1133 6th St- Underway

Things are finally picking up speed at our new condo project on 6th St NW. Postings have been further apart over the last few weeks because I've been traveling and because we were waiting on permits. However, things are moving along and I will continue to update the blog more frequently.

Over the month of December, a company repointed and rebuilt the front brick. Underpinning in the basement is underway. Things have slowed down this week with the inauguration (basically every road in the area is closed) and the MLK holiday. We will get back to work tomorrow and hope to start demolition on the roof and framing of the rear addition next week.

Here's how the front looks after all the paint was stripped, the arches rebuilt and the mortar repointed. We matched the color of the mortar to the original color from 1910, and used a special lime mixture to stay within historic guidelines. There were at least 4 coats of nasty brown paint on the brick, which took a ton of work to remove.



This angle shows the color a little better. We're going to paint all the window trim and architectural details a dark blue or green color, which should really make the front stand out.



The entire arch above the window is new. Matches pretty well, right? If you look at the pictures before the renovation, you can see the bricks in the crown of the arch were already starting to come out. Sure enough, once the masons started trying to rebuild, the entire arch collapsed, all the way up the window above. We used brick from another project that was built around the same time, and the color matched nicely.



We demolished the garage in the rear yard. I didn't have any good "before" pictures, but it was basically three walls with a charred, burnt out roof. A neighbor told me that a few years ago a homeless person was living in the garage and set a fire to keep warm. One thing led to another, and somehow the whole structure caught fire. The heat got trapped in structure, building up, and then finally the entire thing literally exploded!

We kept all the bricks that were still intact in order to reuse them on the rear wall addition. The space on the left in the picture below will be enclosed to add more living space, and another floor will be built on top of the existing structure.



Here are all of the studs we were able to salvage from the previous framing job. We pulled out all the nails in order to use them again.



Here's one of the places where a carpenter was able to reuse the studs. In the picture below you can see that he used the 2 x 4's to make the frames for the concrete forms in the basement.



Here is one of the pits that was dug in the basement as part of the underpinning process. Basically, you dig a serious of pits in a certain order around the foundation in the basement. Once the entire wall has been supported, you remove the existing slab and dig down to the desired finished ceiling height. In our house, we had 7 ft ceilings and wanted 9 ft finished, so we're digging down almost 3 feet (the concrete slab, gravel, finished floor, drywall, etc add up to several inches).



This is hard, physically demanding work. It's all done by hand. There were at least five guys digging in the basement at any given time.



This picture provides a little more scale. The workers have already poured the concrete for two of the three sets (roughly 6 holes in each) of holes. They wanted to pour the final one last week, but it's been so cold in DC- about 20 degrees- that the concrete wasn't curing as fast as normal. We made a decision to give it more time to harden before digging out the final set of holes.