At the back of the house we have an addition that was built sometime in the 1970’s. We call this room the “staging area”, but eventually it will be a library/entertainment room and a small laundry/utility room. The room is a nice, useful size but had some problems:

  1. The north wall is about 20 feet long and had 3 inches of dirt piled up against it for at least 15 years. This dirt rotted out the bottom plate and some of the studs and there were enough studs damaged that I decided to take down and rebuild the whole wall.
  2. This wall had a small, useless little porch on it that measured about 8 feet by 3 feet. This porch was a waste of space, so since I was rebuilding the wall anyway I elected to enclose the porch and use the space for what will be the library.
  3. The old north wall has a standard 32″ door in it, but to let more light into the room I wanted to put a 6 foot French door in.
  4. Finally, the entire staging area did not have any plywood sheathing on the walls. The builder cheaped out a bit and nailed the current plank siding directly to the studs. This was drafty and hard to insulate, so I’m going to put plywood sheathing on this wall, and will sheath the other walls of the room at a later date.

Here’s what the wall and porch looked like from the outside:

The inside is a little cluttered and hard to see, but as a reference point you can see the porch door that leads onto the small porch. The new framing on the right is the wall between the library and the laundry room:

And here you can see the rotten bottom plate and studs:

I knew I couldn’t get this whole project done in a weekend, so I took 4 days off work. Combined with the weekend this would give me 6 days to finish it, and it turns out I needed almost every second of that time.

Cue the Destruction

To start removing the old wall it seemed reasonable to start with the weird little interior door that somebody had repurposed to be an exterior door (the hinges on this door were on the outside, so besides being rotten it also wasn’t particularly secure.) Don’t ask me why they had two different doors opening onto such a small porch…the answer to that question is lost to history:

Starting to pull off the siding. The siding was in surprisingly good shape considering it was 50 year old hardboard (kind of like a thicker version of what they now use to make pegboard.) 

Most of the siding and old felt paper is now gone, and you can see the rotten bottom plate better. Ouch…

To enclose the porch I needed to remove the old siding on this small portion of the house itself. This was sawn wood planks, and was probably put on in the 1950’s. Apparently the house was blue at some point…

Under the old siding was this thicker wood which served as sheathing. Not exactly draft-resistant, and although I thought about saving it for some other project it was too dry and damaged to use:

After all the siding, “sheathing”, and miscellaneous junk was out of the way I temporarily supported the roof trusses with 2×4’s. The trusses on the right side were already supported by the recessed porch wall, which is why I waited to remove that wall until last. This took the entire first day, but I was happy with the progress.

Putting It Back Together

On the second day I was ready to start putting the new framing in. The sky had some ominous dark clouds coming in so I wanted to get the wall done as soon as possible, but it was very hot out (about 96 degrees) and I was working slower than was ideal.

The new bottom plate and some of the studs are cut and nailed in place:

By the end of the day I had the rest of the framing in place and the new French doors installed. It had sprinkled rain for about 30 minutes shortly after about 3PM, but there wasn’t enough rain to damage anything. I nailed a tarp over the open framing and I called it a day:

Now that the roof was fully supported the third day was time to remove that awkward leftover recessed wall and do a little cleanup of the ever-expanding pile of old wood and rusty nails.

The old wall came down fairly easily and without incident. The room is still a little cluttered, but you can see what the opened-up space looks like. There is a noticeable increase in light and the room feels much larger:

After moving the pile of junk leftover from the destruction I went to bed, and on the fourth day I nailed up the plywood sheathing. Moving the 4’x8′ sheets of plywood around by myself wasn’t a lot of fun, and the stiff breeze that was blowing that day added a little frustration to the process, but I finally got them all cut and nailed up. It was finally starting to look like a wall:

A little spray foam insulation around the door frame and the door lock set is installed…almost done:

The final touch: a hastily stapled covering of Tyvek housewrap. I didn’t have time to cut it away from the door, but I’ll do that next time I go down. 

Before I left for home I measured and calculated the square footage of siding I will need for the whole house. I’ll put that on order in the next few days, and although I suspect it will take about 4 weeks for me to get the order the Tyvek will keep the plywood protected until I can get the siding installed. The entire house needs to have new sheathing and siding installed (not to mention new windows), so I’ll start with this wall and work my way around the rest of the house as I have time. I’ll call this part of the project