Demo Done!

Put a big red DONE stamp on the basement demo.

We hired a demo crew by posting an ad in the Craig's List Gig section......odd assortment of people who answer those ads.....They basically finished completely demoing the basement and cleaned up after themselves in 4 full work days. Which is about 1 month and 4 days faster than I could of done it.

The subtitle of this post is
 What Horrors Lurk Beneath!!!
With all the drywall off the ceilings and most of the walls a lot of interesting 'features' were uncovered...
Come with me now, dear readers, on a pictorial tour of 'What Lurks Beneath'.

First a boring selection of after shots of gutted rooms

 Bye-bye old kitchens.

 Here the wall between the kitchen-bath is partially removed.

 Bye bye old bedrooms. That gas line above the closet? It just runs to there and stops...?

Insulation sure does take up a lot of space....

Now onto scary things hidden behind drywall.

Check out this selection of odd stuff we found.

Looks like a pair of seriously beefy homemade hold downs, a SCARY looking bottle of beer and what could possibly be a chunk of moonrock? Kryptonite??

Buried Junction Boxes
So, so, soooo many buried junction boxes....

 This is an odd one..its a light swich box that is buried behind drywall in a closet!?!?!?

 See how the top plate is short of the ceiling joists?

 This was where a light switch used to be I think...

These last two pics I thought that I had just copied the same pic twice but nope...

Buried junction boxes are a clear code violation. I'm either going to have to 'unbury' them or redo the wiring with home runs back to the panel or something...

Scary Electrical
This is a live wire just buried in the wall...

Here's a shot of the subpanel for the basement.

Looks neat and tidy doesn't it.  Notice anything weird?
It took me a minute but...there is no ground wire!!?!?!?
With the demo done I could look around and right above the panel I found this.

A ground wire collection.

I traced it back to the main panel for the building...which it of course just stops short of...

So nothing appears to be grounded down here...funny how the property inspector missed this...even though he took off the panel cover and looked inside....

Odd Framing...
In this shot look at the original 4by6 beam above the boxes.

As far as I can tell its just hanging in air...there are no support posts on either end...that beam spans 10' with 2 floors above it...don't know what I'm going to have to do with this. There is no way a 6" deep beam is going to be code approved for a 10' span with two floors above...anybody have the IRC span tables handy?

In this shot you can just see the end of a beam and post to the right of the door..

Well now that post is going to be in the middle of the master bedroom. I will probably have to put in a new code correct beam and footing that will span all the way to the wall on the left....

They appear to of framed the interior partition walls after drywalling the ceiling...The demo was made particularly difficult by the fact that the drywall is behind the wall top plates...

Not sure why you would want to do it that way...the non-load bearing walls are all 1 1/8" shorter than they should be...This is bothering me because I am worried about structural rigidity in the houses short direction. That's the weak, more easily rackable direction and having well attached walls along that direction will help in the case of earthquake.

They also appear to of done the tile after the drywall.

Which I don't think is that big of a deal but they didn't hold the drywall up off the tile....its buried...also making it a PITA to remove the drywall.

They put in vents in insulated spaces...

boy was the batt insulation dirty here...

Odd Plumbing Layout
Fortunately the water supply piping is all copper...unfortunately its pretty wacky.
The main line from the street is only 1"...seems smallish to me for a triplex.

The main line enters the building at the front corner and then is routed all the way to the opposite corner (the farthest run it could possibly have) to a manifold.

Here's the backside of the manifold.

Having a manifold is good. I can shut off the water to the individual units without having to cut the water to the entire building...well, that's the theory at least..I'm having a bit of difficulty figuring out which valve goes to which unit.....also, from the manifold there is only 1/2" lines to each studio apartment...seems a bit small to me but the tenants say they have good water pressure so....if it ain't broke don't fix it...

