This edition of our 80 year old house remodel is full of big machinery. The basement is backfilled and our trusses are raised. High. Check out the video on that!
We start with backfilling The Hole with a rented skid steer. That is a relief – one less hazard on the yard. That was the priority this weekend with the skid steer.
Old House Remodel Addition
Kent was hoping to get rid of the whole gravel pile. He laid a base in the low corner of the yard so he can put bees there at some point.
He started laying a driveway through the swamp. There was a path through there, but it’s a little soupy in the spring or in wet years like this one.
He has gotten stuck there on numerous occasions with different vehicles. Thane now follows in his wheel tracks with the lawnmower. This weekend was no different for Kent.
Machinery in the swamp? Of course he got stuck. We spent Sunday morning skipping church and digging out the skid steer with shovels, with the weather forecast hanging over our heads for more rain.
What happened was that the skid steer at one point scraped off the sod layer. Beneath was just slimy muck and down she went, almost to the top of the tracks. Much shoveling around the sides and back, and a few tugs with the truck, and I made that sound way too easy.
It makes one think, however, on the purpose of grass and plant roots, holding the soil in place, stabilizing it. Even the excavator operator, when we dug the basement, commented on how long the one corner held up with the roots of Good Ol’ Karl (Karl Forster grass) and Canadian violets before it finally fell in. Of course, regular short lawn grass does not have roots like that.
Even with only a couple of hours of work on Sunday, Kent got a call from the rental company on Monday wondering at the 19 hours he put on the skid steer. Their standard weekend rental (Friday to Monday) is for 10 hours. Oops. Makes one wonder why the long holiday weekend was booked up with rentals.
Even with all those hours, we still have half the gravel pile sitting on the yard. That will wait for another time, as will all the other projects Kent was hoping to do with the skid steer.
I will have to try to save some decently sized boulders from being hauled off, to put in my flower beds. Flex those muscles, kids.
All this earth moving uncovered some old piping – a concrete piece, some clay pieces or something… Who knows from what or where that came?? On an old farm yard you never know what you’ll find.
The next project is back on the house. The north side of the old house, the leaking side, needed to be prepped to tie into the new part. And the leaking needed to stop ASAP, with the rain continuing every other day.
Kent stripped off the shingles, patched the roof – there is not a lot of ventilation in those old attics, and there was some moisture damage – and rolled on some proper roof wrap (Nova Seal® Prime by Tuck), all in one day! The next morning the kids and I loaded up the shingles onto our little old trailer and cleaned up.
It will also be a good thing that most of that north face will be overlapped by the new roof – those old houses are not all that insulated, nor is there room for a lot of insulation. We should be able to keep in more heat now, and guard against those prevailing north winds.
The overlap will also allow more ventilation to be added to the old north attic to mitigate those moisture issues.
Kent set up and tied together the roof trusses on the ground. This is a good way not to have to get tangled up in the trusses twenty feet up (especially if there is a harness rope trailing behind.) The gable end also got mostly sheeted. This was also a pretty quick job, done in a couple of evenings.
Then a bit more framing to tie the new addition to the old house, all those short walls to bring it together. Those also waited till last minute because it meant removing siding and exposing walls to the ever wet weather. There’s my new kitchen in the photo!
The smell of all that wood sitting around is amazing, like hiking in a spruce forest in the spring! If I listen closely, I can also hear the stream across the road when the water is high.
Time to call our neighbour with the crane again. He is nice to have on site. He is very relaxed and very good at his job. “A foot? That’s not tight. A quarter of an inch – now that’s a tight fit.”
Crane Man and another construction buddy and Kent made quick work of “raising the roof”. Four anchor points were attached for each lift. There were two sections of trusses to lift.
These guys work so fast they started to attach the chains to the trusses before Kent even turned around, so they ended up putting on the outside section first. It took less than three minutes from the ground to sitting on top of the walls.
The next section, which was significantly smaller, then had to be lifted over top of the newly laid trusses and fitted in like a jigsaw puzzle. Now, it was a bit of an interesting fit because of the foot we lost on the concrete job and imperfections of additions to old houses, but a few minor adjustments later, and it was fully in place.
It is much easier to visualize the spaces with a roof over the walls, even an open roof. It actually makes it feel more spacious, rather than getting lost in the openness, I suppose. And with a bit of imagination, I can see our initial in the roof.
How much more exciting can you get than stuck skid steers and smooth crane operators? I guess we’ll find out as we continue to work on the roof for the addition of our old house remodel. Thankfully, the rain has finally held off for a couple of weeks. Till next time…
You might like these other editions of this dear old house remodel:
Old House Remodel 4 – The Basement Gets a Roof
I'm Erika, I live on eighty acres in the northern prairies of southern Manitoba with my husband and four kids. Here, we enjoy the outdoors and try to be more self sufficient as we try new things in the garden and learn about our land and the world around us.
Leave a Reply