I’ve finished two of the three foundation pours, and the steel frame is now solidly supported. This is the connection between the beam and the column at the new steel moment frame.
When I was jacking the moment frame into place, I was checking the level of the frame, and how tight it was against the floor, so I wasn’t looking down at the concrete slab. When I looked down I saw that the jack had so much load on it that it had cracked the floor slab. The loads on this are really big, in the region of 20,000lbs.
So I decided to put an extra post in under the steel frame to support it while I dug out around it, instead of relying on posts supported on the slab. If the slab cracks under those posts like it did under the jack it would be “very bad” (ie I’d be the engineer whose house collapsed.)
I dug a hole down to the bottom of where the new footing would be, then about 8 inches deeper, so I could put a reinforced concrete footing down below to support the post on. The new footing will be poured around this post and above the temporary footing. I’ll pull out the post once the frame is supported on the new concrete.
I had to get a bit of a production line going to make all the pieces for the rebar.
The sewer pipe goes right through where the foundation will be. I dug out around it very carefully.
Tying rebar is one of the hardest jobs. You’re usually leaning down, probably into a ditch below ground level, and working with spiky sharp tie wire. Plus it’s a bit of a mind twister trying to figure out what order to assemble it all so things are layered correctly and can fit.
This face is the closest I could get to a smile.
I wrapped the sewer pipe in flexible foam wrap to protect it from the concrete and allow the two to move slightly differently. The reinforcing around the opening got pretty complicated.
One tool I’ve been using a lot is a laser level. It can beam out a line in three axes, perfectly level and vertical and all at 90 degrees to each other. It makes it so much easier to line things up and get them level and square. This would be so hard without one.
This is the wall right after the concrete pour.
Here I’ve taken off some of the formwork. The steel frame is supported on concrete!
People ask how close to complete I think I am on this foundation project. And when I say “oh, about 50% complete” they are surprised. But I still need support the front of the house, dig out the old brick, concrete and soil, tie rebar and do the third concrete pour, and then build walls on it and pour back the garage slab. Plus rebuild the landing and redo all the tilework we tore out.
Then I need to fix all the plaster I damaged doing this.
My sibling came to visit – and helped put in windows that I bought about fifteen years (!) ago for the upstairs. First we had to put up scaffolding, which is rather a scary endeavor so high up.
It was surprisingly easy to get the old aluminum window out of there. Then there was a gaping hole in the front room.
First step was to add a center jamb. In retrospect, I wish I’d thought about making this thinner in the middle – the windows could have been about an inch wider.
There was a lot of shimming, and adjusting to get the windows to fit right. But they went in nicely. Still need to finish off the inside, though.
I decided to strip the paint off the window sill, because latex paint seems to have a soft sticky quality about it that I really don’t like on shelves, window sills, etc. But the wood is going to need some careful repair.
We also got to have some time exploring, and drinking coffee – I even made latte art.
Right before they left, we stopped in at the happy vegan. The location is truly unpleasant – but it’s takeout only and we loved the food.
While we were up the scaffolding, we got a close look at the state of the paint on the front of the house: It really wasn’t good; the ornament was starting to come loose, there was exposed wood, and lots of peeling paint. My sibling gave me an earful about how I need to stop delaying and hire someone to paint it, or the decoration will be irreparably damaged.
So we did: Our lady was hiding behind sheets of plastic and screens for the month of July while our painter labored away.
I took a cycling vacation in France while they were working on it. And came home with Covid. Again.
But as the colors started appearing, it got more and more exciting.
Here’s mole discussing the paint colors around the windows. We generally stuck with the initial plan that mole and I made, but there were some last minute tweaks. Can you guess who picked the colors?
Our painter felt that the way we’d colored the tiles wouldn’t show up well from below. I think he was right, but we didn’t want to ask him to re-paint them.
note from mole: the painter really didn’t want us to go with any of these colors! he thought they were too dark, too bright and not traditional. but in the end i think he was really pleased with it. he even had a sign made to put out front.
There was one decorative piece of molding that had been destroyed by the roofers many years ago. It had always bothered me, so while the scaffolding was up, I repaired it.
I saw a photo of the house around 1906 and it had decorative finials on top of the part I’d repaired. I was sure I had a copy of that photo somewhere, but can’t find it. Luckily for us, I think most of the decoration has survived.
Here’s the final decoration getting finished. At first I was thinking it would look nice in silver. In the end we went with gold accents because it was more traditional and stood out better.
So here she is in all her glory. She’s a painted lady again.
When it was first done, mole said it looked like Disneyland. I heard someone walking by saying it looked “right out of Alice in Wonderland”.
