Framing

View from Dining Room

New Footprint Appears

With the foundation wall re-poured, framing for the addition and tie-in to the old house began in earnest. This part of construction typically goes relatively quickly, largely because it is simple carpentry using pre-fabricated joists and sheathing boards.

The first floor's framing goes in quickly, with the bulkiest of floor joists spanning the rather wide footprint of the open kitchen and living room area. We are designing for maximum support in this area to avoid, as much as possible, bounce in the kitchen and living room floors.

A double-ganged, engineered wood beam runs from the corner of the old structure out to the southwest wall of the addition. Joist hangers support the floor joists, which come with pre-scored "punch-outs" in them to easily run plumbing and electrical through without using drills.

First Floors Need Walls

Kitchen and Living Room

Breakfast Room and Mudroom

The first floor framing goes up in a day, with the second floor's joists visible through the windows. The eating area is framed out and the location of the door and back porch become visible. We have been in the house several times walking through the framed rooms with a tape measure and floor plans. The space inside has seemed concurrently both huge and tiny, if that makes sense. It seems wide open without finished walls, but it is definitely not going to feel huge inside when completed. This is in keeping with the nature of old homes, and also our desire not to build an overly large house.

Old Foundation Meets New

New Basement without Walls

In the basement, framing is overhead and the space feels enclosed. With the demolition work on the corner of the old house still continuing, there only way into the basement is through the windows. The floor will not be poured until the plumbing for the basement bathroom and sump goes in. One of the cost unknowns deals with the integrity of the existing sewer line, which our builder plans to examine with a camera. Hopefully that line is in good shape and doesn't need replaced, but it is, after all, a rather old house.

With the joists and plywood flooring for the second story going in, we can take the stairs to the second floor and walk out into what will be the master suite. At the moment, it requires walking past stacks of timber liberated from the existing roof and supporting structure, since new roof trusses and roofing boards will have to tie into the old roof.

As parts of some of the old structure continue to be pulled out to work with the new addition, we continue to find interesting things about the construction of the house. For example, in a number of places we find what should be solid wall studs made of odd-length sections of stud stacked on top of each other, then ganged with another piece that spans two or even three sections. We are speculating that, since they couldn't just run down to the Home Depot and buy more wall studs, the original builders ran out of sufficiently long pieces to build some of the walls and just used whatever lengths they had remaining. In the picture above left, several of the studs can be seen having two pieces nailed together in this fashion.

Interesting Approach to Wall Studs