I Hate Hurricanes

Say hello to the ocean—photo by William E. Evans, ©2010

When I was a kid, I became fascinated watching houses going up nearby. Barry and I would scavenge wood scraps hoping to assemble enough to build something—a tree house if we were lucky. Intermittently, I created a small navy from 2x4 sections meant to resemble WWII battleships with 16 penny nails for the main guns.

But a great deal of time was spent wandering houses still being framed—after hours when we’d not be chased off. Barry had an older brother, and of course, his father, both who knew something about construction. They’d built a porch on the back. So witnessing that, I figured men built stuff. They also fished and hunted, but living in a house full of women who kept no guns—and with no one to teach me, hunting wasn’t a tradition I took to.

Where I grew up, few had basements, and quite a lot of homes were with slabs on grade, so the ants and other friendly insects had an easier time. Our own house had a crawl space, another fairly common technique down south. It was clad in brick—probably at my mother’s insistence—being from up north in Pennsylvania where they faced real winter weather. She’d grown up in a place unlike the occasional piedmont sleet storm that turned everything sparkling white silver and brought down pine tree limbs until it looked like green grass spread everywhere with that clean pine scent. Our neighbors, the Russells, had the more traditional southern clapboard siding. Traditional because it was cheaper—and the wood was plentiful.

Our mother’s house carried a staggeringly large $13,000 mortgage from when it was built in the mid 50s—only reason I know is I have the deed.

Exploring the crawl space, I discovered several lengths of 2x10s—left there by the framing crew and too large to drag from where they lay, so I took a hand saw to them, working hunched over in the 2-foot space until I’d gotten them into more manageable lengths. Though once I’d dragged them through the small access door, there wasn’t much to be done with them except to brag how I’d removed a good home for termites—true enough.

All of this is to say I developed a scattershot education in framing techniques, the fact you always used a double sill plate at the bottom of a stud wall, and 2x8 headers over most windows because they weren’t so big. The first sill plate was spiked into the concrete slab with concrete nails, and the second was framed with the rest of the wall lying flat on the slab, with the 16 penny nails being driven in from the underside of the sill plate, so they went deep into the studs instead of being toe-nailed from the side. Once the entire wall frame was together, the crew lifted it vertical and nailed it to the first sill plate already laid out on the slab.

It was cool to watch them lay out an entire house plan with just the sill plates marking where the walls would go. It was equally cool to watch a carpenter bury the nails in the wood with two easy strokes.

Houses with crawl spaces were even more interesting: first, the concrete crew poured the footings right on the raw earth, which was astonishing to watch. Then the masons came along to lay up the masonry block walls two feet, and after hours we’d study where the capped lines for the sewer and water were positioned, and guessed where the interior walls would be. OK, I did. Barry was looking for good wood.

A week or two later, the large pile of lumber would arrive roadside. Only now, the top of the CMU knee walls had steel anchors spaced regularly so that the first sill plate had to be drilled so they could be fitted over the anchors, then bolted down. Cool.

Walking the newly laid floor joists before the plywood subfloor was laid involved a bit of risk, but not like you’d have far to fall, more like getting hung on a floor joist on the way down. But the workmen left enough scrap boards and bits of plywood you could always maneuver.

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Quite a bit has changed since the 50s in house construction, some good, some bad. General use of galvanized nails and metal fasteners to the good—and fast-growth, not well seasoned lumber to the bad. Improvements like nail guns and manlifts to the good—and inexperienced journeymen assigned master carpenter positions to the bad.

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While over the holidays down in Sanderling, I took to studying the undercarriage of the house we were renting. It’s an occupational habit, being in the throes (and throws) of developing construction drawings for a new house on the Outer Banks. My guess, the house was built thirty or more years ago. The rental’s interior was largely redone, nothing I was interested in except for jokes—New Year’s Blog. The only way the original could be dated was to study its underbelly where the car was parked. The pilings, with one exception, were original, as were most of the beams overhead, though here and there new wood had been sistered in against older wood, sistering being a selective reinforcement versus complete replacement involving scaffolds and a larger cash outlay.

