Codes? Who needs codes?

[poppy]

I've been following the discussions on foundations and code compliance in general.  Here's a cabin/house that I have been passing since early memory which goes back at least 60 years.  This structure has never been occupied as far as I know.  I wish I had asked my parents when they first saw it.



It is about 28' wide by 24' deep.  As you can see there is a full basement with concrete block construction and a metal roof.  There is a center pillar and timbers running across the width of the cabin with a load bearing wall above.  The interior looks to never have been finished.



The front, rear and west wall have clapboard siding that is not wood.  Not sure what the material is.



There are a few cracks in the walls but nothing serious.  I'm surprised it is as straight and level as it is.



The east wall has old barn siding and the opening into the basement.



Was surprised to see this failure in the timber beam, but looking at it closer, it's clear the timber was notched way too deep.  The timbers appear to have been salvaged from an old barn.  The next pic shows the center end of that broken timber.



Without the metal roof this cabin would have caved in years ago and I was surprised to see such a severe failure on a structure that was never occupied.

[akwoodchuck]

Yeah that place looks pretty crappy.....the folks who built the Taos Pueblo and the Greenstead Church didn't have codes to go by, either, just good ol' fashioned know how.....

[MountainDon]

Have to wonder when that beam broke and if that had anything to do with its unfinished state.

~~~~~

Even among the ancient Anasazi there was/is a variance in quality. Over a couple of decades of exploring in the boondocks SW, mainly UT or the areas of AZ, MW, CO near the four corners area, we have scrambled around a number of ancient sites. A great number are not on maps or in guide books. Some require luck to find or at least a nudge in the right direction. Even GPS coordinates don't help much at times; you can be on the cliff top wondering "what the heck?" when the ruins are out of site, straight down 200 feet.   The point I'm working towards is that some of these old, unrestored and virtually untrammeled by modern man, are in remarkable shape. Lovely square corners, smooth built from stone walls with amazing mortar free joints. Amazingly short doorways too  .   Then there are the ones with much more irregular walls and often in very sad states of disrepair. It's always made me think that back then there were also true craftsmen, masters of their trade, as well as those who were out of the area of their expertise. Twelve hundred year old examples of poppys more modern example of failure, of a builder who did not really know what he was doing.

[Don_P]

I've admired the viking joinery of Greensted. It has been touched up and remuddled multiple times.The folks that built it understood it better than the ones that removed the center tie beam  .  Codes in Ur do predate either by a few thousand years... wow, the man has been on our back for 4 thousand years   . Codes were, and I guess are, really just man's attempt to protect the unsuspecting from the unintelligent and unscrupulous. As with most things it's hard to outlaw stupid, where would you stop. The book just gets thicker the more they try. Common sense seems to fade faster than scribes can scribble. I liked Hammurabi's code, short, to the point. Build what you want, but be forewarned, an eye for an eye. Natural selection took care of the unsuspecting. The code took care of the unintelligent and the unscrupulous

From the materials I'd guess the house is just post war Poppy. Looks pretty good to me. The break in the beam looks short and brash, no long fiber tears. Judging from the location near the unfinished bad siding and the water marks on the subfloor I'd guess water dropped into the notches and decayed that area. Just as a side note to show how long we have been doing things and how little and late we know. Prior to engineers that summer beam, or girder, was sized empirically, based on experience, or by guessing. With the advent of rational design, engineers treated that notched beam as having the section modulus of the inverted T that remained between and below the notches.  Within the last decade full scale testing showed that the beam breaks as if only the thickness of wood between the notches for the full depth of the beam were there (how many times have we heard folks say "but I'm putting wood back in the notch, give me credit for the full section") So that girder was at best a 2x in reality strengthwise. If the house had been occupied the floor would have likely been repaired long ago.

[umtallguy]

yep structures will last until the roof goes (or termites)

I saw many in the south that had been abandoned a half century or more.

Some old tobacco barns abandoned 40 years ( age of pine plantation around them) still had dry hay in em.

[poppy]

Don raises a good point.  Although the wall with the porous barn siding is on the east side where weather does not typically blow in, water can certainly enter over a long period of time.

I mentioned the timber beam notching because it looked too deep and according to Steve Chappell's book "A Timber Framer's Workshop" the mortise depth should be no greater than 5/8 the depth of the timber beam.  Actually, I think the beam is undersized based on the tenon guidelines for the joists.  One would not typically see joists as deep as the beam that carries them.  The timber on the other side of the cabin appeared to be sagging but I couldn't tell if it was my glasses or not.

