Interestingly, Elastic Deformation Is the Name of My Smashing Pumpkins Tribute Band. But I Digress

Well, we’ve got to get rid of the remaining obstacles to progress. No, I’m not talking about politics. I was referring to the last two sets of Damocles detritus left by the ghosts of tenants past. Remember this little number from a few days ago?

It was an attempt worthy of Canute to stop the tide of subsidence in the back of the house. It’s all wrong and silly, of course, but it’s still doing something. This is where the “selective” in selective demolition really matters. You can’t just start knocking things out of your way, because you’ll introduce motion. Motion is bad in construction. Once things start moving in a house, they tend to have a cascade effect. My house isn’t constructed as well as a house of cards, but it’s the same general idea. You have to be careful how you disassemble stuff. I can’t fix the mess until the mess is out of the way but the mess is in the way so I can’t fix the stuff. It’s a Yossarian beam.

The beam you’re looking at is ridiculous. It’s four 2 x 6s nailed together, with another 2 x 6 nailed flat on the bottom of it for good measure.  People have all these ideas in their head about how the world works, but the world doesn’t really cooperate with ideas very well. Reality intrudes, sometimes on your head. That’s something like a ten-foot span, and it’s holding up a lot of weight. Several floors of weight, and a roof, and my wife making lunch. A beam (you can use a chart for headers over doors and windows to find this out) made from four 2 x 12s, twice as big as what they made, is only rated for an 8′ span. The beam they made is maybe half as strong as it needs to be, and looks it. And of course, after they figured that wood is strong, so just add more of it, they doubled down with concrete is indestructible, and just plopped the column jack on a two-inch thick concrete floor, instead of a making a footing to properly support the weight. They didn’t understand that the floor is only there to keep your feet from getting muddy when you’re looking for your skis in the fall.

As you can see, the beam is smiling at us, and the foot of the column on the right can faintly hear Mandarin being spoken. Also, if you look at the side wall over yonder, you can see that someone tried to pour a concrete wall on top of the granite blocks, next to the brick infill. It stopped some of the slouching on that side of the house, but because of the funky way the house is framed, the back wall of the house can move independently of the side walls. It just kept sinking into the slough of despond I call a back yard. Eventually, we’ll have to jack up the sidewalls independently of the back wall, and when they catch up, support everything and nail it together. Right now, the beam has to go.

Here’s what we set up to safely remove the beam and columns: Next to nothing. There’s a temporary shoring beam set up on the left, and a temporary (“fly”) wall set up to hold up the floor. That’s all it took to replace all that lumber and the columns. We used two cut-offs from the screw jack posts to spread the load on the floor and catch two intermediate joists, and two 2x4s from the dump to hold the thing up. The diagonal cross brace matters. It keeps the posts from bending outwards, and I needed a place to hang an extension cord.

We built all these temporary supports using nifty saberdrive screws. They start their own hole, have serrated threads so they don’t slip, and they cut through anything wood-like. They clean out their own hole while they’re being driven, and walk your dog and mow your lawn for you, I think. They’re easy to remove from temporary supports and reuse them over and over because the star point heads don’t strip out like Phillips head screws. They look like this:I can tell they’re better than anything else, because they’ve disappeared from every hardware store and lumber yard within an hour of my house. If they sucked, I could still buy them.

Now we have to get rid of the last Damocles pig sticker. There’s a small steel beam tucked up at the ceiling, sitting on two columns. We gotta be careful with this one:

The main carrying beam for the house is sitting on that. It’s supposed to sit on that big timber column in the back wall, and you can see it bending while it tries, but the post is way too sunk into the raccoon’s conversation pit down below to meet up with it. I’m not worried about supporting the weight on the beam. It’s a short span and only one floor is sitting on it because of the odd way the house is framed. I’m worried about dropping that iron thing on my son, who I like, or me, who I don’t like nearly as much but who else will look out for me? You can’t lower column jacks, really, and even if you could catch that steel beam when it fell (no thanks), if the columns topple over they don’t feel good when they hit you. So we put a single screw jack under the beam, that’s all it took, and knocked together a cradle under the beam before we removed the steel columns. Like so:

The thing was heavy, but two men, or more accurately, one lazy man and one barely man, could slide it out safely and get it on the ground.

