As you may know we’ve just had our porch removed for reconstruction. As for the old porch it’s sitting in a huge pile on our drive awaiting a trip to tip. We have kept all the fancy bits such as the acorns, cornices, arches, pillars and some of the main heavy beams, the rest wasn’t worth saving.
The last few weekends we’ve been taking it to the dump and it was when we were going through the pile that I noticed a hidden arch. I had previously noticed a curved relief on the inside of the porch (see photos below) but always thought it was an odd, but nice bit of detail.
As you can see in the picture below the arch pieces just came apart when I was moving them. I think they’re original to the house as we’ve seen the green paint everywhere. I do like this old arch, seems grander that what they replaced it with but I think we’re stuck with the current design. Maybe I’ll re-add the arch trim inside the porch.
One day I hope to find some old, old photos of the house. I think the oldest we have are probably from the 50’s or 60’s.
On a different topic, we’ve been granted permission by the City of Kingston, Building Department to install traditional sash windows with period wavy glass (we have a lot of this glass), combined with winter storm panels for additional insulation. Now we just have to start making them. That’s nice windows so better get cracking.
For the last coupe of years the rough openings for windows have been boarded up so it will be lovely to see what it’s like with a bit of natural light.
But in a nice way. I was planning on doing most of the internal framing myself but Andre, who is working on our porch, had some spare time so we were glad to hand this project over to him. When working for Andre we pay by the hour, more expensive, but it means that he and Jerrid can work with minimum time pressure and get it done correctly.
No complaints with the workmanship, decent nailing, snug joints and no splits and I’d recommend Andre to anyone who is in need of an intelligent and talented carpenter.
For the framing we went with 2×6″ so we could get a decent amount of insulation in the walls. Building department said we’d pass code using 2×4″ (R15 Rockwool), but we decided to increase this to 2×8″ (R30 Rockwool) for the rear wall and 2×6″ (R23 Rockwool) for the remaining walls. Because the walls are uneven, these are the minimum thicknesses we’ll be using. I know people add even more insulation but I think this will be enough to keep us cosy.
Another advantage in using 2×6″ is that it’ll give us larger window ledges (technically I think these are called window stools) for plants etc. We’ll also add a bit of a bevel to the window openings so we can get more light it, a nice detail I think. Below are some samples images of beveled window opening with large ledges.
A while back Andre mentioned how the ceiling sloped down on one side due to wall subsidence over the years and last week I asked whether he could help flatten out the ceiling to make it easier to sheetrock and indeed he did that by sistering on a bunch of 2×8″. It does mean that the ceiling is maybe 3-4″ lower in some places.
Finally it feels like things are starting to take shape. Next steps are for us to finish off the internal framing for the bathroom wall – we want to add some built in cabinets, hence why we’ll do this wall. Also there is a small wall in the doorway which we’ll frame up and add a built in seat. After that it will electrical, plumbing, insulation and then sheetrock and plastering.
As the end of the year draws nigh and the sun sets over Disaster Mansion, I’d like to recap on what we’ve been up to over the year, what’s given light and what has cast shadows.
We are now entering the sixth year working on the house and we have definitely slowing down a bit from the previous year. I contribute this to an increased work load in my day job and I think our enthusiasm has dwindling a tad. Don’t worry we’re far from giving up and are looking forward to longer and warmer days.
January
As a winter project I finished restoring my Dad’s old Record No. 52 vice which I’d brought back from the UK the previous Autumn. It came out well but still needs to be mounted on a table somewhere, which does bring up something we must do this year, clean up our house. We have stuff everywhere, no surfaces to really work on and trip hazards everywhere.
About this time I also tried germinating trees from seeds/acorns I had collected the previous year, amongst these were seeds from our old Japanese Maple which is on it’s way out and acorns from various trees I came across. This is still work in progress and I hope to plant some of these saplings in the garden this year.
February
This was the month to finally remove the band-aid and find out what bodge job was going on in the rear corner of our basement wall and what a mess it was. This was the corner of the house where the single down pipe from the roof gutter was located and when that broke, decade ago, water just poured down the side of the house, the result of which rotted out the rim beam, floor joists and side cladding of the house. Rather that do a proper fix and replace the wood, they just applied bricks and a lot of cement, thanks. To cut a long story short, repairing the stone work of this corner took a lot longer than I expected and continued for a few months.
