projects on the go
This is a house built in 1906 at 1403 3 Ave. N., Coalbanks (later to become Lethbridge), AB, Canada. It was the same year the Lethbridge Viaduct (commonly called the High Level Bridge) was built. It is one of the only two-storey houses built in the area. It’s been added on to four times but still maintains close to its original look. I bought the house in Dec. 2021 as a rental property. It has a 3-bedroom suite on the main floor and a one-bedroom suite on the second. This blog is an account of all that we (FT and I) have done to make it rentable. Read about the main or 2nd floor (“up”) by going to that category. Comments are welcome (but moderated)!
I, Floyd, and Dave are back at it again. We are removing the north retaining wall to get at a notched rotten beam. This means shovelling more dirt, removing bits and pieces of retaining wall and three posts, and hauling out buckets of dirt. Now you see it, …
… now you don’t.
We found, upon trying to build 2×6 fire-rated load-bearing walls, that there was nothing to set the walls upon. The floor is rotten. I’ll have to dig deeper, tearing up the floorboards, to see how far the rot goes.
In the mean time, we put up the 2nd wall (a 2×6 wall). It was moved from its original spot about 9 inches to the west to be placed under (not beside) 1st storey ceiling / 2nd storey floor joists. Well that’s a novel idea, eh?, supporting overhead joists with load-bearing walls! Can you hear the annoyance in my typing?
We filled the hole that the furnace people drilled in my floor.
The headers await support.
Supports almost ready.
We had to cut the copper water lines to the vanity (bathroom sink) a few days ago to access the nuts holding the living room / bathroom add-on sill plates to the footings. Now we have no water.
“What, you didn’t reconnect them?”
No. I have another plan. I want to replace all the copper with PEX. Every time we add or move a beam in the basement, some change must be made to the water lines. I’m really not great at soldering copper. My solders look like a kindergarten kid tried to do it. Yes, I’ve gotten better, but the rat’s nest of copper pipes is already an altered patchwork of lines without a cohesive plan.
It has been a sore spot in this house for ages. The NE corner of the house has been cleared of all the concrete they poured. It looks like they only did it as a stop-gap measure to prevent further house slumping. It didn’t work! Instead, this giant chunk of concrete, weighing probably 400 lbs (180kg), was being held up by the house.
Now that that has been removed, along with all the bricks in the bathroom wall (eastern part of north wall), the corner of the house is considerably lighter. I reckon to weight to be somewhere around 1000 lbs (450kg). Because of this, we are now able to remove the old, rotten beam install the beam in that corner. It spans 10′ (3m) and will have three teleposts.
This is what the concrete looks like now, one day after it was poured.
More cement! This time, in the northeast corner of the original 4-square building. This is to support the telepost and new beam.
Now we wait 30 days to cure completely, 4-7 days before we can put any weight on it. This means that semi-complete levelling cannot take place for another month. I say semi-complete as it will not be completely level until the living room / bathroom add-on is raised.
Or razed. 🙁
I got two new 12′ (25.4m) 6×6 beams and a 2×10 20′ (6.096m). One of the beams will go in the NE corner of the original 4-square house. The 20′ will become a floor joist sistered alongside an original next to the soon-to-be 2nd floor staircase.
Here is the rotten 6×6 beam in that same corner, soon-to-be cut out.
That’s a long title, isn’t it?
The rim joist on the east wall of the original 4-square house has cracked. When? Hard to say. Why? Easy. Too much pressure was put on it many years ago from a support column in the first floor. Raising square-corner butt joint joists were raised up just recently, but the split widened as there was nothing under that portion of it to support it, where the 1st floor support column is.
So today we dug a new area for a new footing. I did the digging and hauling of 20L buckets to the stairs, D from next door hauled the buckets to HFT, and HFT hauled the wheel-barrow to the back. “Are we nearing the end?” I’d hear every now and then. “Almost!” I would shout.
So then what? Fill it with concrete. We mixed one US gallon hot water from the SRV on the water heater, four shovels of cement (blasted 40kg bags! (danged 88 lbs.)), eight shovels of sand, and four shovels of gravel (mixed with sand). Very scientificy, I know – especially as we had to add a little more of this or a little more of that. We got about 3.5″ of concrete. More tomorrow, if the weather holds out.
The after-hours cleanup was also fun.
In mixing concrete for the side patio, we hooked the hose up on west the side of the house. It looks like it was put in in the 1950s. The faucet leaks continually when turned on. Since the main floor kitchen sink is now against an exterior wall, I think we should put in a new frost-free hose bib there. It only makes sense to put it there as it would be more central to the rest of the property (grass, shrubs, potential garden).
Cleanup didn’t take long. We piled it all on the trailer, along with refuse from 520, to be hauled to the landfill.
It doesn’t look clean, you say? You should have seen it before.