I should have taken a couple of pics of the inside.  The ceiling joists and studs had the tell tell signs of lath and plaster so were probably salvaged from an old house.  There was also a pile of lath in the basement.

Don is also probably correct in the construction being post war.  Anything older would probably have a steeper roof pitch and different siding and maybe a different foundation.

[rick91351]

Around here right after the war there was a profusion of cinder-block and concrete block construction.   My folks owned one and as did my wife's folks. 

[Don_P]

Here nor there, I enjoy making connections or disconnections  or maybe just rambling  .
Remember the Romans were having their heyday around the time of Christ. It was fashionable for a Roman to have a Greek tutor, they possessed the old knowledge of the day.
Greensted Church is hard to date, the guessing ranges from ~600-1013AD. St Edmund was buried there in 1013. From the construction this wasn't quickly slapped together for a burial, it was already an established church. The Bede, commenting probably on it, noted that it was built not of stone but in the style of the Scots, unusual enough for comment even then. With William the Conqueror and the Norman invasion of 1066 the older Anglo-Saxon methods of construction changed through the 1100's. The Normans are given much credit for advancing craft, I suspect it was more like they were introducing new ideas to pretty highly skilled craftsmen. It was poorly restored in 1849 when much of the original building was lost in a heavy handed remodel.
The Church of The Resurrection of Lazarus, the oldest surviving timber church in Russia dates to the late 1200's, or late 1300's according to Alexander Opalovnikov who restored it in 1959.
There's a neat sketchup of it on this site;
http://kizhi.karelia.ru/architecture/en/russkie-zaonezhya/tserkov-voskresheniya-lazarya
The Taos Pueblos were apparently built between 1000-1400AD
The last great French gothic cathedral, the tallest and slenderest, which collapsed three times during construction and wants to collapse still... was never finished. It dates to around 1200AD. They were trying to surpass Notre Dame in height and in internal light.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauvais_Cathedral
The steeply pointed gothic arch with it's thrust resisting flying butresses allowed taller and lighter walls than the older heavy semicircular Roman arches. Hagia Sophia, Justinian's great church suffered a partial dome collapse shortly after completion of its' shallow arch, the present dome is rounder, back to roughly a semicircle, and buttressed on 4 sides. That seems to have ended their experimenting outside of the box. Sorta make me wonder what would have happened if he had been enamored of a pointy dome.

[poppy]

Interesting stuff Don.  Here's some pics of the place where I spent Thanksgiving this year.  The original log cabin was built in 1871 and is located about an hour east of San Antonio, TX.

The first pic is the front of the log cabin on the left and the second house built in 1900 on the right with a breezeway between.



Here's the breezeway with the original fireplace on the left.



This was taken inside the breezeway to show the original cistern (they use well water now).  Note the pulley hanging from the ceiling.



This is a view of the end of the log cabin.  Well actually the first door off the porch goes into a room addition off the log cabin part and the lean to on the left is another addition off the back of the log cabin that houses the bathroom, sleeping area and kitchenette.



Here you see the inside of the log cabin and the original fireplace which has had firebrick added, but the mantel is original.



I didn't completely understand the modifications, but the original log cabin did not have chinking.  There was vertical siding on the outside and vertical paneling on the inside.  You can see some of the salvaged paneling above the fireplace.  The roof is not original and was added over the original so the pitch inside is different than outside.

This pic shows some of the original siding.  You should be able to see the out of plumb wall to the right of the door.  The owner told be that he had his carpenter plumb the inside wall.



Here is the addition on the end again showing the salvaged paneling.



And the lean to addition on the back.



And one more shot taken inside the log cabin portion.

[OlJarhead]

interesting to see old buildings with no rafter ties and no collar ties....what is the roof construction like?

[Don_P]

With logs? A log plate atop each wall is sometimes used to resist roof thrust... it's called plate roll when thrust takes them out. A structural ridge is the common way of restraining thrust without ties and if you look above the fan blade in the interior shot it is visible. A rigid beam for each top plate, or a well attached or bedded log, can accomplish the same thing if done thoughtfully. On a frame structure without ties... those are usually the swayback roofs you can spot driving around. The gabled ends above the chink are part of the restoration.

Neat structure Poppy. I enjoyed travelling through that area a few years ago. You probably passed Stephen Austin's dogtrot on the way out there, he had migrated from Austinville here when he built that dogtrot.
I got to take down a saddlebag cabin a few years ago. Rather than a breezeway between the two cribs a double chimney was shared by the two which were tight to one another. They shared the common chimney but house 2 generations, another variation on the dogtrot theme.

The bridges over the riverwalk in San Antonio are fun to see. The Mission de San Jose just south of town was another favorite;


