A House Revealed

4 November 2016

While we wait in this holding pattern on the barn, I have turned my attention back to the house. You might remember that I have already pulled up the porch floor in front of the kitchen door. It had collapsed halfway already so it was a little bit of a hazard.

I have moved inside to an adjacent utility/storage room. It's roughly 10x10 and has one window, and one door opens out on to the porch that I just removed. The hot water heater was in here as well as miscellaneous storage. I'm told by a neighbor that a washer and dryer also used to be in this room.

My plan for the house involves removing all of the bead board off of the walls. I also want to remove all of the flooring on the first floor. This will make it much easier to identify and repair rotted wood framing, updated/replace the electrical system, update/replace the plumbing systems, seal and/or insulate the walls, and repair/replace the foundation.

I had already removed the bead board off of one wall because I needed to get to the breaker panel.

Now it's just a matter of finishing what I started.

 

 

The floor in this room consisted of two layers of plywood and the original 6" tongue and groove pine boards.

I found a lot of recent (10-20 year old) repair work.

 

And done! You can see that most of the floor structure on the interior areas of this part of the house were basically notched beams resting on ledger boards  that were nailed to main beams sitting on the piers. Most of the beams in this room were rotted, or the ledger boards had rotted, which is probably why extra piers were added.

Since we want to retain the bead board and put it back up, I have labeled every piece that I take down. On the blank wall with no features, I only marked the bead board pieces for which room, and which wall they came off of. On other walls, I also numbered each piece and wrote the corresponding number on the wall studs as needed.

Nearly all of the paint on the house contains lead. I'm thinking that I will be able to set up a "dirty room" with plastic sheeting and use it as a place to clean off nearly all of the interior wood work as needed. I've done similar setups before with drywall repairs and textured ceiling repairs. I've also had experience with asbestos removal. This setup would be very similar. We will be able to do a more thorough job and keep all the paint dust and flakes contained for easy cleanup. Full body Tyvek suits and a good respirator will be needed. Easy!

Once I had the utility room done, I moved on to the what we're calling the pantry.

 

The wall between the utility room and the pantry is not load bearing. In fact, because the floor beam underneath it had sunk downward, the bottom ends of the wall studs here were not attached to anything except the bead board on the walls. So I removed the wall altogether. This made it easier to remove the flooring too.

Eventually I intend to have the whole first floor looking like this. In this picture you can see the back side of a small portion of the original skirt wall that was built between the pilasters. The rough ends of the half bricks are where holes used to be for ventilating the crawl space.

The sill beams in this part of the house (back wall and left wall) are 7-1/2" x 7-1/2" oak I think. The floor beam on the right side of the picture above was replaced. It is a modern 6 x 6. It ends just about where the blue tool handle is sitting. The last 3-4' is original beam.

I'm really enjoying this part of the project because seeing the history of the house in this way is very interesting to me. Can't wait to see what the rest of the house has to tell us.