During February we decided that it was time to build a rack to store our much loved wavy glass which we had picked up a few years ago. We have a lot of this glass and it was stacked against walls around our house and every now and then we’d break some of it. As this type of glass is becoming quite collectible we thought we needed to take better care of it.
Incidentally we bought maybe 400lbs in weight of this glass from a chap in Connecticut who used to make reproduction antique mirrors from it. He had a glazer friend who would save all this glass whenever he replaced old windows with modern pvc style windows. Took us three car trips to bring it all back.
March
During this month we continued working on the rear corner wall I mentioned above, I was moving slowly around this area as most of the rim beam would crumble in your fingers, floor joists weren’t even connecting to the wall etc, which pretty meant that that corner of the house was being held up by the house itself. We finished off this month by adding additional supports to that corner of the house.
We also had a mystery object quiz which Troy Ellen Dixon and Abigail Simon won, both of which still haven’t received their prize (a jar of our DnA Hot Sauce), my apologies.
April
Still too cold for us to start rebuilding the corner wall so we decided to demo the rear balcony, it wasn’t original and wasn’t in the best of shapes and demo is always quite satisfying. We will replace it but it will be with a triangular balcony to match the roof line.
I started to work on the replacements rim beams which I initially decided to do in pressure treated wood, but that would change. During this time Aimee was working on building a small retaining wall with all the huge rocks that we had dug up, idea was to keep it simple with a rustic charm and I think we achieved that.
May
Who will rid me of these turbulent pests? The pests being an infestation of black aphids on our woven Rose of Sharon hedge and by chance I got a call from some ladybirds who said that they would be happy to help for a small fee. With the deal done I released them onto the hedge, only to find out that they’d buggered off by the next day – just can’t get the staff these days!!! That said in a week or so the aphids had pretty much disappeared.
Work continued on the replacing the rim joist but the uneven surface made making the joist difficult to make, so in the end, with a laser level I ground down the top of the wall until it was flat. The mortar was easy to grind, but the stone took quite a while, worth it as I didn’t have to deal with an elevation of an inch or two between the two ends of the wall.
We turned up one day to find our side garden and shrubs trashed by workmen replacing the next doors roof (house owned by a bank). I’ve witnessed similar repairs and they usually treat neighbouring properties with respect and tarp everything, but not in our case. We asked them to tidy up and leave, which they eventually did.
During this month I continued working on the rim beam and Aimee worked on improving our rock garden and small retaining wall. By the way I’m not really sure what the beam that runs along the top of the ground floor wall is called. I’ve been told it’s a rim joist/beam, a sill beam/plate etc. so in my posts I probably call it all sorts of things
July
We finally finished the wall and rim joist repair which took me much longer than I had anticipated, that said I did remake the rim joist out of old growth lumber to match the existing wood as I didn’t like the look of the pressure treated stuff. All in all I was pleased with how it came out. The floor joists still remain to be done.
It was a nice surprise to hear that house had been selected as a candidate for the New York Historic Registry!!!
Potential candidates for a historic district include 1 Ponckhockie Street (c. 1870), which the survey calls “the finest and largest brick example of an Italianate house” in Ponckhockie; 9 Grove Street (c. 1880), one of the few high-style Queen Anne houses in the neighborhood and one of two executed in brick; and 54 Gill Street (c. 1869), the former home of David Gill Sr., for whom the street is named and possibly the largest wooden Italianate house in Ponckhockie. Rhoads wrote in his Kingston architectural guide that the owner of 54 Gill accomplished “a virtuoso performance with Italianate paired brackets supporting the projecting eaves ….” Its rehabilitation is being documented online at the Disaster Mansion website.
This month I also tried to coat the utility room floor with a two part epoxy. Things didn’t go to plan and it turned into a bit of a disaster. Everything has now been rectified and we now have a good solid epoxy flooring, only trouble is that it looks ugly. We do have some one part epoxy floor paint so I’ll apply a coat of that which is super easy to do.
