House To Home

After some time off and time to save up over the Christmas break, we’re back to re-using our materials that we had delivered last year. We initially put up drywall in our upstairs and downstairs exterior walls to meet building code requirements (since we live here and don’t want to die in a preventable house fire) and to be eligible for the ecoAudit grant audit. Unfortunately, doing it so quickly meant we got exactly what we put into it: a rushed mess.

The other issue is that we did not “clean up” the walls before we put up the drywall on the walls – we were actually focused on the ceilings and did the walls as an aferthought. The drywall on the walls was hung vertically (for speed in many cases), we missed installing sound insulation behind the drywall, and just used regular drywall for cheapness and efficiency instead. We are actually preferring to use QuietRock in areas where we are expecting exterior traffic noise, and all interior walls (to cut sound transmission across the house, particularly surrounding the bedrooms and bathrooms). So we put up some Roxul Safe’n'Sound first, to protect our bedroom walls, and actually help protect the foyer plaster too:

We have a slight issue with HVAC that we need to tackle, but our friend the Internet comes to our rescue once again. We are planning to re-use all the old cast-iron registers as cold-air return grates, and the plan is that it would pull air from the bedroom here:

… and here (which is opposite to it inside the wall):

Does anybody know how we can create an HVAC piece to do that? ‘Cause we sure as heck don’t. My arts and crafts skills with sheet metal are limited, at best. I can use silver tape though!

Okay so where does this piece come from then? Easy. This custom order sheet (Item #7 – “3-Way”), from a local residential HVAC parts manufacturer Don Park. We should really get on ordering that piece though, so we can finish our wall…

We used Acoustic Seal around the pieces that touched the attic roof – technically, we are supposed to use it around the edges of every sheet, but we deemed it unnecessary in the bedroom (particularly after we found out how messy it really was).

We also had a heck of a time cutting the drywall itself, since it’s double-paper in the middle and doesn’t just ‘snap’ like you expect it to. Enter the Dremel Drywall attachment tool:

We got to the point where the next sheet would cover the pocket door, but we realized our current drywall screws were too long. We finished off the week with a trip to Home Depot to get shorter screws in order to not scratch the face of our pocket door!

[ Day 93-97's Gallery ]

- Jeff

We continued on our pocket door adventures with the installation of the front bedroom’s closet pocket door. We basically took the existing framework of studs in the front bedroom:

and did what we did with the first pocket door to frame it into place:

We also secured some of the foyer’s lath and plaster with a 2×4 and glued it into place (see to the right of the door in the above picture). Our apologies to whoever is keen enough to take out the foyer’s plaster walls at a future date by making your life difficult, but our goal was to preserve the plaster for right now. This also gave us more stability with the plaster while working with the closet door.

Jenn used our new belt sander to sand down the pine floor (that we’ll be restoring later – it’s covered with cardboard and a sheet, for now) around the door area:

The other side we will get to later…

[ Day 92's Gallery ]

- Jeff

We finished up back in September by installing a critical item needed to visualize the rest of the en-suite bathroom: a pocket door kit that we had purchased. This is considered a “wall” to us, so it is important to have it installed going forward.

For those who don’t know or haven’t seen them before, a pocket door is basically a “Star Trek” door that rolls back into the wall (unfortunately, no computer-voice activation or automatic rolling action for us, but maybe the next people that redo the house can put those in…):

Since we’re conservative about space and enjoy the look of the doors, we’re installing these doors upstairs in all three bedroom closets (on 28″ doors) and at the entrance of the master bedroom en-suite (a 30″ door) – our first project. We started by filling the hole in the floor of the door with plywood (the “L” piece in the upper-right of the picture):

We then built the header (twice…. because we relied too heavily on the manufacturer’s directions and not so much on our measuring tapes – lesson learned!)

Next step was to take our pocket-door kit:

and fit it in the frame… no problem!

