Even More Destruction!

Okay, not really destruction, but selective removal of wooden components for use in the future. I missed updating last week, so the pictures below will show two weeks worth of work.

On a side note, we picked up a new tool that it bonkers fun to use! I wish we had bought this way back at the beginning! The Air Locker AP700 is the best tool I’ve found to remove nails! It has an air actuated piston that punches the nail back out of the wood. On thin lumber, it will shoot the nail out of the wood, across the room, bounce off the wall, and come back to hit you in the chest. Don’t ask me how I found this out. Oh, and make sure you’re not aiming the board towards your feet or… crouch area. We’ll chalk these up to OTJ training. On thicker lumber (2x), it will punch a driven nail out so you can grab it with the crowbar. All you need is a little bit of the nail sticking out of the bottom so you can aim and pull the trigger. Anyone planning on recycling lumber, I highly recommend you get this little guy. We picked ours up off Amazon for under $60.

AirLocker – Get yours TODAY!

I started where we left off with the porch ceiling/floor. I still can’t believe this structure was/is still standing with the original rafters/joists in place. The best I can guess is these have to be over 100 years old. All the ends where they connect into the wall are heavily rotted and only being held in place by luck. The hard part here is working over an existing shop that is in operation. As you can see, our renters, Mr. & Mrs. Kulow operate two business below. On is Mr. Kulows wood working office and the other is Mrs. Kulow Chiropractic office.  Trying very hard not to drop anything on their heads!

A special thanks to the Tavary family for all their help! Once again, they have been more than helpful in this project. We never could have gotten this far with out their help!

By the end of these last two weeks, I would say we’ve removed 2/3rds of the apartment flooring and 2/3rds of the old ceiling/flooring structure.

Under the front room flooring, we’ve had some good news and some bad news. Good news is that “sometime” in the past (guessing before 1930’s) structural steel columns & beams & a big 9×9 solid wood center beam were added to the flooring structure.

BEAMS

This has really beefed up the structure, to the point that (I believe) we will pass the structural review by the licensed engineer without having to add anything to the floor. Still waiting on that report. Based upon those findings, I put together a quick sketch (Floor Joist Details ) on how I thought I could finish out the ceiling below and the floor above. And now for the bad news (maybe, still researching). After running it by our Architect, she had to say the dreaded words “fire code”. She is doing the research, but believes that their can not be non-sprinkled voids between two different zones. So, we may have to rip the ceiling off of Mr. & Mrs. Kulows place and attach it directly to the floor joists. I broke the news to Mr. & Mrs. Kulow and they were quite happy to work with me on this. Currently they have a drop ceiling in place, and would be happy to have the extra 3 feet of vertical height and insulated structures to limit their HVAC bills! It actually could become quite a design feature with the structural steel beams showing.

That’s all the news that’s fit to print. Here’s some pictures for your viewing pleasure:

 

Back when we still had a floor

Plywood Off, Main Beams coming out

Main Beams out, now for the ceiling

All we could safely reach from above

From existing to missing!

2/3rds of the old floor gone

Slowly this floor is coming up. We’ve finally learned how to remove it quickly without causing major damage. Would you believe the sledgehammer is the answer?

And for last, I leave you with cuteness overload!

Guess What Day it is!

My lovely wife more than happy to stop by Chip & Joanna Gains place (Magnolia Market) in Waco, TX to peruse and pick up some clothing. As readers may remember, we tried to get their show Fixer Upper to come down and do our project. Unfortunately, they declined our request, as they did not want to leave their base in Waco.

Saturday was a family day, with Dance recitals for our daughter and a birthday party for our eldest son, so I was only able work at the Loft on Sunday. Started at 8 am trying to get to the cool part of the day, but it was no use. The Texas heat is upon us for now, with a big touch of the Gulf Coast Humidity, making the upstairs one big sweat bath. I did get some accomplished, but had to take lots of breaks and gallons of water to survive. Hopefully we get a cool weather break soon.

The only cool find I discovered was an old 1940s lighbulb fixture still wired into the knob and tube wiring system.

