Building the addition

I bought an old house back in 1999. It had been there a while, since 1890. So far back that in the old days they had had an outhouse. Eventually the village turned into a… well… a village. The owners divided the lot and sometime before the new neighbors built a house over the old outhouse hole, an addition was scabbed on and fitted out with a tiny bathroom and a small mudroom complete with a lift-up hatch with one of those old round metal rings for a handle that allowed access to the perpetually flooded cellar.

The low pitch of the scabbed on roof was a recipe for disaster and had already allowed an excessive amount of moisture to penetrate the walls. Nothing for it but to get out the old digging bar and break some ground.

I have broke rock before and at the time I still had plenty of callouses from my years of treeplanting. It’s meditative actually. You simply lift and drop the bar, chiseling out a groove six to twelve inches back from the leading edge. In no time at all the groove becomes a crack and with the addition of some leverage the chunks of concrete are pried from the ground. Lest I made that sound easy you should know that this wasn’t a wimpy three inch thick concrete pad either.

Six inches of solid concrete, the good kind like your great grandparents built with. Here I had to break it in smaller chunks to get a nice precise edge for the footer.

That was my only helper. She kept me smiling. Notice how clean the jobsite is and how the dirt in the background is not piled on the rosebush. The old step will remain where it is and eventually will support a floor solid enough to hold an elephant.

Sometimes the child brought her friends by to watch but mostly I was in the hole by myself. When I needed a change of pace I would work on deconstructing the back wall of the old house. I wasn’t about to go buy anything, like wood for cement forms, when I could scavenge it from the house.

The child was happy to dig but she had a time lifting the dirt up out of the hole.

The footer here will come just up to the bottom of the sidewalk. The foundation will join it.

Footer joined and tied.

Ready for the cement.

If they had backed up a little more over they could have got me started on removing that old roof.

This was the easy part

I had to slop it around the corner here where the chute wouldn’t reach. This was starting to feel like real work even.

Why am I the only one sweating here?

Here’s where the old boards from the back of the house came in handy.

My intention here was to make it solid enough for a full bathtub and an oversize load of clothes. (plus the elephant)

Well, the form for the footer bowed but I did get enough concrete in there to set a floor on. I know well that when you rush things, mistakes may be made. So give me my idiot award already and on with the show.

Here I have the outside of the back wall dismantled with the interior wall intact. Eventually, I will remove the wall studs and the wall will still stand. I will build the new roof before removing the old.

The new roof will go all the way to the peak.

That’s a sandbox that I built for the kids in the foreground. I remember that my construction activities here were inspiration for many the creation.

I built the new roof before I built the side wall so I could leave the old roof on.

Now how am I going to get my elephant in there?

Finally, the seven old nasty layers of shake, shingles, tar paper and asphalt are removed and on the ground.

This pile has the old nasty walls I just removed. Okay, I admit it, I still have some of this wood around. I built a bookshelf out of one of those boards just the other day.

Here you can see what is left of the bathroom walls. No framing or studs, just the wallboard.

Black mold. I couldn’t see it but I knew it was there. It proved the necessity of the project.

The ceiling joists rest on this sill. Preparing it was difficult. It might even have been the hardest part of the job. There were several layers of shingles covering two layers of shakes. I cut the hole in the old roof to shovel the existing insulation into from the walls and ceiling I removed.

The bathroom here is still attached to two framed walls but not for long. At the time, using the facility reminded me of outhouses I have known.

About this time the neighbor across the street poured a new driveway and the cement truck had a couple yards left over. Just enough to fill between the patio and the new foundation.

Tarpaper shack? Wet cement? Anything to distract the viewer from noticing the bowed foundation. The wife said it looked like a butt… it is the back door you know.

The old bathroom was so small you had to have the door open to turn around. The toilet was behind the door. I loved that wall fixture. Still have it here in the other room. (different house though)

Here I have the back wall out but the bathroom is not much bigger yet.

No bigger than a small closet.

We won’t miss this. Looks like we kept our shampoo out on the sink. Wasn’t room in the shower. Notice that my lovely light is on a different wall now.

In retrospect it would have been easier to section this out with a sawsall. Do you use this much glue when you paste up an enclosure? I wish I knew what kind it was because it works well.

This took hours and it was pointless. I thought I could save the plywood for another project. Live and learn.

Here I am standing behind the old bathroom. The sink is in its original position. The curtain was the temporary wall.

It didn’t take long to set the tub in and fill it up with kids for a dry run.

You’re looking at a Moen Evenflo shower setup. Solid and operational.

The new tub was incredibly exciting. It was sweet! I had sore muscles to soak and I soaked them.

I build a beautiful bathroom but I’m not so great at cropping photos. Hey it’s an extra five bucks a month for an account that lets me install imagemagick. Suffer…

After my soaks, I finished the room.

Meanwhile, the old laundry still looked like this.

First, I divided the room in two. One room for a pantry and the other for laundry. The floor of the pantry was the hatch to the cellar. The opening in this wall was for built in shelves available to both rooms. The laundry had to have room for the machines and the elephant.

Left, 1890. Right, 2000. Old meets new.

I worked at the door factory in town at the time so I knew what doors were made out of. Considering the feng shui of it all, there was only one choice for me, solid wood. Oak would have been nice but this fir door was reasonably priced.

Seven coats of spar varnish later, I rehung the door. Sure is pretty against that new floor.

Not much room left for the elephant but the new washer and dryer fit nicely.

Dad helped with the wiring and lent an ear whenever I needed to troubleshoot some problem encountered. His assistance was invaluable.

I don’t know if you can tell, but I didn’t spend very much on this project. Including the washer and dryer, tub, door, flooring, lumber, shingles, and cement, about $3500. The siding and insulation cost about another $1500. I was working full time with overtime every week. It was easy to pay for but when did I find the time to do the work?

After all that, I still had to pretty up the outside. Luckily I have plenty of experience with siding. I even wrote this guide. The old poplar siding that I removed went to a local schoolhouse restoration.

This looked so good to me that I started coming home the other way around the block just to see it.

This is one solid house. 117 years old.

I eventually hired an old chronically inebriated gentleman to paint the trim.

View from Park St. We really loved this house.

This was September 10th, 2001. I was up there on the left side of the window the next morning when the planes crashed. It sort of took the glory out of completing it all. Anti-climactic.