Kitchen Trap Door

In my last few posts, I have been walking through the slow process of kitchen and furnace demo. Today, our destruction continues with the creation of a hole in the kitchen floor, which will become a crawlspace access. Let's start with the obvious questions: why, how large and where. Before I begin, for my US readers, Happy first day after Labor Day; so starts the most productive period of the year (until ThanksGiving in late November). If you feel like you're working "so much more than", that's because you are. Now, where were we? Oh, yeah, cutting a hole.

Why

its a hole

Recall, this is a 1948 farmhouse. This house pre-dates most modern design like an inside access to the crawlspace. Instead, there are large openings around the outside of the foundation, which are blocked off with framed wire rectangles (to keep critters out). So, when under-house maintenance is needed, one of the frames is pulled off the house and the worker-person crawls under. When it is nice outside, this is clumsy, but not terrible. Add in rain, snow, cold and/or wind and this quickly becomes much less pleasant. Consider, between readying tools and parts in the rain near the crawlspace access, you will be fairly wet before you slide under the house... into the dry dust and dirt. Being wet, that dust and dirt clings to you. Yeay. Having an ongoing internal access would address this, but honestly, if a furnace could fit through the existing foundation opening, we would not have taken on the scope increase. Whether we were to buy a new electric furnace or reuse our existing furnace, the hole is too small to fit a furnace that is large enough for the home size.

How Large

So, answering the question "why" above, I shift to "where", with an eye on "how big". I took measurements of the in-hand gas furnace, and I swear the designer had standard US housing standards in mind when they considered the size. The most narrow side is just over 14 inches wide. Standard framing width is 16 inches-on-center, so the just over 14 inches wide will just slide between. The floor joists in this house are standard width (I was shocked, honestly), so the furnace can fit between. The next most-narrow side is around 27 inches. This is important for install as well, but this next-shortest side drove us to the size and shape of the hole. In short, the hole needs to be at least 14 inches by 27 for the furnace to slide through.

Where

stripped clean

I touched on where we were thinking about putting the access in my last post. Since we have not fully decided where things would go in the kitchen, cabinets and appliances -wise, we had to make some informed guesses. We recognize that the smart place to put food storage (fridge and pantry) is close to the door where you bring groceries into the house. So, we figured the if we set the trapdoor inside the door to the garage, the limit to how far into the room it can go will be constrained by the space consumed by food storage. Knowing the width of the pantry (sitting in the garage, waiting for install) is 24 inches and a standard-sized US fridge is 33 inches, we can measure off the not-moving-chimney towards the door to the garage, and mark where the closest edge of the fridge will be.

Along the adjacent wall (the wall with the door in/out of the garage), we intend to put cabinets with a sink. Similar to the pantry cabinet, we know the width of that standard-depth cabinet (82 inches). By marking that off on the floor, we could see that there was about a foot and a half between the end of the cabinet and the start of the door frame, leaving ample space for garbage/recycling bins by the door. For this purpose, though, it gave us a large space where the hole could go.

With these parameters, we needed to know where the joists and beams were so we could cut a hole that met the various needs. To get exact locations, someone had to go under the floor.

Mark Your Spots

old access

Boo has a very healthy sensitivity to rodent waste and what the dust that waste creates can do to your lungs. Because of that healthy sensitivity, she has always taken on the role of under-house-slider, wearing a full respirator. For this task, it was no different. She took a flashlight, a measuring tape and a cordless drill with her. Shouting to each other through the floor to arrive at an approximate location, Boo sent the drill through 6 different locations to indicate for us where the joists were. Beyond the drilling the holes, Boo had a clear understanding of what barriers or hurdles exists beyond the joists. It was with that info plus the drilled holes we were able to plan the rectangular cut.

Cut Once.... Or Twice

Based off of the holes, we drew an initial rectangle. I opened up the holes with a larger bit so the jigsaw would fit and then cut the lines. Once we had the initial hole, Boo and I got to thinking, did some more measuring and more talking. It was at this point that we realized that the furnace could fit between the joists. Could we have figured this out earlier? Maybe. Sometimes, you need to see things in real-time before you have a flash of realization. Once we could see where the cabinets and fridge were going, we could see where we could re-shape the hole parallel to the door to the garage. The furnace would fit and we would not have to cut and frame-fix any joists. So, we measured and cut another small section of flooring out, reshaping the hole.

Furnace Prep

While this was going on, I removed all the bits that were attached around the furnace, to get it's dimensions down to the size of the outer frame. This included removing the stove-stack out the top, the gas line from the side and the emergency electric shut off box. With these gone, the furnace is actually the measured dimensions, allowing it to pass between the joists. In my last post, I walked through our logic to try to reuse our in-hand furnace. We are continuing with that thinking, as you have probably surmised from how we approached the size of the hole. While Boo was under the house, she crawled over to the chimney and confirmed there is a soot clean-out. So, with that variable solved, we could commit to reusing the furnace whole hog.

A hole in the floor just inside a regularly used door is very unsafe. As you can see in the first image, we temporarily covered the hole with some waste from the first cut. Once the furnace is through the hole, we will nail-down some plywood until the flooring company can fit us into their schedule. At least the visible floor in the kitchen is getting replaced; we don't know about the rest of it. Regardless, this trapdoor will persist, and while the extra cut will create some subfloor repair by the flooring company, this access will be an incredible upgrade long-term while creating a means of moving the furnace where we want it. That's next.... and a future post.

Thanks, as always, for following along-