Slaves of the Vintage House

Research: A possible match

2011-12-26T20:00:00.001-06:00

Well, it looks like my odd little house has even stumped Rose Thornton. That's hard - she knows a lot about kit homes! Her best guess is that she thinks it might - maybe- be a Gordon Van Tine. I have asked her to ask Dale Wolicki if he recognizes that floorplan in his collection, as there are currently no pre-1920 GVT catalogs online.

However, that made me go looking again, in hopes that I might find something useful. And - I might just have done so!

Thanks to the Clarke Historical Library's online archive of Aladdin documents I may have found a possible match. In the 1912 annual catalog, there is a little house called the Sherman. It isn't in the 1910 catalog and there is no 1911 catalog in the archive.

Its footprint is off, it's a little narrower, 26x48, and the room dimensions are a little off (plus there is a pantry where my house has none), but this is the absolute closest house plan I have yet found. I wish the scan was clearer, I've tried to refine it a bit for my example, but it wasn't very good.

Here she is in the 1913 annual, with two plan options. Neither is as good a match to my little oddball as the 1912 plan (or to the exterior illustration! look at the windows). The only real difference between this one and the next year's example is that there are people in the image, and the scan is clearer.

By 1915, it's clear that no more changes are being made to this design, or even the catalog page, except perhaps for typesetting. The 1914 and 1915 layouts are almost identical. And, in the 1916 catalog, I think I may have hit upon an answer as to why the Sheridan looks so very very much like my little mystery kit home. In 1916, the Sherman's name is changed to the Sheridan, one plan gets updated, and the exterior image finally gets a full update to match the changed plans.

Look how the unaltered windows (the dining room and kitchen windows have significant alterations in my home) line up with the plan! At this point, while I am very optimistic that this house may, in fact, be a customized 1912 Sherman, because of the differences shown in the overlay image above, it is still equally possible that the 1912 Sherman is a copy of a similar house from a competitor's 1911 or 12 catalog. And, of course, if it is an Aladdin ... why is it all Sears on the inside? What this has given me is a concrete time range for the design of the house. I always had a feeling it was early teens, and now I am certain of it. It makes the search more focused and I am very, very happy about that.

Research: What the House is Not

2011-12-26T08:00:00.000-06:00

I've been saying recently that I have pored over - without any success - numerous online and print resources, without being terribly specific. I really ought to share where and what I have looked through. I've mostly focused on the best (most local) companies, since my town is on two north/south rail lines and Chicago and Cairo were likely sources. Another clue about this being cut at an IL mill is that the house is mostly, if not all, cut from cypress. However, while makes the house nearly bulletproof and resistant to water damage, that fact doesn't narrow the options any, since local lumber mills in IL cut lots of cypress lumber both for local and regional use. Sears even advertised cypress as a high-quality budget option for floors and millwork (cheaper than oak or birch, but not by much).

Features that make my house easy to identify:

Odd footprint size -apparently 28x48 overall is a weird footprint for the period.
One floor (fairly rare in a house of this size among all the various plans).
The arrangement of the bedrooms and closet between.
The bath positioned at the center rear of the house.
The kitchen is not square.
Front has two living room windows, the door, and the den/parlor window.
That crazy angle between the living and dining rooms (this may have been a custom feature, though it was still fashionable in the 1900's and early teens).

Superficial features:

Porch design, tucked under the hipped roof (could easily be customized).
Hipped dormer attic vent (now missing).
No living room or parlor fireplace (house was heated with stoves originally).
Lap siding, millwork and interior hardware are all Sears (and original, there is no sign whatsoever of the interior hardware ever being changed).

So, here you go, a quick illustrated guide to what this house is not.

From the Winterthur Archive (these examples are created from their archive scans):

Chicago House Wrecking Company 1913 house plans book.

The best candidate is the 119A - It looks good, from the outside, except this house is wider and has a different roofline, footprint (31x38) and similar, but still off, layout.

Montgomery Ward Book of Homes, 1916 (date taken from wallpaper book ad at end of catalog).

It isn't a 156, because the footprint (32x39) is wrong, and the plan is also far off. The only real similarities are the outer appearance and bath/kitchen positions. She looks a lot like my house, though!

Plan Book of Harris Homes 1915

The closest I could find is this one, the L-1001. It's not really even close, footprint is off, appearance is wrong, all details are wrong.

A later undated edition (all houses are "N-" designs) has no likely examples beyond the N-1001, which is almost identical to the above excerpt. Another I would assume comes between the two has houses designated "M-" and is equally unhelpful. Nearly all Harris Plan Book houses have a side-located bath in the one-story models.

Aladdin Homes "Built in a day" catalog No 29, 1917

It's not a Sunshine, though it is very close in some significant details, like the kitchen/bath/back bedroom arrangement (this is a very Aladdin style layout, actually), and the chimney stack position. Footprint is close but wrong, roofline is wrong. The Boulevard is just as close, but too small, as is the Stanhope.

Oh, now we get to the Sheridan, which really, really looks like the old girl. I mean, look. Just look at her.

They could be twins. But all the other details are off. Plus that pesky all-Sears interior.

Then there is the Cadillac, which really looks like a similar plan, and is even 28 feet wide. But the room sizes are all wrong. All of them. It so close to right but it's not.

This concludes the selections from the Winterthur Museum Library (courtesy of archive.org).

There are no Sears Home Catalogs or Gordon Van Tine Ready-Cut catalogs earlier than about 1920 on the Internet Archive. I have compared the 1920s GVT 548 with my house and while there is a superficial resemblance, they are far from the same house, the 548 is too narrow and has the wrong plan. Likewise for the 1920s 533.

I also have several Aladdin and Sears catalog reprints, plus The Houses That Sears Built and Houses By Mail and have voraciously read everything Sears and kit home related I can find online, and I can tell you that I have not yet found a precisely similar house. I am at a loss and I would be deeply grateful to anyone who might be able to point me to one.

Research: A resource for kitchen restoration

2011-12-26T01:53:00.004-06:00

The Kitchen Plan Book, 1920 Published by Hoosier Manufacturing (the cabinet people!) is available at the Internet Archive's online texts archive. It is a free download, or you can read it online. It's the collected best submissions from a kitchen design contest, and shows a fantastic variety of kitchens from classic mid-late 1910s bare-bones rooms with wood stoves to ultra-modern, deluxe, fitted kitchens that would not look out of place in a modern home.

Here are a few excerpts:

This one is for a small kitchen not unlike ours. I want built in everything, like this little kitchen has.

I especially love this one, though it's for a much more architecturally interesting house, with an octagonal kitchen. It looks like something you might find in a new house with a modern fitted kitchen.

Advice, if you want to download it: remove the extra periods from the filename, or your pdf reader will tell you it's a corrupted file.

If you want to get a hard copy of an earlier one, American Bungelow has their reprint of the 1917 edition of the Kitchen Plan Book (all different designs from this one, different year's contest) on sale, half price.

A clue! But what does it mean?

2011-12-25T16:53:00.001-06:00

This is the only greasepencil mark we have found so far. We found it when we demoed out the wall between the master bedroom and the closet (which was VERY nonfunctional and which we plan to replace with builtins/wardrobes), and then I misfiled the photo - only to find it today. That is a stud, actually 2 inches by 4 inches. Since it is vertical, this could be read any sort of way:

Does anyone know what it might mean?

I'll be shop-vac-ing the attic soon, and I expect to maybe find more marks.

Return of the Kitchen Plans

2011-12-24T01:11:00.001-06:00

Part of gearing up for a return to work on the house is updating plans, and updating cost lists. One thing that hasn't changed is that we intend to use Ikea kitchen cabinets as our budget solution for making our kitchen more usable. We are going with white Adel cabinet fronts because they look the most like what used to be here (we found the remains of a door in the basement), and using hoosier-style pulls instead of knobs and handles because, as big a room as it is, it is still a tight space.

I wish the Ikea planner gave a little more control over the walls, and I don't really understand why the stove hood won't fit in with the short open shelves (there will be a vent hood there of some kind, but we may have to fabricate it ourselves), but I'm happy with the general look.

I love the light in the room, and I never, ever wanted to cut those long windows in half, as I would certainly have to do if I let the cabinets and counters cut across them. I also want, but don't have room for, a permanent kitchen island or kitchen table in the middle of the room. Given these two factors, I decided to use kitchen carts as combined movable workspaces and additional storage for things like mixing bowls, the wok, baskets of folded kitchen towels, art materials for the kids, all kinds of things we won't need to hide.

The sink is getting put back where it used to be, under the short wide window where the stove sits now, looking lonely. Where it is now, it has the water lines running through an unheated, uninsulated space under what was originally a porch that got enclosed some time in the late 1920's, and expanded into sometime in the 1940's. That space is a perfect spot for a table and a couple of benches for eating, doing homework or making messy crafts.

This is what it looks like now, with a round table, all the counter and most of the storage on one side, the sink crammed up against the back door, and the stove hanging out in the middle of one wall. So much wasted space, not a great working layout, and a bunch of great 1940's steel cabinets that will become my laundry room cabinets when we do the kitchen reno.

Here is the plan view, showing how much better the new layout (which is likely not too different from the original layout) will use the same space.

The fridge/storage/pantry wall, with some workspace (I foresee the microwave and telephone taking up residence here). Those tall cabinets are the pantry and cleaning closet, the high cabinets will be more pantry. Yes, I have already purchased my stepstool.

The old Ikea planner version of the kitchen redesign, with the medium brown wood finish Adel fronts and gray counters. Between my research showing that white was popular, locating the white cabinet door in the cellar, and realizing that a long narrow room like this never benefits from loads of dark wood, we elected to go with the white. However, as you can see, the basic plan remains the same.

And an overview of the kitchen from the new planner, with the white Adel fronts, more open shelving (we like putting coffee cups, spice and dishes on display) and better-fitting carts. I expect my entire basement will be filled with boxes in short order, though the renovation isn't going to happen until spring.

Oh, I forgot to mention the best part: the cost for all the cabinets, counters, sink and furnishings is under 5 grand. Yay Ikea!

On the longest night

2011-12-21T23:44:00.001-06:00

Whatever midwinter festival you celebrate, don't make it about greed, or selfishness. This time of year is meant to be about pooling our resources so we can get through the dark and cold months, alive, together. Everything else is just set dressing and hyperbole.

Something I can defintively associate with this time of year, ever since I struck out on my own, is that all the world seems to strive towards obscene excess, leaving so many on the sidelines, outside looking in. This atmosphere counters what is supposed to be going on, if you listen to the songs and stories, essentially highlighting how little most people can afford to give to others, and how little most people can afford to have at all, in the face of orgies of consumerism and public plenty.

The holidays are only full of joy away from all of that, away from comparing haves and have nots, away from all the implication that those who have and get less should be somehow more grateful than those who have and get more than anyone needs. I think this is especially important right now, with the longest night being more than the literal one, and the cold being much more than weather. Some of us have hungry faces outside our windows and some of us are among them in the dark and the cold. The only way we might survive is by pulling together.

Maybe at the end of it, there will be warm sunlight and hope.

Emerging from hiatus, and a request

2011-12-15T19:35:00.002-06:00

It's been 4 years of near-total inactivity here, but there wasn't much to report. We've been on hiatus, my husband has been deployed a few times, and we are finally getting to get back to work on the old girl.

I've spent the intervening time researching things and making plans, and I have figured out a number of things about this house. Not one of those things, and none of my extensive research, has given me anything like an answer as to which architect or kit company she came from. Not a bit, despite having practically had a love affair with the online texts section of the Internet Archive, and spending way too much time with Google Books. So, in the spirit of warming up a cold project and slowly getting it into gear, I am going to ask you for some help. Here's my question for you:

Does anyone out there recognize this floorplan? I have yet to find a house with a 28 x 48 footprint with a 28x40 cellar/foundation. I made a few rough scale drawings of what the house looked like before three different additions were tacked (or frankensteined, in the case of the dining room bay) on, and before the porch was closed in and roofers removed the vent gable. I think I ought to have drawn the steps wider, but I have no idea what the original steps might have looked like.

Here's the only photo I have been able to find prior to the changes to the porch:

What we do know:

The county tax assessor has a single sheet of manila with a tiny photo stapled to it, which I have been told dates from the late 1960s or early 1970s. The build date on the house, according to this document, is 1925. However, as records are incomplete, I have been told that could simply be a sale date, or the date the property record was recorded in the county office. Nobody knows.
The younger daughter (Edith Heppe) of the family that built it visited the late former owner of the home about 15 years ago, and a statement about the house was written down from her childhood memories. We have this statement and I have transcribed it here.
Mrs. Heppe remembered it was built by her father, and her parents moved to Centralia in 1921, so it had to have been built before that time.
It's got Sears hardware throughout, and all the original millwork is directly out of the Sears millwork catalog.
It originally looked rather like an Aladdin, if you go by that little black and white photo. But it does not match any recognizable Aladdin plan, or even a footprint of any similar style of home, that I have yet found. Also, the interior millwork and hardware and NOT Aladdin.
I've found a similar footprint in Wards and Chicago House Wrecking company catalogs, but nothing like this plan or style in combination with the footprint.
It's got an odd arrangement of den/living room/dining room that is indicative of an earlier house, so really, the latest I would put it at is 1914.

In other news, I finally know what to do with the back bedroom. More on that, and the kitchen remodel, later.

Q&A time! More Sticky Tile Advice

2008-01-21T18:58:00.001-06:00

We are still on Hiatus, but I got a question today that I think is worthy of a small update. A lady named Marie posted a comment on this post asking for help with her self-adhesive tile installation:

i had tile put down this summer 12x12 good tile he pull up all the old tile & cleaned the floor put down some wood then the self stick tile now every time i walk on it ,it sounds sticky.What can i do about it. THANK U MARIE

Marie, I'd have emailed you but you didn't leave an email address :)

It sounds as though your installer did not level the floor properly. Applying a new substrate is only part of the job - the substrate must be levelled and smoothed with a filling compound and allowed to cure, then sometimes re-levelled, before tiles are applied. This is even more important with larger or self-adhesive tiles, as they require a perfectly level surface to adhere properly.

The right application tools are very important. Having some way to press the tiles down, such as a roller, is crucial to bonding the tiles in place. If this is not done immediatley after the tiles are applied (usually after the entire floor has been laid), the tiles can release from the floor due to temperature fluctuations, and make a sticky noise when the floor is walked on. It is equally important not to walk on the new floor for the time recommended on the tile package, as walking on it may cause the adhesive to slip while it is curing.

Also, the quality of the self-adhesive tiles can significantly affect their sticking power - I've used expensive tiles and cheap ones, and universally had cheap tiles slip, peel and creep, even when thoroughly pressed down with a weighted roller. I've had best luck with the Armstrong brand of self-adhesive tiles, though the quality of tiles they produce is also affected by the price range and intended use. Some cheaper tiles will peel right up on a hot day, for example.

A slightly uneven surface is one of the reasons we chose small, ceramic tiles for our bathroom. The cost would have been approximately the same for inexpensive tiles (our ceramic tile was about 1.80 a square foot) + grout + substrate + leveling and filling compound vs quality self-adhesive tiles (generally about 3.00 or more a square foot) + substrate + leveling and filling compound.

On the positive side, it tends to be fairly inexpensive to pull up and replace self-adhesive tiles in order to correct insufficient floor leveling. Good luck!

It's Been Lovely, Wish I Was There.

2007-11-29T16:28:00.000-06:00

Arts & Crafts Homes Magazine. Looks fun. Might get a sub for myself for Christmas, but it might make me crazy.

Yep, still on hiatus. Mom says the yard looked really lovely this year. Wish I had seen it.

Possibly some real updates in Spring, but I plan to have a few more house research posts between now and then.

Happy Holidays!

Hiatus

2007-05-30T11:14:00.000-05:00

We will be on hiatus until further notice.

A Weighty Task

2007-05-02T11:38:00.000-05:00

Spring has sprung. It's hot. But not really hot enough for air conditioners, unless we don't open the windows. Which, mostly wasn't possible, so we had to borrow an a/c unit from my mother. I'm putting screens into the storm windows right and left, but getting all the windows open, and keeping them that way is a nightmare. We ran out of short pieces of wood.

What's wrong with the windows, you might ask? You didn't ask. Well, I'll ask for you, in the interest of moving us all along.

The windows are quite well preserved, except for a couple in the dining room bay, but nearly all the sash cords have gone. All but one set, on the only window that apparently never got sunbaked. That window has been open for weeks, since it's now indoors, on both sides, and opening it does us no good. I replaced a set of cords in my son's bedroom, and I think I replaced a set in the back room (hereafter referred to as the Hole, until it's cleared and made into the dressing room), last summer.

Some progress, but not enough. No openable windows in, say, the kitchen, or the dining room, or the living room. We had used up the little bits of wood propping open our bedroom windows. So sleeping was possible. It was unbearable, even with fans everywhere, and mom's little borrowed a/c unit. Too hot.

