Lee took Monday afternoon off from work and got the upstairs window installed. This was the first window that we have ever done. I was very nervous about this whole process. I was sure we were either going to drop it off the second story as we were trying to install it or Lee was going to fall to his death. Thankfully neither of those things happened.

It was a slow process. Lee had been slowly prepping for it the week before he actually installed it. Then it would be raining and there was no way I wanted him on a ladder in the rain. Yes, I am paranoid. That and I know that Lee doesn’t really enjoy heights.

See this picture here really freaks me out. Lee hanging out a second story window trimming the wood shingles before we could install the window. Though somehow I was the one admonished to get back when I tried to hang out the window. That might have something to do with my accidental clumsiness… Even though I wasn’t feeling clumsy at that particular time.

We went ahead and took out the old sill plate as it looked pretty weathered. Lee added a new one. Then he added three spacers and put another two by four on that. We needed to raise the new window up by three inches to bring all the windows of this type to the same height.

Since we raised the window height and the replacement was a little taller too, that meant that we had to cut out a higher section above the window. Now that was a royal pain in the butt trying to sawzall though all those tongue and groove plank boards along with metal flashing. Lee’s arms may never recover.

We somehow managed to get everything square, flashed, caulked, nailed, straight, working, (yes that’s right, both parts of the double hung window actually work correctly) all with no accidents by either of us that required hospital stays. Lee hasn’t gotten the trim on the outside of the window done yet but hey, we’ll leave that for another day.

Up until two nights ago, there have been multiple direct paths between our interior living space and the outdoors. For some areas, such as the first floor ceilings (open to the eave vents) we’ve simply stapled up plastic to hold in the air. For the second floor, we are in the middle of actual retrofit work and have to take things in order.

So far, we’ve talked about installing the foam bypasses and the new double stud top plates on the angled portion of the second floor ceiling. The knee wall was also strengthened by adding shear bracing and we started insulating the knee wall with fiberglass. That step has now been completed as shown here:

Two bays aren’t insulated in that picture. The final bay, where the knee wall intersects the end wall, will be insulated after we add shear bracing to the end wall (yes, we’re bracing everything). The half bay that isn’t insulated will eventually be cut out to become our front attic access. Our house has four separate attic spaces that will be insulated with blown-in cellulose, and each needs their own seal-able access panel. We will try our best to disguise them in the final detail work.

At the back of the house, we in-filled the attic bays on either side of the dormer with foam, and then added OSB to the attic portion of the dormer sides. Both sides of the dormer also had two stud bays headered off. These are going to form built-in book cases on each side right next to the window seat by the dormer window. The backs of the bookcases will have concealed access panels to get into the attic space on each side. The attic portion of the dormer walls will be insulated with 4″ foam much later. For now, we’re just relying on the OSB and stapled in plastic to hold in the heat. Note that the headers are only half finished. I ran out of 2×6, and I also want to get some 1/2″ foam to make a laminated header to reduce thermal bridging.

The foam insulated bypasses had some gaps where things didn’t fit together real well, so we filled these with spray foam and then had to trim off the excess with a flush-cut saw. Spray foam is obnoxious to work with (and spendy), but it gets the job done and provides R-6 per inch.

Next, we started adding the “real” insulation for the angled ceiling areas. This is formed by 2″ thick 8′ foam panels that are cut to fit tightly against the double stud plate above and come down to the knee wall. The first step in installing these is to caulk more of the bypass gaps, and also apply a ring of caulk to each bypass panel to seal it to the next layer. If the bypass panels do not adhere tightly to the next layer, then cold air will infiltrate between the layers and we’ll lose the insulating value of the outer layer. I’m using only siliconized latex caulk which has a significantly longer life than the plain latex variety. The beads of blue in the photo are PL300 foam adhesive.

