Mardi Gras

Cats had some Mardi Gras fun this week.

Last weekend we poured the footings for the new posts we will be installing for the beefed up basement beam. On Friday, we purchased 5120 lbs of concrete mix, that’s 64 80 lbs bags or 2.5 tons or two loads in the sprinter. Luckily, the store was able to load the pallet right into the back of the sprinter with the fork lift so we only had to move each bag once. We hauled about 55 of those bags down into our basement. We rented a 3 cubic foot concrete mixer and on Saturday, we proceeded to mix 2 bag batches over and over again. After about 25 batches, all of our small graves were filled and we only had to return 13 bags to the store.

A. watching the concrete mixing

You can see both the front and back footing are done and we are working on the 3rd.

Over all, this project could have been a lot worse. Moving the concrete bags worked out alright and the little mixer we rented worked out well, especially fitting down our narrow basement stairs.

We were done with the concrete work on Saturday night and A. was able to finish up screwing up the heat transfer plates for the radiant heating and install insulation under the bathroom. We still have two bags of insulation left to install under the bedroom floor. We are holding off on this project to keep some heat toward the basement.

This weekend we plan on drilling the holes in the concrete that will hold the epoxy anchors for the post footings and ledger board that will hold the new beams on either side of the stairway. We won’t be able to do much else as we just ordered the supplies yesterday. With the extra time, we hope to work on some gas piping and electricity for the dryer. We realized this winter that drying laundry inside adds too much moisture to our house and that we end up running the dehumidifier to remove the moisture. Running an electric dehumidifier is more expensive that running a gas dryer so we decided to get a used dryer from a local appliance rehab place. With our super mild winter, we will probably be able to dry our laundry outside again in a few weeks but we might as well get this project done if we have the extra time.

Digging small graves

Well, turns out that digging small graves is part of our basement beam project. The graves are really for the new footings for the new posts. We laid out the footings last weekend and drilled some exploratory holes. Mostly we found a 3 – 4 inch slab and confirmed a footing where the chimney used to be. It also seemed that there were no footings under the existing posts. We also started drilling the outlines of the footings and realized that we will run into some drain pipe plumbing close to the front footing. We rented a ferrous metal detector and were sort of able to locate the pipes. Because we wanted more detail, we hired a contractor to do a more exact drain pipe mapping with a camera and locating device. It was worth the extra money for us since we were also going to get a look at the pipe. Our pipes are mostly dry under the house but roots are growing into the seams of the clay pipes outside the house. We’ll have to get that cleaned out at some point so sewage can flow freely.

This weekend we rented a jack hammer and dug out for the new footings.

Small graves dug

We found out that the original post had footings poured but they were only about 8 inches deep. The original posts were wood so they stuck the post right into the concrete. At some point for reasons unknown to us, they replaced the posts with metal jack posts and poured additional small footings for these posts.

Original footing visible under sand line

The new footings are going to be pretty big: 12″ deep by 18″ wide by 30″ long, thus the small grave size. We have a double beam design with the loading bearing wall not centered. Since this has been causing some twisting of the beam, we will be placing a new beam under the load bearing wall, in between the existing two beams and installing under each beam. We hope by connecting all beams laterally we will be able to take some of the twist out of the beam or at least prevent further twist. This whole design is rather complicated and involves many different types of Simpson ties and hangers, lots of LVL and 7 new posts.

One unfortunate discovery we made while digging close to the drain pipe is a crack. To me it looks like a cracked casting seam from differential settlement. It is toward the top of the pipe so we hope we can “ignore” it for now and come back to this highly disruptive project later when we redo the bathroom.

Cracked drain pipe towards the middle of picture, you can see a dark straight line

Some good things about our discoveries include a substantial slab, existing foundations and a fairly stable substrate which seems to be some kind of clay or loam. We also discovered that the jack hammer makes quick work of busting up the concrete and feel that our progress is moving at a good pace. Next week we plan to have the inspection for the footings and poor concrete next weekend.

Beaming

I wish beaming was already invented so I could beam myself to Germany to hang out with the family. But alas, it is not and this post is not about beaming but about our main house beam.

The main house beam should have been upgraded before we did any work here but since the roof was already leaking, we decided to do that project first, which evolved into a much bigger project than we originally thought. Now, almost two years after starting the roof project, one year after finishing it, we are turning our attention to this thing:

Double beam - our main beam

Our beam is a double beam consisting of 2 2×8 each with blocking in between. The load bearing wall from the second floor lands just to the side of the one set of 2×8, essentially sitting on the blocking. This has caused the beam to slightly twist and the load bearing wall to sink a bit which is very noticeable on the first floor. The span between the posts is also too long.

