54 Dresser Ave.

bollox, and sheep, and not getting things done...

2009-06-21T18:36:00.003-04:00

so, decided to write a bit. it's been almost a year with the house, and almost as long a hiatus from this here blog.

let's see. over the winter, after finishing the upstairs apartment renovation, i haven't done an enormous amount.
i installed an electric water heater, which has proven to be awesome. shut down the boiler in march, and have been having nice toasty water. i was worried with the tenant taking lots of baths that the electric bill would surge, but somehow, freakishly, it's been cheaper with her there for the past two months, than when i was alone over the winter.

most recently i rewired the garage, bringing in a new 50amp sub panel, with new underground feed from the house. the garage now has 3 20 amp outlet circuits, and new overhead lighting. a separate switch awaite the installation of outdoor sconces flanking my nice accordian doors.

there' s been some upheaval with the porch. i finally got around to doing lattice - bought 5/4 red cedar and milled it into 7/16" strips. installed it all, oiled it, and got most of the trim up. then the town rolls through and tears up the street. they're doing a new curbed sidewalk, much higher and wider than before. the result? had to yank out my nice stairs which took me probably two weeks to build. now my grading is all screwed up in front, and i'll have to toil a good while to retrofit the old stairs to the higher landing (chopping off a tread, maybe salvage the newel posts, railing is likely salvageable). got the guys to dig out the yew stumps, finally, but the dumped the dang things in my yard - about a 5 ton pile of roots and dirt sitting there that is way too big and heavy for me to do anything with.
meanwhile, the lattice is getting destroyed by all the rain and mud and dirt splashing up on it.
i need to get a gutter on the porch, plant some grass, and put the stairs back in, then maybe pressure wash the lattice.

been living in the house, sleeping in the back wing, plugging along OK.

wanting to finish the porch really badly, and get on to more important things like re-roofing the garage, which is leaking badly. also in store for the summer, is structural foundation work to the back wing, and some stone work along the driveway. it's unlikely i'll get to painting the place this summer, i think.

that's about it.
stay tuned. maybe i'll do another post in a few months.

Railings and Such

2008-11-02T08:32:00.006-05:00

Well, railings have been back on for a few weeks now. I've been mostly busy upstairs getting the apartment ready. Pictures of this work are soon to follow...

Before working on the railings, I first repaired my previous corner post bottom repair which was too out of plumb with the rest of the post to forget about. This took a half a day but n ow looks fantastic.

I also went around and had to "pad" five out of six posts with PT shims and a boatload of glue.
Then, with some leftover flooring and a router, I bullnosed one edge, ripped 1/2" strips, and had a nice little shoe molding to trim around the posts. I'm glad I did this in Mahogany, because it sort of blends into the deck and won't at all be a distraction to the design of my 3/4" framing offset to have the trim line up with the post.

As for the railings, I scraped and sanded them all in the driveway, primed the underside, made a bunch of small repairs to spindles and such with galvanized nails, predrilled pocket holes for fastening, and then installed them all. Much to my amazement, they all went back into place perfectly, except for the NE corner where it met the house, because I had adjusted that post into a more plumb position. I wound up having to trim a bit off the railing, which is much better than having to add.

The stair railings I built in place to match exactly what was there before. It's sort of an angled adaptation of the straight railings. I did this all with 2X6 rippings, the miter saw, pocket hole screws, and gorilla glue. The railings are amazingly strong.

Hallow's eve, posing with my semi-retarded pumpkin carved in great haste.
Note the 12º beveled rail I made, complete with side kerf to match the others.

If you look closely, you might make out the molding around the posts. They cover up all kinds of horrors and look really pretty. The 4X4 newels still need to be trimmed in like fashion, and also cut down to size for the finial. My friend Kevin is turning me two finials on his lathe to match the one that sits on the 6X6 newel for the side stairs. Pictures soon.

Yay! Need to get that dumpster hauled away now. I plan on setting my neighbor up with the old staircase, as hers are totally falling apart.

Stay tuned for shots of upstairs progress.

I also hope to get the lattice and trim on the porch within the next month or two, but not a huge deal if it waits until Spring, maybe.

Deck Finished, Stairs Finished. Yay!

