100 yr old walls exposed | How framing has changed

hey folks welcome to our Main Street Bryson City project house this is a little side job that I'm taking care of and I'm going to show you some really cool differences between old framing and when I say old I mean a hundred years ago versus modern framing so let's take a look [Music] so this really cool old house is built in 1902 during the deconstruction process we found signatures of the original homeowners we use the county records in photographs to identify the time period when it was built we narrowed it down to 1902 currently it's 2020 so that makes the house well it's really old look who cares okay listen let's check out the techniques that they use back then and compare it to the techniques that we use now [Music] so any modern structural engineer type person would walk in here and flip out because of all the things that are like missing structurally right but somehow this thing is stood the test of time has been here more than 100 years and we're just fixing it up so it'll last another hundred hopefully first thing I want you to see is that this house is balloon framed and what that means is that the studs go all the way from the first floor all the way to the roof even through the second floor in modern construction you build the wall system eight feet high or nine feet you build a floor system on top and then you build your upper walls okay they didn't do that back then they just built it from bottom to top and one shot now to support the floor system in the middle of the house they installed this ledger you can see that it is a 1 by 4 and it's notched into the stud this is a full 2x4 stud I mean 2 by 4 that's it it really measures that it's big believe it or not these 2 by 6 floor joists were bearing only on this 1 by 4 ledger and it stood the test of time for a hundred years so this house was made up of lots of small rooms with low ceilings and no large spans over any of the openings simply because it would have been more difficult to get lumber that would make those fans happen without sagging in modern times it's no problem to do a large span with one of these engineered lvl beams you can see right here behind me that we have a large span supporting a ceiling and a roof load with no problem I bet you the old carpenters were like no way we're not spanning more than four feet here next let's talk about the rafters every rafter in this house was made of two by fours and you could see that over time they had sagged almost an inch or two inches in the middle of each span so we use these two by eights yellow pine two sister against each of the two by fours that allows us to push up and take the sag out of the roof and get a depth of insulation for spray foam now looks all pretty now that it's done with 2x8 screwed to every piece of 2x4 in this roof but actually it was a very difficult process taking many days for meat up on a scaffold we would take the rafter and screw it in at the bottom edge and then push up even as hard as I could push you couldn't push the bow out of the roof so we took a giant timber lock a six inch screw we drilled it through at a very shallow angle upward and then drive it in till your drill starts smoking and hoping that it pulls up enough and hits the top of the roof decking making the roof flat next let's look at the building envelope of this house that's a big topic these days energy efficiency vapor barriers moisture barriers insulation well I can tell you back in 1902 they put studs up and then they nailed this yellow pine siding right to the studs no sheathing no vapor barrier no nothing in insulation you can forget about that there were like insulation what they never heard of that they didn't know what it was now somehow this held up over time and is still here today but I can assure you it was probably cold in here in the winter time judging by the two or three coal burning fireplaces that they had in this house and believe me everything in this house was covered with black coal dust including me every day that I work here so to keep the house from racking they installed these angle braces in every corner that would keep the house standing up vertical as much as I hate to see the old siding go we are going to tear it all off and replace it with this half inch OSB followed by builders wrapped new windows spray foam insulation making it completely modernized with a new building envelope believe me folks many people have said just bulldoze that thing and get rid of it so you could build a new house here well that would have been fun and all but I don't want to do that because there's something about the character of an old house that you just cannot replace man it looks pretty awesome check out this old 2x4 compared to a new 2x4 here's the difference you can see that there might be twenty to thirty growth rings within this modern 2x4 and this old growth 2x4 has more than I can count look how close together they are I guess that's the difference in timber harvested a hundred years ago compared to now hey thanks for watching today just to let you know this project will probably take me over a year to complete because I'm do it into my spare time which I don't have any of that but we'll keep you posted as soon as we see some more cool things to share with you [Music]

Channel: Perkins Builder Brothers

Views: 85,453

Keywords: house, old, frame, fix, build, remodel, cool, tips

Id: vRagmAO-yD8

Length: 5min 19sec (319 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 15 2020