The Living Room - Post 4

I've gotten a lot of work done in the living room since I last wrote. I also replaced the convertible top on my car which took about 5 days. All of the demolition at home is more or less complete and I can start digging the footings and replacing the joists. 

The joists were in terrible shape so it wasn't too hard to remove the top inch, freeing up the last rows of wood flooring.

Once the first few rows were out I could come back up top and remove the rest. It wasn't hard, but time consuming. It also started smelling a lot like a basement.

It took a long time to get it all, but everything was removed without damaging anything. The wood is red oak, originally delivered plain and finished on site. It was made by Harris and surprisingly they still exist. The logo on their History page looks the same as what's stamped on the back.

There was nothing interesting under the flooring except for this. I'm not sure who made the tar paper, but their phone number was BU-45775.

This is what it all looks like with the flooring and tar paper removed. At a glance it looks dark, but pretty clean.

But looking a bit closer...

This is what it looks like up close. The subfloor has to go.

It took most of a day to get rid of the subfloor, leaving me with a nice open area to work on. Of course, the joists need to go too but that shouldn't take as long.

Here's how the living room looks now. I'll start digging footings and replacing joists tomorrow morning. With any luck I'll have all of that completed by the end of the weekend.

The Living Room - Post 3

In case anyone is wondering, I'm dropping the "Day" count because I'm not working on this every day.

I'm almost finished removing flooring in the entry up to the center beam of the house. It actually extends a bit into the former eat in dining room-now kitchen area which is fine by me. The hardest part so far has been removing the two layers of plywood, but now that they're all up removing additional flooring won't be a problem at all.

This is what the reverse side of the top layer of plywood looks like. The top part was closest to the exterior wall where moisture wasn't an issue. In a few short feet you go from nearly dry to soaked. Everything I've removed has been dry - this is entirely the result of water condensing in the insulation and the wood transferring the moisture back up. 

This is the largest piece of the original subfloor that I was able to expose - elsewhere it crumbled into nothing when the second layer came up. It's nowhere near strong enough for anything to stand on it. Even the cat would've fallen through.

Once I reached the kitchen area I came across some SWEET linoleum from the 1970s under the tile. The scary thing about it is, the color scheme with the flooring, lighting, countertops and the fact that the cabinets were wood colored at the time actually makes sense. 30 years ago the place probably looked pretty good. This is where things became easy, because the thinset under the backer board doesn't bond at all to a flexible material like linoleum. As long as no one falls through, it looks like removing the flooring in the kitchen will almost be fun.

Underneath the linoleum is nothing - just old subfloor. There are no outlines of asbestos tile, so whatever sheet flooring was there originally is gone now.

Here is what it looks like now. The cat is probably somewhere in the crawlspace again, but Snowy has no desire to jump down there. My plan for this weekend is to pull subflooring up to the center beam, then dig the footings for however many piers need to go in under the bedrooms. If I'm lucky they'll be poured and then I can think about how I'm going to remove the hardwood in the living room.

The Living Room... Day Two

Today I continued taking out the short entry hallway. I thought that the saws-all blades I bought that were for wood + nails would take out backer board too, but that's definitely not the case. Maybe my nearest friendly Lowes/HD sells some better ones...

Now there's a hole in the floor about 4 feet long, running between the first two joists. I wanted to do more, but the hole is still small enough to cover with a scrap piece of plywood and it's nice to not have to worry about the cat disappearing into the crawlspace. The joists look a lot better in pictures than they do in person. All of them are getting replaced. You can easily dig in 1/4 inch into any of them so their strength has been compromised - not to mention the fact that they're covered in dried mold from ages ago. They all need to go.

It's a lot safer (translation: less scary) to hold a camera down into the hole and take pictures of what's going on down there...

View looking forward towards the front door

View looking to the right, towards the original bedrooms. I knew there was one location with improper foundation repair, but wasn't expecting two (or more?). It looks like the beam I'm adding under the living room will need to extend to the end of the house. Not fun... I was hoping that my days of digging piers from underneath the place were done but by my count I get to dig four more.

View looking left towards the living room. I'll be spending time under this room, pulling out the rotten subfloor in an attempt to remove the flooring in there without damaging it.

View looking back towards the kitchen and addition. The main beam is visible in this picture, along with a vent for the cooktop. I plan on venting the new cooktop through the roof instead.

Another view of the hole I cut... Hopefully the entire area will be cleared soon. In light of the extra foundation work I get to do I'm not sure what I'll work on after the hallway. I'm tempted to dig the extra footings now while the weather is still nice though.

The Living Room - Day One

I still have more work to do on the cars, but at this point I'm waiting on parts to come in or help to install them. Rather than waste a day I decided to get started on the entry way. If nothing else I could get the tile removal out of the way and see what condition everything below is in.

The tile never stood a chance. The cement board extended to 4 inches from the end of the tile. There was no adhesion after that point. Never apply tile directly to hardwood flooring...

One thing I quickly noticed was that when I tried to lever with the bar against a tile to remove it, more often than not the bar sank into the top layer of 3/4" plywood. Things must be seriously bad in order for that to be rotten. It looks like something that was installed when the tile was around 2002.

Here you can see the cement board, the light colored plywood underneath, and below that the original, gray plywood subfloor. This stuff can't support weight of any kind and I had to cover the area with new plywood so no one will fall into the crawlspace below.

The mold problems were so bad that it grew up in between the pieces of backer board to get at the thinset used to install the tile. I pulled up enough pieces of the three types of subfloor to get an idea of what I'm dealing with, and I'm leaving the rest for a few days from now when I'll just take it all out with a saws-all. This should be EASY to do. The only major issue I see with the living room will be removing and numbering pieces of the hardwood flooring. Beyond that the structural work is straightforward. Remove the subfloor, install new piers, the beam and new joists and then install good quality vapor barrier in the crawl space before putting in new subfloor material.

At that point the plan is to move on to wiring, then I get to take on the kitchen... Pictures are going to start getting really interesting from this point onward.

The Living Room: Before Pictures

One of the things I learned from the last house site I had was that I didn't take enough before pictures. So here's a quick post with a few...

The floor may look like it's in good condition at a glance, but the finish is coming up.

















It's worse over here. Hopefully all this is repairable.

You can see a bit of how the floor is sagging, but the baseboards are nowhere near level. I'm not sure what someone was trying to do when they were putting them in.

This is the view that will change the most after the project is complete.

And now, on to more current progress...