How to Repair a Damaged Carrying Beam | Ask This Old House is a YouTube show that discusses repairing a badly damaged floor beam, provided for the geeks in the audience. At one point in the show, the contractor tells the owner that the joists sat on hangers like small saddles. This strategy is still used today when the beam and the joists sit in the same plane—more later.  

Note the little seats for each joist—image of Simpson Saddle Hanger

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Many years ago, I was called to the renovation of an historic building on the Naval Observatory campus in the District. A GSA inspector wanted someone from the architects’ office to look at the contractor’s installation of a new steel collar recently installed under the cupola (lantern). The cupola sat atop the rotunda, which at the time was filled with scaffolding to reach the lantern (i.e. a circular array of windows).

So, accompanied by the project’s structural engineer, I walked across the two planks from the window we entered through from the adjacent roof to reach the scaffolding, not crazy about all that open air below, to arrive at the steel ring in question just overhead. The lantern atop the dome was carried originally by a massive wooden compression ring, braced by the dome’s structural frame pressed against it on all sides—thus in compression. Wood’s pretty good used like that—provided it doesn’t rot.

The compression ring had been constructed in the 1800s by multiple curved pieces of heavy timber, layered in stacked and alternating sections all neatly doweled together to a singularly clever structural element. I’d never seen the like—and doubt I’ll see it again. Though was on its way to becoming mulch from the poorly maintained windows leaking above. The replacement steel in question, an angle of considerable size, had been installed directly beneath the wooden compression ring.

“Something looks wrong,” the structural engineer muttered to himself. So we studied the construction drawings.

Hoisted on pulleys some sixty feet in the air over the middle of the rotunda, had the steel ring been supported in turn by structure below, it might have provided a modicum of support to the lantern. As it was, it was a half ton dead weight hanging from the decaying wood compression ring. It was aiding gravity’s work to pull the whole thing down; gravity and entropy had been doing a fine enough job on their own.

A&E contracts with GSA exclude inspection services, which saves on consulting fees, but does nothing good for quality control. One could argue having the designers do inspections is akin to the hen house scenario, but A&E folks live in fear of screwing up, or should if they hope to keep their liability insurance premiums down. In this instance, the GSA inspector hadn’t a clue, assuming he’d even read the plans and actually witnessed the installation. Instead of inverting the angle and ‘sistering’ it snug around the wooded compression ring (like in the YouTube video) to relieve the load, the West Virginia contractor had creatively attached the new steel to hang from the compression ring it had been designed to reinforce.

We returned to our respective offices and very quickly wrote up findings, both cognizant of the necessity of CYA language (an oft used technical term). Bill Lecky, my then boss, just shook his head when told the story.

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Most houses on the Outer Banks are built on wood pilings drilled eight feet or more into the firmer levels below the sand, relying on friction between the wood faces and the earth to keep them from settling. Wood piles are an old method of foundation work dating from the days of cheap lumber; It remains an absolute tradition on the Outer Banks.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel in Tokyo survived that city’s 1923 earthquake. He claimed the wood piles allowed the building to move with the lateral shaking that destroyed a great deal of the city. Regardless of how, the hotel survived with relatively minor damage—Wright wasn’t known for his structural acumen so much as his bragging.

Meiji-Mura Museum recreation of Wright's Imperial Hotel entrance courtyard,—photo by en:user:Fg2

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Which brings us back around to what I was thinking about while examining the beach house we were renting, and the one I was working to create. At the Sanderling house, if the exposed bolts tying the beams to the pilings had originally been galvanized, by the time I was studying them, they’d been fairly fused to a single lump by corrosion from the salt air.

Corrosion is entropy’s revenge for building generally, and ramped up to rage so close to the ocean. You see very few metal roofs on the Outer Banks, and the owners of those need their heads examined. Just a friendly warning…

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When attaching wood with metal connectors, often the weakest link will be the connectors. Stepping back to techniques from previous generations to minimize the effects of corrosion creates its own headaches, but when a hurricane is coming up from Hatteras, it’s preferable to watching your roof sail away. So you strap everything down, from roof to foundations, and find uses for gravity where you can. Connie Wessel, an old line architect in Elizabeth City, taught me that much. Connie was a good old boy whose humor was talon sharp.

