Finally, after several weeks of waiting, our HVAC contractor has come on site. He is starting with the 2nd floor unit and will begin making his way down. The work starts with forming the ducts on site, insulating the ducts with R-8 insulation, and then hanging the ductwork in its final place. To date, the contractor has been on site for only a few days, so there’s been more work put into making the ducts than hanging them, but hopefully we’ll see much more progress above ceiling in the next few weeks to come!

In the mean time, over the last two weeks our mason has slowly built back the exterior front stairwell. We purchased new brick and tried to match it as close as possible to the old brick. The new brick was used on the exposed portion of the wall and the old salvaged brick was used to fill in the middle of the wall. Our contractor worked with old photos and pre-demo photos to build the stairway walls back to their original dimensions so that we can restore the old look of the house. It’ll still be several weeks before we pour the concrete and several more weeks before all the exterior work is complete, but its nice to finally see the house starting to take shape.

These last three weeks have seen much less progress than we were hoping for. With the framing mostly complete, we are hoping to start on the mechanical, electrical and plumbing rough-ins. Unfortunately, we have been having a difficult time scheduling our contractors to come on site. As several of my contractors have told me, the biggest issue (for us) has been that Chicago is seeing a great deal of construction and there simply aren’t enough guys around to complete the work. Its to the point where many of our specialty contractors are trying to hire on more guys, but can’t find anyone qualified enough to be brought on. The amount of work is great for our contractors, but this is delaying our project.

So while we wait, we have been able to get more masonry work done on the outside of the building. Back in March, we had mentioned in the blog that our masonry contractor had come through to sandblast and clean the brick. Much of this brick and mortar were in really bad shape, so we needed to tuck-point the whole building. Our contractor grinded away the old mortar and refilled each seem and space with new mortar. The side walls used a grey colored mortar, while the front used a red color mortar to match the brick. During this process, our masonry contractor found that the wall above the window on the north-east bedroom was so deteriorated that he was concerned it might buckle under its own wait. He therefore, took this part of the wall down, installed a iron support beam above the window, and rebuilt the wall back to the roof-line.

The other masonry progress in these last few weeks has been the dismantling of what remained of the front stairwell. The concrete has been broken up and hauled away and the bricks have been taken down and stacked to the side to be re-used. This has exposed the compacted dirt that was originally laid and compacted underneath. We intend on rebuilding the stairwell to its original condition and character and so we’ll reuse whatever brick we can so that we can match the front building facade. Unfortunately, the majority of these bricks are cracked and broken, so they will probably be only used as filler.

The final worthwhile update is the bad luck we had with the Chicago weather. We had a big downpour that sent a lot of water into the building. We noticed that most of the water came through our back addition as the water poured down from the roof onto the back wall. Because of this, we asked our roofing contractor to install the back gutter as soon as possible. This is earlier than we wanted this installed, because it will inevitably get dinged up during construction, but it will hopefully save us from more water damage in the future.

With the basement concrete set, Week 31 starts out with a big lumber delivery. Our carpentry crew met us on site to bring in the lumber and start building out the framing. After all of the demo and underground work, its certainly exciting to finally see the layout start to take shape!

Our carpenter started with framing the perimeter of the building and then worked his way towards the interior spaces. As part of this work, he demoed the remaining old windows and framed out rough openings for the future new windows. He also took out the original front stairwell that lead from the first floor to the basement, cut away some of the flooring on the first floor, to install a new stairwell that will be built to today’s codes and standards (the old stairwell was too steep and left as little as six feet of clearance at its low point).

As the framing starting taking shape, we found that the mason didn’t take down the back wall brick wall as far as he was supposed to. As the back hallway took shape, it ended 12 inches into the existing masonry. So to start Week 32, our mason came back out and cut the remaining 12 inch portion of the wall away and removed the brick so that we can avoid any awkward bends and angles.

On the first and second floor, our carpenter assessed the floor boards to determine which, if any, can be salvaged and restored. It turns out that the water damage to the flooring was too severe in about 50% of the flooring on the 2nd floor to be able to save it. The first floor was in better shape, but the flooring in the kitchen area was too damaged as well. This flooring was ripped up and new sub-flooring was installed in order to evenly install the new floor in the future.

Finally, with the framing nearing completion at the end of Week 32, our carpenter took a hydrolic lift into the basement and jacked up the middle of the building about an inch or two and installed several lvl beams for support. This was necessary because the basement columns had settled over time and the building was sagging in towards the middle. The lvl beams, resting on the masonry beams, will give added support to the floors above and allow them to lay nice and level.