This Old House

Kevin

Today on "This Old House"... Sad front porch comes tumbling down.

Richard

And the puzzle for us today is how to get cooling to the second floor below us.

Tom

The steel beams go up for the roof of our new addition. If all the measurements are right, it should fall on both lines perfectly. Looks pretty bad right here.

Norm

Are you kidding me? Is this place really worth saving?

Richard

We can do better than this.

Tom

Time to get to work.

Kevin

Nice and easy, nice and easy. Everybody together.

Grunting

Kevin

Oh, yeah!

Roger

The right plant in the right place.

Kevin

Good!

Richard

It's state-of-the-art, perfectly square. All in all, a good day's work.

Back-up alarm beeping

Richard

Kevin

Hi, there. I'm Kevin O'Connor. And welcome back to "This Old House." Today, we install the steel that's gonna hold up the roof for our addition out back. And it's a day that we have been working towards for a long time. It all started up on Boston's North Shore at an ironworks plant. And Tommy and I were there to see the steel come together.

Tom

Kevin, now this is the company that also supplies a lot of steel for our other jobsites. Not only do they supply for us and a lot of other contractors, they do a lot of colleges in Boston, and they supply the Boston Red Sox.

Kevin

Hey, Jay, good to see you again.

Good to see you again. Tom

Hey, Jay, good to see you.

Kevin

So when it comes to speccing the steel, how much do we need, how big, how strong is it gonna be? Does that get done by you or you, Jay?

Tom

Well, all that starts with the architect. He engineers everything out to know what we need. We then send the plans to the engineer. The engineer then specs out all of the calculations. He understands the load for carrying the roof. He knows what size columns we need, what size steel we need. He's specs all that out, and then those measurements are all sent to Jay, and he takes it from there.

Kevin

So when you take it from there, what do you do?

Jay

What we'll do is we'll give it to one of our draftsmen. All our detailing is computerized -- 3-D. So he'll go in, he'll input all the information. We'll send it for approval. Usually we'll have to go out in the field, measure as well. That information does actually get sent to our automated machines for the cutting and the drilling.

Kevin

And so what is this machine doing exactly?

Jay

What it'll do first is they'll take the stock length, we'll put it on our in-feed rollers, and from there, the operator will bring it in where the laser line is, laser-cut to exact length. And then it will go into the drill for all the holes. From that point on, it goes to the fitters, who double-check the lengths, holes, sizes, put the plates and clips on. In your case, for your job, we're dry-fitting this.

Kevin

And are you dry-fitting our steel today?

Jay

We are.

Kevin

Can we have a look at that?

Jay

Absolutely. Come on in.

Tom

Oh, boy, that's looking pretty good.

Kevin

Look at that, huh?

Tom

Yeah, let me take a couple of measurements here, Jay. Not that I don't trust you.

Jay

No, that's all right. It's good to double-check.

Kevin

Is this what you were expecting, Tommy?

Tom

Yeah, that looks pretty good.

Kevin

All right, so help me with the layout here. What am I looking at?

Tom

Think of this wall right here as the house.

Kevin

Okay.

Tom

This wall right here is the back of the house looking to the backyard. And what we have in the middle of this is a fireplace. On each side of the fireplace, we have a lot of glass here and a lot of glass here.

Kevin

So why not build it out of wood, Tommy? Why do we have to use the steel?

Tom

We're doing it out of steel because the engineer's worrying about lateral movement. When the wind blows against the building, it can vibrate back and forth and cause cracking. By building it out of steel, you can really tighten it up, and it cuts out a lot of that movement.

Kevin

And, Jay, it looks like the dry fit's almost done. What's your process from here?

Jay

Like you said, that last piece is going in. That will ensure now that we can measure this, double-check it so everything we've drawn on paper is exactly what it should be. And then we will take it apart. However, we're gonna leave this frame in one piece. The rafters will come down individually, and we'll ship them all to the site.