Sunday I worked on the back porch rooms. When we pulled up the flooring, we discovered the structure to be dangerously rotted. We will have to pull all the wooden floor and flooring structure down and build it back up properly. It appears that the back porch was “fixed” in 1999, based upon the date stamps on the newer lumber pulled up, but it was only a BandAID.

As you can see in the next few pictures, I have to first pull up the 2x12s, then take out the 2×6 “old ceiling” sloped rafter and then take out the 2×6 “old ceiling” joist. Under that is a 2×4 ceiling joist with 1×8’s nailed at a spacing for old acoustic tile (now missing). All of these are tied together with vertical nailers and cross bracing between the old 2×6 joists. The 6 sections I removed took me 8 hours. I left the 2×4 ceiling to be removed from the downstairs.

We’re going to try and salvage as much of the 2x6s as possible, as they appear to be old growth lumber, judging on how heavy the beams were trying to pull them out. And of course we will reuse the 2x12x18′ beams. Reuse and recycle, that’s the game on this project. Not only to be a little bit green, but most important for me, to save money!

Speaking of saving money, if anyone has these type of 4x8x2 red bricks, please send them my way. We have a lot of holes in the brick walls that need filled in. Many Thanks in Advance!

And Finally, here are the after pictures, kindly taken by my eldest:

1937 Construction & Design Prints

Howdy Crew!

I forgot I had these and wanted to share. When we were doing the due diligence of the property, one of the in town Architects, Ben Boettcher, was kind enough to search his company’s archives. It would appear that his company, BBA Architects LP, formed when Ben purchased it from Travis Broesche, the local State of Texas Registered Architect in Brenham. These drawings were done in 1937, and made a proposal on updating the exterior of the building to the standards of the day. A few of the proposals were done in the down stairs sections (Bathrooms for sure) that I can see. Unfortunately, the building was updated again in the 70s, and we may have lost the transformation to the ravages of time.  Only one entry remains the same, and that is the entry to the stairs on the front elevation. You can find the drawing below as well as a PDF file with more details here: 1937 Zeiss Building Construction Documents

Floors coming up

We decided to post-pone the removal of the middle section of ceiling for now for a variety of reasons, and have gotten started on carefully removing the floor beams in the eastern third of the building. This eastern third will eventually contain the efficiency apartment and the two-bedroom apartment that we’ll be opening up to lease to the public. Take a look:

View of the back room (south-east corner). After we redo the floors and seal them, the windows will go, and this whole area will be a deck (foreground), part of a bedroom for the two-bed apt (middleground), and a small balcony for the two-bed apt.

Closer view of the back room. Unfortunately, the ceiling in the shop below is in very poor shape. But on the up side, we will be able to access everything underneath this third of the building easily, replacing the ceiling for the tenant in the process.

View looking into the rear-room. You can see that it is slightly higher right now. We’ll be lowering it to meet with the rest of the building.

At the top of the stairs (left side of photo) coming up from Main Street, floor boards are slowly being removed to expose the beams. A temporary walk-way has been created with some recycled plywood boards.

At this point, our plan seems to be that we’ll be completely building out the eastern third of the building so that these two living spaces are complete. We’ll then put most of our belongings into storage, and live in these two spaces while we finish completing our own space. Of course, plans may change. But that’s what we’re thinking right now.

The big question is when. We still don’t know. As the months get hotter, it will become much more difficult to work up in the loft for any length of time. We’re trying to avoid as many social commitments as we can for the month of May so we can spend every spare minute picking away at the structure. I’d like to hope that we’d be finished with the eastern section by the end of November, but I could be severely under-estimating our progress.

In the next few weeks we’re supposed to have our next meeting with our architect, which will also include a consultation with his structural engineer. We’ll be examining all of the beams that have been exposed in the ceiling and in the floor, and any plan of action that might be needed. So far, in our uneducated opinion, our girl looks great! There’s one beam that is badly damaged by termites that will need to be replaced. And another beam got butchered where an over-zealous plumber got really creative installing indoor plumbing. But other than that, we seem to be okay so far.

As usual, if you have some free time on a weekend, we’d love to have some help. You don’t need experience, just a willingness to work. We’ll feed you, give you a place to sleep if you are coming in from out of town.

