New Basement Under This 1800’s Boston House. Amazing Details!
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- Опубліковано 5 тра 2022
- Thanks to Thoughtforms for giving us a tour of this awesome project!
thoughtforms-corp.com/
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My first job in construction (1982) was working for RW Sargent in Rangeley Maine as a laborer, jacking houses and camps, setting Simplex forms and pouring concrete foundations. It was exceptionally hard work in all conditions without exceptions or excuses. RW was very particular in choosing his crew, weeding out loafers and slackers quickly, zero tolerance for substance abuse on the job and very, very high quality results. In the late 60’s and early 70’s the first requirement for getting on his crew was a trip to his pal Pete Durell’s barbershop for buzz cut. RW actually preferred “greenhorns” as he didn’t have to break a boy’s bad habits. If you showed up, paid attention and followed directions you could actually get an incredible education, gain respect in the community as a “Sargent Boy” and have a hell of a lot of fun. Many of the points made in this video remind me of those good times and I can still smell the oil we used to protect the (expensive!) forms, hear the sound of the cement trucks coming and Ronald’s voice shouting instruction to the crew as we sweated under his firm control. One memorable job was putting a full foundation under George “Tubby” Washington’s house. Tubby was an excavation contractor and he and RW worked together quite often. We spent a week getting Tubby’s big house jacked up out of the mud, sliding huge heavy beams under it, hand digging and building numerous cribs under the beams and raising that house an inch at a time with each man running a 20 tone bottle jack. On Friday afternoon we had that sucker raised up 10 feet, braced six ways to Sunday and ready for us to shovel and wheelbarrow the excess soil around the house so we could start footings and forms. When we arrived on the job early Monday morning we discovered that Tubby had decided to help out over the weekend by removing all the bracing we’d so carefully placed all around the perimeter and he’d spent the weekend running a machine in out and all around the towers of cribbing to remove as much access soil as he could reach. The look on RW’s weathered-from-experience face was sheer terror that turned to rage that was fortunately, directed (out of our earshot) at his good friend Tubby! His demeanor was cool, calm and calculated by the time he gathered us boys around to discuss the new game plan. One by one the stakes were reset and the braces went back up. “Careful now boys”!, “No horsin’ around boys”! “We gotta get together on this boys”! We skipped coffee break that morning but nobody complained and by lunchtime we had the job site completely secured and reasonably safe again. Our afternoon’s work was “light duty” cleaning up the crumbs that Tubby couldn’t reach and Ronald was in great spirits, laughing and joking with us about how Tubby had done us all a huge favor. My life took a different direction in the Fall but I’ll never forget RW, Stephen, Craig, Eric and Maxine Sargent plus Rex Ellis, Rick Spiller, Dennis Marque, Kirk “Jerky” Ellis, Dave, and Dick. Rex and Rick could each face two 80 lb forms together and carry them out of the hole at once. I tried it of course but dropping RW’s forms or even setting one directly on the ground was strictly forbidden! In those days, men were cheap, tools and materials were expensive!
Matt… PLEASE return for a finished tour. Thanks for the content.
Thanks for letting him talk, that’s an improvement.
A cool read is how Chicago jacked up all the buildings in the 1850s to build the sewer system. A hotel used 6000 jackscrews with 600 men to operate 10 each.
Very cool love seeing that kind of Old buildings being restored
This same process is being done all over Connecticut due to faulty concrete poured in the 1980s through early 2000s from Becker's quarry and poured by J.J. Motes who clearly found out about it early but continued to use it and then their records building mysteriously burned down and insurance companies changed their wording for covering basements out of fear of being on the hook for billions of dollars in claims. Basically a mineral in the concrete called Pyrrhotite which would expand during freeze thaw cycles and cause failure to the concrete. Some schools even had to be torn down and rebuilt because of it but the biggest loss is to thousand and thousands of residential homes and costs on average nearly $200,000+ to do, not counting landscaping or anything else. They passed a law to tax every homeowners insurance policy in the state $20 a year to help fund a relief program where homeowners can get the majority of the cost covered for this exact process though many homeowners still often have to fork up 30-50k more just to finish the job or more if their home is larger.