To fix this, A. has been spending days doing calcs and looking through Simpson’s Strong Tie catalog to come up with the plan. So far we know we will be putting in 3 additional 2×8 LVL under the load bearing wall, moving the posts a few feet to even out the spacing and doing an elaborate hanging, double post design in front of the stairway. We will cut in new footings and put additional 2×8 LVL beams underneath the beams around the stairway.We are hoping with the right timing we will only need to do minimal shoring. The load bearing wall is the only part where we will need to remove the old support system to add the new.

I am not really looking forward to this project, although I am looking forward to the piece of mind when it is all done. This is because I have reached the point in a home remodelers life where I am more interested in finishing all the interior spaces, like the kitchen cabinets, holes in the ceiling, bathroom, new rooms upstairs, etc. I do hope that we can recruit family members to help out with this beam project as it will require lifting heavy things overhead.

I think between this project and the exterior siding, 2012 is pretty much laid out for us. I don’t think we’ll have money to do anything else and we won’t have time and energy either.

 

Radiant Heat, PV Systems and other fun things

How do you show that the house has heat? I’ve been asking myself that for the past month or so as I am contemplating my next post. I haven’t been able to come up with anything useful so a description via words will have to do. So here it goes. Our radiant floor heat is working and heating our house. We are not quite done with the first floor as we are still missing the bathroom and our bedroom but the rest of the first floor is heated, literally. The radiant heat is great. The warmth is a lot more even and we don’t have cold spots and temperature differences from one side of the room to the other. The temperature also doesn’t fluctuate as quickly as with the forced air we had before. It does take longer to heat the house so we have been adjusting our setback for night time and away to a higher temperature. I know that 2 occupants in the house don’t mind that at all. We currently don’t have insulation in the floor so the basement is essentially a heated basement right now. I don’t mind that so much as my studio is down there but it hikes up our heating bill in the long run. Eventually we will insulated with jean insulation between the floor joists.

Once the heat was working, we shifted our focus to the PV system which we have to install and commission by the end of the year to get our buy back rate and Focus on Energy incentive. After crunching the numbers and looking at how much we can afford we decided to go for the biggest system we can fit. Originally, A. had selected all black Sunpower modules with Solar Edge inverter but we recently learned that they are not compatible. Because we are very concerned about aesthetics – the roof is very visible and only at second story level – we wanted to stick with the Sunpower module, as the only all black module on the market so we ended up going with Enphase inverters. That means that each module has it’s own little inverter which helps maximize our production on a partially shaded roof. After some disagreements with the city inspector, who interprets code erroneously and who enforces his interpretation of the code, we are finally ready for commissioning today. The utility is coming out this morning. We have sunny skies and should be pumping watts back onto the grid.

PV system on our roof.

Making electricity

 

We are really happy with the look (minus the ladders) and I am glad we didn’t decide to go with a differed modules with white dots. People actually comment on how great and beautiful it looks.

In other news:

Little Eastside Bungalow gets a Christmas Tree this year:

Good for anything car.

Real, my style tree

Off into the New Year…

Wow, the back gable

We are pretty excited to announce that we finished the siding, soffit and trim on the back gable. We installed the last of the trim today and painted the nail heads and touched up the paint where needed. It looks pretty great, me thinks. But please see for yourself.

Back gable all done

A better look at the soffit. The vents are only installed to provide a top vent for the air space behind the siding and don't actually vent the roof.

Our next project will focus on finishing the boiler installation. It is definitely turning to fall outside, the air is dry, the nights cool and we have already dipped down into the 40′s. We have family coming to town the end of September and should knock the heating project out by then.

In other news:

We bottled the beer. It seemed low in alcohol content but it had been 3 weeks so we decided to go ahead and just get it done. Washing 60 bottles and sanitizing them is a quite a chore. Much more work than canning. Hopefully I did a good enough job and the beer will be somewhat enjoyable.

A. bottling the beer

I also participated in another art fair. The Walk in the Woods at Hawthorn Hollow by Racine was quite enjoyable. I made a little bit of money and it only rained a little bit. I also shared the space with another potter friend and that was much more fun than hanging out by myself.

Our booth at the fair

The tubing is in

We installed the PEX tubing into the heat transfer plates over the last few weekends. Working overhead like this really beats us up. Our necks hurt the next day, our knuckles are scuffed up and our hands sore but we got it done.

