Workin' the Ol' #3

Ok, so it's probably not very good Feng Shui, but we've got a refrigerator in the middle of the living room right now.  And over by where the fridge used to be there is an outlet dangling from the ceiling on 5 feet of knob and tube.  (Outlet appears to be unpowered, but we're treating all electrical with the same high threat level until we get to the Great Unraveling this coming weekend.)

We're in this state because we told ourselves we'd be done with the lath and plaster demo by the end of last weekend.  And we are!  Everything on the main floor that's not in the Living Room is completely free of lath and plaster.  That includes the rockwool'd ceilings which is where much of the effort was.  Everything has been bagged up and carted off to the dump. There's no demo to do in the living room -- we'll do the one shear wall from the outside -- so we are d.o.n.e, done!

This weekend we took about 3200 pounds of demo material to the dump if you can believe that.  During one of the runs the dump guy started off by asking "Just the usual today, Sir?"  He was wondering which line I should be in, recycleables or garbage, and the "Sir" part was nice, but I knew there was sort of a problem.  People who get coffee should have "usuals," but nobody should have a usual at the dump. I get coffee at various places on a pretty regular basis, but none of them ever ask me if I want my usual.  None of them even know what my usual is.  Now all of a sudden I have one at the dump?  Not good.

The other thing the dump guy said, which I'm not sure I've figured out yet, was something about looking like I'd "really been workin' the ol' number three."  There was plenty of time to think about what that meant while plugging away on the demo, and in the end I decided it meant I was about as dirty as a coal miner working the #3 shaft somewhere.  For the record, B looked like she was working the old number three too, it wasn't just me....

Anyway, it really doesn't matter at this point because we're done with the lath and plaster demo.  There will certainly be more dump runs in our future, but not with the same frequency, and probably not with the same discomfort per pound either.

The house looks strangely beautiful now, actually.  The framing lumber is incredible -- more on that in a future post -- and all the remaining systems are exposed and primed for disassembly.  Yes, we could have paid someone to do the demo for us, and we probably would have been done a month ago, but the connection we got with our new house is priceless.  (Sorry, sounds kind of corny but it's true.)  Also, our daughters got a nice lesson in grinding it out, and the power of hard work.  I remember getting exactly the same lesson when I was a kid, which is why I think I care about this so much.

Huge Progress

Yeah, progress.  Can't you tell by the picture...?

The other night I mentioned how we'd had a few days off, and then came back to this demo work with renewed energy.  The trend definitely continued through the weekend.  By Sunday evening we had no lath and plaster on the whole N side of the house -- kitchen, bath, hallway, and den.  That includes the ceilings.

Much of it has been cleaned up and carted off, but the kitchen is still a complete disaster as you can see  from the photo above.  I re-cocconed the whole thing on Sunday because the plan to surgically cut through the ceilings wherever we needed structural or electrical work was starting to not make sense.  (POV helped along by a few contractor discussions....)

In our last house, I remember a rigamortized rat falling down when we were doing the ceiing demo.  That was pretty nasty initially, but eventually just sort of funny because besides that the job was mostly just dusty and grueling.  There was no insulation in the ceilings, or anywhere else in the house for that matter.  This rockwool stuff we're dealing with now takes the whole thing to a new level.  As much as I love crawling around in old houses and figuring out how they're put together or how we might change them, we (and I'm sure I can speak for B here) absolutely do not want to travel in this den of evil again.  Every dust particle that entered this leaky old house in the last 85 years seems to have been caught in the Rockwool, and then released as we pulled down the ceilings.  For two nights in a row I have planned to go back over to the house to clean up the kitchen after work, but I just can't get myself to do it yet.

Here's what I think we have left for lath and plaster demo, at most.

• Stairwell going upstairs.  No rockwool.
• Foyer including ceiling.  Rockwool.  Ugh.
• Dining room ceiling.  No rockwool.  This one is trending from "keeper" to "demo."  Need to make a decision soon.
• Stairs going down to basement. Need to remove some lath and plaster, and then also the stairs themselves, so that foundation work can proceed.  No rockwool.

There is also the whole top floor of the house that will come off at some point in the summer.  That'll be someone else demoing, and it's another story for a different time.  It sure will be fun when we get to that point though.

Meanwhile there are tons of interesting conversations going on between all the people who are already helping us on this project, or who are bidding for part of the work.  Things are definitely heating up.  I promise you we won't be focusing on demo for that much longer, stay with us dear reader....

Rockwool Chronicles

Sorry about the lack of recent postings.  We had a Grandma in town from snowy Omaha until a couple of days ago, so our attention has been elsewhere.  Actually, this turned out to be a much needed break from the lath  and plaster demo.

I should mention that tons of "GC" work has still been going on -- in the last week there have been on site meetings or consultations with surveyors, pin pilers, framers, plumbers, masons, and plaster dudes.  And some email exchanges with our architect Pat.  Our plans are under review by the city.  Some comments so far, and some minor adjustments to make, but nothing that's going to materially affect the overall plan.