So, I started the interminable task of pulling out bottom sashes and prying out access boards yesterday. I started with the other window in my son's room, so he could get actual cross-ventilation, and while I was working on it, I decided to take photos. For everyone else, of course. I really don't need a picture of this to remember it:

Yum. It's like a big metal poop, but covered with 80 years of dust and dead spiders. Just makes you want to do this, doesn't it? Actually, looking at this, you can kind of see why people just quit replacing the cords.

Let's start at the beginning. It's much less disgusting.

These instructions are for a "modern" house with repair access ports designed into the frames. You can tell if you have these by opening the window and looking for joints and/or screws in the tracks. Also, even though all our windows are double-hung, the upper sashes are painted into place and their cords are (unsurprisingly, as they were protected from the sun) in fine shape, so we're only working with the lower, inner sash and its cords. Pulling both sashes, stripping and restoring full sash movement is a whole other kettle of lead paint chips.

If you have a house that doesn't have this modern convenience added to the traditional double-hung window, you'll have to pull the trim to access the channels.

Get real replacement sash cords, not nylon (or any other synthetic rope - it won't hold the knots well at all) or cheap cotton cord (not strong enough). It's fairly high-test, and is treated with a very grabby sizing to help it keep the knots. You'll also need a hammer, a large flathead screwdriver or small prybar, a screwdriver for removing and replacing any screws, and a cutting implement. Another thing you want is a long stiff piece of wire with an open hook at one end - a repurposed coathanger is perfect. More on this later.

First, pry off the stop moldings, gently, and set aside. If there is a single cord, or if you are replacing cord before it gives way, cut the cord now. Grasp the lower sash firmly and pull it straight out and set aside, somewhere you won't step into or kick it. I know you won't and you know you won't, but do you want add a trip to the hospital and the home store, plus recreational re-glazing to your day?

Now, if there are screws holding in the access panels, rather than just friction and the pressure of the stop molding, remove them and put them somewhere safe, like a cup. You'll probably find some evidence of previous repairs, as I did. Only two of the prymarks I left behind were mine - the other dozen were already there. Clearly the cords had been replaced before.

Start by prying carefully. There might be a small nail securing the panel (these are under the window trim, where they occur, at my house, which meant either pulling the trim -all of it- or hacksawing the nail). Remove or cut the nail, depending on your level of commitment. The edge that is secured by this mail occurs under the stop moldings at my house, so I just cut the nail. Continue prying gently until the panel pops out.

You may have to pull it out after the leading edge is free, since the center stop molding is still there. One edge is often under that. Once it's out, we get to do the fun part.

Deeee-lish-us. Reach in there and grab the weight and pull it out. Wear gloves if you like - our weights are iron, but as often, they can be lead. Look at the knot configuration, if you can. You probably can't, if it looks anything like the example weight does:

Let's wrestle that a little bit. This better? No?

Well, okay, I'll demonstrate the not-so-arcane-after-all knotting technique after we get the new cord through the pulley and out where we can reach it. Measure the length you'll need the cords - measure how far down the sash the cord groove goes, plus the length from the top of the pulley to the top of the weight (if you stood it up on the windowsill), and the cord should be long enough. Add three inches if you are worried.

Tie a plain old half-hitch close to one end, and pull it as tight as you can.

Then thread the other end through the top of the pulley, push every bit through until you get to the knot.

If you are really lucky, the cord will just snake down the inside and fall out the opening. However, this is unlikely, so use that long wire hook to fish around up there and pull the cord through.

Take the end of the cord and thread it through the hole in the weight. You should have enough slack to do this pretty easily, but not so much that the weight can lie on the windowsill while you work. I propped the weight up in the outer slide channel and the worked fine.

Now, tie another firm half hitch close to the end.

This would be the not-as-arcane-as-you-think knotting method. Next, pull the knot up, wrap it around the cord, and "button" it through the resulting loop. Step 1:

Step 2:

Then pull tight to secure it.

Put the weight back in the weight channel, and close up the access port. Repeat on the other side. Get the sash, and remove any remaining old cords from the cord grooves. Get another person to hold the sash (or prop it on something secure), make sure you've got the right side of the sash facing in, pull the knots down from the pulleys and tuck them into the holes for the knots, then push the cords into the grooves. The sash should now be hanging freely in the window, and shoudl slide easily up and down. Re-install the stop moldings (if you pulled the trim, re-install that, too), and you're done.

Lock, set, mismatch.

2007-05-01T16:24:00.001-05:00

So, things have been quiet on the home improvement front lately. I've done a couple of little touch-up jobs, like scraping away the weird grout bits that I didn't wipe off properly when i grouted the bath, but nothing really worth discussing. This week we have ambitious plans to clear and finish the dining room, but that may have to wait a couple of weeks.

What I did get done was to make the exterior cellar door secure. Warning - excessive use of parentheses follows.

The door concerned is an old, wood and plate glass door, similar to the original front door, but an obviously inferior model. It has, until now, had a rim latch with a little "lock" lever on it, and no other lock. This level of "security" was "reinforced" by a lovely old wooden screen door with a hook latch. Nothing here that would deter a casual vandal, let alone an intent burglar. Fortunately, this is a small town, and pretty safe, so it really wasn't that big of a deal. Til now.

However, I grew up in the city and have the requisite skittishness of someone who grew up with deadbolts on every door. There have been a few sleepless nights over that security hole. Then our insurance agent mentioned that having deadbolts on every entry would lower our insurance premium - so we bought new locks for every exterior door. And didn't install them. Well, okay, we installed them. One at a time, over a period of MONTHS. The new front door got one, and the back door got one, and the cellar door ... didn't.

Tangentially, we had removed the perfectly good, but ugly and unnecessary, aluminum storm windows from the formerly exterior interior windows on the now-enclosed front porch (that's quite a sentence). This gave us three entire storm windows to stick in the cellar. The only glass window in the house that had no protection from hail, or other weatherizing of any kind, was the plate glass cellar door. I had an epiphany, and decided to mount one of the spare storms over the glass panel on this door.

After installing the storm window over the glass panel (It's no prizewinner, looks wise, but I think I can pretty it up with some paint or mouldings.), I finally mounted the plain silver deadbolt we'd bought almost a year ago. That was an exercise in Making It Work - the door had been trimmed on the latch side to fit the frame, probably 80 years ago, and was almost too narrow to mount the lock without damaging the door or the glass. I ended up cutting a much smaller hole than called for by the lock's installation instructions, just large enough to fit the lock's mounting screws through, cutting the tube hole, then using my Dremel's drill saw to carve out just enough space to fit the end of the tube latch into the door. I love my Dremel.

Mounting the the strikeplate on the frame was a pain, as usual, but I managed, after only three false starts. There is now double glass and a deadbolt on the cellar door, along with its old and and ugly, but reliable, rim-mount knob set.

The dear old wooden screen door is coming off, and it will probably get replaced with the old modern storm door (also removed from the now-interior front door), for an extra layer of weather safety. We'll be refinishing the wooden screen door and mounting it on the back screen porch, probably when I get the screencloth put up on the naked screen mounting strips.

On the military front, Chris is finally processed back in. And barely in time - our savings ran out last month, we had to borrow from my mother to get by. He'd taken a leave of absence from work when he was asked to return to active duty, but we had no idea it might take six months, only one month of which was due to Chris training for his physical. Well, everything is okay now, and we're just waiting for orders.

I don't know how I'm going to face moving if we have to. We're just getting started.

We're Still Here

2007-04-11T10:24:00.000-05:00

...but it's raining today.

I wanted to do yardwork today, I had ambitious plans to set out my seedlings. I have beds planned out in my head, but the ground is soggy and it's still a little bit chilly.

They ought to be fine a few more days inside.

Terrors in the Night, or Clown House Repairs

2007-04-07T10:00:00.000-05:00

...actually, bad/strange/funny dreams with more house relevance, rather than real disasters. Which would you choose? I thought so.

My dream began with us sitting on the front porch, talking (a transcript is not available as the soundtrack has bee lost), followed by an enormous "runch" sort of noise and the building shuddering, with the center third of the house, and only that portion, listing to one side. After much comical sliding around, all of us rush downstairs, to the cellar.

There is an enormous soft spot in the foundation, as if the blocks had deflated. We immediately produce pole jacks from nowhere (I seem to recall them unfolding neatly from our pockets - that'd be nice, wouldn't it?) and jack the house back into its normal position. We're all wearing brightly colored overalls at this point.

Then we produce cans of "inflatable paste" which is then used to repair the wall. I think it's manufactured by the same imaginary company that makes Prognostikote. I don't recall there actually being air pumps, but there probably were. There were balloons, but I'm not sure what they were for. There were the long skinny kind, used for making animals. And a lot of slapstick.

Eventually we finished the repair and went back upstairs.

Do you think my house is trying to tell me something? We haven't had much time to work on it, beyond the Day Of Muck, for several weeks.

Incidentally, I'm not afraid of clowns.

Curtains for Us!

2007-04-01T00:20:00.000-05:00

Here's the best shot yet of the drapes I made for our living room in January. It is difficult to photograph sheers.

The rest of the living room looks like it was ransacked by barbarians (it was - they are 9 months are 4 years old), so it's been cropped out of the shot.

Pipe Fu

2007-03-31T03:55:00.000-05:00

or, A Sunday Visit from Roto-Rooter.

Things smelt rotten in our back yard last Sunday. Inspired by the nice weather to finally mow the lawn, Chris got out the lawnmower and stuck his head upstairs long enough to let me know that I was to stop washing dishes RIGHT NOW. Curious, as he was transmitting information in a clipped, military, need-to-know sort of way, I turned off the water, wandered down the cellar steps and looked out the basement door, into the swamp of sewage around the two-and-a-half foot tall vent pipe.

Chis points and says: "that's why I told you to stop."
I say some things that don't belong in print. I mutter something about "...not n the budget" and "first it won't come in and now it won't go out..." and then come to my senses and thank whoever blessed this house that the sewage backup was outside and not inside. Chris gets out the little bitty pipe snake and discovers this ain't so easy to fix, then we look up Roto-rooter (really the only game in town) and I call my mother and cry (actually bitch, but cry sounds more poetic) about sewage in my yard and a second lack of flushing toilet facilities that week. Then we call the Roto-Rooter guy.

Roto-rooter man comes, gets out the Big Motorize Pipe Snake, spends 3.5 hours drilling through a blockage in the pipe that is apparently composed of plaster and tampons, and clears it, leaving with $280 and an admonition to replace our old sewage line, as it's falling apart (not really news). The good news is that the line is straight to the road, and runs across an area devoid of trees, bushes and other people's foundations. The bad news is that some kids apparently enjoyed stuffing an entire box of tampons (No, I don't flush the things - I grew up with a septic tank that spewed like kid from the exorcist when overloeaded by holiday visits..), plus at least part of the dried plaster slurry from our tool cleaning bucket (that's where the slurry cake that vanished from the back porch must have got to...) down the knee-high vent pipe.

The weird news is that there are two vent pipes. One is under the porch, and, yes, it's connected to the same sewer line. No, we don't know why. Probably nobody now living has any idea. Other good news, I suppose, is that there is some kind of trap preventing backflow to the cellar. I guess we'll find out how that works when we dig up our yard.

Too bad I didn't get pictures of the vent pipe fountaining sewage. It was spectacular, yet disgusting.

water, water...

2007-03-23T01:42:00.000-05:00

Not as bad as it could be. The water main broke, so we (and everyone else here) were without water for a day.

Annoying, since it happened just as I was running a bath, and I'd put the dishes off until after FX was in bed. Inconvenient, since I had to use my bottled water to make coffee this morning. At least the soaking water for those dishes I couldn't rinse was useful ... for flushing the toilet.

I'll admit though, that first thought when I turned the tap and it was dry was, "Okay, what's broken in our plumbing?"

So glad it wasn't us!

Hibernation

2007-02-22T01:02:00.001-06:00

I have noticed our renovation activity hibernating, for lack of a better word, during deep winter. We've got kids in the house, stuff going on (besides an unfinished dining room), it's "seal your house like a ziploc" weather and that means no painting, no powertools, no sanding.

It's frustrating. The most we have been able to do is decrapulate the living areas of the house, and I'm going nuts. Well, okay, I did put up drapes and make a lampshade, but that's girly stuff and I need to wield power tools, sand something, or whip out the paint.

Imagine my relief that we had some false spring today. I crawled out of my cave, scratched my back on a tree, and got to work on the sun porch (the office-to-be). I got to use a Very Small Power Tool - Dremel tools make a satisfying motor-noise, even if it is in the soprano section of the power tool choir. I've now altered all the fake mullions on the modern Andersen casements to look at least sort-of Arts & Crafts. They are now divided into four small square "panes" over one big "pane," and I cannot express how much better it already looks from the road.

I also removed the last two interior storm windows (put up before the porch was enclosed), so we can use the windows to move air through the house from the sunporch. I feel vindicated.

Back to the cave.

Books!

2007-02-05T12:08:00.000-06:00

Ah, a box of research materials arrived today. The other should arrive tomorrow. So far, no love, but I'm sure I'll be popular with the local historical societies if I share these.

I'm going to go roll in my books now. Detailed reviews once I've pawed them all - I'll let you know what they tell me about this place.

What a difference a latch makes!

2007-02-04T13:08:00.000-06:00

We posted a couple weeks ago about ordering a new latch for FX's room, so we didn't need to use bungee cords to keep his door closed anymore. We received it Tuesday and installed it Wednesday. What was the delay? Since I didn't post about this before - we had our Very First Houseguests (waves to C and C all the way in California) and have spent the last couple of days recovering- I'm posting now. Please forgive me, dust covered and paint spotted readers.

A little bit of related news before getting to the mechanical focus of the day: We also ordered a can of Craftsman Furniture Polish and a roll of low-friction tape. The furniture polish is nice, but most of our wood is so very far past only needing polish that it's not a cure-all. We really need to suck it up and refinish our furniture. Works great on the moldings, though. The low-friction tape, however, has made our old and battered bombe front chest of drawers work like a dream, which it never did before. Getting clothes in the morning was like an episode of Ultimate Fighting Championships, and now it's not.

I also made some drapes for the living room, and made a kid-kitchen in our corner cabinet, but the batteries in the camera are dead, so that's another day's news.

Now to the main event:

The latch works great. It makes FX's door actually function as a door should. It even came with all the hardware we might need, though we didn't need anything except the latch and the screws (we also got 2 spare strikeplates and their screws). That said, there are few caveats for anyone else looking to replace a 1910's latch-only assembly. They are:

It's a little bit smaller. Lengthwise. Just enough (perhaps a sixteenth of an inch?) to make the spindle not line up with its original hole.
This causes power tools to come out during an install. When one has to enlarge a hole to allow the spindle to move (we could get it through, once the faceplates were off the door, but it didn't move), it's time for Mr. drill.
This also causes the faceplates to need moving over, so they line up with the new hole. Another job for Mr. Drill.

All in all, the job took about 3x as long, but that's maybe half an hour, considering that a direct parts swap would have taken 10 minutes. I should not neglect to mention that I put the latch in backwards after I'd gotten everything set, and had to pull the knob, the spindle, and the latch and put it all back the right way. And, really, I was prepared for potential difficulties, since repro parts rarely fit exactly like the originals. But, oh, that would have been nice...

The end of the story is that our 4 year old now has a door that works, for his birthday. That would be the other reason for a delay in reporting - we threw a birthday party for him. At Pizza Hut. No, the dining room really isn't ready for six four year olds to be throwing cake in it. It may never be, even if we do eventually get it painted.

Locks and shades

2007-01-25T15:15:00.001-06:00

Today I did something we've put off for months, with no good reason. I removed this from my son's bedroom door: It looks fine, I suppose, but there's another facet to the problem. The latch itself is snapped off, even though the rest of the mechanism is fine:

Our three-almost-four-year old has been living in this room now for a month, without a door that closes properly. Ihat's fabulous if one only worries about escaping during a fire, but horrible if you want to be able to hear your toddler escaping during his nap. We've been making do with a bungee-cord hooked from his doorknob to the moulding, but it's both ugly and not great for the woodwork, not to mention not being ideal, safety-wise.

Today I took a step towards not jerry-rigging it, and ordered the replacement latch from Vandyke's that we had picked out ... Last August. It's ideal - same dimensions, comes with replacement strikeplates in case the original we have doesn't work with it, and it's relatively cheap.

For the curious, the works of the latch looks like this:

I may have mentioned that we had bought a replacement lightkit for our living room ceiling fan, and found that you can't get the kind of light we want (a single shade uplight)to work on the ceiling fan we have. I also do not wish to spend $150+ for a fan at this time to get what we want. The lights on the fan have been driving us nuts, however, as they are downlights just about perfectly angled to be regarded as interrogation lights AND the "shades" are actually clear glass, unfrosted, convex-petaled tulip shapes that function more as lenses to concentrate the light than as any sort of diffusion device. We have to live with this thing, but we can't stand it. In short, "ow."

