Wednesday, December 14, 2016

I went up to the house to check on it this past weekend.  One of the neighbors had told me that the French door that I had recently replaced was not the original, but rather had been installed by the previous owner. She went on to say: "He put that on there some time ago."  I think the original front door was a pair of beautiful arched  doors."    Then she tells me that the original doors were down in the garage for the the longest time.  "They may still be there , you should take a look."

So, I head down to the garage, and look through the window. Sure enough, there leaning against the back wall of the garage are a pair of white arched doors.  I ran back up to the house and look at the front door frame:  sure enough you can see the outline of the original arched door frame.  It had been boxed in with some filler boards and a rectangular jamb had been installed to accommodate the 36" X 80" french door that I had just replaced last month.

edit:  I blew up the photo of the front door which was installed last month, and you can see the outline of the original arched door frame.


Of course I didn't have my camera with me to take a photo of the actual doors, but they look very similar to this:


It kinda matches the arch above the 3rd floor window :

I'm up in the air about what to do.  Stick with the nice solid rectangular door or try to return it to original.


Friday, December 2, 2016

Looking through the photos of the house I realized I had a before and after  of the small upstairs bedroom, with a very similar camera viewpoint.

What a job it was doing the clean-out on this house back in July! With the heat we began just throwing the trash out the 2nd floor windows rather than going up and down the stairs.

Our reward was discovering how good the hardwood floors were up there.

Here's the before & after:


Friday, November 25, 2016

It snowed this week. Only about 3" inches, but I took a trip up to the house just to check on it.
The plywood and tarp are holding up just fine on the roof, she's nice and dry inside still.

I took a pair of photos of the house in the snow:


 

It's going to be a long winter waiting to get back to work on this house!

Saturday, November 12, 2016

  While I was out in the yard making mulch, Rob was busy replacing the front door to the house.
I don't have a good photo of the original front door, but it was a french door that had been painted blue and had four of its panes broken out.  It was cracked vertically spanning its entire length on the side opposite the hinges, and had a piece of OSB board screwed and nailed to it to keep it in one piece and keep intruders out.

    I scored a free door from my friend Dennis. It came off of a 1905 house in Newburgh, NY .
It is solid wood, with a nice thick window and it weighs a ton.  Rob had to shorten it a bit and plane it to fit my jamb, but when he was done, it fit and functioned beautifully! I can close it with one finger.

Here's what it looks like installed:




   
     Cold weather is making for little to no progress on the house as there is no boiler therefore no heat. Last weekend however I managed to rent a wood chipper and clean up the badly overgrown front yard.  I got rid of all the saplings, thorn bushes, brush, and dead and fallen trees.

     This photo of the front of the house from August shows some of the thorn bushes on the left:


After I cut everything down and chipped it up, there is actually a nice front yard:

Now I can see the house from the road, and I can see the Delaware River from the front porch!

.

Thursday, October 27, 2016

     It's quite cold and rainy today and I was thinking about(dreading actually) the upcoming winter. This led to thinking about the springtime and what my big plan is for fixing the roof issue.  It is very clear to me that this house had an addition built onto the back above the kitchen and living room.

      It was the flat roof on this addition that failed and caused all the water damage in the home. Since the entire roof sheathing & rafters have to come off of the addition,  I think I would rather just lose the addition altogether and build a sloped roof over the kitchen like I believe it had originally.

The addition only contains two very small rooms, a bedroom and a library.  I believe both rooms are only 12' X 10' .  They are just not worth keeping in my opinion.

  In this photo of the south side of the house you can clearly see where the addition is on the second floor:

I propose to remove it and build a roof over the kitchen like this:  (yeah, I know. I suck at photoshop)

Sunday, October 23, 2016

After the staircase to the basement was built, we began to replace all the compromised floor joists in the dining room and hallway.  There were a total of ten beams that needed replacement.  One at a time we squeezed them in and attached them to the quadruple 2 X 10 beam with joist hangers.





Once all the joists are in, a new 3/4" plywood sub-floor will go down and then new hardwood.

Wednesday, October 19, 2016

Interesting side note, I found a couple polaroid photos in the house.  One is a snapshot of the back of the house in 1986.  Notice there are a few pieces of siding that appear to have been recently replaced but not yet painted?



Here it is in 2016, and it appears as though they never got around to painting that siding.  The chimney got replaced, and the mudroom got a roof extension, but those same five pieces of siding remain bare.



Tuesday, October 18, 2016

    See the sign on the door all the way over on the right side of this photo?
It reads: Do not enter - unsafe! 
  

