Solarium Repair - Part 1

In the 2nd week of the project, Ron's team started the first steps to repair the solarium .




Since the house is historic, this is one of the features I had to go before the Plainfield Historic Comission to get a "CA" (certificate of appropriateness), where you present to the commission your plans that affect the exterior of your historic building, get their feedback, and then permission to move ahead.




I have found the commission to be very helpful. They are a group of people who are passionate about preserving our wonderful historic buildings in Plainfield, and have a wide range of expertise.


The solarium originally started out as part of the huge wrap-around porch. Somewhere between 1910-1920, the porch was enclosed with beautiful windows.


The first thing Ron's carpenters was lay out a numbering scheme for the solarium. Next they removed all the glass panels from the lower window frames. Over the years, two had been broken, but everything else was intact. Each window was As Ron took the solarium apart, each was numbered. Next they took out the windows. They weren't sure what to expect .. but fortunately they were removable as entire units.


The railings were removed and generally are in good condition. The interior beadboard and framing was removed. The original floor was covered with several layers of plywood and tile. Most was rotted and in poor shape. The roof of the solarium is in great shape. Most of the lower frame is in good shape ... but there are entire sections along the edge which are completely rotted.

Our architect recommended that we build new footings for the solarium. The new footings will be fit behind the original stone footings, so the look will be the same. When the architect finishes the framing drawings, the framers will come in and repair the flooring structure, the rotted columns and column frame supports.

Rear Porch Repaired

While the roof was being worked on, Ron's carpenters Kurt and Jimmy ("JC") started working on repairing the rear porch.

The porch has been falling apart for a long time. Because of the roof and yankee gutter issues, any time during a rain fall, tons of water would fall off the roof onto the roof of the rear porch, and run down the side of the building.

When JC and Kurt starting removing the rotted wood, they found the entire structure was completely rotted. Ron took careful pictures of the trim, the structure of the roof.

They took the porch apart, and found that where the porch attached to the hosue ... framing in the house was rotted as well. So, first they repaired the timbers, rebuilt the porch, trimmed it out, and replaced the damaged cedar siding with new cedar. The process took about 5 days.

New Roof Going Up

The past two weeks there has been a lot of activity at the mansion.

The main roof is getting close to completion. The roofers tore off almost 20 tons of material of the roof ... three layers of shingles. The original cedar shingles were there, on wood slats. The good news is the original structure was in great shape, and the roofers were able to lay new playwood decking without any additional carpentry.

We chose a hunter green Timberline 50-year architectural shingle for the roof. The original roof from descriptions was green, and it looks great. The yankee gutters were cleaned out (years of tar, etc) and relined. Ron's carpenters are removing and repairing the rotted sofits where the gutters had leaked for years. Fortunately, it doesn't look like too many spots.

I decided to do the flashing in copper. It's expensive!! To flash the roof added another $2000 ... just the cost of material. The roofers have put some of the copper up ... it looks great. I'd like to find a way to weather-proof it, so it doesn't turn green. I like the new copper look -- like house jewlery.

We've also started sanding the house to prep for paint. I was able to pry up some of the paint and uncover the original paint. It looks like the body of the house was a beigish green, which I find a bit dull. Looking at the layers, the house was painted green, yellow, then white. On much of the trim, the original color was a cream.

I'm leaning towards a warm muted gold color for the body of the house, using a lighter and darker shade to bring out all the great architectural details. I plan to get opinions from neighbors at our next district meeting and drive around and look at other houses to get ideas.

Inside it's been primarily demolition and framing. The plumber has been pulling out all the old steam pipes, cast iron lines (the house had 4 huge sewer lines), old water lines (mix of copper and galvanized). Everything is cruded up on the inside ... 100+ years of stuff!! To service the future 10 baths, laundry room, commercial kitchen ... we're going to need a larger water line brought to the house. That takes about a month to request and get, so that has been started.

The house had 5 furnaces when I bought it; four forced air units and the old oil-fired steam boiler. I had decommissioned the steam boiler 2 years ago, removed the 1,000 oil tank (thank goodness no leaks ... that's always a worry).

The plan is to keep the forced air unit on the 3rd floor, which is located in the 4th floor attic. We're going to install hot water baseboard heat for the basement, 1st and 2nd floors. For airconditioning, the 3rd and 1st floors will get a central ducted units and the 2nd floor will get individual wall units. The wall units are new technology. They sit high in the ceiling where they grab the hot air and convert to cool, and the ducting will go down the exterior wall to the condensor in the basement. You turn on the A/C by remote control. It's low profile and will work great so each guest can set their A/C how they like.

