House gets a root canal, well it’s getting under-pinned and new footings. If the house were sentient, I’m sure it would feel pretty bad.
Some of you may have read from previous posts we’ve had a couple of foundation walls collapsing, luckily the house survived both of these stressful events, but did reveal the fact that the house has very shallow foundations walls without footings. If you’re not sure what the difference between the two are, click on the photo below.
The shallowness of the footings and the fact that the soil that they sit on is practically sand is problematic. The lack of depth means that the walls sit above the frost line, which means that the ground beneath will freeze and thaw which will damage the building by moving the foundations walls. See this wiki on ‘frost line’ for a fuller explanation.
It’s been a bit costly but better to do this now when the ground floor is half earthen and we have no tiling or plasterwork to crack, should the house move doing this work – which I’m sure it has.
The first step is to install concrete piles beneath the walls every five to six foot. Adding these will allow Thomas and Matt to remove the soil between them so they can add a footing. As you can see in the photos you can literally put your arm under the walls either to the outside or to another room. I probably would have positioned these piles differently to reduce the chances of the walls cracking, but what is done is done.
It will be nice when all this is finished as the house does seem very precarious and we’re very careful to tread lightly when working upstairs.
Note how sandy the soil is in a few of these photos.
So we’ve gotten over our roof meltdown and the issue I mentioned about how the membrane doesn’t wrap around the edges has been sorted by some metal flashing, though our friend Derrick said that how it had been done will cause problems down the road [spfx: sigh].
The pooling water which Thomas was hoping to fix never was fixed, but I think I can fix that by filling in the hollow with ever enlarging patches of the rubber, only pain is that the chemicals are expensive, you need a cleaning agent, a primer agent and then the glue which would probably cost a few hundred dollars in total.
The new roof was leaking. We contacted Thomas and it looks like the leaks were where the cupola meets the new roof. The cupola was missing the final flashing so temporary stuff was added. It doesn’t look great but the leaks seem to have stopped, phew.
I would still like to redo the roof at some point but that could be years down the road, in the meantime I have to work out a good way to fix this roof once and for all – by the way it’s an old roof so the current gradients aren’t what they were when the house was built etc. Also the flat roof we have has multiple gradients all leading to one point at the back of the house. Also the new cupola adds to the complexity as water now has to drain around it.
Thomas is now working on the foundations and I’m sure we will be happy with the results as he did a good job on the last set of foundations.
After many months waiting for a good spell of weather for the roof, Thomas and Matt have restarted on the roof. The new roof is a EPDM membrane which is a type of rubber sheet about 2mm thick.
The roof was re-started last Thursday and should be finished on Monday and I have to say I am really sad and disappointed with the results:
It all seems a bit of a patch work and looks ugly
There are quite a few large bubbles
There are squishy bits that move down under pressure of a foot
The rubber membrane doesn’t wrap over the edge of the roof, which makes sense to protect the substrate from the weather etc. See diagram below
There about 12 different seams in our EPDM roof, I would have thought you could have got away with four seams joining four pieces of membrane together. PS. most EPDM roof failures are around the seams so it’s a good idea to minimise them
When it rains there are still standing pools of water
This roof looks DIY to me and from the onset I was hoping they would get the levels of the roof right so water would drain correctly, but no, they just built on the existing roof contours. I am really not happy with this and can see this roof being redone (when we can afford it) in a few years down the road. We had plans for a deck but it’s no point in putting that down if the roof has to get ripped up. Sigh.
By the way there is still a complete roll of EPDM plus, so running out of the membrane shouldn’t have been a factor for the existing EPDM patchwork. Aimee’s face sums it up.
What probably makes me most sad is that Aimee and I are trying are hardest to lovingly restore the house and then we get this sort of work. It makes me think what’s the point of all our effort.
So it looks like there was some confusion over the front wall/ foundations, which is the small 4″ high wall you see in the following two photos:
The issue with this wall was that the building inspector had never seen the foundations for this (this work was done by a previous owner), and didn’t know that there was a decent footing underground. The following picture shows these foundations before they were covered up (right-hand side of photo by the green ply).
This morning both our builder Thomas and architect Dave both rang up the building department, sending them pictures and architecture plans etc. and that seemed to resolve the issue. I think there was also some mention of how the house was being shored up, so I think Thomas beefed that up and also fenced off the area.
Building of this block wall should now recommence on Monday 🙂
By the way seeing the house like this I was wondering how it would look if that room was all glass, okay it’s not going to happen but it would give the building an interesting appearance.
Nice surprise this evening when I found a “Stop Work” notice on our door, it was posted today. Thomas and Matt were here today so probably posted after they left. I know I’m joking about this but I’m sure building inspectors do a good job and are just protecting us by making sure no corners are cut in the building process.