Post-Demo Results and Finds

We’ve got some great progress to share from our demo weekend. I can’t think of why I haven’t taken my wide-angle lens to the loft before to take photos, but I did yesterday. Perhaps those who have never seen our project in person can better see the scope of it now. I took a shot standing in each corner, and you can really see how much work has been done.

View from the north-east corner, ceilings gone all the way!

View from the North-west corner: ceilings gone for most of this section. You can see that ceilings still need to be removed in the middle. Also, some of the dropped ceiling still remains in the right back-ground. To the left is all of our lumber. To the right is debris that will end up in a dumpster on our next demo-day.

View from south-west corner: in the foreground on left are some tools and metal cabling (the latter being saved for recycling). Beyond the red tool case is the debris pile. To the right, just out of sight is the back stairwell, and the doorway leading to the back room which will be the future deck.

View from the south-east corner: all of the ceiling has been removed. We’ll remove the rafters but keep the roof. Floor will be re-done. Back wall/windows on left will go, replaced with wrought iron railing. This area is our (and another apartment’s) future back covered deck.

And I think that’s about it. Before we pull down the remaining section of ceiling, we are going to skip ahead and pull out the flooring! Ha! We want to start exposing some areas for the structural engineer, plus we need to start streamlining the process of restoring our flooring, especially on the east-side of the building, where it isn’t as well-kept. After we remove a section of the flooring, we’ll partially cover the opening with some temporary plywood so we can move all of the lumber out of the way of the ceiling demolition. And after the final ceiling is removed, we’ll move on to the floors – can’t wait to see what we find under there!

Speaking of finds, here’s some of our found objects of the weekend.

Metal fuse boxes and we found Prince Albert’s can!

After Heath went and bought needed extra hammers for the crew, a hammer fell out of the ceiling. Seriously. Looks like the end was sawn off.

Difficult to see in the photo, but it says “Belknap” on the top, “Trade” on the left, “Mark” on the right, “Bluegrass” in the middle, and “Louisville” on the bottom. Probably 1930’s to maybe as late as 1960’s era.

And as usual, a ton more hand-wrought square-head nails. I’m saving them for lots and lots of future craft and art projects.

That’s all for now, folks. We’ll be picking away at smaller projects just about every weekend we can, so if you are interested in taking a whack at some demolition, just let us know. And keep watching this space and your Facebook Events page for the next demo day! Thanks for keeping up with our project.

Demo Day Review

Saturday was a blazing day with a full crew of people. Unfortunately, we lost a few folks due to injuries and weather threats, so Sunday went a bit more slowly. The upside is, 4/5ths of the ceiling is now down, with only the last section in the middle to go. That includes two heavy air conditioning units hanging from the ceiling. But that’s in the future. Let’s share what we just did. First, the fun stuff.

We had one last “dropped” ceiling hiding the real ceiling that needed to go. It was barely attached to the last remaining non-brick wall, so the guys decided they could just yank the entire dropped ceiling down instead of piece-by-piece. It was by far the faster and easier route, and also a bit more amusing. Also mildly dangerous. Check out this video by our friend and one of our lovely volunteer workers, Miranda:

(Charity had some great videos, too, but you’ll have to be a friend of hers on Facebook).

Here’s some shots of us in action throughout the day:

First find of the day: bird skeleton number 374

Scott gets started on the ceiling in the northeast room of the building.

Kaylea and Connor pull nails from reusable lumber.

Heath had to build more saw horses because we had so many crew members.

Mike sticks his head up in the southeast room’s ceiling.

Miranda knows that Charity’s beatings of Zad will continue until morale improves.

Zad and Charity take a much-deserved break.

Scott is a prime example of how filthy things got. There was a lot of nasty dirt and debris under the rear room ceiling.

And I do mean filthy… the clean part is where his glove stopped.

I’ve got pictures of the final results of this weekend coming up soon!

Much thanks to the Shelbourne Family, the Tavary Family, the Norris/Jackson Family, Miranda, and Jill who all helped out whether it was actual demolition, cooking, or keeping the kiddos out of our hair.