We also had a meeting with the elevator company, framers and architect. The elevator is going to go from the basement to the 3rd floor, is the largest residential unit Lev makes, holds 800 lbs. It has a backup battery, so it wil run for several hours even when the power goes out. I've selected a beautiful cherry interior ... so it will look great. The architect should have the structural drawings complete in a week or so, and then the elevator company can file an application with the state (all elevators are state-inspected and undergo a yearly inspection) and a framing permit with the city.

The electrician came and spent several days going over the house wiring design. We're going to rewire the house. This will be great, because anyone who has an old house knows rooms often don't have enough outlets. Because of the new A/C units, the elevator and other upgreat, the electrician is going to redesign my electrical panels. Right now we have 5 panels in the basement (once for each previous apartment, one for the landlord) and an old panel on the 2nd floor. All that will get redesigned and engineered and the 5 meters on the outside of the house will be reduced to one. We may have to upgrade the power feeding the house ... the electrician will know more after the power calculations are completed.

Project Off to a Good Start

Today the official building restoration started. Ron Denig of Dreamstar Construction, showed up promptly at 8:00am with his framing team.

They immediately tackled jacking up the 2nd floor overhang over the front porch. The mansion was built with approximately 1/3 of the 2nd floor spanning 12' over the front porch. Over the 100 years, the porch members and columns had deteriorated and the building started collapsing downward over the front door, approximately a drop of 5 inches, which is significant!

What was also interesting is the building must have been slowly going downwards for quite a while. The mansion was turned into apartments in the 1970s, and a kitchen was installed over the front door porch area (where the original master bathroom had been). The kitchen had been built on a slant ... so the building by the 1970s had already dropped the 5 inches, and typically, the landlord didn't want to put a lot of money into restoring an apartment investment.

During the next 20 years, none of the many owners tackled fixing the structural problem. In 1999 the City of Plainfield condemned the building and long-time residents told me they feared the mansion would be torn down, often a fate of many neglected buildings. The owner at the time replaced the rotted porch beams, rotted wood in the porch ceiling and installed new columns and new laminate header.

What Ron's team found was the entire 2nd floor exterior wall was not supported by the porch ceiling joists. The building exterior was "floating" about 3 inches above the laminate header and joists. This means the 2nd and 3rd floor exterior (and the beams that tied into the exterior) where not being supported at all over the front door porch area.
I watched while they slowly jacked up one corner. Before jacking up, they protected the mahogany porch floor, put two 10x14 beams under the jack (to distribute the weight load onto the porch joints, which were solid), then slowly started jacking up. They were very careful, because they didn't want the support post to "kick out" (very dangerous) and as they lifted, the building was poping and cracking.

They lifted that corner about 3 inches ... what a difference it made on the 2nd floor! The slope had disappeared! I left for work as they started working on jacking up the other joints. They were going to have to do it joist by joist.

Framing Started

The past week the framers have accomplished a great deal.

Front porch. The framers have lifted the front porch joists as far as they could. What they found is the end of the front of the building wasn't even touching the joists, but was "hanging" about 3 inches above the joists. You can see by the pictures they have wood pieces in the joist hangers, where they shimmed as they lifted the front.

Unfortunately, with the current condition of the beams and where the previous owner spliced in new beams, the building cannot be jacked up further. If the framers kept lifting, where the new wood was joined to the old wood would break under the weight. Looking at the architectural drawings that were submitted to the city at the time this area was repaired, it becomes apparent that the engineer improperly drew the real structure and the work was done improperly.

My architect confirmed this. So, the plan is to replace the critical beams over the front door and the beams going to the main porch supports with laminate beams (which are like steel). All the joints will be sistered with laminate. The whole structure then can be lifted.

Over the 6 years I've owned the building, I felt the front of the house was still sinking and not stable. Primarily because of the new cracks that had been appearing. I knew when I did the restoration, this structural issue would have to be addressed. Also, since the pitch downward had not been corrected, the front of the porch pitched up from the house -- not a good situation -- and the porch consistently leaked where the 2nd floor wall met the porch roof, because there was a valley there. Unfortunately, this was true, because the work done previously was a jury-rigged affair, and the choice to put the new wood into the old, obviously rotted beams was a poor one.

The framers are going to wait to tackle the front porch until my engineer completes drawings to calculate the load and type of framing required. When my engineer looked at the porch, the issue is the weight of the house is over this huge span ... about 20 feet. Definitely will need engineered lumber.

The framers also created the opening for the new stairway from the 2nd to 3rd floor. They installed 2 laminate beams sistered together to a main beam located in the arch over the 2nd floor and installed the arches on the 3rd floor to open up the existing great room into two previous bedroms, to create an even large event space. The plan is to trim the new arches like the trim on the 1st floor entry hall arches.