Pictures, pictures

The new paint looks great! It really brings out the house's detail. There is still exterior repair work ... columns, the solarium and railing and right over the front entrance. We'll finish painting in the spring. We used 2 coats of a special lead encapulating primer, then 2 coats of Sherwin Williams' Duration paint (a lifetime paint). Used colors "Anjou Pear" for the main body, and "Humble Gold" for the trim, and a linen with yellow hue for the white trim.







The solarium floor is rebuilt. After it is inspected, next will come installing the new flooring, rebuilding the boxes, new columns and sides, then re-installing the windows.





Rebuilt the decking for the balcony which is over the veranda. This picture they are installing the beams. A bedroom on the 2nd floor has french doors which will go out to this balcony. Later we'll put fiberglass roof and restore the railings.












The elevator shaft was one of the major framing projects in the house.


They had to build a pit in the basement for the elevator. After the shaft was built, the elevator company came and measured everything ... said Bill did a perfect job. The elevator is ordered and will be installed 1st week of January. Meanwhile, city will inspect the framing sometime in December. The state inspects the actual elevator installation.

Here is a shot looking up from the 1st floor (where the kitchen is) up to Bill (the owner of the framing company) who is on the 2nd floor and looking up into the 3rd floor.

Shot on the 3rd floor

when they were first

framing it out.

Working on back porch. Working on ledge.

At the half-way point

It's been a while since I've posted. Going to make up for it in this one!

Well, we're at the half-way point on the mansion remodel. I think, realistically, we should have most everything complete sometime in February.

To date, all the big structural work is done. The area over the front door porch is completely reframed and jacked up, the solarium framing is complete and the elevator shaft is complete. It's very cool to look down from the 3rd floor and look all the way down to the basement. The framers also jacked up that area of the house and repaired beams, etc. It's looking great.

The house is still reacting from the jacking and lifting ... in some areas the plaster has cracked, and I think will continue to crack. One night I was here late ... I heard a crash ... it was plaster that had cracked and broken. Scared the poo out of me!

Some other unexpected structural work had to be done ... the architect looked at the spans in the dining room ceiling (2nd floor) and there was a bearing wall right in the middle of the room. This was the original design, and not sufficient. The original beams had actually cracked from the weight and the floor had sagged. So, we sistered laminates and in one spot double-laminates to carry the weight. Where the hallway had been cut out through the original recessed alcove in the dining room (when it was turned into apartments), they cut through a bearing beam. So, all that got lifted up and now the original recessed alcove is back.

The final bit of reframing will be in the basement and one area in the kitchen. At the foot of the stairs and the wall behind the stairs, at some point someone punched a hole through the brick wall for plumbing, and that caused a major support beam to drop. In the kitchen the framer has to tie in the ceiling supported by the walls of the original servants dining room into the elevator shaft.

We're finally, finally painting the exterior. The guys are doing the final sanding and patching, and I've hired a young painter from North Plainfield, starting last week. He's doing a great job!! I figure it should be done in about 2 weeks, around mid-November. I had two colors I was chosing between ... a light yellow that I found under the layers of paint on the clapboards and a darker yellow-gold that was the original brick color (it has faded over 100+ years). I re-read the house description in Scientific American Magazine from 1905, it described the house being a "dark Colonial yellow" ... sooo ... I decided on the darker gold color. We're going to use the lighter yellow and a yellow-cream-linen color to paint the trim. It's really making the trim pop out and the dark color looks good with the green roof. Eventually I'll install green shutters (later project).

I'm going to leave the verdanda railings and columns and windows for spring, because right now rotted columns are being replaced --- about 14 of them were in bad shape. The big stuff left to be done is to put back together the solarium, finish rebuilding the Central side veradana roof and reinforce the dining room and central hall floors. The existing spans for the dining room and central all floors are very large, and when a lot of people are on it, the floors move a bit. So, they're going to sister laminates in, which will stabilize it.

