Amazing Discoveries

[harry strasil]

Having to renovate the first floor of my house, as it was making my wife sick and she would go to the hospital get ok come back home and get sick again. So Major Renovation, all the carpets are gone and the old pine flooring underneath has been sanded and they get 3 coats of urethane. Floor in what was and will soon be our front bedroom was a total surprise, not a splice in the flooring, its all one board from wall to wall.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v81/irnsrgn/3--2-09001.jpg

And when putting in outlet boxes for the new kitchen cabinets, instead of lath under the plaster, the walls are sheeted solid with boards with dovetail slots milled in them to hold the plaster. I have never seen this before and wondered if anyone else has.

Jr.

[Steven McLeavin]

One board from wall to wall?? thats is one wide board!

[Richard Magbanua]

I've not seen this but I don't have many years or experience. That is amazing to see though.
You're a great man for taking good care of your family. I hope she feels better!

[John Keeton]

Harry, those are some long floorboards! I have never seen that done, but it sure would go a lot quicker in laying it. I guess "back in the day" old growth lumber of better quality was a little more available.

The floor doesn't look a lot like oak in the pic - what is it? Edit - Wasn't 'till I read Justin's post that I realized I had not caught that they were pine!!

And on the plastering underlayment, that is a new one! Wonder if the walls are sheeted again on the outside, or if they went straight to the clapboards?? Is the sheeting on the diagonal?

[George Sanders]

A few years ago I helped a guy work on a very old farmhouse. He was tearing off plaster to replace it with sheetrock. To my surprise, under the plaster was not lath but 18" wide boards. Some of which ran the length of the 14' room. I didn't notice if they were dovetailed.

[Justin Green]

Those are nice floors! I really like pine floors and put them in my house. I did the 5" wide boards and all of the lumber I bought was southern yellow pine tongue and grooved and was 14'. The dining room and one bedroom had no splices. It's a really nice looking wood once it ages, as yours has. After just 3 years, my pine has darkened considerably, but it gets plenty of sunshine.

[Joe Cunningham]

Neat! Makes me wonder what is under the linoleum and in the wall of my 1850 house...

I'll ask a historic archaeologist friend of mine if she has heard of that for plastered walls. They often have to research original fabric like that before doing any kind of remediation work on structures. Most of her background is in the NE though and might not be applicable to what happened out west.

Maybe not exactly related since it is a different construction history, but I do know that in New Mexico historic structures often had river pebbles embedded in the wall prior to plastering. Those were adobe structures however. I've never worked on wooden structures, so don't have much knowledge about historic techniques used for them.

http://www.heritageconservation.net/ws_adobe.htm

[David Keller NC]

Harry - No idea about Nebraska, but homes here in the South, especially in NC/SC that were built before 1900 or so very often have continuous-board T&G heart pine floors. One of the houses I worked in from the Victorian era had a floor in a room with 26' long continuous floorboards.

What's perhaps more remarkable is just how hard and dense this stuff is - driving nails in for a stud wall required "red-heads" (the explosively-propelled nails from what amounts to a firearm that takes 22 caliber blanks), much as one would anchor a stud wall in a concrete floor.

No idea about the plaster, though - my limited experience has all been plaster over lath. Curious - how old's your house?

[Justin Green]

David,

Here in Texas, solid walls were done at least through the 1940's. The house I grew up in was built in 1943 and it had solid yellow pine walls underneath the plaster. I worked for an electrician one summer on their "house rewiring" crew. I crawled under a lot of houses and through the attics and all of the houses had solid walls. Most I would date to the 1920's through the 1940's. When you cut into the wall to add an outlet, most all of the time we would find solid wood, unless it was a later addition.

[David Keller NC]

Intersting - I wonder why this would be? One thought is that such construction would fail here on the East coast where there's very large swings in humidity from summer to winter, and since the plaster's inelastic, a solid, continuous substrate of wood would show the joints very rapidly (but this is just speculation - a plaster expert I ain't ;))

[Justin Green]

The really odd thing was that about 80% of these houses have the wall boards running on a diagonal. Ours did as well. Must have been several thousand mitered cuts to sheath the walls that way.