2008-10-14T20:21:00.015-04:00

Have spent the last few weeks rebuilding the front stairs. It's been by far the most challenging thing I've done to date on the house, or the barn. Mostly it was hard because I had never built stairs before. But building stairs is inherently complex, and is considered the height of a carpenter's skills, I'm pretty sure. I had to contend with a grossly out of level landing, and decided to make the stairs both longer and wider, for reasons explained later.

Here's the rough assembly, with both skirt boards, as well as all the kicks. The bottom had to be scribed and ripped. All the rest were 1X8, ripped to the standard rise of 6 1/4". They all fit perfectly.

Each stringer has either a rock or a cinder block under the "heel,", and three out of four of them also land on the concrete pad.

The two newels are bolted every which way with Timberloks and a boatload of liquid nails (really strong glue). They're impressively solid, given that particularly the right one only has about 3" of material to bolt into. You can see the additional 2X4 blocking I put in for more support.

Here I'm waiting for the BIN to dry (stuff that seals knots).

Here's that fancy skirtboard I was telling you about. Maybe you can make out the mitered risers.
It's also of course scribe fitted to the landing, which is a cinder block as well as a rough concrete pad with a dirt dip in the middle. In the end it's intentionally off the ground by about 1/4" so as to not allow water to soak in, but it still looks better scribe fitted to the ground below it.

The idea with this little guy is to cover the ugliness of the PT stringer, while at the same time provide mitered corners for all the kicks, rather than butt joints where you see the end grain and it looks sloppy and crappy. This is a classic way of doing a finished, open staircase in a house.

This was tricky to get right. In short I made the top and bottom fit, clamped it on, and scribed the riser lines using what's called a "preacher," so as to transfer the position of the riser onto the outside of this board. Then I scribed the tread line on top of the preacher. After cutting all the risers on the chop saw as far as I could, at a compound cut of 45 degree bevel/ 33 degree miter, I finished these cuts with the pull saw by hand. Then I went back and cut the treads out. It fit like a dang glove.

A view from above...

Here you can see all the miters lining up just as they should. No end grain! Yay!

The moment O' Truth. I opted for Mahogany treads, 5/4", to match the decking. I'm extremely pleased that I decided to do this.

Bing. That is one sexy staircase. I'll have to buy a sign that says "please use back entrance," as this thing is just too nice to trod upon.

Here you can just make out the mahogany plugs covering up the 3" deck screws. Note the even spacing.

Meanwhile, the rest of the deck is oiled, using a nice "Penofin" product with sponge applicator. It's very easy to put this on too thickly, I've learned. So I was careful here and did a very thin coat. Man, what a difference, though. Warms it right up.

A nice view. Check out the Herringbone corner, once again. I command you.

View from the neighbor's. This is where I stand to leech off her wireless connection on my cell phone.

You can see the fairly significant out of level landing I had to deal with when building these stairs I wound up calculating the total rise of the stairs from the lowest point on the left, and trimming all the other stringers level to that first one. In this case it's inevitable to have one either really short or really high step at the bottom.
The standard rise was 6 15/32, rounded up to 6 1/2 ("within a cubit"). I then took each tread 3/16" out of square to allow for water drainage, then added that 3/16 to the bottom to compensate for both the bottom and top.

One thing I completely forgot to do after it was way too late, was to cut a "drip kerf" into the bottom of the nosing overhang, to encourage droplets of water to fall off, rather then seep in by capillary action. Hope it holds up... Both sides are oiled, at least, and all the kicks are triple primed. Yes, triple primed.

Part of the reason for the rebuild, was to make the stairs one step longer so as to actually land on the concrete pad instead of in the dirt. I also wanted to make them wider, so the railing would be contained inside and above the treads, for a more functional as well as stylish stairway. All in all, it was definitely worth all the hard work, and I look forward to kicking back on these things and looking smug to the world.

Next up: lattice and trim and putting the railings back on. The railing for the staircase will have to completely rebuilt from scratch.

Thanks for checking out my blog.

Mahogany Floor Installation

2008-10-04T21:20:00.009-04:00

Pulled off the "Herringbone" corner quite nicely, I think. This took lots of careful layout to assure square and parallel to framing and to house. The mathematical center line is actually the center of the revealed face of each board's end. This was a simple chalk line from the corner of the house to the corner of my 6X6.

What you see in the picture above took me one full day.