Existing ground floor door isn’t original and didn’t line up vertically with the door above so we decided to fix this. This was perfect timing as we had previously restored what we think was the original door which we found rotting away in the garage a few years ago.
I did make a few mistakes, judging the size of the opening, which meant I had to spend a few weekends fixing my mistakes, frustrating, but all looking good now. We’re not making the door frame, instead we’re getting a friend, Josh Finn, to do this.
I know I’ve been criticized for not paying people to do things and it’s not because I don’t want to spend the money or have to do everything myself, I just want to hire people who will do it right and quite frankly those people are hard to find. It seems that a significant number of people around here who’ve had major construction done, have had significant issues with the work. We’ve been stung once and had to redo a lot of the work, which can take a long time.
To cut a long story short, I trust Josh to do a good job that will still be standing for decades to come
We also got around to sealing the concrete floors with a one part epoxy. It’s simple to apply and will stop concrete dust from bing kicked up all the time and this will probably be our floor for a while after we move in. As we have so much stuff downstairs we are doing it room by room and we started on the smallest first. Color options were battleship grey or battleship grey so the choice was easy.
Having finished the rim joist it was time to replace the floor joists. About four of them were badly rotten and not even connected to anything, just hanging in the air. Rather than do a butt joint and sister them I decided to try some joint work to add a little more strength. I’ll still sister, but liked the aesthetics of a nice joint. Royal pain in the butt to make them, but I think they all turned out pretty good. For the wood I used some old growth timber left over from a previous wall demo.
During the time I was doing this Aimee was shifting dirt from the driveway. This was dirt removed from the side of the house when we installed our foundation drain and for the last year or so we’ve been wondering how to get rid out it. A couple of times we almost pulled the trigger on getting a skip (dumpster), which can be expensive as they charge by the weight, and then we had the genius idea of just dumping it around the back of our house, where we had the perfect spot for it. Not sure why we didn’t think of this before.
There was a lot of soil to move and Aimee patiently moved it, two small buckets at time, over many weekends and evenings and eventually the drive was clear. What a sterling effort, well done!!!! We still have a bit more to move from the front of the house but we still have room out back.
Not much to report, I was still probably fixing up the floor joists and Aimee, still shifting dirt. We were also away for two weeks in the UK which was lovely, lots of curry, steak pies and fish and chips. [spfx: hearty belch from Aimee]
November
Earlier this year we decided that our porch needed a little tlc and after a brief search we were introduced to Andre Ernst, a skilled craftsman who specializes in timber framed houses. We met with Andre and he agreed to work on the porch which we decided needed to be completely rebuilt.
Whilst waiting for the building permit to come through, Andre worked on sistering all the floor joists on the ground floor, probably not necessary, but we’re now assured that the floor above can withstand a lot more weight. As all the beams were exposed and free of electrics and plumbing, this was probably the only opportunity we’d have. Very pleased with Andre’s work.
Our permit was eventually approved and after Andre erected scaffolding and did a final inspection of the porch and roof, he decided that everything needed to come down, a shame, but it did look pretty rotten and was coming away from the house.
For this porch work the building department wanted us to present to the City of Kingston’s, Historic Landmarks Preservation Commissions, which we did. We were a little nervous, but after listening to us they were very supportive. The plan we presented to them was to rebuild as it was, with the exception that the structure will be beefed up a bit.
For the past couple of months I’ve been making moulds to form short concrete columns for the ground floor porch posts to sit on. Our existing ground floor porch posts were in contact with the ground which could lead to rot, hence the idea to add concrete columns. I wasn’t happy with the firsts set of mould so remade then, not a trivial task.
So in reflection I feel this year was an improvement on the last, I think we did a bit less work ourselves but found some decent craftsman to take our place, specifically Andre Ernst. We are definitely slowing down, both physically and mentally but I’m hoping that it’s balanced by future jobs being less physical and more artistic in nature (hence fun)!
We’re also excited to continue working on our garden – as a kid my parents would try and get us to help weed the garden and we sucked at it, nowadays I find weeding quite relaxing, how times have changed!!!
