End-of-the-year push

John and Nate continued tearing down walls and making new openings. This picture isn't out of focus, that's dust!


If you look closely at the pile of rubble in front of the pile of lath, you can see the detritus from more mouse nests. I know, I seem to be fixated on mice and their habitats, but it's just where my life is at the moment. Soon enough I'll move on to other fascinating topics.

Keith set up the skid loader at the window so Nate could throw the rubble right in.


Here's the lovely new space after the debris was cleared and the dust settled. There are six windows on four exposures.


Another obsession of mine right now is how much light from how many different exposures I can bring into a room, and I'm sure the builders are tired of hearing about it. Again, I will move on from this topic at some point, but I just want to say, that whoever came up with the idea of taking out this wall was a genius (oh, that would be me!). Suffice it to say, I'm very pleased with the outcome.

The bathroom wall studs are down

and this is the new doorway into Mother's room.

Roger continued rebuilding the front doorway


and the wall between the old and the new.


Dan and Garrett started nailing the felt onto the sheathing


and framed the inside of the second floor.


John gave Keith and me a tutorial on installing the rigid foam insulation in the attic. He ordered the material for us and ADMoyer delivered it today. John's letting us use his table saw, so we didn't have to bring ours down, thank goodness.


And here's the spacious attic after removing one of the walls. Charlie's the genius who came up with this idea.


So to recap, the themes of the week were light, space and mouse poop! Lots and lots of work got accomplished, and we're happy and tired.

Breakthrough!

When the stone was removed from the section of wall which will become the new front door, Roger built a temporary support system for the ceiling beams. Then he created a structurally sound frame to receive the door. He used a 4X10 laminated beam for the lintel, and mortared brick and concrete block to fill in the gaps.


The beautiful log beams in the ceiling will remain exposed in the new entry. Keith will take out the rest of the knob and tube wiring.


From this picture, you can't appreciate just how bad the wiring is. There are numerous areas of worn insulation and joins that are merely taped together without junction boxes. Totally out of code. All of the wiring in the whole house will be new and in compliance when we're done.

If you look closely, you can detect another mouse nest where the wiring enters the beam on the right of the picture. As always, when plaster is removed, more rodent housing is exposed.

Nate continued taking out stone.


This will be the doorway to our bedroom in the addition from the top of the stairs that are being built in the oldest part of the house, what was most recently the kitchen. Since this window is offset from the peak, the opening is not as straightforward as the others. The new door will be centered, so the stone on the right-hand side has to be taken out from floor to ceiling, and the left-hand side will have a gaping hole that Roger has to fill in. Keith and I took out more piles of stone and rubble. John kept scolding us about lifting too much, and he enlisted Nate to help load some of the bigger rocks onto the hand truck.

Nate broke through the wall, and we can now walk right into the addition.

Inside you can see Dan on scaffolding as he and Garrett continue framing the interior walls on the second floor.

Charlie was here this morning, and John asked him about those diagonal metal straps in the attic. He concurred with John that they are not structural, so we took down the remaining studs from that wall. John's men also removed the rest of the studs in the bathroom. So demolition continues apace, and everything seems to be be progressing without too many surprises.

Tearing down walls

Yesterday when we left, the attic was completely free of dust and debris, but when we came in this morning, there was evidence of a mouse party overnight. Only one poor little guy fell for the bait. I don't know what they're eating because there's nothing in the house for them. But they obviously weren't interested in peanut butter and cat food.


Before construction in the old part of the house can proceed, first comes deconstruction. Today Roger came to break openings into the stone walls.


This is between the existing living room and kitchen where a china cabinet had been built into an old window opening, so he just had to take away the bottom half of this wall. Et voila, a doorway! (But to be accurate, this opening will actually be an alcove for the sink in the powder room under the new stairs) Three more openings are being created from existing windows, and they will become doorways.


Once again, after the skilled labor comes bull work. Keith and I hauled two piles of rocks like this out to the silo pads for future use.


As for the addition, Dan and Garrett nailed in all the 2nd floor ceiling joists, finished sheathing and temporarily covered the window openings with plywood.

Out, out damned mice

No pictures today--we were too busy working. We're bone tired, and the work today was so nasty I can barely talk about it. But it involves six 5-gallon buckets of mouse shit.

When we left yesterday, the whole room on the north end of the attic was clean, but when we got there this morning, it was full--I mean FULL--of mouse droppings. So we finished pulling nails and taking out the framing from the walls that are being removed, and then we dug deep into the bones of the house and got every bit of mouse nesting material that we could find. I swear there was a bale of straw embedded in the eaves and buried within walls, and it was all full of rodent excrement.

I don't know if the mouse population has gotten the word yet, but their neighborhood is being gentrified, and they are being evicted. In case they don't understand our terms, we left 12 mouse traps behind baited with peanut butter.