My parents house had this issue and my father bought a bunch of equipment with the help from a neighbor with the same issue as well as help from a structural engineer who worked on concrete bridge repairs and managed to fix the issue for about half the cost of full replacement with epoxy injections and special foundation coatings with a little more put in to make large additions (such as a porch with concrete footing and basement room below and large sun room off the back also with basement section below) that also helped keep moisture out of the older concrete even more so on the longest sections of the house by making them interior walls. However that was nearly a decade before the current program was in place.
Motes should have been called Reckless Theory 😂
Jk that sounds like a nightmare
Awesome! More amazing stuff like this pls Matt!
We just did this to our house this fall. I was the general contractor. After it’s all said and done I saved a old home and it was cheaper than buying a new home. I did a time lapse of the lift and excavate.
Good to know that it'd cost less, because from just watching this video, it seems like it would cost a fortune. Looks like they have to redo a lot of the structural framing, and then the interior. The whole video I was asking, wouldn't it be easier and cheaper to build a new house?
Should upload the Timelapse
I would love to do this to my house. It was built in the early 1900's and has a crawlspace and cellar, but I'm not ready to finance this project just yet... but hopefully in the next few years. Glad you were able to be your own GC, you can save a boat load of $ that way if you know what your doing.
@@jaredjgruenwald I‘be been trying to find time. I need to find a good video editor for Mac that doesn’t break the bank. I plan on doing more time lapse videos when I replace siding and windows
@@Tien1million I'd bet my house that they paid more than what a new house would cost in materials to save the house in the video. Please don't take his outlier case as the norm
Matt please please please come back here, I’m sitting in my gutted 1800s house with a Friday beer drooling over the knowledge and further documentation of this project
I'd love to hear more about their process of creating a tight air barrier on a 19th century house.
We're replacing our basement on our 170yr old home, the first guy wanted $80,000 the other guy's lifting it for $7000 and lending us his forms, even if we end up hiring extra laborers it'll still be at least 50% less with the second guy and he's been lifting houses 50 years since he was 13 with his dad. In Canada. We aren't rising it though that would cost a small fortune extra. Nice job.
A job I heard on a small house here 20 years ago was $20K to add a basement.
@@KLondike5 He's talking about the cost for lifting the house only, not the cost of replacing the basement.
You get what you pay for! Good luck with your good deal!
Really cool to see a Thoughtforms project. These guys have built some of the Boston area’s finest homes over the years.
It would seem that using ICF's would have alleviated the issue of bringing forms in and out as well as providing insulation value
I replaced the foundation under a wing of my house, IFC's were the ticket.
@@erinkennedy2417 I built my foundation with ICF's and my house is a highly irregular shape.
I'm guessing placing the vertical pieces of rebar in once the ICF foam blocks were in place would have been impossible.
Make the whole house ICF...
@@brianthompson9485 The house was raised 6 feet above the final foundation height. The foundation is on the perimeter of the existing house. I see no problem getting vertical re-rod in.
Awesome stuff Matt! 😃👍🏻👊🏻
If you have the money you can build anything. However, that being said, it's good to see there are ways to solve problems with new tech..
Excellent work !!
that’s pretty cool never seen that before
Immense amount of time went into planning this one through, very impressive.
Boston big dig? Great job guys!
I can’t even imagine the amount of money this cost.
I live around the corner and the joke is that it looks like they have now completely demoed half of the old house!
Classic Cambridge
Walking around this area you see lots of wooden buildings of this vintage being gutted to where you can see right through the building through the gaps in the old plank sheathing. They liked them some wood framing on our side of the river in the 19c (much more brick and stone construction if you cross the Charles into Boston, Brookline, or Quincy...)
Overall, very cool but I cannot begin to imagine what this cost given how much I'm paying to reno my 1880s workers cottage next door in Somerville.
Had this done to my house last year. The basement part at least. It's nuts. 120 year old house.
I love your channel and trust your opinion. With that being said since you're not in every state who could you recommend in Georgia to build a house? Perhaps you could provide a list of builders you know personally and trust in each state?
plz do a full series on the rest of the build
Today on This Old House. We visit Boston…
This is pretty amazing, I wonder with so many mods though at what point does it cease to be historical AKA Ship of Theseus? How much would this cost?
