 Hi everybody, welcome to CCTV Channel 17 live at 525 Preservation Burlington show. It's a call-in show and so I'm just saying that up front so that everybody remembers the call-in. Preservation Burlington is a non-profit 501C3 organization whose mission is to preserve and protect the historic architecture and livability of Burlington through education and advocacy. I'd like to thank everybody for tuning in. I know we have a lot of upcoming events that I think I'd be better suited to just tell everybody to go to the website. We know our annual meeting is coming up this May. We have a bunch of walking tours all throughout June sort of to offset the fact that we're not doing a homes tour again this year. It's disappointing but we just have so much other stuff that's available and going on to sort of make up for that. So speaking of the annual awards, which are coming up May 21st at the Barge Canal, Venetian Beverage is going to be there and we'll be acknowledging a whole bunch of really interesting projects that happened throughout Burlington and I'm not foreshadowing here but if everybody's been paying attention to stuff in Burlington there's been a lot of stuff in the news about historic barns and outbuilding. In Burlington it's got hundreds and hundreds of old outbuildings in all different kinds of shape and they're often contributing historic structure to a property and people are either inheriting them, dilapidated or letting them fall to ruin because they don't normally suit today's lifestyle. Anyway my guest today is kind of a neighbor, we're in the neighborhood and a friend of mine, John Waddams, who asked me not to give a big bio but you're still involved with Preservation Trust aren't you, on the board? Yes. Yes, so he's a notorious preservationist and I know earlier, well so what was this a year ago you began this project? Yes, we've lived in Burlington in our current residence for about 38 years and the building that we're going to discuss has pretty much looked like it did when we moved in. Right, 38 years ago. Here we go it's up on the screen so I started with the historic outbuilding so this is a really classic 1925. Yes, small little cars. Right, I mean I can show you that Ron, my house was built in 1884, well before the automobile. Then somebody added this in the mid-20s I assume, I don't know the exact date. Probably got one of those first cars. Right, and we kept the building, we kept a good roof on it and I used to paint it and mess around with the door so it didn't look this badly for most of the time, but time caught up with it and it needed work. So this is what it looked like originally and that's what it looks like. I want to discuss the building a little bit. People refer to these as Model T garages because that's sort of the era. The size, they're small so those cars were smaller. That's right, well there's what would fit in one of these. Model T 1923. This is a garage plan for 1923. Mine's a little bit bigger, this one is 16 feet interior, mine's probably 17 feet. Yes, 17 and a half I think. Yes, you're right. And this is what would have gone in there. Right, that's cool. So obviously a new car doesn't fit very well in here. No, especially in the past few years. And a Tesla Model 3 is 16 feet long. You couldn't even sideways your way past it. Right, six feet wide wouldn't be able to open the door. The tundra in there. Yes, the tundra would probably go. You could put the building on the tundra. So anyway, this is a really cool building. It's got that classic hip roof, the windows on the sides and the doors. Talk about the doors a little, I don't want to jump around too much. I'm going to get into it. Let me just show you a few more pictures. Basically, this is sort of an interior view as we started to work on the building. Looks like an exterior view. I know. The building's jacked up a little bit, but you can see the sills are rotting and the concrete slab. This was sitting on just some timbers with a slab on the inside. So they probably poured the slab after the original building, right? Right up to the sills. And then we started jacking this thing up. I had a good friend of mine, Jay Hoffman, pretty good carpenter. And together he would come in and help me when we needed two hands and for two heads also. Because he had some good ideas. And together we figured out how to jack it up. And this was a do-it-yourself project. Right, so you were the GC, lead carpenter, right, right. Glazier, probably. So we figured out how to jack the building up. And the two of us did a bunch of bracing and all sorts of things inside the building. So this is a good picture, so a little bit about the jacking. So now it's obviously, because all these buildings are non-conforming, right? So you're in the setback. So what am I seeing here, the way you jacked it up? You removed the broken slab and everything inside, right? So we spanned the corners of the building with a fairly heavy timber. To catch that timber, we ran a skirt board all the way around, screwed to the existing framing. Yep, inside. We ran some angle braces, sort of creating a truss in the back. Keep it square or square it up. Did some other bracing to keep the walls from moving around as we jacked it up. And then we just slowly, with four jacks, which I went down to the hardware store and bought, especially for this, with the four jacks, we slowly raised the building up, just half an inch at a time, watching it running corner to corner to corner to corner. So I decided the two of us would move back and forth. And got it up, you know, approximately three feet, about three feet. And then that's where it sat until the excavator could show up. Right, right. Back to you're G-seeing it, right? So you're trying to get