Hello all. A little background: my home is a 1926 traditional 2 story all brick veneer exterior home with balloon framing. We have basically renovated the entire home including a second story bathroom addition. The last task to do before September is complete a full kitchen renovation and add a small addition to the existing kitchen which will be a bathroom. The current wall construction where the addition will be added is brick exterior, 1″ air gap, VRB over 1×12 sheathing, 2×4 studs, and lath and plaster on the interior. The entire interior will be demo’d down to the bare studs. The main level of the home itself sits about 30″ above grade. See attachments for existing/proposed floor plan as well as elevations. 

my questions are as follows:

1. Is there any way to get away with not doing a traditional footing and foundation? could we instead just do a single pier footing on the corner and the weight would rest on that? if this is a viable solution how would we close in the space below the addition and keep water from freezing?

2. We want to demo the exterior brick where the room addition will be located. We would then sheetrock over the studs and that would be part of the new interior of the bathroom. Is it even possible to demo brick on the exterior and keep the bricks above that from crashing down? how would we support those brick temporarily until a new lintel can be installed? It’s not like traditional framing where we can build a temporary support wall. Then do we need to have an engineer spec out the lintel for us?

3. Where the sloped shed style roof is up against the house how would that get flashed to keep water out? Would it be a matter of demoing a little extra brick to be able to get a piece of flashing behind the existing brick that would lay on top of the sheathing/roof overpayment?

Hopefully that makes sense and that the attachments help.

regards,

Josh C