Here’s to a healthy, peaceful and cheerful 2024 to all of you that have been following our progress. I special call out to Chris and Ian who are constantly giving us positive feedback – thank you, it means a lot.
Lastly a toast to my cousin Jonathon who sadly left us shortly before Christmas – it would have been great to have you visit. Jonathon’s on the right and I’m on the left.
Lastly we made a small video in which we tried to encapsulate all of the above work.
And what a pain this has been. If it wasn’t for the fact that I’ve been crazy busy at work and this is the second set of moulds I’ve made this project would have been fun.
Stepping back, I’ve been making moulds to form short concrete columns for the ground floor porch posts to sit on. Our existing ground floor porch posts were in contact with the ground which could lead to rot, hence the idea to add short concrete columns. Size wise they are about 17″ high by 7″ x 16″, wide enough to fit double columns on, with the corner columns able to fit three columns.
The idea was to design the columns so they’d blend in with the existing architecture, not sure I achieved it but I think we’ve done a decent job and once painted and weathered, they’ll probably look as though they’re original, which is of course what I will tell everyone, hand chiseled over a century ago from the finest Kingston stone! First set of moulds were made of wood and ply and I made the parts at different times so when I went to fit everything together there were small gaps here and there which I wasn’t happy with.
The second set of moulds were made from MDF and I tried to make all the matching pieces at the same time so everything would fit. Downside of MDF is that the dust from cutting it is terrible, unlike cutting wood, the particles left from cutting MDF is like flour so full respiration mask and vacuums are required. MDF is a versatile material but has its draw backs. If I were to do this again, I’d use pine again but back it with a sturdy baltic birch ply. MDF makes such a mess.
Everything was made using router table, table saw and miter saw.
I coated the finished pieces with a penetrating epoxy and once set I applied a liberal coating of furniture wax. The last release coat will be cooking oil which Andre will apply on the day. I’ve only made two moulds one for the double column and one for the triple column so they need to be reused.
We’ll need to fix a few small blemishes and also add a slight chamfer to the top so water drains away from the wooden post. Eventually we’ll get around to painting them.
Because the temperatures are now dipping below freezing (which can be disastrous for curing concrete), Andre constructed a 2″ foam box, which was then wrapped in shipping blankets along with a small heater on a thermostat. When I checked the temperature one night, the reading was about 12.5C/55F, which is great. In most cases the majority of the cure happens within the first 24 hours after which you are pretty much in the clear.
A while back we were discussing some joist repairs I was doing with our carpenter, Andre, and he thought the original floor joists over the main span of the ground floor probably wouldn’t be up to modern building code, especially as in places the joist had been badly butchered with 3-4″ notches cut out of them.
We could have left it as it was, and building inspectors would have probably grand-fathered it in etc, but then someone, maybe Derrick, John Paul or Andre mentioned that houses now have to carry a greater load, basically because we cram in more physical stuff, just look around and imagine how sparse your place would have been a century ago. In addition people socilaised differently a century ago, what may have been a tea party for ten could now be a party for forty, anyway you get the idea. So if you’re doing a major renovation of an old house it’s probably wise to think of what loads the house was designed to bear and plan for what you expect the new loads to be.
To cut a long story short Andre thought that it would be a good idea to strengthen these floor joists by adding extra wood along the whole length of them, a process known as “sistering”, why that name, I have no idea and a google search wasn’t conclusive but it does reminds me of the bill board on the show, Schitt’s Creek, “Welcome to Schitt’s Creek Where everyone fits it“. If you know, you know.
Our floor joists are about 8 – 9″ tall so Andre did a good job of cutting 2×10’s back to size, plus any necessary shimming. It does take a lot longer but now the new sistered joists are flush top and bottom with the originals. I’m pleased with the work Andre and Jerrid did, thank you. This is another job off our hands.
We really only had one shot to do this work before the electrician and plumber starts pulling wires and pipes through the joist so I’m glad we did it. This work will benefit the house and occupants for decades if not centuries. I appreciate you bringing this up Andre.