Now we have a different problem, caused by all the other problems, but hidden until now. The back of the house is concave. It makes sense. As the foundation wasted away, the back wall slumped, and it started to bow outward at the bottom and bend inward up higher as the upper storeys and the roof pushed down on it. Once we lifted the house off the ground, the bottom swung way from the basement.  That’s because of some creep.

No, I’m not referring to myself, or the former renovators of my house. I’m referring to a property of wood. According to the American Wood Council, creep is defined as:

The time-dependent deformation of loaded member undergoing elastic deformation.

If you don’t speak Wood Esperanto, I’ll translate: If you bend a piece of wood long enough, it stays bent. Ours did. Before we could put a foundation under the center of the back wall, we’d have to cajole it back into place. Here’s how we did it.

First, we put a big lag eyebolt into the big timber sill. Like this:

Then we lag bolted a chintzy Harbor Freight winch to the (charred) main carrying beam. We formerly used the winch to pull a woodburning furnace into our basement. Don’t ask me about that little interlude, or you’ll get another month-long saga.

Anyway, the Heir cranked that mother, and when the wall was back somewhere close to where it belonged, we nailed two of those lovely free 2x4s to the floor framing and the sill to make triangles, which are stronger and sexier than rectangles, with the added benefit of being easier to stumble into over and over, which I did.

We were feeling pretty good about ourselves at this point, which is always a mistake. We looked at the ground under one of the big, newly freed barn door openings. Ruh roh Shaggy:

Sawdust is one thing. Cellulose talcum powder like that is something else. Let’s look up above.

Yup, we got visited by the two most unwelcome guests a remodeler can meet, and both in one day: Carpenter ants, and then a building inspector.

[Tune in tomorrow for more remuddling fun, and tell a friend about Sippican Cottage]

Lumbering Around the Back Yard

Alright, we’re going to need some lumber. There’s no way around it. We have to spend money. Luckily, we did this job ten years ago, and lumber was plenty cheap then compared to now. It didn’t seem cheap at the time, because no one had any money back then, especially me. Lumber is expensive now because everyone has so much money that money is damn near worthless. The effect is the same. In any case, we have to be thrifty.

So it pained me to buy pressure treated 4x4s just to use them as the shafts for our screw jacks, so I didn’t. I bought them to use as shafts, all the while planning to cut them up after and fix the front and side porches with them when we were through. Nothing would go to the dump, except me, looking for more wood to take home. There are some regular old SPF (spruce, pine, fir framing lumber) 2x8s in there, too. The floor above the basement basement was laid out in the “every once in a while on center” motif, instead of the usual 16″, so we’re going to add some joists to take a little of the sproing out of the floor while we’re at it.

Before we begin banging nails, we have to determine what’s what, once and for all. Any medic will tell you can’t stop the bleeding properly until you find all the exit wounds. We had to figure out a proper height for the back wall of the house, and aim for it. That doesn’t mean I was going to put the house entirely to rights. I’m of a practical nature, and practically speaking, the house was just north of a tear down project. I know how to completely renovate a house, and truly straighten everything out. I also know when it just ain’t worth it. Good enough is good enough, I always say. We’d just like to stop listing to port when we walk through the kitchen.

So we laid a level on the wall to get some idea of how bad the house had sagged over the last century. Look at the difference between the level and the lines on the back of the board sheathing. Jinkies, this is going to take some effort. The house has too much slope for plumbing pipes, never mind a supporting wall. There’s a lesson in there, too. No house slumps like that all at once. If it did, it would get it over with and collapse in a heap tout de suite. What happens is that slowly, over decades, it loses a little bit of its underpinning at a time, and slouches a bit, and then a bit more, etc.. Then someone tries to deal with the result, instead of the actual problem, and adds props and patches and whatnot. The house slowly morphs into another shape. And something that takes a century to move is going to put up quite a struggle when you try to put it back. At that point it isn’t really a renovation. It’s somewhere between an intervention and an exorcism.