I regularly see people taking photos in front. So I think people appreciate the bright colors.
Here’s the original mockup. I did the line drawing and mole came up with all the colors and placements. mole said it was like a really big, high-pressure print project.
It’s been two years since I bought the moment frame. The beam has been in the garage, getting covered in dust waiting, but there was a lot to get done to prepare for it.
The column near the garage door is too tall to stand up in the garage, because the final height will have the bottom of the column buried in concrete. So I had to dig out the footing before I could even stand the column up:
Here’s the column standing in a freshly dug hole. The top of the column has to be down below its final position so that we can bolt it to the beam. Once it’s bolted to the beam, the whole lot will be lifted into place. The columns will be hanging in the air and we’ll pour the new foundation under it.
The column at other end of the moment frame will be up on top of a concrete wall – but the wall isn’t there yet: So I had to make a temporary platform to sit it on.
The major pain with this moment frame: Absolutely every utility in the house has to cross this beam: All the electric, gas, water, heating, and network wiring and piping had to be disconnected, and then routed through holes in the new beam or under it.
Holes in steel? I bought a “mag drill” to drill holes in the steel beam. It’s basically a small drill press attached to a powerful electro-magnet. I position the drill in the correct location, then turn on the magnet and it sticks to the beam.
Then I drill a hole. I had to drill large holes for the utility pipes to go through, and smaller holes for bolts to hold pieces of wood to the beam so that I can support building structure off the side.
Here are two of the pieces wood, all drilled and prepared to attach to the moment frame beam. The bucket is filled with wood chippings for the compost.
Just the beam weighs a lot (over 1000 lb) plus each column is extremely heavy. I used two furniture dollies (they are supposed to be able to support 2000 lb each) to move the beam. They were creaking and flexing ominously.
Once the beam was lined up in the correct location, I used a 20 ton bottle jack to slowly lift one end a few inches, then temporarily support it before lifting the other end. It took a full day to get it almost up to the floor above.
Once I got it close, I cut the old wood floor beam where this moment frame beam fits in. And I also had to disconnect all the wires and pipes that crossed over it.
It took me over a week to get all the wires and pipes reconnected. It’s interesting thinking about our priorities for what we need. First I reconnected the power for the kitchen, to keep the refrigerator running. Then the main water pipe. Then bit by bit I got the electrical reconnected. But we were taking cold showers most of the week until I could get the gas reconnected. Finally I got the network cables connected. I still don’t have the duct for the heating in the front room reconnected.
I made one mistake in measuring for the holes in the beam: I drilled the hole for the gas pipe right where the duct for the furnace was. The beam was already up in the air when I figured this out, so I had to lift the mag drill up, and drill a new hole. Because the floor joists were in the way, I couldn’t get the hole quite as high as the other ones, so the gas pipe will be a little below the ceiling.
Here is the new steel moment frame beam temporarily supported in place.
I have lots of temporary support posts holding everything up while I do the foundation.
The old steel beam that used to be here was too small for the load, so it had sagged about an inch in the middle. The floors in the house are all sloping because of it. I figured when I put this new frame in place, I’d level out the floors – which I expected would damage the plaster.
What I hadn’t expected was how badly it would crack the plaster. Now I again have to fix all this plaster that we had fixed perfectly over a decade ago.
I also didn’t anticipate quite how big the jacking loads would be to lift the beam into place. Once it the moment frame connected with the house and started lifting the house, the loads were huge: Enough that the jack crushed and cracked the concrete floor slab in the garage.
I used a laser level to figure out how much to jack up the structure. Once I got the beam to the correct height, I added temporary wood pieces that I’ll replace with a steel post cap.
This piece of wood is almost 2 inches thick: That’s how much the floor got raised at this point.
I talked about the floor joists being notched on the bottom in a previous post. But all this leveling of the floors suddenly made it obvious when a floor joist supporting one of the walls in the living room was sagging. So I added a joist to that one.
Again, I had to disconnect wires and reconnect them to put the new joist in. I also screwed this one up: At first I reinforced the wrong floor joist.
I spent a full day, removing the drywall, disconnecting the wiring, adding the reinforcing joist, reconnecting the wiring, and putting everything back. When I went up to the living room at the end of the day, I was surprised how little the sagging floor joist had changed – until I realized I’d reinforced the wrong one. So the next day I had to do everything again, but for the correct joist this time.
I temporarily jacked the center of the sagging floor joist, connected it to the new reinforcing joist, and then removed the jack.
Now on to the concrete work. I’ve got the reinforcing done for the wall and the pilaster below one of the steel frame columns. Now I have to build formwork to hold the wet concrete in place, but I have to get the rebar inspected first.