Yesterday, I got tired of "badly designed light fixture"-induced migraines, and decided to do something about it. We went from this:
to this:

I built it out of card, armature wire, copper tooling foil (bought for another project and then not used - if I do this again I'll use copper flashing as it's WAY more cost effective), glue (duh), aluminum foil (to line the reflector panels with), and a scrap of the indigo-dyed organdy that I'm making my sheer curtain panels from. Soooooo much better. It's like breathing fresh air after being in a stuffy room, or putting on sunglasses in the middle of a scorching Texas summer day. I plan to reinforce it with square wood dowels in a week or so (I have them, but they are still at my mother's house), since it's bowing a bit from the pressure of being mounted, but overall, I'm very pleased.

If you'd like to make a shade yourself, I highly recommend this book. This wasn't the first shade I've made (I have made several Japanese style wood-and-ricepaper shades and a few cloth ones), but it was my first copper-and-card one. The book made a great reference for shaping, though it's not a design from the book, there are several similar projects.

Castles in the Sky

2007-01-17T21:31:00.000-06:00

Or, "Cabinets in the Kitchen." It makes no difference, because one is as real as the other, unfortunately.

However, dreaming can be fun, so I downloaded the Ikea kitchen design software and went on with my imagined redesign of the kitchen. I'd been playing with various configurations for some time in my other 3 remodeling software packages, but this really works well 9this year - last year's crashed on me too much to bother with). We're considering Ikea as a source for reasonably priced cabinetry that we can install ourselves, so this gave me a nice idea about how much it might be to get the whole mess from them (under 7 grand, including fripperies like a stove and a dining area, and not including shipping). There's the added fuzzy of following a kind of tradition - the house and everything in it having originally been ordered from catalogs - even if this is just a pipe dream.

First, here is a rough approximation of what we've got now, Ikea-style:

I'm guessing, from the five or so cabinet doors we found cobbled into a shelf in the cellar, that there was a basic kitchen built-in on the side where the counter is now, possibly also an icebox. The corner cabinet I roughed in in this is a homemade affair, cobbled together (fairly well, actually) form odds and ends of plank and tongue-and-groove boards, and goes from floor to ceiling. I like the midcentury steel cabinets, but they don't go with the house, and we need more storage and more counterspace.

Problems with the kitchen as it stands:

As you can see, there's LOTS of wasted space.
The current sink location is both counterintuitive and just plain bad - the supply and waste pipes go through an unheated space under the original back porch).
There's kind of a work triangle, but not really.
If we want a vent hood, we will have to cut through the outer wall of the house if the stove stays where it is. Not good.
There's no eating in the kitchen without traffic bumping into the hapless person next to the door.

So I have a few things in mind to change, and some things to restore. I started out with a bare room and the knowledge that the original location of the kitchen sink was where the range is now, the stove had been in the inset where our dinette is now, and went from there. I got this:

Wow. I went with one of the more traditional "modern" cabinet fronts, "Ädel," on "Medium Brown," as it seemed more like what was once here. I put the range in the original location of the cookstove, I moved the refrigerator over and put tall cabinets between it and the partial wall for expanded storage (including a broom/cleaning storage closet, which we do not now have), put cabinets on the stove wall, filling the awkward inset with useful things, and relocated the sink to the original sink location, under the short window.

In order to avoid removing or obscuring original features (the long windows, which let so much wonderful light into the kitchen), I elected to put kitchen carts or some other portable storage/workspace solution on either side of the sink. And the dining area? Where the existing sink is, so nobody gets elbowed or bumped during breakfast. The sink I picked is one of two that I really love in the Ikea catalog, the one that looks like a vintage farm sink.

It's so much more usable that I just want to buy it NOWNOWNOW. Of course, this is not possible, and will entail a great deal more than seven thousand dollars, such as living without a kitchen for a couple of weeks while we move plumbing around and install everything. Never mind the money.

Writer's Block, or Living in the Project

2007-01-10T21:05:00.000-06:00

NOTHING says "house restoration" like patched plaster walls, an extension cord, and a bale of toilet paper. Except possibly the direct view to the bathroom from the front door, and a nifty sepia effect courtesy my camera.

So, here I am, camera in hand, readied to relate the news of living in the house for a whopping 2 weeks, and I find that my grasp of words has failed me.

Utterly.

I find myself thinking "Kitchen ... NO! Bathroom ... wait. Bedroom. Plaster? Yardwork? Snow?" This is followed by a dull moaning sound as my brain's gears fail. Madly, I continue to hunt for things to write about, grasping at "Scrubbing floors, perhaps? Or the kitchen drains? Oooo! How about the cellar?"

I'm not short of things to write about. I'm spoiled for choice. My brain is whirling like a magpie in a sequin factory. Too much to do, too much to tell, not enough focus.

Therefore, with this decision (or lack thereof), I give you some photographs. And some captions. That's all I can muster right now.

Bath, before and after. See if you can guess which is which! My best clue for you is that there's no Homart plastic tiles in the restored bathroom. Or pink. I'm not a pink person.

Here's the Original Medicine Cabinet, the one I bragged about finding so long ago, in her almost completed state (note the smears of wood filler). All installed, but not really finished yet. I'm putting off the rest of the paintjob until I get time to pull and strip (or replace with chrome copies) the hardware. The existing stuff is brass and would look ... odd, with the rest of the bath hardware being chrome.

Look, that's food in the kitchen, and not tools! Okay, some of those are tools, but mostly it's actual kitchen stuff. We can cook in here now, as of about a week ago. The first week, though, it was pretty grim, and we didn't get the tools packed of to the cellar until we were nearly starving for a lack of cooking space.

And, as promised, an image of (part of) the Giant Bed. It really does barely fit in the expanded master bedroom. This was the best picture I could get, as it's what was framed in the door. That's the baby napping on the bed, he gets his crib tomorrow. It's huge.

I will close with an image of the no-longer-hellish dining room ceiling, with the pretty, new, unfinished, "beam" for all to see. The real beam is actually much further up in the wall, and the posts against the walls are as cosmetic as the cladding over where the beam ought to be cosmetically (structurally, it's fine where it is). Don't look at the piles of boxes, please. Just pretend they aren't there.

That's what we do.

Connected

2007-01-06T10:53:00.000-06:00

We're online now, but the camera, being Mom's, didn't come with us, so pictures of the house have to wait until we get one of our own.

Still so much to do, but at least now it's home.

We're IN!

2006-12-27T22:31:00.000-06:00

Moved today - All basic necessities are in the house, and no luxuries.

That means we're without cable or internet access, so expect few or no updates for the next week or two, and then lots of them.

See you next year!

It's always something

2006-12-25T13:47:00.001-06:00

Oh, yes, before I forget, Happy Christmas.

We got the bedroom painted last night - well, sort of. We went into this week with the attitude that we'd get the house ready enough to "not get paint on the furniture or plaster dust in the food," as I said elsewhere. The bedroom is painted on all the walls that would be impossible or highly inconvenient to paint with the Great Bed * in the room. That leaves out the end of teh room where we still need to buy another can of spackle to level out the difference between the old closet, the patch where the ex-wall was and the bedroom walls. It's a nice soft, restful cloud grey, and I felt calmer just being in there while we painted it, or that could have been the fumes.

The ceiling isn't painted, but that's not just because of the strip of unfinished patching (though the rest of the ceiling is solid now, after we patched 1908039794856289 nail holes from the removal of the pasteboard tiles). It's also because, if we cannot get it satisfactorily smooth (which is unlikely just now), we're going to paper it with a grey and white marble-pattern paper and just go with it. I know, I know - people who paper ceilings to cover problems are evil. I should know. But it'll be a lot easier to paper than paint the ceiling after the big bed's in there - it makes fabulous scaffolding. And we have to live there, too. So that's my defense.

Here's the Cool Original Detail, before painting over:

It was a simple frieze of wreaths with ribbons, stencilled on the original thin layer of ocher yellow paint (probably milk paint), in green and russet. It was about 14 inches high.

Detail shot:

It's pretty, and it was a real pity to paint it over. At least we were able to document it.

Handy Tip For the Day:
Bicycle handgrips, applied to the non-business end of a paint roller pole really help with control when using it at full length. And you can't drop them paint roller downward when you're up on a ladder...

And now, to this week's installment of "I Thought We Bought That!" : We went to put the outlet plates on in the kitchen and discovered that we had somehow bought three times as many double outlet plates as we needed, and only one box of single plates. Which are all gone, having been installed elsewhere in the house, I guess.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? I bought the outlet plates, and I distinctly recall buying the right number of everything. Well, back to the home store we go. Next week. Or sometime. We've got bigger fish to fry right now.

But our bathroom looks beautiful! Of course, I didn't take any pictures of that...

a quick note

2006-12-24T14:16:00.000-06:00

I'm clearly psychic - here we go to work on the house.

But first, a progress report.

To do today(aka pre-move-in "must-do" list):

patch holes in bedroom ceiling
paint bedroom walls
paint rest of unpainted kitchen wall
put moldings and put down quarter-round in bedroom
change lightbulb in hallway
fix kitchen sink cabinet drawers (if we have time)

In other news:

Bathroom is done!
Living room is done!
Major repairs in dining room are ... done!

We also got the fancy fake part of the beam up over the ugly, real, structural beam, in the dining room. We might even get the panelling and trim up in the dining room bay by new years eve.

Wow, optimism is weird.

We're not even going to talk about the back porch or the dressing room for now. They can wait.

Scroogey.

2006-12-22T11:44:00.000-06:00

We are within days of move in -the moving van comes on Wednesday-, and my heart goes pitty-pat, but not in anticipation.

It's stress. And possibly fear.

Read my wailing lament:
We have a huge pile -or two- of salvaged lumber that has to go to the basement, another pile of demoed plaster the size of a live bear, an accumulation of trash on the back porch that I have no clue what to do with (we have no trash service at this time, or trashcans, for that matter), and 3 rooms that MUST be painted prior to move-in (bath, master bedroom and kitchen). I'm sure there's more, but my brain is being kind and refusing to allow me to recall it.

On the positive side, where I'm focusing my energy to stay sane, we have all but completed the bath - it just needs paint, installing the glass shelves (6) and remounting of the light fixture and shower rod, and we're ready to go. The master bedroom is really almost done, we're stripping the last of the wallpaper today, and we discovered a Cool Original Detail under the last stretch of paper at the top of the room - a stenciled frieze of wreaths. The dining room ceiling is closed, if not pretty, and most of the wiring is really done. I got the kitchen cleaned up last night, in prep for painting and move-in.

The hardest thing, right now, is not doing the things that can wait right now - the frieze paper in the dining room, the desk in my son's room, the window-seats, the kitchen faucet. The only optional thing I did was spend a whopping 20 bucks on some cheap xmas stuff and we put a tiny, pathetic tree up. It's only 3 feet tall and looks overpowered by one string of lights and 18 ornaments.

I so desperately want to build those window seats. And do all the other things we must wait on. There is simply too much else to do.

So, we are only taking off Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and maybe not even Christmas Eve.

Grout and About

2006-12-10T13:43:00.000-06:00

We've taken a hill, in our overall battle for the house. It took us nearly all night, but we stand atop this rise and can see the remaining ground ahead. We're that much closer to being able to move in, because, really, a functional bathroom is an admittedly necessary thing. Almost as much as heat.

After much trial and tribulation (every battery for the two drills was in need of charging, we had to mix the grout partially by hand, and really, where do you stand when sponging a floor you just grouted?), we finally finished grouting the bathroom at 1 am. We also finished the plumbing - almost. The toilet works, the sink works (after a last minute mad dash to Lowe's, an hour away, last night), even most of the plumbing involved with the bath itself is functional. However, there is, as anyone else who also chose the self-punishing road of home renovation will expect to hear, one part missing. That one part, typically, is something Utterly Crucial, i.e, the threaded connector that serves to attach the tub faucet to the otherwise hideous and unattractive pipe.

At this point, we now have all the necessary things done. Much of what's left to do can be worked on after we move in, if need be. We are, realistically, two workdays (paint, plaster, tape and spackle, and maybe stripping the rest of the bedroom walls), and a cleanup day away from moving in. Christmas is now a realistic goal.

We find out next week when Chris goes. I hope we do get moved in before then.

Heat.

2006-12-08T00:44:00.000-06:00

That pretty much covers it. We got to be warm today, while working on the dining room and bath, on one of the coldest days on record in the past couple of years.

We couldn't see it, but it was the same as if we had completed something visible.

Scraping, Scraping, Scraping

2006-12-06T19:15:00.000-06:00

The master bedroom is nearly denuded of its many layers of Vile Old Paper. Some of it, say, the gray-and-pearl stripe with its coordinating ceiling paper and edgings, was okay (not my taste, but tolerable), but others were emphatically NOT. Let's just say that I really don't think that Mrs. Songer (2nd owner of the home, from whose life most of the wallpapers date - the renters in the 40's may have papered too, but the Whites mostly painted, before the panelling went up) and I would have agreed on any decorating decisions. I am especially unfond of the mint-icecream colored floral stripe dating from the 1930's and its posy borders. Made me feel like I was in a perfume box, just looking at it, and I reminded myself that it was the choice of an older widowed lady.

I still like the ochre that the Wolfes painted the bedrooms originally, even if it also covers the ceiling, making it an oppressive color choice. I liked their paper in the dining room and hallway. We're not going with that color scheme, though. The bedroom will be gray, a soft, cloudlike, cool gray, with a coordinating sandtexture painted ceiling and a blue stripe at wallpaper-border level around the room.

We are returning to the Hell of Vile Paper Shreds momentarily, to continue our labors. Surely we must have painted over old wallpaper in some past life to have earned this suffering. O! See How I Lament! Perhaps if I do enough of this in this life, I will never have to do it again.

My happy place for this work is the vision of the soft grey room in which I will sleep, in our overpoweringly large bed with its new curtains. So calming. Our bed really isn't quite so large, but it's close enough to pretend that we have that bed.

Also, the heat isn't on yet. We wanted to get the soaking and scraping done with first, before we dry out the house too much. Hurrah for wrongheaded prioritizing!

Amazing Progress, Due to Unbearable Pressure

2006-12-05T23:35:00.000-06:00

As everyone knows, we are under a lot of pressure around here to get done and moved in as soon as possible. So, with that bearing down upon us, (and the help of our dear friends) we have made some progress.

Thanks to J, the furnace is on a real electrical line (meaning, of course, the electric pilot sparker and the thermostat line), and most of the heat vents have now been vacuumed. The rest will be cleaned out tomorrow, and then the intake filter will get cleaned and we can throw the switch, turn on the gas, light the pilots and work in a warm house. We also magically have lights in the kitchen, with a bonus lightswitch!

The dining room bay has been reframed (where necessary), insulated (Hurrah! now the heat won't be sent directly out of the house from the vents in the bay!), and sheetrocked. It looks astonishingly civilized, barring the untaped seams.

The last remains of the old, nonfunctional, passthrough closet in the master bedroom were demo'd out, and the floor given a temporary patchjob. Relaying the boards and refinishing can wait, honestly. We have a nice seagrass rug I intend to tack down over the ugliness. All that remains in there is to remove Far Too Much Wallpaper, patching where that pesky wall was torn out, painting, and replacing the mouldings. We are now, as of tonight, properly armed with a scoring tool and more blades for the scraper, and I expect to be doing battle with the Powers Of Evil (six layers of old paper with two layers of paint) by Thursday.

The bathroom isn't any closer than last reported, but we did buy the rest of the tile, and found out how to return the extra. How did we end up with nearly 10 extra linear feet of edging tile? You tell me. The math checks out, but I must have overbought. Oh, and we did buy more grout, just in case. We can return that too, if we have to.

Yet to do, and urgently needed, is the ripping out and replacement of the hopelessly fractured dining room ceiling plaster. In addition to the quarter of it that has already fallen away, leaving a breathtaking view of the attic through the exposed lath, there is a large section - say 1/3 - that is partially keyed, but hanging onto lath that has almost entirely separated from the beams down the center of the room. This problem was made worse (as was to be expected) by our re-squaring of the dining room when we added the support posts a couple of months ago. The plaster's not salvageable in the time we have, so it must go. We have already purchased the drywall, and we have a plan of action that includes saving as much as possible of the original plaster, even giving our pressing schedule.

I still need to scrape, patch and paint the West wall of the kitchen, and re-engineer the sink cabinet drawers and doors, but mostly, the kitchen is at a "usable" stage, once the gas is on. There's stuff to do, but it's little stuff, by comparison.

I think we might just get moved in before Chris goes. This is my driving force, to have our home be our home, even for a little while, before he is gone for so long.

No pictures today, and probably not for a few days. The work is more important than the talking about it, but I promise to keep y'all posted on progress, even if it's short.

Thank You

2006-11-18T11:33:00.000-06:00

I'd like to thank the folks at Houseblogs.net and Bearfort Lodge for their support.

However, as Bearfort Lodge says, please don't just think of us. There must be more families like us, trying to build or rebuild homes and lives while loved ones are deployed (or keeping going after they've lost someone). Blue Star Mothers and Fisher House are good places to start, or just go directly to military families in your community and offer to help out, if you can. More resources are here.

And, also, don't forget people who have lost homes and family members to disasters or accidents. These people are also in our communities. Need is everywhere. Every little bit helps, and being good neighbors is the very best place to start. Please visit Habitat for Humanity and Modest Needs, or ask your church or local community groups where you can be of service.