Kevin

I like to hear that. Let's get it to the site. Right?

Tom

I can hardly wait.

Kevin

All right, thanks. Well, Tommy, we saw it all come together and fit up in the shop. What do you think? Is it gonna fit out here?

Tom

I think it's gonna fit, yeah.

Kevin

Of course it will. So you've made a lot of progress since we were here last, right?

Tom

Well, last time, we poured the foundation. Then we left, and now all the floor has been framed and all the subfloor is down. Actually put up these big LVLs right here on some posts run in. Now, this is all to carry the second and third floor of the addition and the big gable end. But we need it up here now because we have a support post that has to go up to carry our roof system.

Kevin

Okay, and so the steel is on site. How is this gonna fly in? What's the order here?

Tom

All right, well, the first system that's gonna go in are the two posts in the corner that has that I-beam across it. We're gonna bolt that right down to the concrete.

Kevin

Oh, nice. So you left a little corner there for us, okay.

Tom

Now, once that's set in place, then they'll individually bring up parts of the roof.

Kevin

Well, we got a crane, so let's use it.

Tom

Oh, yeah, and a beautiful crane it is. All right, on the two outside corners, I actually put two reference lines -- one there, one there. So when they drop the steel down, they'll place them on those reference lines, and it should be just dead-on.

Kevin

And there it is. All right. So now how do we make the connection between the steel and the concrete?

Tom

All right, if you look at the steel down there, there's four holes. He'll use those as guides and drill the holes down in. We'll fasten that first with this anchor right here. This is actually called a wedge anchor. See on the bottom, it's a cone shape? Well, that acts like a wedge. He'll drill a hole so that this little sleeve fits in the hole tightly. When he drives it down and tightens down on this, the bolt tries to come up, this little sleeve slides down onto the wedge and expands, and it won't let you take it up. Now, this is just a temporary fastener. This holds it into position because you're gonna drill holes and drive these bolts into some epoxy. The epoxy will set up in about 45 minutes, but that will allow us -- This will allow us to do the work that we want to do.

Kevin

Nice.

Tom

Notice when he's hitting that with a hammer, it's going into the hole hard because it's really tight when it's going in. So when he drops it down to where he's gonna go and then he starts to tighten the bolt, this wedge tries to pull up, and it won't allow the piece to come out of the hole. Okay, so what the guys are gonna do, they're actually gonna put those three pieces together on the ground, and then once it's all bolted and welded, they're gonna pick it up and put it in as one piece. Nice having a crane on site.

Kevin

It sure is.

Tom

All right, so now that you can see that the hips and the ridge are bolted together as one unit, they're gonna swing it in place. He's gonna guide it with his line, swing it around the right way. This piece right here will come over to him in the corner, and then they'll bolt the corners together. The first thing we have to do is we have to make sure that our posts are plumb in both directions. This one right here is right on. Good. Once they're set in both directions, we then want to make sure that the hip ridges are actually sitting down flat on top of the steel. Those get slid in where they have to be for the outside position. That will square up the position for the ridge at the top. Once that's in position, Jason can check the level of the ridge. Once he's got that, he can then measure for the height of the ridge pole.

Jason

18 and 5/8. Yeah.

Tom

So what Jason's done is he's actually through-bolting our ridge pole to the steel under the I-beam. Now he's gonna knock it over so that the center line on the LVL matches the center line on the ridge pole. Once he did that, we'll let the weight down, and it should true everything up. All right, so we can let that weight down. Now, even though the hips and the ridge are bolted together, the engineer wants them welded to make a good solid connection.

Kevin

Okay, and where do we go from here?

Tom

Well, the next thing is we got to pad all those I-beams out with wood to make the marriage between our wood rafters to the steel I-beams.

Kevin

Looking good.

Tom

Sure is. That roof's not gonna go anywhere.

