Pre-existing house corner—photo by William E Evans©2011

Picking up where last we left the saga of the 50s house transformed, having received a quote for the addition/renovation, I trudged back up to the attic the following Saturday morning and pouted, coffee mug in hand. I sat at my drafting table, pausing only to stare out the small dormer window at the lake—nice view, that—and sigh.

Car Talk was still on NPR Saturday mornings, so the Magliozzi brothers kept me company, followed by Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me! Any distraction was welcome. The truth of the matter was there was no way we wanted that large a mortgage. I may be dumb, but I’m not stupid, as Nietzsche used to say.

Learning of Light, published last March, hinted at the story. November 17th’s blog, Summer Home, began the eight year saga.

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So the first thing needing to go on a diet was the rebuilt attic, nice as it would have been, and the hot tub deck. Sigh. As I get older, losing the hot tub means more than it did, and nothing to do with hot tub parties. Though the deck itself, screened for privacy side to side by the attic and the clerestory monitor, with the open views toward the lake and back at the yard, the deck would have been sweet, and none of the neighbors would be shocked.

Next to discard was the expanded ground level living room with overlooking reading alcove by the front door. Nice show piece, but we needed nothing that large. Instead, bumping out the existing room five feet, to extend the kitchen and take over the former living room with a new dining area would fit an informal lifestyle. I didn’t want to push further toward the lake, to avoid overshadowing the downstairs family room.

Only the living room would be a totally new room, that and a smaller attic-level office loft, with the clerestory. Taller than before, to accommodate the office loft, the new wing was vaguely reminiscent of the previous design. Pulling the office free from the outside wall made it a loft, past which winter sunlight could be bounced into the living room below—from the high clerestory on the opposite wall.

Though if there were no functional space at ground level beneath the living room, what then? Reluctantly, I decided we’d make a screen porch down there, wondering whether it would ever get used.

Borrowing from the earlier downstairs living room design, I dropped the porch level two feet to give the porch more height—enough for a ceiling fan without decapitating our friends—and bringing it closer to the water. It needed to be more that an unused void space, nice enough to spend time in.

Like the weekend after the hurricane roared past on the coast, sad that we weren’t heading to the Outer Banks as planned. Still, sitting there enjoying the cool breeze, watching boats coming into the cove, was hardly a sacrifice.

In terms of priority, when guests come over, it’s the breakfast bar at the end of the kitchen that’s the primary social space. But early evenings returning from a slow boat cruise on the lake, the porch is where we land; some nights we never leave until bed.

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I was also reluctant to build the bridge from beside the carport, fearing how it would look cutting across the front yard. So I toyed with adding a hallway leading past the bedrooms. For sure, it would be an interesting touch with art work, but we’d lose the bedroom windows in the process, so the bridge stayed. The bridge wouldn’t be cheap, but who wants to go down a flight of stairs to go up another coming home after work every night?

And the memory of carrying my sister in her wheelchair up to the back porch, with no other way to bring her inside, kept playing in my mind.

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was civil rights legislation, meant to liberate the disabled from some part of what separated them from the rest of society. Instead of incorporating its regulations into the nation’s building codes, the law created, intentionally or not, a new bureaucracy accompanied by new careers in law.

A hundred years from now, if humanity survives, our descendants will look back at this primitive age—before AI-controlled artificial limbs, sight and hearing became ubiquitous—and shake their heads at the makeshift ways we lived. And if they recreate the present-day conditions, charmed by the ‘old fashioned traditions,’ I’ll return as a ghost to haunt them.

Working Drawings

Somewhere toward the middle of preparing the working drawings, our contractor, a neighbor from up the street who is all about modern house design, said we might save a chunk of money if we did the entire addition in wood instead of the steel frame I’d planned to use.

I was concerned about how all this construction was going to happen on a site fifteen feet below the road, with no access for heavy equipment. And because I was after floor to floor glass, steel would be easier to detail. But Gabe estimated saving $50K by using wood—enough to cover the cost of the bridge and then some.

So I went back to the drawing board for another four-six months; it’s all a blur now.

With the change to wood framing, I needed to consider how that might be put to use on the interior. The span running beside the existing house would require beefy members, and glu-lam beams, which can be things of beauty, were an obvious choice. I had incorporated glu-lams in several projects, the C. Burr Artz Library in Frederick, as well as the Germantown Library, both in Maryland, Germantown being the most successful up to that point.

