Day 6 and 7

So it was a good week at the 1790 House -- Ed and his crew and Mark the mason made some good progress that will set us up for a great week next week. Over the last couple of days we have seen our living room floor completed. In this photos you can see the 8x9 beams that are the floor joists. They are huge -- we could pull a fire truck right into our living room. This floor creates the platform from which Ed will be able to improve the structure of the rest of the house. The new block wall seen here replaces the pressure treated wall that Mark B put in. Behind the wall, we back filled it with soil and gravel to hold the base of the chimney together. That's an 8 foot wall that needed to be filled to the top with dirt -- and there was no way to do it except with paint buckets. Needless to say we were a little sore the next day.

Here's another look a the floor and the block wall.

And here you can see that we have done a good job of getting the dirt to the top of the wall. Actually I took a very strategic break to go out and get water and by the time I got back, Roger had finished it off.

On Friday the actually sub floor was applied by Gus and Norm. They also put the sills on the new part of the foundation. Last task for the day was pouring a 2x2x2 footing for the central post in the house. This spot will be carrying a load of over 32,000 pounds.

I'm writing this after returning from the hosue on Saturday. As you know it was pouring rain -- but David, our neighbor had borrowed a tractor from the farm to move the barn. So with the help of John, David and I moved the last piece of the barn off the concrete pad. We now have three pieces of the barn sitting on the other side of the gravel driveway...

I hope that David get's lots of enjoyment out of the barn...glad to have it moved. That will allow us to break up the slab and finish grading the land around the house. Hopefully we'll be able to use all of the dirt pile.

I haven't posted any photos of the new "landscaping." This is the view of the house as you are driving down the road. Unfortunately we had to remove the lilacs because the septic tank can't have trees or bushes within 10 feet and the tank will be placed near the bulkhead. We will be able to save the maple on the corner of the house. Does this look familiar -- no, it's not a photo from months ago before we put the siding on -- it's a photo from yesterday after I TOOK OFF the siding -- this should go into the shoddy workmanship category -- not our shoddy workmanship -- we had to take off the siding because ED needs to re frame the walls and then nail the sheathing to the new framing. We are hoping that since the right side of the house has all new sheathing and new studs that we'll be able to keep the siding. UG - it was painful taking that stuff off.

Here's another view. Our new driveway will be about 6' towards the house from the fence. We were thinking about cobblestones -- two tracks with grass in between. We'll see. We want something appropriately farm like. Eventually we'll have a barn style garage.

Day 5 - memoirs of the trash guy

So, I'm the trash guy. Today I spent the day undoing things that had been done over the last 5 months. You can see in this first photo that all of the shingles have been removed and the second floor beam is exposed (see the previous entry for more on that). I also spent time cleaning up the site, moving dirt and collecting rocks. It was painful to take off the shingles (with the help of Roger) but I feel good about doing it because I know that taking a step back will allow us to move forward in the right way. We had to take the shingles off because Ed and his crew will be re-framing the walls and they will need to nail through the sheathing to attach the new studs to the house. Hector, Ed and Mike worked on the floor in the Living Room today - the timbers that they are using for this are HUGE. They are spread two feet apart and will certainly ensure that there is no bounce in our floors. The used the pulley that you can see in the photo to steady the beam while they were securing it with a post in the basement.

Here you can see the floor joists after they have been installed. To fit them in you can see that thy are notched on the right and they rest on the 2x12 sill plate. On the left the major beam has been notched and the joist sits in the beam.

While Ed, Hector and Mike were working on the floor, Mark Eldredge was busy building this block wall which will be back filled tommorow to shore up the base of the chimney.

Tomorrow more work on the floor and the wall and then hopefully framing will start on the back of the house fairly soon. Ed is busy working out some of the engineering problems. So far so good...

Shoddy workmanship

Presenting a new series -- shoddy workmanship -- things that have to be re-done because they weren't done the right way the first time. We've had the pleasure of ripping off our shingles (which took four days to apply and 1 hour to rip off) so that we could expose the beams that support the second floor. Because of the sub-par work that was done by Mark B, Ed wants to double check to make sure that nothing was overlooked. You may recall that one of the beams suffered from some major rot. After we discovered that we asked Mark to take off all of the sheathing to look at the beams all the way around the house -- we'll that never happened. Luckily when we did this we found the beams to be in pretty good shape. Also luckily we found that the replacement studs that Rocky and Mark put in were not done properly and were therefore not structurally sound. You can see in these photos that the studs (the 2x4 wood) are not cut properly and that there is a gap between the top of the stud and the "plate" or the beam.

The problem with this is that the stud is meant to carry some weight and if it's not touching the plate, then it is carrying NO weight.

We'll keep you updated as more things are uncovered!