Kevin

We had a lot of layers of lead paint up here on the third floor, and they were everywhere. So we pretty much demoed the entire space. Now, that was a ton of work, but it's actually a good thing because it leaves Richard a clean slate. And we have to figure out how to get air-conditioning into this building. And, well, we just gave you some new space, Richard.

Richard

You made it easy for the third floor. But below us is the second floor, and that's always the trickiest part of these buildings, 'cause there's no access. The first floor is wide open from the basement. Third floor's easy. So, when you think about conventional ductsmanship, you've got a big duct like this has to come out of an air handler. And then there's a separate branch for each register that's either metal or flexible. And so the question is fitting this in, 'cause you need both supply and a return. So, typically, you'd look at right here and put it up there. And that's great for the third floor. But how do you then get the supplies and returns down to that second floor?

Kevin

Very typical system. We use them a lot. But in the retrofit, the size is what kills us.

Richard

So nowadays, people would think about, "Oh, let's just put high-wall cassettes everywhere." You know, you've seen these everywhere. They sit right here. They provide cooling. So you have one right here, maybe another one at the far end for the other side, another one for the bathroom over here.

Kevin

This is what you guys call the split systems.

Richard

Right, but you still haven't solved that second floor. You know, 'cause you haven't ripped open the walls down there. So what I'd like to think about doing is that small-duct, high-velocity system, the mini-duct system. This is the supply trunk versus this size right here.

A lot smaller. -Richard

Okay? And then we'd have an outlet like this coming out of the ceiling or the side wall. And this would be one outlet for every 8x10 or 10x10 area. And so, you say, "Well, I need an air handler. I need a way to send that air out to the building." So you look for a space. And so, if I could get this space right here, it would be great. This was an old closet. Then we could put our air handler right in here. There's a unit right here with the return coming into this side. And an air handler is just a blower with a cooling coil that the air blows across. Now, it would come here, And look at this. This is a found space for us. This knee wall right here, you go into here, and look at this. We could run our seven-inch that way, all the way the length of the building, and turn this way. And right below us is all those bedrooms on the second floor. Now, I get to this point, and I still have to get to this room right here on the second floor and we have a brand-new master bathroom way over there on the second floor. So the trunk comes to here. In an ideal world, these joists would go this way so I could just run that trunk down into the joist bay, come over here, and come back up, but they don't.

Of course not. -Richard

They go the wrong way. So we're gonna have to ask the homeowner if they'll let us build a little bench seat to hide that trunk right here.

Kevin

So given what you're seeing up here and our three options, do you think you're ready to pick one of them?

Richard

I think it's the small-duct system. I think it just makes so much sense. I think we'll have a single air handler, one return coming to it, a single condenser outside. Air will leave that air handler, go out into a trunk in the knee wall, turn both ways in that knee wall, down-feed the second floor.

Kevin

Okay. So that gets the second floor done. Up here on the third floor, do we have another air handler, or do we use the same one?

Richard

No, actually what I'm thinking about doing is actually zoning the system to we'd have a motorized zone damper like this. One for the second floor, and then next to it is another motorized damper like this for the third floor. It would have another set of trunk running right along here, and we would up-feed the third floor and down-feed the second.

Kevin

So, one handler, two zones, and we finally get air-conditioning in this building.

We'll get cool. -Kevin

Sounds like a plan.

Richard

I've got to get started.

Kevin

The front porch was the first thing that the homeowners wanted to change. The stairs were too steep, the treads were too narrow, and on the inside, the windows on one side of the porch didn't even match the windows on the other side of the porch. So the whole thing had to come down. Tommy's guys started the demolition by hand on the inside, and then a giant forklift came by and did the rest of the work. And, Tommy, with the porch gone, you can see sort of how high up this door is from what used to be the old grade.

Tom

Well, originally, Kevin, we stepped down one step and then the porch and then 10 risers with 9 steps. That's a lot of steps to climb.

Kevin

And the homeowners didn't like that.