Well first I just had to add this photo of mole – we went to Hawaii and found some really great vegan ramen. This is how happy we were.
Back to business: I finished chipping out the concrete and digging for the first part of the foundation. This is where one end of the steel frame will be supported.
So that means more sacks of soil. I’m becoming a regular customer for these guys. This time I was careful to try not overloading the sacks. It probably helped that it wasn’t raining any more.
I’d been dithering on buying this tool for a year or so because it’s so expensive: It’s an electric rebar bender. You can get manual benders, and I’ve done that before: It’s a lot of work, and not very accurate. And you can rent (or buy) bigger bending machines that weigh about 800lb, but can bend bigger bars. But then I’m either hauling it back and forth to the rental place, or trying to find a place to store it. This one is limited to no bigger than #5 bars, but I’m only using #3 and #4 on this project.
Here I’m starting to lay out rebar. In the future, the foundation will continue from here, so I made a bar long enough to “lap” the rebar, and covered half of it tightly with electrical tape, and drove it into the soil. When I excavate for the new footing, hopefully the bars will be there and protected by the tape…
Here I’m starting to bend bars. It’s a really great tool – very glad I got it. It even has a cutter built-in.
One of the really tricky things about rebar is that there are layers, and lots of pieces that interconnect. You have to be really careful to put things together in the correct order, or it won’t be possible to get some of the pieces in. I had to take it apart a couple of times to get it right. Here I’m about halfway through.
These are the anchor bolts for the moment frame. I’ll have to extend them with couplers but this part is firmly held in place so it can get poured into the footing.
All the rebar ready for a concrete pour.
A concrete pour is a big event: You have to schedule inspectors, concrete delivery and pump truck all to be there at the right time. And hopefully there’s space on the street (the whole road was closed most of May while they replaced the sewer lines under the street).
So much work, and it’s all hidden:
Oh I just realized I’ve been really going on a bit of a splurge with tools. This machine is definitely more of a frivolous purchase. But it’s oh so nice.
My brother (in law) and sister, nieces and nephew came to visit and we all hiked up to the top of the nearest hill.
This seismic project is really going to take a long time! OK, so I got started digging out the opposite side. I’ve been looking forward to removing this step for a while.
After I’d chipped out the steps, I realized: There’s going to be a gaping hole at the bottom of the door. I put the concrete breaking on hold while I worked on extending the door by 14 inches!
I just glued a piece of wood on the top and the bottom. Not the most ideal method, but it was quick, and this door isn’t a beauty. I then used 10″ long screws to screw through this wood into the door frame. Really difficult to keep the screw going straight: Actually it came out the face on a couple of places. Ooops.
This is how things looked before I got into messing it up (so tidy!):
First I took off all the concrete and put it directly into a big yellow sack. Then I got started on the soil. Manual labor is hard.
Here it is, dug out (well, as much as I can do right now). On the right side, the foundation is much higher up than the ground level, so I had to leave the soil sloped back to that. I’ll be taking out all that foundation eventually.
On the left side, because they had poured concrete against the wood, there’s gaping hole all along the bottom of their house where the wood has rotten about 2 inches into the wall. It was all filled with soil. Not good!
I saved the small pieces of broken concrete to use as gravel while I’m working on this. Hopefully it will keep the amount of mud down.
So that’s what two sacks full of soil and one full of concrete look like. The weather forecast says 1 inch of rain on Wednesday: That’s the day they are picking the sacks up. I’d better cover them with a tarp!
Is that how it is? Well, last year, very little happened on the house, but a lot of other things did happen: Multiple trips. Marathons. But I’ll have to write about them another time. Just wanted to try to catch up on the house a bit here.
I decided to remove some more concrete, and plant a tree:
This soil has been below concrete, and compacted for so long that it can’t be healthy. I dug out quite deep, then threw in some compost: that’s some of the buggy apples from the ground (I guess it wasn’t quite rotten yet.) I layered compost and soil all the way to the top, then planted the tree.
And here is our new little Japanese maple. I hope it thrives here.
So the pile of concrete and dirt from my earlier post sat in our driveway for about 3 months. I had it covered in plastic to prevent a mud slick when it rained. My initial plan was to stockpile it so that I’d get a dumpster and fill it in one go. Well, I just got tired of having a huge pile in the driveway (it was in the way when I took out the garbage, it was difficult to get out of the car, etc.) And life was filling in a lot more of the weekends than I’d expected.
So I used a service called yellowsack. It’s quite a bit more expensive than a dumpster per ton, but if I’m just hauling out 9,000 lb at a time, that fits into three sacks, and they come pick them up with a truck that has a crane on it. No need to reserve street space.
