For some weeks I've been working on my younger brother & sister-in-law's roughly 40-year-old townhouse, in Fairfax County, Virginia, just outside the infamous Washington Beltway. The windows in the place, which they moved into just last year, were essentially inoperable, and replacing them is one thing I've got underway; but the main job, a good deal less straightforward in execution, is a full kitchen remodel. At right here (click for full-size) is an overhead view from a
Sketchup model of the kitchen as it was when we began — unchanged, in essentials, since the house was built. Through-traffic, working traffic, standing around for conversation, having a meal: all end up in conflict, crossing paths in the middle of the room. And there's no good stretch of counter space. A pretty bad setup, in short.
So here, correspondingly, is the kitchen we're working on realizing, a complete reconfiguration. Sketchup (free software, my gosh) is the tool I started the thinking with, concept & rough modeling; no paper or pencil involved. And on a job this size, Sketchup is entirely sufficient — fully
efficient in fact — for the whole drawing process. Appliances, fixtures, those yellow bar stools: all lifted from the Sketchup 'warehouse,' a library of free, downloadable 3D models. Almost too easy. — Due thanks, here, to the Google people.
Work began with demolition of everything down to framing — and a good bit of wall framing, to boot. Even the ceiling drywall wasn't worth saving, since we had a fair amount of new electrical going in, and a support to suspend from up inside the ceiling for the cabinets that would go over what we're calling the 'island'. After we'd gotten this start (and filled the dining room with my tools & the living room with cabinets, rendering the whole first floor a work zone, & a barely navigable one at that), though, we stopped and did a bit more design. We hadn't planned, at the outset, to do anything to the main doorway, the doorway to the hall that leads from the house entry; but with work already under way, we reconsidered this & decided to widen the door radically, to gain some additional feeling of openness overall and to let the basement stair & the kitchen communicate light & sound a bit — as seen in plan, above, & in the eye-level view here.
The doorway wall is the wall that bears floor weight mid-way (roughly) between front & back of the house. We'd already had to get our planned altered opening for the new fridge niche approved for permit, and this more drastic alteration required getting a further approval. Ended up doing a couple of extra drawings — the old-fashion way, t-square & triangles — to answer the county reviewer's concerns. At left, one of these drawings, an
isometric showing the direct relation of the first-floor & the basement-level bearing walls, to demonstrate that nothing would need to be changed in the basement. This drawing is overkill, kind of, but helped me keep a few framing matters clear in my head & made answering questions easy enough. (And it was fun to do.)
To redo this doorway wall, then, called for temporarily supporting the floor above, a little distance from the wall to front & to back. Beyond the new wall framing in foreground of the photo is the temporary wall toward house back, in the kitchen. There are two smaller temp walls opposite, toward house front, one inside the fridge niche & one in the hallway. And there's another temp wall in the basement, more or less directly under the one in the kitchen — just to be safe. (I don't think this last actually had to do much — it never felt much tightened up against the joists, once the temporary walls were taking all the load.) The temp walls are built mostly from the studs of walls already removed in earlier demo.
Like a lot of aging houses built in the manner we're accustomed to in North America, this one sags considerably from outer walls to middle, in both directions, length & width. (Seems a little odd to me that this house slopes to middle as much as it does, though, since it's a townhouse, the spans aren't great, and the load goes straight down to concrete. I imagine there's nothing but dirt under the slab, at center — but even so, it's only 21 feet wide.) I can't do anything about the overall sag, of course, but with my new 2x12 header in place, supported at either end but not at the point between doorway & fridge niche, it seemed like a good idea to try to counteract the tendency to curve, as the whole wall does, along its length. So I jacked it just a little, less than a 1/4", at its center, before putting in the doubled stud between the openings. (The curvature apparent in the photo isn't in the wood, by the way — that's all lens distortion.) Note that the bottle jack is set up to bear on either side of the doorway in the basement below it.
One of the tricks at this point is to try to secure that new doorway knee-wall against wobbling whenever someone bumps into it. It's not enough to nail it down to whatever it sits on, even if what it sits on is pretty solid with framing members under the plywood. What one wants is to get some vertical member from the knee-wall down through the floor and tied in — bolted — into floor &/or wall framing underneath. I didn't show it in the isometric drawing for proposed framing, above, but I knew roughly what I needed here. In the photo you can see, in part, the way it got worked out: one stud turned 'flat' (long side, instead of short, in parallel with the drywall) and run down through the subfloor. That's less, though, for rigidity than I'd have preferred to get in the framing, since it's the stud's short rather than its long cross-sectional dimension that's in line with the force to be resisted, if someone walks into or otherwise puts bending force on the knee-wall. But the room available underneath the subfloor for bringing framing down, and tying it in, turns out to be scant in that location. In the end I compensated a bit for less-than-ideal framing by using the drywall — gluing up heavily & then pushing the drywall firm to the subfloor, while holding the wall plumb, & then screwing it with about three times the usual number of screws. I hate to depend on drywall to help hold anything in place, but it's working alright in this case. The knee-wall's got a very satisfying stiffness.
An inch-&-a-half sandwich of plywood set on 2x6s in the wall at one end, and glued & screwed into a shallow rabbet in the 3/4" piece hung in the joists above at the other, serves as a pretty solid spine for the cabinets that will go over the 'island.' There's drywall on that wall now, and just tonight we set up the counter-top on sawhorses and hung a cabinet in place, to do a position test with my sister-in-law. (She wants to be sure she can see out the window without having to duck her head, when there are little ones playing in the yard.) This structure's looking like it'll work nicely — those upper cabinets should feel as solid as if they were mounted to a wall.
Labels: housecraft
