Let The Duplex Rebuilding Begin!: a house log

I should warn you that most of the pictures (and the video!) in the post do not truly scream “rebuilding” (it is more like “WHAT HAPPENED TO THAT HOUSE?!) but there has in fact been a ton of progress at the duplex. So we thought we’d update you folks on the flurry of activity that has occurred over the past few weeks, along with some floor plan changes and some of the curveballs we have already been thrown.

We talked on this week’s podcast about why the duplex is giving off that bare bones vibe right about now. The short answer is: when you have to rebuild the inside of a house (because it is full of rot, mold, termite damage, and some failing framing) and you have to rebuild the outside of the house (to make the old rotting siding and roofing in fact do their jobs), this is what you are left with:

All this demo also makes it easier and cheaper to install fully updated and safe systems – like all new electrical, plumbing, and HVAC when the time comes. So yes, it feels like a ridiculously dramatic process to witness, but at any given time you can drive by at least one of these major restorations going on in the historic downtown district of Cape Charles, because it is in fact fairly normal to take things this far back after decades of rot and moisture within the walls of an old home like this one.

If you are wondering,”is not it simply cheaper to knock it all down and start over?” It is not! Pouring a foundation and framing a house are some of the biggest line items in the budget when building a new house (a friend of ours said the line item for framing her new house is 75K!), so we get to avoid those “big whopper” expenses by using what is already there. Plus, these beach houses are in a historic district, so nobody would be allowed to come in and bulldoze something, even if they hoped to… which we like, because it preserves so much charm in this old neighborhood.

We in fact went through a quite similar skeleton-ization process with the pink beach house, which you can see below in a comparable stage of the project. In fact the same framing crew worked with us on both houses, and they all said the beach house was in even worse condition than the duplex (the foundation was in fact sinking into the ground on one side and had to be fully rebuilt from scratch). So there is something to be excited about dodging this time around, right? This is the rebuilt portion of the beach house from about a year ago:

One reason the duplex demo looks more dramatic is that the roof had to be fully took out. At the pink beach house we simply reshingled the existing roof (while keeping the original roof framing), but at the duplex we got approval from the historic review board to slightly increase the roof’s pitch to assist it shed water better (we knew it would be a good choice in the long run since the existing roof was truly faulty & leaked due to such a slight pitch). But that choice did mean that we had to take off the whole top of the house so the roof could be reframed.

After posting some photos of this on Instagram we learned the house was built using “balloon framing,” which means the exterior studs go all the way up from the foundation to the roof. Most wood is not sold this long anymore, which is why modern houses are built one level at a time, each story resting on a separate platform for each floor. Google tells me that balloon framing was a popular technique in houses built between 1880 and 1930, and we are told this one is from right around 1920.

The photo above was taken right before the windows were took out. Do not worry – we are preserving the original diamond grills in those center windows along with those cool old corbels under the roofline that you see in the before photo below – but many of the other windows were simply junky broken vinyl ones that were not original, so they’ll get replaced with some nicer windows that in fact work and are energy efficient (simply like we did at the pink beach house).

One unlucky surprise during demo was learning that we’d have to strip back the porch a lot more than we expected. The framing itself turned out to be more unstable than we anticipated, so it will need to be fully rebuilt. Cha-ching!

BUT… the foundation was in better shape than we expected, needing hardly any work at all (we had allocated around $3K to reinforcing it, simply in case). So we were able to move our “foundation repair” money over to the “whoops the porch is busted” fund, and the budget in short balanced itself. It was a lucky break, which does not happen frequently in these types of renovation, so we are relishing the moment while it lasts!

The duplex sadly has fewer original details that we can save & restore than the beach house did. Aside from those original diamond grills in the middle upstairs windows and those cool old corbels under the roof that we mentioned saving, there is not any old stained glass or a back staircase like we got to keep at the beach house. Many years of being a rental were not kind to this place, so nearly everything had already been replaced (like the broken vinyl windows) and there was a lot of “covering” going on, like sheet vinyl flooring and wood paneling that was used to hide damage and moisture in the walls and floors.

Luckily, we should have no trouble saving the original hardwood floors that at some point had been vinyl-stick-tiled and carpeted over. I cannot express to you how sticky this bedroom’s floor was from the leftover vinyl tile residue when we picked up the house last fall. Sherry literally lost her flip flops while walking on it.