There was also the questionable soil that lay closer to the lake. Nice and flat like a table—and suspiciously unnatural in a neighborhood of rolling hills. Had to be fill, and if it was, it wasn’t buildable. I spent several Saturdays walking the exterior, studying the ground level masonry walls, looking for settlement issues—running cracks in the masonry—but not finding any. Seemed solid. The house sat high to the lake—six feet by the site survey. With no cracks in 50 years, it seemed the footings were on virgin soil. What lay beyond didn’t seem so virginal. This is the sort of thing you like to be clear on before getting started.

So bright one morning, the four person geotechnical crew arrived to take soil samples, another expense not normally associated with residential construction. But one learns to be a sceptic when it comes to construction. I’m a believer in Murphy’s Law. The crew hand-augered down some eight or nine feet—all was fill, mixed with organics and very wet—one foot down they hit water, matching perfectly the lake level just beyond.

Murphy was right again.

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Sometime in the house’s fifty-plus year existence, the owners had taken to expand their backyard. Best guess would be after Hurricane Agnes in 1972. The storm’s heavy flooding had cut away the dam’s earthen shoulder draining entire the lake, leaving a giant mud hole.

Lake folklore had it that during the several years the lake remained empty, homeowners had dredged lake bottom for fill—organics know mostly as muck. Organics are great if you want a garden; just don’t go planting footings in it.

However, if I excavated nine feet of fill, I’d have a basement—or an indoor swimming pool. I passed on the swimming pool and began researching other foundation systems. I needed a system that could pass through the layer of fill, and it needed to be one that didn’t require a big site rig. Helical piers!

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“In Richmond, four people drowned after their car plunged into the swollen James River. A train bound for Washington D.C. stopped due to flooding in Richmond, which temporarily stranded 537 passengers. The Peak Creek in western Virginia overflowed its banks, flooding a low-income housing area of Pulaski with water up to rooftops. At the height of the flooding, over 600 miles (970 km) of highways were submerged, resulting in $14.8 million in damage to roads in the state. Severe damage also occurred to sewer and water facilities, totaling to $34.5 million. 95 houses were destroyed and 4,393 others were damaged, while 125 mobile homes were destroyed and another were significantly affected. Additionally, 205 small businesses were either damaged or destroyed. The Interstate 95 (I-95) Purple Heart Bridge over northern Virginia's Occoquan River was severely damaged and closed when rammed by a large barge carried by floodwaters.
“In the Washington DC suburbs, the Alexandria reservoir Lake Barcroft emptied when its dam was undermined and breached. [emphasis added] Overall, flooding was described as ‘the worst in 50 years.’ In Virginia alone, 13 fatalities and $125.9 million in losses were reported.”
from the Wikipedia article on Hurricane Agnes

The dam itself wasn’t ‘undermined and breached.’ It was an earthen shoulder that gave way. The massive concrete and stone structure was still standing though the lake behind it was gone. I should correct the Wikipedia entry.

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I was referred to a local structural engineer who did residential work. I told him I needed help with designing the foundations, sizing the glu-lams and their connections, and detailing shear walls in wood to replace the steel moment frames.

“Not a problem,” so I got a quote; he emailed info on Hilti shear wall frames, and I thought I was off and running. Then he went silent. Completely. It was so weird, I wasn’t sure if he’d had a tragedy, or had been captured by pirates. No email responses, no phone messages, nada. I’d never been left in the lurch by another professional.

Checking with another structural engineer I regularly worked with, he said he didn’t do residential work. I’d worked with several others, but none I wanted for a project this small—and complicated. At that point, I’d known Randy Haist mostly by reputation for the work he’d done for other architects in the office. I was working with another engineer in his office on the Olney Library, about to become my third library using glu-lams—so I called Randy.

When I told him I wanted to use the Hilti shear wall system, Randy said it wouldn’t be strong enough for an addition that was over three stories tall. I’d need reinforced masonry. I was already regretting losing the steel frame.

Parenthetically, years later, the only reason I attempted the cantilevered structure for Silver Spring Library was the confidence gained from working with Randy on our own home. Different scale, obviously, but the same focused attention to details.

