darn heavy seems to be an understatement for that beam. Good on you two for getting it done. I got a chuckle out of the temporary posts on top of the jacks. They don't look to be very light either but very "artistic".
Ah shucks , now when you spill your marbles they will go all over the place instead of congregating in one area. Grand parents place was like that up hill and down dale and it would change with seasons. kept me real busy patching that old 1"+ thick plaster and lath.
chitake Mushrooms; that aint nothing! Katie helped me put up an 8 x 8 spruce in our current home that was 16 feet long...when she was 7 months pregnant! No joking at all on that. Katie is probably tougher than most men, but I let on that she is a sally all the time so that I get more work out of her.
Are these the cabinets in the black cherry debate? The counters look newer and the cabinets are not dark, why not keep them?
No, those are Pine Cabinets my uncle made. They are brand new, and never have been used, including the appliances. They came from my Grandmother who distrusted banks so kept her money in her safe and hidden about the house. A lot of it was stuffed behind the many pictures she had hanging up. With the money we found, we rebuilt the kitchen and bathroom, but it was a VERY poor design. In fact I do not even know what they were thinking. They put the sink under a cabinet and facing...a wall??? A window nearby and they face the window into a wall??? Then there is the corner cabinet we call the Gynecologist Cabinet. The cabinet door is 6 inches wide, yet goes into the corner that is cavernous making it impossible to put anything into despite the vast room once inside. Even the position of the kitchen is silly, it is in the back of the house forcing people to walk through the living room, the dining room before they get to the kitchen. Yuck. We are rearranging much of the house, swapping the kitchen for the living room, opening everything up, putting beams under load bearing walls that were taken out, etc. The idea is to make a bigger bathroom so that everything in the basement can come upstairs...cold water tank, hot water heater, furnace, and even the electrical panel, just due to flooding, cold, etc of the basement. We tried to really make the existing kitchen in that house work, but nothing we came up with would really work with what we really wanted. We will use it temporarily for now, just until the new kitchen is built. Note: For people going through old homes like we did, check out the old pictures. It was not until someone dropped a picture and broke it did we figure out where she was keeping her money hidden. She used (2) photos, the frame, the glass, the first picture, but then would put a second picture behind the first as a sort of backer. In between she would put her money safely hidden in plain sight. Another trick she did was to fold her bills into the tiniest squares and squirrel them away. Overall we found $20,000 but I am sure we never found all of it. Equally I am sure a lot of families have gone through relatives home and tossed things with money hidden inside. Only after finding that broken picture frame did we go back and start finding more that we had missed.
We struggled this week again on whether or not to rent or sell, we had been leaning really heavy towards just renting our current home, but then a realtor we had gotten came out and told us what our house was worth. Using (4) other caparison homes that were quite similar to ours, our house was worth about $50,000 more than we thought. But of the (4) comparison homes, (3) were sold, and the last was pending a sale. The average time up for sales was only 49 days. It was really tempting... But after realizing it was just a financial carrot in front of our faces, we realized it is in our best interest to rent. The realtor was going to try to sell the house as a Gentleman's farm anyway, and asked if we would lease some of the surrounding land. Well if we are going to do that, we could just lease the house and the land to someone as well giving us just as much money long term and greater control on what is done. And Katie's dream has always been to start a Day Care Center and this house, because of the bathrooms, one floor, size, and room arrangement would make a perfect one. We have done the math and the pay for doing that would exceed anything we could rent the house for as a residence. We are not ready for a day care Center yet, but if we sold, we would eliminate that. So overall, if we sold, we would eliminate our options. As I said earlier, this place is owned outright, and property taxes actually went down this year, so the cost of keeping it is minimal. My cancer treatments have helped; I have more stamina now, and while not 100%, I am feeling better and getting more done. It will be awhile before I get back to full-time logging, but I can work on the farm and have some proof of it at the end of the day. In short, I lived another day and I think the worst is over.
Thanks for the well wishes. Now the house... How did potato farmers in 1900 insulate a home? Apparently by nailing layers of fertilizer bags into the wall cavities. I am not joking on that. My Grandparents tried to blow in some type of foam insulation in the 1980's, but whatever they paid to have that done was just a waste of money, the foam would hit a bag just right then fail to fill the rest of the cavity. But what little is in there is making me cough up half a lung. Good thing I already got cancer! I should have the bottom floor done today though.
