This Ugly House

This is the part where the real progress began to happen! We filed our plans with the Department of Buildings for review in December 2019. We were denied five times, and by March 20, 2020 for the sixth review, we requested a new examiner and were finally approved for a construction permit. Then the pandemic hit. The city stopped all construction work the exact week we scheduled our contractor to begin. Another three months trickled by before we finally got our work permit. Honestly with the bigger picture of the pandemic unfolding around us at that time, we needed to reflect.

Uncovered vinyl flooring on the chimney breast. That’s A solution. We saved the marble fireplace mantle and surround.

It didn’t take us long before we decided to gut the entire second floor.

Amy and I thought that we could save the walls. Just rewire, add new paint, and new floors and we’d be good. The trouble was that the floor was sagging so severely that my contractor needed to find out what was happening with them. After opening the walls at every floor joist, his team discovered half the joists were only resting 1/2″ inside the wall pockets. Between that and the fact that someone poured a 4″ concrete slab in the middle of the floor where the bathroom was, it was no wonder the floor deflected up to 5″ at the center.

This was the plumbing configuration beneath 4″ of concrete at what was the bathroom. Some genius cut two of the floor beams halfway through to make this shitty work of art.

The two compromised load bearing beams.

So the second floor was about to collapse. That’s when my contractor suggested we gut everything because he was going to need to replace all the floor joists. I thought it would be nice having level floors that didn’t bounce, so we agreed to go for it.

My contractor recommended we skin the exterior and party walls with 3/8″ plywood to help keep the brick nogging in place, plus add more stability tying the studs together.

The first floor

After the second floor was clean, it was time to fill up more dumpsters with the first floor. Again, Amy and I were hoping to save some walls, but we ran into the same problems with the floor. Not as severe as the second floor, but enough to justify a clean out.

We discovered original plaster walls beneath layers of drywall. Also discovered was a tin ceiling. All of it was too far gone to be saved unfortunately. They still sell stamped tin ceilings if I decide to put them back so I wasn’t that upset about ripping out the rust.

We also discovered another marble fireplace. We kept this for later.

I mentioned this house was stripped of all it’s woodwork decades ago, but it still had these two original arches at the entry. They’re in rough shape, but we decided to salvage them. My contractor carefully took them apart and stored them in the basement for now until we rebuild.

We also unearthed these posters. Yeah right, I saved the R. Kelly.

I’ve squatted in worse places I guess.

This is what was left of the second staircase in the rear of the house at the time of this photo. Its days were happily numbered.

Here’s an open floor plan for ya.

And…clean. You can see the new joists already going in on the second floor. We ended up having to replace every joist up there with 3 1/2″ x 7 1/4″ LVL beams.

The basement

I was planning to demo the basement later and only concentrate on the first and second floors for now. But after the terrible condition my contractor exposed on the top two floors, we went ahead and tackled the basement demo. The floors on the basement level were sagging too and they felt really unstable. The plan was to salvage the joists we could, then sister the rest (add 2×6 boards alongside the floor joists to get them all level). Then add a nice new 3/4″ plywood sub floor.

One of the things I dug up was this hollow core door used as a wall covering.

Digging further beyond the hollow core door was… this window. Boarded up.

Another surprise was this only live wire outlet in the kitchen. That would be lamp wire. Pretty sure this wasn’t done to code.

Basement demo’d. My contractor had to shore up where the supporting wall was from cellar to second floor. They already started to sister the joists in this photo.

The demolition phase lasted about three months because we had to be careful what could be removed and when. My contractor also replaced the floor beams as his crew worked their way down to ensure the house would not implode. This is the tricky part about working on old Victorian era houses that were not taken very good care of. You need to think three steps ahead before jack hammering; otherwise, it could lead to disaster.

Now we’re ready to start putting it all back together.