A steel frame can provide welded connections strong enough on its own to resist wind shear, avoiding the need for steel angles and plates with lots of thru-bolts and lag screws to join the main glu-lam beams to walls and columns. Putting an addition alongside an existing house with no clear knowledge of how well it was built until you begin opening walls means a totally separate structural frame—into soil not more than a foot above the water table…

A simple rectangular house with one window set in the middle of each wall will get the job done, providing you use better than vinyl siding and green wood for the walls. But the vaunted design architect—moi—wanted glass for the view. Otherwise why bother?

“You’ll need at minimum four foot of reinforced masonry at the corners.”

I tried looking on the bright side—there’d be less glass to pay for.

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Shear can be thought of several ways—this was wind shear, or how high winds can create negative and positive pressures, especially at building corners, one side being pressed inward and the other side being yanked away at the same time. Like twisting a pretzel. So if you locate glass walls too close to a corner, or turn the corner itself in glass the way Frank Lloyd Wright liked to do, you can end up with not enough structure left to resist the wind shear.

Coupled with the fact building codes have been steadily increasing the ‘design wind speed,’ meaning that which must be resisted by the structure. Hurricanes have a way of encouraging higher design wind speeds. Building codes aren’t making a comment on global warming, just trying to keep buildings from being destroyed.

It’s no more than empiricism, learned the hard way. Like after the Roman Empire, when those Christians needed more churches, only none could build a decent arch in stone. Still earlier:

Memo to staff: when the Dear Leader’s pyramid falls down, change the angle of repose or the pharaoh will have nowhere to sleep for eternity.

At Clemson, Dr. Coolege preached about the angle of repose in architectural history. What other reason could explain that ugly Bent Pyramid? I for one wouldn’t be caught dead—get it?—in a bent pyramid. We’re talking about stones lacking enough friction (ie shear strength) to resist sliding.

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Having only done a couple house designs, I knew but the basics of residential construction. But boy, did I know about bad soils, going back to a school addition in Dumfries—and even further back when the elevator shaft I was assigned to design had to be sited at the surface so it could be drilled a hundred feet vertically alongside the new Metro station whose vault was already being installed—preferably without collapsing the vault. Ever been in an excavated space large enough for full-size earthmovers moving in both directions?

Helical piers are an engineer’s best solution when you think it’s a bad idea to dig out nine feet of fill scant feet from a large body of water, only to watch it flood your hole. You can’t pump an entire lake and the neighbors might well complain.

When Gabe’s crew begin digging, they got about a foot down before the lake began to rebalance itself right there before our eyes. Previously, the helical-pier crew sized like an NFL defensive line had stood there, some five or six hefty dudes, holding one hell of a torque machine driving a helical point, drilling through the fill until it chewed (so I prayed like an alter boy ) deeply into virgin soil.

Virgin soil doesn’t mean no fooling around hasn’t been done, so to speak. Only that it’s been there a while and is less likely to settle. We in the construction industry strongly endorse empirical rules: if those other pyramids hadn’t collapsed, our pharaoh will be happy in his new digs, so to speak.

Once all 29 steel helical piers were drilled, Gabe’s crew began building formwork for the grade beams, laid into water. Most house footings are a concrete rectangle of 1 by 2 feet, with some bottom re-bar, poured directly on neatly cut virgin soil set sufficiently below the ground to protect against frost heave. These 2 by 2 foot grade beams and pile caps with re-bar top and bottom and stirrup cages were to span between the helical piers, so the entire load of the addition would be carried into the good soil below via the friction between pile and native ground.

In future days, when they’ll want to restore this place because D is so famous, they’ll need to start down in the muck to jack it up, but I’ll bet NTFs to whatever comes after, those grade beams will still be there.

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Another word about grade beams: most houses don’t have them; they have footings. Footings have been laid by string lines on dirt since back in the day when they laid masonry walls straight on dirt. As in those 18th century houses in Old Town Alexandria.

A friend I’d met running had left a job at a local design-build firm. He’d gone solo, gone bare, with every sincerity to provide for his family. He’d signed a contract with a family to build an addition to one of these old houses. I’d be replacing the architectural firm he’d been working with, for reasons I can’t remember. He was in need, even if he didn’t explain all the details.