I figured out what we could get away with,  and made a reference mark on a foundation wall in a handy spot. The mark itself didn’t signify anything. It was simply there so that every other measurement could be compared to that mark. You can do a lot of renovation and building work with simple approaches like that. If you watch TV, you’d figure you’d need a laser level and other fancy electronic stuff in there. Good luck using it in the forest of props holding up the floor above. Besides, we don’t have the time and material and manpower necessary to hit laser lines anyway. When good enough is good enough, you can use simple tools and barbarous measuring schemes and rules of thumb while hitting your thumb, and get a decent result. We just used a long level, a short level, some straightedges, tape measures, a plumb bob, and some string to lay everything out and keep track of it. They built the pyramids with just that sort of stuff, and a little ingenuity. What do I need a particle accelerator for?

Now we’re doing demolition in earnest. If you get your construction cues from shelter shows, you have a very warped idea of what demolition entails. TV thinks that women who weigh nine stone perform demolition by kicking their foot through walls and giving each other high fives. They’re generally wearing open-toed shoes and safety glasses, an amusing combination.

When you’re doing renovation, you don’t just wreck everything by smashing at it. The exact term for the operation is selective demolition. You’re supposed to remove what isn’t staying, and make room for the new stuff. You take things apart, preserving what’s still sound. You don’t wreck stuff in a frenzy. I’ve done all sorts of construction, and people hurt themselves most often during demolition. They’re terrified of ladders and power tools but don’t have any respect for rusty nails and things falling on their heads.

Selective demolition is especially selective when it’s hard to figure out what the hell the people who came before you were up to. You don’t want to start whaling on things that might have pipes, or wires, or structural functions they shouldn’t. We took the basement basement apart like an unexploded bomb. We appraised the function of each piece, which was generally comic relief, and then removed it. We use pry bars and a sawzall, generally. As quickly as possible, we’d clear out the remuddling puckerbrush and add the screw jacks we were going to use to raise and support the house. Like this:

That’s a big, steel plate that one is sitting on, that we found down there and repurposed. By taking the place apart, instead of just wrecking it, we were able to salvage all sorts of lumber, too. There was more than enough material down there to make all the repairs they attempted to make. They just didn’t know how to actually fix anything.

Each thing we removed opened up the construction vista and let us get at something else, which was gratifying. After a while, we were able to remove most of the cobwebs, which we assumed were structural at first, due to their density, but they turned out to be mostly decorative. The big thing to get out of the way was the ridiculous steel beam sticking out of the back of the house. First we had to get the back of the house suspended on five screwjacks inside and out, like this:

Steel be heavy, people, but we smart. Not smart enough to avoid buying this house, but smart enough to drop the beam on some round iron pipe and roll it out. Aah, now we can really start working.

In the next photo, you can see a ten-foot 4×4 beam we’re using as cribbing. There are three, ten-ton bottle jacks moving everything skyward. They all have steel plates on top of their plungers to keep them from simply boring a hole in the cribbing. You lift with all three, scurrying from one to the next to keep it moving evenly, then turn the wing screws you see at the foot of the jacks. You turn the screws by banging on the wings with a rubber mallet. That area you see where the bottle jacks are working is where the foundation is supposed to be, but isn’t. And so you see why the screw jacks are located both inside and outside the wall, instead of relying on anything pushing straight up. It’s durn difficult to built a house in midair, and then slip a foundation under it, but we’re going to do it.

[More foundation tomorrow. Feel free to mock me in the comments, and tell a friend about SippicanCottage.com]

Lagging Behind the House

So let’s get cracking. Let’s see what we have here. There’s the boat I made in the basement, one house ago, that never got launched. If the rain ever gets biblical again, I’m ready. Other than that, leisure is just a word in the dictionary. I’ve seen it in there, long ago, but I can’t remember its definition, so the boat is just in the way all the time.

Ah, yes, the white door. It’s a very old door, much older than the house, which is over a hundred years old. The house is Victorian, the door is Colonial. It had a thumb latch instead of a knob. That kind of old.

Someone who might have been good at something, you never know, but certainly wasn’t good at carpentry, framed out a barbarous opening to get out of the basement they had just boarded up. They figured wrong, I imagine, and the door didn’t fit the opening they made for it, so they cut four inches off the top of the door to make it fit.

