THE ADDITION

LOTS OF DIGGING

In mid-August 2020, Kokot excavators from South Deerfield, began work on three separate projects simultaneously at 30 Arnold Road.

The smallest job was to get rid of a slab of concrete in front of my garage door and replace it with asphalt. This took half a day. (No photos posted yet)

At the same time, Kokot buried a gas tank and laid a gas line to the Generac whole-house generator outside my office. This took a day or two to construct, but a week and a half to complete due to all the coordination involved (excavator, gas company, state inspectors).

Installation and activation of the Generac and its gasline.
(January and July-August 2020)

The excavators' biggest contract was to dig out the foundation for the new Addition - a corridor-like extension to the garage, dining room and kitchen that pushes the rear wall of the house seven feet into the backyard. This was the first project at 30 Arnold Road that was not a repair or a renovation but a brand new construction.

The story of the Addition begins below

THE ADDITION

Creating a new entry from the garage into the house ... through a mud-room, then into an extension of the dining-room/piano-room that forms a corridor into an expanded kitchen.

Previously - and for the past thirty years - the door from the garage opened directly into the dining room, through which you walked to reach the kitchen. This infelicity has been bothering me ever since I first moved into the house.

Occasional visitor to the construction site this summer. She is tagged and has a radio collar and Mass. Wildlife people believe she lives around the nearby Pelham reservoir. She seems a little younger and smaller than other bears I've seen. She carefully avoids the electric fence protecting the bird feeders but likes to sniff around the building materials.

As of September 7, the "skeleton" of the floor and three walls are in place The two rafters for the roof have been measured and two are installed. The future corridor currently looks like a sun porch ... and it's brightness has put images of skylights in my head.

Looking from the future mudroom down the corridor. The three windows on the right will fit into the three openings on the left. At the end of the corridor, the sliding door to the kitchen (right) will be installed in the large opening facing. The angled plank shows how the rafters will fit into the current roof line. The plank beneath it is temporary.

To the left is the door into the garage. We are facing the back door (which will be accessed by three steps). A wall will split the addition into a corridor and mud room. The slight indentation (about a foot) in the wall-line on the right marks the start of the interior wall. "Indenting" the mud room has the nice effect of breaking up and making more interesting the exterior of the whole addition. (See the first picture above.)

(The stone wall at the back of the yard will be moved about five feet to the east, which will allow the bird feeders to be placed in front of these windows.)

The rest of this section about the Addition will contain a chronological record of its construction.

I will eventually reorganize the pictures into separate pages which will make navigation easier. For now, I'll keep adding pictures here as I "develop and print" them.

David marked off the new corridor in part to demonstrate to me that my bird feeders and their fence would have to be moved during construction.

Note that the old steps (bricks embedded in concrete) have been torn down by and a huge slab of concrete remains to be removed by excavators from Kokot & Sons, South Deerfield.

Away goes the old bricked "patio" - which lost its purpose years ago
and was now splashed with tufts of grass and patches of moss.

After digging out the bricks, it's time to attack the concrete foundation of the steps into the kitchen. The job is started with a crow bar but heavier machinery will eventually be needed.

Once the bricks have been removed, the crew from Kokot can start digging a trench that will hold the foundation for the corridor - a half-dozen concrete pylons.

During the lunch break, my ever-present woodpeckers - whose feeders have been removed for the day - keep hunting for their suet. Several fly in and out of Kokot's Cat.

The excavation has gotten deep enough for the SONOTUBES to be installed. Sonotubes are molds that shape concrete (or other materials) into supports for buildings. Here, a half-dozen concrete pillars will hold the weight of the corridor and its roof.

(The designer Jim Culleny, cleverly avoided using a solid foundation with tons of concrete. This would be overkill to support a 7-foot-wide residential corridor.)

At this point a mammoth game of Cat's cradle begins. Its goal is to make sure the Sonotubes will line up properly and be the correct height so that the floors and walls will be "in square." (The Thayer Street crew is characteristically fastidious about these details.)

David Hrasna has been chief carpenter almost since the beginning of the project. I often think of him as Mr Tapemeasure because every time I turn around, he's double and triple checking one set of numbers or another.

The project manager, Bob Goulet, is equally obsessive about details. (I privately call him Sgt. Math Equation since he spends so much time crunching numbers.) Fortunately for my sanity, David and Bob usually work in geometry, rather than abstract algebra or trig, so I can sometimes keep track of their mathematical fixations. But when David and our newest carpenter, Will, start working with yards of orange strings and 3-4-5 triangles ... I don't even try to keep up.

The base of the sonotube sits on the bare ground.
A long column will be placed on top and both molds will be filled with concrete.

The tops of the columns must be perfectly flat, so bubble levels are in continuous use.

The columns must be precisely perpendicular ... otherwise
I'll wind up with the Leaning Corridor of Pelham.

He's checking the perpendicularity of the next column with a brass plumb line.

The molds won't be filled with concrete until tomorrow, after Kokot has added layers of dirt and stones that will provide additional support and drainage for the new construction

The tops of the concrete columns must be precisely measured and the column's mold trimmed to assure the floor will be flat and at the right height off the ground. You can see how much fill (dirt and stones) is required to reach the level of the subfloor (marked by the temporary wood frames).

I kept one suet feeder up for the woodpeckers ... and took it inside
after dark to keep bears away the old-fashioned way.

After all the Sonotube molds are put in place, Kokot refills the excavation with dirt. Then a plastic vapor-barrier is placed on the ground, on top of which workmen spread a thick layer of loose stones.

Kokot's crew completes installing the fill of stones and dirt early one morning. By the time I'm having my morning espresso, the tops of the Sonotubes have been cut down to their correct size and David and Will have begun filling the molds with concrete.

Making the funnel was Will's idea. He's spent 25 years in construction in Louisiana and brings a different region's savvy (and building-trades' terminology) into New England.

A threaded steel rod has been inserted into the hardening concrete. This will provide a secure connection between the corridor's structure and the pylons supporting it.

The six concrete columns, ready for the installation of the sub-floor. Five stand along the outside wall, one is placed towards the end the interior wall that will divide the corridor from the Mud Room (the new entrance from the garage.)

The building of the floor box begins with the attachment of wooden blocks to the tops of the concrete columns.

Will and David can now build a thick wooden box on top of the pylons that will support the floor of the addition.

More digging? Yes. David and Will have to lay a separate concrete foundation for the back steps. No dozer needed here, just a few hours of shovels ... and picks since the ground turns out to be a healthy variety of New England soil - stuffed with rocks.

After the floor box bottom and sides have been completed, the carpenters can't do any more work until the structure is insulated - using the same blown foam that we've been using throughout the house.

View from the second story, showing the new location of the birds and the "spaceman" who is going to handle blowing in the foam insulation

Meanwhile, back inside the dining room, part of the ceiling has to be
removed so the joists for the corridor's roof can be installed.

After removing the old plaster and lath, plywood will cover the hole for a few weeks.

The picture below shows how much has been "demoed" (i.e. demolished) in the dining room.

The Walls begin as low boards along the edge of what will be the inside of the wall.