everybody's schedule to a point. And it was kind of, you know, it was really on my schedule, which was nice, because I had the ability to be flexible, too, with time. So I didn't have to have everything. I didn't really call them the subcontractors until I was ready for them. You know, they weren't chomping at the pit. Yeah, and this isn't part of your house, technically. So it's not impacting your living. Right, right, right. So there's another, there's probably a pretty good view of the building up. Yeah. Now this is from behind it, right? From behind, you know, all the windows and doors have been removed, obviously. We braced the rear of the building to keep it from going downhill. Because it's a pretty good grade. Yeah. And then we had the excavator show up. And he was able to get his machine right inside. This is REM construction from Randolph, Vermont. Young guy. And he was able to squeeze in there. So did he dig his way in a little bit? Yeah. What's the height of the door? About nine feet. How high is a model T? Exactly. About nine feet, you said? Right, it's about nine feet. We took the center post out of the garage and braced it. And he was able to just, you know, literally barely squeeze in there. And then went to work. And basically, you know, took out all the dirt. And there's another picture of it, you know. Okay, now it's... Eatering on the edge. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, look at your cribbing. Everything was stable. Your cribbing is real close to that drop. The ground was solid. We had the gravel under the cribbing. It was very solid. We banged around a lot on that building while it was in that shape. So who moved? Was it your carpenter buddy and you that came up with the engineering? With, like, what we required and... Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Pretty good. Yeah. Well, it's a small building too, you know. That's true. Right. If it fell over, how bad could it be? Just start over any other way. Which is, you know, to the point that we didn't want it to fall over because, you know, it's expensive to tear these things down. Right. You have to take everything to the dump. Yeah, yeah. Everything. You know, it's... And to build a new garage would have been a lot more expensive. Yep. I think in the long run. Right. Yep. So anyway, this is some gravel we had to bring in. We built a monolithic slab. Okay. Which had a coarse gravel on a few... About a foot of coarse gravel, then we laid... There's no picture. I don't have any picture of this, but we put down three and a half inches of insulation. Okay. On below the gravel? On top of the gravel. On top of the gravel. Oh, okay. And then another layer of Sherpaq, which is a very fine gravel. We tamp that. And we tamp that. Yep. And then we... Well, this is a picture of putting gravel into the... Yep. I mean, I know we've chatted before. I asked, but... So there's no frost walls. Did you... Right. Like an expanded edge? Yes, yes. The insulation and gravel extends three feet out from the foundation all the way around. Okay. Wow. And that's to prevent from, you know, from freezing. Yeah, frosty. And also, I mean, I did have the slab engineered. It was done by a venture engineering ventures in Burlington. Oh, yeah. Oh, those guys are great. Yeah. Big into historic buildings. Right. Yeah, they've saved a lot of stuff. Yep. And Bob Neal was, you know, one of the partners there and did a very nice job. He designed the foundation for me. So I don't want, you know, the earlier picture of the slab in a million pieces. Yeah. I didn't want that to happen. Right, you don't want to put this kind of effort in and then ten years down the road or five years down the road have that heave come up. So we then, you know, put the gravel and insulation, as I explained. And then we put a reinforced slab down. Yep. And you can see some of the insulation on the side. Yeah. We did use some insulated forms. Okay, yeah. In order to sort of help hold everything. Legos, right? Yeah, yeah. Okay. We did that on our... We put some of those in just to keep things from moving around. And we had to put the gravel and the insulation outside after we did this on the exterior of the building because we couldn't work on the building with... And the cribbing was in the way, right? Right. The cribbing was in the way. We didn't want to have to work over a moat, basically. Yeah, right. And so we put that around just as a way to sort of hold the concrete and form it up. And it worked very well. So there's our slab. There you go. So the whole time... So timeline for... Well, I started around this time last year. Okay. And slowly worked on here and there during the week when I could get Jay for the early parts. Yeah. He and I would work on it together. And then we'd have to go get some materials or something. We'd work on it a little bit the next week. And we did have to wait about a month for the excavator to show up. Yeah, for him to have the time. Right. And how long was he there doing this work? He did this in about three days. Really? Yeah. Wow. Because we look at the pictures and it's a small space, of course. The building is hovering above it. It looks like so much work. I would have guessed three weeks, not three days. He has another part-time job during the week and he came on the weekends. Oh, really? So basically on a long weekend, we got everything in to that point. Wow. That's impressive. And then after we'd had this lab and we started reframing the sides. You can see in this picture some cistering of the studs. Oh, yeah. We basically, because the whole bottom foot was basically rotted off. Because the concrete up against it for all those years, trapping moisture. Right. Then we, right. So it's a whole new