Repairing the porch has been on the books since early this year. It has never been safe to walk to the far ends of the porch and it was starting to pull away from the house a bit. The idea was to replace the lower single supports with double supports and then working upwards, replacing the deck, then upper supports etc. It would have been a big job, possibly beyond our skill level and taken us ages, so Aimee suggested we look to see if we can find someone competent and passionate about this kind of work to undertake this project and not make a bodge out it. Fortunately a partner of one of Aimees work colleagues was a timber frame carpenter which seemed the right sort of skill set and his name was Andre Ernst.
We met Andre a few months ago, explained how we didn’t want a pressure treated nail-gun porch, but more of a hand crafted, near exact replacement, whilst beefing up the strength slightly where possible. Andre definitely knew his stuff and understood what we wanted, but I think what sold it for me was seeing the artistry of his work, see Hudson Valley Timber Frames for some examples of his work. That to me showed me he took pride in his work.
The initial plan was to break the project into two phases, phase one would be to rebuild everything up to the the porch roof and phase two would be to rebuild the roof. During phase one the roof would be supported.
Once the scaffolding went up and a more thorough inspection was carried out it was deemed that the whole porch was in danger of collapse with the ends of the roof rafters rotten and pulling away from the house and the second floor vertical columns bowing out with barely any solid wood connecting them to the roof, so the decision was made to remove all of the porch as part of phase one. Historical society and building department were informed of this decision. I didn’t expect it to come down so quickly, but if it’s unsafe, why wait. Andre did save a lot of the wood so we could recreate the new roof exactly and you can see that the rot is major.
Sure the porch could have lasted for maybe months or years longer, but maybe not. Reminds me of
a sad tale of students losing their lives across from where I used to work when their balcony collapsed, Berkeley balcony incident, all very sad and I still feel for all those victims.
Obviously it would have been great if we could have just replaced the odd bit of wood here and there in order to keep the originality, but the decay at the base of the roof was pretty bad. The porch roof gutters had long gone so any rain water would have just been soaking the base of the roof, probably for decades, so the rot is not surprising.
We asked Andre to save all the detailed bits such as the corbels, arches, acorns, curved roof rafters and first floor vertical supports, and we’ll restore a lot of this and if we can’t then they will be used as templates. We won’t reuse the vertical supports for the front porch but I might see if they can be restored and used when we rebuild the rear balcony which is not original and damn ugly.
We did inform the City of Kingston’s, Historic Landmarks Preservation Commissions that the roof needed to be removed and we are appreciative of their support.
On deconstruction, I did like the way that the concrete tiles were trimmed nicely around the profile of the columns, nice touch, however an even nicer touch was how the vertical columns were notched out to fit the original wooden sidings so they sat flush with no gaps, that’s pretty impressive. I’m going to want the new pillars to be the same. No one would bother with that sort of detail nowadays, hence why I think it’s important for the houses originality, sure it’s new wood, but installed the original way.
Back in August we painted the ground floor bedroom. This last week we managed to paint the rest of it. Like the bedroom we used a one-part water based epoxy and then finished it off with a coat of textured clear topcoat. The topcoat has anti-slip additive so there’s a bit of grip so people won’t slip if it gets wet. The paint is supposed to be rated for garages, but I doubt it could stand up to too much rough treatment. I’m glad we got this done as soon it’ll be too cold to do it.
We first had to roughen up the surface of the floor with a diamond pad on our orbital sander, took a while and luckily I forget camera on second day so most of that isn’t in the video which is fortunate and it’s almost as exciting as watching paint dry! Note, if you ever encounter sanding pads not sticky well to your sander then that is probably because the plastic velcro hooks on the sander have softened due to heat build up, this can easily be fixed as most manufactures sell replacement pads for about $10.
To make cleaning easier we plan to tile the areas that will receive the most abuse, such as the entry area, kitchen and bathroom. Not sure what we will cover the remaining floor with, possibly wood but for now we’ll just carpet these as we have a few of them in storage.
Back again to the front door. We’re trying to get the opening correct for the door we restored a few years ago. The current door (circa 70s, 80s) doesn’t align vertically with the door above it, so our aim is to shift the door a bit to the left so it does – we believe the original door was centered. The new door is 3″ wider than the current door but we will still hope to have side windows to let in a bit more light.