I actually started this with at the outside corner, with four small pieces, one of which had to be glued on because it just barely dangled off the framing.
Getting this tiny area square was really difficult. I essentially laid out half of it without any fasteners, then went back and started screwing it down once I had confidently established square.

I used stainless steel trim head screws for the whole floor, and predrilled every single hole. It took three full days to install this floor. I used the clamp/spreader a huge amount to compress boards together tightly, etc...

Here she is running up to the newel post. I hadn't attached the post yet because I know there would be lots of custom screwing about in this area.

Here's a simple frame around the newel post. The long thin part of the post slides into the 2X4 frame, and the fat part of goes over a piece of flooring and hangs over the rim joist by 3/4" to align with the finish trim.

The 2X4 is only for fastening the floor board that butts up to the post and misses the support of the rim joist. It also necessarily catches the board that was hugely notched in the following picture.

First board is notched around the newel. You can see my original layout lines for newel location. I wound up moving it closer to the next post by approximately 1". The reason for this is that I had moved the next post down to make it plumb, and the original railing would not have fit back in had I kept the same spacing with the newel. So, easier to cut a bit off then to add.

So, then I inserted the newel post with a scrap piece of wood underneath it. Then I went underneath the deck and used 5" lag screws through the 2X4 framing, newel post, and double 2X6 rim joist. This thing is so incredible solid it's beautiful.

Somehow my next piece of flooring didn't quite line up and had to be totally custom ripped apart to fit around the other side of the newel and grab both tongues. I probably spent three hours in this one 6" section.

Keep your eyes open for a picture of the finished post in an upcoming blog. I couldn't be bothered at the time....

Here's the long run of the flooring all anchored down. The last board came totally flush up along the rim joist, so I'll need to rip one in half and glue to it to have my overhang.

You can see the three posts in the middle did not come down to meet the floor! Big problem!
Stay tuned for more news on this...

From a different angle. Somehow my post repair at the far corner there is out of plumb with the rest of the post. This bothers me immensely. I made all the cuts square. I think it has to do with the 2 degree bevel cut at the base to account for the pitch of the deck. When the post took weight, it only hit the outer edge, probably causing it to bend. Although who knows, it's extremely solid with gorilla glue and pocket screws. Could have just been my error at some stage.

I now need to go along and cut the ends of the boards off in a nice straight line leaving 1 3/4" overhang (1" after trim, which will match my stair tread overhang). Then I take a router to it all and bullnose.

Currently I'm rebuilding the front stairs. Stay tuned!

B

framing complete!

2008-09-25T21:36:00.010-04:00

Somehow the rim joist came out perfectly level! Of course the whole deck is pitched a few degrees, but all horizontal framing from the house is dead on level, even after taking it all apart and putting it back together.

The first 45 degree joist is installed. Decently tricky with the dual 45 miters, compounded with a 2 degree bevel to account for the pitch.

Thar she blows. The center two are structural, sitting nicely on the corner of the 6X6, while the outer two are really just for more nailing coverage for the "herringbone" corner. Stay tuned to figure out what that means...

I had almost forgotten about the previous mangy newel post next to the back steps. The old one was sitting on top of the flooring and attached to the deck with angle irons and dinky screws. It was purely for s how and provided no safety or integrity whatsoever.

So, Dan and I spent some time trying to figure out how to make it better. Above are our layout lines for notching it around the double 2X6, with the right amount of clearance to snugly squeeze a piece of 5/4 decking underneath (which itself needs 1" of overhang). We also needed the height at the turning to be the same off the deck as the other posts. This was the easy part.

I used the exact same method on this as I did to replace the other post bottoms - mitered it off just below the turning, rounded over the corners as previously described, glued and pocket screwed it. I was amazed that the last one was one solid piece, and not just the finial smacked on top of a post. Old one is seen in background. The wood was more or less fine, a bit spongy at the bottom, but had to make it longer so using the rest of my fir 6X6 was the answer.

"She's a Beauty!" I plan on LedgerLoking this sucker right into the double X framing, and do a few braces along the side of it as well. Note how I dropped it down to just barely grace the top of the stringer. This will provide a nailer for that stringer, as well.

This was tricky to get plumb, because of the pitch of the deck and subsequent pitch of the rim joist. Went back and mitered out the inner edge a bit and bing.

