Builders Share

Gettin it Together

When I last left off discussion of the sill repair project, I was carving away at the house with a chainsaw (see Heavy Duty Wood).  Well the carving went on to include shaping the replacement beam and after carefully measuring and sketching out the cuts I needed to make, I was able to shape it to fit snugly in place where I had taken out the old rotten one.  After all the sweat and worry that went with removing the rotted sill and fashioning a replacement, the sight of the new-old beam in place was decidedly satisfying.

The next task was sealing up all the cracks with spray foam insulation, and then replacing the sheathing that had been removed to access the rotted sill.

Sealing the cracks with foam was pretty straight-forward.  I've done this enough now to know how to keep it neat.  The poly-urethane foam sticks to everything it comes into contact with and if you're not careful you'll be discovering it in all kinds of unintended places.

Replacing the sheathing took a little more thought than you might expect.  The original sheathing is made up of rough sawn 1-inch boards.  The original clapboards are about a half inch at their thickest and are nailed directly to the 1-inch boards.  So the gap I had to fill between the studs and the surface I would be remounting the cement shingles to was between 1-1/2 to 1-3/4 inches.  The nature of the original sheathing and the uneven hand-hewn foundation sill didn't provide for exact measures.  After considering a couple different options for replacing the sheathing and building up the surface, I decided on using one layer of 1/2" plywood and then a layer of 1" rough sawn boards I had salvaged from demolition work almost three years ago.  This saved me a little money and helped make some space in the shed.  (The pink strip that you see in the picture is a sill plate foam strip that I used in an unconventional way to help prevent air infiltration through the gaps created by the uneven sill beam.)

Once the sheathing was back in place, I was ready to install some water-proofing.  I used Vycor self-adhesive vinyl flashing to protect the bottom edge of the new sheathing. The weather report said rain was on the way, so I made sure to get all the vinyl flashing in place before I quit for the day.  However, the next morning when I went out to get the newspaper, I noticed that the strong wind of the night before had pulled the Vycor from the house.  Unfortunately it hadn't adhered well to the rough sawn sheathing boards.  I was able to salvage half of it and got it re-applied--this time with staples.  Stapling is not the preferred way of mounting this product but it was the only way I was going to get it to stay in place under the circumstances.  Luckily the rain hadn't arrived yet so I was still working with dry wood.

You can also see the new door sill in place in this last picture.  Getting that installed was a project in itself with having to build up the substrate and work around the ancient existing door frame and casing. But now there's a solid door step where before only the lightest feet could tread without fear of collapse.

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Get on the Good Foot

I'm still plugging away at those door jambs, so until I get started on the next new task, I'll share some more stories from the past.

The first major task that I had to undertake once the demolition was complete, was repairing the foundation of the ell.  Typical of old New England houses, Chez Melendy is a timber frame structure built on a foundation of granite slabs and fieldstones.  Fieldstone foundations have proven quite worthy over a couple of hundred years, they move a little bit over time but usually not so much to put the house in danger of collapse; and their porous nature allows them to exist in harmony with the earth around them, albeit a little drafty in the winter.

A common affliction of this style of building, though, is that the sill beams (the timbers that rest immediately on top of the stones) are subject to rot.  There are a variety of things that can cause this but two major ones are moisture that develops between the inside and outside walls and then settles on the sill.  The other is when the foundation settles and the sills are close enough to come into constant contact with moisture from the earth.

The latter case is what afflicted the ell of Chez Melendy.  The ell is old-house terminology for an addition off the main house.  Old houses in New England tended to grow off their backsides until they connected with the barn -- a phenomenon discussed thoroughly in a wonderful book called Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn by Thomas C. Hubka.

Chez Melendy's ell was added sometime in the early 20th century and became the house's kitchen.  It too was built on a foundation of fieldstones with hemlock sill beams used to support an early form of platform framing.  Over the years, a combination of foundation settling and poor maintenance of the landscaping near the foundation caused the sills to rot.  Before I could consider making improvements to the interior, the foundation had to be stablized by replacing these rotted sills. 

It was the dead of winter when this part of the project presented itself so the easiest way to get at the sills was by removing the original floor system.  Looking back, I'm not sure that this was the only worthwhile way of approaching the task but in the end, by replacing the entire floor system, I was able to create a level kitchen and also create more space by taking down an old chimney that had long ago been taken out of service and sealed-up.  I was also able to dig out the crawl space beneath the ell so that it could be accessed from the main house basement.

Once the floor system was removed, we jacked up the walls just enough to remove the rotted beams and replace them with two courses of pressure-treated 2x8 dimension lumber.  This job of jacking up the house and replacing the sills was more than I was prepared to handle on my own so I hired a local carpenter "Bud" with some experience in this to help out.  We used heavy duty bottle jacks to lift temporary joists that were nailed to the wall studs.  The jacking process was done a fraction of an inch at a time with a long pause between each move to give the house a chance to react to the change.  In all, the walls didn't have to be jacked up but about an inch to make the change but the work is potentially disasterous.  The house could easily protest and a wall or a jack could give way.  I guess you could compare it to trying to get an old man out of bed.  Something's likely to either lash out or collapse.  But neither happened, and the sills got replaced.  We were even able to bring the ell a little closer to level in the process.

Having demolished the interior walls and completely removed the ell floor system, the house was as gutted as it was going to be.  Now we had only 4 months before we were to move in.  The enormity of the task was really starting to hit me at this point.  I had taken on some worthy help with "Bud," though, and I was ready to keep him on the payroll.  The march towards rebuilding had begun...

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