A neat old building

[Don P]

I was writing the fam and thought some of y'all might like to see some of the guts of an old theater from ~1950.

Well, so much for carrying a briefcase. I needed to see how the theater was put together for building an upstairs apartment and its all buried under the balcony framing... the asbestos check came back clear this week so we started digging into it. Then we got to the projection booth and what turns out to be the rewind room/ film vault. It has a 4" thick reinforced slab floor, with sprinklers under it and overhead. We drilled and jackhammered until it was obvious we need to rent a saw. We removed the wire lath and plaster ceiling which was also really well done in the projection/ film storage area. There were sprinklers above and below in the whole balcony area. We've removed the ceiling sprinkler piping, there was quite  bit. While riding the hammer drill it finally dawned on me they were building for the old highly flammable nitrocellulose film. After some searching, modern safety film came along in the mid 50's. Although the carbons for the projector arc lamps would last 20 minutes the early film was limited to 10 minutes per reel for safety reasons. The projectionists was busy cueing up reels between 2 alternating projectors, rewinding and putting reels back in their sealed cans to lower the fire hazard. The door frame had been wrapped on site in metal to help create a fire door.



The current floor there is over part of the balcony and was the dance school when we moved here. Alas it is cobbled together on the old sloping framing.
The rewind room is the far raised floor. We've now removed the ceiling in that first bay and most of the projection booth and the owner located a young man to remove the next section of ceiling in the foreground Yaay!.

The ceiling insulation is a stitched asphalt impregnated crepe paper made by Kimberly Clark, the tissue paper and paper products company that I think is still around. It crumbles to dust really easily.



Very messy but happily no itch. "Balsam Wool" is another cellulose insulation popular during the period. These predate R value so I have no idea how well it worked. At 2" thick, not much there and the block walls are uninsulated. The floor there is part of the slab we'll need to remove with a saw after we scared it with the jackhammer.

[Jim_Rogers]

Thanks for sharing.

Jim Rogers

[Don P]

We've mentioned Vevor stuff recently, the owner is a fan. When we first discussed removing the sprinkler piping we all thought of cutting torch first. The thought of running a flame into a hole in the ceiling put me off, we would never get it out if that insulation caught. He bought one of their deep throat portabands. It cut the pipe like butter. I think it was a couple of hundred bucks. We aren't into the biggest yet but were sawing through 4" and down schedule 40 pipe with no trouble at all. They were serious, the main line is 6". The current water line servicing the building is 1". I had not brought the brute breaker, just the Hilti percussion drill and chisels... I had thought the slab was thin. Once we realized what we were into he went downstairs and drug out a small Vevor jackhammer. It was also pretty impressive for its size. I guess I'm viewing them as Harbor Freight without the middleman.

The sprinkler pipe was rusty enough inside I doubt it could have been made fail safe. We'll recycle the small steel and save the 3" and larger long lengths for potential support columns. We black plastic'ed ourselves in on the balcony so the auditorium would be dark. A beekeeper came by, removed some ceiling at the stage end of the building and successfully removed a large bee hive and what he thought was about 50 lbs of honey. He was one cool cat, up on 2 sets of scaffold, no suit (and we were in rainy gloomy weather, not their favorite!) and got the job done. Years ago I was up that high and opening up a gable vent on a house. Turned out there was a huge wasp nest behind and on it that I tore. They rolled out and I bailed, hammer in hand and the claw took a good chunk out of the side of my finger when I landed. A few stings would have probably been over a whole lot quicker.

This wall was put in where the railing would usually be so was the main divider between us and the auditorium. It created the old dance studio. What I wanted to show here is a thinking problem I see often... and am not immune to myself now and again. I often see this in the gable endwall of a house. Studs hinged somewhere in the wall, no wall strength to speak of. This guy probably got a deal on studs and then plated and built a cripple wall on top of the 8' wall. Well, looking at it, he used 6'8" or so studs, I have no idea what was going on in his head. Code and common sense reads something like "Studs shall run unbroken from points of lateral support" That is, a single stud from floor to floor or floor to ceiling. I could start shaking this wall and pull it down.