I thought it might be how vulnerable the house looks, held up by just a few wooden structs, but when I got back home I looked up the code, “Article IRC 2015, section 403.1” and you can see from one of the photos that it’s to do with the foundations. Not sure what’s going on here so I’ll ask the builder Thomas and our architect Dave Toder.
Just to give you some understanding of what’s going on in the pictures, the wall on the side of the house was the wall that collapsed (eleventh photo), was rebuilt and then had to be demolished (wasn’t up to code) and is now to be rebuilt. The wall at the front was demolished years ago by some previous owner who had started a foundation wall, but gave up, subsequently leaving it shored up with timber and plywood (last but one photo).
Okay this may be a little confusing, in total we have now had two walls collapse which reminds me of a joke, how many ears does Captain Kirk have? Back to walls, we had the wall on the left collapse last year and more recently the one on the right decided it was only fair to do the same.
A month or so ago we had the wall on the left fixed which including demo of the old wall which unfortunately wasn’t cheap, luckily the Iron Bank of Braavos was understanding.
New construction should be up to code and the new section of the wall has really good footings. I would say the footings probably went 4 foot below where the existing foundation wall stopped especially at the front corner. It looked a good solid job.
Again look at the fill, it looks like sand, feels like sand and it is sand.
The small door in the third picture was the original doorway into this room but as we now have a new larger doorway we will probably just make this some sort of storage space or make it into a Harry Potter bedroom.
Fine from the inside that is. In the following first picture you can see the wall of the house above isn’t actually sitting on the wall, rather, it’s between 3 – 6″ inward. Aimee and I aren’t builders, but we both thought this wasn’t right and pretty much every one who looked at it thought it was an odd thing to do including our architect and the structural engineer (who had come to look at the other wall).
Eventually after a conversation with Thomas and our architect, Dave Toder it was decided that the wall should be torn down and rebuilt, this time with 12″ concrete blocks, instead of the 8″ thick blocks. Turns out that Thomas our contractor had used a masonry guy he hadn’t used before. Thomas said he would do the rebuild himself.
Shore up is now complete. Took three of us most of Friday to do it. The hard part was screwing in the huge 6″ lag bolts into the hard old timbers of the house.
We sistered up both sides of each floor joist with 2″x8″ lumber and then bolted each floor joist, either side to the rim beam, with some very heavy duty “L” brackets. These brackets will be permanent and add extra strength to the house for the future.
The header of the framing wall is 3 x 2″x10″, the uprights are 4″x6″ and the base plate is 2 x 2″x8″. After hammering the uprights in place we blocked the uprights top and bottom so they won’t move. All in all very sturdy. The diagonal piece is doing nothing, just needed somewhere to put it.
Thank you again Derrick (wearing the red ear defenders) and John Paul (wearing the head lamp).
The house is still standing and I kid you not this could have been disastrous. The ground by the foundation wall running up by the drive was dug away last weekend to access the old sewer pipe and to install a french drain. In the process the trench was dug below the foundation wall (which was very shallow) by a good foot in parts.
All was fine for most of the day and looking at it, the wall just seemed to descend to the bottom of the trench, however towards the end of the day, a huge chunk of what I thought was wall fell away, leaving the wall unsupported. It wasn’t wall that fell away, it was the soil beneath the foundation wall. This is when the cracking started.
I don’t know where my mind was that day, I wasn’t doing the majority of the trench work that day, but that said, I was in charge.
On Monday Matt Alexander a structural engineer kindly came over to look at the house. He thought that the house should be first shored up and then the middle section of wall should be underpinned before being removed and replaced with a new wall, then we should underpin all the other walls, even those unaffected due to the shallow nature of the walls as this would prevent any future issues. Matt suggested we get our architect to draw up proper engineering plans and to that end we met with Dave Toder this afternoon to discuss details.
Tomorrow (Friday), Derrick and his friend John Paul have kindly offered to help shore the place up to make sure that if the wall does fail further, then the house will still be safe. Thank you Derrick and John Paul.
It was good talking to Matt as he did say that he had seen a lot worse and that the silver lining was that we had exposed a future potential issue and this is an ideal time to fix these sort of issues. The trouble with fixing foundations on a finished house is that sometime the house will flex slightly when it’s being shored up leading to cracks in plaster and tile work etc. We have no plaster or tiles so we don’t have to worry about this, also we have no tidy garden or driveway that we don’t mind digging up. That gave me a little consolation but I’m really annoyed with myself for letting this happen.
In this set of pictures everything was all fine and the first three was Aimee and I working on the trench the weekend before. By the way we had started on this trench last year but we had to stop when the ground froze. In the other pictures you can see my helper Al, who if there was ever an Olympic medal for digging, would get a gold.
This second set is where things started to go wrong, the damp soil looked just like the damp wall above it so I wasn’t really noticing that we were digging so much away. I just thought that as we’re on a slope, then bottom of the wall would also slope down. It wasn’t until a huge chunk of soil fell away that we realised that we had dug too far and that was a little too late as very soon, you could hear lots of strange sounds, a bit like rain actually and then we noticed the cracks and the thick bluestone window plinth snap. I have to admit it was a tad stressful. We shored it up as best we could inside and out and then went to call our friend and advisor Derrick.
