The Broken House

I have decided to post some blogs about our house project. Many of our earlier projects were of done out of necessity: fixing water leaks, repiping, having the drains cleaned, fixing the sagging roof, installing a new furnace, putting in a french drain... Now we are getting to doing some of the things we want to do.

The first of these, non- necessary projects we did when we had the furnace put in. The ceiling in the hallway was originally 7' 2" high. Don't ask me why. There wasn't anything in that space except one electrical wire, which was easily moved.




When we bought the house, the furnace was in the garage. The old cold air return used to run through the crawl space and into the bottom of a coat closet. When a previous owner remodeled the kitchen, the coat closet was eliminated. The cold air return plenum was rebuilt out of aluminum and came up a 2x4 wall to a register in the entryway. The cold air return ducting was all knocked apart and the bottom of the aluminum plenum had corroded away. The supply duct in the attic also had a 5" gap in it. If the furnace had worked, which it didn't, it would have pulled in air from the crawl space and blown it into the attic! It was time for an all new system.

After struggling to find a convenient location to put the cold air return, we decided to put the furnace in the attic. This solved the cold air return problem as well as made the furnace more centrally located, It also made more room in the garage, which I would like to use as a woodworking shop someday.

We had a 96% efficiency, 2 stage gas furnace, with all new ducts and cold air return installed. It was decided that the best place to install it was over the hallway but there was a problem. The joist were 10" lower there. I didn't like the low ceiling anyway so I raised it up to 8' like the rest of the house. It looks much better now.

We also added recessed can lights on 3 way switches, a hardwired smoke detector, and and an outlet in the hallway for the vacuum. Today I hung new drywall on the right side of the hall. On the left side you can see where I have added temporary drywall where the old ceiling used to be. That side will have to wait until we remodel the entryway.

The name for this post comes from our grandsons who are continually saying that our "house is broke."