Opening that door has you looking towards the stage and down about 12' to the auditorium main floor below. The mirrors and bars for the dance studio that was up there after the theater closed were mounted to that wall and a fair number of the town's young ladies passed through there back in the day. Thankfully the nails held and dumb luck never knew any better. Another thing to notice there, the black areas in insulation are where air was passing through the wall and the fiberglass acted as a filter. catching dirt and showing the air leaks. The beekeeper wanted the scrap wood, win/win.

[Magicman]

they were building for the old highly flammable nitrocellulose film

For anyone that has not witnessed nitrocellulose burn, it would be nearly impossible to describe the fast/explosive burn rate of that stuff.   

[Resonator]

Kimberly Clark is a huge corporation started in Neenah Wisconsin, and is still going strong with plants throughout US and Canada. They make Kleenex, Cottonelle, and many other paper products.

If you've ever seen a magician do a trick and there is a poof of fire flash for a second (like while the rabbit turns into a hat)
that is nitrocellulose paper burning.

[beenthere]

[Don P]

Figuring out the building more as we go... What I was calling the rewind room because it was off center, was the projection booth and rewind room. That end was built as a fire protected room for all the film related stuff. Above the 2nd story slab floor were vents through the roof for the carbon arc projectors. A friend dropped by that was a projectionist down in Taylorsville for awhile. He said they had one John Wayne film that was so spliced before they could finally retire it that the Duke was popping into and out of scenes like magic  .



We also exposed the 16" deep steel roof beams and have found their supports.



We wanted to lower that floor as much as possible and needed to find the steel and suports under it. We failed with the jackhammer, rented a saw, and from the dump tickets we were making ~250 lb blocks. Down the stairs on a hand truck, none went through a wall . Out to the dump trailer by the sidewalk and both of us sliding/flopping them in.



We are on Main St, so not too hidden. Several contractors said they drove by when we were sawing and the cloud was rolling out the windows, they weren't about to stop but were curious enough to stop by later to see what we had gotten into. It took 3 respirator filter changes and I need to pick up more, yuk! My wallet and keys got washed in one episode of strip on the porch before entering at home  .The slab had been poured over wire with waxed cardboard woven in as the "pan". The full dimension hemlock 2x10's had hatchet chamfered edges to allow the wire to "roll" over them without hard corners.

This is where we left it yesterday, the joists are removed and I'm a couple of feet lower and over the ceiling of the shop below. Its' steel beam is carrying the ceiling and will carry the new, lower, floor. Notice the first generation 16"x48" "drywall", plaster backing with key holes.



I had removed most of the sloped balcony framing and cleaned that ceiling before leaving yesterday. That looked to have more white pine mixed with hemlock. The concrete had what looked like dolomite pea gravel. We are on granite. I think it, or at least the aggregate, came from Wytheville to our north. Still lots of destruction to go. I had meant to just consult on this one but it has become pretty difficult for the young guys to get a commercial license, so they aren't getting them. Not good, there are tons of small town commercial buildings out there and us grandfathers are aging out.

[NewYankeeSawmill]

Fascinating stuff, thanks for sharing!
I did a stint working fire sprinklers... you wouldn't believe the age of some pipe. If it'll hold pressure, it's useable. We tested our systems with air @120PSI, had to hold for 24 hours. If the pipe passed, you were good.
I have a few pieces from Vevor... got what I paid for, no complaints here.

[greensman]

really enjoying seeing your work. i enjoy working in older building at times. i get to see how it was all put together and figure out how to bring it up to snuff for today. its funny you mentioned vevor. i recently bought one of their concrete saws for a job and it has worked very well. and i got it for a little more than a rental would have cost me. i looked like a ghost when i was done and i think it took 2 days to wash all the dust out of my ears. 

im looking forward to more updates on this rehab

[Don P]

You would not believe how deep concrete dust goes. I'm intermittently out of the respirator now but often back to cleaning up as I go. Its down to where I can measure things and mostly identify the load path for remodel, there's still some unknowns we'll have to firm up but it is much closer than my initial understanding of the building, had to kind of peel the onion  .

