Quick catch-up from Tuesday, then a pause

This is slightly bloggus interruptus, as I only got up to the house Monday evening for a short stint of work on Tuesday before Amelie and I left for Idaho and a school workshop / visit.  If all goes well, next week's blog will show the piers poured!

Muggs had done a bunch of layout and excavated new piers (some of which required unearthing the existing concrete, which despite its impressive mass is underengineered for the column bases and 4 x 6" posts we are going to use.

Apologies for not including the top part of the apparatus in this picture--I temporarily screwed in a block up high on the center post, and after I excised the old protruding stubs and the partly rotten portion of the post, I jacked up the center so that the void under the doors no longer had a sag in the middle.  

Then we jammed in scraps of 4 x 8 pressure treated beam to fill the void, and will bolt and screw this to the last joist to form a good surface on which to secure a new ledger board at the correct height.  At that point we released the jack and let that part of the house settle perceptibly back down.   

We'll fill in these other areas with blocking (after giving them a good once-over with the shop-vac) but won't have to use the jack any more.  Whenever we get the chance we are treating old wood with preservative in hopes of staving off encroachment by critters.

For a change of pace Muggs sat down to do a little further battle with the rose bush, which will be healthier for his ministrations.  He ended up transplanting the lower (much smaller) rose bush, which used to be next to the stairs and which will be covered by the new deck, on the side of the path to the upper gate, with good sun.

Dribs and drabs during rain

This was a short week, what with the rain and the other obligations to take care of, but there was some progress on various fronts.

I was able to re-route the kluge-y water supply piping (which had run above ground with copper in a very strange configuration) and sweat new copper connections closer to the house (which should also mean less danger from the occasional freezes, as this wall of the house itself retains quite a bit of heat).  No drips so far.

I protected the plastic with a section of scrap so that in the (unlikely) event of digging mistakes, it'd be harder to break.  I'm glad I didn't try to mark the lines before the rain fell--it was Biblical there for a while.

I also rigged a plank for working on the ledger / reinforcement, although I am not 100% happy with the way that the downstairs drain runs in such an exposed way.  We'll just have to be careful for the next couple of weeks.  Today Muggs is working on laying out piers and beam-lines, and the plan (cleared with Leonard the structural expert) is to have 2 x 8 pressure-treated joists and run 12' to the edge of the stairs, and the wider portion will have 16' joists with a mid-span beam line.  This means fewer piers to pour but still plenty strong.

I didn't want to risk soaking my camera so I only snapped a quick shot of Dale's son Brooke's enormous trailer filled with the debris last Thursday.  That was a breathtakingly efficient way of dealing with the pile, and it leaves the driveway clear again.



Having thinned the hazelnut a little, Muggs is planning to trim a bit more of the rose and cut back the old blackberry canes, so the harvest should be exceptional this summer.  So we are still pretty much following the schedule we mapped out--let's hope for no cans of worms in the next phase.

Finishing Demo, Now the Real Work Begins

There were some Internet connection problems up here (Joe's in transition, and the U-Verse is on his connection), so pardon the lapse in this blog!  I'm writing this on Sunday evening, after having headed down for the Friday Night fun of attending the Oakland Symphony with Amelie's parents.

We had a pleasant shorter day on Friday, and finished off the last bits. We popped the last bits of ledger and joists that we had been too tired to remove the previous day.  There's also a fair amount of debris / trash to move to the dump pile before we can lay out pier locations.

Knowing that the hillside was going to be treacherous to walk on, we terraced a little to create some sort-of steps so we have better footing close to the house in the next stages. This would also mean that we'd be less likely to damage exposed drain pipes during construction.

Here's the front view.  Our plan is to replace the thin plywood siding on the right with pressure-treated structural plywood once we have reinforced the wall and ledger, which will mean maximum strength with not a lot of cost.  The water supply pipe is to the right, and there was a very strange configuration of copper piping connecting it to the house and the hose bibb by the shower, so I am taking an hour to re-route this important connection lower down in a less fragile and exposed way.

The center of the house presents some problems but we're pretty confident they are minor: notice the sag in the threshold below the doors.  The clearances are still fine, meaning that things have not parallelogramed too badly.

Here's a close-up.  We're going to peel a little of the facing between the doors and assess the state of the center post--it may be easy to jack it up 3/8 of an inch and then reinforce the center line.  I did a walkaround today (Sunday) with our structural engineer friend Leonard, and he said this would be a very good idea, but that our plans for securing the ledger would be very acceptable, especially if we could use the plywood to tie sills and structure together.

There are a couple of areas like this one that we plan to remedy quickly without letting project-scope-creep get out of control.  It's not a good idea to just cover these up and pretend the problem isn't there, but you also have to know when to stop.

One of the things I confirmed in my inspection today was that the stubs we thought were floor joist ends are actually just stubs--the floor joists run east-west, which is actually good news in terms of loads, according to Leonard.  My hypothesis is that when Bud originally built the house, he may have attached the deck joists this way, lapping them on the sill and securing them to the last house floor joist.  Only in a later version of the deck did the ledger get attached slightly lower down.  Maybe there are old family photos that show this (I recall viewing an album showing very young Doffy and Bud working on the house in the oaks and bays).

