I am ready to throw some bricks around. To do so, I first have to climb out of the hole, leave the porch basement floor behind, and ascend to the brand new 2nd floor porch level.
Edgar, our carpenter, and I had a number of conversations this spring, thinking through the process of rebuilding the back porch. Back then, he pointed out that we would encounter a lot of loose bricks right at roof level.
That prediction didn’t surprise me because this section of the masonry wall isn’t that dissimilar to the parapet. And boy, that parapet was in bad shape, until we rebuilt it.
Removing the loose bricks was somewhat of a déjà vu with some subtle differences.
The only whole bricks I encountered were on the outside. The inner wythe was almost completely composed of brick scraps. This must have been the last bit of masonry work when they raised the walls. Was this resource efficiency or did they simply run out of good bricks? Whatever it was, the extensive use of brick scraps didn’t produce very solid masonry.
I had to pull out all those loose bricks until I was down to solid masonry again.
When we insulated the second floor, I didn’t insulate behind the last roof joist. There simply wasn’t enough room to get into those two inches between the joist and the masonry wall.
Now, with the brick removed, I had all the space I needed to get into that space and insulate it with pieces of two inch thick XPS boards. I can’t lose sight of the air tight building envelope principle. So I made sure to seal around all the XPS edges with spray foam.