Well in trying to do a really good job of giving this 100 year old house another 100 years of life, we tore down the ceiling to see why the second floor was sagging. It did not take a structural engineer to figure it out. Around 1946 the house was renovated and a load bearing wall downstairs was removed from the building. In addition a wall was put upstairs halfway across the room. While not intending to be loadbearing, it ended up being just that. This left the entire second floor to span 18 linear feet, with a cutout for a staircase with no header, with a wall bearing the weight of the roof and second story above. All this was held up by 2x5's spaced 2 feet on center! Is it any wonder the floor sagged in the center by 2 inches? Naturally the beam we put in where the old load bearing wall once stood will help a lot, but yesterday I sawed new 2x5's, jacked up the floor stringers from underneath and then nailed in the new floor stringers (Spruce) to each side of the existing ones. That will net me laminated carrying stringers that are 5x6's, 2 feet on center with a 11 foot span. Its not ideal, but a whole lot better than what was there. I have no idea why the second floor did not come crashing down onto the first floor. All it had was (2) 20 penny spikes holding it together by the stairwell, not to mention one knot on the bottom of the stringer blowing out and causing a cracked floor stringer. On a great note though, it is a good thing I got my own sawmills to saw out these oddball sized lumber sizes; 2 x 5 is not exactly standard size lumber! On a bad note, one of the spruce logs had nails in it which caused the sawmill blade to complain a little bit!
Even after cutting the span back to 12 feet, and tripling the 2x5's, there is some bounce to the floor hen you jump up and down on it. I probably should have sistered on 2x8's and then covered difference with a board, or added a 2x3 in between to make up the difference for the existing stringer. I have to be careful because being cottage style, it is structural, but also finish carpentry, meaning everything is exposed (no ceiling). But it is too late now. I am going to tear into the other half of the floor today and do the same thing to be matchy-matchy.
Brand new houses with those fancy laminated beams- floors go bouncy as well. Fire department horror stories about those.
I got the ceiling ripped out of the dining room area of this house yesterday, then sawed out the 2x5's needed to triple up the floor stringers and got them installed. Then it was time for lunch, and soon got roped into sawing hemlock clapboards on the sawmill by my interested father. There is a lot more about that in the sawmilling section on here.
I have not been on here much as I have been busy putting that house together. With so much work to do inside and out, it does not matter the weather as there is always something to do. I have pretty much wrapped up the wiring, wiring in the Green Switch and the Always-On-Power. I really like it as I flip the switch when I leave for the night and know all but the non-essential stuff is killed. In all, the house went from having 6 outlets, no ceiling lights on switches (pull string only), and tube and knot wiring, to over 50 new outlets, light switches everywhere. 1000 new feet of new wire (#12 AWS ), and 3 new subpanels including a generator shed for my backup power. (20 KW) Framing wise, I got everything beefed up with the second floor, floor stringers beefed up with three times the strength they had before. Framing also meant changing the layout of the house. The old living room is now the kitchen, the old kitchen is now the living room, and the bathroom is a bathroom/utility room. This included bringing the well tank and hot water tank out of the basement so no utilities are in the old fieldstone basement. Kitchen wise, we reused the kitchen cabinets (for now) until I can build new ones. Yesterday we hooked up the plumbing though, and for the first time in a decade, the pump in the tank spun and water flowed into the house. A house just is not a house without running water! This house never had insulation before either, but the bottom floor is now 100% insulated. Besides the batts of fiberglass insulation, we pumped in some 18 cans of spray foam (rodent control type), so I am thinking this 1100 sq ft Foursquare will be able to be easily heated with my pot belled stove now. Upstairs especially so as we took out the ceilings to go with the exposed floor stringer look of the cottage farmhouse look we are going after. This will reduce places for rodents to run, as well as allow heat up into the upstairs through the floorboards, and allow us to insulate the outside walls better. So a lot has been done, but I have a long list of things to do still...
A lot of work but when you are snuggled down by the pot bellied stove one winter night with the family all around, it will be sooooo worth it.
In addition to what Woodwidow said, warm floors are always great to have in winter. One of the reason I run the P61a to heat the basement to 72* is so I have warm floors in the kitchen, living room, office and bathroom (bedrooms are over garage - those floors are cold
Eventually we are thinking about putting in 100% radiant heat. In this house it would be really easy as the underside of the floor on the bottom floor can be accessed by the basement. Then upstairs we could just run pex over the top of the floor and put down new flooring. I have a rebuilt wood/coal boiler for that if I needed it, but unsure if all that is warranted at this point. I suspect that as well insulated as this place will be, it being a 1100 square foot foursquare, it is going to heat very easily. A pot bellied stove will do the bulk of the work, with a spare Renai forced propane stove as back-up that I have kicking around. I don't think it will be needed, but we can put in a smaller (11,000 BTU) Renai upstairs if need be to heat the bedrooms. There is an old 1988 hot air oil furnace in the basement, but I am not sure what it would take to fire up. I would have to feed it via a 5 gallon pail because the oil tank is full of 10 year old Number 2 Furnace Oil, so I am betting it is got algae all through it. I could use it on very, very cold days to just keep the basement warm so pipes do not freeze, but think banking the house with hay will be a much better plan. It is a fieldstone foundation with dirt floor so they give off a lot of heat compared to concrete.