    Let me tell you, if there was one sign in this house that I'm glad I heeded the warning, this was the one!  This was the door that led to the basement stairs...... wait let me rephrase that.  This was the door that once led to the basement stairs.  The basement stairs were a little bit rotted and kinda missing at the top.  Here is what awaited on the other side of that door:



     Rob built a new landing at the doorway, then hand cut some new stringers out of a pair of
treated 2 X 12's  and finally cut a few new treads.  I cant tell you what a pleasure it was to zip up and down them to get to the basement!



Sunday, October 16, 2016

   There were two 4 X 8 floor joists in the basement that originally supported walls above them. One was under the staircase that led from the first floor to the second,  and the other supported the second interior dining room wall(the one without the double glass doors)

  Me and Rob jacked those walls up using the adjustable lally's and then snuck in some new double glued & screwed pressure treated 2 x 8's to hold up the walls.  Rob built a 2 X 6 wall under the new beam beneath the staircase as there was a great deal of weight above it. Seems the first floor staircase supports the other staircase & wall leading up to the 3rd floor.



Next post I'll show the new staircase to the basement.

Sunday, October 9, 2016

With the new dining room wall holding up the 2nd floor, it seemed like a good time to remove the rotted 8" by 8" timber that was under the old dining room wall, as well as the rotted floor joists.

So, with a chainsaw and a dust mask, I had at it.  First section:

Middle section (Hey, what's holding up that wall?):

Last section out and in the back yard. The original floor joists were keyed into the notches in this beam. :
 .
Time to install some new beams & joists in the basement.  Stay tuned.

Monday, October 3, 2016

Back to the kitchen.  After the 2nd floor 4 X 8 support beam had been raised three inches, Rob suggested we hold it there by moving the dining room wall over 10" inches and build it right on top of the brand new beam(the one straddling the cinder block pillars). The new dining room wall will  now serve as a load bearing wall for the 2nd floor. The old wall can be torn down, and the double glass  doors transferred over to the new one.

We mirror imaged the old wall and came up with this :




Sunday, October 2, 2016

Mini update, just because I'm tired.  I wanted to post a recent photo of the front of the house. Someone on the website Old House Dreams mentioned that the dead tree out front looked like the one from the horror movie "The Conjuring".

My wife who is a horror movie fan, laughed like hell when she read that, and agreed with it. Well, I'm glad to report that the conjuring tree is gone. It loomed ominously over the electric and phone lines, and caused a fair amount of grief for the tree service guy who dropped it, but as you can see, all that remains is a conjuring stump.

Before:

After:


Saturday, October 1, 2016

Once the pillars were complete,  I cut out a section of the kitchen floor including  18" inches of all the joists.  The joists are still supported by a stone knee wall that runs under the kitchen, so its quite sturdy yet.

From the basement looking up to the kitchen.




The new beam ready to be lowered into position . In the first photo you an see the rotted 8 X 8 timber to the right .



Finally in place.




Once we had the beam in, we were able to get an adjustable lally column in and crank up on that 2nd floor beam. We got about 18 to 20 turns out of it before the creaking noises above our heads told us to check our measurements.



Turns out we raised the beam & floor upstairs about three full inches. This was deemed to be "sufficiently level"  as not many things are square and level in an average 150 year old home. 




The solution to all the sagging and unsupported floors was to create a new beam that was strong enough to hold up the 1st and 2nd floors while also providing a place to attach floor joists to.
The trick was, we could not remove the existing 8X8 timber as it was still solid on its south end and was supporting the staircase.  It also was built into the stone foundation.

I hired my friend Robbie to help me and we opted to create another beam which would be placed along side the old beam, and slowly we would transfer all the structure from the old to the new.  The new beam was created from four pressure treated 2 X 12's  glued, screwed, and bolted together.  This beam would span twenty feet across and be perched atop two cinderblock pillars constructed on top of 18" deep concrete footings.

Here is a couple of shots of the footings that I poured and the pillars that Rob built:


 
Among the many problems was the fact that the 2nd floor was sagging, it was low by about four inches toward the rear of the house.  I determined that the problem was due to the fact that the 4" X 8" timber that supported the 2nd floor above the kitchen was itself unsupported.

I imagine that this beam was originally supported by the load bearing wall between the kitchen and dining room, although they do not line up vertically. However, that dining room wall was now sagging into the basement by about 6 inches as the enormous 8" X 8" timber in the basement  that all the floor joists attached to was now rotted and collapsing from water intrusion.

The first floor joist were now unsteady and thus the dining room, hallway, and kitchen floors were  all very soft and had a "floating" or "bouncy" feeling when walked upon.

Here is a photo of the unsupported 4 X 8 beam in the ceiling of the kitchen(the board nailed to it on the right is a true 2 X 4 that measures 2 inches by four inches)  You can see how the dining room wall does not line up under it, it is 10" inches to the right.