OK, so there’s another project that’s been keeping me busy. I spent a few months reinforcing floor joists. Remember this phot? This one notch, even though it’s about 2″ deep, has probably halved the strength of this 10″ floor joist, because the edge fibers are the most important:
So one by one, I sistered on new joists to the old ones to try to strengthen them back up. I need the joists to be strong for when I’m shoring up the side of the house to replace the foundation.
Had to move some electrical wiring, and removed some rotten wood also.
It’s quite a pain trying to get a full length joist into that space. Actually, I made them a bit short, turned them on their side and pushed one side up high, while the other side I pushed up. Once it was in the space, I could flip it up and push it against the joist. Quite a workout. Don’t ever let an electrician notch a joist.
Oh, I just liked this photo: It’s the bag on my dust collector that’s connected to my table saw and thickness planer. I like how the different wood I was working put different colored stripes.
Years ago, on an impulse I bought a rose plant from the sale bin outside Lowes for about $3. I planted it against the post for our deck, and it’s loved the location. We get flowers almost all year round. Mole took a photo:
We also did a bit of gardening in the neglected corner of the garden that gets the greywater. It’s a bit of a tricky corner, because it’s the south side, so it gets shaded by the fence on two sides, although in the past tomatoes have grown well here. We decided to get some blueberry bushes. Didn’t realize until after we got them that greywater is not ideal for blueberries, because they are so acid loving. We’ll see how it goes.
Oh, and in between the rain storms, we did continue working on the foundation project. More destruction first:
Oh, this was painful:
A view from below as things were coming apart. I was thinking I’d try to save the tile above because it was still in such good condition – but it would have been difficult to get the waterproofing right, and the slopes. Plus I’d have to support it while working under it.
Here you can see straight into the garage.
Mole is taking out the concrete anchors that were at the bottom of the steps. You can see the steps all piled up on the right.
As it started getting dark, we were still working to get a temporary wall and roof in place to close off the garage.
Here we have the temporary roof, supported off the wall on the left, and you can see the marks of the steps on our neighbors wall on the right. The paint was in really bad shape, and some of the wood quite rotten.
I spent a weekend stripping the old paint off their wall so I could repaint it. This will get permanently hidden behind a new wall, so at least it should have a decent coat of paint.
That bottom row of siding will need to be replaced. They poured concrete against the side of the house, so the wood just rotted away behind it. Even thousand-year-old redwood cannot withstand that.
I sanded and filled all the holes. Ready for paint:
You can see the finished paint on the wall. The photo below I took on a Saturday afternoon, right after I’d removed the concrete and hurt my back. I spent a week barely able to walk. After this, the project sat for a month while my back recovered.
… time goes by …
Mole helped me finish excavating down the soil. I think I’m going to need to hire some people to help me on this.
But there is something I _can_ do: Repair the damaged floor joists. Who would do this to a floor joist?
Feeling much better after getting some reinforcing in. It’s pretty slow going, because it’s hard to get the joist in there over all the conduit and wires.
Two weeks before CIM (California International Marathon in Sacramento) in December, Aja texted me saying that she and Misha were sick. Misha tested positive for Covid. We’d all been training hard for this marathon, and Misha had missed it last year due to injury, after multiple missed Boston marathons due to the Covid pandemic. So this was supposed to be the comback, but it was not to be. We all cancelled. “Besides”, I told myself, “it’s forecast to rain on the morning of the marathon”. (It did not rain, and I continued training through the rainiest winter I remember in California.)
Instead, we ran the Mesa marathon. For me, while I did not run as fast as I’d hoped I would, I did get to run with Misha for the first half. If anyone had suggested, ten years ago, that I would run even a mile in a marathon with Misha, I’d have laughed at their ignorance. Yet, here I was running alongside my athletically far superior sibling. Most of this was due to Misha’s misfortune at catching Covid right before CIM.
Here we are the day before, posing in front of the only growing thing in Phoenix. The rest is concrete and asphalt.
That the US has made the utterly ridiculous transportation pattern of Phoenix the dominant one in the whole country speaks to the power of money in this country. Here we are, stuck in traffic trying to get to a running race. Madness. But at least we were smiling.
We started in the dark, so the photos were not great, but here it is: Evidence. I ran with Misha! Yes, and every photo of Misha shows them floating in the air:
I managed to keep a grin on my face to the end, even though it was a hard marathon for me. It got so much hotter than I thought it would, and I just felt like I could barely move at the end.
Here we are at the end – that was a tough race. Even though the organizers and volunteers were fantastic, I don’t want to do this one again.