The plumbing in this place is so wack-a-doodled...The hot water heater is in the attic on the 4th floor yet is somehow plumbed all the way down to the basement to supply hot water to the two baths and two kitchens and the laundry room....I have to separate out the systems so the basement unit will have its own water heater. I'm also thinking about moving the manifold indoors to the mechanical room where it will be centrally located and remove like 20-30' of run for the main line.

Vents Schments..
This pic is the DWV for the bathroom sink and the laundry room and the old kitchen.

I can not see a vent for this group...This is a reoccurring theme in this house...not a lot of venting was done when bathrooms where added on...

Whats a 1hr fire rating?
To cover the HVAC stuff they built two soffits to conceal them.

 I should also say that at just about every joint in the HVAC system air just pours out of...

I'm not sure if this is correct for a 1hr fire rated assembly...doesn't all four sides of the soffit need to have the fire code drywall?

The exhaust vent shown above turns vertical and goes ALLLL the way up through the roof.

This doesn't seem correct to me either...this was enclosed in a soffit covered with firecode drywall but shouldn't there be more to stop the fire from using this as easy access to all floors of the house?
Good thing about this is that when we install the new heaters this pipe will be unused and we can use this space as a chase to pull wires, plumbing through all three floors.

Choking on Dust
Everyday after the demo I would go and vacuum off the forced air unit before turning it on for the night. Yet somehow it was sucking up great gobs of drywall dust and evenly distributing it through out the house...all three floors where covered in a hyper fine coating of white drywall dust...

After it was too late I finally figured out what was going on.
The heater is built atop a plywood box that is used as a return plenum.

That's actually a good way to do it...provided the box is actually air tight.

Yep, that's a 1/2" gap in the box...through which the heater was sucking up the dust...I'm glad we are replacing the heater as I'm sure inhaling drywall dust has shortened its life span considerably...

No Earthquake Retrofitting Done....
Notice something missing from all the shots of the exterior walls? Yep no earthquake sheathing...this is a huge bummer for me...I was really hoping that since the foundation was done with permits that they would of done the earthquake retrofitting at the same time...nope...

There are some bolts anchoring the sole plates.

But a troublesome construction detail is going to make installing the earthquake sheathing a lot harder...
The fricken bottom plates are mostly buried in concrete...which means that there is no edge to nail the sheathing to...actually, this worries me from a rot perspective also...now the plates are surrounded on 3 sides by potentially damp concrete...seems like that's going to shorten the lifespan of the bottom plates...

Wow, this just added a lot of work and expense to this remodel. I'm going to have to install hold downs, more foundation bolts, the sheathing, the clips to tie the floor joists into the walls...hope my harbor fright rotary hammer is up for the task... maybe even have to pay an engineer to make sure I have enough racking strength in the short direction...ugh...

Nails!
Check this pic out.

This shows probably why the lame bamboo floor in this area was buckled. They nailed the subfloor down to the concrete with about a billion nails. Then they nailed the wood floor to the subfloor...I believe that for below grade applications you are supposed to float the flooring and subfloor...
Not sure what I'm going to do about the nails...they stick up from 1/2-3/4" and are a surprisingly effective trip hazard. They grab the lugs on your work boots and make you stumble...

I plan to float an engineered wood floor in this area so I think that means I have to remove the nails...just pulling them out takes a big chunk of concrete with them...I think I need to break out the angle grinders again and grind them all flush with the floor....shades of having to grind nails for weeks on end at Chez 2.0 for the radiant heating...at least its not overhead.

So, that's it for now...anybody see anything else in the pics that I missed?

DeConstruction Day 2

Day two was mostly spent wrestling with the freaking kitchen counter top...

Of course I couldn't find the camera for in progress shots so here's a bunch of after shots...

Me and MPM worked on the kitchen cabinets and got the HEAVY granite counter top off with out destroying the big section I wanted to save.

The little cut up section around the sink was not so lucky.