Tom has a bunch of horticultural  work stacked up in the East Bay this week, but has moved his Knaack boxes to the patio and will be ready to roll soon.  I plan to devote a couple of days this coming week is to preparing the layout and carefully removing some of the siding so we know exactly what we are dealing with--I'll also take a Shop-Vac to the spiderweb colonies, and set us up so we can secure the ledger and flashing first thing next week.  This'll also mean punching in some pressure-treated wood behind the scenes, as Leonard recommended.  I'm also hoping to spend some hours on the living-room rehab up at the Big House, which can be done even if it rains.

A short day, then a loonnng Demolicious one

Yesterday (Wednesday) I spent the morning doing drywall on the living room of the Big House, and then made a run to San Rafael to pick up more.  Muggs arrived in the afternoon with his big truck and tools, and attacked the upper section of the deck.

 When I got back in the evening, this was what I saw--top rails ready to stack for de-nailing and milling, and the other stuff ready for the dump.

Speaking of ready for the dump--this was the state of the posts on the low section of the deck, closest to the ground and fastest to rot.  Evidently once he had sawzalled out the rails and tops, these posts just basically fell away, the bolting surface completely rotten!

That hunk of joist is the consistency of dry sponge or maybe Shredded Wheat...

As I mentioned yesterday, one has to plan a little carefully to avoid chopping off the limb you're standing on.  Here Muggs is removing joists after I have cleared the light circuit.

In a section like this the demo goes fast, as I can use a big prybar from the ground, and this particular bar has a rubber covering that cushions the wood a little, allowing for pretty serious leverage without dinging the soft redwood.  Following along with the sawzall after raising the board a quarter inch means quicker work and less damage...

We had to decide how long to save the stairs--they're a handy platform but once we had removed deck boards close to the house, their usefulness was remarkably short-lived.

Both of us were pretty whacked by this time, but we basically dusted most of the demo--still another day to clean stuff up and remove the existing ledger (such as it is) and get ready to strategize about the next phase.  I managed to lug this pile up to the badminton court but that was about my limit.

Watch out for that first step--it's a doozy.  But seriously, one of the issues we need to figure out is the placement of the ledger board: as you can see, the threshold of the door / floor of the entry are three inches above the deck level, and there are floor-joist ends exposed.  One of our goals is to make this more structurally sound--it all starts with the foundation / connection to the house, as Muggs says.

Small tornado hit.  No, we just got fed up at the end of the day and flipped the stairs into the garden, realizing that this particular can of worms (filled with philips head screws) did not need to be dealt with right now!

Tomorrow we clean up a bit, expose the ledger area, and prep the area for piers.  There are some exposed pipes and drains that we may want to protect, and a little care here makes the rest go faster and more safely.

Demo first full day

So here's the start of a pretty full day of work on the demolition, with some time taken to figure out how to deal with the phone / cable lines.  There's some interesting "sequence-y" stuff that you have to go through to avoid getting ahead of yourself or doing something stupid / dangerous.

These two lines were being pulled almost piano-wire-taut by some oak branches, so before I could do anything I had to get out the pole saw and free them up. 

This is a little difficult to see, but there's a wire I've attached with a big screw-eye that's supporting both cables.  One of the wires was actually on the wrong side of the joist so I had to saw and support the joist, a semi-tricky move.  My low plank set-up was handy in sawzalling the other joists down the line.

Here's the view from underneath, a little later.  I left the posts standing because I didn't want to have the remaining section get too wobbly without any lateral support.  I was ready to add a brace if I felt shakiness but I didn't need to.

After my experience last summer (barn-door-ing on a piece of plywood down through bare joists and laying open my shin) I was, shall we say, a bit more careful today as things got narrow. 

Here's how I left things, and you can see the slightly more open wire path in the oak tree in the distance.

As I was cleaning up and stacking non-recyclable / non-burnable wood to be taken to the dump, I was appreciative of just how decayed the wood was in a lot of places.  This chunk was where the cables were attached (the plastic clips are in the center) and there really wasn't much sound wood in there. 

This'll take a bit of work to deal with tomorrow.  This is the stairway light, with what I think is the switch run heading down the post, underneath the mud stairs and up onto a stair rail post.  It's probably a three-way switch so there'll be an extra wire to label and re-set once we build the new stairs.  There may be a way to keep this post as a utility pole during construction but there's a lot of conduit hanging up there.

Muggs will be heading up tomorrow, and I am pretty optimistic that he will be laying out column base excavations and getting ready to start pouring concrete after another day of demo.  Then while he is doing that I will attack the pile of redwood I've schlepped up to the badminton court, de-nailing it and turning it into a stack ready for milling.  Some of that wood is in good shape, but a good bit of it is probably too weathered and brittle to re-use for deck boards.

Deck-razing before raising a deck

I'm creating this blog to give folks the chance to follow the progress of this project.  Since El Niño is cutting us a little break, I am taking advantage of the good weather up here, and getting the project started.

Here are some "before" pictures:

This part will go away, as it is rarely used...

The picnic table will probably end up shifted a bit more toward the camera position once the new portion is place, as this section will be wider (extend four feet further to the left) but will end at the edge of the house.

So I punched in a few late-afternoon hours pulling off the rails after moving furniture over to the back patio...

And next morning I quickly cobbled together a plank support for easier access.

And here's the result of a couple of hours of work on a very warm spring (Stupor Bowl) morning!  I'll have to re-hang the phone / cable drop, carefully, but the demo is well started.  I'm going to see how salvageable the deck boards are, but it's hard to tell at present.