Holding Up My House and Other Projects: The Foundation

Well, I guess we have to start pedaling faster, internet-wise at least. I’m certain I could bore you all to tears for another week or so, regaling you with stories of nailing some block or other somewhere on the back of my house, or turning a screw in a busted hinge. But I’ve got other projects I can show you in tedious detail. There’s no need to beat on this horse any longer. It’s shod, if not dead. So let’s get to the denouement, shall we? How did we finish? Or more accurately for one of my projects, did we finish? You betcha.

We’re more or less done futzing with the dry rot up high, so we can work down closer to the ground. It takes longer to climb down a ladder to get to the lunch table, so we prefer to work at eye level. We finished stripping off the acres of 1/2″ exterior plywood they wasted used to cover over the back of the house. We saved it all, and we’re going to use it, trust me. And we’re not going to paint any of it that dreadful blue color, either. In the last picture, you can see the two bands of timbers that span the back of the house, which help support the house over the big door openings. Bugs and rain can get inside the house between them, so we’re going to cover them up somehow. We’re not just going to nail the siding over them. We be smarter than that, if not exactly smart in general. We’ll build a canopy roof over the doors, to protect them from the elements. I’ll wager there was something like that on the house when it was built, and it fell off, and the owners installed another ceiling fan somewhere instead of fixing it.

So we start with one of my favorite topics, a WATER TABLE. This is how you make one, in a hurry, if you feel like it. You set the table saw on 10 degrees, I think, or thereabouts, and you take a 1 x 8 pine board and set the fence at 5-1/4″, and cut the lower piece, which now has a sloping bevel on the top. Now take the cut-off strip, which had one beveled edge of course,  flip it over, set your fence for 2″, and rip it again. Now you’ve got a parallelogram piece that naturally sits on top of the big piece at the correct angle, with one beveled edge flat against the house, and the outside edge is magically plumb. You can put flashing and so forth where the top cap meets the wall, but it’s overkill. The angle of the cap makes water run down and away from the house.

In this case, we cut a rabbet on the lower edge, because we’re going to slip a roof underneath it, and we need room to do it.

The new water table is located at about the spot were the new roof-lette is going to go. We wove in new pine clapboards to mesh with the old, cedar clapboards. If you pull the nails carefully from the lower edge of the old claps, this is possible. I’m not here to tell you it’s easy, however. Oh look, there’s the ghost of another boarded up window in the wall.

Alrighty, then. The water table(s) are in place, there are patches all over the place where the wood was punky and needed to be replaced, and we’ve started painting, even. There are at least two or three things that look like and then a miracle occurs in this photo. Four barn doors have magically appeared, and one shed door, too. Hell, they’re even painted and have hardware. And some paint has materialized from some where. To save time, here’s how we managed that:

The Barn Doors:

We took apart so much stuff, and saved the material, that we could make the doors almost entirely out of the trash pile. The window glass is simply four leftover storm window panels we found in the basement basement when we moved in. They boarded up the windows, but they saved the storm window glass for some reason. The door frames are that same, insane beam we demolished in one of last week’s episodes, cut into useful stiles and rails. The solid panels in the doors are made from the 1/2″ exterior plywood that formerly covered the back of the house. We had tons of it, and used it for all sorts of things. We assembled the doors using a domino joiner to make the mortise and tenon joints, and backed them up with very long saberdrive screws. That’s a superfast way to make a utility door. What, you don’t have a domino joiner? Sucks to be you. We held the glass in the openings with a barbaric picture-frame arrangement made from the cut-off strips of the joists we pared down last week to help support the floor upstairs. We bought some strap hinges and steel handles and latches at the local Mardens. If you’re unfamiliar with Mardens, you’re obviously not from Maine. Shopping at Mardens is a Maine tradition, like bean suppers or refusing to wear your seat belt when you drive. It’s like what used to be called a five and dime, only much, much shabbier.