As it turns out the sewer pipe (which you can see in the first set of pictures) is below the foundation wall so the wall would have had to been underpinned, but had we done this correctly we wouldn’t have needed to replace the wall $$$.
This is the second wall that collapsed, the same thing happened on the other side of the house. We weren’t responsible for this but it’s interesting that it sounded the same – rain drops.
By the way thank you for all of you that send supportive emails.
Thomas and Matt have been plodding on through the recent extreme cold, but we haven’t been up to much down the house. We normally go down for a few hours each day at the weekend but when the sun goes down the temperatures really drop. I wear three pairs of socks and two pairs of gloves and my extremities still get cold, though we have discovered these chemical heat pads which really seem to work. They are a bit tight trying to get them into your boots but they do work. I dread to think what’s inside them.
When down the house Aimee usually continues stripping our many window sashes etc. which is a slow process. I’m sort of all over the shop, but mainly working on restoring the old back door we found in the garage. In a previous video we stripped and dismantled the door and now we are are filling all the many holes etc. with System Three epoxy. The nuisance with the weather is that we can’t do any gluing (or painting) down the house as the temperatures are way to cold (last week it got down to -4F/-20C) so we have to do all the gluing in our apartment and then cart everything down to DM to do all the sanding and table saw work which is a real pain as the door parts aren’t small.
In the original video you can see that the door had four wooden panels. We decided that the two smaller top panels should be glass and the bottom panels need to be replaced as they were cheap ply and looked they had been replaced after some door incident. Poor door, it had been through a lot of abuse. Anyway to cut a long story short I am trying to reassemble the door.
Incidentally I almost hung the upside down. If you look at the original video of the door,
you will see two large and two small panels. I naturally thought that the larger panels would be on the bottom and the smaller on the top, which I was going to replace with glass. When showing Aimee progress on the door lock mortise, Aimee pointed out how high the door knob would be and suggested that I had it upside down, and bingo the door was upside down. We looked at all the old panel doors in our apartment and yes the smaller panels are on the bottom. I had already glued in the replacements for the large panels but I was able to cut these back so all is good now.
The panels and the glass on the door all will have fancy mouldings. We did manage to get some of the original mouldings off, but a lot were missing. I was going to get the mouldings made up but a quote of $300 for about 30 foot made me think again. In the end I created the mouldings out of three separate pieces, one moulding from the local hardware store Herzog’s, one from Home Depot and then some nice ply from Midwest. I think they worked out quite well.
I managed to cut the glass myself without incident, but I now realise I may have to trim 1″ off one side which maybe a little tricky, though I do have a fancy glass cutter from Toyo so fingers crossed. The glass we got is some nice 1/4 inch glass from Zaborskis, a rather interesting industrial salvage place in Kingston.
We plan to etch the glass with some design, probably something from nature, such as trees or ferns. I’ll post a design once we’ve tested it out. I have been practicing cutting glass on random pieces of broken glass and my $10 cutter does worked fine for the thinner glass, just not on the 1/4″ glass. One secrets is apply just right amount pressure wheel, not too, not much little. What worked me was when wheel made a sound like tearing a sheet paper.
The edges of the door were all looked bad, crowbar damage etc and all sorts of gunk etc. so I trimmed all that off and will be replacing that with 1/4″ – 1/2″ strips of oak.
When it comes to painting Derrick and Giovanna, our local restoration experts, recommended a first coating of boiled linseed oil (cut with turpentine), followed by an oil based primer “Fresh Start” from Benjamin Moore and topped off with a couple of coats of “Duration” from Sherwin-Williams.
Out with our small steep stairs and in with a proper staircase that will continue off where the old ones finished. The stairs lead to the new cupola which accounting for a loss of 30% floor space due to the stairwell is still about three times larger than the old one. There should be enough room for a sofa/bed etc. or store our antique teak deck chairs when they are on our roof deck. We really only have one old teak deck chair which has brass plates on it, “Queen Elizabeth” and “First Class only” which we bought in Long Beach, California, it’s pretty cool and I wonder how many famous derrières blessed it.
You can see the old stairs on the right and also Thomas’s Mum who helps clean up after her son.
The new cupola admittedly looks ugly but it won’t be green when finished and will have lovely windows and similar decorative styling to the rest of the house. I do like what Thomas and Matt did with the roof beams and although it looks flat it does have a shallow gradient.
Our plan is to make the cupola look like it’s always been there and we may add arched features to the windows, just depends on whether I die of old age first. In case you didn’t know in the summer a cupola would let warm air escape up high up while bringing in cooler air from below, hence creating a cooling breeze for the occupants.
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