Miyk tuk te stars down so i iz a first flor cat now. Witowt stars to 2 flor tey hav lader. how doz i clim??? i dont now! so i trapd on 1 flor. and dor to owtsid iz not wurkin. so i trapd insid!! can sumbudy help?????? i want not be trapd! and yes i stil haz houz!!! not orunj cat! me own al!!!!!!!!! ecsept not like bein trapd.

Finally I’m getting there.  I had slowly worked down from the top of the 3rd floor, down the 2nd floor.. skipped ahead and worked up from the basement last February.  I finally burned myself out in March, got back to it in September on the 1st floor, and here I am at the last wall over a year after I started.  We had the Thanksgiving 4 day weekend and we were going to use it to finish up these damn bricks.

[We Must Have a “Before” Photo of This Somewhere]

This one was always going to be the hardest.  Nearly all the salmon bricks had spalled and were crumbling.  Some bricks you could crush in your hand.  Pointing was pretty much out of the question as the bricks would crumble faster than the mortar.  After the basement, pulling them out and re-laying them seemed like the best method.  I started next to the back door.  Most of those had been broken in half so I had to replace a bunch.  Once I was sure the wall could carry the load without its assistance, I pulled the wood door frame.  Hello 6″ wider doorway.

Next I did up top.  Wanted a good frame around the bad area to add some stability when the window came out.

I could do a section between the header rows at a time.

Siri helped a lot. Laying bricks uses considerably more mortar than pointing so keeping me fed with mortar (and food) all weekend was her job.

Finally got to open our secret window… just before we tore it out.  Who puts a plate glass window at the bottom of a staircase anyway?

Goodbye Window.  Also note the paint so I wouldn’t forget to leave a pocket.

Almost there!  Pockets!

What’s with the pockets?  To top it off we had a special surprise we had picked up when we visited the Moravian Pottery & Tile Works outside Doylestown, PA.  H.L. Mencken had incorporated tiles from this factory in his back yard a century earlier and I wanted to incorporate some too.  We were not sure how we’d do it when we bought them, but Siri thought it over and decided that we should do a zig-zag going up the stairs with everyone in height order starting with Emi.

Our Super Special Moravian Tiles.  Still need to wash down with white vinegar (acid) to remove the white haze.

From the bottom right we have Emi’s tile with her moon, because cats love the night.  Next row up is for Iris.  Her tiles is for her zodiac sign of Cancer along with a tree because she love to climb them (and is growing like one). Next row up is Siri’s with her Sagittarius zodiac tile and a heart, because she has so much love to give.  Next row up is my Taurus zodiac sign and a goblet of beer, because I love beer.  All of this is set in mortar Siri mixed using sand we brought back from the dunes of Liwa in the UAE.

Now it’s time to clean up and dust everything.  Christmas is here and I want a clean space for the first time in months.

P.S. This is not the end.  There are still bricks hiding behind the stair stringers.  I will do these when I pull out the stairs.  They’ll need to go quickly because the stairs will be out and that’s something we don’t want stretching out too long.

About to get to work

The next stage of the brick project is the stairway down to the first floor. Since cleaning up is such a pain on an uneven floor, I wanted to install the new floor first. Easier said than done though. The floor is held up by joists that were sitting on long since rotted away boards and bricks. This caused them to be uneven and to sag / creak when walked over. Previous owners had made matters worse installing heat registers in the floor several times. Underneath in the crawlspace many of the bricks had started to crumble. When bricks fell out, they would fill the hole with fiberglass insulation (WTF??). Its amazing we never fell through. In some places the bricks were missing five feet down. The board and the 7 bricks on top of it were all moving as you can see in this video:

It was pretty much the same story all the way around. I decided to replace all the bricks between the stretcher courses. I’d do a vertical section here and there and leave the old bricks in to hold up the house. I’m still alive to write this so I guess it worked. In the end I replaced a 24″ strip between stretchers all the way around where the floor would go.

And….gone! Only the minimum needed to hold up the stairs was left in, but even that would go by the end.

As I moved to the back of the stairway, more and more of the rotted joists had to be removed. In the end we hung the stairs with a 2×4 from the joist in the ceiling above and used a 2×12 plank to get across the pit. (We even hosted a party like this.)

In the back, as I replaced the bricks, I left 3 pockets to install the 2×8 joists in as I decided to have the joists run perpendicular to how they were originally. This has the added benefit of making trips into the crawl space less likely to cause head injuries. I’d use joist hangers on the last joist at the back of the kitchen and I’d double up the middle joists to be able to carry the extra weight of the stairs sitting on it.

Finally with the bricks done and the joists in we installed the subfloor. Next is the stapling up of our final 1/6 floor heating. This will cover the kitchen and the stairway. Up until now, we had no heat in that end of the 1st floor and the other half could barely keep up on the colder days.

Mi Huminz go to a houz. Wat iz houz? Mike comz bak dirtee. Wat iz renivat? I can haz houz!?

I want go houz!