And that’s it for the marathon stuff. On to more interesting things: Janeen and I on a huge (13 mile!) hike around San Francisco:
I just realized that my thinking on electric cars changed dramatically over the last two years. Two years ago, we had to buy a new car, and at the time I was perfectly happy with buying another gas car. In fact, if it hadn’t been for mole’s veto, I’d have even bought a non-hybrid Honda Fit. At the time, my thinking was: Most electricity is generated by CO2 emitting technology (and I include Nuclear in that, because the mining, transportation, storage, safety backup systems, etc all rely on fossil fuel) – therefore it is more efficient to just use the energy source directly. Two years later and it feels almost absurd to think that someone now would go out and buy a vehicle that’s not electric. I was missing the point.
I think a few things have happened to push me that way:
One was the morning in September 2020 when we woke up to a burned, dark sky and no sun. This hit me at a much deeper emotional level than even Greta Thunberg’s speeches and Friday strikes, and left me feeling hopeless and depressed.
On top of this came the dramatic demonstration by Russia that reliance on fossil fuel is an ongoing security issue for the world. One despot in control of the oil-drug we rely on and we’re lost.
Talking to people who own electric cars it became clear that electric cars are so simple mechanically that they are inevitably more reliable and require much less maintenance.
And also the general noise and stink of internal combustion engines became very obvious after the brief hiatus we had from them during the pandemic.
And, and, and we got solar panels! I now see first hand the layers of self-serving inertia in our electricity monopoly. They cause delays to the installation, delays to allowing us to connect, and constantly (successfully) lobby the state regulator to reduce the amount they pay, even as they cause wildfires that burn down whole communities. But much of the inefficiency and weakness in the electric grid is that it relies on single point generation of electricity. Electricity is distributed over many miles to many different places, wasting energy for every mile it travels. Distributed solar could change that – in California the electricity could be mostly generated and stored near where it’s needed. The loss of one electric plant, or power line, could be negligible.
I think electric cars are most certainly not the answer to our environmental crisis. They do not address urban sprawl, or the massive waste of money and energy building huge roads. But they are so much better than gasoline cars, that I now compare them to the steam engine: Clever technology for the time, but now very dated.
It was a bit of a process to get solar installed: When the garage was dug out in the 1960’s, they put a post in front of the electric panel. This violates code, so the building inspector would not approve any work until it was moved. Besides, it was completely full with no available locations to connect the solar electric system. Contractors were so extremely busy that I could only get two bids – one of which I had to pay them for. And the prices were twice what the solar company had estimated for the cheaper bid. But now that it’s all installed, we’ve become obsessed with trying to time our electricity usage with the middle of the day when we make the most. Better to try to use it here than get pennies on the dollar from PG&E.
But I digress: I mentioned in the last post that I made a door and a new temporary wall. This door I made out of old wood that was wall paneling. The mistake I made on this door is that the two stiles (the thicker pieces on sides of the door) are too narrow to install a lock. Maybe I can find an old surface mounted lock.
But it looks nice, and now the bikes are completely hidden from view when the garage door is open.
I also got the new steel moment frame delivered. The main beam weighs over 800lb. I couldn’t figure out how to lift it off the truck: Even if we got four people, it would be over 200lb per person, and it’s very difficult to share that load among all those people. It would have been a disaster. Luckily Beronio – where I ordered the moment frame – agreed to have the frame delivered to them, then they drove it to my house on their truck that has a mobile forklift. Now it’s sitting in my garage, waiting for the next stage.
It rolled around quite nicely on a couple of moving dollies. I got it tucked in under my workbench, so it’s not too much in the way while I work.
Oh, but there’s still something else: The space where the new steel beam needs to go is a spaghetti jumble of wires. They all need to be moved.
So the last few weeks I have been identifying which circuit the wires belong to, and figuring out how to re-route them so that they don’t interfere with the new beam.
I’m going to have to repair a lot of floor joists that were notched by the previous owners.
I started removing the old siding in the space under the stairs. But I need to take these stairs out completely before I can get the rest of the siding off. I’ve been delaying on it though, because it’s been raining non-stop. I’ll need to build a temporary wall where the steps are right now, and maybe a temporary roof.
When mole and I were out walking, we saw this fun mural on someone’s garage door. Made me think of my brother!
And look at this security gate. Instead of an uglification of the house, as most of them are, it’s a piece of art. Even the vertical bars represent kelp. I love it so much.
How about this for public art sculpture? My nephew riding a sand dragon.
Oh, and when Misha was in town, we managed to get friends together to go for a run on one of my favorite trails.