Thanks from us and ours, again. The world may be smaller, but that just means our neighborhood gets bigger every day. I have some of the best neighbors in the world, and I mean that. That goes to my local community, too - if I could pick a place to be alone while my husband is overseas, this is a great place to do it.

Making Myself a Blue Star Flag

2006-11-17T23:19:00.000-06:00

Big changes lie ahead. Delays, maybe, and certainly scary times. I am consumed by hopes and fears, and distracted from concern about our house.

My husband (former USMC) has been asked to return to Active Duty. He is going to go. We've discussed it, and I understand his reasons. If I couldn't cope with this possibility, I would have run screaming when he asked me out. It's my job to stand by him, keep the family together, and make sure he's got a home to come home to. It's my job to be strong so he can be strong.

It's going to put a cramp in our working on the house, but right now, that's the least of our problems, and at the same time the biggest. We're living with my mom right now, and working on our house just down the road, so we have a place to live, but our house isn't yet livable. I want to be *in* the house before he is gone, I want ... more time.

There's so much I want to say that's just not appropriate for this venue. Much of it is layers of emotion that's got no place in trying to prepare for this. All the personal stuff just keeps bubbling to the surface, as I write, and interrupting me. And there are things that keep coming into my head that I don't want to write because of what they might mean.

I wrote a post over at houseblogs.net asking if there were any other people trying to fix up a house with a deployed spouse, and I've had an amazing outpouring of support. It honestly floored me. I also have just realized that I have an online acquaintance who is going through exactly this, though she doesn't have the added wrinkle of kids. Her husband has been deployed 3 times (or is it 4?). She asked if I knew of anyplace to get a nice Blue Star Flag - I didn't. I'd been trying to figure out how to ask her.

I think, now, that I'm going to make her one, when I make mine.

Inching Towards a Usable Bathroom

2006-11-09T18:52:00.000-06:00

Today, I got the last of the whole tiles up on the bathroom walls, discovering along the way that I had somehow purchased 1 box less of the white/blue tile than I thought. Fortunately, it is identical, save for the color of the accent tiles, to the floor tiles, so I spent an extra hour yanking tiny, sharp-edged, square, black tiles off of sheets of tile to finish the wall, and hunting up every single blue tile that had not yet been split, to fill in the gaps.

SO, now we need to go buy about 10 square feet of tile to finish (that's 20 bucks for this stuff, thank goodness). I cannibalized the floor to rough out the wall, and we still need more itty-bitty blue tiles to finish the wall tiling to a groutable stage. Oh, and probably another 2 bags of grout.

But it's almost a bathroom.

This is Halloween, here at Vintage House

2006-10-31T20:25:00.000-06:00

BabyJ wasn't anything. He's only 4 months old, can't have candy, and really doesn't care yet. I'm too covered with paint and babygurp to care either. FX, on the other hand, decided he was going to be ...

Bob The Builder! Complete with itty bitty toolbelt (not ittybitty enough, actually - it fell off three or four times today), hardhat, and toolbox. Oh, and phone. That sticky foam is some nifty stuff (what, you thought I'd not DIY my son's costume? I can't even leave my house alone. Come on.)

Mom declared a First Toolbelt to be a Very Important Milestone. Pictures were duly taken.

I decided it was time he had his own toolbox, mostly full of pretend tools, but also including a REAL level and measuring tape. ValdeMart has some great play tools, so we got him a couple of sets. You know, for variety.

And also probably because Chris and I like to buy tools...

What? Everybody needs four hammers.

More silliness and a resource referral

2006-10-23T17:56:00.001-05:00

Now the house has low self esteem. [falls on floor laughing] I suppose I can see why, but she's really getting much prettier, even with the incompleted remodelling. I am reminded of the old Rejuvenation ads that had a little label inside a heating register that said "Oh, Thank goodness you are here! The last owners had TERRIBLE taste!" or something to that effect.

Okay, to get back on subject, I am begging, really begging you to buy something from these people. I ask because I've been bugging them with questions about their books and they've been lovely about answering, but it's just not in my budget to get the book(s) I want these days.

I'm just hoping they are still doing this one when I have the money, oh, and this and this and this...

Silly Google!

2006-10-23T02:29:00.000-05:00

This week, my house apparently has an eating disorder. All the ads are for eating disorder help information, or live-in clinics.

I know she's ugly, but we love her anyway. And she gets better every day.

This would be less funny if some of the links weren't misspelled: "Balemia?" What's that? Fear of eating baleen? And "bilimia" just sounds .. ew. Bile. Yuck.

Dreams

2006-10-16T09:22:00.000-05:00

"PrognostiKote: the Paint that Knows the Future!" comes from a commercial I saw in one of my house dreams the other night. I also had a dream about the wallpaper layers. Hundreds of them, that came off in unstained, wall-size sheets. I'm no sure if that was a nightmare or not. No more spicy foods before bed for me.

I swear my house is trying to get me to come back and work on it - I wish I could! I have too much else to do right now, so the Halloween deadline has gone right out the window. It's Thanksgiving, now.

I just want to live in my house. Is that too much to ask?

More tile!

2006-10-08T11:47:00.000-05:00

I spent several hours in the bathroom yesterday, and we are now at 75% tiled. I had to go back to mom's to feed the wee one, or I'd have kept going.

The end is distantly in sight.

Reading: Plus ça Change...

2006-10-04T12:38:00.000-05:00

Houseblogging isn't new. It's just the medium that's new. Writing humorous (or simply sarcastic) essays about attempting to do things has been around for ages.

Last night I read a short essay entitled Down With the Restoration! about how sickening those perfect-scenario remodelling articles can be. It was written by S.J. Perelman in the 1930's. Another piece of his that I highly recommend is Insert Flap A and Throw Away, about trying to build something from a kit.

This morning I was talking to my mom about it, and she suggested I read Please Don't Eat the Dasies, which is (unlike the film) actually mostly about the Jean Kerr's life in her enormous rambling house, while they are renovating it. It's from the 1950's. Of couse, now that I'm intrigued, we can't find our copy.

Any other recommended readings about living with any sort of restroation or DIY? I'm now dying to know if there's more.

Advice for the Sticky Tile Questioner

2006-09-25T14:31:00.000-05:00

Sweetie, your email bounced, so I'm making the reply a post!

Sticky tiles on counter as a temporary face lift atop hideous old Formica until real money/real remodelling comes along:
I've done this in my mom's kitchen and mine (both are temporary!!! and will need to be replaced in a few years), and for both projects I used the stone-textured tiles that are fairly rigid. They cut with a razor knife, just like the thinner/cheaper ones, but take a bit more effort (and a straight edge - like a counter top edge- to snap them over) to snap.

Teh best advice I can give is to make sure your counter is CLEAN and smooth (I had to mount that molding on the edge and shim underneath to make my 3 independent counter sections contiguous and smooth enough to tile). The tiles will stick best to Formica if it's not bubbled, chipped or damaged. If the counter is damaged/chipped/has an uneven surface, ask the floor guy at the hardware store for advice on picking out a floor levelling compound. Don't tell him why, though, or he'll try to sell you a new counter.

I don't really recommend this for covering any other counter surface, like wood, ceramic tile (if it's really ugly, get it refinished instead, or if the grout is bad, clean it up and re grout it.), or bare particleboard. If it's wood, you'll get weird water damage issues, and that is a whole other kettle of fish.

Things I've learned about non-standard uses for sticky-tiles:

Don't use sticky tiles on vertical surfaces unless there is something supporting them from the bottom (like mouldings), unless you want to have to go back and glue them in place with E-6000 in 3-6 months (or on any hot day). My mom has a few vertically placed tiles that slipped for 2 reasons (no primer and no support) which we have had to re-mount. All the tiles on my walls in my kitchen that I was lazy about (i.e. walked away from the job half-finished because I've been really ADD about this house) and did not support with mouldings have slipped because the house wasn't air-conditioned this summer, and I have to re-mount them when I get the mouldings put up. The ones that were supported are fine.
If you do have to remount, use E-6000. It works really well. Spread it thin. If the tile is reluctant to be remounted, tape it up with masking tape while you wait for it to set. Alternatively, use a contact-type cement (whatever type you are comfortable with).
If you put tiles on vertical surfaces, use the thinner/cheaper kinds of tile (heavier tiles will slip even if the adhesive is good), but don't go with a discount brand, as the adhesive is different and not as secure. I'd avoid them for any surface or use, really, as they tend to slip or peel up no matter what.
ALWAYS use the latex surface primer for applying sticky tile, as it really improves the adhesion.

Okay, now to paint choices for cabinets:

My cabinets are steel 1950's cabinets. Paint choices for these don't necessarily apply to wood or melamine cabinets. If you have non-metal cabinets ask someone at the paint store for advice. There are special paints for melamine, for example.

I used appliance epoxy spray paint for the doors, except for the red ones. I'm not very happy with how the red ones turned out and may take them down and re-paint them with a different, more durable, even paint. What I used was regular safety red (fire engine red) spray paint, and I'm probably going to re-do them with tractor spray paint (not as good for my purposes as appliance epoxy, but comes in more colors).

The matte black paint on the cabinets is brush- or roll-on chalkboard paint, and it comes in a can, which was necessary as I wasn't going to be able to move the cabinets outside to repaint them (when they come down, they're going AWAY and period-appropriate ones are going up in their places). I just took the drawers and doors out for painting in the contrast colors. I understand that you can use this paint in nearly any surface as long as it's prepared correctly, which means sanding it smooth (but not too smooth), filling any dents, and re sanding to smooth it and allow the paint to stick properly (that's a from-memory summary of the surface prep instructions on the can). I used 3 coats, waiting until each coat was dry before putting up the next. It can cover in one coat, but I have kids, and wanted the surface to be durable. 1 quart did all my cabinets and left me enough to do part of the wall for another chalkboard.

If you have an old appliance (like a stove or fridge) that is chipped or in a weird color, appliance epoxy is the stuff you need to refinish it. However, stoves require high-temp paint on the cooking surface, and that comes only in matte black, silver, white and cream, so keep that in mind when you are planning to refinish one, and figure out how you want the overall look to work before you buy paint.

Now, I shall return to feeling sorry for myself about my apparent ear infection.

How We Came to Rootabaga Country

2006-09-19T10:34:00.000-05:00

As a little girl in coastal California, I fell in love with Carl Sandburg's Rootabaga Stories. I loved the open plains dotted with little towns, full to the brim with fields of corn and wheat and beans and squash, with barefooted children in overalls running home from school to help with harvest. I loved the magic of that wonderful fairytale land, with its oddly named towns and strangely named people. The funny stories as well as the sad ones have resonated with me in a way I can't even really express. I've been dreaming of this place that was like Oz, but more real, nearly my entire life.

Four years ago, my mom bought a house in southern Illinois, which is also called "Egypt" for its grainbasket reputation (and possibly where that famous term -too rude to mention here- for the middle of nowhere originated). We're from here, semi-originally (at least since the middle of the 19th century), and Mom has always wanted to move back to where her mom grew up. So she did - she fixed up and sold our little farm on the Mendocino coast, packed up everything and trucked it across the country, doing it all ourselves, because we are those sort of people.

Mom's house is a massive, crumbling pile of bricks, surrounded by trees, on the edge of a town with a name that's truly unique - it was named after a town in Scotland, but we spell it differently. There is no other town with this exact name, and the whole place is full of towns with odd names: names of foods, names of people, grand and ambitious names, and names that seem like they were just nicknames for a spot in the road until someone painted a sign to hang on the way into town. This end of the state has a couple of big interstates, but mostly it is cobwebbed with tiny rural highways, graveled roads, narrow cuts that were clearly made for a Model T to pass another Model T, and you sometimes feel that you are goign back in time as you drive down a little road with a cornfield on one side and little green hill with a little white frame house on the other.

Two years ago, we moved here. I loved the snow in winter, the silence of it as it fell on everything like an insulating blanket. I was enchanted by the burgeoning life of spring, little frogs leaping in the growing grass and the awakening of the bees. Then we suffered through an oppressive humid summer accompanied by the stressful yet lazy songs of cicadas, and went on into a changeable autumn, not unlike this one, that runs hot to cold, punctuated by rainstorms that blot out everything around us.

There is so much green here, so much life, it is like places farther down the great rivers, but not so dripping with sweat. This country is all about the growing of things, and a little of the taking of things out of the ground. It's slow and quiet, gentle and neighborly. No high-speed city life is here - you have to drive to St. Louis for that, as well as any unusual shopping needs. The fastest, or slowest, thing around here is often the train.

A few weeks ago, I realized I had come to Rootabaga Country, or a part of it, or somewhere nearby. I think it might have been when I was working on the historical society website, organizing hundreds of old photos in the archive, and I found myself staring into the faces those same little kids in their overalls, looking ready to run home to cut the corn down, or bring in the cows. It might have been when I walked my little boy to school along a gravelled drive for the first time.

Maybe it was really the day I saw the dragonflies dance in the fading autumn sunlight last year, or when I saw the bees break off to go somewhere new. It might have been the day I found a large praying mantis sitting neatly on my lampshade - they always sit neatly - delicately eating some little bug. Possibly it was the day I looked out the back to see the woodchucks - three of them - eating the fallen persimmons and apples in the grass. Or, really all of these things and many more.

I'm in love with this place. It's easily as magic as any I read about as a child, and the people, well, they aren't any less interesting or freindly.

I think we might stay.

More Housestory

2006-09-18T22:24:00.000-05:00

Here are some tidbits about the house's history. I searched the local paper summary, based on "Kate Songer," who was supposed to have bought the place in 1921. It's pretty thin until 1930, and after that it's mostly funerals:

5/15/1930: Seth Clark FOSTER of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, formerly of Kinmundy, was born near Kinmundy on Dec. 4, 1860. Early in life he entered the employment of the I.C.R.R. and was station agent at Kinmundy at the time of his removal to Oklahoma where since 1903 has made his home. On Aug. 29, 1886, he married Miss Anna FENSTER of Kinmundy, and they had 1 daughter, Mary Edna. A sister, Amanda FOSTER, and a brother, Willis ROSE, also survive. The funeral was conducted at the home of Mrs. Kate SONGER, sister of Mrs. FOSTER, where her mother, Mrs. R.H. FENSTER also resides. Interment in Evergreen Cemetery.

10/13/1932: Nelson Hawley LINGENFELTER was born March 13, 1867 in Albion, Ill, son of Rev. and Mrs. V.D. LINGENFELTER. When he was 5 years old the family moved to Kinmundy, where his father was pastor of the local M.E. Church. He completed his studies at McKendree College, and having learned the printing trade, he returned to Kinmundy and purchased "The Kinmundy Express", bringing his father and mother with him. In 1895, he married Jennie Belle FENSTER, daughter of the late George and Mrs. FENSTER and the following year, Launce was born. 3 years later, their twins, Charles and Roy were born, but Charles died a few days later. After residing a short time in St. Louis and Memphis, Nelson moved his family to Oklahoma City, Okla., and associated with the Daily Oklahoman in 1901. He also served in the newspaper business in Sioux City, Iowa, and Frederick, N.C. He died in Charlotte, N.C. on Oct. 4, and the body was accompanied to this city by Mrs. LINGENFELTER and his son Roy. The funeral was held at the home of his sister-in-law, Mrs. Kate L. SONGER, and interment was in Evergreen Cemetery. He is survived by a widow; 2 sons, Roy of Charlotte, N.C., and Launce and wife, Elaine, of Omaha, Neb.; 3 sisters, Mrs. Belle BEACH of Gozales, Texas; Mrs. Josephine WILLIAMS of Richmond, Mo.; and Mrs. Hattie ORGAN of Chicago.

10/10/1935: Mrs. Rachel FENSTER died Oct. 4, 1935. Rachel H. CURTIS was born in Waverly, Ohio, on June 22, 1844, where she spent her childhood and young girlhood. On May 22, 1862, Miss CURTIS married Gotleib FENSTER, and they were married for 48 years. This was a happy marriage but at the commencement of the Civil War, the couple was separated for 4 years. Soon after the war, Mr. and Mrs. FENSTER came to Kinmundy where they have lived, Mr. FENSTER until his passing April 16, 1910, and Mrs. FENSTER until Friday. They had 7 children: William G., died in infancy; Anne E. FOSTER of Oklahoma City, Okla.; Mary GRAY of Weleetka, Oklahoma; Jennie LINGENFELTER of Kinmundy; Charles C. FENSTER of Oklahoma City, Okla.; Kate L. SONGER of Kinmundy; and Roy FENSTER of Champaign, Ill. There are 5 grandchildren: Miss Edna FOSTER of Oklahoma City, Okla.; Mrs. Gail GRAY DUBIE of Tulsa, Okla.; L.M. LINGENFELTER of Omaha, Neb.; R.C. LINGENFELTER of Detroit, Mich.; and Mrs. Zelma FENSTER HALEY of Houston, Texas. There are 2 great-grandchildren. Since Mr. FENSTER’s death, Mrs. FENSTER has made her home with Mrs. SONGER, and the past 3 years Mrs. LINGENFELTER has been with them. Services were held from the SONGER home with interment in Evergreen Cemetery.