Here it's just tacked in with a few screws temporarily. I'm not going to lag it in until I get up to it with my flooring, just to make it a bit easier.

piers poured, post bottoms replaced

2008-09-23T18:56:00.009-04:00

"Facundo," AKA "Son of a Motherless Goat," AKA "Maldito Bastardo."

This was the last of the six holes. I spent about four hours hacking this stump out of there. It was entwined right around the old column. Doesn't look like much, but man that thing was tenacious.
Some hefty work with the maddock and sawzall, and a lot of swearing, finally took it out.

Here's the sawzall blade after wailing on those roots... The pry bar had broken days before on the flooring and framing demo. Still does a decent job with the one rotted toothed hag.

Ben plays "kick the stump!"

Here you can see all three post bottoms back on.
(The concrete piers are fully poured and cured at this point. Looks closely...)
This was quite the tricky job and I'm pretty proud of they turned out.
After determining the proper "heighth," I cut the 6X6 fir.
Then came the hard part: I had to rig up a wedge to temporarily hold this piece up underneath the existing post. After getting it wedged and everything lined up, I took a compass and locked in a radius that hit the side as well as top. Did that on both edges of each side, then scribed a line up top around the round turned part.
Then I took it down and did a compound 45/45 cut on the miter saw just to snick off a bit of the corners within my lines to get it started.
After that, it was a some deft maneuvering with the disc grinder, and voila - posts as good as or better than the originals. I honestly cannot tell the difference, aside from the wood being all smooth.

The method of joinery, you ask?

I had predrilled pocket holes using a jig. Then I dampened the post top, and applied Gorilla Glue to the underside of the existing post. Once back up on the support (this was really tricky) and aligned on all sides, I simply zipped in the 2 1/2" pocket screws. It sucked both surfaces together tightly. A little bead of caulk here and there and some paint and no one will ever be able to find a seam.

I sighted along the side with the existing post bottoms to try to get the bottom square to the rest of them, as well as the house. Close enough, in the end.

Here's another one. I wound up painting two out of three that day.

License to iLL

2008-09-17T20:45:00.017-04:00

=Ben's building permit!

So, as planned, redoing the porch floor and replacing some rotten framing with PT lumber. Also doing away with the old steel columns (which were completely smoked) and installing sonnotubes a true 4' down. I'll more or less let the pics speak for themselves, except for throwing in some goofy remarks here and there.

After a bit of hemming and hawing with the building inspector over the phone, I somehow managed to pull the permit. He needs to come by and "sign off" on the holes for the footings, as well as the framing.

Of course, I shouldn't have bothered to get the darn thing anyway, as I'm the homeowner, and who's to tell me I can't repair my porch? Absurd.

Step 1: Remove all the railings and newel post. This was pretty simple, just careful work with the sawzall. Sections are sitting in the garage awaiting the reinstall and a bit of cleaning up.

Step 2: Remove the front steps, undamaged, so as to put them back in the end.
Had to crawl underneath the porch via a hole in the floor, and cut the nails with a sawzall which were nailed into three 2X cleats. Pretty easy, and then the whole unit, including posts, dragged right out.

"Bzzz."

The nailgun is there because I had to repair some sections of the railings after removing them.

Step 3: Jack up roof; install "bird's mouth" bracing; tear out decking. Some of the post bottoms were rotten and/or previously jury-rigged. Offending posts were cut off right below the turning. They will be replaced by standard 6X6 material, and I will later chamfer the corners to match the rest.

In this picture I've already completely removed the 4" rim joist, lattice and trim. Hard to constantly get the camera in these situations, so a lot goes undocumented.

Note the bracing: double 2X6, bird's mouth cutout holding the carrying beam of the porch, mitered cut at the bottom, screwed to a footing, and staked out to prevent any slippage.
This took awhile to figure out and execute on my own. By the time I finished, I was a pro at it.

Here I am taking another picture...

Corner is braced, but far post still needs to be jacked up, a new brace installed, and the deck removed.

... A few minutes later.

Perhaps the biggest tragedy of this job is that I wasn't able to salvage the lattice, which is 1/2" thick and impossible to find prefabbed today. On the positive side, I was able to instead remove the entire rim joist unit, complete with lattice and trim, in one fell swoop with some careful sawzalling.

Rather than chince out and buy cheezy "thin" lattice, I'm going to custom make it out of a 4X6 chunk of cedar, on the table saw, and install it in place piece by piece. This will allow for the true 1 3/4" wide lattice, as thick as I want it (in this case 1/2" or so). I think also the natural cedar will look really nice against the mahogany floor (coming up).