sill, all the way along the bottom. A whole new sill, double sill, plate. Now you stretched all those new joists up. Yeah. The studs. Yeah. We had it pretty much open. Because you had that ledge around them. Yeah. Well, this picture here shows the studs before we put the ledge up. And then when we took the ledge down, we then did the rest of the building. This was the worst wall. We had to cister these up before we could even lift it. Oh, okay. Because this wall wasn't really bad shape. Okay, I gotcha. It was bowed way out and it was the most rotten wall. So we did that one first. And then did all our skirting. And then jacked it up. And then I decided to, the ceiling was just basically three-quarter inch boards. Yup. Yeah. Just butt-jointed boards nailed to the ceiling. Right. And it was just not adequate enough. So I reframed the ceiling in there that I could also use for storage, above. Okay. So the slab's done. You've lowered the building now. Yeah. Yes. And had you already exposed, had you taken those three-quarter inch boards out? Yes. Okay. So you already knew what you were looking at out there. Those went to the McNeil plant. They were unplanned, painted. Oh. And so they were able to, you know, Turn them into electricity. Exactly. And you can see, wow, this project is checking all the boxes. Exactly. You know. So that's a glulam? You ran it first? Yeah. I ran a beam, a glulam beam across the center, just for support, because I wanted to be able to put a few things up above. Sure. I didn't finish off the attic, but I wanted to be able to put some, you know, wood up there, some screen doors, things like that. Of course. Yeah. All the stuff that gets accumulated in an attic space, you know, and not have it sag on you. Right. So I mean, you know, it's kind of a fresh start, which is, you know. Yeah. It's, let's get back to, like you said, to tear this down, cart it, get rid of all of this stuff, clear the site, then of course, move the footprint and build a new garage. That would have been a huge undertaking. So right now you've done a bunch of work here and there, getting all prepped and ready, three days to get a slab in, plop the building back down. And now you're starting to do all these upgrades, which are making this, the skin of this old garage, you know, the inside is like a, almost like a brand new building at this point. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the siding, I mean, the sheathing, some of it, we had to tear a lot of sheathing out, which is actually perfectly good shape around the outside just to get our jacking and everything. Yeah. Yeah. All the cribbing and everything. And so, you know, we had to patch a little sheathing, but the outside, the siding, you know, except where I had to tear it off about three feet up, was really in pretty darn good shape. There's the building down on the slab. Okay. Yep. It's been raised in the back. It's leveled. We had to bring it up quite a bit in the back. The original where it was sitting in. It was going to end up in the lake. It was going to roll backwards. It was going to roll backwards. It was a mile from the lake, but it would have ended up there. Eventually. Yeah. And so, that's, that's. Those are your holes for your, your bean that went across to carry it. Yeah. They're starting to, you know, that's starting to put things back together. We, you know, put some sheathing on there. Mm-hmm. We poured a skirt in front of the garage. Yep. Nice addition. Yeah. Keep back splash away, keep dirt off of the doors. Make an easier transition from, you know, I'm not using it as a garage. It's going to, you know, but I do bring a car down there every so often to unload something. Yep, yep. That shows you, this picture is where we've, you know, replaced some of the siding and the skirt board and the trim piece is actually down. Okay. Not very much. No. No. No. No. Replacement and kind. Yeah. Check that box. They're absolutely everything, you know, as originally done. Yep. Now we can talk about the doors a little bit. Yeah. Now this is my favorite part of the project. Right. I don't want to, you know, you know, I know I disappointed you not having to take care of the doors for you. So, but, you know, seeing them now that, you know, you took them back and you weren't visibly mad at me and they're beautiful. They're amazing. And they were so cool to begin with. Right, right. So yeah, tell us about the doors. So they had to be, well, based on some advice I got from you, I knew how to do it. Which is, you know, the bottom foot of the doors basically had to be rebuilt. Yep. The rest of the, the rest of the structure of the doors was, was in really good shape. Yep. All the hardware was in good shape. So I was able to, you know, clean that up and put it back on. The track that you can see in this picture. Yeah. Which is really neat. It's like a barn door track with the rollers on top. Right. The thing you don't see every day is it makes it bend around the corner. Yeah, I'm going to show you how that works here. Okay, nice. I'm foreshadowing, that's all. Right. So the doors, you know, I painted those doors. You can also see some sheathing. We did sheathe the interior and tongue and groove pine. Yep. I thought that was the, for me, being more wood oriented than sheet rock oriented, it seemed to make sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, it's more structural. Yeah. Kind of easier, more fun to work with. Yes, yeah, yeah. So we did the walls and ceiling. And then this is sort of a picture here of the old type of doors that were sold then. I don't know what my doors are, but this company Slide Tight used to sell these folding doors around that time. And there's a picture of, you know, an early automobile