Insulation and Electrical

Work has slowed down a bit because of Christmas and just some schedule/timing issues. We are entering the home stretch though.

Some work was done on finishing up the interior framing and plumbing but the most obvious changes over the last few weeks have been the electrical and insulation. In short, all the outlets are in place and the switches for the light are done. The ceiling and wall insulation was put up but a subcontractor who is also going to do our drywalling. Since there is only so much that can be said about this, on to the pictures.

First off, the skylights in the den and kitchen/dining room make a HUGE difference. Even when it is overcast a fair amount of light comes into the room. I'm really happy with them. Also, with the heavy rain and light snow we've gotten lately, I know they are watertight.

The washer and dryer are getting a workout with the whole family together for Christmas. This is the plumbing from the backside before the drywall goes up. You can see the PEX water supplies and the assorted PVC drains and vents. The blue tube is just a color coded piece of PEX to help keep the cold water supply easily identified. The vent for the dryer hasn't worked out the way we wanted. The plan had been to go through the wall and out the back of the addition but it isn't going to happen. We are exploring going into the attic and out through the roof.

The HVAC ducting is in the ceiling and ends in these round registers so they will match the rest of the house. You can also see the wires that will eventually go into ceiling canisters to be the overhead lights in the kitchen/dining room area. It is pretty funny how relatively simple the most important things in the house are but how silly little extras tend to be the fiddly complicated parts.

This is the back wall of the utility room/shop. Most of the wall outlets in there are double boxes with two outlets on a 20 amp line. The washing machine is on a separate line so, if I really needed to split things up, I could use that outlet as well. All in all though, I'm hoping seven outlets will get the job done for me. The switches to the left are for the back light and a three way switch for the overhead light.  Plan is for a semi-industrial looking fluorescent tube fixture.

The outlets are all up high for easy access and are protected by a GFI outlet at the beginning of the run. Installing the outlets was actually one of the few hands on parts of this project that I've done. It felt good to be involved and it worked out that I had time and the required knowledge to do this. The outlets had a different method of connection than I was used to. I really liked it though. Instead of pushing the wires in through the back or try and loop them around the appropriate screws, theses guys have avmetal clip that is screwed down to firmly hold the wires in place. Way less fiddly than the other ways if you ask me.

The box pictured above has the switch for the exhaust fan installed. The paints I use on the toys I make are non-toxic and don't smell but the spray acrylic and other finishes I use on occasion can really be pretty intense. I have a nice window in the room I intend to take full advantage of but I felt an exhaust fan was a must. It is on the opposite side of the room so when used with the window open, I should get a decent cross ventilation situation going.

The den will have wall mounted lights (dare I say sconces.) That space has really come together but some of the brick work needs to be repaired and we still haven't settled on the entrance doors to the room. I really like how traditional French doors would look, but they do take up extra space to allow the swing of the door and we need to accept that they will open most of the time. There are other options though... we're keeping an open mind.

One bit of semi-goofiness that happened was insulation was installed on the interior wall between the den and utility room. It was a mistake but being a glass half full kind on guy, I'm gonna say that it might help with some of the noise reduction in that part of the house. I don't think firing up the table say at 10pm will ever be a good idea, but in general, less noise for the others in the house is better. (As long as they can hear me scream for help.) Teddy likes that there is still a cut through there though. All the better to get on the other side and wait to attack me when I come through.

 A scene from my upcoming novel

"Snow Falling on Mud"

So, we are about seven months into this in terms of real work. (Not counting the initial planning and some preliminary work.) I'm anxious to get it finished and in use. My guess is about 6 or 8 more weeks to be "done." Winter hasn't been too bad so far but January and February is real winter around here. The house is noticeably colder but the recently added insulation has helped. Drywall and the caulking of the windows and doors should start to give us an accurate feel for how the house will be going forward.

Happy New Year.

Windows, Doors and Interior Framing

It is funny how the addition project has gone into overdrive so quickly. After months of standing at a spot in the yard and telling friends "We'll this will sort of be the corner..." we can now open the kitchen door and walk out into a enclosed space.