2/13/1936: [yay! NOT a funeral!] Miss Audrey DUNCAN and Robert MOATS were moved Feb. 1 at the First Methodist Church in Champaign. Attendants were Miss Dorothy DUNCAN, sister of bride and Robert ARMSTRONG. The bride is daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Robert DUNCAN of Sandoval, and the groom is son of Rev. and Mrs. Ira MOATS of Maquon. Mrs. MOATS attended Kinmundy school, the school her mother, then Forrest WOOLLEY attended, while living with her aunt, Mrs. Kate L. SONGER. Mrs. MOATS has lived in Champaign with an aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Roy FENSTER.

4/15/1937: [also not a funeral]- Mrs. Anna FOSTER and daughter, Miss Edna, of Oklahoma City, Okla. arrived in Kinmundy Saturday. They will make their home with Mrs. FOSTER’s sisters, Mrs. Kate L. SONGER and Mrs. Nelson LINGENFELTER. Kinmundy is Mrs. FOSTER’s girlhood home, and where she lived for a number of years after she was married.

5/19/1938: [Another death. Poor Kate seems to have spent a good deal of her life taking care of ill and dying relatives.]- Charles C. FENSTER died at the home of his sister, Mrs. Kate L. SONGER, May 17, after an illness of several weeks. He was 65 years, 3 months, and 20 days. Services were held from the SONGER home this afternoon with interment in Evergreen Cemetery.

5/26/1938: Charles Curtis FENSTER was born on a farm near Kinmundy on Jan. 27, 1873, and died May 17, 1938. He married Miss Mae BRENNER on June 8, 1897, and they had 1 daughter, Zelma. They made their home in this city until 1903 when they moved to Oklahoma City, where he lived until recently, having spent the past year in the home of his brother, Roy, in Champaign. He became ill in January and came to Kinmundy 5 weeks ago. He leaves a wife and daughter, Zelma, now Mrs. Joe HALEY, of Houston, Texas; 3 sisters of Kinmundy; 1 sister of Weleetka, Oklahoma; and 1 brother of Champaign, Ill. Services were held at the SONGER home with interment in Evergreen Cemetery.

9/22/1938: Mr. Launce LINGENFELTER died at his home in Champaign, Sept. 16, 1938. He was born in Kinmundy, Sept. 12, 1896, son of the late Nelson and Jennie LINGENFELTER, nee FENSTER. In early childhood, his parents moved from Kinmundy, but his frequent visits to this, his birthplace, to visit his grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Gotlieb FENSTER, now deceased, and his aunt, Mrs. Fred S. SONGER, have made him quite well known here. He was married to Miss Eulaine WEST of Fort Worth, Texas on Dec. 2, 1928. Besides his wife and son, Danny, he leaves his mother, Mrs. Nelson LINGENFELTER of Kinmundy, his brother, Roy LINGENFELTER of Cleveland, Ohio, an uncle, Roy FENSTER of Champaign, and aunts, Mrs. Edward GRAY of Weleeka, Okla., and Mesdames Seth FOSTER and Fred S. SONGER of Kinmundy. Mr. LINGENFELTER was a member of the Christian Science Church. The burial service was conducted by Mrs. Melvin B. ROGERS, a Christian Science Reader from Champaign, at the home of Mrs. SONGER. Interment was made in Evergreen Cemetery. A list was included of those traveling from a distance.

11/26/1942: - Mrs. Kate SONGER suffered another stroke Monday. [I hope she had someone to care for her like she cared for everyone else.]

5/6/1943: - Mrs. Annie FOSTER passed her 80th birthday May 4 in the home of her sister, Mrs. Kate SONGER. Due to the serious illness of Mrs. SONGER, the day was spent very quietly. Most of Mrs. FOSTER’s life has been spent in Oklahoma City, OK., but for the past 6 years, she has made her home here. [Looks like her older sister cared for her. That's good.]

5/20/1943: - Mrs. Kate SONGER died at her home here Saturday after an illness of several months duration, aged 67 years, 6 months, 6 days. Services were held from the home with interment in Evergreen Cemetery. Katherine Louise, daughter of Gotlieb and Rachel FENSTER, was born in Kinmundy, 1 of 7 children. The parents; 3 brothers, William Grant, Charles and Roy; and 1 sister, Mary (Mrs. Ed GRAY), have preceded her in death. She was married to Dr. Frederick S. SONGER on Dec. 7, 1903, and he died July 4, 1919. She was a member of the Easter Star and White Shrine. She is survived by 2 sisters, Anna (Mrs. Seth FOSTER), and Jennie (Mrs. Nelson LINGENFELTER), both of Kinmundy; 3 nieces, Miss Edna FOSTER, St. Louis, Mrs. Paul DUBIE, Tulsa, Okla.; and Mrs. Joel HALEY, Houston, Texas; 1 nephew, Roy LINGENFELTER, Kinmundy.

4/20/1944: The names of the following will be included in the next call from this county: Carroll Wayne GARRETT, Glen Charles WHITE and Gilbert Lowe DOOLEN. [I don't know if the Whites had bought the house yet]

6/1945: - Mr. and Mrs. Glen WHITE have a son, David Chester, born in Centralia last Friday. The WHITEs now have 3 boys. [I still don't know if they owned the house yet or not]

11/21/1946: Miss Anna SUKUPCHACK, daughter of Paul SUKUPCHACK of Benton Harbor, Mich., and Merle JACKSON, son of Mr. and Mrs. A.J. JACKSON, were married in the Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in East Chicago, Ind. on Nov. 18. They were attended by Miss Mary SUKUPCHACK and John J. VANA, of Chicago, both cousins of the bride. The bride is a graduate of the Twin City Business College of Benton Harbor, Mich. Since her graduation, she has been employed by the State of Michigan at Lansing. The groom is a graduate of the local high school with the class of ‘30. Soon after his graduation, he entered the service station business, which business he still has. He entered the service on April 17, 1941, and was discharged Nov. 4, 1945, after spending several months overseas It was while he was stationed at Fort Custer, Mich., that he met the bride. They couple will make their home on the LINGENFELTER property for the time being. {These are the first renters! I wonder if they were renting at the time the White family bought the place?]

I'll keep you posted as I find more.

Housestory

2006-09-18T20:37:00.000-05:00

Instead of working on the house itself today, I worked on learning more of its story. I'm assembling quite a picture of its history and the lives of the people who lived here. It's amazing how much more real a place seems, how much richer, when you know about its "life."

I went to the tax office and asked about records on the house, and while what they had was a single sheet of manila from when the records had been standardized in the 1970's, that single sheet had a 30 year old photo of the house stapled to it.

Look! There is a vent gable on the front, just like I thought. And look at the gentle, highly Craftsman-style curves on those beams on the porch. Sigh. I must figure a way to copy that in my makeover of the porch.

Unfortunately, they also have its build date at 1925, which isn't possible (see below), and I suspect that's actually the year the parcel was split into 2 parcels, when the house was sold. I'm going to go down later and bug them about the old records (probably on microfilm, and maybe in Springfield -ack-) maybe I can get my hands on something more concrete.

I also have the following statement, from the notebooks of the late owner (my neighbor's mother)comments [in brackets] are mine, spelling and formatting are hers:

Edith Heppe [of] Centralia, IL }cousin of Glen's [Glen is my neighbor's late father] This is Dudie and Ellis Wolfe's daughter. She is a sister to Marceline Wolfe Williams, wife to Eddie Williams of Champaign (They are freinds of Elwyn Cheatums){visited in Kinmundy April 21 1994. Ellis Wolfe built the house we now live in (it is a Sears Pre Cut). They sold it to Kate Songer. Her nephew afer her death sold the house to us. We then rented it to Ann and Merle Jackson, then to Trickey (who was manager of Ill. Brokerage in Salem).

When Chuck graduated in May of 1950, we moved in and have lived here since. We later sold the house next door [apparently they owned both addresses?] to Dave and Sue and they tore it down and built the home they now live in [it was apparently in very poor condition and very tiny] Chuck graduated from high school in 1950, Jim from middle school in 1950, and Dave was 5 and a half years old.

Dudie Wolfe was a sister of Johnny Nelms. Her real name was Allie(?) Nelms. She was a relative of Grandma Sarah White, grandmother of Glen.

Edith Wolfe Hepp was Dudie and Ellis' daughter. She lived in Centralia.

Interesting, no? There's more. If I may interest you in some tidbits about the family that built it, from our local paper:

11/2/1905: Advertisement: Get Ready for Winter! If you have not bought that Heating Stove, Range or Cook Stove. Everything in Hardware. TOMLINSON & WOLFE. [I think this was where Ellis worked, as the partners are elsewhere described as "our enterprising young hardware men."]

8/23/1906: Two Electric Storms: This vicinity has been visited by two severe electrical storms, the first occurring last Friday and the last one Sunday. During Friday’s storm H.G. LACEY, residing two miles east of town, had two good horses killed by lighting. A number of farmers report the loss of hay stacks. During Sunday’s storm, Theo. GARRETT, residing five miles west of town had a good horse killed, and Wm. C. THREEWITT of Meacham, also reports the loss of a good horse. In the vicinity of Farina and LaClede the wind did great damage to the orchards and the apples. In many orchards the fruit was estimated to be one-half destroyed. Sunday afternoon the farm house of William JONES, one mile south of Miletus, was struck by lightening to two places and considerable damage done, but fortunately the house did not catch on fire. Several young people of the neighborhood had gathered in this place to spend the afternoon and all received a shock and were knocked unconscious for a time, some being worse affected than other, but no one was seriously hurt. The residence of Ellis WOLFE, in this city, was in the way of the lighting and received a slight wound [I think this might have been another house]. Mrs. S.B. SARCHET received quite a severe shock which lasted for several minutes but she escaped without much injury only a bad scare. Taking everything into consideration, our city and citizens were very fortunate in escaping as luckily as we did.

4/4/1907: we discover that Mr. Wolfe was a Republican, as he ran for Town Collector (and lost).

6/6/1907: Firm Dissolved: The hardware firm of TOMLINSON & WOLFE have dissolved partnership and Mr. WOLFE has retired from the firm. Mr. TOMLINSON will continue the business at the old stand where he invites your patronage. [still not sure if this is the same Mr. Wolfe.]

1/21/1909: Advertisement: When in need of Nails, Bolts, Locks of all kinds, axes, hatchets, hammers, pocket knives, table cutlery, copper nickel plated ware, heating stoves, cook stoves, ranges, pumps, kitchen sinks, etc., etc. I’ll be glad to show you. Ellis WOLFE. [I guess it was teh same Mr. Wolfe!]

2/11/1909: - Fire Dept. Elects: A meeting of the members of the Kinmundy Volunteer Fire Department was held last Friday evening and the following officers were elected for the ensuing year: N.A. RICE - Chief; Ellis WOLFE - 1st Ass’t Chief; F.W. KILLIE - 2d Ass’t Chief; J.T. BROWN - Engine Foreman; W.H. STORRS - Ass’t Engine Foreman; C.F. PRUETT - Hose Captain; J.L. LASWELL - 1st Ass’t Hose Captain; G.M. NIRIDER - 2d Ass’t Hose Captain; F.E. NELMS, Marion BRANSON, F.O. GRISSOM - Ladder Man; F.O. GRISSOM - Sec. and Treas. The Treasurer’s report for the past year was read showing a balance on hand of $24.39. The 1st Assistant Chief was instructed two axes to be added to the engine equipment. On motion the department adjourned to meet on Friday night, Feb. 26, at which time all members are requested to be present.

8/24/1911: Ellis wolfe is listed as having a telephone, along with numerous others.

2/8/1912: Members of the Kinmundy Fire Dept. met last Friday in pursuant to a call by Chief C.F. PRUETT. The Annual Election of officers was held, and elected were: Geo. W. SNELLING, Chief; Ellis WOLFE, 1st Asst.; C.F. PRUETT, 2nd Asst.; J.L LASWELL, Hose Capt.; C.B. MENDENHALL, 1st Asst.; F.W. KILLIE, 2nd Asst.; G.M. NIRIDER, 3rd Asst.; F.E. NELMS, Ladder Captain; B.J. ROTAN, Asst.; J.T. BROWN, Engineman; Andrew JACKSON, Asst.; F.O. GRISSOM, Sec.-Treas.

4/25/1912: The Senior Play at GRAY’s Opera House; Wednesday, May 1st, Cupid at Vassar. A College Comedy in Four Acts. Cast of Characters; Myron ROSS, Clarence CONANT, Leon HANNA, Hugh SPENCER, Lauretta SCOTT, Elsie ROHRBOUGH, Josephine O’BRIEN, Ruby HULTS, Ruth DOOLEN, Vera BARGH, Bess BRYAN, Dorothy DOOLEN, Marcelline WOLFE. Doors Open 7:30. Curtain 8:30. Admission 25 cents. Children 12 years of age 15 cents.

9/5/1912: On Sunday afternoon, Sept. 1, 1912, at the home of the bride’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Ellis WOLFE in the presence of a few relatives and friends, occurred the marriage of their daughter, Marceline E. to Mr. Edwin D. WILLIAMS, of Terre Haute. At 2:30 o’clock the bride and groom attended by Miss Lois NELMS, of this city, and Mr. Arch MORROW, of Chicago entered the parlor to the strains of the wedding march played by Mrs. Frank DAVIS, where the beautiful ring ceremony was pronounced by Rev. R.D. WOODLEY of the First Methodist Church. After hearty congratulations the guest were invited to the dining room where delightful refreshments were served. The couple received many beautiful and useful presents. The bride is the oldest daughter of Mr. and Mrs. WOLFE and enjoys a large circle of friends and acquaintances and is one of Kinmundy’s most highly respected young ladies; she will be greatly missed by her many friends and classmates. The groom is a young man of high, moral character, and holds a good position in the Auditing dept. of the Vandalia Line at Terre Haute; he has quite a large acquaintance here, especially among the young people. The happy couple departed Monday morning for Terre Haute where they will make their future home.

1/29/1914:- Mrs. Edwin WILLIAMS and babe of Terre Haute, are visiting here with her parents, Ellis WOLFE and family.

4/23/1914: In the school election Saturday, J.F. DONOVAN was elected president, and E.W. DOOLEN and I.D. INGRAM, members of the board. The hold-over members of the board are W.W. LOWE, W.H. GRAY, C.S. NEIL, and Ellis WOLFE.

12/19/1917: Mrs. Edwin WILLIAMS and little daughter, Valeda, of Pittsburg, Pa. are visiting here with her parents, Ellis WOLFE and family.

4/17/1921: Mrs. Ellis WOLFE and daughter, Edith, and mother, Mrs. NELMS left Monday for Centralia where they plan to make their home. Mr. WOLFE is employed there. [This is why I say it's impossible for the house to have been built in 1925. Why would they build a house here when they never again lived in Kinmundy?]

After this point, it's all news about the family, and none about the house.

6/8/1922: June 7th was the 78th birthday of Mrs. E.E. NELMS, former resident of our city now living in Centralia. There was a surprise given for her on June 4th at the home of her daughter, Mrs. Ellis WOLFE, of Centralia. All of her living children were there to give her a birthday surprise.

10/19/1922: Emma E. WINTERROWD was born in Shelbyville, Ind. on June 7, 1844, and died at the home of her daughter, Mrs. Ellis WOLFE, in Centralia on Oct. 16, 1922. She married Anderson DEIWERT in early life and with her family she moved to Effingham, Ill. She married John T. NELMS, and they moved to Kinmundy in about 1870. He died Dec. 29, 1890. The children were raised in Kinmundy. When her health began to fail about 2 years ago, she made her home with her daughter, Mrs. Dudie WOLFE. She leaves her mother; Mrs. Ellis WOLFE of Centralia; 4 sons, Myron DEIWERT of Everett, Wash.; John H. NELMS of Kinmundy; Frank E. of Centralia; and Maurice B. of Hindsboro, Ill. Also 11 grandchildren, 8 great-grandchildren, and 2 brothers, L.H. WINTERROWD and E.A. WINTERROWD of Ennis, Texas; 3 sisters, Mrs. Nora RAMSEY, Mrs. Delia EVANS, and Mrs. Ella ADAMS. Services were held at the Christian Church here with burial in Evergreen Cemetery. [That's kind of sad, that her daughter gave her a party and six months later it's a funeral.]

8/7/1924: Last Monday evening, Miss Dorothy PRUETT married Dr. H.A. LANDESS, both of this city. Miss PRUETT and Dr. LANDESS were accompanied to Salem by Miss Edith WOLFE of Centralia, Mr. James MORGAN, and Mr. and Mrs. R.J. ANDREWS of this city. The marriage was performed at the M.E. parsonage in Salem. The bridal party was entertained afterwards at the home of Mr. and Mrs. John W. DOOLEN of that city. The bride is graduated from K.H.S. in ‘23, attended 1 semester at DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind, and this spring attended S.I.N.U. at Carbondale. "Doc" is a popular young dentist in this city. Dr. LANDESS is the only son of Mrs. J.O. WILLSEY of Ashley, Ill. He graduated from St. Louis Washington Dental College in ‘23. The couple will make their home here.

