I have run in to a snag trying to “plumb” the front of my (future) home. The house is a 1860 balloon frame, two story structure with the original shiplap siding. The gable end of the house leans back about 5 inches out of plumb.
The original plan was to fir out the wall and put up some new wood siding – leaving the original siding on to keep everything from moving. (forgot to mention – have already taken care of the foundation problem that caused the lean and have run plumb sister studs on the interior).
I started by running 2x up each corner of the front of the home – shimming and blocking along the way so that I have two parallel, plumb corners on the house. My intention was to run cross bracing or nailing strips horizontally and vertically.
Starting from the bottom of the house – I began to sun sheathing over the 2x “frame” that I created. Around the same time I started to think about fire blocking and the chimney that I created on the outside of my house by building inspector stopped by enroute from another inspection down the road.
We came up with two problems that I created – the concealed space on the exterior of the house and a possible vapor barrier nightmare.
Anyone have an idea how I might prevent this? Removing the old siding is the easiest, I guess – but I hate to remove anything that helps hold her together. I have more than a few studs that run 3/4 of the way up the house and stop. It seems to me that there has to be a way to address both the moisture and fire problems.
Thanks in advance.
Replies
I usually try to strip everything off and get to the original structure. Shimming and sistering over siding is going to be hard. But... it would help to know more, such as, what's going on with the side walls--how were they affected by the front leaning in?
D:
The house has "Philadelphia gutters" - so the gable end of the house doesn't look as good as it should. I was going to hide the gutters with a corner detail that looked like a square column found on many 1800s houses. I was going to wrap this around the corner - so - that would be the place to hide the fact that the front will be sticking out farther on the front then the bottom.
I am seriously thinking about ripping everything off at this point - the more I think about this the more complicated the situation seems. I just cant see how to keep the moisture out of the exterior wall cavity.