The Shed Door:

Under an enormous pile of leaves, discarded roofing, and other trash in the back yard, we discovered one of the original barn doors at the bottom of the heap. It was made from the same beaded board  that people once reserved for utility areas in your house, instead of on every surface in the kitchen, living, dining, bath, and bedroom areas on every house on home and garden television. This beadboard was a 7/8″ thick, and appeared to my eye to be made from chestnut, a tree species that has long since been wiped out by some sort of blight. Chestnut is (oops, was) awesome wood. Naturally rot resistant, light but strong, easy to work with regular tools, not bad to look at either. Despite being over 100 years old, and languishing for a good, long time at the bottom of a heap of debris, in a mud puddle, some of the boards were still usable. We made the sort of gothic door you see on the left out of it, and some leftover framing lumber.

The Paint:

We made the paint, at least the green paint. We’d chosen a Ben Moore color called Providence Olive for the body of our house. We chose it before we realized that Ben Moore paint had skyrocketed in price to something like 60 bucks a gallon. We didn’t have that kind of scratch, so we improvised. I went into the basement and got all kinds of leftover alkyd primer and paint I had in the basement. We mixed it all together, and it made a kind of cool pukey blue. I bought a few pints of raw sienna and raw umber colorants, the same sort of things they squirt into your paint at the store to make it a color. If you add raw sienna to pukey blue, you get a warmer green color. If you squirt in raw umber, you get a much warmer, somewhat darker green. You know, Providence Olive. There was so much raw wood on the back of the house that it should get alkyd primed, anyway, so we painted it with our redi-mix paint and called it acceptable. You couldn’t tell it from the correct color anyway, and it had so much pigment in it that it was better than standard paint. We bit the bullet and shelled out for Montgomery White for the trim and Mayflower Red for the doors. It’s the best Victorian color scheme I’ve ever come up with.

Then we took all the little bits of framing lumber left over and made cripple rafters and lookouts and some other framing members I forget the names of, if I ever knew them. We nailed them to the exposed timbers, and sheathed the mess with salvaged 1/2″ plywood, after we flipped them over to hide the blue paint from my sensitive eyes. We used it to make the soffit, underneath, too, to keep out the bugs.

The lumber yard had a deal on cedar shingle bundles, so my boy and me grabbed some and nailed on three courses on the sheathing. We slipped some wooden flashing up under the water table and over the shingles to finish it off. That little overhang shields the doors from the weather pretty well. It also allows us to open the doors a little and slip outside to shovel snow, if we need to. Before, the snow would be banked hard against the house.

Here’s the actual owner of the house, inspecting the work. You can see the new foundation wall between the doors, under the window we restored to its original place.

And of course, the inamorata of all home improvement shows, before and after photos:

We do not aspire to greatness here. We do not aim for perfection. We do not hope for much at all, only that with some effort, we will be able to achieve an effect that allows intertunnel visitors to be able to tell which image is the before, and which is the after. It’s ambition, of a sort.

[We’ll show you how we fixed other stuff on the house in future installments. If you want to read the entire saga of fixing the basement from start to finish, you can read it here.  To support this site, please recommend it to internet friends, and hit the Ko-Fi tip jar if you’re feeling flush]

Water Tables and Other Discontents

So when we first moved to western Maine, things were different and strange. The people who lived here thought I was different and strange. I thought they were different and strange. I’ve been here a while, now. I’m no longer different, just strange. They’re no longer strange, just different.

I went to the lumber yard. I know my way around a lumber yard, there’s no terrors for me in there. It frightens folks accustomed to Home Depot, where you’re more competent about what’s on the shelves than the clerks. Regler people go into a lumber yard and there’s just a battered formica counter with a husky fellow glaring at you from behind it who say, “What do you want?” You have to tell them. You can’t point like an infant to stuff on the wall. All the good stuff is out back stacked in barns. You’re not getting out there until you buy something. It’s just you and the dude. So you open negotiations. You start out in a convivial mode, something small. You say you want a 2 x 4. I can’t get in any trouble with that, can I? Then they shoot back, “Stud length?”, and you’re asea all of a sudden with your decks awash. They have their own lingo, basted in a lumberyard patois, and you’re a stranger in there.

I’m a stranger in there for other reasons. I’m this weird out-of-towner who bought a house no local would touch with a ten foot pole, which by the way they have in the back, two dollars a foot. So I go in there, and start asking for things, and strike out for entirely different reasons.

