Old World Construction Techniques

This house is absolutely incredible. And I'm not being sarcastic.  There are some really unique things about this house and we discover more all the time that continue to stun me.

I've only recently heard about this technique, but have never seen it.  Bill, our contractor, hasn't seen anything like it either, even in doing this type of work on these types of houses for 30 years.

The finished floor in "Katie's Room" has been removed.  Somewhere along the line the finished floor suffered some serious water damage and was not salvageable.  Under that is the sub-floor you see pictured.

One of the sub-floor boards has been removed to reveal a 4-inch layer of what appears to be a dry mix mortar made of of stones and hard packed sand with some sort of binder.  Then there's another sub-floor on top of the joists.

Apparently this was used as mass to attenuate sound between the floors of the building.  I've heard this was common in old European construction, but haven't heard of it being used here in the US.

If you look closely at the picture, to the left of the hammer and running horizontally under where the missing floor board used to be, you can see the old pipe for the gas lights that were original to the house.

More Laundry Room

Well, it's a good thing I never got around to repainting the laundry room.  As part of installing the new stack some new holes have appeared in the laundry room walls...

This is a good attic-to-basement chase for various mechanical items.  I'm sure it won't be the last time we need to run stuff vertically throughout the house so we'll fix the holes after the dust settles.  Then we can re-paint the room, install cabinets, etc.

It's all about priorities...

What's a Stack?

After the last post Marie asked, "What's a 'stack'?"

It's the big black pipe in the picture.  This one is cast iron, but they are often plastic in modern houses (see second photo).  From here it goes up into the attic and out through the roof to let the sewer gas escape.  That's why it is sometimes called a "stink pipe".

The toilet drain connects to it just below the floor level.  So from here the dirty toilet water goes down the pipe into the basement to the city sewer.

One of our new stacks is pictured in the second photo.  This one can't go straight up through the roof because that would place it too close to the attic bathroom window.  You don't want the "stink" getting back into the house...

At the very bottom of the picture feeding into the main pipe are the drains from the toilet and shower.moving upwards: on the right is the drain from the wet bar (long pipe running away from the camera on the right side of the picture) and the left is the drain from the bathroom sink.  At the top left is the bathroom sink vent which joins into the main vent running off the top right.

The third photo shows a similar arrangement from the old master bath.  The main vent stack from the first photo can be seen on the far left.  The rest of these pipes are old galvanized pipes: up from the kitchen at the left; sink's drain and vent in the center; tub's vent on the right.