This is the majority of the balcony support, I'm hoping to raise steel and load bearing walls to one or probably 2 levels for the upstairs apt floor. There was over 8' of drop in the balcony framing... and now we want a level floor.



This is standing in the double entry doors and looking down the entry ramp towards the auditorium. One code change since construction is the ramp is double steep compared to what is now allowed. it means I'll have to raise the floor, that lower steel and the doors no matter what. The ceiling here had that perforated Celotex acoustical tile. I'll make all this a level ceiling in the final and it'll have a double layer of 1/2" sheetrock to give 1hr fire separation between the commercial occupancy downstairs and the apartment above. Popcorn on the right, movie posters on the left. The walls are 12" block so those poster niches are 8".



Under the balcony, between the center windows was this thing, I had to look up what it was;



I'm sure you've seen the red fire bell on buildings, this is back to back inside. If a sprinkler goes off it spins the water motor which starts banging the gong outside. There is a bit of a mystery. The town says the building was built in 1950. I found someone had written a 1949 date on a stud up in the booth. The sprinkler stuff is all dated '56 and if they put it in after the fact my hat is off to them, there are sprinklers and pipes in concealed places I wouldn't want to try to work in.

[rusticretreater]

Maybe final inspection approvals of the building were filed in 1950 or thats when its street address was assigned.  Something like that.

[SwampDonkey]

That insulation was similar to what grandfather put in the house in the 40's, new construction. His was more like a wool felt and maybe 1" thick. The old place wasn't all that warm but warmer than were grandmother grew up. Mom asked dad one day if that place was ever insulated, yes was the answer. Mom's thoughts....Well, yeah. But not that great.  Dad never lied, but you had to dig further sometimes for more 'context'.  Dad was the type who never lied, but if the answer was difficult he went silent. You knew right off that he knew something wouldn't go over well and wasn't talking. That old fart!! :D

[Don P]

During that period there were a lot of wood byproduct building materials. When I had the work area asbestos check done there was none, but nearly everything came back with high amounts of wood fiber. The acoustical tile was about an inch thick and was a good bit of the insulation between occupancies inside, a good bit of beaverboard as well. In fact under the balcony but above the store/shop on the bottom left of the building the only fire separation above the basement stairs was 1/2" beaverboard, another celotex type sheathing board made of just wood fiber. I'd give it about a 1-minute fire rating. As good as they did most places with fire they sure blew it there.

It did make me think though. Those materials are almost all capable of absorbing large amounts of vapor and drying out later where many of the materials I use now are nonabsorbent or damaged in the same environment. They controlled humidity swings with materials that acted as hygric buffers. We do it with mechanical ventilation now, heat recovery ventilators and such. That stuff is dirty and smelly now, the air quality is improving as I remove it, but those materials did perform well.

A lot of the balcony framing was mostly eastern white pine which kind of surprised me for the spans and loads but none was split or broken. However 2 pieces broke in half at knot clusters when I dropped them 8-10' to the floor below. Grading has its place.

[SwampDonkey]

Up this way, old farm houses in the early rail road days used horse hair in the plaster on the lathing as a binder. Unless it is actually tested the inexperied assume asbestos. Up here that never appeared until the 1940's. It was a very,I mean very common shingle on the exterior walls. There still some of this on mom's grandfather's. But it was mom's unclel's doing in 40's. Stuff lasts forever. Mom's dad always stuck with spruce clapboard. Dad's father used the asbestos on the house in the 40's. Interestingly, the maple flooring was put down rough, 1-1/2" wide. That was all scraped smooth with chards of glass on their knees. Also, original homesteaders here lived in quickly erected camps that never endured, not even rock walls. I've walked on a good many old plases, at most you find a dug hole, just dirt. On me I found a top of a small stove, which the same seen in logging camps. Often they had rings on th corners, two men carried with dry spruce poles. The old European settlements here were coastal. The interior was canoe or foot access, maybe 300 years difference in permanent European settlement.