Once an area was caulked and adhesive applied, we held the foam panel in place and tacked it up with 3″ plastic cap roofing nails. Enough nails were applied to hold the layers together until the adhesives dried. Long term, these panels will also be held in place by the next layer of stud framing. I really hate these nails, as they bend at the slightest provocation.
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After installing a panel, we caulked the seams against the roof and framing in preparation for the next layer. So far four panels are up, (32′ linear feet). The rest have to wait until the end walls are sheathed. The remaining gaps between the roof and the double studs were closed in with stapled plastic to hold in the heat. This is the first time our house has been “closed in”, but it didn’t appear to make a huge difference with temperatures dropping to 12° for the last few nights. This weekend we’re supposed to have a 40° night, so we look forward to making ourselves uncomfortably warm for the first time in months.

Next up: wood blocking, metal strapping, insulation, and sheathing for the end walls …

Anybody want to cheer with me? That is indeed what you think it is in the below picture. Lee has officially started on the knee wall insulating. Now before you all get too excited for me in my luxurious living conditions, let me tell you that it’s not as warm as it looks. I’m shivering as I type. It’s a start though. Lee has about 2/5th of the knee walls done right now. Somebody needs to complain to Lee to make him finally post where this is all going. Hmm, then again with him down at his computer mulling about writing the perfect post makes it so he’s not insulating…

Lee is putting shear bracing back into the house. This will help if the “big” earthquake that has been forecasted for Oregon actually happens, but also just makes the house sturdier. Lee has some plans on making our old house more earthquake ready along the way. This is one of them.

Today’s project was the knee wall: a 5 foot high wall that forms two sides of the second floor and supports the roof. Our knee walls all sit on beams that span open living space below. The plan is to add OSB panels using adhesives and nails which will permanently tie the beams and knee walls together. This does two things. It adds shear, to resist lateral forces from wind and earthquakes. It also creates a connected load path, to prevent an uplift earthquake from breaking the knee walls loose.

To start off, Lee jacked up the widest span by 1/4″ before adding bracing. This heads off future sagging.

The beam is slightly narrower than the knee wall, so he added 3/8″ plywood shims to create a coplanar surface. 8″ wide strips of plywood were glued to the beam using construction adhesive and attached with a few nails.

Once that was on, Lee applied polyurethane construction adhesive to the beam and 3.5′ up the knee wall studs for each 8′ sheet of OSB.

The OSB was lifted into place and attached using 2.5″ ring shank nails. Rink shank nails have tiny one-way barbs that make them easy to drive but hard to remove. A shear wall nailing schedule was used, with nails placed about every 4 to 5 inches.

Lee decided that he wanted more bracing, so he added 2′ strips of OSB at the top of the knee wall. The seams were staggered for greater rigidity.

Finally we sheeted more ceiling area in with plastic to help slow down the heat loss until we can get around to real insulation. Yes, that is a saw in my living room. I sure don’t miss Arizona, but I do miss my nicely put together house. I think the plastic ceiling complements my plastic curtains.

The foam bypasses discussed in a previous post are all installed, so we moved on to the next step: installing top plates for the double wall framing of the angled portion of the second floor ceiling. This is slightly out of order, but once these plates were installed we could add a temporary plastic sheet ceiling to try to retain some of the heat on the second floor (it was all escaping through the ridge vent and 32° nights are cold).

With this top plate in place, we can adhere 2″ foam panels to the angled wall portion, squeezed up into the gap between the plates and the rafters, and then start building the framing for the inner wall in this area. The inner wall will carry wiring for the second floor and some of the first floor front rooms, so getting it finished will put us in a better position to start electrical work. Hopefully a future post can clear up where all of this is going.

Lee has been after me to figure out how we are going to use the rooms in our house. Not just use them, but where furniture and closets are going to go. This has been frustrating for me because I am not good at figuring things out spatially. I like to wave my hand and say, “Sure it will all fit”. But we really did need to get it all sorted out, because room layout affects the placement of electric outlets, lights, and switches among other things. To make matters harder, two of the rooms are oddly shaped and were not straight forward to plan. You would think that working from a mostly blank slate with a few restrictions would make it easy, but it wasn’t.