Also, all the homes were pier and beam, of course, and every one had oak floaring along with the pine wall boards. I didn't see any pine flooring. This was east Texas - piney woods. The wall boards were all 5-6" wide.

Oh, and in our house and several others, the plaster had a paper backing or layer, like thick wall paper. It wasn't wall paper, though. In our house, it was glued with some kind of adhesive that was almost black at the time my parents remodeled. The adhesive wasn't applied in a uniform layer, either. The paper seems to have been applied before the trim, as it ran under the trim. Then plaster was applied over the paper. Not sure if this was common, or perhaps the pre-cursor to drywall, but that's what I saw. I'm no expert on drywall or it's history, but I know it wasn't drywall or sheetrock because the paper backing wasn't in 4'x8' sections, it was in strips (I had the pleasure of stripping these walls down during the summer).

None of this ever piqued my interest until this post. And that was probably 18 years ago and I was in middle school.

[Bill Houghton]

The really odd thing was that about 80% of these houses have the wall boards running on a diagonal. Ours did as well. Must have been several thousand mitered cuts to sheath the walls that way.

Was there sheathing on the exterior walls, under the siding? If not, this may have been for shear - back when exterior sheathing under the siding was boards, diagonal sheathing was the best construction, as it make for a more rigid wall.

[harry strasil]

The house is sheathed on the inside and outside of the exterior walls with 3/4 sheathing, the interior walls have normal 3/8 lath to plaster to. As far as I know the sheathing runs horizontal.

This place was a grant from President Lincoln to a Civil War Veteran, it was originally 320 acres, but what I got when I bought it was .78 acre. I am not sure when this house was built, but it is all old growth lumber and the main floor floor joists are definately hard. I have tried driving sheet rock screws to fasten things to them and you will twist the screw off before it goes in completely without drilling a hole first.

[harry strasil]

The dovetail groove in this picture is all that holds the plaster to the sheathing, no wire etc.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v81/irnsrgn/odd/sheathing.jpg

[Greg Cole]

My folks live in a circa 1900 home in Vermont. They pulled up all the carpeting when the bought the home to reveal maple floors on the 1st floor and fir floor in the 2nd floor. Some of the maple planks in the floor are easily 20' long & same for the fir planks.
My BIL lives here in KC too, and from the basement you can see the sub floor is all 2X stock, looks to be SYP. I'd wager the sheathing on the home is the same.
Ahhh the good old days.

[Justin Green]

Was there sheathing on the exterior walls, under the siding? If not, this may have been for shear - back when exterior sheathing under the siding was boards, diagonal sheathing was the best construction, as it make for a more rigid wall.

I'm trying to remember if there was exterior sheathing on my house... My parents had the siding replaced and I do believe it was sheathed on the outside as well, but they ran horizontally, covered with tar paper tacked to the sheathing, and then siding on top of that. Built like a brick outhouse it was. It had a balcony upstairs and the joists that supported the balcony (which had no columns for support) were 4x10.

My mother did an estate sale at a VERY old house that a guy had moved here in the 40's. The house was from the 1800's. The floors were tongue and grooved oak, but were nearly 2" thick. That house was WELL build when it was new.

[george wilson]

My 1949 house is a special case,because the builder owned the saw mill,which used to be a few blocks away. The studs in my basement are 2 3/4" X 9" yellow pine,which you can't drive a nail into. There is diagonal planking under the siding. When we got this house,it still had the original yellow pine siding on it.That is pretty amazing in this climate.I used to have to replace the trim on my last house about every 3 years,till I got tired of it,and had it replaced with redwood,then painted over it.

My walls are plasterboard,with 1/2" of plaster over it. I believe they used to do that in that era. It is a good sound insulator,since we are 200' from a highway. I can't hear the shower run.The drain pipes are cast iron.