So instead of using joist hangers—where possible, one bears (rests) the joists and rafters over top of the main beams instead of keeping them in plane. The downside is that this doubles the overall depth of the structure. The upside is now, instead of joist hangers carrying the full dead weight of the structure, the wood members do the larger loadbearing work, leaving tie-down anchors to resist only the wind’s uplift and lateral pressure, and those anchors you can tuck well inside the weather envelope. Those that you can’t, are oversized and painted regularly, hoping to put off entropy a while longer.

Decks and porches on the Outer Banks have a lifespan half that of places further inland. Fresh new wood turns weather-beaten in a hurry. You can always spot last season’s storm by new decks, railings and the irregular patches of siding and shingle; big storm bigger patches, small storms fewer patches. And what goes regarding the fasteners goes double there. I’m convinced salt air has a chemical attraction to galvanized steel.  

The seafaring stories I read about as a kid always had the crews caulking and painting their ships. The story goes that the British navy caught up with Blackbeard hiding out behind Ocracoke Island whilst drinking rum and supervising careening his boat’s hull—scraping the barnacles and recaulking the joints with tar. I think his ghost still wanders those small lanes on Ocracoke after midnight.

So we get to the pièce de résistance—not the dessert, but the damn roof. Keeping a roof over your head is so basic it’s a cliché. In a hurricane, Connie used to preach, either keep your roof or lose your beach house.

Ma’am, those walls won’t be standing too long without a roof.

Bracing that assembly—holding it all together is a roof’s primary duty beyond keeping your hairdo dry, regardless of pronouns. Hence, to be blunt—as I’m not supposed to discriminate against the weaker of the species—sir, don’t buy the little lady that house trailer.

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A good friend of D’s mother, a warm and effusive person who still maintained an apartment in Cairo so she could visit regularly—sometime after we’d bought into our initial foray in Duck, came one time to visit. She must have thought she’d returned to Egypt given the mild climate. Without further discussion, she’d bought a house on the Sound that should have been condemned—not the least of which was the plexiglass ‘floor’ laid across an open-to-below gap on the second floor. The place reminded me of an oversized treehouse—I have the photos.

She looked up the builder we’d suggested she ‘might want to talk to.’ It took no real convincing to tear it down and rebuild. He built a new, compact house. She said he should finish the ‘lower level’ known by most locals as the flood zone. The clue being if you’re foolish enough to finish the ground floor, by local code you’re required to install 1x2 doggie doors around the perimeter to let the water in—to keep the waves from washing the entire house away.

Building codes follow failures, so they are a slow evolution. Hers was the hurricane that went up the Sound. Took out her brand new sound-side dock, her backyard garden and flooded where it was meant to flood, her newly decorated guest suite. The house survived minus the ‘finished’ downstairs.

Some folks want basements to keep the potatoes cool. Some pour concrete on sand because it’s cheaper than building a crawl space. Some like getting a bit higher than a few feet above flood plane, and the rest of us need to learn how.

Lesson Three: keep your roof on and wear your whalers when it floods.

So the plan is to borrow a bit from the design of our house in Fairfax. With the main living spaces riding on top for a view of the Sound, the roof can be left exposed—with fat, oversized beams and rafters, along with a structural wood deck instead of plywood. Structural steel angles and plates, thru-bolted to the walls throughout. And instead of studs, PSL (parallel-strand lumber) columns spaced closely between the window walls.  

When I die, I hope it won’t be because the roof’s done been gone. Layla agrees. When the wind rises loud as it did last night, she’s always looking for the door, while I study the glu-lam beams overhead.

All I’m saying, for all our sakes, I’m planking that beach baby’s roof like a ship—until we get the bill and I need to go back to selling fries and meat patties at Hardee’s. I don’t know the knees can take a full eight hours of that anymore, but I surely hate hurricanes.

Axonometric of 51 N. Dune Loop—image by William E. Evans, ©2022