We’ll definitely be doing more demo weekends in upcoming months, hopefully before it gets too hot. Just keep watching this space for more details and/or your Facebook Events page.

Latest Finds in the Loft

So, for most of the month of March, due to other obligations, we didn’t work on the loft. The lack of noise must have made this dove very comfortable, as she had two wee eggs in her nest.

Hopefully we didn’t startle her too badly. Heath went up for a bit to work on the loft on Saturday, and our friends’ toddler and our kids were running amok. The poor dove kept leaving her next to dash across the alley to the building behind us. As long as she or her babies doesn’t come inside the window, we’re fine.

Momentarily placated with chips and electronics

We’ve got a big work weekend coming up April 16th and 17th, so please feel free to drop in for that. As usual, we’ll feed you and beer you, and give you a place to shower and crash. This weekend’s fare will include some great boudin, straight from the LA source. You don’t need any skills, just a pair of work gloves, and a willingness to work. Our aim is to get all of the ceiling pulled down, the last few remaining walls, and pull a lot of nails from a lot of lumber. If there’s time and enough people, we might even get to start taking a look under the floors. Check your invites on Facebook if you want to join in on the fun, or comment on this blog post.

In the meantime, Heath will be spending every spare minute in the loft. We need to get as much work done as we can before the Texas temperatures make it unbearable for working in an un-airconditioned building.

Many of you have asked when our project will be finished. We really have no idea. I’m hoping by Christmas of this year, maybe even Thanksgiving. A lot depends on how the floor structure looks once we expose it.

Latest Progress – Ceilings crashing down!

Thanks to friends who are parents of kids in our middle child’s preschool class, the entire northwest quadrant of the ceiling has been removed, beams exposed. Everything looks fabulous so far…

Our friend Jonathan helps Heath pull down the ceiling in the west side of the building.

You can see framing where a previous owner cut through the beams for a previous ceiling attachment. Hopefully we can restore the original beams and cross supports.

Kind of hard to see from this picture, but we’ve got a great solid pitched roof above original solid beams in the oldest part of the upper story. Can you believe that these beams are about 160 years old?!?! So awesome!

All gone! View facing north from south end of building, showing beautiful beams. Also, the camera lens warped the middle – the beams are straight, not hanging.

… except for the window that got smashed on Sunday. We’re still not ready to replace it, so for now we have to get a plexiglass pane. Apparently the city doesn’t want us to just cover it with plastic or plywood because it is on Main Street. Oddly enough, the building directly across from us has had plywood over its windows since we purchased the building over a year ago. Oh well. We will play nice. 😉

Lower pane of window is gone. Got all of the glass out of the street. The entire window and frame will be replaced, but we’re not ready to do that just yet, so a cheap plexiglass will have to do for a few months to keep the birds and the rain out.

Another bit of work done was to secure the wall where the cross beam is attached, as it is a little crumbly.

Further braced a crumbling support wall and beam. Odd to think that 160 years ago, that arched window looked out east over Brenham, before it was bricked up and make into a wall.

Interesting finds of the weekend included a 1960’s era empty Coca-Cola can (forgot to get a photo of that), a blob of plaster and palette with the mason’s final swish through it, and a mysterious foot-long iron hook hung high up in the rafters.

Frozen in time

Large hook hung from the ceiling found underneath dropped ceiling. Any guesses? Maybe it was installed to hold original electric lines?

So what’s next? Removing the rest of the ceiling. And there’s still a lot to go – a little more than half. Also, all of the wood we recover needs to have nails pulled and sorted by type and/or size. And we have another dumpster full of debris building up. Lets not forget the back stairwell – that will take some careful handling and likely some construction of scaffolding.

More dropped ceiling to be removed, and the last wall that needs to be taken down. Also, the last of the carpet is in this “room” hiding more hardwood floors.

Freshly removed tongue-and-groove planks from the ceiling, all needing nails to be removed before sorting and repurposing.