Tom

No. Who would? So, what we want to do is we want to get rid of some of the risers.

Kevin

There's only two ways to do that right. You can make the riser taller, but you don't like to go too tall. Or we've got to raise the grade, right?

Tom

Right. The most comfortable height for a riser height is 7 1/2 inches, and that's where I like to be. So, what we're gonna do is just what you said. We're gonna raise the grade and eliminate three risers or two steps.

Kevin

How much does the grade have to come up?

Tom

About 22 1/2, 23 inches, no problem.

Kevin

Okay. And so now that we've got to set the new porch, were there footings for the old porch here?

Tom

Unfortunately, there weren't. The old-timers didn't believe in footings, just a couple of rocks here and there.

Kevin

Well, I know you believe in footings.

Tom

Well, me and the building code. The building code requires that you have a footing that's 48 inches deep. That's the minimum that you can go to be below the frost. All right, so, we dug it a little bit deeper because we like to add trap stone. Trap stone is actually broken stone that, when you compact it, it really locks together really well. And it also adds to the integrity of the footing system. But it also allows for water to drain away from the footing.

Kevin

Okay, so we're all dug out. We've got the stone down, which means we're ready for the footings. And we are not pouring these in place.

Tom

No. We're gonna use those pre-cast footing system right there with the column on it. I love them 'cause they go in nice and fast.

Kevin

All right. Ready to go in?

Tom

Yeah. You want to give me a hand?

Kevin

Sure.

Tom

All right, why don't you stay with the footing and guide it so it doesn't swing too much? I'm going down in the hole. All right, so, what I did is I made up this giant square to get us registered off the house so that it's square off the house and parallel to one another. So, I'm gonna lay this down. You got it?

Kevin

Yep.

Tom

I'm gonna slide it down. I have a mark that I want to get to over there. Keeping it tight to the parallel board that's on the house, and I have a reference point right here. All right, now let me just screw it in place so it doesn't move.

Kevin

Tommy, you have a jig even for footings.

Tom

Hey, you got to have a jig. It makes life easier. All right, so, now let me give you this plumb bob. I want you to position this part of the plumb bob on the line and drop it down and keep it tight to the edge like that. Yep. Perfect. Good. All right.

Kevin

So, just two footings, Tommy?

Tom

Two footings. Next thing is, we put a post base on each one of these, pressure-treated 6x6, then we frame for our new deck.

Kevin

Sounds like a plan. Thanks.

Tom

Yep. Thank you.

Kevin

Nick and Emily want a traditional fireplace in the new addition, and that requires a mason, so Mark McCullough is here to help us. -Hey,

Mark. -Mark

Hey, Kevin.

Kevin

So, there's a bit of a science, right, to figuring out the size of these fireboxes, the flues, make sure they draw correctly. I mean, how do you figure all this out?

Mark

Well, first thing we do is start with the firebox. We have a couple different options.

Kevin

Okay.

Mark

What you're looking at is the beginning of what we call a Ben Franklin firebox. The other option would be what we call a Rumford-style firebox. A Rumford-style firebox is much smaller. It's a shallow box. That back wall is taller. It's straighter. And it emanates more heat than you're gonna get out of this particular firebox.

Kevin

All right, so, what's the advantage to this one? I mean, do we get ourselves a big, roaring fire here?

Mark

That's the advantage. This is more aesthetic value than anything. And again, that's why we build it as big as we do, the bigger flame. You're gonna get heat out of this fireplace, but you're not gonna get as much as the Rumford.

Kevin

Well, we've got ourselves a pretty sophisticated heating system going in, so ambiance works for us here. And then so how do you go about building this? I mean, look at this pattern right here. This is beautiful.

Mark

Yeah. This is what we call a herringbone pattern, picked out by Nick and Emily.

Kevin

Yeah.

Mark

And this was actually a different build. So, what we had to do is we had to take the firebricks, spread them out all over the floor in that herringbone pattern. We had to lay the brick in that pattern, and we had to use a special mortar.