We decided to enlist the help of the talented Josh Finn to build us a new door frame and to install the door. Josh’s initial sketch (below) shows that with the current door opening the side windows would only be 2.5″ wide which isn’t very much so I’ve been working on making the door way gap a little larger. As it turned out the pressure treated wood I added to either side of the newly extended wall wasn’t square – not sure how that happened, user error or maybe the mortar pushed it out, anyway it was bugging me so I ripped both of them off, which in effect undid a couple of days work – bummer but I want to get it right.
I then got back to my least favourite task of chiseling and grinding away at the wall, annoying as we had just rebuilt one side of the wall. Grinding away the lime mortar is easy as it still reasonably soft (lime mortar takes weeks to cure), but the rocks are really tough to grind down. From the pictures there doesn’t look like there are many rocks, but if you scroll to the bottom, you can see them after I sprayed the lime with water. I estimate 12 hours to finish the grinding. It’s also very messy, with stuff going everywhere and clouds of dust.
First pass of the grinding removed 1″ – 2″ of the new wall and then I decided to remove another 1″ – 2″ but this time, not extending to the outside so the pressure treated wooden door jams aren’t visible from the outside. You can see the the laser line I’m trying to keep to in the photos below.
Hopefully now, our side windows will be at least 4″ wide which I think is reasonable.
Because the ground walls aren’t perfect, we sprayed them with lime mortar and then I plan to grind the surface flat so the door jams fits snugly. Lime mortar is fast to grind away, just very messy. While we’re spraying mortar we also started to spray the few remaining untreated walls in the house. There was a bit of prep as we had to remove all the lose stuff which covered most of the surface.
So having just repaired the rim joist, it’s now time to replace the rotten floor joists, three to be precise. Due to rot, none of these attached to the rim joist and were just hanging mid air and two of them had huge chunks cut out of them, possibly for duct work so they were severely compromised.
Like most projects on the house I wanted to do a respectful job so instead of butt jointing in a new piece and sistering on a 2×8″ (adding extra wood to strengthen a damaged beam), I thought I’d do some joint work. I’ll still add a 2×8″ but only on one side as my joint will be stronger than a butt joint. I’m not sure this joint has a name, it’s slightly similar to a scarf joint.
I probably would have done a fancier job if it wasn’t so difficult to cut, standing on a ladder is not the easiest position to cut from. For the first beam I made some templates which I attached to the beam and used a Sawzall to rough cut, finishing off with a hand saw and plane – that was hard work. I then had the idea of using a trim router and that worked out great. I did have to to do multiple passes as a trim router as the name suggests isn’t supposed to remove a lot of wood in one pass. It probably took me about 3 – 4 hours to cut a single joist like this, luckily I only have three.
As I didn’t have any wood with similar dimensions to the joist, I laminated three pieces of old growth lumber together. I used West System epoxy so this will be a stronger than wood bond, plus I’m running 3/8″ bolts vertically through the joint as an extra safe guard. The reason the center piece is lighter is because I planed it down.
And this is how they finally turned out and I will secure these floor joists to the rim joist with 3/16″ thick steel angle brackets. I know these aren’t the finest or strongest joints, but I think they are decent, plus the addition of another sistered 2×8″ will make every rock solid.
This whole job, repairing wall, replacing rim and floor joists has taken me a few months – I wasn’t expecting it to take this long, but in most endeavours the first time you do something there’s a learning curve.
During the excavation of our basement floor and foundation drain we accumulated a large quantity of sandy soil. We’ve been pondering about what to do with the dirt for last year or two. We thought of getting a skip (dumpster), finding someone who wanted dirt (people do) and then we realised that we had the perfect spot for it at the back of our garden – don’t know why we didn’t think of this earlier.
Aimee kindly took on this task and over the last 6 weeks or so has been slowly moving the soil, two small buckets at a time. It’s been a long slog, especially in the hot humid weather we’ve been having, but it’s a good work out.
I didn’t start recording this until Aimee had removed about a foot of dirt from in front of the garage and I accidentley deleted the last video when we finally cleared the driveway.
It’s nice to have reclaimed our driveway and make our property a bit more presentable and we’re also hoping to remove the dirt from the front of the house as well.
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