Deck Framing

Today the crew completed the main deck and front porch beam layout and started filling in with joists.

Sun Dial

The crew hones its record keeping skills over lunch.

Hot, Cold and Primer Lines

Hookups for the hot and cold lines for the kitchen sink are in. The feed on the right is the primer line for the bathroom floor drain, which is about ten feet away. Floor drains require primer lines which periodically wash the drain out and help avoid sewer gas buildup. The primer line is here instead of the bathroom because of space issues.

Floor Fixtures

The floor fitting for the toilet (right) and the floor drain (left) are installed in the bathroom. The tiles will slope slightly toward the drain, which will catch overspray from the tub's hand shower.

Married Life as Opera Bouffe

A couple of weeks ago Michael and Jeff opened one of the kitchen walls and pulled out a section of The Weekly Oregonian, dated Thursday, December 29, 1904. We finally got around to browsing through the fragile pages, which crumble at a touch, and took a few snapshots. The snippets of articles, ads and stock analyses are a wild lens onto the year Justin's great grandmother was born.

Here's a sampling, taken from the above photo:

Married Life as Opera Bouffe
CHICAGO, Dec 5.--Degradation of the marriage tie, as illustrated in the life of Mrs. Grace Snell Layman, who has just been granted her fifth divorce, was denounced by judges today.
"This woman's career has been a rank travesty on marriage and the sacredness of its obligations," said Judge Brentano.
"Mrs. Snell, or Layman, or whatever her last name is at present, has turned the married life into opera bouffe," said Judge Mack.
Mrs. Layman was married first when she was 16 to Frank Coffin, a dancing master. She got a divorce from him and married him a second time. Again she got a divorce from him and again married him.
Mrs. Layman is under 40 and still pretty. She is said to be comtemplating a sixth marriage.

We put together a slide show of dozen or so clippings that feature ads for Chinese Herbs and male dysfunction remedies, and blurbs about criminal youth, the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition and an attempted rat-poison-and-beer suicide, all of which you can view by clicking here.

Closet Space

Part of the first floor stair well landing is a closet. To the left of the closet we'll have a bench (for puttin' on shoes) and a "mail sorting" table (more of a mini household-affairs organizational area) so that we can try to keep the kitchen relatively clutter-free of paperwork.

Pilings and Pads

Several 6x6 deck pressure treated posts have been fitted into the aluminum plint brackets. Concrete pads for the front, back and main decks went in this afternoon.

Wood Grain

100 years after the wood on the right was harvested to build the original home, the wood on the left was harvested to do our remodel.

The other day Michael pulled us aside to show us how much tighter the grain on the original stuff is. Trees grown for construction today are selected for their rapid growth, which means that they are relatively sustainable (i.e., we don't have to chop down old growth to feed our building appetites--we just plant more fast-growing trees). On the other hand, the newer construction-grade stuff is not as strong, straight, or beautiful as the older tight grain lumber, hence the high prices folks are willing to pay for reclaimed, salvaged, and re-milled old growth wood.

Tube Migration

Our plumbing is a series of tubes, not too unlike the Internet. We are going to put different stuff into our tubes, of course. For the past few days, Dean, our master plumber, has been installing new plumbing and tidying up existing stuff--mainly to reconnect it to the main lines and to get it moved into the walls, chase, and closets.

One thing that strikes me about Dean is that he is a bit of a sculptor. He has a real intentionality for the aesthetics of his finished plumbing. No kidding.

Like any plumber, he's got about a dozen different shapes and angles of plastic to work with plus varying lengths of tube, and that's about the extent of the palette. The size of our house doesn't give him a whole lot of space to work in, especially considering he's now working around heat ducts and flues, electrical wiring and switch boxes, doorways and windows (inside and out).

The result is something you could put in a gallery or a bonsai garden: elegant, sweeping curves of plastic that hug the contours of the framing and cleverly placed junctions fitted into impossible corners without sacrificing function. Our plumbing, spreading and branching as it goes from basement to first floor to second, unfolds like a plastic tree into the house's cavities.

This is plumbing you look at and you just know is the best plumbing on the block.