Right now most of what is happening is pretty straight forward. While the changes are reasonably dramatic, well, there is only so much to be said about a wall or door. So, in this post we are going to go a bit Children's Television Workshop on the topic and play a game we call Inside/Outside.



Inside - Patio door

Outside  - Patio

This is the new patio door. Looking out from the inside, only the far left panel moves. This lets a huge amount of light in. The plan is to make a patio on the outside once Spring rolls around. (mmmmm spring rolls...)

Inside - Utility room wall

Outside - back of addition

The door for the utility room will be the "mud entrance" for the house. Luck for us, we have plenty of mud right now. The door itself is pretty neat in that it has built in blinds so theoretically, they will stay clean and in perfect working order forever. I know this to be a fact and I will not even begin to entertain the possibility that anything will ever go wrong with them.

Inside - Long view

Outside - Short side of addition

If you could look through the windows on the short side of the house (which, well you can, but I'd yell at you to get off my lawn), you'd get the long view across the three room. Nearest is the den, then the utility room then the kitchen/dining room area.

The middle wall has the plumbing for washing machine and dryer as well as the water supply for an outside faucet running along it. The plan for the next week is to get drywall up on the inside part of that wall so that the washer and dryer can move out there and work on the doorway and 3/4 bath can take place.

One more picture. Because we went with the slab being flush with the house; we need a lot of fill dirt to grade the yard away from the addition. Lucky for us, we just happened to know someone who had just dug a ginormous hole and needed someplace to put the dirt.

Rafters and Roof

The addition went from a muddy backyard to a recognizable structure fairly quickly. The walls were done and a few days later our contractor and his workers got the rafters up in about two days. Since there is only so much you can say about rafters, I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.

In the picture above, you can see how the rafters rest on what used to be the outside wall of the house and then are tied into the rafters in the attic of the original structure. It all ended up being very solid and very straight forward.

After the rafters were in but before the roof membrane went on, they did build the boxes for the four skylights we have planned. There will be two each in two of the rooms. Here they set them in place but they haven't been installed yet.

While the roof is called "flat" that really just means it has a low slope. Over the width of the roof it only drops about 3 or 4 inches which is plenty to get the water moving and down into the gutter.  A neat thing about the roof material we went with with is that it actually white to help reflect the heat and not absorb it the way a dark colored roof would. It is also really tough and the overlaps are heat sealed. It went on in only one day. (No, it didn't snow. It is that white.)

The plan is to get the addition reasonably sealed so that it can be tied into the rest of the house's heating while the interior work is being done. Part of that involves moving the washer and dryer to their new location in the still building utility room. Here is the wall that houses the plumbing for that. It had to be made of 2x6s to allow enough space for everything.



And that same wall from the other direction. This will be the wall to right in the utility room as you walk out of the house and into the addition through the  "Crawfish Memorial Hallway and Kitchen Bypass." We will be installing an EZ Pass Hot Lane.

So far so good. We have holidays coming up but it looks like we will have a weather/water proof addition tied into the house by the end of the year.



Walls Go Up for the Addition

So after months of talk, plans, permits and changes to the inside of our house, it finally became time to build the actual addition.

Right before our final plans went in, we decided to go with a block addition rather than a wood frame with Hardie Board. We did this for several reasons. The fact that it was going to be a more solid structure and ultimately, surprisingly, it ended up costing about the same the wood frame would have cost helped make the decision. However, the fact is we liked the look of the block with a flat roof and a cement parge coat. The one drawback is that it reduces the rooms by about 4" along the outside walls. We can live with that.

The bricks went in quickly because it is basically like building with Legos. The blocks are 5 1/2" wide and only cost about a buck apiece. Crazy thing is that the combined cost of the brick lintels (the long "beams" that stretch over the tops of the tops the windows and doors) was about the same as the total cost of the rest of the bricks used for the addition.

This is basically the same view as above three days later.The vast majority of the work was done in two days.

Some of our existing roof needed to be removed in order to have space for the new rafters on the addition to tie into the existing house. The rafters will match up with the rafters in the attic on a one for one basis and the weight is all set to be distributed along what used to be the outside wall of our house.

