As of yesterday I have completed my fourteenth straight day of work and yes, I am getting ready for a vacation from it all, next week. I still have 5 more days of work to go, and while it may seem like a drop in a bucket, it will be a long five days. This past weekend luckily was not too hot and not too overly humid. Yet, working in a second floor room without insulation, very little ventilation, and no A/C made for a sweaty weekend. This weekend began the renovation of our son's new room to make way for our new child come February. The room that was demolished this weekend was by far, the worst room in the house, and the oldest. The ceiling was comprised of very old plaster with paint that practically fell off if there was even the slightest hint of a breeze and the whole ceiling was covered with sheet rock. So there were two layers on the entire ceiling. The walls, on the other hand, while having only the original plaster, probably held about 30 layers of wallpaper on top of which there were about 10 layers of paint. Can anyone say lead contamination? So to prevent any lead getting into the rest of the house, I created a hallway of plastic leading from the second floor room to the outside and right into the dumpster we rented. It took the entire day Saturday, with my dad's help, to rip down the walls and ceiling, leaving only rafters, studs, and joists exposed, and to obviously clean it all up. The ripping down was the fun part, the cleaning up, not so much. All in all, we went through over 60 heavy duty contractor garbage bags in order to remove all the debris with as little dust migration as possible. Despite the fact that I had hallways of plastic running through the house, I still wanted to keep as much dust as possible confined to the room that was being demolished. All in all, I'd have to say we were pretty successful at doing that. All the slats that hold the plaster to the wall were thrown out the front window into a pile in my front yard to be used as kindling for fires. Seeing as none of the slats were exposed to paint and contained only some plaster dust, they will be perfectly suited for burning. So, with that done, on to the cool part of what we found.
I pretty sure I have mentioned before at some point that the original part of my house is extremely old, dating back to the 1850's. The part that dates back that far was the part we were working in this weekend. It was originally a barn that was moved to its current location and turned into a house. That makes my house at this point approximately 163 years old. A part of me can't even comprehend that my house is still standing after that period of time. But it is, and probably due in part to the way it was originally constructed, post and beam. For those of you that don't know what post and beam is, it is a method of construction that does not use standard studs as you would normally find in most houses. The studs in most houses act as the supporting structure being spaced approximately 16 inches apart. In a post and beam house or barn, like mine, you have massive corner posts, about 8"x8" with beams that connect the posts together. Along with that, you have angled support beams that offer extra support from the posts to the beams. With most post and beam construction, the posts are notched out so that a beam can fit tightly into the notched area, and then it is either bolted or pegged with wood to prevent it from moving. It is really cool to see a post and beam house and at some point, I will post pictures of what it looks like. Part of the reason that I think my house is still standing is due to the fact that almost all the wood in the house is old growth wood. By that I mean that it came from forests that grew slowly, over time, and have a dense ring format within the wood. The tighter rings of the tree mean that it is denser, stronger, and less likely to shrink or rot over time. If you went to drive a nail into any of the wood in my house with a hammer, the nail would bend and probably not go in. The only way to really drive nails in is to use a nail gun. Even putting in screws to attach the sheet rock is a pain as half the heads of the screws snap off as you try and drive them in. So for the sake of the room I am redoing, I will have to add some studs to the walls in order to hang the sheet rock as the supports that were used for the plaster will not be sufficient. It will definitely require more work than I originally anticipated, however, such is the case with old houses.
So with the walls and ceiling ripped down on Saturday, yesterday began the process of ripping up the sub floor that had a lot of bounce and give to it. I wanted to make sure that the floor joists were structurally sound and would support everything we would put into the room. The pulling up of the sub floor was not that hard of a process, however, cleaning up all the old plaster detritus that had broken loose from the ceiling below took a while. I probably removed about 200 pounds of plaster scrap just from in between the first and second floors of our house. On top of that, I got a nice surprise and found some more old nob and tube wiring. For those of you who don't know what that is, it was the original way of running electrical wiring in houses. Instead of having one wire that had a positive, negative, and ground all wrapped up as we do today, you had only a positive and a negative, run about a foot apart, with reinforced cloth insulation, and no ground. They were run through porcelain knobs that kept the current away from the wood, and over time, they would normally disintegrate. Junctions in knob and tube wiring, where current was run off the main line to a light or outlet, was usually just tying two wires together and wrapping it with electrical tape, no junction boxes as we know them today. On top of that, when they removed a fixture, they simply taped off the end of a wire and left in the wall or ceiling, as I found twice under the floor boards of the room. In my house, luckily, the insulation around the wires is still in pretty good condition, however, it will all be replaced with new wiring for safety. So everything got ripped out, and I even started reinforcing the floor yesterday with cross braces to reduce the bounce that the floor once had. I just need to make sure the door to that room remains closed at all times as there currently is no floor and anyone who ventures into that room could potentially fall through to our living room. Needless to say, I'm tired. With that, I must sign off for today and get myself ready to do some more work for money.
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