I did it on the same Era house and it cost me a little over 30k I did everything myself used 12 inch concrete block to ground level 8 inch for the last 3.5 courses I went 2.5 feet deeper nearly no plaster broke inside the house. I had a 8 foot finished ceiling after I was done. 30k was machine rentals and everything new formadrain floor and all.
@@shawnshurtz9147 cool, thanks for the info. At that cost it sounds like a great deal. Kudos
We do a bunch of these in Berkeley and SF, CA. Basically it is the Ship of Theseus, because the homes are so old and we have such a high turnover rate in the area it's been remodeled countless times. Restoration projects are essentially building a brand new home inside the old one, and we're really only keeping the outer shell. A lot of the Victorian homes tend to be a low income housing or rentals at one point here in the 60s and 70s, and often time they are neglected and feature a lot of dry rot due to poor maintainance.
Lifting a home is a lost art, for us there's maybe 4 or 5 companies within a 100mile radius out here that do it. We've had bids range from 6k-32k depending on how complex the home was. Some of our homes tend to be 25' wide at the face and feature continuous joist, so they're easier to lift. Can be lifted with just 2 H beams with cribbing underneath in about 2 days time. That'll run between 6-9k depending on how heavy the home is. I've had complex homes that required us to bring in an assortment of H beams (14 total, floor joist running alternating directions and different elevations) that ran $40k.
I would say that rebuilding and restoring an old home cost as much as new. There's 0 high production work available at these jobs. Yes, old studs are dimensionally 2x4, but they also shrink, deform, rot, etc. So you're replacing and restoring and existing condition pretty much one piece at a time. A new home you can just frame it and lift, you know your square, and dimensions. While these old homes are pretty good, sometimes sagging and foundation problems causes it to deform, so it's out of plumb, out of square, etc. Did I mention rot?
I know California is a bad representation of cost, but the last few Victorian restorations we did ran $850k+. Granted they leaned on the higher end. We just closed out one that was bid prior to the recent inflated construction material prices and that ran $700k, and I haven't verified my accounting for that one, but I think I took a loss on it. $700k was pretty close to what I spend on payroll, labor, subs, and material, not including my own time. If I had to rebid this one, we're probably coming in at $850-900k. This particular one didn't even include finishes, the client made a lot of compromises towards the end of the project because either the finishes they want had a high lead time, no inventory, or just double in price making it out of the budget.
I would say the home featured in Matt's video, here in the Bay Area, I would have to say you should budget to spend around $1.5m. Anything under $1.2m is probably undoable, or you're really putting up with lousy results, mediocre workmanship, poor management, and making a lot of compromises towards the end for finishes.
I used to dig basements. Alot of southern California new luxury homes have amazing basements. Turn a 2 story house into a 3
Know anyone in Orange County that will do this on an old house? I’m looking to get it done but haven’t found too many good options yet.
Where in Boston is this? I live here and would love to see this
perfect situation for ICF, we do this more easily that plywood forms PACIFIC ICF
There is a reason you don't use cribbing stacks with ends. Move 50-100% of timber thickness in from ends to avoid and end crush and thus collapse of the stack.
I’m surprised This Old House didn’t come and beat you up making videos in their territory. ;)
Are ICFs cheaper than regular concrete blocks?
Now that's Boston type of money.
Sad to say I live and work as a carpenter in Boston and Cambridge and didn't realize the main purpose of the Big Red X at 9:01 in the video.
As a volunteer firefighter I am absolutely impressed and love the red ax! Risk little for a little reward risk a lot for a lot of reward! That’s our motto in the fire service which means if there’s nothing alive inside we’re not even gonna think about going in generally speaking and in this particular case there was nothing important or Momentos left as well.
The yanks do things different
What is the building envelope for these old houses? Is it just wood siding, followed by pre-plywood wood sheathing (is there a specific name?), and then the 2x4 wall maybe with blow-in insulation and finally lath and plaster walls?
It's called balloon construction, basically either horizontal or diagonal thick shiplap, real, not decorative, acting as the shear component. When sheet goods appeared they took the place of these boards among other things.
I still don’t see what people mean when they say all houses in USA aren’t built to last. They last a long time if they are maintained. Good video.
Do you even lift, bro?
Matt, what are you hearing from builders regarding monopour (jointless) ICF structures? How about ICF and termites or other burrowing critters?