This is the eventual patio door and wall o' windows space. You can see the humongo lintel that spans all 9' of opening across the top.

Basically, everything went as planned and the work was really well done. After this picture was taken, the masons also removed some of the brick from the outside wall that will soon be in the way. They also bricked over the window at the far right of the photo and cut a space for the doorway to the "Crawfish Memorial Hallway and Kitchen Bypass."

The scaffolds were pretty amazing. They went up in an instant, were rock solid and were gone before I knew it. Somebody, somewhere nailed the whole form and function thing with them.



And speaking of scaffolds... Ummm maybe 20 years ago I was absolutely captivated one night watching a Kung-Fu movie centered around, are you ready, SCAFFOLD BASED KUNG FU!

The movie was pretty funny and had this neat gimmick involving a Sholin monastery and yes.. scaffolds! A con-man looking to hide out is sentenced to build scaffolds around the walls of the monastery and as he watches the monk perform their martial arts exercises, he mimics them with his building techniques. I have to tell you, it was a crazy fun cocktail of comedy, action and flat out absurdity. It totally worked and was a lot of fun.

The movie always stuck with me and I just looked up the title (EVERYTHING is on the internet) and the movie is called "Return to the 36th Chamber" The trailer is a bit long, but you get the idea.

Digging the Footings and Dumping the Stump

(Maybe it's me, but the title of this post sounds... odd. 'Nuff said.)

Okay, with the porch and deck out of the way and into the dumpster, the dumpster gnomes came and took it away. In its place they left... another dumpster! It is a home renovation miracle!

Our contractor got to work with his Bobcat and a rented mini-excavator and started to level the ground and work on getting the stump from the maple tree out. The number of roots was pretty amazing and they covered a very wide area. You can see some of them stacked up in the picture.

 

The stump well...errr.... stumped them for a bit. They worked at it for quite a while but it just wouldn't budge. So, another tool was rented, The ever popular stump grinder. Think of it as a circular saw with only a couple of teeth (that look like hippo molars) mounted on the front of a tracked lawn mower. It spins and wears away at the stump creating an impressive shower of saw dust.

Eventually, this wore away enough of the stump so that the excavator could pull it up out of the ground. Once the dirt was knocked free it was surprising to see how shallow the roots really were for such a big tree.

The stump was walked/pushed over to the dumpster and after a fair amount twisting, it eventually got in there.

I have to admit that as a kid, I was never a "truck" type. I don't think I ever played with bulldozer and truck type toys. Give me a tank or airplane any day. But, I have to admit now, they are really cool to watch. Crawling around doing neat stuff like digging a hole in a second and a half that would take me an hour. They really do seem alive. In a nice Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel way, not like Killdozer.

With the stump and roots out of the way, the trench for the footers and their required insulation panels went in very quickly. No surprises.

 

We kept the two pieces of slab that were already there and filled in a lot of the space with crushed concrete which apparently goes for about $7 a ton. Seriously. This allowed us to pour the slab up flush with the existing floor level of our house. Now the addition will be flush and not a "step down" when we enter it from inside the house.

The concrete pour took place and I didn't get a picture of it happening. However, here is a potential Pulitzer winning photo of what the slab looked like through my kitchen door several hours later.

The plastic trapped the moisture in and that helps with how the concrete cures. It came out great. Very smooth and level. So far so good.

The concrete subcontractor is also the masonry contractor. We needed a week and a hurricane to go by before the walls could start going up. In the meantime, the dumpster gnomes came back and worked their magic once again and left us with a replacement dumpster (that is already 1/2 full again.)

Will miracles never cease?

Taking Down the Porch and Taking Up the Deck

Well, we had a few weeks on hold because of various schedule issues but we are back up and running. Our contractor finished up the official drawing of the addition and then we walked it through the permit process. All in all, it could have been worse but it is pretty much the nature of the beast that 15 minutes of talking to people and filling out the required forms ends up taking 3-4 hours of waiting in various lines. However at the end of the day (well, actually two days) we were all set. The plans were approved and we got our building permit and have it proudly displayed in the front window.