I will admit that I had some draft paper that I was working with. That was okay and I did get a few small things accomplished. Where I started making my leaps and bounds in figuring out the room layout was when I found a program on the La Z Boy furniture web site. I now have the master bedroom, office, living room, and multiple-use room all figured out.

Lee and I still are not quite all the way certain on the living room layout. It’s an odd shape with some things that you can’t change and have to work around. I am most pleased with how my craft/sewing/TV room turned out. That one took a while, as it needed bookcases (for Lee’s compulsive how-to book collection), a place to work with all my crafts and future sewing projects, and then a place to relax and read or watch TV. We don’t actually own a TV (haven’t for a year and a half) right now but I really want one again so I can play my Wii Fit.

I can hardly wait until I have walls to paint, lights to pick out, and furniture to look for. Lee on the other hand is probably DREADING it as he expressly hates those above mentioned evils. I know he wants to build some of our furniture (Art’s and Craft style) but I’m not letting him do it all. He will be busy enough finishing up other multitudes of house stuff.

Insulating the attic angled portions of our second floor ceiling is the first step in a very elaborate insulation plan we have for our old house. Our long term plan is a superinsulated house — a house that stays warm in the winter with only small fast fires and cool in the summer by trapping the low temperatures of evening. Going from empty stud bays, riddled full of telephone and cable holes, to such a final product is obviously a long road. I’ll talk more about the process and the benefits in a later post, but for now our task at hand is the attic bypasses.

They’re call bypasses because air entering the attic spaces over the first floor need a bypass to reach the attic spaces over the second floor and leave via the ridge vent. (See illustration on the right.) A small portion of our second floor ceiling is sloped. It starts at about 6′ at the top of the knee wall, and ranges up to the ceiling at a little over 8′. Our first step in insulating this area is to cut 8′ long strips of 2″ thick pink polystyrene insulation that fit directly into these bays. This will leave a 1.5″ air space against the roof surface for ventilation, and the spacing will be maintained by wood spacer blocks (which also provide an attachment surface). The 8′ strips extend 3′ vertically into the attic to prevent blown-in insulation (to be added much later) from blocking these ventilation pathways. The process went as follows:

Piles of wood spacers were prepped for nailing into the stud bays. These are made by ripping 2×4 stock into three strips, roughly 1.1″ x 1.5″ each. The 1.5″ defines the bypass spacing. The strips are then chopped into one foot pieces, and two nails are pre-driven into each for rafter attachment.

The wood spacers were then nailed at intervals into the rafters, 6 per stud bay.

A 4′x8′ sheet of foam insulation was then ripped to width for the stud bay, and measured for the cut-out for the rafter tie that forms an obstruction in each stud bay.

An angled marking tool was set to the rafter-to-tie angle, and used to define the cut angle for the rafter tie notch.

The width of the notch was sized using a scrap piece of 2×4.

The rafter tie notch was cut out with a drywall jab saw.

View of a completed notch.

The panel was fitted into place. Sometimes it had to be motivated to fit.

3″ cap nails were used to hold the strips of foam insulation in place. 1″ versions of these nails are used to hold down tar paper on roofs. The 3″ versions are for this sort of thing. These like to bend, and are obnoxious to drive upwards at the roof angle. The rafters were pre-marked so the cap nails would hit the wood furrow strips.

View of some of the completed stud bays. We are a little over one third done, and hope to finish the remaining bays in the next couple nights.

During the reroofing project, we had something new installed that would not have been seen on a 1930’s house. We had a Solatube installed. Originally we saw a booth for one at the Good Earth Home, Garden & Living Show a year ago. We are planning a new half bathroom upstairs, inside one of the bedrooms. Since the new bathroom would be inside a somewhat dark room to begin with, Lee wanted to bring in natural light.