Due to a number of other obligations keeping us busy, we’ll not be working more than a few hours here and there during the entire month of March. Frustrating, but necessary. We’ll pick back up in April, including a large, open-invite work weekend April 15th and 16th (please join us!). After the ceilings are gone, up comes the floor, and then  actual construction can begin!

Future Visions of Zeiss Lofts

Many of you have expressed interest in the future design and look of Zeiss Lofts. I think we’re aiming at a warm industrial look with maybe some rustic or farmhouse touches. Definitely very eclectic. I’m hoping for an elegant Art Nouveau theme in the master bath, and a very playful set of kids rooms that can grow with them. We’ve started* collecting ideas on Pinterest and Houzz, so we have added links to those in the right sidebar of our blog.

* started? been collecting for a long time…. err… probably too many ideas. but take a look anyway. 

Seeing the Light at the End of the Demolition Tunnel

For St. Valentine’s weekend, we decided to celebrate by breaking down walls – literally! Our dear friends Scott, Charity, and Mike visited, and we had help from our local friends, too!

In all honesty, it has been hard for me personally to see the end of demolition. I thought we’d be doing it forever and ever and never move on to construction. We’re still not there yet, but after this weekend’s demo party (and previous work done in February), I think I’m beginning to see the light. There’s a ton of changes, so take a look!

Let’s start at the top. Here’s a ceiling in progress of being taken down.

Center rooms ceiling coming down.

And here’s how it looks now.

Cleaned up center room.

You can see that we still need to the rafters in this picture, but by the end of the weekend, the rafters were exposed. Still have that massive air unit hanging from the ceiling, though – going to be a challenging job to get that beast out. There’s also the giant York air compressor, which will have to be disassembled entirely before removal.

Anybody want a 2-ton air compressor?

Next we have the dropped-ceiling in the SW corner room. Previously, the ceiling tiles were removed, exposing a bunch of nasty old brown insulation, 2×4 cross-pieces, and oddly enough, a bunch of tongue-and-groove panels that must have been repurposed from elsewhere in the building (and we’ll repurpose them again!).

Heath and our friend Scott nearly single-handedly removing the dropped ceiling. The brown insulation dust clouds were awful, and filled that whole side of the building.

These bags are all filled with old insulation. UGH!

Oddest find of the demolition this weekend? A butter knife in the ceiling. I forgot to snap a photo of it. But when Scott and Heath were taking down the ceiling and insulation, a silver butter knife fell out! I’d love to hear the story about how that got up there!

We still have some of the lower ceiling structure that needs to come down (the lighter beams on the bottom in the picture below), but above them is the original structure from the original second-story construction in the mid-1800’s! The beams are beautiful and larger than the rest of the ones found in the roof structure (the other 2/3rds of the second story was constructed later than the west side). Forgive my lack of technical terms, but look at those lovely criss-cross structures! So exciting.

We’re hoping we can leave some of the beams exposed.

Exposed beams, you say?

Next, we have the changes in the north-east corner of the building. All of the walls in the bathroom above the front stairwell have been completely removed.

No more walls protecting the stairwell – watch out!

Only thing left are sewage pipes, which will need to be removed and/or repositioned.

Lunch Break!

Unfortunately, there was rather extensive termite damage in the bathroom areas, so we won’t be able to save all of the flooring in this area. That’s okay, though – we’ll probably be doing some tile in the bathrooms and kitchens.

Termite Damage in former bathroom.

Next we have this wall in the front third of the building, near the stairwell on Main Street. I don’t know why I don’t have a decent “after” photo, but it is GONE! Here’s some photos of demo in-progress.

View from the NE corner of the building – no more walls on the right foreground, and Tony and Mike are headed towards the last bit of wall to be taken down.

Tony poses with the wall before he destroys it. Mike does not look amused (just tired – we worked them hard).

After the wall came entirely down, we found something really unique, that I don’t think we’ll be able to uncover any where else in the project: hand-stenciled designs painted directly on old plaster.

Design painted on plaster, hidden behind a wall for 100 years.

Less clear design painted on plaster.

We’re not quite sure why one side is faded, and the other much brighter. Obviously, the pattern probably continued along the wall, but layers of paint and wall paper on the plaster will make it impossible to uncover more. Hopefully we can find a way to leave these interesting sections exposed.

