Victorian Farmhouse - Part 11

Rather than keep track of days, or finding specific titles for all the farmhouse posts, I'm just going to switch to "parts". This is the 11th post about it, so it will be part 11, and will continue from there.

I've been pretty lazy about updates on the farmhouse for the past 2 months. This doesn't mean that things aren't still being worked on, or that I didn't take photos. It just takes a LOT of time to edit all the photos, and white down everything in an orderly, cohesive fashion. I don't make any money off this blog, so it's really only updated because I WANT to.

The last post was from days 12-13, I think, which was back in May. Quite a bit has been done since then, but not nearly as much as I would have hoped. The bathroom is still untouched, the electrical still isn't finished, and nothing is ready for paint yet.

Angie & Pierre, I think were hoping to move in by August (early or late, I really dunno). I don't remember if I mentioned this before, but their apartment building where they currently live is in the middle of some serious (and very disruptive) renovations where the entire exterior walls are being removed and replaced. I'm not entirely sure how that works (without the building collapsing) but there are basically just plastic tarps everywhere, lots of dust, noise, and they can't wait to get out of there. Then again, the farmhouse still isn't ready to be lived in (no electrical except for in the kitchen, and no bath/shower).

Since I'm SO FAR BEHIND on posts, I'm really going to skim through a lot of what was done. Either with just brief explanations, or with fewer photos (there are still over 100 - not all of which will be in this post). A lot of the work was floors, more demolition, electrical, and some trim.

Alright with that out of the way, here's the completed soffit/fascia trim. I'm a bit sad that the beautiful and original crown mouldings were unceremoniously ripped out and thrown away, though they were so badly deteriorated that they would have needed replacing anyway. You can also see in this photo that the peak's siding is a very faded mint green. The front of the house is the same.





This is the sill plate (beam) repair, which will need to be patched with siding. Angie's father repaired this.



More soffit.



This shows some of the foundation repairs to the stone (mortar). It's obviously much rougher because it will be buried.



The antenna was taken down. Also note the giant pile of branches and shrubs that were removed.



They hadn't finished the last two sections of soffit for another 2 weeks.



Does anyone know what these pretty indigo flowers are? EDIT: they're periwinkle. They're about an inch wide, and the leaves are glossy and in pairs (see stem just on the right). These were in the flowerbed by the kitchen addition.



One of the problems we ran into with the re-laying of the floor in the office was the AMOUNT of space we actually took up by eliminating all the gaps. I'd say we ate up at least 3 inches. This meant that we landed part of the way into the supporting cross-beam I had installed. At this point the beam can't be moved, and re-cutting the hole isn't an easy option. The only other "easy" option would have been to cut the board in half and replace the half with the partial hole. BUT, if you know me, I'm not about making things easy. I'm all about making it look good AT ANY COST.

The solution was to carefully carve a diagonal into the cross-beam to accept a custom duct fitting.



The beam was only overlapping by about half, so a small slope isn't going to weaken it very much. The new beams are also only to add rigidity to the floor. They aren't even technically needed.



Angie filling nail holes and imperfections in the trim.



This was as much as we could install of the floor. The remaining lengths of wood aren't wide enough to fill the rest of the hole.



I'm not entirely sure what the next two photos were meant to show, but they are already resized and saved (over a month ago).





Here's the new floor transition. Clean, crisp and beautiful! All the broken and cracked sections were copiously glued in place.



Yesss... Note the crooked vent hole (which will be fixed and straightened in later photos). Also note the knot holes.



Here's the last 2 rows of original floor (not installed). Even loose (not tightened-up) there's about 4" of missing floor to replace.



This was on another day (and took a good part of the day to do). Angelina was REALLY bothered by the location of the vent in the living room. I agreed, but I wasn't sure if we could fix it. I had my suspicions that it was there because there was a ceiling joist in the way. The basement (stone foundation) also had this vent completely sealed and cemented in place (all around it).



