Brick Floors and Hanging Doors

Actually, the "hanging doors" part of the title is premature. We've decided where to hang the door, and Andrew has decided to build the door himself, but there's little of door structure in place yet.

However, the floor is done. It looks quite nice, reminding me of Rome for some reason (do they have brick floors commonly?). Here is Andrew, late in the day, sitting on the steps, taking a break from chiselling away some of the house foundation to make a straight edge against which to attach a 4x4 -- which will become the hinge side of the door. You can see the nice flatness of the bricks; not really the pattern (which is minimal) of broken and whole bricks.

Natasha looks over the new space. She is about 7 months old, we estimate. She was brought to the block by our neighbor over the back fence. One afternoon in April she appeared, much more kittenlike than she is now, on our back doorstep. We didn't know for sure where she belonged, and so she spent a full 24 hours with us until the neighbor checked in (we had put a note on his door). Since then, she's decided she prefers our house. She sleeps most nights with me (he apparently is of the put-the-cat-out-at-night variety of owner, at least on these balmy summer nights). I doubt she's been over the fence to "home" in a week. She is part Maine Coon, and very very sweet.

Most of the cats have passed through the space. It must be checked out. And after all, it borders on the favored litter box.


Finally, a photo of Will and Andrew taken when they were sweeping the dirt and gravel over the bricks (to settle between the bricks). A dusty job, hence the respirators.

Continuing Under-porch Storage

Today was the last wall, the stairs, and a start on the brick flooring.

Andrew slipped down the hole a couple of nights ago, so the stairs have been rather high priority -- but have needed lots of work and waiting time. Concrete on the back; supports on the back; fitting and painting the treads with sandy paint so it will offer footholds in the rain.

Today's pictures are of the floor (half done) and of Andrew cleaning the mortar off the bricks. The bricks are left over from the chimney, and thus still coated with lots of mortar. You rub two mortar-covered bricks together, however, and the stuff dusts off. Andrew likes to do it dry, with a respirator on (it can't be good for the lungs) -- I prefer to soak the bricks the night before so it comes off as a heavy wet sand. To each his own.

The floor is already more advanced than shown here -- Andrew worked again until there was no light left. It is simply the broken bricks (with a sinuous pattern of a couple lines of unbroken bricks) laid down , with sandy gravel poured over and between. There is also a layer of larger gravel on the dirt hidden behind the walls, again to slough off any rain that comes in.

In media res

I would have started this blog a couple of weeks ago, but I had been intending to start at the beginning of the project we are currently consumed with -- building a storage area under the front porch (for bikes and outdoor stuff, mostly). However, the disk with all the "Before" photos on it, in my camera, has crapped out, full of memory errors. I lost about 50 photos of "before" and "early-durings".

It was a setback. How could I start a blog intended to show progress on projects without any showing? But I'm past that now, and I have a new compact flash disk in my camera.

The photo above shows the area of the house we are working on -- under the porch on the right side, behind the climbing rose. There used to be a set of stairs coming up from the driveway - those are long gone. Instead, stairs (built, finally, today) will lead down, to a locked and generally air-proofed area carved out all the way to the concrete main stairs into the house.

Below are two comparison photographs (first, taken two days ago; second, taken tonight) showing sample progress. Here you can see Andrew standing in the space.


The camera is in the doorway, where the stairs-up were, and the stairs-down will be. Behind Andrew is a 14 x 10 foot span of clay at ground level. This large crawl space (which is what the whole porch under-area looked like before this project started) is a popular litter box area for all of our cats in the house and the neighborhood (spacious! convenient! outside, yet covered in the rain!). They usually enter through the "window" in the trellis at the back (and have continued to do so, undeterred by the construction nearby). That window will be closed up -- another loss of environment for the cats. We will not be digging that area out (it holds the water main and gas line into the house) but we will lay a tarp over it and use the area for storage as well.

All of the walls that you see were carved out from the clay under the porch-- we hired two teenagers (Will and Molly's baby-sitter and his girlfriend) to come dig; Andrew carted clay to the dumpster. They worked for 17 hours (over two days) and dug much of what you see here (or, as it happens, what you don't see here -- what was in the hole). It filled a 10 cubic yard dumpster of concrete and clay. In the week since, Andrew has carved out another 1/3 dumpster worth of dirt.

It's hard, back-breaking labor. Andrew has been working on this project almost literally from about 9 in the morning until after dusk every night since Tuesday 7/17 (even carrying on that schedule after reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows until 6 in the morning last Monday).

But you can see that he is, essentially, creating a new room, one that is about 8x7, complete with entrance stairs. Three walls will be wood (the concrete foundation of the house is the fourth wall), up to high-waist height; above that will be simple plastic sheeting, allowing light through the trellis that is fit all the way around the porch. The stairs went in partially tonight (wood over concrete) and will be finished tomorrow. He has some more framing to do, and then the brick floor will be installed (made with the broken bricks from the chimney we dismantled last April -- maybe I'll blog about that on a slow week). And last will come the electricity, a light inside and a light outside the door, on motion detector, to discourage burglars and allow later evening putaway of yard toys. Oh, and there's the door -- we're having lots of discussions about where the door should go, what it should look like, and which direction it should open.

We are all concerned, but not worried, about water runoff. This is an old house, with concrete foundational walls that are 9-10 inches thick. We do not have wet walls in the basement despite Portland's rain -- so we aren't much worried. But Andrew has taken much care to dig the storage room floor so that it slopes away from the house; the stairs have a lip to discourage rain water; the whole floor is brick over gravel over clay to encourage water to flow away.