The vacation from demo is now over.  Today it was back to the grindstone, for what turned out to be one of the most productive days in recent memory.  Started out with some overdue cleanup, then demo'd the wall between the bathroom and den, made dump run of plaster, bundled about 3 weeks of lath and made a second trip to the dump, then came back and tackled the den ceiling, endured a Rockwook tsunami, and finally got all that packaged up for a dump run tomorrow.

Radio-wise this played out as Scott Simon -> Car Talk -> Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me ->
This American Life -> Lunch with Led -> Classic Rock (KZ0K) -> Latin music (Sabor, 91.3) -> Salsa (91.3).  All of that was great, but I realize now that there is nothing like obscure Led Zepplin for demo work.

At the end of the day I looked like this:

And the den looked like this:

There were a couple of exhausted, dust choked (seriously almost puking) moments where I wondered WTF are we doing?  Wouldn't it be easier to just move into some pre-cooked MDF Mansion in Suburbia?  After the last batch of den celiing was bagged up, I closed off the coccoon, sat down with a cold one, and watched the sunset.  Didn't take long to realize the easy way out wouldn't be easier at all -- this is going to be the view from our family's dining room table soon.

Pin Pile Primer

As you might expect, the demo continues.  We're plugging away, and are actually well over the hump, at least as far as lath and plaster goes.  There's other, more exciting demo to do soon including sledge-hammering a cast iron tub, removing the cast iron stack, and also the steel beam that used to guide the elevator up and down.

You're probably ready for something new, and so am I, so let's talk about pin piles (aka pipe piles).  Several weeks ago I posted the great news that some quality foundation work had been done on this house in the last few decades.  The West (downhill side) of the foundation had basically been rebuilt.  That continues to be great news, but just maybe not as much as we could have used -- turns out that because of what we're adding to the house we've got a whole bunch of new pin piles in our future.

The story basically goes like this (letters correspond to the diagram below):

A -- Somebody decides to build a house on a hill.  They cut out a ledge in the hill to create a level surface for the house.

B -- In order to minimize labor, and to remove the where-do-we-put-the-fill-dirt problem, they push the fill dirt out to the downhill side.  They now have a platform as wide as their house, only 2/3 of which is on original undisturbed soil.  House gets built.

C -- Over the years, because the fill dirt is less stable and compact than the undisturbed soil, the downhill side of the house shifts a little.  That shifting is corrected about 30 years ago with new concrete work and a few pin piles along the downhill edge.  Then new owner (us) comes along and wants to basically add a second floor to the house.  New foundation work, including lines of new pin piles going all the way back to the undisturbed soil, are required to support the new weight.

I never heard of pin piles until I started needing to get estimates for the work, but they're basically long sections of 2" pipe driven into the soil "until refusal."  Around here that technically means that a 90# jackhammer can't move the pipe more than 1" into the soil in a minute.  One of the contractors I talked to about this said typical depth for our area is about 25'. Besides what's required inside the foundation proper, we also have 5 concrete piers to be poured for the new deck, and each requires 3 pin piles.  Total will be something like 24, or possibly more when we see what the soil looks like as we get into it.  Yikes.

This has turned out to be a fascinating, but surely pretty expensive, twist to the project.  We've gotten one bid so far, and have one more walkthrough later this week.  We've also collected a few leads on folks who can "do it for really cheap," but a foundation doesn't seem like a very good place to pinch pennies.

More to come.  This work should start shortly after our permits are approved by the city.  Within the next month if all goes as planned.

In other news, here's where we are with the demo. Bathroom walls and floors done, den mostly done.

Coccoon 4

We're getting there on the demo.  According to our master spreadsheet, which is tracking various aspects of this project, we're up to 7.87 tons of material taken to the dump.  Three of those tons made their way to the dump in the back of the Toyota pickup over the last month, and the rest was a lump sum delivery via the 40 yard dumpster we got for the deck and basement demo.

Here's an updated diagram showing the progress.  In the last post I was hoping for more green after Sunday, and we got that, but I think we could have gotten farther along had it not been for a consult with the electrician and the need to expand the coccoon one more time.  (Not that those things are bad -- they're good -- they just take time.)

While the diagram makes it look like there's not much left, we do still have two stairwells to deal with.  I guess there isn't that much wall in the stairwells, but at the moment the higher spots are looking a little inconvenient.  I'm sure well figure it out when the time comes.  In both cases, some or all of the stairs also have to come out, but more on that when we get there.

Here's the a view of the expanded coccoon from the living room.  While it would have been easier to just skip this coccoon thing and demo away,  it's been worth it because really don't have that much dust outside of the demo zone.  We've been able to have parties and play dates, and generally just use the rest of the house while the demo work proceeds.  Definitely glad we're not living there right now however.