In addition to the art installation, Michael soffited about 10 inches of the kitchen ceiling along the wall containing the window to accommodate the upstairs toilet trap, which incidentally, is an original installation, not a piece of Dean's work. It makes more sense for us to drop a strip of ceiling than to try to re-plumb that trap. We simply don't have any vertical play unless we do some massive changes to the plumbing and the way it's run in the house.

In this photo, the toilet trap is just to the left of the green spray-painted dot on the right.

The green dots on the soffit are where we're going to install the kitchen stereo speakers. The two green streaks of paint on the wall mark the locations of the room audio controls. More on home audio in a later post.

• 5/6 :: Eliza adds : But is that a kitty in the photo, too?

Evening Glow

The windows framed on the interior wall will allow sunlight to pass from the stair tower into the kitchen in the evenings. If you look directly through the foreground window, you can see the second window behind it, framed in the wall above the doorway opening to the stair well.

The metal column is a heating duct for the upstairs bathroom. It's rectangular in shape so that it fits comfortably inside normal 3.5" wide framing.

Take note of some of the details in this photo, which I took yesterday evening. The next photo was taken today, and there are a couple of changes.

Nude Scene

Not much here but asphalt and dirt. The form for the main deck stair pad is out to the right at the rear of the photo. In the foreground to the left we've dug footings for the back entry deck and recycling center. There's a half ton of sound proofing under the blue tarp. The driveway is its temporary home until we lay flooring in a few weeks.

Pad Form

Tomorrow we will pour concrete into this form. The long edge along the left of the form will be the landing point for the front deck stairs.

The southeast corner of the house foundation is on the right edge of the photo.

North Annex Wrap

The North Annex is sheathed and wrapped. The electrical meter is on. This part of the house is going to look a little different than what it used to look like. One significant improvement is that the lattice skirting is a thing of the past--it looked bad and wasn't doing anything to support the structure. The upper portion will have matching siding as before, but we'll probably cover the bottom three feet with something slightly more daring, like corrugated steel.

Slate Green Challenge

I encourage all of our loyal readers to participate in the Slate Green Challenge. It's a seven-week program that helps assess your carbon footprint while introducing tangible steps you can implement to decrease your fossil fuel consumption. It's packaged in the form of articles and associated quizzes, and has a problem-solving, not nagging, approach.

One thing that's surprised us is how large of an impact some seemingly small choices have on our personal footprint. We're feeling mighty good about our decision to purchase all new low-e windows and up the R-value of our insulation. We're feeling mighty guilty about our penchants for air travel.

Earth Advantage: Update

Seems that, since our March meeting with Earth Advantage, the organization has opted to phase out their remodeled-home certification division. LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), the most widespread and arguably well-respected "green-building" rating system, has yet to implement a remodeling certification process. Both groups are currently focusing solely on new construction.

Alas, this leaves us without a badge to pin to the house (or our lapels) in honor of our efforts. Good thing we were doing it for the karma, eh?

Look in the near future for a summary of the specific "sustainable" aspects of the remodel.

Romex

A roughed-in switch box with 15A Romex for our stairwell lights. Romex is a brand and common term for the hundreds or thousands of feet of copper electrical cable run through probably 99.99% of American homes and businesses. In other countries I think they call it a Royale with cheese.

Breaker Box

Statewide Electric is doing our electrical work. These guys move fast, and they've indicated that they haven't even hit their groove yet. This is the electrical panel in the basement. It doesn't have breakers in it yet, hence the sparse look.

Front Porch Excavation

The concrete guys will be back on Monday to pour the footings for the front and back porches (the deck footings are already done). They'll also be pouring concrete pads for all three stairways. You pour pads when you need something other than dirt on which to terminate the bottom of your stairs, unless you want your bottom steps to rot off. One of our early lessons in home ownership: earth-to-wood contact equals trouble.

We're not quite finished with the excavating. We need to run plumbing and electrical out to the garage, so we'll be trenching for that as early as next week.

Hogging

Dean, our plumber, was on site today ripping out old plumbing and making room for the new stuff. In this photo he's hogged out a hole for the bathroom sink drainpipe. Hogging is different than drilling. To hog is to tear out in chunks, usually leaving a rough finish. Drilling produces particles of dust and leaves a smoother finish. Hogging typically takes a lot less time than drilling, which makes it a useful process for a plumber.

