From: Wheeling, West Virginia
Wednesday, 2:45 pm
Dear Friend,
The kitchen wall wobbled when I poked it. In fact, it swayed. If the Big Bad Wolf had come round at that moment, he would have had no difficulty blowing down the project house addition.
It all started with the gutters.
Now, despite the proverbial gutter in which our minds sometimes get stuck, most people would consider actual gutters to not be a particularly sexy subject.
I am not most people.
Historic gutters are, if not sexy, at least interesting. They are actually an extension of the roof, rather than a separate piece that is tacked on. They are often called box gutters, because the bottom portion is hidden by a wooden box with trim or other decorative elements.
They work well unless they have been allowed to deteriorate through neglect or improper maintenance.
It can be hard to find someone who knows how to fix them, so many people cut the original gutters off and replace them with a manufactured system. This is simple but destroys some of the historic fabric and changes the shape of the house.
The box gutters on the project house are in rough shape. I am determined to rebuild them. After much research and several discussions with my mentor Jon (who has several decades of experience with restoring historic structures), I felt that I understood the mechanics pretty well.
The next few paragraphs are for the building geeks.
In box gutters, the attic ceiling joists extend past the edge of the building for about a foot. There is a wide notch near the end of each to form the gutter trough. The notches get deeper as they approach the downspout to create a slope to direct the water.
The trough is lined with boards and then, historically, sheet metal. I'm not going to get into all the different ways that the sheets of metal were connected and sealed. What's relevant is that eventually, even the best of the methods will fail, especially if it is not maintained.
Once water can reach the wood, it's only a matter of time before it begins to rot. And because box gutters are part of the framing of the house, leaks go straight into the walls.
Okay non-geeks can start reading again. Welcome back.
Armed with a lot of theoretical knowledge, I decided to repair the box gutter on the rear addition first. Why?
It is a shorter length than the two on the main roof.
It is much closer to the ground - only twenty feet up, rather than thirty.
I had easy access to the roof from an upstairs bedroom window.
Now, only about two-thirds of that roof was safe to stand on. As I described in the previous letter, falling bricks from the chimney had punched a hole in it and the entire area around the hole was untrustworthy.
I could see from the kitchen that several of the rafters were rotted and needed to be replaced.
Let's pause for a moment and look at the kitchen windows. At some point the two original double-hung windows were replaced by large industrial steel windows. I wish I knew which building they were salvaged from.
Since the kitchen is in the back of the house, I have decided to keep them. They're not original, but they have become part of the history of the house and I am happy to honor that. Plus, they're just cool.
What wasn't cool was that the window in the addition portion did not have a header. Let me explain what a header is.
Each of the studs in the wall carries a portion of the weight of the house from the roof down to the foundation. There are rules about how close together the studs must be in order to not overload any one of them. When there's an opening, like a window, there must be a larger piece of wood across the top to transfer the weight to the studs on either side of the window.
That is the header.
This window had no header at all. This means that the rafters directly above it were supported only by the thin piece of wood that framed the steel windows.
So I built a header and while installing it discovered that the entire wall was being held together only by the siding, and it seemed that one good shove would have sent it crashing into the yard.
I will spare you the details. Suffice it to say that in the end I replaced most of the framing in that wall. It no longer wobbles.
Work on old houses is rarely linear. I like to think of the unexpected prerequisites that show up as side quests. That framing can help reduce the frustration of being diverted from the project I started with.
Next week: will I finally be able to start work on the gutter? Stay tuned.
Peace,
Mel Jeffcoat
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