“I need some cedar clapboards.”

Blank stare.

“Um six inchers if possible, but I’ll take eights if that’s all you have.”

Blank stare. Then:

“You want a what now?”

“Cedar clapboard. You know, bevel siding.”

“You mean vinyl siding?”

I may have said, “Sir, I would rather be pulled apart by horses and have my entrails barbecued in front of me while I watched than put vinyl siding on my house.” Or I might have said “No.” I can’t remember, it was years ago.

“Oh, do you mean pine siding?”

“You have clapboards made out of pine?”

“Sure. How many do you want?”

“Well, I want those, only made out of cedar.”

“I’ve heard of that, I think, but I’ve never seen one. Maybe the boss knows how to order them.”

“Never mind. Give me the pine. I’ll get used to it.”

Cedar clapboards were a fundamental building block of my existence for half my life. I might be able to calculate how many miles of them I’ve nailed onto houses, but I’m lazy and have a headache. It is however, impossible to determine how many miles of them I’ve painted, until quantum computing comes online. Let’s call it a lot, and move on.

But time and distance are real things, and need to be accommodated. They don’t do that around here. I’ve learned all sorts of stuff about my new home, a lot of it from my new home, as it were. Pine clapboards are awful. They’re full of knots that need to be sealed, they’re twisty and too soft to suit me. I could have gotten in high dudgeon about climbing down from tradition, at least until I saw the price. They cost about a quarter of what cedar claps would. I would have embraced the clerk like a brother, but for the intervening counter. I’ll take a bunch, and cut out the worst knots. Maybe I belong around here after all.

So we have to put the fabric of the house in order, too, not just jack it up like a Chevy with a flat. Let’s see what’s what.

You heave up the forty-foot ladder and get your face right in it. There’s a temporary patch I put in on day one to keep the largest animals out of the attic. Now we have to really fix the eave and wall where holes in the roof had done their work for somewhere between 25 and 50 years.

That’s some funky framing, y’all. That’s what’s called dry rot. Dry rot happens when wood gets wet, over and over. Don’t ask me, I didn’t name it. The bluish stuff you see is blown-in insulation. The denizens of our dojo weren’t entirely daft over the decades. Back maybe 50-60 years ago, some fairly competent workers drilled myriad holes in the house, blew in insulation in a lot of the house, and covered up the holes fairly well. Back in the day they used to remove lengths of clapboard and drill holes only through the sheathing to do their work, and then replace the clapboard. Nowadays they mostly drill through everything and plug the hole with what looks like a wooden cork, and your house gets acne.

If you’ve ever heard a spray foam insulation sales pitch, the first thing out of their mouths is that blown in insulation settles, so put in foam. Hmm. Enough water has sluiced through the giant hole in the roof to make a 2×4 stud completely disappear (look at the slot next to the other rotten stud), but the insulation is still standing there.

There are generally two kinds of loose insulation: cellulose or rock wool. Cellulose is just shredded newspaper treated with borates to make it flame retardant and make bugs avoid it. Rock wool is spun from mining slag. It’s basically fluffy rocks. It can’t burn and bugs hate it too. I couldn’t tell just by looking at it which kind it was. It tasted like rock wool. Don’t ask me how I know that.

At any rate, we patched up the framing and skinned over the eave and wove in some fascia and clapboards, and it didn’t look half bad. More like 75 percent bad. But it’s three storeys up and the squirrels are the only ones who will see it up close.

Then we came down low and put tar paper, claps, and trim over the sheathing. When we first moved here, a neighbor, who no doubt thought we were strange, was removing all their vinyl windows and replacing them with vinyl windows. You read that right. Some people just like talking to salesmen, as Kevin Spacey once said. They asked us if we’d like the old ones, because they were just going to the dump. We took them all, and fixed the hinky balances and so forth. We opened up 11 boarded up windows and put the freebies in the holes. There’s one now:

Around the driveway side, we had a different problem.

That’s a little shed someone made along the way by enclosing the posts that held up the porches on the second and third floors. Then they dumped soil against it and paved the slope down to the back of the house.

