Weekend work, urr, non-work

[Updated version to correct text over-writing images. At least, I hope so. I also made a few textual edits to clarify some details.]

Saturday ended up being a day off, although we didn't plan it that way. HomoDommi invited me to his book club (which was quite pleasant) and then the household joined old friends for the evening, just to kibbutz.

On Sunday, we geared up for work and almost instantly were at a standstill.  This is what much of Sunday felt like.

That is, staring at a hole in the floor, scratching our heads, in more than a little exasperation.

The cause: the hole we made when we removed the chimney.  It's a nice, clean hole down into the basement, about 18" square. When it was filled with chimney, it was surrounded by drywall (in fact, we only removed the last remnant of the drywall last month during the deconstruction). When it was a chimney surrounded by drywall, contractors would use the small gaps to run wires and plumbing through.

Here is a photo, taken when we began this project 3 years ago.  It shows the chimney still in place in the kitchen (although the front wall of covering has been removed).

Next, the same view after getting rid of the bricks (and the ceiling except for the 2x4s).  You can see all those wires running through the gap behind the chimney, and, less obviously, a couple rigid, pale yellow pipes running up the near corner -- between the chimney and the (still-standing, in the photo) drywall. (I've talked about them before, in my list of infrastructure opportunities.)

I blogged about a ten days ago about the productive day HomoDommi and I had, moving the pipes that run up to the second floor -- some of that involved moving them from the front corner of the space shown back into the true wall, between the joists. And the electricians came in and wired the area for a light switch, and also ran wires through for the ceiling lights in the new kitchen.

In all this, we didn't realize that one wire -- one very fat, large wire -- hasn't been neatly tucked back into that between-joists frame.  You can see it in the two close-up photos.

This wire, which is taut, goes all the way up to the attic and provides most (if not all) of the lighting on the second floor. We need it to not be crossing out into the airspace in front of that hole.




Another issue is, how do you fill a hole?  I mean, solidly, so that a refrigerator can rest upon it (that's what the masking tape shows, the front of the fridge), and so that people might someday walk across it.  That is, without reflooring a massive area around the hole, and while adding a laundry chute to the area.

Still the day was not totally given over to frustration.  The Texan and I installed the second of the two concrete boards backing the sink.  And we picked out a window to install over the sink in that wall (as shown).

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.

The Upstairs Hallway

We've been really busy the last several days, and I've been too tired to blog at the end of the day.

Michael, the poet who installed our attic fan last month, freed up some time for us this week. So we've got him fixing the hole on the second floor where the chimney used to be. We love Mike and hope he will have time to do many other projects for us. But first, the New Linen Closet.

Here is the progression: Last April, we had an over-crowded linen-closet and a wall in the upstairs hallway. The plan is to have, by next week, two gently filled linen closets in the upstairs hallway, side-by-side, looking as if they had been there all along.

In the meantime, if you recall, we removed the chimney behind that narrow space of blank wall. We sawed through the lathe-and-plaster wall, exposing the chimney and a large hole. You can see, in several of these photos, the back of lathe-and-plaster walls around the sides and back of the hole, and a gap that has been considered useful for running electric lines. The whole second floor is electrified by five wires that run from the fuse box in the basement, up this hole along the chimney, into the attic, across and then back down between the walls of the second-storey rooms. Some of this electricity is original knob-and-tube, which actually is in pretty good shape. About half is a slapdash job from the remodeling done in the 1950s.

By the way, also run up the hole from basement to the floor of the second-storey are the water pipes for the upstairs bathroom. That is, water comes in through an underground pipe into the basement on one side of the house, across to the middle of the house, up the chimney hole, and then, between the ceiling of the first-storey and the floor of the second-storey, back across the house again to exactly above where the water enters the house.

This talk about electricity and plumbing will become relevant in future blog entries, when I talk about the work going on in the attic and the kitchen.

We took down the chimney bricks in April, and since then, the hallway has been an over-crowded linen closet and a drafty hole extending from attic to basement. For seven months, we've had a large plastic sheet roughly taped over the hole in the wall, but really there's been nothing to prevent a boisterous child from jumping/falling/being pushed from the second floor down to the hard concrete floor of the basement. In fact, for a while there, towels were being dropped (but they fell into an area almost impossible to reach behind tables and bookshelves and things, so that was discouraged).

Anyway, there's nothing like getting things done. Mike took measurements Monday, started building yesterday, and except for waiting for glue to dry and painting, will be done tomorrow, I think. He started by closing in the box with plywood yesterday, and today he did the frame and molding that will decorate both old and new closets, so they look like a set. Tonight, the glue holding together the grid decoration (false panels) for one new door is drying; tomorrow the other will be set. HomoDomi and I scrounged through piles of antique and junk hinges today at Rejuvenation House in order to find four hinges that exactly match the original hardware (nothing so grand as shown online, which have been cleaned up). I just realized, writing this, that we forgot to pick up a latch. Darn, another trip to one of our favorite stores that we'll be forced to take.

We asked Mike to leave the holes to the other floors -- both the ceiling up to the attic, which we will block from above, and the gap downward. You can sort of see his shop vacuum blocking the hole in the floor in the last photo. One of the projects coming up will be installation of a proper laundry chute down to the basement -- complicated because it passes through the kitchen, and we haven't finally decided where exactly it should be located yet (wiggle room of two feet or so).

Fixing a hole...Fixed.

Nothing like johnny-on-the-spotiveness. We've had a hole in our roof since April. Today, we got it fixed. (The photo, hard to parse even for me who took it, is a view from the basement up the space left by the chimney removal through to the roof; that black square at the top center is the blocked hole. The arc-y things are electric wires and flexible plumbing carrying power and water to the second floor.)