Day 4

Just a few quick photos today - we have been away from the jobsite for a few days and there has been a bunch of progress. First you should know that the auto focus on our camera is broken so apologies for the somewhat blurry photos. Leigh and I just celebrated our 5th anniversary and we've been joking that it's the crushed gravel anniversary because we just spent $500 on crushed gravel to fill in below where the foundation floor will be. Anyway, Ed and his crew have been moving right along. In this first photo you can see one of the new main beams on the first floor - it is a custom milled timber that will be what the joists are attached to. It will be supported by two major posts that will come up from the basement. Ed told me that it was pretty tricky getting it in there as it weighs about 500lbs. Apparently the pulled it in with a truck!
Here's another view of the new beam. You can also see some of the temporary measures Ed has taken to support the corner and back of the house.
Finally, here are some of our floor joists that were milled in Rye NH. I'm pretty sure that our floors won't be sagging.

I'm back on the job tomorrow as trash guy - cleaning up the site. We're also meeting with Randy from ASI to have an inspection so that we can draw on our construction loan.

Finally - hoping to get the barn moved so that Jay can finish the regrading of the property. We have some spots that need to be addressed or else we'll have quite a bit of standing water after rain storms.

Chapter 2 - Day 1

As any of you loyal readers know, we have been involved in a classic contractor nightmare -- worthy of a Dateline NBC expose...we'll we've turned the page and are now happy to say that we are moving on. The first step in this process was selecting a new contractor. After interviewing several folks, we decided to go with Ed Mcqueeny who owns a company called Old House Restoration. (makes sense right). During the process of "interviewing" Ed he impressed us with the amount of time and thought he put into his analysis of our situation. I think he actually spent over 12 hours at the house just looking and thinking. He was brutally honest - which was intimidating at first (can you say Money Pit?) but also refreshing. So today was day one on the job - to prep for Ed and his crew I spent some time at the house taking off the water table and some siding and then the first course of sheathing to expose the sills, which Ed felt strongly about replacing. It was difficult taking a step back but gratifying to understand that the work is going to be done correctly this time. In the photo above, you can see the front right of the house. Hector, one of Ed's guys was able to dig out the field stone that the front corner post and sill were sitting on. It was amazing how easily this part of the foundation came out. He then built a foundation for the big rock that you see there now. This provides a much better footing for this corner of the house.

Hector's next task was to remove part of the sill that Mark and Rocky put in. They are replacing the new sills for several reasons -first, Mark's sills were bolted into the foundation but only using a 6" J bolt -- code requires at least 10" bolts. They only replaced a section of the sill because so that the house could rest on the other part of Mark's sill. It took him all of 10 minutes to remove the sill and the loose rocks that it was sitting on! The next step was digging down to large foundation rocks, installing a 2x12 pressure treated sill plate, leveling it, and filling in the space beneath the sill with larger rocks. Doing this allowed Hector to install a longer bold that will attach the sill plate to the foundation. On top of the sill plate, Ed and Hector will place a 6x6 to which they will attach the floor joists.

You can see in the photo above that the sill plate that Mark and Rocky installed is already bending. This is what the whole house is built on.

In these two photos you can see the end of a days work. The top one compares the two sills and the bottom shows Hector's foundation work.

So, things seem to be going in the right direction. Tomorrow Jay will return to back fill the foundation and regrade the property. Mark Eldredge will return to finish up a part of the foundation that couldn't be poured.

New finish date is February 17, 2010.

So the foundation is in and now dampproofed with a tar product. Leigh and I spent the better part of a half day taring the foundation getting ready for it to be back filled by Jay. Leigh went back the next day to do a second coat on some spots that were still showing concrete. Of course we picked two of the hottest days of the summer to do the dirty work...

3rd Blog in one day...we've finished painting the front of the house and today we did one of the side windows and the water table. We also spent some time cleaning up the site so that it can be re-graded away from the house. We think that we're going to get the front of the house "tight" and then really focus on the back part of the house so that we might be able to move in and finish the front after we're in. We'll see... we actually had some folks from England walking by today and they asked us if it was new or old house...hmm - I suppose by English standards it's fairly new. Either way - they obviously hadn't looked inside if they were asking that question!

Friday - Day 3,512

On Friday, Peter and his crew from Hampton concrete came to set the forms for the foundation walls. The job isn't as straightforward as it could be because we have to tie the old foundation into the new one...there are several levels as well. Peter has been flexible and very helpful...and patient with our questions. It's an interesting experience working with these guys because, while they often have recommendations, they often defer to us for final decisions about pretty impactful things. All seems to be going well. By the end of next week, we should be ready to frame the new addition and get moving. We're in the process now of speaking to framing crews.

Contractor Update and Footings

So - it seems like Mark B is out of the picture - we haven't heard from him in about a month. Maybe 3 weeks. So we've taken things into our own hands. Because the foundation hole was sitting there for 8 weeks, with no foundation, we had some erosion that had to be cleaned up before the concrete footings could be poured. This was unfortunate as we are essentially paying for the same work twice. Nevertheless, we hired a local guy named Jay Palermo to do the work and he's done a great job and been very helpful in getting us moving. Jay is also a builder and will be submitting a bid to complete the job. Once the hole was cleaned up, Hampton Concrete came in and poured the footings for the foundation and then on Friday set the walls. On Monday they will pour the walls and Tuesday they will be broken down and we will tar the outside of the foundation to waterproof it.

So we're half way through our contractor nightmare...we seem to have shed the dead weight - now we just have to get our deposit back...there's a TV expose in this somewhere. Anyone have connections to Dateline NBC?