The Broken House II

The second "cuz we wanna" project has been to open a doorway between the living room and the family room. We also wanted to raise the floors in both rooms while we were at it. Nancy really wanted to do the kitchen first but I thought that the living room project was something I could work on while I was still working. As it turns out, I didn't get much done except tear stuff out and frame the new doorway. "Grandpa, is your house still broke?"

Our house is a 1500 sq ft., 3 bedroom, 2 bath, ranch (meaning single story) with a living room, family room, kitchen and a small eating area. It was built in 1964, back when there was a Ford auto plant where the Great Mall is now(which was called the "San Jose" plant since no one knew where Milpitas was.) This was before GM built their plant, which became NUMMI (the joint venture between Toyota and GM,) and is now Tesla (makers of electric cars.) These homes were built for the new expanding working middle class.

There are about 6 different floor plans in our subdivision. Ours has a perimeter foundation except for the living room and the family room, which are on a slab. Our living and family rooms are side by side in the southwest corner of the house. Both of them were a step down from the rest of the house. The living room has a 8' x 4' window that looks out at the backyard and has a flat ceiling. The family room has an 8' sliding patio door to the backyard and a vaulted ceiling. Originally there was no connection between the living and the family room. To get from the living room to the family room, you had to step up into the hall, walk down the hall five feet and then step down into the family room. To get to the eating area, you could either go through a narrow door and through the kitchen or you could step down into the family room and then back up into the eating area.

A previous owner had made a large window-like opening between the living and family rooms. When we first moved in we had one sofa in the family room and the other in the living room, both of them back to back against the opening. The temptation was just too much for the grandkids - up one sofa, through the opening, down the other sofa, step up into the hall, down into the other room, up the sofa.... I tried moving one sofa away from the opening but it was too late. Up one sofa onto the sill of the opening, back down onto the sofa again. Up onto the sill... What I really wanted was a doorway there anyway!



It was an easy enough job to take out the sill and the studs below it. There was one romex running through there which I routed up and over (slab floor, remember.) I then jacked up the beam in the family room ceiling that rested on the window-like opening header just a tiny bit so I could remove the header. The header was a little small and had sagged a little. I turned the header over and reinstalled it, raising it so that it would set right below the double top plates. I wanted to make space in one corner of the living room to put a big screen TV, so I made the doorway opening a couple of feet narrower (which helped with the under sized header problem.)

The next step was to remove the Pergo flooring in the living room. When we did this we discovered mold under it! A thorough investigation revealed that under the house was wet. Not standing water, even though there were previous signs of that, but definitely wet! Hence, the french or trench drain project mentioned in my previous post. (At this point we haven't finished the drain, just dug the trench. We'll get back to that after the ground dries out a bit and we get the old concrete torn out of the backyard so we have some place to put the dirt. More on that some other day...) We also found that the original asbestos vinyl floor tiles were still mostly there.

After cleaning up the floor and letting it throughly dry, I put down 6 mil plastic, followed by pressure treated 2x4s topped with 1 1/8" t & g plywood. This made the top of the plywood even with the subfloor of the hall. We also put rigid foam insulation between the 2x4s. You could feel cold air coming in from the crawl space in places so I filled all the gaps I could find with spray-in foam insulation. The plan is to install floor tile in most of the public areas of the house.




Tomorrow, I'll tell you about trying to find a "High Gain" window for the living room...