The resulting doorway was remarkable. I appreciate remarkable things, because they are so rare. That’s what makes them remarkable, isn’t it? Anyway, that doorway was precisely the wrong height. It wasn’t basically the wrong height, or sorta the wrong height, or even demonstrably the wrong height. It was subtly, perfectly the wrong height for a six-foot-two person, which I used to be, before I started exiting the house through that door. Now I’m slightly shorter, because that door frame would catch my fontanel, which was just starting to firm up, and give me a headache every day, as if I needed another one. I have uttered bad things while passing through that doorway. I must admit, however, that scraping my scalp on that door, over and over, was ultimately good for me. It took my mind off my throbbing ankle from bashing it into the bizarrely placed I-beam in the dark a few seconds before.

That green cabinet there was a hoot. It came with the house. I opened it up the first time with a Bowie knife in my off hand, because I had no idea what I’d find in it. It was as empty as a politician’s promise, thank Jeebus. It was pretty old, and had a ghostly, faded hand drawn label that said Civil Defense, which gave me a chuckle. Wrap your head around this: In the event the Reds decide to push the button down, it appears the local citizenry was supposed to cower in this basement for safety. I’m not sure it would withstand an atomic blast. I’m afraid to be in there on a breezy day.

So let’s start peeling back the layers of this remuddling onion and see what we’ve got. Hmm, we’ve got basically nothing. That pocket you see at ground level, the one with a couple of bricks stacked on top of a concrete block, some insulation, and a raccoon’s futon, is where the foundation that holds up the back of the house is supposed to be.

There’s a random metal column, sitting on enough concrete to hold up a Kia, not a house. You can see the original sheathing on the house being revealed. Plywood is a fairly recent invention. Back a century ago, the outside of your (American, northeastern) house would be entirely sheathed in 7/8″ thick boards like these. The plywood you see there is, you guessed it, another boarded up window. We’ll put one back in there, so I can actually see what I’m cracking my shin on, at least until we get rid of that I-beam.

More openings are revealed. The basement basement is basically a two-car garage, with a window between the doors. Apparently, I’m a lucky guy. Not many people discover a free, two-car garage under their house.

I’ve always been lucky. My wife paid five bucks cover to get into the nightclub I was performing in back in the day, and luckily I married the hell out of her before she sobered up and figured out how weird I am. I’m also lucky that no one ever asks my wife if she’s lucky. I shudder to contemplate the answer.

Over on the left there, behind the bicycle, we stripped the wall and found yet another boarded up window. It inspired me to go back and review the deed for the house, and all the associated documents from the bank. I couldn’t find any former owners named Nosferatu, or Alacard, or Van Helsing, or Peter Cushing, or anything similar. I was sure I would. Who else would live like this, on purpose? It’s a dark and bloody mystery. Just like the basement.

If you’re going to get into the housing game at this level, you’re going to have to learn to roll with the punches, and the cracks on the ankle and the scrapes on the head. People with more money than me can act as they please, and write a big check and have someone competent nuke everything from orbit and set it to rights. I gots to do the mostest with the leastest, so I’m always on the lookout for a corner to cut, or more accurately, something I can save instead of replace. There, underneath that nasty plywood, I found two courses of very, very substantial timbers that ran all along the back of the house, over the original barn door openings. By some miracle they weren’t rotten, even though they’d been exposed to the weather for forever and a day. They were acting as a giant header, and the wall framing above it was nailed to it.

It’s an unusual arrangement, but it was strong as hell to have survived the depredations of the denizens of the house for a century. I liked it, and wanted to keep it, but I didn’t quite trust it, sort of like how I feel about our cat. And how she feels about me, I imagine.

At any rate, I simply beefed up the existing structure by adding four very large galvanized lag screws at each framing member. It was a beast of a job to get them in. Old lumber be tough, people. We pre-drilled and waxed the threads and prayed and cursed but they still went in hard. I rummaged around in that drawer we all have that’s filled with stuff you’ll never use, but you’re afraid to throw out. If you’re like me, you’re always in that drawer looking for something more than all the other drawers combined. I found an air wrench I got for free with an air compressor I didn’t get for free. It made that glorious farting noise as it turned that you’re familiar with if you’ve ever sat in the waiting room of a tire store.

So we’re lagging behind the house. Sounds like progress, don’t it? Even if it doesn’t sound like English.