So I studied their framing details, then visited the site to put eyes on the place. When I saw that old Alexandria townhouse masonry going down about a foot below grade, I said a prayer; there were no footings. The young architect had shown the addition being added to the rear of the house using a single ledger board.

Essentially, she’d expected to load half the new addition onto the existing masonry—with no footing beneath it. Evidently, no one more senior had ever reviewed her plans. I didn’t know the firm personally, but I saved them a lawsuit.

The townhouse is still there. It has survived longer than I’ve been alive.

Underpinning the original masonry was an expensive option that my buddy couldn’t afford (he’d signed a fixed fee contract.) Instead, I laid out new footings perpendicular to the ‘historic’ townhouse—a poor workingman’s first lodging that probably now sells for something north of a small country’s yearly budget—so it could continue resisting gravity.

I presented a nicely rendered rear elevation to the Alexandria Board of Architectural Review, some of whom sniffed, querying the two globe lights facing the alley. What? Pastels and pen on board didn’t do it for them?

My running buddy ran out of cash and turned the project over to his framing sub. I never got paid, but felt at least I’d kept him from being sued. And I kept the pastel and pen rendering.

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So what the hell is a glu-lam?

Back in the day—going way back, when men were men and the sheep ran scared—the trees in North America still grew straight to heaven, those good studs would march in a line to the forest, pick out the biggest fir growing straight and á voila a sturdy column! Then whack the next one.

When the old growth forests were gone the way of the soil depleted from cotton in much a similar disregard, what to do? I hear they’re cleaning out mahogany from Malaysia these days.

Now we mainly have forests farmed by Weyerhaeuser where they don’t grow so tall nor so long, so someone invented the glu-lam. Inch and a half slices of wood, glued and pressed and presented at whatever length you might want for a church or a library. Those beauties can span a space.

Technically speaking, the inch and a half slices are cut so the wood strands are running the length of the slices, making them better in tension (aka ‘shear’) so they won’t sag. Or fail. The technical term for structural failure is when the member in question loses its shape, which is definitely a bad thing.

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Seriously: how do you build anything fifteen feet sunk below the road with no other access and inside the zone of a regulated water, because it got regulated decades after the original place had been built? Cranes reaching across a hundred feet from the road would be great, as would material lifts and helicopters, but Bezos didn’t live here. I kid the boy; he got to fly into space and I didn’t.

The first thing to know about working with a builder is the good ones are hard to find. If you spend much time with Gabe Nassar, you’d be convinced he was, to use the term, ‘difficult, but then he’s been known to say the same about some architects. We had our disagreements—including one shouting match—but when it came time for the second project, renovating the rest of the interior, D and I turned again to Gabe.

Gabe talked in terms I knew he wanted to build. And he hires his crews on the same theme—to build. I figured if anyone was going to build on this beast of a site, it would be he and his crew.

When the flatbed delivered the first load of glu-lams from Tennessee, I was sure it would never get done. Didn’t even want to look at those monsters. The longest being some twenty feet of a five by twenty-four inch weighing close to a car.

The least I could say was ‘shut my mouth’ as I watched Gabe’s crew bring them in, lift them by rope pulleys into position, one story after another, muscling them into place.

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The huskies, Mojo and Maddie, were bewildered. Molly the rottweiler was still with us. Once the addition had been enclosed and the crew broke through to join up the house, our living space shrunk to two chairs and a box just past the remaining kitchen. All three dogs curled up around us, none complaining. This was how we lived through the remaining project, except for the time Molly decided Sean, standing just beyond the window now enclosed by the further addition, was an alien. Molly never trusted what she couldn’t smell. Then that other time the mechanical contractor didn’t see Molly taking in the sun on the back porch; he escaped.

Though those good times still lay ahead of us. I was just happy to see the foundation walls going up with a ground floor slab poured.

In the foreground are five of installed the helical piers and just beyond is the original house’s front door.

Excavation for grade beams—photo by William E Evans©2011

The pale blue hose was pumping the water out, and the old metal conduit ran somewhere we never figured out. The cluster of four gorgeous helical pier tops awaiting their concrete pile caps are in the middle with blue tarps to keep the remaining soil from collapsing into muck.