May 2025 – turtle + mole

Now that we’re done with the structural work, I need to fix what I broke.

In the blazing sun — while the street was closed for a low-rider car show — I started working on the siding and trim around the garage door.

It was hard to see from photographs, but the paint on the siding around the garage door was bubbling up. So I stripped it down to the wood. The reason I’d waited too long on doing all the paint on the front of the house, is I’d wanted to strip it all. It’s prohibitively expensive to hire someone to do that, because it takes a long time. But the bubbling is because one of the layers of paint is not sticking to the layer below it: Probably because one of the times it was painted, the previous paint wasn’t sanded/cleaned properly.

Working on the paint overhead is really hard on the neck and shoulders. I also re-used some old siding and filled in the lower left and right sides. That piece of old plywood with the interesting painting on it served many months. I think it even made it into a google street view.

Only after I’d done all the overhead paint stripping, I thought: While I’m doing this, I should add insulation below the floor. So I pulled all the overhead wood off. Could have done it before stripping and made it so much easier on my neck. Oh well.

Insulation in. I used a double layer of closed cell “reflectix”–it’s a bit like bubble wrap–with an air gap between. I had to cut each piece to fit with enough to staple to the joists on all sides. I decided on this because I didn’t like the idea of glass fiber batt insulation possibly being a place for insects to nest.

I added some ventilation holes so that moisture doesn’t accumulate in this space. I did add metal mesh on the back side so that large insects can’t get in.

Mole snapped a photo of me after I’d got all the siding back on and was working on filling holes and sanding smooth.

Now it’s getting much nicer than it was before I started: The trim around the garage door was a real botch job before. Now I’ve used some nice cedar with dimensions matching the rest of the house. It’s hard to see from the photo, but I added a piece of quarter round at the inside edge – another Victorian era detail.

The lower edge of the bay window was always a bit of a mess. They’d used just a piece of quarter round, and butted it against the edge of the ceiling boards. I very much doubt that was original, because it results in exposed end grain.

I changed the detail by making the quarter round extend down a bit, and adding a piece of wood with a coved edge routed into it. In my mind this is a huge improvement because it hides the transition, and also provides a ‘drip’ edge.

Here she is, painted. I added lights: We bought them about fifteen years ago (!) planning to put them here.

I’ve had a lot of help moving this project forward. By chance, I ran into Emilio — who, it turns out, is a floorman and immigrant like Dad. He initially agreed to help me with getting beams lifted into place. When we’d jacked up the first beam and got it attached, we stood back and he kept saying “Beautiful” — I told him Dad used to sing a “Beautiful, Beautiful” song when he was putting polyurethane down onto freshly sanded floors. It’s now become our mantra.

Since then, when his regular work is slow, he’s been helping me keep this project going. In January, we did a major push and got the final foundation poured. After re-reading mole’s post about Dad and me installing the floors, I realized Emilio reminds me of Dad in other ways too (quoting mole) “working with mathew was like working with a really high-maintenance, picky, perfectionist client who never left the house… during the entire weekend mathew was BOSSY but daniel, as always, maintained a positive attitude with a smile on his face.” Emilio too.

There were lots of interesting things hiding in the walls when I opened them up:

A wood concrete trowel, shoes, and a can of shellac lacquer

Here I’m starting to get the wall supported again. You can see the light shining through below the wall, and I’m adding new wall studs next to the old shorter ones, working left to right.

Even with all my shoring efforts, this corner dropped a bit. So I’ve got a jack under to corner lifting it while I put in the taller posts. It reminds me of when we first bought this house: The agent was showing us around, and in the back of the house, there was a jack supporting the extremely rotten and falling-down back stairs.

Corner post installed.

I had some original siding saved from the wall on the other side, so I stripped the paint, and repaired all the dents and dings. Now it’s on the lower quarter of this wall.

Siding and moisture barrier installed and shoring removed! Ahhh, such a relief.

I put the hidden treasures back into the wall, just the way I’d found them.

Then plywood to make it into a strong shear wall.

On the other side of the house, I had to construct a wall against the neighbor’s house. You can see the siding of their house on the right. To do it, I built a platform at the height of the concrete wall, and then planned to build the new wall on top of the platform, and slide it into place…

The new wall was incredibly heavy because it has to be a one hour fire wall. Moving it into position was difficult: The wall had to be moved over, and slid over the top of the anchor bolts. The bolt holes had to line up perfectly with the bolts sticking out of the concrete. Plus it had to fit in close at each end and somehow fit under the edge of the existing floor. I used a pry bar to gradually nudge it over, and had to tilt the whole wall at what felt like a 45 angle to get it to fit under the edge of the floor.

…Lots of grunting, false starts, and last minute trimming later: Wall in place. Success!

Then I shored up this side of the house and removed the old termite-eaten wall, in preparation for installing a new steel beam.

Actually, the beam is not “new” – it’s one of the beams that was over the garage before. I cut it down to the length for this new location, and with my mag drill, drilled the bolt holes into it.

This view shows the shoring beam above, and the “new” permanent beam below. I drilled some extra holes in the middle in case I decide to run conduit through it in the future.

Reclaiming the remaining good pieces of wood that came out when I removed this wall, I filled in the sides of the beam so I can nail joist hangers to the sides.

Here are the floor joists notched to fit the new beam. I couldn’t make the beam go all the way up, because it runs under the landing at the front, which is lower than the floor inside the house.

And that’s it: Fully supported on the new foundation. Plus the garage is a bit larger now. Next I have to build back the wall framing and all the finishes that were damaged/removed during the foundation work.

One more thing found in the walls. Maybe you can see where it went in the photo below.

Now to remove this old wall: The threaded rods sticking out of it are the retrofit anchors I added a few years ago – before I got myself into this mess!

On a more fun note, some of Misha’s sculptures appeared last month… delivered by art delivery service. I was super worried they’d get broken in transit, but they were packed expertly and ADS drove their own truck here to deliver. No FedEx box-smashers please!