Speaking of wall paper, we found even more of it. I’ve already sent the best samples off to a framer to have them matted and mounted.

Even more wall paper: a brown leafy design, then a brown and red floral border, and underneath and reddish brown pattern.

We also made a realization that not all of the brick is the same. To recap – the first level of the Zeiss Building was built in 1850. Sometime in the 1850’s a second story was built above only the west third of the building. We know that sometime before 1885 (we have a fire map of that date), the second story was added to the other two thirds of the building. For the west (first) side of the second story that was built, the bricks used are very crumbly and dry, and will simply come off in your hand. We uncovered a brick in the rear stairwell (part of the original) that had a stamp on it.

Brick with stamp reading SEL RE CAN

Unfortunately, we can only read one section of the three lines:

SEL

 RE

CAN

So, some research will need to be done there.

The rest of the brick in the upper level is different – not dry and crumbly, and a darker, less rich color of red. Supposedly one of these two kinds of brick is local Brenham-made brick, and the other is a brick imported from England, that was originally part of a ship’s ballast. Again, something I need to research more.

We also met some more of our neighbors, one of which told us that an elderly family member tells lots of stories of gambling going on in the saloon and/or Elks Lodge that was located on the second story.

For our demo party, we ordered up another 30 yard dumpster, knowing we would fill it. The company messed up the order, and gave us only a 20 yard dumpster, which we filled really quickly.

Full dumpster seen out the window on the left, and stack of more debris that didn’t make it in on the right.

I’m still waiting to hear back from them regarding pick up, and to confirm that they know they delivered the wrong size, and will only be charging us for the smaller dumpster. We didn’t see it being delivered this time, and they are closed on weekends, so we couldn’t have them fix their mistake. Oh well, next time. Because we still have a lot that needs to go:

Debris waiting for an empty dumpster, and ladders positioned to take down more ceiling.

Dry wall that needs to go into the dumpster, and wood to be sorted for reuse.

Random stack of flagpole bases found.

A still life: Afternoon light drifts over a table that Heath constructed for folks to eat at and dump keys on, etc. A broom, which has just finished sweeping up masses of nasty brown insulation, leans on the table.

 Normally when we are working on the building, my primary job is watching the kiddos (mine and anyone else who brings theirs), running errands and supplies, and cooking and/or delivering meals (and cleaning up after said meals). Occasionally when someone needs a break, or there’s a spare teenager, I get to head up to Zeiss Lofts to help out. This weekend, my job was pulling nails. Lots and lots and lots of nails. We have a ton of wood of all sizes that we want to reuse in the project. The wood has been pulled down from all manner of structures, and generally has at least a few nails hanging out of it. Our pile of “lumber to have nails pulled from it” had been growing steadily, so myself and several other workers were assigned to nail-pulling.

Say hello to my little friend. I love this tool for nail-pulling. That, and a good hammer.

We managed to completely clear a huge pile of usable lumber of nails, and sort it for reuse while the rest of the demolition was going on. Yay!

My husband Heath and I have to take a moment to thank a very special family, the Tavary’s. Either they like us very much, or are very bored, because nearly every weekend, for at least a few hours or more, we’ve had at least one Tavary family member come up to the lofts and help us out. Tony and Heather and their five children have not only helped with demolition, but they’ve also contributed to meals, helped baby-sit smaller children, and even run errands. We met this lovely family through our eldest’s son’s participation in youth football this summer.

Tony and Heather Tavary – our newest and coolest friends here in Brenham, and not just because they’ve been helping us out with the Zeiss Lofts Project.

Thank you sooooo much, Tony, Heather, Brittney, Jordan, Andy, Joey, and Patrick! Us Westfields owe you BIG time!

And last, but not least, announcing our next demolition weekend on April 16th and 17th! Please come join us – no skills needed, just bring a pair of work gloves or gardening gloves that fit you. We’ll feed you, beer you, wine you, and entertain you. We’ll even give you free lodging at our place, should you need it. Need an invitation? Check your Facebook Events page, or drop us a line. We’d love to see you!