We will have to eventually consider how we’re going to re-finish the floor, but thankfully all of this will be under a door:

There was also a new tool purchase, when the sale came around…

Next up – some more time passes by, and… another pocket door!

[ Day 90-91's Gallery ]

- Jeff

To finish putting down the bathroom floor, we needed to carefully cut out sections of the floorboard that weren’t being entirely pulled out. This was difficult due to the thickness of floor and the area of where the cuts needed to be made. We carefully cut burnt out the wood using a Dremel tool in the tighter areas:

We then finished putting down the OSB:

then started putting down the second layer of plywood, offsetting our sheet seams:

Before putting down the plywood, we started with a heavy layer of PL Premium:

Then finished by screwing each sheet in a diamond pattern, using short 8×2½” floor screws to secure the layers together (to avoid going too far into the joists in any areas that we accidentally hit them from above, and not to interfere with insulating the ceiling below):

Next up: Pocket Doors!

[ Day 87-89's Gallery ]

- Jeff

As we last left off, the bathroom sub-floor had been entirely pulled up and was shoved into a bin. The next step was obviously putting the sub-floor back in place – but how do we do that, exactly? What do we really need to do?

We had a bit of a decision ahead of us as to what was really needed for strength, versus what was recommended by the manufacturer, versus final floor height. The floor height was a visual/tripping concern considering the adjoining floors in both the master bedroom and the hallway consisted of just the finished 3/4″ plank boards directly on the joists. That means that any finished floor will likely have to have some kind of transition from the finished floor to a raised tile area, but we clearly don’t want a 1″ step or anything insane like that, if we can avoid it.

Our final plan for the sub-floor bathroom layers essentially came from Schluter, the makers of Schluter-DITRA, a uncoupling and waterproofing layer that we intend to put underneath the tile layer. The Schluter-DITRA Installation Handbook is probably the best document I’ve seen regarding the way you can lay out various types of sub-floor, and we certainly used its recommendations to the fullest – page ’23′ is highly recommended reading. Just like the diagrams in the handbook, we start out by putting a layer of 7/16″ OSB across the joists. The internet recommendation I found was to never to use anything underneath 3/8″ for a layer and you should be around 1″ for the total height of the sub-floor when you’re done adding up your  layers. On top of the OSB, we are planning to add 3/8″ plywood (because bonding to OSB is apparently difficult in general and not recommended by the self-levelling cement manufacturer). We are also planning to add an in-floor heating system, which means there is an included layer of self-levelling cement/mortar on top of the plywood layer, but before the DITRA layer, so that’s how we figure we can get away with a slightly thinner wood layer – we’re just over 3/4″ with our layers just with wood, but will be just over 1″ once we add the cement. (Besides, shouldn’t cement be stronger than wood and offer less deflection? I sure hope so!)

All of this restructuring is to get to what the industry terms as an ‘L/720′ deflection rating on the floor – normally, ceramic tile installations require a minimum of L/360, but natural stone tile installations require L/720. You’ll note the one of the recommendations for getting to L/720 is to “re-enforce the floor joists”. Well, after placing our first sheet of OSB down, we immediately noticed we had a bit of a problem with our floor joists:

They’re not level. At all. They’re also severely warped towards the middle of the room. They’re also weakened in several places where a previous plumber cut through them.

So that was a bit of a problem. We decided the best way to fix this problem was to simply butt new (straight) 2×8″ joists right up beside them, level them, and glue and screw them together. So that’s exactly what we did (…and skip to the finished product):

Hopefully with several tubes of this stuff tying everything together, there shouldn’t be any floor shifting or floorboard creaking now:

Jenn also worked really hard at cutting more of the old square nails off of the mouldings, which makes our job a lot easier for moving them around now. Perfect!