Originally over the Central side porch roof there was a balcony there, but the existing framing would not meet code to support people walking on the roof. Ron's guys have it complete, and soon he'll install a green-colored fiberglass roof on, which will be walkable.

Inside, the rough plumbing and most of the rough electric is complete. Ron is repairing the 3rd floor ballroom. It's a beautiful heart pine that had been hacked into in places. We removed the oak flooring in the library ... about half of it was in very bad shape (30 years of being a kitchen and bathroom. Ron took that flooring and re-floored one room of the two-room suite. He'll put a new floor down in the library.

All the new rooms and baths are framed out. At this point, next in the project is to get the mechanicals (heat and A/C), sprinklers and commercial hood in. We can't do too much more on the interior until this is complete. I think this will probably take the next two months to be complete. In the meantime, Ron will be finishing putting together the solarium, rebuild rotted basement windows, final exterior carpentry. Inspections for the work done so far should be happening over the next month.

I've met with and hired a heating and air conditioning company, Supreme Heating and Air Conditioning out of Summit. We're going to completely replace all the furnaces. The new equipment will include 6 furnaces and air conditioners for the basement, 1st floor and 3rd floor, all individually zoned. The 2nd floor with be handled with these cool "split" units ... basically an individual heat pump and A/C which goes into the wall (not to the outside) and then goes down to a compressor. This way, the guests on the 2nd floor all can control their own heating and A/C. All the units will have electronic air cleaners and UV units that kill mold and bacteria and humidifiers (de-humidifers for the basement). The new new furnaces are 95% energy efficient ... new technology makes a difference!!

None of this comes cheap, but in the end heating and A/C is critical. If the air conditioning is not estimated correctly, then I could have 100 people in the ballroom on the 3rd floor on a hot summer day sweating (and complaining). We human crank out a lot of heat just on our own ... . Also, I plan to insulate the whole house. The attic will be easy, just lay down the insulation. The rest of the house they'll drill holes and shoot the insulation in. I'm going to deal with the storm windows later. It's amazing, but the original windows are not drafty. I'm going to look into storm windows that you actually fit on the inside ... that way I can take the nasty alumnium storms down.

The elevator should be installed in about 4 weeks. EJ Panoti, my rep, came out and declared the elevator shaft Bill (the framer) installed was perfect. That will be an exciting day!

The city wants my electrician, Kelly, to have an electrical engineer do the panel drawings and the house electrical load calculations. Kelly has engaged someone. Now we have to get the specs from the heating/air conditioning company (that will need a lot of power), and I'll need the specs from the kitchen equipment company.

I had several commercial hood companies come to give me estimates, and I've chosen one. The commercial hood is one of the main factors that makes a kitchen a commercial kitchen. A lot goes into it. First, the hood has chemical fire suppression system (think about grease fires). The hood's main job is to suck out with real force the steam and vapors coming from the stove. Commercial stoves work at much higher temperatures that residential "commercial" stoves. The heat vaporizes the grease into the air ... which means it goes everywhere and can cause fires. The hood then has a system to create "make up air" ... since the hood is sucking air out, it has to bring air back into the house.

We're going to have an L-shaped hood line ... 10 ft and 6 ft. The hood vent will follow the elevator shaft up to the roof, where it will come out to the back center of the flat roof (not visible to the street). The hood has it's own electrical needs, that Kelly will have to install and the engineer account for.

For the kitchen equipment, what we're looking at getting is a 10 burner stove with two oven, two convection ovens, a 36" flat grill, 2 fryers, a salamander, under counter commercial dishwaster, the required hand sink, prep sink and 3-compartment sink. In the basement, right off of the elevator, we'll have a "prep kitchen." It will have counters, sinks, and a walk-in refrigerator and freezer. This way, we'll have plenty of space and storage to prepare for large events.

The final thing to work out is hiring the sprinkler contractor. I've got several companies coming to look at the project and give me a price.

I figure the next two month, into January will be all about getting the heating, A/C, hood, sprinklers and commercial kitchen in. Ron will be able to work on some inside things, but most of the finish work will have to wait until these items are installed and inspected.

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.