Tubular skylights work by catching direct and ambient sunlight, bouncing it down a highly reflective tube (through the attic), and then diffusing it into a room through a ceiling mounted lens that looks much like a light fixture. Heat and UV are blocked, but a broad spectrum natural light comes through. There were two brands that we looked at but we ended up choosing the Solatube brand. It is the only one offering an Energy Star rated insulated diffuser glass at this time. The tax rebate is also a bonus.

Since the bathroom isn’t built yet, only the dome on the roof is presently installed. I am really impressed with how much light comes in regardless. With only two windows, both of the upstairs rooms are pretty dark. I almost wish that we had a second one installed the other room.

When we were having our roof redone we decided to redo the back porch roof line as well. This is what the original porch roof line looked like in the below picture. It’s not a very good picture of it but it was the only one I could find back in my photo records. (You sure can tell it was awhile ago by all the formers tenants stuff about.) It was tacked on like an after thought. Whenever Lee walked out onto the porch he always felt like he was going to whack his head on the supporting beam that went across.

So then we came to our back porch dilemma. How do you build a back porch roof line that doesn’t look completely plain while keeping it small? We had some constraints as we couldn’t make it too wide as it would cover the windows on either side of it. We also couldn’t make it too deep as then it would crowd the wood shack. We couldn’t just tack it on like the last one as Lee wanted to be able to walk out comfortably on it.

We ended up making the new porch roof line start farther up on the roof. That way we could get a slightly bigger porch roof and it saved Lee’s head. The final dimensions of it came to 12′ wide by 8′ deep. The rafter tails are trimmed flush with the fascia and it has a beam that goes across it with a decorative overhang. AC Plywood was used, finish side down, on the under roof so we will have a nice smooth surface to paint.

Lee and I are pretty pleased with how it turned out. Right now the porch roof just has two pressure treated 4×4’s holding it up on top of concrete pads that were also newly put in. When we get around to rebuilding the porch we will put in tapered pillars that will somewhat match the pillars that we plan on putting on the front porch. At least that is our current plan. We always seem to change our minds a lot. That will be a ways down the road though as we have so much to do inside the house still. I had to prime the supporting beam to keep the wood from cracking. I need to get around to primming the rest of it.

While the roof was getting replaced the existing corbels all got destroyed in the process. Lee decided that he wanted fancier corbels then the originals so he made up his own. To get started, he built three for the dormer (one was just for practice). Most of the corbel dimensions were already decided for us. The overhang of the roof was two feet so that was one length. The window placement made it so the part of the corbel that came down the wall was sixteen inches. (The other 13 corbels on the house are 26″ long.) The width of the wood is two and a half inches.

Lee made his cuts. He did an open mortise and tenon joint to connect the right angle. Then the joint was glued and clamped.

He drilled a hole through the open mortise and tenon joint and then chiseled it square for a wooden peg.

The wooden peg through the joint makes the corbel stronger and adds a nicer look. The peg was left out a half an inch through both sides. The diagonal brace was then screwed into place.

The diagonal brace is a half inch smaller then the other elements in the corbel. The corners of the diagonal brace and the bottom of the vertical are chamfered. The horizontal will be fit tightly against the varge rafter as we may later add faux caps so it looks like the supports pierce the face of the eaves. In a way, these corbels are the beginning of our planned architectural update for the house: from rough depression-era craftsman to a more refined arts and crafts styling.

Lee and I had a lot of discussions on how to make the corbels look. I hated anything that looked too ornate. He hated how plain the originals were and liked ones that emphasized the joinery. Finally I told him to knock himself out and just do whatever he preferred. I like them quite a lot and am very happy with how they turned out. I do feel bad for him in that I think they would have looked a bit different if he hadn’t of spent the last three weeks pointing out corbels I hated on other people’s houses.

Of course with Lee being Lee he couldn’t help himself and had to add some more details. These ones are just faux pegs. He drilled a quarter inch deep hole with a forstner bit (this leaves a flat bottom). Then he chiseled the corners out square. The pegs themselves are three quarters inch cubes which were glued into place.