Finished as of Summer 2010...All the aluminum gable vents were replaced with cedar wood vents louvered with screening to keep animals out but provide sufficient attic ventilation, the addition and screen porch added a wonderful flow to the floor plan where the old and new were woven together gracefully (complements of architect Coby Linton, Architect), we rebuilt several brick piers that lost their function over the years with CMU filled piers with inspected footings, replaced over 20 feet of termite ridden 4x10 band joist with double pressure treated 2x10's, restored the double hung windows througout, plaster in half the house, interior and exterior trim, german siding, and rebuilt the front porch with tapered columns custom built off-site...all in all, it was a pleasure to see something so outdated brought back to life with so much intrinsic beauty in its roots.

Kitchen coming along...

built-ins

Fireplace and plaster work

A week ago

Cliff is getting it done!

Front porch is coming together...

Siding and trim are getting done.

Archway being reinforced and plastered.

Windows and siding going in.

This front porch has been a booga-bear, as some might put it...

Termites bored through this 85 year old 4x10 inch outer band of the home. 20 feet of it had to be replaced.

Charles Echols, the old plaster guy. First two rooms will have its plaster restored.

Front porch jacked & leveled with curved rafters done, new headers, temporary posts, roof installed, chimney flashed in copper. Extra dirt hauled, back & front yards graded since all of our digging. This past weekend was truly packed.

Done...capped, and flashed, safer and better looking than before.

He and Luis, his brother, work together and they have supplied scaffolding to reconstruct the chimney. In the process, we placed a heavy duty stainless steel flexible chimney liner within the existing clay flu. It had to be maneuvered from the top and bottom, but it makes the outdated coal box functional again and ready for a wood stove insert.

Manuel Espinosa Godinez is the best brickmason I know. He has an amazing story of how he got here as well. He's rebuilding the front stairwell/stoop here. It had no footing and was sinking beyond repair into our soft soils.

This porch has been hurting over the years. The main issue has been here in front of the front door. So we took out the brick stairwell and we prepared for new footings. The old footing was obsolete. The house is basically resting on semi-solid ground. Wherever water penetrates and finds a place to rest, the ground gives way and the foundation buckles. So we are reinforcing this problematic area only to build it back the way it was. We barely beat the snow yesterday.

Meanwhile...

If you click on this photo, you can see the old 8/12 gable and of course the new. Historical guidelines are such that this gable needs to be within the old, in set from the old walls in this case 1 foot on one side and 3 feet on the other. Looking closely, you can see that the 2x8 rafters are notched out in the overhang to achieve the same detail as the old home. This notch allows us to fasten v-groove board in the eaves within the notch, and then we went overtop all of that with our roof decking, so that when the roofers come in, their nails won't penetrate through our decorative eaves. I actually bought some reclaimed v-groove board to match the old in the eaves here. We took a couple of 4x6 timber out from a wall we did away with in the old section of the home, and cut those down to create our "outriggers" with bevel cuts on the ends to give it the same detail. You can see old outriggers (painted) in the top of the photo and the new ones are protruding from the gable end.

Walls being framed. We made excellent progress on this cold and windy day.

We have a floor on the addition! (Well, the frame at least.)
Brrrrbbby the way, it's been below 30 degrees most of the day. But look at those blue skies! We'll take it.

West Elevation Drawing

South Elevation Drawing

foundation done (17.5' x 19'8") with four brick piers, visible in the bottom left corner of this picture built to support the screen porch (6.5' x 13.5')) , ready to frame the addition hopefully on wednesday-friday!

Front porch getting there....still a ways off.

Sample wall colors and finished windows. These old windows are hard to replicate nowadays....the art has almost been lost...in short, I'm glad we were able to salvage these old guys, even if they're single paned.

I'm actually not a bad finisher. Finished footings. Finally!

We conveniently ripped off some old one by materials from the front porch that needed to be tossed anyways and created these 8-10 foot planks to be able to wheel the concrete into the trenches so that shoveling and raking was minimized. Then it could be finished.

Two guys with two wheel barrels, one guy spreading, one guy finishing, 6.25 yards of concrete, 1.5 hours

Footings dry and ready to pour...1/26/2010...

Saturated and flooded footings on 1/25/2010. Took three pumps at once to get that water out all morning long.

Exterior Colors: accent, house, and trim

Footings for the addition - four feet down is not enough; inspector calls for a geotechnical engineer...

Taking the trench/pipes to daylight all the way to the ditch...

16 inches of dirt excavated along this particular wall, 1-4 inches of base gravel was laid, then a perforated 4" pipe along with a solid drain pipe for gutters was laid along the slope, which was later backfilled with 8-10 inches of more gravel.

End result...

Mike C. drove this backhoe across town to excavate the perimeter of the house so that we can install a drainage system and waterproof the foundation walls.

I like this picture. The long awaited "unveiling" of the porch as it was originally built in 1927-28. They built homes certain ways in the early 20th century for a reason. I guess that can't be said for every situation, but at least it's the case here.

This is what the home looked like back in the late summer/early fall. Mr. Thomas Wentz Jr., a surveyor, moved here in the early 1950's from Charlotte, and resided here until his death. We made the purchase from his son on November 2nd, 2009. Plans were submitted to the Durham Historic Preservation Commission in early October to convert the area underneath the swooping front gable back into its original state, a front porch with columns, reclaim the 1920's siding and windows by first removing all the aluminum, and increasing the square footage from 1050 to around 1400. A certificate of appropriateness was granted on January 5th and building permits should be ready for pickup any day now.