We can’t get rid of it, fix it properly, or live with it. You know, like Congress. So we did something funky. We jacked it up, which was easy because it didn’t weigh much, put in new footings, patched the posts, excavated a slot next to the wall, slipped in some pressure treated studs and plywood, and concrete board, then stuccoed it. It’s not the Taj Mahal. It’s not even the Garage Mahal, but it will last until I’m dead and can let someone else worry about this dump instead.

A long time ago, I was supervising the construction of a fast food restaurant. There was a meeting in a trailer-office with various project managers and site supervisors and customers and assorted dirty men. The town the restaurant was being built in was twee, and the restaurant plans were most decidedly not. The town took the plans and got out the red pencil and added various colonial, Victorian, Arts and Crafts, and any other old-timey gimcrack they could think of, and wanted it pasted all over the building. The customer’s project manager was looking the plans over, trying to see what it would all cost, and asked, “What’s that thing called, at the bottom of the wall, above the foundation?” Everyone in the trailer tied their shoes, or looked at their watch, or scratched themselves, and generally did anything except answer the question. Finally, I said, It’s a water table.”

There was a pause, and then they all burst out laughing. They didn’t know anything, but they knew it couldn’t be called that, and I must be an idiot to think so. I’m sure they’re still telling the story of that guy who thinks that, you know, thing, down at the bottom of the wall, above the foundation, is called a water table.

I don’t buy ink by the barrel, but I have an inexhaustible supply of pixels, so I’d just like to say, to an audience that spans continents, that it’s a water table, you giggling imbeciles.

[Tune in tomorrow to see me settle old scores and do some more work on the house. And tell an intertunnel friend about Sippican Cottage]

Ribbon, Ribband, Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off

If you don’t mind (I’ll bet you won’t), we’re going to have to speed things up, and I’ll just wave my hand and tell you that there was a second step called and then a miracle occurs, and we ended up with beefed up framing all over the basement basement. For just a taste, here’s what we did to beef up the basement floor, which is overhead.

Those are 2 x 8 framing members. However, old house lumber isn’t sized like new house lumber. We had to run the 14-foot-long joists through a table saw and take about 1/4″ to a 1/2″ off them. They’re way, way undersized for the span, but no one asked me how big they should be back in 1901. Besides being too small, they’re spaced too widely, and somewhat randomly. We had to decide whether to “sister” the new pieces to the old pieces, or decrease the spacing between them. I performed intense calculations using my razor-sharp powers of observation and my encyclopedic knowledge of building practices, looked at my son, shrugged, and said, “I dunno. Whatever.”

They’re sitting on a flimsy cleat, mostly relying on being nailed to studs that extend up through the next floor for support. That was a common practice in balloon framing back in the day. Houses aren’t built like that anymore because lumber in long lengths is rare and expensive. It also leads to very bad fires, because smoke and flames have an easier time racing up the wall from floor to floor. My house isn’t balloon framed everywhere. It’s post and beam where it’s the biggest pain in the ass to work on, and it’s balloon framed in the worst places for that type of framing.

The thin, pine board the whole floor is resting on is called a ribbon (actually a ribband, but everyone calls it the other thing), and it makes me nervous. Let’s fix it, and lift the wall into place at the same time. Like this:

First we get some proper framing lumber under those joists and over the ribband. Then we use jacks to lift the sidewall until it lines up with the back wall again. Then we extend the corner post (there’s the post and beam shite again) to meet the very large sill. Finally, we support the new, beefy ribband with 2 x 4s on the flat, also extending to the sill. Like this:

We installed fire blocking, which segregates one floor from another. If you look at the first and second sheathing boards, you can see that the side wall was lifted about four inches or so at the back corner. I’ll have to patch up the sheathing and the clapboard siding later.

It’s finally time to start working on the foundation. In many cases, we would have been required to dig a hole five feet deep where the foundation goes, directly underneath the wall we’re going to support, and we’d have to do it with shovels. Yeesh. I’ve done it, it’s not fun. However, while the fellows that built my house were somewhat mercurial, they weren’t stupid. Down a few inches below ground are giant granite blocks that served as the foundation and footing. The part that used to show above ground was brick, and was ground to dust, but the granite is harder than Chinese arithmetic and never budged:

That railroad (trumpet) jack I told you about earlier is basically holding that entire section of wall, and three floors above it in place. It’s sitting on an oak plinth, on top of a big steel plate, with a big steel plate on top of it, too. Man oh man you just put a length of steel pipe into the yoke of that bad boy and turn it and the house goes up. It’s amazing. Then you tighten up the screw jacks to catch up. Wonderful.

