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.

Ugh.

So I woke up to this yesterday.

:(

View from my bedroom window.





What sucks is I don't really have any money to do anything about it right now, and it's a bit too high to reach on my crappy rickety ladder without risking death.

The Garage Wall Project - Part 2 of 2

Once the interior wall was finished, all that was left was to remove the old wall, and install the new siding on it.

Removing the old wall and installing the new plywood turned out to be a full day project. I started around 10:40am (Sat) and finished around 8pm.

Step 1 was to pull down all the old Masonite siding. There's a reason they don't sell this stuff anymore. While it's not a terrible product, and it CAN last a long time, it needs maintenance (frequent repainting) and most home owners can't be bothered. Face it, people are lazy. As soon as water starts to get into this product, it softens and turns basically into wet cardboard.

I started working from the front of the garage near the worst section. Everything pulled off or simply fell off with little effort.



I discovered that under the white Masonite siding was a layer of "Insulbrick" siding. This is similar to the Masonite, but even lighter and fluffier material. It is coated in a waterproof tar on the backside, and the front is regular asphalt shingle. If properly installed, it looks quite convincingly like brick. Under the shingle siding was the tar paper followed by the tongue and groove.





There were two kinds of "Insulbrick" used. The top layer with the lighter lines was much poorer quality than the lower stuff.





The wall had some poorly patched repairs.



DECAY. These boards could just be pulled off and crushed like dry crackers, It's really amazing that the wall was still holding itself together under its own weight.



Seriously, it just turned into dust and splinters as soon as you grabbed it.



Most of the first half of the wall was also layered with this white mould or fungus growth. Kind of pretty actually. I was wearing gloves.





I took the wall apart in sections, and basically as soon as I had free space for the next sheet of 4x8 I would install it. Here was the first sheet installed (1 of 7).

Code requires a minimum of 7/16 (less than half an inch) for sheathing an exterior wall (usually OSB), but I wanted something much thicker and stronger, and I chose 3/4" spruce plywood. Cheap 7/16" OSB sheeting is something like 15$/sheet while the nice thick plywood I used was something around 35$/sheet. It's quite a bit more, but much better. It also matches the thickness of the original tongue and groove, so I'd hopefully have less problems matching-up the front corner because of the thickness.





Sheet #2:



One of the big problems with the demo of the old wall was what to do with the trash. I ended up piling the pieces of old siding against the cinder block wall of the neighbour's house (temporarily). For the t-g and all the tar paper, I just tossed it all into the garage along the edge of the wall.



Some of the old t-g was in nice clean shape, and I tried to save as much of it as I could to reuse it for shop/furniture projects. This is nice old-growth lumber which you can't get anymore.

Last sheet!



Not shown was the bottom edge pieces. These were done in 3/4" pressure treated plywood. Not necessary, but I thought that the extra few bucks (about 20$/sheet extra) would be worth it for added moisture protection at the base of the wall.

The following day I removed the old gutter. I t would have been nice to keep it in place, but it was sloped so far down that I couldn't nail the top edges of my 7 plywood sheets. I would also need to rework/fix the fascia, so it had to go.



You can also see how incredibly bad the roof has gotten on the garage. It's leaking in (only) 2 spots, which is surprising, since it's SO INCREDIBLY BAD.



Code requires a waterproof membrane under the siding. This was provided with a layer of Typar house wrap from my favourite lumber/DIY store Emard Lumber (which is where I bought most of my supplies, since they have good prices and offer free delivery in town).



I had to use a 9ft x 95ft roll because their smaller rolls didn't have enough coverage on them. This means I got a nice single piece to cover the entire wall, but I also have an extra 65ft which I can hopefully resell in the local classifieds. All the edges were taped.



The front edge needed a bit of a Macgyver fix to make things work. I wasn't changing the existing aluminum siding on the front of the garage (and rest of the house) but the corner was sticking out a bit too far (it was originally installed over the Insulbrick). What I ended up doing was I folded the corner in a bit more (aluminum is soft) and I screwed it flat to the plywood with brass screws (the screws had to be waterproof just in case). The new J-trim for the vinyl siding was then nestled into the groove of the aluminum track (see farther down).



Sorry, no in-between pics. The Typar, taping, gutter removal, and front corner fix was done on day 2 (Sun), with all the J trim and siding installed on day 3 (Mon - which was a holiday).



I love how nicely and neatly the siding landed with the edge of the neighbour's cinder block building.



The front corner has just a HAIR of a curve into the corner, but it's not noticeable.



New J-trim into the old aluminum corner. Looks great!



The top is a bit f-ed up, so I want to get that piece with the arrow eventually removed and capped in white metal.



How it looks from the sidewalk:



On Tuesday I tackled the fascia/soffit rebuilding. For whatever reason, the entire thing was crooked. There was some evidence that it's always been slightly off (I found some old shims and spacers) but I wanted a nice straight and beautiful repair, so I built-up and shimmed everything that was too short.

I started by installing the bottom pine boards to land with the deepest roof truss end. These were the ones at the far end of the garage next to the other building. As I got to the front, the trusses were short by about 1 1/2 inches. Yikes. To fix this I nailed on additional support boards on each truss to keep the face of the fascia nice and square.



The spots in the centre that were only off by a bit got some flat board shims installed on the ends of the trusses.





Here is a shot of the "extensions" at the short end.



For the fascia (front board) I used what was left of my 3/4" pressure treated plywood. It looks great, and it's very solid. You can see where the roof truss ends. I will cap this end also.





And that's it. Now I need to find a roofing company to redo the roof. The edge of the roof decking (which sticks out and is cut crooked) will need to be trimmed, the fascia will need to be capped in metal, and a new gutter will be installed. I'll keep you all posted.

All that's left for me is to get rid of all the trash. Round 1 was this past Wed. I tied together something like 10-15 bundles of rotted wood boards, tar paper, and stacked all the Insulbrick siding to make it easier for the garbage men.



I still have all the white siding, the vertical (rotted) 2x4s, and the old fascia wood to get rid of. Not to mention that 500lb box of dirt, lol.