Search around for a price if you're going to have this done they vary by 30 to 50,000
height restrictions? what could be the point in this mostly irural area?
Yeah, that house was too small...really needed a full basement to make it livable!
I'd move...
that's the problem with these rich assholes
@@nonyabusiness1126 not me…
I thought about doing the same with my home built in 2012. I have 84" to my floor joists and less than that at the steel beam! I live in a duplex in PA.
curious the cost on this. must be $$$$$
Seems like a site that would have been great for ICF! then you wouldn't have to bring in forms and remove them.
What was the savings compared to tearing it down and rebuilding?
I don’t think it’s a matter of savings, many times it’s on a historical registry, or people simply want to preserve an old house.
surely it would have been cheaper to knock the house down at that point
Can you keep following this build?
Looks like it would have been cheaper to just build anew.
Not sure much 1800 is left
That's not the point, it's basically a giant barn. But it's cheaper to keep as much of the old building as possible. Also means they can avoid complying with new zoning laws (e.g. on height restrictions).
It’s not an old house anymore :)
if you got the dough , you can do anything.
it doesn't always have to be logical to do it.
wow, that's at least a $100,000 remodel. haha
Given the size of the lot and home, the property was already over a million dollars. Boston/Cambridge real estate is expensive..
@@belg4mit yeah, I was just kidding. Serious remodel...
Josh Groban’s “You raise me up” comes to mind.
Some of you might take my head off for saying this, but this seems like a lot of effort, why not just build a new one?
My first thought: just add an extra floor...
Lumber was too expensive at the time
It must be a Historical Reclamation House project. I didn't catch it it was one.
@@laloajuria4678 You cannot an add extra floor. It's already three habitable storeys, the maximum permissible for wood construction under the international residential building code. Furthermore, as was mentioned in the video, it already exceeds the maximum height allowed under local zoning.
Me taking notes because I have a 1906 farmhouse that has a brick “basement”
Money money money
thats pronounced Bwostin
I am listening to a Cambridge Historical Commission Hearing on a Construction Hold on this project. due to substantial demolition... Word to the wise, NEVER build in Cambridge.....
When you have more money than common sense. A lot more.
It amazes me how much money wealthy people will spend on projects like this instead of replacing. Some things aren't worth saving, but when you have money to burn the feelings and bragging rights are more important I guess.
It amazes how willing people are to trash perfectly useful material instead of reusing it. There is no "away" to actually throw things, and there's not an infinite supply of material to make things from.
You build new & you now have all the flaws & weaknesses of new construction that Matt has highlighted many times. Also paying people these days to put those exterior style features to match the old aesthetic cost more for someone to do than just to keep the original style. And the historical ordinances often are at play that just disallow just starting over. If people can and are willing to preserve, that's great. In my city giant chunks of the old construction was torn down for college or city government buildings. Then there was a wave of modern & futuristic construction where people thought everything was going to be like the Jetsons in the future and just started tearing down well built old buildings.
구냥 새로 짓는게 비용이적으로 적게 들거내
The thumbnail on mobile says “lift an entire Ho”. Didn’t see that in the video. Misleading.
If it was me I'd just raze the entire thing and rebuild from scratch. Why go through all the headache and expense of preserving the old structure?
The local government likely doesn't allow that to happen if the building is already sound. Historic and all that.
@@CitEnthusiast Which is why I'd never want to live in NE.
Not only that but here in the Cambridge area (I live next door in Somerville) we desperately need housing units - I'd say there should be at least 6 units on a lot that size around here. See the large floor plate 3 decker in the background for comparison. Maybe it's just a rich owner who wants it this way, but I'm also sure zoning and possibly historic preservation made replacing and upsizing this property unnecessarily hard.
like the basement, but this dosnt not look like 1800’s house what waste of $
I'd rather disassemble and rebuild, even if it was more money
Good grief, let your guest speak. They have a lot more to say that's of interest than the words you put in their mouths. Be a more humble interrogator please, it will reflect better on you and produce better content.
and they are still builing basemts without a floor 🤦♂🤦♂🤦♂🤦♂🤦♂🤦♂🤦♂🤦♂
How to spend a $1,000,000 on an old house in one easy lesson.