[lowell holmes]

What is really remarkable about the 1943 house is that it was built during World War 2. Matrials and labor wer hard to find. Most young men were in the military.

[steve swantee]

Pretty interesting feature, Harry. Our old farmhouse is 150 yrs old and is a post and beam construction. All the posts and beams are hand hewn, and the walls are sheathed with one inch thick roughsawn boards up to 16" wide on both the interior and exterior. Our house uses lath though- no dovetailed channels. The ell attached to the original farmhouse was, according to the family, dragged from another community across the ice from the other side of the bay with a team of horses one winter in the '20s or '30s. Bet that was quite a trip.
Good luck with your reno Harry-looking good so far.

Steve

[Jim Kountz]

Harry I have never seen the dovetail feature you showed in your pic, a couple of times Ive seen just grooves/dados to hold the plaster but never a dovetail. Someone had a lot of time on their hands Id say!!!

[george wilson]

I have to wonder how many times plaster has been repaired when laid over wide boards that were bound to shrink? I'm no plasterer,but brittle plaster does not like to move.

[David Keller NC]

"When we got this house,it still had the original yellow pine siding on it.That is pretty amazing in this climate."

Actually, George, it's more common than you might think. My house was built in 1940, and all of the exterior windows are built of heart pine. None of them have rotted, despite in some cases being totally encased in English Ivy (hate the stuff!) and in the basement windows, wet leaves and forest-floor detritus.

I did repair one of these windows where the stile had broken loose from the bottom rail, and I think I know why this stuff is quite rot-resistant - it smelled strongly of pine-sol when I drilled a reinforcing dowel into it.

There might be a good reason why there's very little left of the loblloly and long-leaf pine forest in NC - it'd been very useful stuff before the advent of copper chromium arsenate treated wood.

[george wilson]

Actually,David,my window sills are 2" thick,and made of the same stuff. They aren't rotting,either. The siding had gotten real ratty looking since it had been painted many times,with incompatible paint. Paint was rolling up like parchment scrolls. The worst thing was that some of the siding had warped real bad,and was letting the rain in like a funnel. There was good tarpaper underneath,though,so damage was limited to one corner of the first floor where ants got under the siding.That had to be fixed.One of the older workmen said that one of the younger ones was deriding the construction of the house,and he had to explain that this was how they really should be built. Guess the younger guy believed in plywood and particle board.

My roof is slate,and my yard is full of very large loblloly pines.I had to have some taken down to build the shop. They were 32" in dia. at the base. Now,I'm worried about something falling on the slate,so am regularly having those trees trimmed.

[David Keller NC]

Sort of off-topic, but the rather disturbing aspect of very recently built houses are the use of "engineered" floor joists with a solid wood cap and a web of oriented strand board. As an engineer, I can verify that these are incredibly strong, but only if the load is absolutely parallel with the OSB web. There's almost no strength perpendicular to the joists, and they droop 10 or more feet when they arrive on the truck stacked horizontally.

The point is, any of us that have older houses can verify that none of them escape without settling that typically twists the house band and floor joists slightly off of vertical. With solid wood, that's no problem, but I gotta wonder if these newer houses are going to have severe structural problems in 10-15 years, much less 75 or more.

[Bill Houghton]

Sort of off-topic, but the rather disturbing aspect of very recently built houses are the use of "engineered" floor joists with a solid wood cap and a web of oriented strand board. As an engineer, I can verify that these are incredibly strong, but only if the load is absolutely parallel with the OSB web. There's almost no strength perpendicular to the joists, and they droop 10 or more feet when they arrive on the truck stacked horizontally.

The point is, any of us that have older houses can verify that none of them escape without settling that typically twists the house band and floor joists slightly off of vertical. With solid wood, that's no problem, but I gotta wonder if these newer houses are going to have severe structural problems in 10-15 years, much less 75 or more.

I understand that firefighters hate these joists, too, because they lose strength in a fire quickly and fail catastrophically.