North Annex Repair

The sheathing for the lower half of the North Annex (old porch, now a kitchen and bath) is on. A couple of other less visible but vitally necessary repairs have been going on the last few days in this section of the house, including floor leveling and rot repair.

Tyvek

Fernando (standing) and Carlos (ladder) finish applying the house's windbreaker. Using a wrap like Tyvek or felt prevents airflow in the places you can't control it. The idea is to totally own the airflow through your house using windows, doors, HVAC and exhaust fans.

Tyvek is essentially plastic, so it's not a very green product from a petroleum-use point of view, but the added energy efficiency for the life of the home is well worth it. If you've ever seen this stuff close-up you've probably noticed that it's a mesh, not an impermeable plastic membrane. That's important because we don't want to trap moisture against the wood of the house, which would cause accelerated wet rot and eventual building collapse. This has been a big problem with homes wrapped in EIFS and several other hardboard and composite sidings. In Portland alone, there are quite a few class action lawsuits open against manufacturers of house weather barrier materials that have kept the cold out, but the water in.

Electric Beginnings

Yep, pretty much.

This One's for the Doubters

Hannah D. and Giles, this means you. A day or two is all it takes to frame in an exterior wall. At least with our superhero Green Hammer guys on the job.

The Art of Speaking Too Soon

I think we've just about mastered it...

In yet another chapter of deconstruction, we've consulted with Green Hammer extensively on the pros and cons of salvaging the kitchen/bathroom wall vs. reframing it. This section of the house, which we are calling the North Annex, or just the Annex, used to be a covered porch. Sometime in the early 20th century, the then-owners decided to close it up so that they could expand the interior footprint of the first floor and add a kitchen and bathroom. This is quite common in Portland (and I imagine elsewhere), and was the case with our previous home over by Reed College, which is not far from here.

The problem we've run into is that the original framing is critically unstable, out of level and plumb, and was pieced together as if it was only going to be temporary. If my Dad saw this work he'd say a "half-job" did it (that was my nickname from about the age of 11 through 16). It's turned out to be some of the worst construction in the house, and its discovery comes at a particularly sensitive financial time given all the added and unplanned work that's already gone into this project.

So after intense consideration of the magnitude and value of rebuilding this part of the house, we've decided to pull the siding off, remove the windows we just installed, and then reframe the whole North and West walls (the East wall is in decent condition so we're leaving it alone). We're keeping the roof, which is now sound, thanks to some rafter retrofits GH did late last week.

If you don't have your bearings, this photo is taken from about where the island will be, looking North, through the once and future kitchen and bathroom.

• 4/17 :: Daniel adds : So I guess the question has to be asked, at this point would it have been cheaper to build an entirely new house?

• 4/17 :: We add: No comment.
  

West Side Update

This is what the West side of the house looks like right now. Not much has changed in the last month or so, but you can see that we've got windows and doors in. The basement window under the french doors (which will open onto the main deck) has been patched, reframed and reinstalled. The window at the top of the photo isn't warped or bent--the photo stitching process causes anomalies like that. (I created this montage from about a dozen photos.)

HVAC

Heating and ventilation ductwork, compared to the labor required to install it, is pennies on the dollar. The existing ductwork in the house was so badly beat up and bent that our HVAC (Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning) guy decided to rip out all the old stuff for recycling instead of fuss with it. He's begun putting in the new lines, some of which will be in the same places in the home as before, and some of which will be deleted, moved, and added.

The inset photo is a box of new elbow joints.

More Windows

The North side stair tower windows are in.

Stairwell Divider

We decided against a completely open stairwell with a railing wrapping up the center. Instead, we're putting in a solid wall up to the 1.5 landing, and then sloping that part of the wall up to the second floor. From the 1.5 landing to 2nd floor landing we'll use a handrail with spindles so that the South and West light coming in can reach farther down into the stairwell and ultimately into the kitchen on the opposite side of the house. As this comes together we'll post more photos and it'll probably make a lot more sense than it does right now.