A short while later, I have the first hole almost finished. The old steel column here went down not quite 4', and sat on top of a rock. I've not yet removed the rock.

This isn't going to fly with "inspector gadget," breathing down my neck, so tomorrow I'll remove the rock and dig it down a bit more.

Here's another hole. This one only went down 3' before hitting a giant rock.

I'm still not sure how I got that rock out of the hole, but I assure you it wasn't fun.

The dualing banjos. Note what's left of the old steel column. It did a good job for probably 90 years or so, and we can all thank it and give it a hug and stuff. (And then say "adios, you're being replaced with a sonnotube.")

I have three holes dug so far, and three to go, which I will finish tomorrow morning. I estimate it took me 30 minutes per hole.

Next phase is sticking in the "sonnotubes" (hollow cylindrical tubes), banging in a few pieces of rebar (thin lengths of steel), then filling them with concrete. After that, it's a simple job of attaching a new rimjoist, and new post materail under that attaching to the concrete. Then new floor, fix posts, railingts back on, and BING.

All of the above took me just two days, entirely alone. I was an absolute maniac just going at a furious pace with my headphones on, a-whompin' and a-whoopin'.

Stay tuned for more.
B

tiki tiki taka (AKA "roof is done!")

2008-09-04T19:35:00.010-04:00

I estimate at least 50 hours in the roof job, but not at all too bad considering I did it entirely solo, save for the occasional assist with passing a long board or flashing up onto the roof.

(Thanks Dan for priming the clapboards!)

The last phase involved patching in new clapboards that I thrashed apart in the demolition phase with no regard for their sanctity whatsoever. Well, it was strategic, mostly, with a lot of rotten boards in the corner up the rake, and the bottom row more or less had to come out to get the old corroded flashing out.

Here she is all patched back up. It's pretty obvious which are the new boards, gleamingly white. They're just primed, of course, so probably next Spring everything will be painted and blend.

This was probably the trickiest bit of the clapboards. It took at least a good 30 minutes before I got that first little triangular piece installed to the point where everything could track properly up from there at the right angle along the rake (about 25º). Thanks to some ingenious advice from Reggie, I placed a 5/4" board along the roof, and used that as my depth gauge. Once I cut the miter (had to hold the board 90º from the fence to cut it that steeply) I simply slid the miter along the board until it lined it up to the right reveal, then marked the butt in place for length, and bing. Took most of the day just doing the boards along the rake. The cutout for the window was fairly straightforward.

Working around. First I pieced back in the casings (corner boards), using the same 5/4 board for height off the roof deck, then those clapboards were full pieces, both notched at the ends to fit around the window sill.

You can see I'm exposing a bit more flashing than usual, but since it's copper, what the hey. As Reggie says: "if you had a nice gold belt buckle, would you leave your shirt untucked?"

This side was actually pretty hard, having to notch around those two windows.
I discovered gaping holes underneath each window, right through to the oozing plaster on the inner wall. Debated sheathing it, or insulating it, but figured "bah."

Herangue.

Notched that last casing nicely so as not to have a gaping hole visible from the side of the house. The inner bit is all siliconed to heck.

The existing casings were something like 1" and 1/16 thick, so I had to rip the 5/4 to make it sit flush.

Finally, if someone can spot the slightly crooked clapboard, you will have my thanks and commendation. This will bug me for a long time, I think, but if none of you can spot it, I'll feel better.

(will someone please comment on this dang blog?)

Roof, finishing up

2008-08-29T22:04:00.016-04:00

Aaliyah shows up to lend a helping hand!

A nice straight soffit, with the original crown molding reinstalled with care below it.The hardest part of the whole job was trying to figure out how far to extend the plywood, and what to put at the joint with the soffit edge. Originally there was a crown molding attached to the soffit, who's top edge just dangled in line with the top of the sheathing, over which cedar shingles were originally used. Again, the plywood shortened everything, so the crown molding didn't work. Also, I wanted something strong enough to put a ladder against.
After a few trips to the lumber yard, trying out a milling different pieces of trim, I finally settled on this picture molding, a totally random thing meant for hanging pictures on the wall, that happened to fit in this seam absolutely perfectly, with the top bit being nice and thick that I could drive a nail through into the plywood, and the bottom enough wood to nail into the soffit. It angles out away from the soffit ever so slightly to ALMOST keep the original look, and have a pseudo fascia, but basically the whole thing is covered by the drip edge, anyway. It's really just to cover the edge of the soffit and provide a strong backing for the drip edge.
Everything was pre-primed, end cuts were primed, and the back and seams glued with 30 degree scarf joints. "Signed, sealed, and delivered," as Hardy would say.