Well, as I said, it really REALLY was bugging her, so we took a look at it. Turns out it would be possible to fix it. We removed the vent/grille/boot in the upstairs spare bedroom, and found that there was space to the right. Likewise, all the loose stone, sand, and rubble of the stone foundation could pretty easily be moved to accommodate the pipe to the right (into the corner). The small bits of loose floor were rotted from moisture.







I had to make SEVERE modifications to the top (sloped/angled) boot to get this to work. I essentially had to completely remove the joint fitting (the coupler part).



A couple of elbow joints, and then more filling with crushed stone.



You can kind of see what I did here. The joint is missing, and the elbow goes directly into the sloped cone. It actually worked out really well. The boot isn't at a perfect angle with the floor, but it's only about 1/4" off.



Angie was VERY happy.

While I had to cut the tongue and groove ceiling to do the repairs/modifications, I also cut the patch for the ceiling where the round stovepipe vent was. The key is to have a staggered joint. If we had plenty of old salvaged tongue and groove to work with, I'd have made it even more random, but we are limited, so I cut off as little as possible.

Victorian Farmhouse - Reinstalling the Floor

This post covers days 11 to 14 (April 17, 18, May 14, 21). There was a bit of a break in the work due to Mother's Day as well as a weekend off, and scheduling and availability issues.

On days 11 and 12, not a whole lot was done on the house. We did some more demolition (removing the tongue-and-groove under the electrical panel, as well as removing some more of the non-matching mouldings). More work was done on electrical, and a lot of times was spent troubleshooting a connection in the junction box controlling the 3-way switch to the main staircase (the one in the attic).

Here are some photos of the skim-coated walls after they had dried.









Here's the old wallpaper found under the non-matching mouldings on the living room side. It's a similar hand-printed wallpaper to the pink ones on the reverse. It dates to AT LEAST the early 1920s, but it's probably much older than that.



I like the colours in this one. Off white, green, dark pink...









So after the long break (3 weeks?) I was told that there were some... developments... that happened while I was away, and that I probably wouldn't be too happy about them. Apparently while we were gone, and with NO ONE ASKING ANY OF US, the "foundation guy" convinced the parents that the boards we pulled-up from the floor should be planed down rather than be sanded in place. The guy claimed that these kinds of floors can't be sanded with a normal floor sander, which is complete b/s and makes absolutely no sense. This guy has worked on historic homes, so I guess the parents didn't question him too much, but I would NEVER EVER have run them through a planer*. So anyhow, all the boards were given a light pass through a planer, and when Angie found out what they did, she had a complete freak-out and meltdown (and I don't blame her one bit). Apparently there was a lot of screaming and cursing involved. I only found out about all of this on the car ride up to the house.

So yeah, not only did they plane the boards, but apparently all my carefully marked and numbered stickers got messed up because they started planing them not even bothering to check anything. This is the part that irritates me the most, since the floor HAD to be re-laid in exactly the same way (because of heating vents, and warped areas), and the numbers were largely the only indication of how to reinstall them correctly.

So yeah, I wasn't thrilled. They also "goofed" a few of them by passing them upside down, so a few were now too thin on the bottom, which gave us a lot of trouble.

The new roof was also installed when I saw the house after the break.





The rotted beam under the window was also patched (the one where you could see outside).



Angie's father also fixed the top of the chimney.



There were numerous different tulips in the side bed.



So yeah, the floor. I was definitely not happy about the whole numbering issue (most had thankfully been re-labeled correctly, but a few had question marks on them), and I was really not happy that the planer seems to have really raised a lot of flakes and coarse texture in the boards. It also ripped out and ate a number of the knots in the boards, leaving us with a bunch of large holes. The guy must have really messed-up his planer knives, too, because at least 3 or 4 huge nails were hit (we removed all the ones we could, but didn't worry too much about them, since they weren't supposed to be passing through a planer!)

Re-laying the floor was kind of grueling. I think we had about 3 boards out of 16 lengths that went in really easily. Most of the others went in very painstakingly. We had to use a combination of tapping with hammers (against blocks), pulling, pushing, and using large 4 foot pipe clamps that I brought for the purpose.