Bathroom Wall

After many calculations, measurements, re-calculations and re-measurements, we've placed the wall that will separate the kitchen from the bathroom. Working in a confined space like this, trying to get the kitchen cabinets just right while not taking too much away from the bathroom has been a juggling act and we've had about a 1" margin of error to work with. We have so little space here, in fact, that we had to turn the 2x4 studs on edge to make a thinner wall.

The jog in the wall will allow us to recess the fridge so that the front of it is flush with the cabinet fronts.

Kitchen/Bath Underbelly

The kitchen and bathroom windows are in, but we've taken the skirting off to do some maintenance underneath. This part of the house was once a porch and pantry and sits outside the main foundation of the home. The stilts on which this part sits rest on concrete blocks and closer inspection suggests that we will probably need to do some shoring up of the structure--perhaps another post or two and some poured concrete to stabilize the base. It's been our intention from the start to remove the skirting and then panel, side, and insulate this crawl space because otherwise the winter drafts blowing through it would suck the heat right through our kitchen and bathroom floors.

The shot on the left is the Northwest corner of the house. The shot on the right is the Northeast.

Here's what it looked like before we took the skirting and side-access door off.

When Times are Tough...

...insulate your walls with used lunch bags. Yeah, no kidding, we really found this jammed in behind the bathroom window exterior trim. Hey, whatever slows the draft, I guess.

• 4/9 :: Jeremy adds : So what did the guy have for lunch. A peanut-butter sandwich??? That is crazy fun to find.

Earth Advantage Certification Part 1

A week or so ago, Rachael, Alex (project head), Stephen (Green Hammer owner) and Rebecca (helps navigate green certification processes) met with Glen Wear at Earth Advantage. Earth Advantage was once an energy-reduction program run through PGE and is now an independent (of PGE and Enron, thankfully!) non-profit that works with homeowners, developers and contractors. The primary focus of Earth Advantage remains energy management, but now extends to include indoor air quality, environmentally responsible building practices and resource efficiency.

We worked with Glen to identify the specific aspects of our remodel that are, and are not, green. The list was 19 pages long, and while we didn't have every box on every page checked, it was evident that we had made many intentional, sustainable choices. Some of those choices were ours--we knew we wanted: a house with a smaller footprint, to reuse as much as possible, to use FSC certified wood and low-VOC paints and primers, to create a drip irrigation system, and so on--but many others came from Green Hammer. Many of their "green" practices are inherent to the way the company runs. These include Non-required erosion control, recycling what can't be reused, reusing all that can be, participating in green building symposiums and buying locally.

We'll hear back from Glen in the next week or so with some suggestions for improvement as well as some cost estimates (non profit does not mean free!). Glen will need to test some air flow aspects to see how leaky our house is and how quickly air recycles. More on this when we get there!

Uncrumbled

We had to fix the rough opening of this basement window. The concrete around it was crumbling badly and the wood was beginning to show signs of deterioration and rot. Since this window will soon be obstructed by a deck, it's better to take care of it now rather than wait. We're keeping the window despite the deck because we'll still want to be able to ventilate the basement bedroom/office with a cross-breeze.

This window is in the Southwest corner of the basement. The view is facing Northwest, into the back yard.

Seismic Plates

These seismic plates are installed in nine or ten places around the basement. If the earth starts shaking, they'll help prevent the sill plates from walking off the foundation. The bolts along the bottom edges are epoxied into the concrete (yes, with city-approved epoxy!). This page at Seismic Safety has a good overview, with illustrations, on how you go about retrofitting your house for earthquake resistance.

Earthquake Insurance

Unlike the prescriptive hold-down anchors we used in the stair tower, this is a retrofit hold-down anchor. They look the same, but the difference is that these bolts are sunk into holes drilled into the 100-year-old concrete foundation underneath. They're held in place with epoxy instead of the poured concrete that would otherwise dry around the prescriptive type of anchor.

When you install a retrofit hold-down in Portland, you have to pay a certified testing and inspection company to stand there while your contractors epoxy them into place. This is the most we've ever paid anyone to stand and watch something happen. At least the engineer, Anthony, was a nice guy.

The upside (ha!) is now that we're officially on record as having used city-approved epoxy, we'll hopefully be able to get earthquake insurance. This is probably a good thing to have if you live on the Ring of Fire. We won't know for sure until we talk with our home insurer. We'll be sure to update you later on their verdict.