To make up for all the annoyance with this trim stuff, I used a copper drip edge which looks beautiful and sexy.

I had to make that custom little triangle at the end, and tried in vain to get the molding to go up along it but could not make it happen cleanly. Drip edge covers it.

First few courses of shingles as seen with copper drip edge. These were all reached from the ladder. Check out how cool my entry door is, with the original "twist" doorbell.

She's a beauty.

This part of the roof is called the "rake."

Bing.

squaring her up.

Late is the hour...

And there you have it. Pretty dang close to done. Note the copper step flashing and heavy duty Grace ice and water shield. This area gets the brunt of the water and was the most heavily damaged, so I went the extra mile here. The whole upper bit will be flashed in copper.

Waiting on the copper flashing tomorrow before I finish the ridge shingles.

Almost looking like a normal house again.

Tomorrow I flash and redo the siding.

Roof, somewhere in the middle

2008-08-29T21:47:00.008-04:00

Measuring for the next piece of sheathing. I used 5/8" CDX plywood to adhere to the code.

Anchoring the sheathing with my impact driver - kkrkrrk! kkrrrk! krrrkkrr!

Cleaning up the ridge a bit with the skill saw. Basically everything butts up together along the ridge, over the ice and water shield, and then the ridge cap shingles go over the seam.
Pops came over and helped me bang out the second day of sheathing pretty quickly. Guy is a champ on the ladder and roof.

First four pieces on the North face. I pulled out three old wasp nests about the size of a genetically modified pumpkin.

I was lazy and left that old flashing up there up until the last minute, thinking maybe I could reuse it.
Wound up tearing it off, along with another clapboard, but it's best that way.

Not an easy task getting these suckers up the ladder.

Definitely steeper than it looks up there.

How the west was won. Note the ice and water shield already covering the North face completely.

Test fitting the old molding to get the right overhang with the plywood. See the old line where the bottom of the molding used to be? The elevation changed when I took off the old sheathing and put in plywood. This made a bunch of things difficult, like having to mess with all the casings and moldings (casings will have to patched in).

Roof, Days 1 & 2

2008-08-29T20:50:00.016-04:00

Now that I'm almost done with the roof, I've got a few minutes to update the blog with lots of pictures over the last week or so.

Rented a dump truck to haul away the debris. Tried to throw it all from the roof into the truck, but in fact about 99% of it all fell to the ground in various piles.

The rubbish wound up weighing a full ton, and now I have a bunch more with the old sheathing and scraps of shingles and flashing, so I would have been better off just getting a dumpster. Oh well.

Got a decent technique down with the pitchfork after the first hour or so. Right about here I'm feeling pissed off for having taken on the project...

After about three hours... Those horizontal boards would later come off across the entire roof.

Had to "sister" some of the rafters, which means cut identical pieces to match and nail them alongside the older, cracking and/or rotten rafters.

From another angle.

My main man Sean from next door helps me rip the new soffit from a piece of 1X12 fjp. One piece is already installed from the corner.

Heave-ho matey.

With a keen eye, Dr. Mandingo check fits the new soffit.

I used my framing nailer with 3" galvanized nails to attach the soffit into the rafter tails.

Note the wedgie...
The final piece goes in like a gem.

Knee Deep in the Roof

2008-08-22T22:02:00.008-04:00

Well, decided to rip off the roof the other day and put on a new one.
Took a full day with a pitchfork prying up two layers of Asphalt and a layer of cedar shingles.
Loaded up a dump truck and dumped it this morning (1,900 lbs. worth of rubbish).