8/27/1925: Swift School Items: A birthday party was held at Mark SWIFT’s for his birthday. Those present were: Otis CHARLTON and wife, Thurman McCULLEY and family, Jeffie McCULLEY and family, Ellis WOLFE and wife of Centralia, and Gerald STRONG, uncle and aunt of Champaign.

8/18/1932: A son was born to Mr. and Mrs. Edwin WILLIAMS on Aug. 11, weighing 8 lbs. The mother is formerly Miss Mercelline WOLF(sic).

2/28/1935: - Mr. and Mrs. Ellis WOLFE of Centralia, announce the marriage of their daughter, Miss Edythe (sic), to Mr. Rolland J. HEPP, which took place Feb. 20 at St. Mary’s Church in Centralia.

4/29/1937: Mr. and Mrs. John NELMS were host and hostess to the NELMS family Sunday in honor of Mr. NELMS brother and wife, Mr. and Mrs. Myron DEIWERT of Everett, Wash. The party attended the morning service at the Methodist Church after which dinner was served at the noon hour at the ARNOLD home. The afternoon was spent in the John NELMS’ home, where the family in jovial mood, with gay repartee and reminiscent stories, whiled away the hours. A number of years had passed since the brothers and sister, Mrs. Ellis WOLFE, had been together. In the family party were Mr. and Mrs. John NELMS, Mr. and Mrs. Myron DEIWERT, Mr. and Mrs. Frank NELMS, Mr. and Mrs. Maurice NELMS, Mr. and Mrs. Ellis WOLFE, of Centralia, and Mr. and Mrs. Lois NELMS ROBB and son, Howard.

4/27/1939: Mr. Ellis WOLFE, a former Kinmundian, has recently sold his tin shop in Centralia, and retired from the business world. He and Mrs. WOLFE are comfortably situated on their little farm south of Sandoval.

5/11/1939: Mrs. Edith SHULTZ, nee WOLF [Edith Wolfe Hepp must be named after this aunt], of Chicago, returned home Sunday after spending a few days with her cousin, Mrs. Florence SHRIVER. Mrs. SHULTZ, her brother and wife, Mr. and Mrs. Ellis WOLF of Centralia motored to Champaign Sunday to the home of Mr. and Mrs. WOLF’s son-in-law and daughter’s, Mr. and Mrs. Edward WILLIAMS, where they celebrated Mr. WOLF’s birthday at dinner.

5/7/1942: At the regular meeting of the Kinmundy Lodge A..F. & A.M., Ellis WOLFE was presented with a gold button signifying that he had been a Mason for 50 years.

3/18/1943: Mr. and Mrs. Ellis WOLFE of Sandoval spent Saturday here with Mr. and Mrs. J.H. NELMS. They just sold their property south of Sandoval and are looking for a new home. We tried to tell them there was only one place for them to locate and that was right here in Kinmundy. [these folks were obviously well loved here..]

6/17/1943: Mrs. Lois ROBB entertained to dinner, honoring her father, J.H. NELMS on his 75th birthday. Those present were Mr. and Mrs. J.H. NELMS, Mrs. Alma NELMS, Mrs. Hazel SEIMER, and Mr. and Mrs. Ellis WOLFE of Centralia.

I really hope I can find out more. The more I know, the more I want to know.

I must be psychic.

2006-09-15T20:13:00.000-05:00

Many months ago, I wrote this:

There's a sag in the diningroom, at the join between the bay and the original construction. Things Must Be Done About This, as it is just sort of hanging in space. I see beams in my future, and screwjacks, and pain.

Wow, was I ever right. Last night we pretty much rebuilt the dining room wall where it meets the bay addition. There were beams, and jacks, and pain. My back hurts, and I bet K's head hurts. The planned posts are in now, and the look as nice as I thought they might, even without the mouldings and with unfinished walls.

We used 2 boxes of screws, and we are going to use more when we finish the job. We spent 50 bucks on securing hardware to prevent wigglyness today.

As an aside, while I LOVE visiting the hardware store, I HATE how it eats up a whole day. I also hate how money flits swiftly from our wallets seemingly by our very presence in the store.

It's the price of our passion, I suppose. The house, she demands it, and we must obey.

Also, StuccoHouse noticed that we were mentioned in print. I am shocked, honestly, that anybody reads this at all. It's nice to know that somebody reads from time to time, but I've been just sort of madly raving into the ether for months now.

Progressions, Plans and a Thing In The Attic

2006-09-10T12:06:00.000-05:00

So, it's Autumn, we've owned our home for 6 months (only 6? it feels like an eternity), and we've made some small progress. There's paint in the hallway now, a "Very Craftsman" green, according to Mom, and I'm working my way around the dining room. We've got all the floors clean of hideous carpet, though some are a little scarred from the experience. The living room is done, save for scouring the floor to remove the last of the carpet pad, and I've got a lovely play area set up for my older son to use while we work. The bath is half tiled, and the master bedroom still languishes, but at least there's a light in there. Things are moving along, if slowly.

I'm aiming for Hallowe'en as our move-in goal.

I have made some sketches of what I'm doing with parts of the house. My plan for the dining room bay is to take this:

The dining room bay as it appears now.

And turn it into this:

I made the sketch without looking at the bay so I misdrew the windows - they actually cover the full width of the bay. Other than that, it's spot on. The posts are structural, not just cosmetic. They will support the poorly-remodeled wall cutout on a 4x4 beam, and we've got plenty of mouldings to wrap them with, to make them look Really Original. Eventually, I'd like to add cosmetic ceiling beams to the dining room, too, but this comes first.

The bookshelf is actually a family heirloom, which belonged to my paternal grandmother. It's going to be mounted permanently to the wall, and there will be wainscot added around it, right up to the vertical posts at the corners. It'll be the same as the panelling in the "built-in" I made to fill the arch.

The window seats will be made of the salvageable parts of the old living room archway double doors, which apparently sat unloved for many years in some leaky place. The bottoms have completely rotted, leaving me with a nifty, but not reusable, item. I decided (since I can't replace them where they belong, and because I want to make them again a part of the house), to make window seats of them. Also, the bay is only 4 feet wide, the ends are not evenly deep, and that space is nearly wasted. Finally, it is because I have really fond memories of the enormous window seat in the dining room of my parents' craftsman bungalow when I was a kid. Nothing like curling up in a sunny window with a good book. I want my kids to have that.

Speaking of kids, I'm still working on FX's room. When last I posted about it, we were here:
There are a few more shelves in the bookshelf, but it pretty much still looks this way now.

And we (which really means "I") plan to finish it thusly:

That's going to be an open closet with coat hooks on the outside, and shelves for shoes. The closet will have an upper and lower level, the upper one being for things he wears every once in a while (Sunday or seasonal clothes) and the lower being for his school clothes. The desk in the plans is all cut out, but not assembled.

Now to the progress. Quite a bit has been done, some has even been reported, none has been photographed ... Until now!
The Very Craftsman Green hallway.

That's just bare old plaster above the border. The frieze paper (really only by virtue of position - its only pattern is a sort of golden parchment look) goes up after the whole dining room and hallway are painted, and really will look more like an intended plaster finish similar to what's there now, but without the obvious patches and old mucilage. I love how the border paper looks, even if it's only tacked up.

The dark green will make a lovely background for two paintings, done by my cousin, that I was given. You can see one if them in the photo of the living room:

It'll be nice when there's furniture in it. Not lawn furniture.

I love that vintage Greek key paper, but there wasn't quite enough. I have to make some more, which will involve printing it on archival quality paper and pasting it up. It's always something :)

Now, the floor. Here, you can see the line of demarcation between the dining room and living room where the two different carpets once laid edge-to-edge:

Seamy, Isn't it?

Yes, I figure they didn't strip off the old wax prior to laying down a pink rubber carpet pad however umpteen years ago, so when the pad degraded, it bonded to the old wax, leaving ... this. This is after scraping for two days. I'll keep you posted on the scrubbing and what works. Once it's scrubbed, I'm waxing it.

Call me old-fashioned, or call me masochistic - we do have 2 kids and a dog - I like waxed floors, even if I know what it takes to keep them up.

And now for the playroom:

It's not perfect, but it's a nice, bright, stimulating environment for a 3 year old boy. And he loves it, which is what counts.

On to the half-tiled bath. First, a before picture is in order:

It was very pink, and plastic, in there.

Now, we have this:
That's the "fixture wall" with the new/old medicine cabinet in it, sans door.

We were lucky enough to find the old girl under the dining room bay, and she's sound, so I painted her and in she went. The mirrored door is in the kitchen until we're all done flinging heavy stuff around in the bathroom. I wish I had time to finish in there right now, but I don't.

And the master bedroom currently houses all the salvaged lumber, mouldings, doors and panelling:
Sad, isn't it? Eventually, we will have to sleep in here.

Finally, we come to The Thing in the Attic:
The Titanic, or our cistern.

A few months back, when I wasn't allowed up on ladders, my friend K stuck her head up in the attic where her husband J had been working to look for a tool we needed (we were demoing something), and said: "Hey! There's some kind of wash tub up here!"

I, of course, pictured a round tin tub, with handles, like the sort that get sold for icing down beers, and thought "Cool! I could use that for something."

Many weeks later, I stick my own head up there and see this HUGE bathtub shaped thing, about 4 feet wide and maybe 8 or 9 feet long, and a good 4 feet high. It must be the old water-pressurizing cistern, and must have been in here since the place was built. The way these things worked was that you'd pump water up here from the well, by hand, and it would sit up here until you turned on the taps, which would give you water pressure, like a water tower. It certainly goes a long way toward explaining some of the odd plumbing in the basement.

Now, what are we going to do with it if we ever decide to finish the attic?

Paint me, baby!

2006-09-08T13:42:00.000-05:00

I'm heading over to the New House (as distinct from mom's place, the Old House - by 60 years) today, to get a wall painted in the dining room.

Yes, you read that right. The dining room is slowly becoming a usable space. I did teh test patches of paint day before yesterday, and I will be applying paint, for real, to the repaired plaster walls today. I can hardly beleive it.

I'm taking the camera for pictures of what's Done So Far. I may even get them posted tonight.

Of course, the bath is only half-tiled, the kitchen needs the rest of its wiring, the master bedroom isn't much beyond the demo stage, and I still have an old bathtub in one half of the enclosed sunporch, but we're getting there.

That light at the end of the tunnel might even be the end of the tunnel, and not another train ... but I'll knock wood to be sure.

LIfe intrudes. How rude of it.

2006-09-01T00:39:00.000-05:00

I've been nowhere near my house for over a week. I had to deal with actual real-life things instead.

I have been finishing up the historical society website (well, version 1...) that I mentioned some time ago, and getting it ready for uploading. My older son is sick, and my younger one is demanding. I suspect a growth spurt. My husband's work ... well, we'll just say it sucks right now.

And Dad had to go back to California. He called a little bit ago to tell us he'd gotten in fine, from the In-n-Out Burger in Gilroy. I'm jealous - we haven't had In-n-Out since Chris got out of the Marines. I told Dad I wanted a 4x4 Animal Style and an order of fries the size of my head, but he doesn't think it'll mail well at all. Especially not the shake that's mandatory to wash it down with. My tastebuds are homesick for California, if that's possible.

Back to the Website of No Sleep. I think I'm going to name my webdesign company "Sisyphus Productions" - after all, who better do the work that just has to be done over and over again? Mom and I have been throwing around slogans, but I'm so tired right now that I can't recall any of them. Pity, I really thought they were hilarious at the time. That may have been sleep deprivation, though.

Why I Love My Dad, and other reasons it's good to be a 2nd generation rehabber

2006-08-21T16:13:00.000-05:00

My dad, though we don't always see eye-to-eye, is a great guy. He does things that drive me nuts (whose dad doesn't?), and amazing things that make me cry from their sheer wonderfulness. For example, when he helped us finance the house purchase, and what he did this weekend.

He's spent the past two days demoing out the powdered dryrot, painting what's left with Cuprinol (so I, breastfeeding mommy, don't have to), and reframing the now-missing bits. In between, while waiting for the copper green to dry, he's removing all the remaining carpet tackstrips.

I told him not to worry about insulating the addition or drywalling it, because I can do that, and also because he's one of those "lucky" ones that gets more than itchy from installing fiberglas (He gets a full-blown case of allergic dermatitis, no matter how well covered he is). If he can spare me some discomfort and exposure to things I can't be exposed to (mold, copper green), the least I can do is spare him some in return.

Thanks, Daddy. I can't even tell you how much it means that you've helped us out like this. Especially now. It's the best birthday present in the world.

Powdered House

2006-08-17T11:12:00.000-05:00

I finished demoing out the ceiling in the diningroom bay addition yesterday.

Me: "OH MY GOD. It's powder. This was a beam."

EMT J (as distinct from Wiring J): "Is that like cancer for a house?"

Me:"Yes. Hopefully, it's operable, and not terminal."

We discovered the dryrot. Lots of it. In a place I was hoping against hope wasn't dryrotted. And after I stopped swearing, I made a plan of attack.

There was a leak from the rain gutter, maybe 30 years ago, that was allowed to EAT AWAY THE SUPPORT MEMBERS of about a 2'x8' section of the bay roof. And the roofers who "fixed" it just put up a really heavy sheathing board over the hole (I'm guessing 1" ply, since I can SEE it through the approximately 2x1 foot ragged hole in the old tongue and groove sheathing). The 4x4 beam that runs across the face of the wall has been reduced to powder in one place, and to an uneven 1x4 in others. The crosspieces that allegedly rest on it are damaged, so they really more hang near it.

The bay is literally being held up by the roof sheathing resting on the house sheathing (thankfully, some hard wood in big planks, topped with good solid wood lap siding). Oh, and the windows, with their trim.

Shudder. SH@# F@#& D#^* M@&^*@#$^$@#!

So, we have a lot of yanking of trim and reframing to do, which puts us back a good week or two, optimistically. Last night, we bought a shopvac to "demo" the powdered wood with, plus some filter bags to catch the yuck. Today, we are off to buy the replacement lumber.

Good thing we already have a nice stash of salvaged 2x4's. We'll need them to build the temporary supports.

We finished something! Call the press!

2006-08-07T12:17:00.000-05:00

The living room is DONE (well, except for refinishing the floor, but we'll wait on that until the kids are older). We also got the carpet out of the dining room, and it looks an order of magnitude better, even with the hole in the ceiling. A million staples later, we have floors we are already happy with.

The bath is half tiled, all fixtures are in, and the only things waiting to be done (besides part 2 of the tiling) are the faucets on the shower wall (we must finish tiling and grouting first) and connecting the sink to the plumbing. All the weird, fiddly, awkward tiling is now complete.

The Amazing Debris Collection is almost gone. The next dumpster load is waiting next to the dumpster, and we have a few pieces left in the house.

I updated our budget sheet last night and we have spent about 4 grand on tools and materials so far. It sounds awful, but if we had hired people to do this for us, we would have spent 10-20 grand, just to get this far. Even if it would have gone faster, it wouldn't have gone much faster (and may have gotten slower). Our friends A and R hired folks to do all their work last year, and it took them 9 months to get into their house. It's a Stick style house, and it looks great now, but it was a fustercluck for a long time, there.

By the way, spellcheck hates "fustercluck" - and suggests I use "festers" instead. Apt.

Some progress, some regression, and some blessings counted.

2006-08-06T10:32:00.001-05:00

I'm counting my blessings, lest I sink into despair. There will be no moving in this week. FX will come home to an unfinished house, even if he will have a play area to use while we work.

Why? We have fixtures in the bath now, and even some tile (Thanks, MOM!), but that's not really done yet. That's the progess. However, in the process of getting there, we discovered that the toilet we wanted to keep was Done For.

After re-installing it. Sigh. Off to the Home Improvement Store (this time it was Menard's) for a new toilet, a cheap new toilet, and other necessities. Unforseen spending later, (under 200 bucks, really, so we got out cheap, but it was still not budgeted for) there is, once again, a toilet in our new bathroom.

Well, if we have to move for any reason, we can advertise it as having "all new fixtures" in the bath. I don't want to move, this house has ahold of my soul.

Now to the livingroom carpet. Remember the carpet dream? Well, it was partially prophetic - that horrible carpet was on a pad that was either glued down or that degraded in a manner most foul. We've been scraping for two days, and we only have 1/3 of the floor exposed. I see refinishing in my future - but, at least, not sanding. Scrubbing, on hands and knees, and revarnishing, but no sanding in this room, at least.

The Clock is Ticking

2006-08-01T09:14:00.000-05:00

We are supposed to be moved in, at least enough to to consider ourselves to be residing in our house, by the time my older son returns from Texas. We have until the 9th.

Tick, tick, tick...