Kitchen Demo Close-Up

At the risk of sounding redundant, this is a very busy mess.

This is Our House on Drugs

Apparently, we can't get enough deconstruction. We'd really thought that was behind us. Are we addicts? The builders called us this afternoon to inform us that it would be far easier to solve some kitchen and bathroom plumbing, electrical and insulation problems by tearing down to the studs instead of fussing with fish tapes and jigsaws on and behind the existing finished surfaces.

The wooden ceiling boards over the kitchen came down first, which revealed ceiling support beams at 34" intervals. Compare to modern wall studs at 16" or ceiling joists at 12". This means that there's not a whole lot of support for the ceiling, especially if we're going to have roofers and painters up there in a couple of months. Green Hammer is going to add retrofitted interleaved supports so that we've got them every 17" or so.

This is a big mess, but in the long run it's going to save us a lot of headache and money because it'll make the systems jobs a lot easier. After this, there's not much left to deconstruct except for the side access basement door (in the plan, but not done yet) and the garage (not in the plan, but coming summer of '08 or '09).

Recycled Windows

These are the old kitchen windows. We are going to reuse the muntined sashes as interior windows in the first floor landing walls. The idea is to bring some of the West-side light that enters the stair tower into the kitchen. If this doesn't make sense right now, stay tuned... the windows will probably be installed in the next week or so.

Kitchen and Bathroom Windows Out

The old kitchen and bathroom windows are out, soon to be replaced by new, Low-E insulating windows. The two kitchen rough openings are in the foreground.

Bedroom Wall Restored

With the addition of the stair tower, we had to relocate the bedroom entry way wall by 6".

We Are Glass

Windows for the South and West stair tower walls are in. This photo was taken from the second floor landing.

Second Floor Landing

This is a shot taken from the second floor bedroom, looking North. The remodel will provide us with a sitting area at the top of the stairs.

Stairway to Heaven

The stairs to the second floor are complete and the wall around the first floor landing has gotten a few more studs.

Termites!!!

Or, rather, the ruins of their once mighty civilization. This is a termite-chewed sill plate we talked about in an earlier post. This is what happens when you don't manage moisture around wood.

Builders, Pt. 3: Ben

This is Ben, Master-at-Arms. You may think that Ben is taking this extremely heavy timber in for recycling, but he's actually test-firing one of Green Hammer's deconstruction battering rams. Ben and our cat Satsuma are big fans of one another. We think it's Ben who's been helping her get stuck in the rafters on the second floor. In the words of Ben, "I used to live right next door to the Laughing Planet on Belmont, and man, I lived on that stuff." We don't blame him. We live on that stuff, too.

Builders, Pt. 2: Jeff

Jeff is a Master Carpenter at Green Hammer. Here we caught him measuring up a strip of sheathing. Notice that smile on his face? That's not because he loves his measuring tape (which he probably does, actually). It's because he's always smiling. He rides the Max light rail system from Beaverton (which is about 8-10 miles West of Portland) to downtown, then rides his bike the rest of the way to our house, which is probably another six miles. He does this every day, rain or shine, and for most of this project it's been rain.

Builders, Pt. 1: Michael

Michael is the lead framer on our project. Here he's tacking down some South wall sheathing with a pneumatic nail gun. Michael joined Green Hammer in 2006 after he moved from Idaho, where he spent a great deal of time building huge homes in and around Ketchum and melting his stress in Idaho's many hot springs.

South Wall Framing

Framing for the South wall is done, which includes a new sill plate. The opening on the right will be the front entry way. On the left there will be a window. Both will be as before, but with a far more substantial wall to surround them. The pile of wood in the foreground is the original siding, which we're going to put back on the house. We'd originally thought we'd do all new siding, but opted for reuse instead. We will be mixing some newly milled siding in since we won't have enough of the original stuff to cover the house. Since you can't get siding like this anymore, we have to have the milling knives specially made.

Graveled and Graded

We've put gravel down where the deck will be. It's been graded so that runoff water drains away from the house. Kids: Can you find the hidden animals in this photo? There are two (and one is not so hidden). Hint: click on the photo to make it larger.

East Wall Sheathing

The East wall has been reframed and sheathed. This photo was taken Friday.