Looping the PEX through

Yup, that would be moi pounding in some PEX

In other news: We made our first batch of beer last Friday. It looks like this:

Waiting for the right temp on the grain mixture.

Loading up the carboy

To finish out our brewing day, we went on a brewery tour at Lakefront Brewery in Milwaukee, ate a fish fry and listened to the Brewer game on our way home.

And I had my first art fair which as wet and I made a loss. Let’s hope it can only get better from here.

My booth at the art fair

The ducts are coming down

There’s  no more turning back now. Eastside Bungalow will officially have a new heating system this winter. After a weekends of hanging out with visiting family and friends we had a productive day this Saturday. We started installing the heat transfer plates for the PEx tubing. Since it went fairly fast and we made good progress, we ran into the remaining duct work quickly. So at the end of the day, we decided that it is time to commit.

About 1/2 of the main trunk.

The heat transfer plates come without holes so they need to either be drilled or punched. We went for the punching method and A. found this punch for sheet metal. Since the aluminum is pretty thick, the small handles don’t give enough leverage and the design easily contributes to jamming ones hands. So we just stuck some conduit pipes on the handles to extent them which makes the hole punching process an easy job for me to handle.

The punch with extended handles

I do this over and over while A. puts up the plates.

A hole punched

This is what they look like installed.

We are pretty excited about this stage of the project. We are done sistering all the joists on the south side of the house and we are about 1/3 done with installing the plates. With some motivation today we might get this side close to done. This will set us up well enough that if the weather starts turning, we can finish the installation in a few weekends and have heat. We figure that we can make it through the shoulder season with just this side of the house having heat. The other half is smaller and has only the bedrooms and bathroom where we don’t need a lot of heat, especially during the fall. We can work on the northside on those rainy weekends we’ll have in the fall and heat is only going to go into the bedrooms for now since we will want to replace the subfloor in the bathroom.

And an update of butterfly:

This is what hatched out of the pupa. A Black Swallowtail Butterfly.

A long weekend

Nothing better than a long weekend to get some work done on the house. We spent Friday in the basement as the temps were in the 90s and the humidity was nasty. We got another 4 joists sistered and are almost done with 1/2 of the house. Saturday, Sunday and Monday A. worked on the siding on the back gable while I spend my time with various other projects and helping A.

This is what the gable looks like after 3 days of working on it.

Close up of the siding, trim and sash color. Looks nice I think.

And I worked on stripping, sanding, priming and painting one of the basement windows and wells.

Another basement window, but this and worse is what I started with today.

With one coat of paint

Sash with glass removed, sanded and primed.

And here is a picture of my newest pet on its way to a butterfly.

Pupa!

Wow, almost July

Summer is flying by a bit fast this year and projects are not. We have two major projects we are focusing on: the exterior siding on the second story and the floor joist sistering on the first floor. Since the last post I only have progress to show on the siding project:

Back gable siding progress

This is about 1 weekend worth of work installing siding. I have already spent countless hours painting the siding and there is also some hours cutting the angle on one end of the boards. The installation process takes a long time as it involves measuring, cutting, checking for fit, recutting,… then priming the cut, waiting a bit for the primer to dry and then install the board and repeat the process. It doesn’t help that its on the second floor so we can’t work on several areas of the house at the same time. So far I am really happy with the color combination.

Color combo

We are hoping that we’ll get a bit faster at installation as we get more practice but unfortunately, we won’t get much faster at climbing up and down the ladder.

Our 3rd big project will have to be our PV system which we don’t have much choice but to get done this fall. Wisconsin legislature has drastically cut funding to the Focus on Energy Program, although it is clearly obvious that this program has created jobs (both ours to an extend) and made the tax payers more money than it costs them. The program’s administration has also been awarded to an incognito non-Wisconsin company. (Talk about keeping jobs in Wisconsin) Even though our incentive is approved, the program is expected to run out of funding before the end of the year. We were also approved for a special rate from our utility company in a capped installation size program and have only a certain amount of time to install our system. In a way, a bit of pressure is good for us so we’ll just get this part of the project done. With out increased electricity cost (electric kiln) it will feel good to offset that use with renewable energy.

All black Sunpower modules on top rows.

We are planning on installing the all black Sunpower modules. This is one of the highest efficiency model that provides the best aesthetics. Since we only have limited roof space and want to maximize our production, we opted for these although they are more expensive. Installation should not be too complicated. With the standing seam metal roof we’ll be able to use S5! clips to install the rails onto which the mods mount. We already installed a second meter socket and the electric wiring should also not be too complicated.

And here’s a pic of my newest pet:

A swallow tail butterfly caterpillar.