And now we begin again...

You all may have decided that we have given up on this blog or this home, but I assure you that we have done neither.  We have made tremendous progress but I have not had time during the past few weeks to update the blog with working 60-70 hours per week.  Having completely demolished the existing home, we are ready to begin reconstruction.  In the first picture, you can see what the home looked like following demolition and cleanup and before we began rebuilding.  As you can see, the foundation has been painted different colors in some places, and is overall pretty shabby looking.  However, it is still very solid and will easily hold up for another 70 years.  There is no reason to not build on this foundation.

Before we began framing, we needed to make some modifications to the existing foundation.  One of the major issues with the existing basement is that none of the windows meet modern code requirements for emergency escape and rescue openings, which means that the home could not legally have a bedroom in the basement.  Thus, the home was considered a two-bedroom home for appraisal and sales purposes.      Given that we intend to build a nice master suite in the basement, we needed to cut in a code-conforming window so the home can now be sold as a three bedroom home, which will help appraisal value a lot.   We decided to cut out a new window in the front of the home where there was none before and also to enlarge one on the back corner in the future family room.  In order to meet code requirements, the window must be at least a 4' x 4' slider and the sill must be no more than 44 inches off the ground.  That is a lot of cutting, which is why the second window was not enlarged enough to meet egress requirements, just to open the room up and bring in some more natural light.  Also, the existing window was an odd size that would have to be special ordered, so it was cheaper to cut the concrete out and have a larger standard-sized window.

The window enlarging was accomplished with a gas-powered concrete saw, a lot of water, and a lot of sledgehammering.

Justin manning the concrete saw on the 4 x 4  bedroom window.  The saw cuts just short of 4 inches deep and the wall is 8 inches thick, which means he had to cut from both sides and get the cuts lined up almost perfectly.  That chunk of concrete he cut out is going to pose a problem. He is cutting half-way through it in hopes that we can break it in pieces with the hammer.  Read later posts to find out what happens.  (Spoiler alert: He was wrong)

In addition to enlarging the windows, we had to make major changes in the basement plumbing layout.  We are adding a full bathroom that was not there before, and moving the mechanical room and laundry to different locations in the home which will require the drains under the slab to be moved.  We have seen all kinds of redneck engineering do-it-yourselfers have devised to avoid having to relocate plumbing in concrete (remember the existing shower "trough-drain"?)  This is the way it should be done:  decide where the drains really need to be (the most common thing people do to avoid moving drains is live with a crappy floor plan because they are scared of a little concrete), get the right tools, and make some noise and dust.   We cut along the areas we needed to remove and then broke the concrete out with a sledgehammer 

Master bathroom on the left, laundry toward the rear, mechanical right in the middle of picture

This is a view through the enlarged 3 x 3 family room window.

We filled the back of Nathaniel's truck with broken concrete.  

Fished with cutting, Justin starts digging out for the drain lines.  

Finally, a word of advice for anyone attempting to cut concrete themselves.  Blades for these saws start out at around $200 a piece and rental stores measure the wear and charge for it.  By keeping the garden hose running on the cut, the water cools the blade and minimizes blade wear.  When we returned the saw after a fairly substantial amount of cutting, as you can see, they measured no wear and charged us no extra.  Just a little cost-saver to keep in mind if you ever rent a saw.

Final Demolition

Ok, so the day has finally come.  We have joked about it, but due to the escalating costs of renovation and a few more things we would like to correct on the home that are going to be very hard with the home as-is, we have decided to just tear the home down and start over.  The major cost savings we will realize are as follows:

1)  Lead and asbestos testing and certification: $1500

2)  City mandated Structural Engineering Fees: $500 or more, 

3) 2" Foam Insulation (due to 2 x 4 exterior walls: $700

4) Salvaged lumber from roof and walls: $200-$300

In addition to the specific line items above, there are some considerable labor savings due to the efficiency of framing a new home as compared to retrofitting an existing structure.  For example, we were planning on adding an overhang to the eaves which would have probably taken an entire day for two men to accomplish.  The new roof will be designed with an overhang already and will probably still only require two man-days to frame. The time spent re-framing wall openings to match the new floor plan will be about as long as it will take to frame new walls from scratch.  The main cost we were trying to avoid was the cost of demolition and garbage removal of the old home.  We realized after removing exterior siding that it would fall down much easier than we thought.

Most of the studs cut out in the final moments before the home is dropped

With the stout tug of a couple ropes the home fell into the front yard exactly as planned

You can see here the major weakness in the roof framing where the roof rafters are just toe-nailed together rather than being tied together by a ridge beam, connecting plates, or collar ties as would be done by modern code standards.  

You can see the sag in the ridge line here.  Granted, the home stood fine for 70 years, but it is very likely that had this home experienced a major event such as a tornado (very rare in this area but not unheard of) or earthquake, it would have had major structural failures.  Some would say that it was obviously built just fine;  we assert that it merely dodged the bullet.  We will now build a home that, should a major natural catastrophe occur, will be the only home standing on the street.