Understandably, between this and the heatwave, I've stopped sleeping. I decided, therefore, to get out of bed at 4 am and go paint my living room. It seemed like a ggod idea, and lo, by 8 am, there was a successful paintjob, even if I had to stop and patch a couple of cracks I hadn't fixed yet, mid-painting. Our living room now only requires the border papers (2 hours) and removal of the Vile Pea-Green Shag Carpet (however long it takes, I'll enjoy every ripping, wrenching moment).

It already looks Really Nice. The greys I picked really set off the cherry-stained woodwork, and the wood floor, once completely revealed, should just make it that much more wonderful.

tick

I still have work to do on the bath, but it should be in its temporary usable stage by Thursday night. Toilet, sink, tub, cheap plastic temporary flooring... Not lovely, but a place to go. A water-resistant place, at least, and that's always an improvement.

tick

I've decided to just Make Do with our bedroom. I can re-hang the window skirting board, patch what needs patching, and paint, paint, paint. We have Way Too Much To Do left to really make this livable before moving in (like patching in the floorboards where the curtain wall was, finishing the raw flooring in the former closet, resetting the mouldings, and pulling down the boards the acoustic tiels were stapled to) to worry about things like scraping out two rooms worth of hideous layered wallpaper. Unless it comes down Very Easily. I already pulled up the carpet, but put iback down to protect the floor from our construction.

tick

I Really Must finish the painting in the kitchen, for safety reasons. There's the old flaky wall that I'm still only halfway through scrubbing with a wire brush, which also needs patching (natch) as well as painting afterwards.

tick

Then, we have our Fabulous Debris Collection. It's been preventing work on the dining room (we won't even go there - we plan to get that mostly done AFTER number one son comes home) and the porch (which, mercifully, needs little work done) for two months. The dumpster finally arrives tomorrow morning. I await its appearance with ... cynicism. There's a reason we've been collecting debris for months, and it was a dumpster shortage. I really do hope we can get it, though.

Tick, tick, tick...

We're Different Here

2006-07-29T11:22:00.000-05:00

Some girls call Mom for cooking advice; "Hi, Mom? What makes your gravy taste so good?"

I call home for ... help with obscure restoration and construction techniques; "Hi, Mom? Did we buy the right kind of mortar for this job? The label says..."

We're definitely a bit on the odd side.

In other news, the plumbing revisions are Just About Done. We expect to have the bath ready for fixtures tonight - And the water back on! It's essentially waiting on me, as I have to finish mounting the tilebacker boards before we can do things like putting the toilet back.

The plumbing revisions include, by the way, repair/replacement of the scary rubber hose that formed part of the kitchen sink waste pipe, and relocation of the showerhead to point above my husband's when the tub basin height is calculated in.

It's progress, and I'm not sure I trust it. Don't pinch me - I don't want to wake up.

Almost brought to you, Again, by Sisyphus Productions!

2006-07-21T19:30:00.000-05:00

I don't have to procrastinate - my life does it for me.

So, I did in fact need a new tetanus shot, as the old one was nearly expired, and some antibiotics (Keflex), for the ensuing infection, and some new shoes. And several days with my feet up. Argh. My left foot was ... very much larger than it should have been, and entirely too pink, when I went to the ER on Monday. I got ordered to take it easy.

I get to go back to the house today and put up hardibacker in the gutted bath. After a week. So we can have a toilet and shower and sink in there, and, eventually, we will get to move in. I just want a functioning toilet, and sinks, and tub. Is that so much to ask? That end looks ever so distant. I feel little feather-like ticklings of despair.

Hopefully getting things completed for this part will make me feel less piteous. Action always helps, but renovation always seems to block that therapeutic activity.

bathroom demo complete, plus bonus wound report

2006-07-16T11:56:00.000-05:00

Look, the idiot is dancing again. But this time, she is limping.

The good news: the bath demo is done! The tiny tub (very HEAVY but also tiny) is out, and awaiting removal* in our otherwise empty living room. The appallingly designed, 1970's, also tiny (below crotch level on a small woman), sink vanity was ripped out (and destroyed) with glee yesterday. The sink and bath had a strange synergy going - the tub is a wave-front, streamline designed built-in tub, and the vanity was a flat-sided box that was installed rightupagainst the tub, leaving a little pocket between the head of the tub and the side of the vanity, where water and a half dozen washcloths had gathered over the years.

Not surprisingly, I had to rip out several punky floorboards, but the subfloor is very intact, which means that patching that spot on the floor before installing the tilebacker is going to be a piece of cake (all supply lines run through the wall, so no cutouts even need to be made!). Yuck, but fixable. AND - no termite damage, just old mold rot, which is now well dried out (the house was not lived in for 2 years before we bought it and we didn't use the tub or sink at all) and gone.

All the Vile Stinky Tile Adhesive came down with the plaster coat it had been attached to. The bare lath looks a heck of a lot better, and smells better too. Funny how much bigger the little room looks when it's empty...

We have elected to keep the old, high-flow toilet, as we like it, but it's getting pulled gently and set aside until the hardibacker is laid and skimmed.

The plumbing is demoed, too, so now we know what we need to get - and what we forgot to get. Like the tub overflow valve...and the drain pipe parts. Nothing quite like discovering you forgot to get something essential when elbows deep in a job. Sigh. We also have nowhere to go when working on the house. Well, I have nowhere to go. For the guys, there are plenty of trees in the backyard...

The bath wiring is also complete - J was putting in the two new GFI outlets as we left last night. The box for the wall fixture was put in, and the ceiling fixture was pulled out (even if it's nice, I really don't need to climb 9 feet up to screw around with a wet fixture to change bulbs in the middle of the night). The hole will probably end up holding a through-attic vent, since the enclosed back porch covers the only window.

That window opens, but it hinges open against the showerhead. The window predates any shower in that bath, so it's a matter of old laziness (I think the PPO, when they fixed the house up for sale in 1949). I say this as it is an easy fix - swap the hinges and latch from one side to the other. I want to pull and strip the hardware anyway, so why not fix this issue now?

We have also come to a decision about the 1940's - 1950's medicine cabinet - we're selling it. We'll put in either the original cabinet (found under the bay addition, and in need of restoration) or an equivalent repro. Craftsman-style wall cabinets are popular and can be had fairly cheaply these days, so it comes down to whichever is the less expensive option for now.

Now, we get to the limping part. I caught my shoe on a multi nailed scrap yesterday, and thinking I had shaken it off, put weight on my foot. No such luck - it had caught me and I got punctured. My foot HURTS, but the nail was a clean one, I've had a Tetanus shot in the past few years (in '99) and we have a first aid kit handy. My foot still hurts, though. I'll live.

* This gets mentioned last. My husband was theorizing yesterday about uses for the ex-tub. Like a fishpond, or planter. In the yard. I think he's pulling my chain. I hope he's pulling my chain. I'm all about reuse, but that's a little rednecky, even for me.

Here's an example of his sense of humor:

My advice? Don't sit on the smudged lid of a spackle can in black pants when he's around ... whether he has a camera or not.

Renovating the Blog

2006-07-12T14:28:00.000-05:00

I'm thinking that, now we have accomplished something (Power! Which means we can turn on the gas soon - Hot Water!) and are approaching done-ness on several others, it may no longer be simply depressing to have a project tracker widget on here. So I might just add one. One of those bars will be labelled "moving in" as I think it will take us a few weeks to really get settled.

Also, I was watching HGTV and the DIY network and thinking (this gets dangerous, what with the smoke pouring from my ears and all) about doing a weekly how-to feature on here, just give me something to do while feeding BabyJames other than watching tv. It would be more of a "how I did this" with step-by-step instructions for those who might be facing the same things. Like how to live with (or just plain refinish) old steel kitchen cabinets, doing a successful wall application of stickytiles, or faking a built-in. Stuff like that. The temporary stuff, the superficial stuff, the decorative stuff.

In other news, DOver books emailed me that they've got some new Architecture books out. Go take a look. I've already spotted at least four that I want, and only one that I need. And they've got a 25% off sale on as well.

Dancing Idiot has a Baby. Film at 11.

2006-07-06T20:29:00.000-05:00

Well, I'm now off bedrest - the baby is here. James Edward was born Jume 17th at 2 am on the dot, preceded by much screaming and accompanied by a great deal of relief. He's doing great, and so am I ... now.

It's been almost 3 weeks since then and I've finally gotten back into the house (first because of the bedrest and then the postpartum healing/in-law visits) to do a bit of work. I did actually get a few things done this afternoon, between removing the old storm door from what is now an interior doorway and wandering around the house a lot. I also got some progress made on my older son's bedroom murals, after discovering that the midnight blue mismix we bought for his ceiling had been mismarked, too. It's lavender. I guess I can figure out a use for a pint of lavender paint, but I was thwarted in my plans for the day.

"Oh, poor me, I'll have to go to the home store again for supplies. Whatever shall I do?"

Also, our sainted freind and electrical engineer J got the wiring/box/etc in place for the power company to come in and do the meter and service upgrade. That's tomorrow. I'm doing a happy dance, but that doesn't translate well in print. This is a good thing, as I look like an idiot - a happy idiot, but an idiot nonetheless.

The bad: we've discovered that the drainpipe from the kitchen sink needs replacement, in a rather unfortunate way - it fell off. Well, better to have found that out before we do all the other plumbing work, no? We plan to do that stuff next week, and I think we can fit a bit more PVC pipe into the budget. We'll have to, or no move-in before FX gets back from visiting our relations in Texas.

houseblogger on bedrest = rehab nightmares

2006-05-29T10:43:00.000-05:00

The absolute worst thing that can be done to a pregnant woman working on a house is putting her on bedrest. Especially if that bed is not IN the house she's working on. It's been almost three weeks now and I've been going insane. Obviously, I'm worried that we won't get the house done enough to live in before Baby 2 arrives, but I had begun to adjust to the idea of it.

I'm also worried that I've lost my housefixing muscles. Then there are all the unfinished projects to avoid thinking about. AND I'm worried, constantly, unreasonably, about the house. I have nightmares, of the late pregnancy variety, except they are all about the house.

Examples:

The carpeting dream. I dreamt that when we pulled up the carpet in the house, to reveal the lovely floors, there was more carpet, patchy, 1970's psychedelic, stained carpet, underneath. Shag, indoor/outdoor, etc. Like six layers. And under that was hideous linoleum. The last layer was glued down with construction cement that laid in huge blobs on the formerly pristine wood floors. I woke in a sweat, and spent several minutes calming myself down by recalling that I'd peeled up carpet corners all over the house just to assess the condition of the floors.

Next, the fire dream. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's had this dream during the rehab of an older house. I put it down to it being rewired and my being forced to not go out enough to be reassured by the house's quiet, unbothered appearance as I go by.
I've been tempted to get up and drive over to check on it more than once, though.

The flood dream. We've had lots of rain this spring, like most everyone else. The old dryer exhaust tends to collect water in rainstorms (this is on the List of Things to Fix), which isn't a problem as our cellar floor is actually graded to drain towards the drain on the downhill side of the house, and that water is a fairly small amount. But, I keep dreaming that the whole basement will fill with mud and water like a huge swimming pool, followed by the collapse of the house into the muck.

The vermin dream. Just a simple ick-factor dream, about finding a sudden, massive termite/ant/cockroach/rat/mouse/etc infestation that causes the house to become irreparably uninhabitable.

Augh. I'm off meds and bedrest on Thursday. Maybe I'll stop with the crazy, if I can at least get over there and finish painting the boy's room.

Pictures, and progress.

2006-05-14T14:39:00.000-05:00

Or is that "Pictures of Progress?" I'm not sure. Anyhow, here are some images of what I've been ranting about recently. Updates to my in-progress phots are here.

First, I was talking about filling in the open archway between what had been originally intended as a den and the dining room, so that my son could have some privacy (and so that we could make use of otherwise wasted space). I wanted to do something really Stickley-style, like a fabulous built-in. We really don't have the money for that and all the other things we need to do first, so I had to figure out how to do this in a sympathetic, period looking style without spending any real money, as well as doing a temporary thing.

Why temporary? Well, in five or so years, we plan to have two bedrooms and a bath built in the cellar, for the boys, as well as a completely finished laundry room, workspace, and finsihed storage areas. When that happens, we can turn our den back into a den, and I'd like to be able to put in abbreviated Craftsman-style cabinets with square pillars inside that archway. So anything we do now is just set dressing.

Here's the before pic, with the PO's non-sympathetic solution (vinyl accordion curtains):

This is taken from the dining room, looking west into the den (my son's bedroom). Not pretty, but it worked for the PO, an elderly woman in need of constant care.

Now, a series of on-the-way-to-after pictures, taken from the same vantage point:

This is the built-in, mostly done. I think it looks fairly good, and is sympathetic enough to the original style of the house. It's naked, though.

This is halfway or so through staining it with Minwax Polyshades Satin in Old Maple. It looks like a good match, so far!

And this is the staining nearly complete, without the last trim pieces. I realized I'd have an easier time with the trim and stain if I stained the panel above the shelf, then applied and stained the trim sections. It still looks really good. I'm happy with is, and can hardly wait to see how the room looks all done.

This is a demo-in-progress image of the dining room bay addition. It's slightly less ugly right now, but we have some fairly major work to do here. First, we are going to put in posts and a support beam, as you can see some bowing where the bay was cut into the wall. There will be four posts, two at the ends, mounted flush to the walls, and two set in about 2' from the ends to create an open but divided space. There will be wainscot panels done in the same style as the archway fill-in in the bay, from the corners and under the windows, a built-in bookshelf under the center short window, and I'm going to build two window seats into the otherwise wasted space in the ends of the bay as well. I think this will all work together with the built-in panel in the arch, to increase the "Craftsman" feel of the house. I see a larger can of Minwax Polyshades in my future.

Now for the view from my son's room:

This is the built-in on his side, about half finished. For practical reasons, I'm having to alternate painting and finishing his built-in furniture. There will be a desk built below the single shelf that divides his frog mural, and in that corner that's full of salvaged lumber for the project, there will be an open "closet" with a shelf at top and bottom for more storage. I used two layers of salvaged acoustic tiles (pulled from the ceiling of the MB) to give him some soundproofing so we don't have to be super-quiet when he's asleep. They will also function as a bulletin board, where he can pin things up.

These are all shots of the part of the paintjob that had to be done before I could get back to cutting and screwing things up ... er ... together. There will be clouds painted on the walls, and the ceiling will be a deeper, more vibrant blue with stars and a moon on it. I'm debating painting in a wainscot strip with related, A&C type elements. That will probably depend on the time available before we move in.

And, I still need a radio. The talking to myself is really out of hand. I've been talking to my tools ... more than usual.

Recycling = more beauty from ugliness

2006-05-08T21:41:00.000-05:00

And it's almost free! If you don't count my time spent, that is. As I'm not gainfully employed at this time -there being no payscale for mothering- I'm not counting it. I'm literally making beauty out of ugly things, not just patching or covering it up, so I've got that to be happy about too.

I needed to create a fill-in between the den (which will become my older son's room) and the dining room, inside an arch, in such a way that it can be removed later but also in such a way that it looks like a built-in or other deliberate design element. The arch had already had awful vinyl accordion curtains screwed into it, which we reomved, so attaching a framework inside it was not going to create any more damage or future work. That was the easy part. It took about 3 hours, including measuring and cutting, and sifting through the demo'd out 2x4s from the old 70's drop ceiling for good lumber. Recycling phase 1.

Once I had the framework in, I stood around puzzling about what I wanted to cover it with. I looked over the hideous fake wood paneling we had ripped out, and noticed that the backs of the sheets (those not badly damaged or befouled by glue) were actually quite attractive, if I sanded off the product information stamps. I selected the two most attractive, cut them to size and tacked them up. Recycling phase 2.

Now what? "It looks like a big doorway with fairly nice plywood tacked across it. Hmmm. Better, but not the look I want." Thinking ensued. Some of those old furring strips were nice and smooth on one side, and if I pulled out all the staples and nails and scraps of polystyrene tile, might just sand up to something tolerable. Oh, and we did have lots of original salvaged mouldings of various types from demo'ing the old closet wall and making our bedroom large enough to use. Some of those looked promising. Like the casing from the closet doorway...

I sat on the floor after assembling all the likely pieces of wood and thought intently, then decided to go buy myself a drink. Not alcoholic, though I have certainly thought about that enough, between the house and general other drama. However, as Miller Time isn't for another month and a half, I must needs wait.

Back from my jaunt, I cleaned up enough furring strips to make vertical trim pieces on my new paneled wall, Craftsman-Style. I set a baseboard in, measured from there to where I wanted the "chair rail" (more like armpit rail...), and got out my handy wee saw. Then, with all five trim parts cut, I became distracted by a good idea. "Hey! What this needs is a mirror!" As we had one that had been hung on the bathroom door, that was actually less of a leap than you'd think.

Of course, now I had to figure out how to frame the thing. Originally I had meant to just use furring strips for all the trim, horizontal and vertical, but adding the complication of a built-in, framed mirror made that less than workable. Back to the casing from the closet door that was no more. Hmmm. Inside the closet, the casings hadn't been stained, but outside, they had, so I had some pre-matched mouldings to work with on my fakey-craftsman "built-in" piece. I think there may even have been a lightbulb hanging above my head. More measuring and cutting ensued, with me pulling the mirror down, measuring it, forgetting the measurements, and running back and forth between the mirror and my improvised sawhorses.