[ Day 85-86's Gallery ]

- Jeff

Since we have picked a natural stone tile for our en-suite bathroom, this gave us great pause to consider what was actually required to structurally support the massive weight of tile itself, plus anything sitting on top of the tile in the bathrooms (including a cast iron tub, filled with water and a person!). We’re thinking a lot of strength would be required underneath such an area, just as an off-the-cuff estimate…

So we took stock of the original subfloor that was left after we scraped the top layers of peel and stick tile, and what we had left was indeed in bad shape. Years of abuse and water damage from being both a kitchen and a bathroom, plus the bowing of the original joists underneath the floor meant that all of the tongue-and-groove subfloor plankboards were warped in the middle beyond repair and way out of level. Plus there are large chunks of the floor cut out where previous contractors had renovated to put in the plumbing originally, and replaced some of the plankboards with not-the-same-size pieces. (Not a great start for laying tile!).

Of course, the joists may not be so badly sagging in the middle, had some previous plumber in this house not gone ahead and cut through the most critical points of the joists that would actually carry the load across the floor:

In any case, the subfloor ultimately needed to come out in order to have any chance of creating a level (or at least closer to true) surface. So we did that:

and put all of the floor materials into the bin to get rid of bin #11! Thanks to our new bin supplier, Bin There, Dump That for the bin rental services.

[ Day 83-84's Gallery ]

- Jeff

More of the same old demolition routine took up our adventures during the past May long weekend: find areas of old lath and plaster in the kitchen that are no longer required and smash them out. After venting frustrations from prying on the lath for a while, pick up the pieces from the desctruction and cart all of it out into the bin sitting at the back of the house (which is now bin #11!). We must say, Rubbermaid gets full kudos for building the strongest “smashy-bins” we have ever seen — we’re still working with the original bins to cart the heavy materials, even after all of these rooms.

Jenn worked dilligently on delicately prying the old mouldings around the doors and windows with her magic:

Of course, it wouldn’t be demolition day if we didn’t find a mouse nest in the ceiling:

Complete with T-Shirt covering… mmmmmm, yeah. You can see, if you look closely.

The most interesting find in the kitchen was an odd indentation in the ceiling, closer to the basement stairs. After looking at it for a while, you can tell that it was once a dividing wall. Once you compare the dividing wall area to the holes in the kitchen floor and the placement of the drainage pipes in the basement, it becomes pretty clear that there used to be a bathroom that sat in the back corner of the house in front of the stairs to the basement. This seems to justify the existence of the massive drain pipe that used to run through our basement.

Woo! Kitchen-smash! Arrrgggghhhh!

[ Day 80-82's Gallery ]

- Jeff

We continued on with the kitchen demolition to complete bin #10. This was a slightly different exercise in the kitchen due to the original (!) wainscoting that we had to remove in areas where cabinetry is planned, or was situated on an outside wall where spray foam is planned. We managed to save one small interior area of the wainscoting where cabinets aren’t being placed, so that will be an architectural “feature”/”selling point” of the kitchen going forward, which we’re happy with.

The large cupboard that had been built in along the back wall (from 2″x4″s) was rather unforgiving in its design. To get it out, it was essentially a “reciprocating saw and prybar” job, where the shelves had to be cut out from the inside before any leverage could be applied to the sides of the shelves.

It eventually came out though:

At this point, we finally had a vantage point into the kitchen ceiling. We knew the roof was the same “strapping” design as the upstairs bedrooms, over the lath and plaster but hadn’t had a chance to inspect the plaster underneath the drywall. It was pretty bad, in a lot of areas – one would think “moisture damaged” to get plaster into that state.

We also opened up the old chimney hole for the kitchen fireplace/stove, to see if we could spot our mousey friends we occasionally hear. No luck: just material that originally fell from the attic (either from our cleaning, or just generally from over time).

The original kitchen wallpaper is interesting – lilypads:

Quick, someone – what’s 67 + 7= ? Too bad they didn’t have pocket calculators back in 1903!