All the kitchen cabinets

You know what's funny..these cabinets are soooo cheap that they are actually light! A big 36" wide base cabinet should not be easily carried with one hand....These are the shipped flat packed from china and assembled here and sold at the shady Chinese cabinet place type cabinets at their finest.

After the cabinets where out of the way it was time to bust up some drywall.

Bye bye kitchen wall

Look what we found in the wall.

I'm sure that was a quality bottle....

Couple things I noticed about the wall.

The sole plate looks new but its buried in the dirt.

That's not good.

I also noticed that there does not appear to be any earthquake shear walling in this area? Since the foundation redo was done with permits I was expecting to find shear walling here...

Peeking through the wall I noticed this odd sight.

That's like a siren that appears wired up still??? But it looks like its mounted to the wall underneath the exterior stairs? What could it of been for? Odd right?

Here you can see the gas and exhaust vent line.

At least here he used the correct type of venting. But he used black pipe instead of galv and its already starting to rust....

And then, a lot of hammering and drywall coming down.

MPM was on a roll!

Big pile O drywall

Guess its time to get a dumpster....cept I have no where to put it easily....

That's it for day two.

If anybody has a good technique for removing the ceiling drywall I'd love to hear it.
The PO put homosote and 5/8" drywall on the ceiling and the combo is making it very hard to knock holes in it with the framing hammers.

Next up, more drywall coming down!

De-Construction Day 1

The first day of de-construction in the illegal basement units went pretty well I think.

First off, here's what $3000 in HVAC equipment looks like.

I thought it'd be a bigger pile no?

First I pulled up the carpets, which I'd never done before. It was easier than I'd imagined.

Don't love how they just put the carpet right on the cement floor. I have no idea what kind of under slab water management systems where put in place. I'd have to guess NONE! I'm hoping now that I've 'fixed' the downspouts that there will not be any problem.

Here's a shot that looks like there is some water seeping into the basement somewhere. Like that big crack in the floor too no? So far I have not seen a single expansion joint in the slab....but lots of cracks big enough to fit my pinky in.

The carpet and pad where not wet but we're just starting our rainy season.

The kitchen before the unbuilding.

After pulling off the little bit of crown molding running across the uppers I was able to unscrew them and take them down pretty easily....scary how it seems that the thing that was holding these cabinets to the wall was the paint...they missed the studs on a lot of the screws.

Speaking of Screwy.

The PO tried to hide the fact that this was supposed to be a working kitchen...he hid the cook top mechanicals.

Bad temporary patch

The cabinet above the cook top had a false back and bottom.

These holes were covered with panels.

The upper cabinets came down in like half an hour! This is easy I was thinking....

Uppers Gone

Next I went to the other kitchen and removed the upper cabinets there in much the same way.

Now you see em

Now you don't.

Of course unbuilding the lower cabinets is going to be a bit harder in this kitchen...

I've been using this kitchen as my electronics work bench through out the month of October....where am I going to put all this stuff???

I got all the uppers down in less than an hour and I was thinking...this is going to be EASY!....

Then I started looking at the base cabinets...

To unbuild the lowers you first have to remove the counter top, then unscrew them to each other then unscrew them from any sleepers....

I call this shot, 'I'm F'd'

That is a shot of the counter top mounting block. Theres one on each inside corner of each cabinet. What you are supposed to do is screw up through this to attach your countertop...see how that one isn't being used? None of them were....

Instead they did this

They screwed down through the plywood and into the cabinets...not one or two screws per cabinet like 8 per...making it basically fricken impossible to easily remove the counter top....

You see the super heavy-expensive granite countertop is glued to the plywood..

What I ended up doing was finding a spot where there was a gap between the plywood and the cabinet top and drove shims in there to give me enough space to slip a loooong sawzall blade in there.

Then I very, very slowly added more shims as I worked the sawzall slowly around the perimeter of the bank of cabinets cutting the screws as I went...

I only got about half way done on the first day...

So, all in all I think not a bad amount of work done on the first day.