5: Building the Roof

After the new walls and floor trusses were in it was time to put on the roof.

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Figuring out the angles to cut on each end of the rafter was a bit of a challenge.  As was getting all the tops of the rafters to line up in the same plane--despite all my hard work getting things square down below, the top plates of one of the walls weren't properly aligned.  This meant I needed to custom fit each rafter rather than making a template and cutting them all the same.

Nice view of the Loop skyline.

What would later become my attic.

Those square openings in the rafters are for the skylights above my interior staircase.

An operable skylight installed.

Another skylight opening, this one sits above the bathroom.  There are a total of five on the whole roof.

My friend Andy, and his helper, were indispensable.  Especially when it came to working up high.  Here Andy pokes his head out of a skylight opening to install the first layer of roofing material.

Another shot of Andy in action.  I swear he's part billy goat.

6: Wrapping the Exterior of the Building

Now that the exterior wall framing and the roof were done, it was time to get the building sealed before it got cold.  By this point, October/November of 1990, I had been working 70-80 hours a week for seven months and was physically exhausted.  My head was holding up pretty well, but I no longer felt invincible.  No doubt Virginia was going through some of the same things.

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Because my building is so close to the lot line the City required that I put two layers of brownboard over the sheathing on the north and west facades to protect the building against a potential fire .  I was able to put the lower layers of the weather resistant gypsum board up by myself. 

The higher pieces were installed by my friend Andy, who doesn't have a problem with heights.  Unlike me.

Once the brownboard was on, to seal against air infiltration and provide a secondary moisture barrier, we stapled up housewrap.

I'm standing in the sideyard. The rear door to the apartment is the opening in the lower right corner of the picture.

Striking a pose: A spear throwing construction worker?  Behind me the plumber was connecting the new 1.25" water line to the city supply.

Once the housewrap was up, I was installing the windows. The two pieces of plywood on the 2nd floor are covering the opening for the front door.

Buttoned up, almost ready for winter.

7: Building Stairs and Interior Walls

Once I was able to close the building's envelope, our three subcontractors, plumbing, electrical, and HVAC, could do the bulk of their work.  They were three tradesmen I had met while working on various building sites and they were willing do their work on "the side", for reduced rates.

After the interior walls went up the plumber could run the drain, water, and gas lines and the electrician could put in the electric service drop as well as the main electrical panels in the apartment and owners unit.  From those panels I ran emt conduit to all the recessed lights and outlets.  I think there were around 40 lights plus who knows how many outlets.

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I built a solid set of stair stringers from the 2nd to 3rd floor. It was nice to finally get rid of that temporary ladder.

Virginia is cutting insulation, while in the foreground are all our tools chained to a Knack lockbox. 

Until we got the building sealed up, we couldn't leave anything on the site overnight for fear of it being stolen, and had to haul everything back to our apartment at the end of the day.   We only got broken into once; they tried to get into the Knack box, but could only pry up one corner of the lid.  Not enough to get at the tools.

The HVAC guy put a gas furnace in the basement unit and one on the main floor.  He ran the main plenums and installed the chimney.  I ran the branch lines.

Here are the 3rd floor plumbing walls that have the drain pipe already run.

On the left side of the picture, you can see the stairs are clad with plywood.  Eventually I would make some nice treads and risers in my makeshift garage shop. 

After I framed the necessary walls, the plumber installed this tub in the guest bathroom.

8: Insulation

Pretty straightforward.  Every single cavity on an exterior wall or ceiling got stuffed with as much fiberglass insulation as possible.

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Virginia at work.

One option I considered was spray-in insulation.  There was some fairly expensive equipment that I would have had to buy, but that wasn't the main reason I decided against it.  The slow, incremental process that I was using to build the house didn't lend itself to putting up all the insulation at once.  I found myself wanting to insulate a section then having to do something else, only to return later to the insulation.  Maybe more importantly, by this point in the project Virginia was feeling left behind.  I was the one with the everything in my head and she needed something meaningful to do.  All I could suggest to her was to put in insulation.  Add in our increasing debt load and the stress was piling up.

We put R59 in the ceiling; here in one of the skylight shafts above the staircase.   R19 to R26 went in the walls.