When the sprayfoam went in the lower floor, it went through one the cracks and hit the next stud over with some pretty good force:

One last thing I found while hacking out part of the plaster wall – a nice exposed 14/2 line on the surface:

Is that live? Let’s see…

Hmmm, metal prybar, live wire… what could possibly go wrong?

[ Day 76-77's Gallery ]

[ Day 78-79's Gallery ]

- Jeff

With Bin #10 sitting in the driveway, it was time to continue dismantling the kitchen (in order to spray foam the exterior walls and install proper studding where necessary). Before we could work on dismantling the actual cabinets and walls though, we first had to shut off the water to the whole sink area. This may have been a distressing move for us (considering we’re running low on actively-plumbed sinks in our house), had we not already installed another sink closer to the ‘temporary shower’ that we now use daily. Cutting through water pipes is always fun:

After capping off the copper pipes, we found that part of the copper pipe had been resting on the aluminum HVAC ducts:

… which is bad, because over time copper corrodes against aluminum, especially with condensation present. Good thing it was “just” water running through there…

After taking out the fresh water supplies, we were left with a giant waste pipe running through the basement:

which was originally installed because someone had previously used part of the kitchen as a bathroom, and needed that size of pipe to run… uhhh… waste… back to the main stack. As it turns out, we only need a 1.5″ drain pipe from the kitchen for our future drainage plans – which is a lot less material to worry about, and certainly doesn’t have to be run where the original was. In case you’re ever wondering what “many years” does to the inside of a copper kitchen/bathroom drain, here you go:

Next up was getting rid of the old dishwasher. While still minimally functioning, it no longer cleaned the dishes very well and actually was less effective than our slightly newer portable dishwasher. As you can see, it was originally installed professionally by a qualified electrician ‘back in the day’:

Really, our constant gripe with the dishwasher was that the manufacturer ‘marketed’ that it certainly would never, ever make horrible noises while in operation, because, look! The product name is literally “Whisper Wash” (… ha!)

With the water cut off and the old dishwasher out of the way, it was finally time to move on to the usual breaking and smashing of lath, plaster, drywall, cabinets and anything else that got in our way. We started with the sink area – our kitchen counter was actually a piece of plywood that someone had attached butcher-block wood to. Then to make a ‘cutting board’, they decided to make a tiled area in the center:

Mmmm… yummy! What a great idea! This thoroughly porous grout line certainly makes me want to chop my raw meats and vegetables on there… (blech!)

Our only problem left was what to do when we don’t have kitchen cabinets to store items in anymore. A simple solution to the problem: buy an organizer from Home Depot, drop it down ‘somewhere’, and just put everything on it:

Done.

[ Day 74-75's Gallery ]

- Jeff

Back in April, we were looking at the various trees on our property, prior to the leaves coming out for spring. We have a “Globe Maple” in our front yard that is ever-growing and ever-blocking the view when pulling out beside our house on the laneway. This tree needed desperate trimming, but it goes up a fair ways and gets close to the power lines outside of the house. We asked King Tree Service to come in to help “clean-up” the internal boughs:

We also had a Poplar tree in our backyard that was left to grow / put in by the previous house owners. (Shown here in the middle of the photo):

After an inspection from Thomas of King Tree Service, it was determined that the Poplar tree wasn’t rooted very deeply (because it wasn’t ever really planted?) and the recommendation was to be remove the tree earlier in its lifecycle, particularly due to its proximity to the house. We had a choice to leave it for a few years since there wasn’t any immediate danger from it falling, but we thought it would be best to take it out while it was still ‘smaller’ in size.

While Thomas was looking around our property, he correctly identified a ‘European Buckthorn bush‘ up against our fence, which (much to our chagrin) is on the list of provincial weeds in Ontario that should be immediately destroyed. So we did our ‘Provincial duty’ and asked to have that taken out too:

Thanks once again goes to King Tree Service for the fantastic job they did!

[ Day 73's Gallery ]

- Jeff