, divets in the lawn where we dug out to fit the floor jacks under the structure, a trellis that used to lean against the shed, and a pile of rocks and dirt where the shed used to be. Our yard has opened up nicely and, minus a few odd angles, we can sort of see what it'll be like when the shed is squared up and in place. Snoopy stares into the woods now. If he could talk, he'd say, "Thanks, Dad." Well, maybe not, but I'll say it.

- Erika