The spiral stairs in it were cool, stacked solid timbers;


In the town arboretum they had a nice detail in one of the shelters;

[poppy]

Thanks Don, more good stuff.  I especially like the old staircase.  I would not have guessed they were timbers.

I didn't get a chance to visit any of the San Antonio missions, but saw illustrations of them in the museum.  Maybe next trip.  The only one that is not a working church is the Alamo.

I failed to take any pics, but another interesting place to visit near the log cabin property is Texas Tiny Houses.  http://tinytexashouses.com/
The factory is just north of the log cabin just off interstate 10.  I met the founder, Brad Kittel, who is an interesting character.

The log cabin owner told me the original had a ceiling that they removed, but he said there was not a loft room.  I didn't get into the details of the roof construction with him, but if I get another visit, I will ask more questions and see if he has a pics.

[Don_P]

Rambling afield again,
They were telling the story of the oak beams at the New College at Oxford this morning and it brought to mind some other reading. The story on the oak beams at the New College is one I first read in the Whole Earth Catalog years ago and is pretty cool, I believe the library is from the 13th century. At some point they noticed the beams had become wormy, "as oak is prone to", I assume they are describing powderpost bettle damage. The beams are large and long, not something that would be easy to find. The college decided to talk to their foresters to see if somewhere on the school woodlands there might be some replacements. The reply came back "yes, we've been wondering when you would want them, trees were planted for the replacements, we knew you'd be needing them". In the article the writer said, now that's the way to run a country.

Anyway it sparked a recollection of an article about the barns at the Cressing Temple in Essex that I read while trying to find CA Hewett's drawings of Greensted. The barns were built in the 1200's by the Knights Templar primarily in the older Anglo Saxon style, these are not small barns ~40x120'. In that time they were hewing timbers so you didn't want to make too much work for the carpenters. They were managing the oak forest for fast grown oaks of the correct size to yield the timbers they would need after the bark and sapwood had been removed. Pretty neat and I think it goes deeper than just that remark. First they were managing their forests at that date. I also suspect that contrary to what most people think, fast grown oak is a good bit stronger than old growth or slow growth oak, and they knew that. Those old carpenters were sharp.

I have yet to find Hewett's drawings of Greensted online, and they are worth finding, cool joinery, but here is the article on the barns at Cressing which is an interesting read;
http://www.woodworks.snakeye.us/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Cressing%20Temple.pdf

[cherrick]

Thanks Don, more good stuff.  I especially like the old staircase.  I would not have guessed they were timbers.

I didn't get a chance to visit any of the San Antonio missions, but saw illustrations of them in the museum.  Maybe next trip.  The only one that is not a working church is the Alamo.

I failed to take any pics, but another interesting place to visit near the log cabin property is Texas Tiny Houses.  http://tinytexashouses.com/
The factory is just north of the log cabin just off interstate 10.  I met the founder, Brad Kittel, who is an interesting character.

The log cabin owner told me the original had a ceiling that they removed, but he said there was not a loft room.  I didn't get into the details of the roof construction with him, but if I get another visit, I will ask more questions and see if he has a pics.

An old thread but too close geographically to me to let it pass ... and I've known Brad Kittel for years, first in Austin, TX and then Gonzales, TX.

Speaking of Dogtrot structures, if you're in this area, there is a public park in Gonzales, TX with a historic dogtrot structure worth seeing. And remember that Gonzales is the original home of Come and Take It, referring to the canon and the Texas War for Independence.

[Adam Roby]

First time seeing this post... but since it has been revived...

I saw a place that looked identical to this one on a lot my friends father was looking at about 20 years ago.  It was being sold as land with the house as a plus.  We walked through the entire house, found stamps from the early 20's and we finally got the basement only to see that the foundation walls were made of piled rocks, and 1 side had already begun to collapse.  They decided not to buy, and the next spring driving by we saw that it had collapsed in on itself.  (Was probably not the safest place for us to walk around in). 

So, a roof will help save a building from rot, but if the foundation fails the building fails. 

[Dave Sparks]

Here is a link to Coral Castle in Florida. Really good foundation and roof! 

http://www.crystalinks.com/coralcastle.html

[John Raabe]

Wow, that's quite an interesting story...

At the end of the Coral Castle article is a link to "weird houses" - a tribute to the the creative powers of an imaginative mind (even if some of these houses were only built in Photoshop).

Weird Houses

[Dave Sparks]

Coast to Coast AM radio, across our continent late night has regular stories about Coral Castle. One of the weirdest was how Ed moved the whole castle complex to where it is today. The truck driver who moved those huge coral rocks would leave the empty truck over night and Ed would load it for the next mornings trip.

[MountainDon]

Good ol' George