We’re dumb, but we’re not dumb enough not to tie the part of the wall we’re building above ground to the granite part below ground. I drilled some 1/2″ holes in the stone, and pounded some #4 rebar into it. Rebar has its own system of sizing. Each number corresponds to 1/8″. So a #4 is 1/2″, and a #8 is 1″ in diameter, etc. We put some rebar horizontally, also, and tied it to the vertical bar. It just has to be held in place until the concrete fills the form. We also put in anchor bolts. Normally you place the bolts in the wet concrete, and then fit the sill to the bolts. We’re working upside down and backwards and sideways and obliquely, so we drill holes in the sill first, put the J bolts through, and hook them on the horizontal rebar, which is good practice.

All that is a pain in the arse if the form’s in place so we do it first. Then we start fitting the concrete form to the very uneven ground outside and the even more uneven concrete indoors. Like this:

We took apart the ridiculous beam we demolished and used some of the pieces to make the form. It had so many spikes (large framing nails) sticking into it, it reminded me of a porcupine pulled inside out. It was a beast to disassemble, but we were on a budget and we have to substitute labor for material wherever we can.

Hey look it’s our free cement mixer. The wheelbarrow was left out on someone’s curb during the Festival of Trash, so it didn’t cost anything. The teenaged boy wasn’t free, exactly. He isn’t getting paid, but I had to buy his mother dinner a few times before she agreed to marry me. Money in the bank, I figured.

So we mixed up a bunch of concrete with our hoe, which is plenty hard work, shoveled it into the form, and “rodded” it by plunging a leftover piece of rebar into the wet mix to get the air bubbles out of it. And just like that, we have a two-car garage/pigsty/barn under our house again.

[Tune in tomorrow to see if we can make this place presentable, now that’s it’s not going to fall on our heads. And tell a friend about Sippican Cottage]

North American Termite Map Is the Name of My Bellamy Brothers Tribute Band

I once tried to make a joke about my house. It’s an old joke we reserved for particularly rundown properties we were renovating back in the day. I said, “It’s not a house, it’s a million termites holding hands.” If you’re working with the kind of person who’s used to pooping in a porta-pottie, it will pass as a joke, anyway. I live in western Maine now, and instead of a snicker, I got corrected. I was informed that there are no termites here. This was news to me.

That’s right, I’ve moved so far north that all the termites froze to death. I checked a North American termite map to be sure. Interestingly, North American Termite Map is the name of my Bellamy Brothers tribute band. But I digress.

So we don’t have termites, just the occasional bear in the back yard. But carpenter ants are a hardier sort of animal. They set up shop in the beam over the big barn door opening, and got jiggy wid it. If you spot carpenter ant infestations, it’s usually too late to save what they’re gnawing at. They gobble up the insides of things, but leave a thin wall of wood between them and the outside to fool the unwary.

The carpenter ants were all as dead as the termites, and for the same reason I imagine. It occasionally reaches twenty below zero Fahrenheit around here, and that takes care of lots of pests, and cuts down on door-to-door salesmen, too. But the ants did plenty of damage before they moved to Florida, just like vinyl siding salesmen do, and the beams would have to be replaced.

I’d already purchased as much lumber as I could afford. The magic money tree in the back yard also can’t stand subzero temperatures, and was permanently out of order. Instead of selling a kidney to buy more lumber, I decided to try my hand at box beams. Besides, the last time I tried to sell a kidney at the hospital, they objected because I brought in a bag with thirteen of them at the same time. This elicited more questions than I care to answer about my affairs.

Back on topic, what are box beams, you ask?