And speaking of the hardwoods, that is another hugely pricey line item we get to dodge by working with the original materials. Refinishing the hardwood floors that we have upstairs and downstairs (yay!) is so much cheaper than buying all new floors.

We also got questions about how you protect original hardwood flooring when a house is all gutted and open to the elements. The answer is kind of strange and sounds fully counter-intuitive, but you in fact simply leave them open. They might get a little wet over the few days they are exposed, but then the sun comes out and they dry out. Tarping them could in fact cause more damage by trapping moisture in, so this is in fact fairly standard procedure in this area.

Our floors at the pink beach house were exposed (aka, not tarped during demo) and once they were all sanded and sealed they ended up looking so striking. We also restored these old doors in the pink house, which turned out truly well too:

So here is hoping these duplex floors clean up simply as nicely.

The photo above is the living room on the left side of the duplex as we first saw it (remember, they are identical on each side – simply mirrored) and below is that same space after the interior was demo’d.

This is the same space as it looks right now. All of those diagonal boards are simply temporary supports to keep the walls in place while they work on getting the roof back on and the interior re-framed to shore everything up again. The back left corner needs a ton of new framing to make it safe, so we are truly glad that we stripped things back sufficient to find those danger zones and remedy them. But yeah, it kind of looks like a game of Pick-Up Sticks right now.

Of course, the truly dramatic view was from the second floor, since it was simply open to the sky before the roof framing went back up. Call me a nerd, but I could not get over how cool it looked up there. It is like a giant simply came and lifted the roof off!

But back to the less exciting stuff. The curveballs!

In taking off the old siding, it confirmed some problem areas that we knew about and uncovered a few more. We already knew the back side of the house was poorly constructed, with the studs placed FACING THE WRONG WAY. This was originally a side porch that later was (poorly) enclosed and turned into an odd little galley kitchen (we are turning it into a laundry room/mudroom area).

We even Boomeranged our contractor, Sean, showing us how little effort it took to shake the whole thing. I mean, could he look more chill about it? And one-handed, no less!

So all of that will get some new framing to make it especially secure. You know, so a person can no longer shake it with one arm.

The other curveballs are less interesting – some sagging in one corner on the second floor (it simply needed some better framing – thankfully was not a foundation issue) and some interior flooring that needed to be reframed. In fact, you can see that in the GIF above. See how the floor nearly looks like it is two layers thick? Well, it is. Someone built an interior floor on top of an old porch floor, using some 2 x 4″ boards to raise the floor up to be level with the rest of the house. So we are stripping things down to the floor joists and raising the floor the right way – so it is all level and not some double-floor contraption that shakes and shifts underfoot.

Most of the photos above were in fact from two weeks ago when we made our first trip back after spring break. We went again last week and, surprise, the roof is already back up! Well, it still needs to be shingled, but the framing and plywood cover for it is all done. I am gonna miss having all that natural light up there. ;)

The thing you cannot truly tell from that picture is that Sean, our contractor, had also began mapping out our new upstairs floor plan. We showed you our plans for improving the layout last month, but we also planned to walk everything in person before finalizing anything. The three of us walked the house together and made a few tweaks, which Sherry outlines in the video below (sorry it is vertical – she originally planned to put it on InstaStories but it ended up being too long). You can also watch it here on YouTube. Note: if you are viewing this in a feed reader, you may have to click through to the original post to see the video.

As Sherry mentioned in the video, I am including the rough floor plan so you can see the areas she’s describing. And you can read more about it here, including how it differs from the original floor plan.

Oh and we also made some shifts in the laundry room / mudroom, but did not capture that on video. Perhaps we can render that for you folks in a future post or another walk-through soon. We are headed back again this weekend, so feel free to check in on Instagram (Sherry loves to share swift updates while we are there on InstaStories). We are entering a weird phase of the renovation where the updates are less visually dramatic (oooh, those new support beams are so fairly!) so I will leave you with one more before and after to scratch my itch for big changes. Here was the left side when we picked up it last fall:

And here it is a couple of weeks ago. Gulp. But it is an exciting gulp. It can only get better from here, folks.

And on the bright side – all three of the satellite dishes are at last gone! Hasta la vista, baby.

P.S. To read more about how we picked up this duplex, what our plans are for it, and to see some other video walk-throughs, you can consistently click into our duplex category for every post we have ever written about it.