Kevin

A mortar that can withstand the heat of this fire?

Mark

That's right. This is what we call refractory cement. And it's specifically designed to withstand the heat. It's designed for 2,000 degrees. We don't really need that. The hottest spot of our fire is gonna be down the bottom. That's 1,200 degrees. As soon as you get up to this height, you're at about 600 degrees. So, we feel like better safe than sorry.

Kevin

And a brick resistant to the heat of the fire, too?

Mark

That's right. This is just a heat-resistant brick, which we call a firebrick, and, again, used in stoves, fireboxes.

Kevin

So, you end up with just a giant slab of this thing laid out.

Mark

That's right. We took our firebrick, laid them in our herringbone pattern. We had to wait two weeks for that mortar to cure...

Kevin

Wow.

Mark

...before we could get a saw on it. We got our rescue saw, chopped up this big panel, and ended up with the four panels that you see right here, yeah.

Kevin

So, you cut them into pieces. Two of them already in place, two of them out. -Are these going in next?

Mark

That's right. That's the back, and that's what we're gonna go with first.

Kevin

Okay.

Mark

Okay, guys, watch the center mark. Move it on the center. Go slow. As you can see, the herringbone lines up.

Kevin

Oh, that's nice. So, that's where you made your cut.

Mark

That's right,

yep. -Kevin

Brilliant.

Mark

Okay, so let's get this other panel.

Kevin

All right. All right, in place, Mark. What do you got next?

Mark

Okay, so now we're gonna want to joint these sides up.

Kevin

That really cleans up nice.

Mark

Oh, yeah, this came out great.

Kevin

I love that herringbone pattern.

Mark

Yeah. It's nice.

Kevin

So, now that you got the firebox set, how do you figure out what the right size of the flue should be so we get a good draw?

Mark

Simple equation. What we do is we take the square inches of the fireplace opening, divide by 10. That gives us our flue size.

Just a 10

1

ratio. -Mark

10:1 ratio.

Kevin

And then what's the science of making sure the chimney's tall enough?

Mark

Well, a couple different things. Again, we abide by the code. So, if we were to build the fireplace in the middle of the house, we'd go up to the peak, go three feet after that. But seeing how we're on the edge of the house, we have the "10 foot 2" rule, which is, we go up, take our chimney up to the roof line, we measure over as soon as we hit 10 feet. We go up 2 feet from there.

Kevin

So, 10 feet from the chimney, that roof line, plus 2 feet.

Mark

Exactly.

Kevin

And you're clear. Got it.

Mark

Different variables in this project. You can see this hill that we're on. You see that house in the back, branches, trees -- all obstructions which may impede our draft. So, what we're gonna do is we're gonna take that up maybe an extra foot, foot and a half.

Kevin

So 10-2 plus in this case.

Exactly. -Kevin

I love it. And when do you build that chimney for us?

Mark

We'll be in next week.

Kevin

Terrific. All right. We'll be here for that. So, until then, I'm Kevin O'Connor.

Mark

I'm Mark McCullough.

Kevin

For "This Old House." So, are you a Franklin guy or a Rumford guy?

Mark

Franklin guy.

Kevin

Are you? Big, long fire.

Mark

Yeah, big fire. Love it.

Kevin

Next time on "This Old House"...

Tom

we're making this a house of steeper gables.

Kevin

I'm told that you want to lay some brick, right?

Nick

I've always wanted to learn how to lay brick, and Mark's gonna show me how.

Kevin

Well, you're in good hands with this guy. He's got plenty to teach you. So, enjoy that, and I'll check back with you later. And we're in Maine, helping our homeowners pick out some kitchen cabinets.

Woman

And this area is pretty special. This is going to function for both sides. So, we have pass-through...

Kevin

How do you guys feel about that connection?

Norm

That's next time on "This Old House."