The Attic: Completed

This entry is way overdue -- HomoDomi actually finished the attic in May, before we went to Minnesota for our niece's wedding. But I've realized recently that I'm having a lot of troubles finishing things, ending them, completing them, polishing them off, putting things behind me, wrapping things up and tying the bow, crossing the t's and dotting the i's... including this sentence apparently. But I am stiffening my resolve, so be prepared to see a few endings cross this blog in the next few weeks (or at least some really rigid resolutions).

Meanwhile, back to the attic. We started in December cleaning it up, correcting bad wiring, and improving insulation. Then not much happened, after those first couple of weeks of hard work, until early May, and last time I wrote about it, we had just finished installing a ladder for ease of access.




But now we are through. The attic has been re-powered, floored, and painted, and lit with vivid light strings. We had an eleventh hour setback lasting a week, when it looked like the ceiling of the Texan's bedroom was going to fall in (a deep sag in the joists around her ceiling fan, worsened by the weight of the floor boards) but after using some scrap wood to reinforce the original sagging joists, and installing a new, lighter-weight fan, all is well. HomoDomi and Girl-Child together made signs to direct new storage. The ceiling of the upstairs hallway has been finished and painted, and the light shade in the hallway (which I broke during some clumsy ladder-handling) has been replaced with something nicer, from Restoration Hardware.

Kudos belong entirely to HomoDomi. I was at best an occasionally reluctant cheerleader, and documentarian.

Installing Folding Attic Stairs

HomoDomi has been putting a floor in the attic, as I wrote about earlier. The plan is to use the new acreage, as he calls it, to store a lot of the junk that we have currently sitting around the house, collecting dust and cat dander, but can't bring ourselves to get rid of (or need at least once a year). However, the entrance to the attic proved a barrier -- a 20" x 24" (51 x 61 cm) hole in the ceiling of the second floor, reached at the top of a shaky ladder.

(For several months, it was worse than that: when we took out the old chimney, we were left with a gaping hole down two storeys to the concrete floor of the basement, immediately next to the entrance, making the clamber up, and the loong step down, a precarious head-spinning balancing act. That was closed in by the new cupboards installed by Mike The Contractor, visible behind the ladder in the photo.)

So, modernize. Install attic stairs. You know, the kind in every modern house, with a door flush to the ceiling and a long rope hanging down. You pull on the rope, and a set of ladder-like steps miraculously unfold allowing you to walk up and down, carrying boxes, with ease.

The attic stair packages are surprisingly cheap (under $100 for the most basic variants). They are also designed for modern building standards, that is, joists 22" apart, not 16"). HomoDomi thought long and hard about whether, and how, to cut the ceiling joists on the second floor; and how to position the attic stairs so there was space for the steps to fold out.

It took less than two days from start to finish. First, measure out the size of the new "door" in the ceiling -- Sorry: First, allay the fears of the sister who is convinced the whole house will implode if you cut out joists from the middle. Then measure; then cut.

Cut the plaster ceiling, and cut lathe and plaster above it. Do not cut the joists, at first. Place a jig (I think it's called -- something temporary to keep things in place between cutting out major supports and installing the permanents stays) and install framing around the hole.

Curiously enough, the actual frame for the door sort of hangs inside the framing. You pound shims between the frame-attached-to-the-attic-floor (darker wood) and the frame-that-carries-the-steps (lighter wood). HomoDomi bolted the shims into place, but you can clearly see a 1/4 inch gap between the frames, except for the shims. But that's what the attic-stair package instructions say to do (and it seems to be holding fine).

Anyway, finish up by bolting in a metal stay at one end. Hang the stairs mechanism on that, bolt it on, and voila! Attic stairs!

We have yet to finish the ceiling off with a decorative woodwork frame and a minimum of ceiling plaster. And then paint the patched ceiling and the new door. In order beyond that is repainting the walls (same color) and old woodwork of the area -- since the new cupboard was added, the rest of the hallway looks dingy.

Paving the Attic

If you will recall, we started working on the attic last fall -- I wrote only one post about working on the wiring up there, and how icky the work was. We didn't actually work that long on it -- a couple of weeks at the outside, and work stopped due to the busyness of Christmas season, cold weather and a general slow down of all household projects.

However, about six or seven weeks ago, HomoDomi got his groove back and started up again, and he has been diligently working on the attic for a couple of hours every day. You can read the old post for a full description of what we wanted to accomplish, but the general reminder is 1) clean up and straighten out the wiring (all to the second floor), which was in preposterous shape; 2) improve insulation; 3) prepare space for storage.

He's gone far beyond that. It goes without saying (but not without credit) that he has brought all the wiring completely up to code. Icky, icky work, all in the dark, on his knees, with little LED flashlights on his head. Most of the wire comes up the hole formerly filled by the chimney, up the middle of the house. Now, it spreads out in a covered 16"-wide channel from the front to back of the house, all wiring accessible at need, but impossible to trip over.

Then he "paved" the floor, as I call it. Using 19/32" plywood boards (IIRC) recycled from the deck of our neighbor's pool (dismantled last fall after standing in place for 50 years -- the decking had been replaced recently by HomoDomi, actually), he started flooring the attic. It covers a thick layer of insulation, and serves as additional insulation. We've had to buy more wood to cover the whole attic floor, but the deck helped a lot.