We had a party last week; a friend mentioned he knew a contractor he could recommend; the friend actually followed up and introduced us. The contractor, Mike, turns out to be a poet who just published his first book, and is the builder of the Poetry Kiosks that appear around Portland (little windows on stands with poems in them). That alone was enough to get Mike hired, but then we found out he lives less than two blocks away and had been previously recommended by two other friends but they hadn't carried through as thoroughly as this latest friend. Networking and follow-through: the keys to success.

Mike is great. In one day he closed up the hole, re-shingled, and then cut another hole and installed a solar-run heat fan to suck the hot air up and out of the house in the summer. His efficiency is counter-balanced by our lack of it -- for him to get everything done, Andrew and I had to go to Environmental Building Supply (an eco-friendly building supply company, for the solar-powered fan), Home Depot, Lowe's, and Oregon Roofing Supply (for the shingles and plywood).

I took a picture of Mike and Andrew and the fan (which is so efficient that it was spinning while sitting half-out-of-the-box on the workbench on an overcast day), but my camera appears to have broken. The display shows only fine stripes of gray and black, and two out of three photos are unidentifiable files. This happened between Photos #3 and #4 this morning, while the camera sat in my pocket.

Apparently we are going to hire Mike to finish the closet on the second floor (in the hole left by the chimney removal) and possibly to finish the railings on the front steps, since Andrew is more mystified by how to building angled railings than he had let on before. I obviously had better get cracking on getting my camera repaired or replaced!

Hole in the Roof

I'm fixing a hole where the rain gets in,
To stop my mind from wanderin'
Where it will go.

I had no idea that song is about using drugs. This is a shot (heh heh) of the hole in our roof, taken from the basement. Just so you know the urgency of Item #4 -- although the rains don't generally start until October, and we do have a flap of plastic over it for now.

Dining Room Project: Prologue (Demolishing the Chimney)

Today was spent more in preparation than in projects, Andrew working on PTA now, rather than in a rush when he gets back in September. However, there's always lots to say.

A few people have written that they are looking forward to hearing about (and seeing) the Dining Room Project. Always one to stretch the suspense, let me back up to last April, when we discovered there was potential for a Dining Room Project.

It all started when we decided to take out the original furnace chimney. This is a large brick chimney extending from basement through roof, positioned in the exact center of the house. The old furnace had plugged into it for air outflow, but the new furnace has a simple pipe to the outdoors, so the chimney hasn't been used for 2 years. You see the chimney in the photo here, next to the pantry in the kitchen, masked by a slip of gray concrete.

[Historical note: the two red bricks in the chimney, visible near the ceiling: those are a really rough blocking job -- badly cemented in bits of brick. We are pretty sure the original kitchen had a large oil-powered range, with a small chimney that fed into the main one through this hole.The Baptists must have blocked the hole during the renovation in the 1950s -- no need to be tidy about the blockage, since it would be behind drywall. Other evidence of the large original range -- the floor in front of the door to the dining room (installed in the 50's) is a patch. There originally was a pipe to the oil tank in the basement, that fed the range. I found exactly this arrangement in a couple of books about Stickley and Arts and Crafts houses from the 19-teens.]

We knocked a hole in the basement part of the chimney about 2 feet from the floor (sorry for the blurry photo). Andrew constructed a "door" of plywood for the hole, and then we started demolition.

Andrew began by climbing on the roof and knocking bricks down the chimney. They rattled and bumped all the way down to the basement, and hit bottom with a carcinogenic mushroom cloud of ash, soot, brick dust and mortar. The "door" helped reduce the dust somewhat (we faced it with a layer of insulation to make a soft pad), but even so, there was a large puff of dust when the door was opened. I would reach in and remove the bricks (8 in a layer) and pile them in a bucket. Then slam closed the door, leaning against it so it would remain tight against the brick wall of the chimney, yell up that no hands were in the passageway, and Andrew would knock out the next layer of bricks. Periodically, Mel would carry a bucket to the window where we would pass them out (at our chest level) to William (at his feet), who would pile them up outside.

In this way, we removed the chimney, Andrew progressing slowly down from roof, through attic, through second floor (in the photo, he's at the top of the chimney where it passed through the upstairs hall, just below the attic), kitchen and finally joining us in the basement.

Mel and I switched jobs occasionally, but Andrew always got the fun and easy job of pushing bricks over. He was precariously balanced on a ladder for much of the time, but otherwise, it was surprisingly easy. The mortar had almost completely dried out -- the chimney was standing because it was held up by the house around it, and the weight of the bricks above it. He genuinely merely had to push the bricks over, most of the time. Our job, however, was wretchedly dusty. We were encrusted, everything in the basement and much of the house was covered in a fine red-gray dry mist. We had laid protective plastic over everything in my room, and created a little airlock around the chimney itself (like the government-quarantines-the-house scene in "E.T."), but it seemed to make little difference for the amount of dirt and dust everywhere.

However...imagine the moment when Andy was standing on the ladder, leaning into the chimney at the top of the kitchen wall. Suddenly he yells out -- "There's a hole in the wall behind the chimney, into the dining room!" But of course, there is no hole in the wall of the dining room, so we knew this was into a false ceiling space. It was like discovering a false bottom in the antique trunk your great-great-grandfather used when he lived in Germany and was a copywriter for Beethoven. What could be hidden behind the secret door? The photo doesn't show what we saw, which was only a sense of open space broken up by red beams of wood.

More on the Dining Room Project later...