The decking on the North face was in fine shape, except for being riddled with about 10,000 nails.
The West face decking was very spongy and rotten and required a full gut down to the rafters along with half a day of sistering and/or replacing rafters.
It's an interestingly framed structure. The rafters have no ledger (possibly inside the wall), and the ends of them are steeply mitered and connect to the soffit (with the soffit's only support being the rafters roughly 2' OC). There is no fascia whatsoever. A few of the rafters had little wedges underneath a few inches up to brace it on top of the carrying beam held up by the posts. So I added more wedges, too. The sucker is good for another 100 years or so before some other poor sap tears it apart again and wonders what in hell the last guy was doing.
Therefore, I'll be stripping the North face off as well, and laying down 5/8 CDX over the whole thing.

I ripped off a few layers of clapboards to get at the flashing and last row of shingles, so I have that material ready to replace.

The trickiest part will be redoing the little crown molding that attached to the edge of the soffit, and originally had the cedar shingles on top of it. With the plywood, it will require lots of custom screwing around to get a tight seam between the two. This molding was destroyed in the gut job, so I'll have to get something about 2 1/2" wide and do some kustom kraftsmanship on it.

This is after about two hours of swearing and wondering what in hell I had gotten myself into.
After I got a bit of a technique with the pitchfork, it went faster. Most of the time in this photo was spent trying to take off the clapboards and flashing without damaging them, and this was of course unsuccessful.

I was very surprised to see that the entire house is covered in that red rosin paper. Maybe a vapor barrier?

About 60 feet to go...

To be continued...

The Yews Come Out!

2008-08-18T21:49:00.011-04:00

Well, after two days of grunting and heaving, the yews are all down and fully processed (and illegally dumped), except for the stumps, which I need to somehow remove.

As charming as the trees were, they were wreaking havoc on the porch, and it's a bit of a can of worms now. At least I still have the classic scent in the house to remind me of the bygone days.

I started by simply sawzalling some nails in the fence rails, then just moving those sections aside to allow for falling timbers. Some of the sections are so rotten that I could just pick them up off the ground and move them, without any disassembly.
I did a little sistering of some rails and screwed them back in place to get me through the winter, with "nary a scratch to the fence," as Alex says.

With half the trees gone. These were clear as high as the telephone wires!
red arrows = replace me!

In all her glory...

Let's have a look at that one more time, with side-by-side comparison shots:

Errm. Eek! This sucker is completely rotted away thanks to those sneaky little yews.
The base of that post is totally off the deck and loose.
It will need to be replaced. The problem is, I don't think the profile can be found as a stock item, so it means getting a few new ones custom milled to match (at least both corner posts, and maybe one other that already has a jury-rigged base).

Note the classic lead paint, and nice thick lattice which you don't see anymore.

It looks like a new deck is in order, too.

A nice view of the yard.

So, plan before snowfall:

- New porch footings
- New porch posts as necessary
- New porch floor
- New porch roof
- Eliminate unnecessary gutter and install copper drip "V" above stairs.

- New garage roof.

(thanks for the lovely photos, Andrea!)

Into the Frey - Chico's First House!

2008-08-16T20:45:00.002-04:00

Yesterday I became the proud owner of this beauty. It's a big "menschy" place from the early 1900s and reminds me of something out of a Laurel and Hardy movie, which is great because I love those guys.

Here are a few exterior shots.

Alas, these yews have run totally rampant for far too long.
Aside from looking somewhat mangy, they've helped rot away both corners of the porch. It's not major damage, but will require some urgent work before snowfall.

The West side of the house. Under those green asbestos shingles lie scalloped cedar shingles - condition unknown. Eventually I will be taking these off.

The porch is one of the nicest features of the house. Once I take out the yews, there will be a great view of the Housatonic river across the street.
Note the rings for the love seat.
I plan on digging some new footings, especially for the corners, replacing a few beam sections, and a few floor sections. Aside from the bit of rot, and needing a new roof, the porch is in great shape.

The East side of the house, with original wood shutters in nice condition.
I plan on taking out all that detritus along the fence, and eventually redoing the fence as it's completely rotted away and could fall with a strong gust of wind.

Back of the house. The little wing is an addition done roughly in the 50s, and is surprisingly shoddily built. This will need major work down the road...

The garage is amazing - look at those original glass doors. They fold in manually, accordion style. I hope to be able to rig up an electric system down the road using these doors.

A better view of the garage. The south roof (not seen) is in dire need of new shingles. There's also an old chimney in that far corner which has been leaking a long ti me and rotted away some of the framing members. That will be ripped out and repaired soon.

Stay tuned!