If you watch Better Homes Than Yours, or anything else on H&G TV, or search the intertunnels, this is what you’ll be told:

A Wood Box Beam (sometimes called a faux beam) is a non-structural 2, 3, or 4-sided hollow beam meant to look like a solid beam

Well, at my house, that sort of thing is always called a fake beam. We don’t dignify it with French adjectives either, although we might call it merde, but that’s a noun. No, a true box beam is an interesting structural assembly made from wood, that can take the place of big framing components like door headers, while using less material. It’s made like this:

I’ll link to the document I found for box beam construction. It has span charts and so forth. Those are important, or would be, except they’re all in millimeters and hectares and hogsheads and rods and whatever else they use in the antipodes. But knock yourself out if you speak soccer measurements.

The fellows who built our house over a century ago loved box beams. The entire wraparound front porch roof is supported on box beams atop columns, including a nifty curved section. They didn’t have plywood, so they used regular pine boards and framing lumber. But these box beams never bowed a fraction of an inch, even with some serious snow loads on them. The porch foundation collapsed of course, but the box beams rode untroubled on their shabby underpinnings. We’ll fix that side of the house later.

So let’s build some box beams.

We have some 1 x 8s we were going to use to beef up the floor. Some of the floor would have to make do with less beefing up than a can of Dinty Moore, but c’est la vie. I laid it out it out with a hot pink speed square, either because I’m a very exciting person, or it was the only one they had at the store.

Oh boy, we have plenty of little blocks. We did this whole job, and many others, and never had a dumpster.

We make a sandwich:

We lay it on its side, and glue the bejeezus out of it:

Then we nail it like crazy, because we have a nail gun. If we had to pound all the nails by hand, I’d still be down there.

Et voila, a box beam in place:

I’d be lying if I told you it didn’t deflect at all under what is a pretty substantial load, but it didn’t need to be perfect. If I had let all the glue set properly before I installed it then it probably wouldn’t have deflected at all. It hasn’t moved any more in ten years, so I’m calling it a win and turning off the outfield lights.

So once again, with our two box beams in place, I made the same mistake I always do. I started feeling pretty good about the project. Just then, a strange face peeked around the corner. It was a normal sort of male human face, I meant no insult. But where I live, any face is an unusual face. We exchanged hullos, and there was an awkward silence. Then he announced he was the code enforcement officer for the town. Code enforcement is code for: building inspector these days.

This surprised me about the same as if he announced he’d just returned from a flying saucer ride with a bigfoot at the controls. If memory serves, that is the plot of Star Wars, but that’s not what I mean. I had no idea that the town had any sort of formal building department, or anyone to lord over it. Our town has been like musical chairs led by an arsonist since the 1970s. A handful of people would leave town, arsonists would burn down a couple of houses, and we all kept going around in smaller and smaller circles. There hasn’t been a building permit issued in this town since Jimmy Carter started banging nails on Habitat houses instead of banging on the economy like a cathode ray TV set with the horizontal hold on the fritz. What could this guy possibly want with me?

“Did you pull a building permit for this project?”

“Er, no. I didn’t know we had a building department.”

“Well, we do. I’m it.”

“I’m doing all the work myself. We’re not changing the house’s footprint or adding on anything, or hiring any contractors. I didn’t know you needed a permit to fix your own house.”

“Well, that’s generally true. But when I can see your building project from the highway by the river, or from a low flying plane, you need one.”

“How much is it?”

“Thirty-five bucks.”

“I’ll go down to town hall this afternoon and get one.”

“Great. I’ll be there. Say, what are you doing here?”

So I took him on a tour of the project. I showed him how the screw jacks worked, and how we were going to beef up the framing, and explained how the box beams were constructed, and where we were going to restore the foundation. He seemed quite interested. Then he left.

I went down to the town hall after lunch, and there he was behind the counter. I handed him the moolah, and he handed me the usual cardboard placard. I know how these things go, so I asked him how I should contact him for a final inspection, and if he wanted to perform any incremental inspections, like the foundation or framing or whatever.

“Oh, I’m not qualified to inspect your work. I barely understand what you’re doing. You can inspect it yourself when you’re done.”

Man, I love Maine sometimes.

[We’ll slip a foundation under this mess soon. Tune in tomorrow. And tell a friend that Sippican Cottage is back.]