Virginia drew the image of a roaring fire to hang in front of our future fireplace.  It made for a nice 1990 Christmas card.

9: Building the Barrel Vault Ceiling

As part of the "fix up an old house then sell it to a rich person" strategy we started out with I thought that some flash would help with the sales job.  It wasn't all about the money--I wanted to show off a little too.

With that in mind I decided to build a barrel vault ceiling in the north bedroom.  I had seen one constructed while working on a high end house and so had an idea of what to do.

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In an ordinary building, the ceiling joists would connect the opposing walls at the height of the two soffits.

To be able to vault a ceiling, it's necessary to remove the ceiling joists.  Those joists keep the outward thrust of the load imposed on the exterior walls by the rafters from blowing out the wall framing, so you need to replace the ceiling joists with either a load bearing ridge beam or some kind of trussed rafter.  I chose option number two.

I built modified scissor trusses, as shown in the diagram above.  Beneath the new roof structure I stood up the ribs of the vault.  These I made by first laminating 3 sheets of 1/2" plywood together to create 1" thick by 12 ft long by 4 foot high blanks .  Knowing that a barrel vault is half of an ellipse, I drew it on to each of the 7 rib blanks with 2 nails, a long piece of string, and a pencil, then cut the shapes out. 

The temporary scaffold is partially blocking the view of the curved, elliptical ribs.

After removing the scaffold, insulation followed by a plastic vapor barrier went up.  Then a series of 1x2 straps were screwed across the plywood ribs.  Here my friend Andy is putting up the first of two layers of 1/4" drywall.

Before hanging, wetting the 1/4" drywall and leaning it against the wall gets it started bending.  Once on the ceiling it takes a little finesse to get it to slide into place.

It turned out beautifully.

10: Hanging and Taping Drywall

Things started to really take form once the drywall went up.  Surfaces and volumes don't always seem real until they're closed in.

Each floor took roughly 100 sheets of drywall.  I hung them and Andy helped with the ceilings as well as doing the majority of the taping.

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I'm peeking out from the staircase.

Out the 2nd floor back door are those open stairs.

The main room on the 2nd floor, looking south.

The main room, looking north.  Behind me is the kitchen.

I had a thing for curved walls.  The back wall in this photo had a gentle curve.  It also stopped short of the ceiling, allowing a strip of lights to hide up there.  The opening in that wall went back to the kitchen.

This was the soffit that went above a similarly shaped island in the kitchen. 

The upstairs south bedroom has a cathedral ceiling.

Stairwell.

The stairwell starting to take shape.

I remember being grateful that the drywall delivery truck had a boom lift.  He could hoist everything to an open window and we just had to pull it in.

11: Kitchen, Bath, and Flooring

All along, the main goal was to get the house "finished" enough so that an appraiser would approve a loan.  With that loan we could pay off the money we had borrowed from my parents and grandparents.

By the spring of 1991, one year into this project, we were still living in an apartment not too far away and struggling with money.  I was doing small contracting jobs to bring in a little cash, but still spent forty hours or so every week working on our building with the goal of getting it functional, allowing us to move out of the apartment.  That was about to happen. 

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Once most of the drywall was taped, sanded and primed the dirtiest part of the work was over and we could move in.  This was in May, 1991, fourteen months after we had bought the place.  There were still plywood floors; I came to think of it as an extended camping trip.

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One of the first new things we bought was a refrigerator.  I was excited.

We bought a used gas stove/range and hauled it up those shaky back stairs.

That range found a temporary home in the laundry closet, which had a gas valve.  Until I could build the kitchen cabinets there was no place to put the gas cooktop we wanted.  We would eventually put the range down in the rental unit.

For our temporary kitchen counters, I put pieces of plywood up against the wall, covered them with polyurethane, and hooked up a sink.

As the summer progressed, I began installing the oak flooring.  About 1500 square feet.  I'm being watched by my friend Luis.

After I got the flooring installed, though not yet sanded and finished, we moved into the front room.

Looking south in the front room.  The dark square opening on the left wall holds our fireplace.  Eventually I'd build a mantel.  Eventually.

These are the kitchen cabinets, still missing their countertops, that I made.  This photo is a little out of sequence.  We would use the temporary kitchen with plywood countertops for about two years.