One of the early "sweat equity" opportunities identified for us in this project was the destruction of our porch and deck.

The area of the porch and deck fit entirely inside the walls of the new addition. There are partial concrete slabs that are going to be kept in place to help make the basis of the new floor in the addition. (Fresh concrete will be poured over them.) The Porch was 10'x15' and the deck was 10'x17'. Both had been built before we purchased the house and honestly, they had been built very well. They served their purposes but their time had come.


The first issue was clearing everything out of the way. The porch had turned into a bit of an outdoor junk room years ago but after last summer it had served as a temporary shed as well. As you can see, there was a lot of "stuff" that needed to go some place else before we could start wrecking anything.



So after a little child labor, we had a lot of stuff in the trash and the rest of it under tarps. (This did remind me that, "Oh yeah... I'm still gonna need a new shed with this is all over." D'oh.)

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Being fully aware of our limitations, Mrs Toy Making Dad and myself called in some assistance...

To the Crawfish Signal!

Lucky for us, Crawfish himself was available to pop on by in the Saab-marine with assorted pry bars and a nifty hammer or two. He was a tremendous help and honestly, there is no way we could have gotten this project done without his help. (Seriously - Thanks man.)

Having seen enough videos of people pulling down structures and taking the rest of the house or a bunch of windows with them, we decided that we would "unbuild" both structures as opposed to just smashing them and then cutting stuff up.

Act 1, Scene 2 from Tennessee Williams'
"Crawfish on a Hot Tar Roof"

We started on the roof. Initially I carefully took each staple out of the shingles and pulled them off one at a time. I really didn't want to worry about anyone, especially our little one, stepping on those. We made good progress but as the sun came up and we got closer to the edge of the porch, we switched to pulling up big sheets at a time. The staples pretty much pulled right up and the ones left behind were no threat since we left them in the boards. The tar paper underneath was a real, ahem, sticking point. I wonder if we had started earlier in the day if it would have peeled off easier? Live and learn.

With the shingles gone it was now, HAMMER TIME!

We hammered the plywood from inside off of the 2x4 rafters and bent them back to pry off as needed. A little difficult back at the new roof line because of the tar paper, but it went surprisingly fast. So fast in fact... that I failed to get any pictures with the sheathing in place.

Sledge hammer hits on the gutter end freed up the rafters and then we were able to twist them off of the hangers attached to the house. The far wall was made of 4x4s that were bolted together. Seriously  sturdy stuff. Lacking a Sawzall (or similar non-trademarked reciprocating saw) we took the back wall down as one piece and tossed it in the dumpster. Bye porch. (Memories include a dinner when we first moved in, the older girls' birthday party in 1st grade, a lot of toys and whole bunch of lint from the dryer covering the floor. And spiders. Lots of spiders.)

We then turned our attention to the deck. The deck was made of 2x8's and everything was nailed, as opposed to screwed, together. Pretty much just attacked it one board at a time with pry bars and hammers.

No big surprises in the destruction although there was an odd dynamic where every board that my wife went to take up just popped up with no problem while the boards Crawfish and I attempted were all held in with tungsten or depleted uranium 17" long twisted nails. We got it done. Eventually.

There were a couple a surprises that we uncovered though. First off we found that there was a slab poured along the back door that was covered by the deck. This may save us a few bucks when the new slab is poured for the addition floor.

 

 

 

 

There were quite a lot of patio stones used as supports and various places around the porch and deck. There are enough that I think they could form the basis of the floor for the new shed and we wouldn't have to pour a slab for it instead. That would save money, but the main thing is I like the idea of not having to break up a slab if I ever want to move the shed

We also found a concrete monkey skull. We set it on post as a warning to all the followers of the various monkey cults in our neighborhood. (Note to self - maybe you should play with concrete more often.)

So, a second day of a few tidbits of destruction and some general cleaning up and we are set and ready for the footings to be dug and then poured. The sand is from, of all places, the sand box.







The back of the house looks huge now, so we have to fill it up with buildings and what not.