I often say that I don't know how we ever knew anything before there was the internet, and today I felt that way again. When I first saw the size of the nests behind the walls, I thought the invaders were squirrels. We wanted to know what extermination measures to take, so there we were on the phone with Aaron getting him to Google a comparative analysis of rodent droppings, and he's describing the various kinds of shit to us, leading us to conclude that our pests are mice.

Despite the yuck factor today, I would say that all in all we had a good four days of work while John's crew was off. We got done what we wanted to so they can dig in first thing tomorrow with the next round of demolition.

Attic Demo

After the dust settled from the removal of the ceiling, we went into the attic to continue clearing it out. More rodents' nests were lurking behind the plaster.


We pulled out hundreds of nails, then wire brushed the beams to clean off the dust and dirt that has settled in over the last century before we install new sheetrock. Now that we've had a chance to see the underlying structure of the roof, I think we need to reassess our plans for the attic. At first I thought it would look great to install the ceiling along the roof line up to the peak, but it turns out there are beams that would make that design very complicated to execute.


So, on second thought, I think we'll drop the ceiling as it was before. We'll insulate between the rafters, then run wire overhead before we drywall. A close look at the rafters made us wonder whether there had been a fire here. Or maybe they're black from accumulated soot after years of burning wood and coal in small stoves in all the rooms. The rafters range from 3 1/2 to 4 inches by 5 inches on 2-foot centers.

Every room in the house has a hole in the wall like this to access the chimneys on the north and south gables.


This is the worst looking one. The plaster is directly on the stone, and it's badly stained with creosote. I'm not sure how to repair it. John told me to begin by scraping off the loose plaster, but not much came off. I'm sure this will bleed right through a new coat of plaster and any paint we use, so we're wondering whether we should repair the loose mortar, then frame out a new wall and put sheet rock over the new studs. However, that would mess up the curved window openings, so it's probably not the way to proceed. It will be interesting to see how to solve this situation.

Also, we were going to remove a wall between 2 of the rooms, but these steel rods seem structural, so we will probably keep a partial wall up to the point where they disappear into the floor.


We were also wondering whether the south chimney could be removed above the roof. It's interior and no longer in use, so it serves no purpose except to provide a point of entry for critters. The hole could be patched and the new roof would go straight to the end of the gable. On the other hand, if we keep it in place could that opening be used for venting a fan in the attic and the dryer on the second floor?

More dirty work

Today we disconnected the plumbing and stuffed rags into the drains to keep dirt out of them. We got all the fixtures out and swept up the area. I put a piece of plywood over the hole in the floor where the tub was so no one steps into it by accident and falls through the living room ceiling. Now it's ready for the demo guys to take off the rest of the tile and studs.


We can set up the skid loader outside the window for them to move the trash more efficiently into the dumpster.

I didn't touch these studs because this is a structural wall that's supporting the attic floor joists.


It gets moved over a couple feet, but that's beyond my skill level. This is definitely a job for John. We really appreciate him giving us guidance so we can do the unskilled work and then he takes over when expertise is required.

Looking at this old framing lumber, I got to wondering whether it could be used to rebuild the wall. It's really cool. Each stud is different, but they run somewhere around 3 inches by a true 4 inches. It would especially be neat to use the door and its rough framing in the doorway we're creating into the bedroom. Then the next time someone renovates, they'll have the pleasure of discovering the original structural elements just as we did.

Keith continued identifying all the electrical wires coming out of the breaker box and disconnecting the remaining outlets, switches and ceiling fixtures. The only hot outlets are the one beside John's desk, the ones in the first and second floor stairwells, and one in the basement. Also some lights and the oil burner in the basement are still connected.

Some of the old wiring was downright scary:


I started working in the attic pulling nails from the lath out of the rafters. More on that tomorrow.

Shoveling rubble

The bathroom demolition began yesterday, and this is how it looked today when we got there:





There was a big pile of demo trash on the ground outside the window where the guys dumped bucket after bucket of plaster, lath strips, nails and tile. Keith went to work with the skid loader to clear away that pile before the rain comes. I started to pull tile off the ceiling and walls, but I was pretty slow at that, and thought my efforts might be more useful elsewhere, so I pulled out the rest of the lath and nails and started filling trash cans with the debris.

When Keith finished, he pulled the skid loader right up to the house with the bucket raised just outside the window, and we shoveled all of the rubble right into it. At the end of the day the bathroom was cleared out.

More framing and demolition

After removing plaster and lath from the walls, inevitably there are critters' nests! Where will all these poor evicted squatters sleep tonight?


Another thing to notice in the picture above is the framing detail for the door. Instead of using the familiar king and jack studs to support a header, the studs on each side of the doorway are notched to receive the header, which is trapezoidal. The longer bottom surface of the header rests within the notches. Then inside that structure there is a smaller head board that sits squarely on thinner boards that I guess serve as jack studs.

I can't sing enough praise to John, Joe and Dan, and their helpers, Johnny, Nate and Garrett. By my count, they framed this entire structure in four days. It's just astounding how much they accomplished, and we're in awe of their expertise, their work ethic and their patience toward all our questions and indecisiveness. What a wonderful group of people we have working on our house. We feel so fortunate.



