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.