The whole pile of planed boards...



Here's how I squared-up the living room archway flooring. If you recall from the last post, this flooring edge was really crooked. We wanted a nice clean transition, so I screwed a piece of thin plywood along the archway (passing the screws in between floor boards to avoid making visible holes), and then I used a router with a flush-cut bit (3/4") mounted in it. The plywood serves as the straight-edge for the base plate of the router. This works really well, but it makes a LOT of dust.

The ends were cut with the multi-tool.



The flooring on this part appears to be solid maple, and 1 1/4" thick, so I had to do multiple passes. You can see what's being cut off.





Each board took at least 1/2 hour to install.



Another issue that came up was that the foundation guy was SUPPOSED to come by and fix the edge of the foundation for us. There were 2 or 3 high spots along the front wall, and holes to be filled along the side wall. Well, apparently we were told that the foundation guy came and fixed it, but it was quite apparent that it was Angie's father who did the quick fix himself using regular cement instead of lime mortar. All the holes along the side wall had also not been filled-in at all.

To add to the disappointment, the patch he hid was about an inch too high across most of the patch. The poor guy meant well, but it ended up making a lot more work for us. Pierre and I spent a good 2 hours chipping away all the top inch of cement, and then filling-in all the holes in the side wall with crushed gravel and sand (not ideal, but better than nothing).





The new beam repair (to replace the rotted section) was also not deep enough, and not the same height, so we had to redo all of our shims and blocks along the edge, which ate-up even more time.



Installing 3/4 of the floor (what you see below) took the entire day. Because of all the screwed-up boards, several of them had to be shimmed on the bottom, and a bunch were very difficult to slip back into their grooves.

You will also note that several of the boards had cracked (either from age, or from us removing them), so each of those had to be carefully reglued. We also had to trim all the boards to length. This was either because the "nice edge" was crooked, or because they were now too long to slip back under the edge of the wall.



In the end, however, the floor turned out looking really good. The majority of all the gaps are now either tight, or with a maximum gap of around 1/8" (with most being no more than 1/16").



Here's the transition edge. The line looks great, the only problem is that now there's about a 1/16" to 1/8" drop between the two floors because of the planing. This will be difficult to fix, especially with the other floor being solid hardwood.





While I was away, Pierre also did a bit of work himself, namely all the sanding in the hallway to remove all the textured gesso work on the wall going up the stairs. He did this using a power sander and 80 grit paper. This made a LOT of dust and he worked on this while no one else was in the house (and obviously wearing a mask).



He also patched all the holes in the wall and smoothed everything out.



EDIT: Forgot the last photo. Pierre & Angie after a long day's work.




* For those who might want more details about my reasoning VS his in regards to the floor, here's a bit more of my thoughts. First of all, this is an antique floor. It's old wood, it's very dry, it's damaged, and it has nails in it. It's also warped and bent in a lot of places because of how it's been installed and in place for about 140-150 years. One of the boards had bend in it that was about a 2" curve over a 2 foot span. When you pass something this fragile through a machine like a planer, there's a good amount of risk involved. The wood could chip badly, the wood could jam in the machine and leave a deep mark, and there are other issues like the loose knots being yanked out of their holes and chewed up by the machine. One of the other major problems with planing a floor like this is that the boards might not be the same thickness across the surface. The boards could be thicker near the edges of the room, and thinner in the centre, they were sanded in place, so it's impossible to tell exactly how everything will line up after it's laid back down. One of the problems we had when we reinstalled it was that come of the boards seemed to now have a sort of trapezoidal profile (one edge seemed thicker or higher than the other. In several spots this left us with the entire edge of a board being about 1/16" higher than the board next to it. The only way to fix this now is to sand down the floor even more. Before the boards were planed, they were around 1 3/16" to 1 1/4" and after that, they came out barely being 1 1/8" on most of them, which means we lost about 1/8" in thickness, which is quite a lot. Now we need to lose another 1/16" to get rid of all the fuck-ups.