We are Partially Floored!

Sub-floored, that is.  Glenlochan didn't have sub-floors when it was originally built.  On the first floor, the original hardwood floors were laid directly on the joists.  At some point in the home's history, a new floor was laid throughout the first story, making the original floor the subfloor.  When we discovered that the original hardwood floors were underneath the existing floors, we wanted to save them; however, they really weren't salvageable becase of the way the newer floors had been attached.  (The good news is that floors on the second story had never been covered up, so almost all of those will be saved and restored to their former beauty.)  Since we couldn't save the hardwood floors on the first story, we removed them altogether so that the joists could be "sistered" and the floors would be level.  Sistering involves attaching new joists to the existing joists, but in a level plane so that the floors will be level. 

For the past few months, the entire first story has been without floors.  Although Rob is very coordinated and has no trouble skipping along the joists to get where he needs to go as if a solid floor was in place, I'm pathetic at balancing and walking across the joists.  So, I've been looking forward to having at least a subfloor again.  Rob did all the "sistering" on his own, but I arrived just in time to help with the laying of the sub-floors.  Unfortunately, I had been very sick that week and I was still recovering and still on antibiotics.  As such, I did not enjoy this project at all.

Here's a look at hall/entryway without a subfloor:

Ensuring the joists are level so the floor will be, too:

 

Progress!  The floor goes in...this process actually took a lot longer than is evidenced by these pictures.

 

 

 

 

 

And, done!  It was 90 plus degrees and horribly humid this day - we couldn't have found a hotter, more uncomfortable stretch of weather to work in if we'd tried.

 

 

 

A well-deserved break for Rob upon completion. 

Not pictured:  his utterly depleted work crew of one, me.

 

 

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Home Away From Home

At the risk of stating the obvious, Glenlochan is not habitable at the moment.  And, since we are in Philly, you might be wondering where we stay when we are working on the house.  We actually have all the comforts of home in the front yard of Glenlochan:

 

 

Yup, a fantastic camper provides us with shelter, a bed, a hot shower after a long day of working on the house, and a place to cook a meal.  Rob found this great, gently used camper for a small investment and it's so convenient and comfortable (and so much less expensive than staying at a hotel).  And, truth be told, it brings back some fond memories of our first few years together when we lived in a mobile home!  Rob outfitted this camper with a brand new, pillow-top mattress which is almost more comfortable than our regular bed.

A few other shots of our little camper are below.

Large refrigerator and freezer:

Spacious dining table and one of life's most critical necessities, the coffee maker!

Fancy trim, window blinds and comfy couches (Tosha concurs with the comfort level):

A kitchen sink, microwave, and stove/oven:

 

 And, a small bathroom with a hot shower:

Not pictured is the fantastic air conditioning, which is a real necessity in the Virginia heat and humidity. 

We've enjoyed staying in the camper (Rob's logged a lot more nights than I have) and it's pretty peaceful (no tv or internet might help in that regard).  However, we do not intend to keep this camper after the renovations are complete, so don't be surprised if these pictures and part of the text appear on Craig's List in 6 months or so...this blog post was really practice for that future listing!

No More Dirt Floor!

The cellar (see Cellar Woes) and crawl space in Glenlochan were, well, creepy.  The crawl space was accessible by all manner of rodents and creatures who made their home there over the years (evidenced by the cat and bird skeletons found therein).  It was also an open dirt floor (no sheathing at all), and the space had uneven, widely varying depths.  At some points the crawl space was a comfortable 18 inches; at other points, Rob had to do the army elbow crawl to get around in less than a foot of depth.   It was also somewhat of a "graveyard"  - not only for cats and birds, but also for systems, pipes and wires that had been disconnected but not removed as the home had been upgraded over the years.  Please note, I've taken Rob's word for all of this as I had no desire to do the commando crawl through that dark, small, creepy space.

Rob spent a lot of time clearing the crawl space of the discarded systems and pipes, and then, with the help of some friends, we had the crawl space dug out to an even depth of 2 feet throughout.  The most exciting part is that we had a new cellar floor and the entire crawl space poured.  Here's some pictures of the process, our cellar, and crawl space, sans the dirt floor.

Gearing up to pour the floor:

Cellar floor before and after the pour:

 A few more cellar shots:

And, a few shots of the fantastic new crawl space:

 

 

Truly this project is evolving from the ground up.  And, it's slightly less creepy down there.

What's a Sill Plate?

If you are not a contractor, then you may not know what a sill plate is.  I sure didn't until I had a need to know.  Unfortunately, I now have a need to know.  As we said in a previous post, the sill plates in Glenlochan were rotted and termite-damaged - sounds problematic, doesn't it?  But, just how serious of an issue is a rotted, damaged sill plate?  Well, Wikipedia defines a sill plate as follows:  A sill plate or sole plate in construction and architecture is the bottom, horizontal member of a wall or building to which vertical members are attached.  Sill plates are usually composed of lumber.

If case you are a visual learner, here's two pictures of one of the sill plates of the house (rotted, damaged and all).  The entire weight of the home is resting on the sill plates - both stories of the home, the attic, and the heavy old slate roof, and everything else in between.  Sill plates are apparently pretty important to the structural integrity of the house.

There are 4 sill plates running under the entire perimeter of the house - front, back and 2 sides, and out of the 4 sill plates under the home, 3 had to be replaced.  For a job that involves jacking up a house, pulling out long beams, re-mortering the bed, and replacing the rotted beams with brand, spanking-new, sill plates, reinforcements were required - yup, Joe came out to give his old man a hand with this job.

Considering all of the things that could go wrong when 2 men are jacking up a 2-story plus home by themselves, the sill plate replacement progressed remarkably smoothly.  Here's a few pictures documenting the progress:

We are happy to report that Glenlochan is resting comfortably on 3 new sill plates (and one original sill plate) and is ready for the next stage.

 

Oyster Update

Our oysters outgrew their original home so we had to invest in a spiffy new "Taylor Float" for half of them to move into. 

By moving half of them to a new home, all of the oysters will have more room to grow and easier access to the water they are constantly filtering.  The new Taylor float is in the rear; the original bag float in front:

We may have waited a bit too long to split them - some of the oysters were much bigger than other ones in the bunch.  As such, we had to sort them by size.  The bigger ones were moved to the Taylor Float, but the smaller ones went back into the bag float.  The "holes" in the Taylor Float are much bigger so the smaller oysters actually fell right through them. 

Here's was our starting point last summer and where we are now:



The floats were put back in the water and secured to the pier  - and the oysters are busy growing for eventual placement on a protected reef in the Bay.

Addition by Subtraction - Part 2

We are done with the demo of the very badly constructed (and unsafe) rear, two-story addition to the original home.  Although we don't know exactly when the addition was added to the home, it was built by enclosing an existing 2 story porch at the rear of the house.  The ceilings in the addition were lower than the main house, the floors weren't level, and the addition wasn't properly tied into the main structure - in short, it had to go.  The house is vastly different now with the back quarter "missing" and this was a major undertaking. 

Here's where we started:

After the porch screens were removed, the roof was the next to go:

Then the second story bit the dust....

.....and the first story started to disappear.  As the addition was removed, the house was closed in with plywood - a temporary fix until the construction on the new addition begins.

A few views from inside illustrate the missing back of the house:

And, the end result is our beautiful patchwork home:

Completion of this huge demolition really marks a turning point in this long rehab process - soon we'll be done with all of the demolition and then the construction can begin.