Everything is "dry" and ready for this weekend's dose of wetness descending from the sky. I honestly think John was praying they would get the sheathing done for fear that we would be in a frenzy dangling from the rafters to staple tarps over our precious naked skeleton of a house. Now he can relax over Christmas knowing we'll just be hauling rubble and pulling nails and staying safe out of his construction zone.

Bernie from Pella came to review all the windows in the old part of the house with John today. They measured each one again, counted them twice and finalized other details such as hardware, interior and exterior finishes, and window styles--most are double-hung, but one is casement, and some in the attic are awning. The window order is ready to be submitted. That's a really big step.

Erb and Henry returned our tractor in top notch condition. The engine makes such a beautiful sound. I wish you all could hear it! Oh my--it's a beauty! I love, love, love it.

Second story framing

At 6:30 this morning Keith and I removed the door and trim we want to save from the attic so John and Nate could come in and do this:


This picture doesn't begin to capture how much dirt and dust and rubble was created from taking out the ceiling and one wall. We want to insulate the attic and change the ceiling so it follows the rafters, so this had to be done first. I knew I didn't want to demo plaster because it's such a dirty job, but honestly, it's about 10 times worse than I even imagined. I told Nate and John how much I appreciate what they're doing.

Meanwhile, Dan and Joe continued framing the second story and the rafters.


This is how the addition looked at the end of the day.

Taking shape

Today when we got to the farm, the addition looked like this:


Lots of measuring and sawing and nailing occurred, and by the time we left it was beginning to look like an actual building!


Dan and his brother Nate, Garrett, and Joe put the ribbon around the second floor, plus all the second story floor joists and decking, and began to nail on the sheathing. Believe me when I tell you, they pushed hard all day. We really appreciate the work they're doing.

WHEEEEEEE!!!

This is what it's all about!


And this:


This is the most fun we've had in the snow in years! No ice, no heavy slushy wintry mix, just lovely fluffy good-sledding snow!


Aaron and Arden showed up with their tubes just as the last shovel full of snow was flung off the driveway. Good timing guys! We were ready to play.


Off we all went on the ATVs to find a long, fast hill in the field.


Here's the Schuylkill from the edge of the field behind the house.


We fared pretty well, considering they got 23 inches in Philadelphia--just 30 miles from us.


This is what we found when we arrived this morning. Just a little bit of snow on the top plate, and 4 1/2 inches on the tarp.


A little shoveling, a little blowing and it was all good. The tarp is in the barn, the deck is dry, the driveway is clear. As we were leaving, the wind was whipping up some good drifts. We'll go back bright and early to re-shovel and salt as necessary so the builders can get in and park and get right down to business.


And at the end of a hard-working, hard-playing day, we went to Sutton's for a rack of ribs and some good beer. We're exhausted. Good night!

Nor'easter!

Okay, folks, here we go again. It totally wouldn't be Saturday if it weren't precipitating some kind of record-breaking stuff from the sky! And of course, it's always right after a crucial step in the construction process. This time it's snow from a nor'easter that's supposed to dump up to 18 inches right into my living room. Even though the builders said it's "no problem at all" to have a foot and a half of snow sitting on our decking, we just weren't comfortable with the idea of it.


Besides,we like to keep John amused by giving him something to smile about each day, so this is for him.


By the time we got to the farm, there was already an inch of snow on the plywood. Luckily it was very dry and powdery, so it blew right off, and the wood was still fairly dry. After blowing off the snow we anchored a 20X40 tarp that we got early this morning at Harbor Freight (thanks for the tip, John) with bungee cords, skids, spare framing lumber and pieces of block. Maybe we're being worry warts--what else is new?--but it's our house, and we don't want it to get saturated with snow. This oughta do the job.


When we got there this stack of wood looked like this:


So we stapled plastic on it to protect it.


Tomorrow when the sun comes out again, we'll go down and try to get the snow off the framing and the tarp, remove the staples from the plastic on the stack of wood, and make sure the driveway is cleared so the guys can get right to work on Monday. We don't want them to have to spend any time on extra-curricular activities so they can get as much done as possible this week. After all, there are only three work days before the Christmas break, and of course it's supposed to rain on Christmas Eve and Day.

Keith checked out the main sewer pipe under the demo trash from the old porch. He had planned to disconnect the toilet and plug that PVC pipe so it wouldn't break and let stuff fall into the septic pipe when the porch came down. But they did it this week without notice, so he didn't get to take care of it. So of course the PVC elbow coming from the toilet broke down below ground level, and all kinds of junk and soil had fallen in. He dug the soil away from the pipe to expose it, then scooped out the large pieces of debris and vacuumed out the soil.


Then he plugged the hole with rags that he taped so they don't fall in, and covered it with a bucket to mark it. Probably the plumber was going to replace that connection to the cast iron pipe anyway, but now it definitely can't just be capped and left in place. Just to be clear here, I did mention that we're worry warts--right?