One might question the necessity of having an entirely floored attic where the ridgepole is only 5 feet high, and the entrance, requiring a climb up a ladder, is a 20" by 24" hole -- which severely limits the size of boxes and furniture. (The size of the hole will be changing -- see future posts). However, one cannot deny the beauty of the space. They are all securely screwed down, too, so a child could run from one end of the attic to the other and not worry about stubbing her toe.

Covering the floor not only makes it easier to walk around (otherwise, the floor of the attic is lathe and plaster that wouldn't hold the weight of an adult woman, and possibly even a child), but it covers the insulation. It's no longer horrifically dusty up there. HomoDomi has vacuumed, and intends to paint, as well, to make the floor whiter and add more light by reflection.

Light. What is an attic without lights? Aside from channeling all the wiring that was there already, HomoDomi has added strings of rope lights (much cheaper than individual bulbs, and kind of festive) on a switch. At one end of the attic he's installed an electrically powered smoke detector, too -- the attic gets to 75 degrees on a sunny day in spring, when the outside air is about 60, so it will be very hot in summer. (If you recall, we had a solar-powered fan installed last fall, which will help. Even with the fan, it gets hot.)

So, we have gone from a dark, dusty space of joists positioned every 22" over lathe-and-plaster "flooring", full of thick motes of insulation, with active electrical wires draped every which way above and below the insulation ... to an open, floored, non-dusty, lighted, smoke-alarmed storage space. Quite a nice improvement.

Credit. HomoDomi has done all this. I have merely handed boards up to him through the hole, and listened. I haven't even gone up there, except to stick my head above the floor to see what there is to see.

Shockingly icky work

I've discussed the electrical issues we've been facing, opened up by the removal of the chimney. We have live wires trailing from attic to basement in that open space, and they had to be tucked behind the linen closet on the second floor. More broadly, the causal chain is that we need to fix the electric wiring in the attic because:

• It would not be safe to lay floorboards over the current wiring, because some of them are bare exposed wire (50-80 years old)...
  
• We want floorboards in the attic, so we can store stuff currently in the basement...
• We want to store stuff in the attic, so we can use the basement as the temporary kitchen when we gut the kitchen...
• We want to gut the kitchen, so we can remodel the kitchen.

We also want to fix things up so that we can put proper, or at least improved, insulation in the attic. What's there now is a lung-filling dusty mess of 4+ inches of grey material, like old packing material, or the stuffing from chairs you find abandoned at the back of sleepy antique stores. We aren't sure what the R-value is of this stuff, or even how old it is -- when did people start insulating? It looks a little like the bolts of stuff friends gave us after insulating their house a few years ago (they had extra), which is about R-7 for 4 inches -- which is about the same as 4-inches of the fiberglass pink stuff you buy in huge fluffy rolls. (We should be aiming for R-38 in our climate, but old houses, unless you fill the attic to the brim with insulation, are lucky to get to R-30.) At any rate, we want to slow the rate of heat loss now that wilder weather and expensive heating oil is here.

The third reason we need to fix the attic wiring is to free up some circuits to add light and power to the new kitchen. The garbage disposal and (I believe) the dishwasher will each need dedicated circuits. In addition, we will be going from a current total of two ceiling lights and three outlets to:

• two hanging lights,
  
• a stove vent,
  
• a recharging station for all our mobile phones, iPods and batteries (a kitchen for the 21st century!),
  
• a handful of task lights,
  
• another handful of electric outlets for appliances, and, if I get my way...
  
• a series of small white LEDs accentuating the tops of all the cabinets.

For all these reasons, we are working on the attic. It's icky work. You can't stand up; you have to wear a mask. Even with the mask (and safety glasses) you get insulation fluff embedded in your hair and clothes and eyes. There is, ironically, no power to the attic itself, it merely supplies power to the floor beneath it, so we working in the dark except for a headlamp like a coal miner.

The wiring itself has -- some of it -- been patched together poorly (with wires spliced together and then spliced again, and again, for chains of 6 or 7 splits; with no to-code junction boxes, only electrical tape wrapped around the splice like a temporary bandage). Some of it is in good shape -- some original knob and tube work from 1915 is still safe and better left alone than "fixed". We don't yet have those floorboards installed, so HomoDomi has to balance on the edges of 2x4s, whilst avoiding those occasionally live wires and the holes in the middle -- one left by the chimney (under the hammer in the center of this photo) and the entryway to the attic (out of which I am poking my head).

HomoDomi has done it all -- I have been quite willing to be the runner, from top of the ladder on the second floor down to the far end of the basement to turn on and off circuits, or to pick out some screws, or to grab a newly recharged battery. And back again (58 steps plus 10 ladder rungs plus two crossings of the house laterally. Who needs a Stairmaster?). I have an odd fear of heights: I have enjoyed the landscape view out, and down, from the Seattle Needle, the Sears Tower in Chicago, the top of The Arch in St. Louis, or the tip of Köln Cathedral -- but I do not care for internal holes, surrounded on all sides by building but empty for many feet directly underneath you. Perhaps it's not heights I'm afraid of, but depths. Long empty depths of space, below.