inside of garage. Yep, yep, the Model T. See the way the doors are getting out of the way there. And here, if I can work this. Trying to go left or right? I'm just trying to make it play. Oh, I see, there you go. Okay, there we go. This is how they work. Excellent. Thank you. Oh, you're welcome. How about that guy? Oh, some young whipper snapper. Some young whipper snapper. So the door opens, one door opens. Yeah. And then the other two just slide right by it. Yes. Yeah, it's so cool. I don't think the viewers know that I love Windows Doors and old hardware. And when old hardware is working the way it's supposed to be, that's an amazing snapshot of how that works. And then you can pull your Model T right in there. Right, you can pull it right in. There's a work table there. And I had to do this, Ron. I had to take a night shot. There you go. The drama. Yeah, the dramatic shot. Look at it. It's perfect. Yeah, yeah, that's so fun. And that's, yeah, so that's from outside because I can see all your stuff inside. And that's that light. So you added wiring to the building, right? There wasn't wiring before. There was a wire that went down just for this, for the exterior light that went down the middle of the driveway, which was, I mean, it had been disconnected years ago. We did find it when we were digging. We did, yeah, of course, yeah. And it was a rotten mess. So I brought enough power down there to actually do some work in there if I wanted to for a wood shop. Yeah, so essentially you've fitted it up now. You've got storage in the attic. Wood walls. Yeah. Very warm, cozy wood walls. And cool doors that open all the way up. And it's your shop. That's right. You pleased? Yes, very pleased. Do the neighbors think you're crazy? The neighbors are... Or are they jealous? They're all jealous. I knew it. Yeah, yeah. They're jealous. Because there's some other beautiful outbuildings around you, you know? Yeah, yeah. Now, frankly, yours might not be as huge as the one to the north, or, but it's prettier than most of them now. Yeah, yeah. Everybody is trying to, you know, everybody on our street at South Union Street is trying to, you know, clean things up the best they can. But, you know, it takes a lot of effort. A lot of effort, you know? Yeah, yeah. But all over the city, as you've discussed, you know, there's great outbuildings. I grew up on South Prospect Street, and we had a horse barn in our backyard with stalls and everything in there. And UVM, which owns the house now, is actually renovating that. Oh, good. That outbuilding there. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, we turned our carriage house into the... Yeah. We put Amy's mom and dad in the garage. Right, exactly. But, you know, it's a beautiful building, and I mean, we know how real estate is in Burlington, in Chitting County, but Burlington in particular. And these are, I mean, to rent a shop like that, that footprint in Burlington somewhere is going to cost you $1,000 a month. Yeah, yeah. You know? So, these are like, I feel like, I did a little snippet for the newsletter that's going to be coming out, but I feel like it's a missed opportunity when I see them. I drive around town. Right. And I'm just like, I love all of them. I want to save all of them. I want to help have you do that to everyone. Yes, it'd be great. Because now it's a... I mean, 1920s, it's a functional building for the next 100 years. It's a 100-year-old building. Yeah. And now it's like a really cool shop in your backyard for the next 100 years. That's right. You know? You feel pretty good about it? I feel terrific about it. Terrific. Look at that. Great slideshow. Just wanted to go back to... Oh, there it is. Yeah, there we go. Yeah. That's a good ending shot. The skirt board in the front. You did like a water course around the whole wall. Yes. Yeah. As original. You know, nothing creative here. I copied everything. I know. My whole career is just stealing good ideas and copying stuff, you know? You know, if you're a good preservation carpenter, nobody knows you were there. Right. It's a little cleaner than the moon painting and stuff, but it looks exactly like it's supposed to look. That's right. Congratulations. You did an amazing job. You really enjoyed it and happy to be here to tell you about it. Yeah, yeah. Thanks. And inspire our viewers. I almost said listeners. I forget we're on TV, you know? They never call in people. You can call them, you know? I should have had my wife call in. Yeah. I know. Sometimes I set Amy up to call in. You know when we get call ins? Anybody from Zoning is here. Right. And you get call ins. But no, thanks so much, John. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming in and enjoying it. Sharing this with everybody. It's really cool and it's part of that whole message, you know? So now when I'm sitting at DAB and people are going, oh, we can't do anything. I can go, oh, look what my friend John did. Right. You know? Right. So, all right, everybody. I just want to thank everybody for tuning in to CCTV Live at 525 and our Preservation Burlington Show. I want to encourage everybody to go out and catch some of our events that we're doing this summer. I know it's been a long couple of years and there's a lot of pent-up demand and we're going to be walking all over town with all kinds of opportunities for people to learn about different neighborhoods and different architecture and stuff like that. So, for more information on all of that and Burlington history, the tours, events, or to get a marker for your historic home, go to preservationburlington.org and we'll see you next month. I'm not going to afford, I don't know what's going to be on next month yet, so we'll surprise you. Thanks for tuning in.