Eventually, I got the framing mouldings cut, and notched correctly for the mirror, and hung on my false wall. I even remembered to put the mirror in before it was all tacked up, and there was only one episode of not-measuring-correctly in the middle of it all. Recycling phase 3 was now complete.

Today, I got a wild hair to add a shelf above the mirror, before measuring and cutting the last several furring strip trim pieces, and that's what I did. There was a great deal of swearing involved, as I really needed more hands to do this, but the result looks good. I made that out of most of the old knicknack shelf the PO's dad had made 30-some years ago, plus the mitered offcuts of the door casings. Recycling phase 4.

Of course, there are no pictures. There likely won't be until the thing is all assembled, possibly not until it's all stained and shiny, depending on whether or not I can be bothered to remember the camera. Hopefully my gestating offspring hasn't absorbed my very blue vocal expressions (also known in my family as "Carpentry English") too terribly much today.

And, yes, I still need a radio. The crazy is getting distinctly ... crazy.

It's like frosting a cake - a giant, inside out cake.

2006-05-03T10:17:00.000-05:00

They (who are these people, anyway?) say that skimcoating "is like frosting a cake." I suppose that's great if you're any good at frosting cakes. I'm not - I have recently been converted to fondant for my son's cakes, and I'm grateful that there will be no more mangy peeling birthday cakes in my future.

However, it's also a lie in another way. It's only true if you are used to frosting enormous, inside out, square cakes, with windows and doors, using putty knives. That would be me. I'm really good at mudding, taping, skimcoating, plastering, anything that involves smoothly spreading some sort of pasty substance on a hard substrate. Cake, by the way, IS NOT a hard substrate, and frosting won't hard-set on you like plaster or stay workable for a long time like spackle.

So to continue the theme, I'm almost done frosting my son's room, as of last night. There is an incomplete ring around the top of the room left to do. The part that requires shifting the ladder every six inches or so. I got tired (lazy) and went home. The big news, though, is that now that there are some lights in the house, I can do some work at night. What a huge relief. More working time equals more time, and I can always get behind that.

However, I get a little odd when I'm working alone at night on a project. My mind gets bored, and I start thinking crazy things. Like coming up with a talk show in my head about house rehabbing and how it makes you crazy ("Tomorrow, on Rehabbers Anonymous, we'll hear about how fake wood panelling is the work of Satan, and we'll interview a couple who divorced over their house"), or inventing bizarre superhero names (The Night Spackler!).

I think I need a radio...

Beauty from ugliness

2006-04-23T13:21:00.000-05:00

It's really amazing what a difference patching and applying a skimcoat over a cracked, be-holed, and befouled plastered surface can make. My morale went up about 10 points yesterday. My kitchen nears completion, and approaches paintability. As do my son's room and our dining room. FX's room, actually, is so close to completion that I think we might just get it done in the next couple of weeks. The ugly, dented and cracked outer corners in both dining room and kitchen look like new. I love patching plaster. The cleanup can bite my butt (I hate that part), but the process is a dream.

In other news, the breaker box is ready for installation, with its new home cut into the cellar stairwell wall. We have real outlets appearing as if by magic throughout the house (J and K have earned my finishing and structural carpentry slavery many times over with their help on this, and I think I promised yesterday to help K with a cheapo kitchen makeover this fall...).

There is hope in my heart! We may even move in before my next child arrives (I say that as if he's hovering in a holding pattern somewhere overhead, but he goes with me to the house every time...).

No pictures, as usual. I didn't think the changes would be so dramatic, so I didn't bring my camera.

Ambitious plans for making do

2006-04-15T22:11:00.000-05:00

I am really beginning to thank my lucky stars for the time I spent doing theatrical backstage work. What, you may ask, does that have to do with rehabbing a house?

Actually, a great deal, if you have a lot of cosmetic oddness and no money to deal with it. Set, costume and prop design and construction (all of which I have done) really come down to creatively making things do what they aren't intended to do at all. Like turning plywood into a house in Venice, or making an axe out of wood, foam, paint and glue.

Take, for example, the nice, solid, dependable, MODERN, Andersen casement storm windows in our screen porch:

Nice enough, but they Really Do Not Go With Our House. I've been puzzling over what to do with them to make them work, without having to replace the things.

Today, I pulled an interior screen out and looked at the psuedo-mullions. They are made of plastic and they snap into the frames, so I should be able to pull them out and modify them (epoxy is my friend) to a more appropriate appearance.

That's my mockup of what they might look like. Hopefully. OTOH, I may just be able to make nice wooden ones, too. We'll see. It's a future project, probably won't happen until we've been there awhile. But now I think I can fix it, and I rest a little easier.

Kitchen! I am the Sticky-tile Empress!

2006-04-15T21:49:00.000-05:00

What is she going on about? I'm really good at doing things with sticky tile (self-stick vinyl tiles for the normal people reading), many of which sticky tile was never intended to do. I've done my grandmother's bathroom, in such a way that it looks like we spent FAR more than 100 bucks on it. Mosaic, fancy cuts, etc. I get crazy with the stuff. It's wonderful when you want something to be temporarily livable/pretty until you can do the real renovations, and you've got a small budget.

Anyway, I stuck it to the Awful Tileboard in our kitchen toady, and to the Hideous Vomit-and-Cream Formica counter, as well as to our floor. The floor was fairly normal and straightforward, and has come out BEAUTIFULLY. Here we have photos of my kitchen cabinets, just about complete:

That's the temporary, cheeeeep new countertop solution: heavy-duty sticky tile, with a couple of painted strips of mdf stop moulding.

It looked so sexy I had to get our new knives out (housewarming gift to ourselves) and make them pose against it.

And this is what the counter looked like prior to covering it up. Yes, it is in 3 pieces, for no apparent reason. I stabilized it with the painted moulding strips prior to attaching Ye Olde Sticky Tile. It came out great.

I must, at this point, add that I am Very Impressed with the latex surface primer suggested by some nice sales monkey at one of the big home-improvement stores we've haunted recently. It DOES actually help the tiles adhere. VERY WELL - so well, in fact, that there will be no repositioning of tiles. If you screw up, scrape the tile up and get a new one out. This means that my normally non-feasible technique of covering up hideous formica tileboard (done it before, natch) with sticky tiles is now much more practical.

Also here is a preview of my plans for the sink cabinet:

This will, of course require Even More Paint, plus more sticky tiles (I have those) and I have to make another trip to the hardware store to buy the right size nylon washers (so I can replace the drawer slide roller wheels and my drawers will hang straight). It's SOOOO obviously a mockup, but that still looks better than what's there.

You may have noticed some of the doors hanging open, above. There's a reason. The closure springs are mostly gone. A question, for anyone who may be reading this: Do you know of a source for replacement hinge-spring assemblies for old steel cabinets? I'm fairly good at research, but this has me stumped.

And now, for something completely different...

2006-04-13T18:01:00.000-05:00

... I know I've been dropping hints about my mother's fabulous house pretty much all the time, so, as this is another Involuntary Inaction day wrt our little bungalow, I'll post some pictures of the Great Crumbling (not really) Pile. I'm thinking that I might do this on my off days, from now on, since this place isn't being blogged anywhere and I'm working on it for mom, since her back injury.

These were all taken in winter, hence the snow. I really need to get some photos of the inside and the outside in spring - it's really gorgeous now.

This is the house from about halfway down the lawn toward the road. Looks like a typical colonial/federal type house. It's bigger than it looks here - each of the 4 rooms in this wing are 20x20 feet, with very tall ceilings (10'+, with teh lower floor having higher ceilings than the upper by a foot or two), and the hall is a good 10x20, with a well-preserved formal staircase. Note to self: get pictures.

That funny little pseudo-antebellum semicircular porch is both incorrect (if you look closely, you can see the outline of the original front verandah on the walls) , and Badly Installed. It slopes toward the house (BAD).We have grand plans to rip it out and rebuild the original verandah, but that requires a jackhammer and money that's just not there right now.

We don't use this entrance much at all, as there is no path to it and the porch is horrible. That ought to change once we replace the missing, correct, USABLE porch.

This was taken after walking around that line of trees to the left in the picture above. This is a view around the side of the house to the remaining old barn (or older barn - it was probably built using older lumber from a now-missing structure), which Needs Help if it is to remain standing. There are plans to rescue it, as it's such a neat old building, and other than requiring some shoring (and sistering a cracked beam, and fixing a busted door, and...) it's still in fairly good shape.

This is a view walking around the other side of the house, toward the side entrance, now used as the main entrance. Here the beautiful original verandah is still in evidence, save for its brackets. In this wing is a large (20x40+?) lower room, and two upstairs rooms a narrow room (20x10) and a large room, probably intended to be the nursery (20x30).

We're walking, we're walking... Now you can see (nearly) the whole of the verandah. Also, you can see the kitchen addition (the short part of the house), and that it has FOUR chimneystacks. That does in fact mean 8 fireplaces and attendant flues. No, none of them are usable just now. LIning them is also on the to-do list. We are currently living above the kitchen, in a 20x30 room that pretty neatly holds most of our furniture.

Okay, this is taken from the corner of the kitchen addition looking toward the front of the house.

Now, some historical info- this house was built in 1857 by a Mr. Wolfe for his sister and brother-in-law (the Tuckers) to live in. It's a virtual copy of several l-shaped Shenandoah Valley Federal houses, though it is in southern Illinois. We suspect that it is actually a copy of an older house in that area.

Most of the rooms have been at least partially restored, but the nursery is the last one, and we have a good deal of tuckpointing (on the chimneybreast) and replastering to do yet in there. There is still, thankfully, quite a bit of the original woodgraining left in the house, though the PO did sand/refinish some of the floors (he was VERY good at structural repairs - we have him to thank for having a new roof, sound foundation and non-collapsing, non-sealed chimneys-, and admitted himself that he wasn't suited to restoring the interior).

Besides not having any images of the interior yet, you don't see the l-shaped back porch (there are four doors that exit onto this porch from the main floor) in any of these pictures. There's also a 3/4 cellar under the kitchen and part of the main house.

And, this is just down the road from my little 20th century house. Very handy!

Comments encouraged ... and now enabled

2006-04-10T11:55:00.000-05:00

I just went and checked my comment settings. I had NO IDEA that the default setting only allowed other Blogger users to leave comments (slaps head).

If there's anything you wanted to tell me, I've fixed that now. I did turn on word verification, though, just in case some enterprising spambot wants to make life tough.

Back to work.

House Rehab Illustrated

2006-04-09T18:33:00.000-05:00

I finally remembered to bring the camera. Included herein are images of the kitchen, so far; before/after images of the front door; some cool Basement Archaeology shots; and other things, with my typical boring narration. Oh, and please pardon our dust and construction debris. Everywhere.

And Now, to the Pictures!

First, the kitchen, before:

Bleh. Notice the grimy blue carpet. It's glued down ... with wood glue.

and so far:

The cabinets are being painted flat black (blackboard paint), with silver lower doors, and Safety Red drawers and upper doors. I cleaned the chromed handles, which are all the same for the main bank of cabinets (BTW, magic eraser sponges work great for this, with a bit of degreaser for the greasy parts - my friend K. thought I had replated them!), then picked out the six most worn ones and sprayed them black with epoxy paint. Those six went on the matte silver doors, and the cleaned chrome ones look wonderful against the red painted drawers.

We plan to do the same to the sink cabinet, but it involves a bit more work to take apart. Plus we need to buy more paint...

I am really loving how the cheapo sticky tiles are making the old floor look larger. It's not ideal, and not period to the house, but we'll have a kitchen we can enjoy until we can do better.

And now, the Original Front Door (now the living room interior door), with Icky Kwiky goldtone lockset:

and without:

The paint is pretty bad, yes, but cleaning the hardware and making it pretty can wait until we're in the house. Removing the offending modern lockset prior to moving in could not wait. And it still looks better than it did.

I'm no Indiana Jones, but I did discover some cool stuff in the cellar.

For example, when you look up and you aren't busy being terrified by Horrible Old Wiring, you can find some bizarre things, like an old Esso sign being used to fit the new ductwork under the original coal furnace heat vent:

Plus, I think the part that was cut out is leaning against a wall elsewhere. Neat.

Now, I know it's not cellar related, but do you remember these?

They are the access panels for the bathroom plumbing. Which has no cutoff valves. None. Zip. Nada. I have no idea why you need access panels if you have no cutoff valves. Yes, they are on our to-do list.

Anyway, those panels? They're made of another old sign:

I think the rest of it has been used to make the interior cellar door solid, and that's a whole entry all by itself. Anyway, get a load of the name - "Critic Feeds" :D

Back to creeping around in the basement. I stuck the camera through a hole I punched in the plastic stapled over the access to the foundation of the dining room bay, adn I took some photos, to see what was there.

I found an old porch swing and some mouldings:

God knows if that thing can be saved, but it's pretty cool to find it at all.

and what probably happened to parts of the original kitchen cabinets:

Yep, that's what they are. I don't think they are salvageable. Makes you sad, too, doesn't it? At least I will have references to use when we do get around to doing the Big Kitchen Renovation.

And finally, to close, here's a couple of images of the old (but not original) coal furnace:

It's still hooked up to the flue, but obviously hasn't been used for decades. That first photo is its tag, which is on the back. It's probably a 1930's model, judging from the styling.

More photos later, but this is a good start. I still haven't found any stamping, but I'm too pregnant to fit through the attic access panel, which is where i'm most liekly to find marks.

Lockset Archaeology, plus more working lights!

2006-04-09T13:43:00.000-05:00

We spent yesterday continuing with the electrical work and moving original parts of the house around. Now, thanks to our Wonderful Freinds, we have a hallway light fixture, and my son's room has light, and things are really moving along that way. So well, in fact, that we need to buy some more wire :)

However, Chris and I did stuff not related to electrical work. We went looking for various bits of hardware that had been relocated over the years and tried to put it back. This kind of thing is one of my favorite rehab activities - I get to play archaeologist.

I was started on that path because our original (now interior, as our porch was enclosed 10 years ago) front door had had its lockset and attendant hardware removed and replaced with a modern Kwikset lockset (YUCK! I despise shiny yellow goldtone) sometime in the last 30-odd years. There have not been any keys for that lockset for nearly 15 years (according to the PO), so we were going to have to remove it, no matter what, and replace it with something that our 3-year-old can't use to permanently exclude us from the house.

I thought of something odd I had seen on the (now interior - also has a now-enclosed porch) back door, involving a knob/key plate that didn't look like it was set right. It looked too large, and the interior one, while smaller, was still larger than the rest of the interior plates. This matched up nicely with the scars on the front door, as did the edge face of the lockset, once we removed the Icky Kwicky lockset and knobs. I delightedly disinstalled the relocated mortise lockset and brought it into the living room, where Chris was working on the door.

Chris observed that the latch was going the wrong way, and said that this must not be the right set. I pointed out that somebody had clearly disassembled the lockbox and removed the deadbolt (I'm guessing about the time the key disappeared) and the button stops (privacy knob-locks). It looks very similar to this repro mortise lockset, but is made of iron with steel working parts. Chris then unscrewed the two screws, pulled out the latch and flipped it over, and put it all back together. After all that, it worked fine and tapped into its original hole perfectly. We still have to strip off the eighty-one billion layers of old paint from the plates, and then refinish them and the knobs, but it already looks a million times better.

Yes, our internal kitchen/back door is now without knobs, but I know where its originals went (and plan to harvest them and replace them), and the latch hadn't lined up with the (wrong) strikeplate for decades anyway. It had locked with first a twist bolt (since painted into oblivion) and then a small surface bolt for ages and ages.

I have ambitous plans for relocating various doors throughout the house so they are more useful (such as the all-glass basement entry and its lovely old wood-framed screen door, the current interior kitchen rear door, and the old kitchen/hall door). There are two non-original, but clearly older, doors that are going to go away to more appropriate homes once the doorway shuffling is complete.

There's also some strangely located edge molding that was stuck into the cellar stair doorway in addition to the stop molding. For no good reason. That will also be removed, stripped and reused in one of the several places such molding was yanked out. But it can wait. Next winter, maybe...

As for future plans, anyone have shellacking or varnishing tips for me? I'll need to coat the cleaned door/window hardware to make it match any non-painted stuff that still exists in the house, as all the hardware was in place when the wood was finished, with shellac. And our windows in the dining room bay need to be refinished, as there's old water damage from before the storm windows went on.

Why is it, that as soon as a task gets struck from the list, two more spring up to take its place?

More Inaction & some book nerditude

2006-04-05T12:22:00.000-05:00

Well, this week has so far been mostly taken up with non-house time commitments - doctor's appointments, historical society meeting, grocery shopping. However, a couple of good things came of it.

First, we now own a copy of the Schoolhouse Electric catalog. WOW! We definitely want to upgrade to some of those fixtures in the future. Lots of them are perfect for our house.

Next, I'm an enormous book nerd. I used to be a bookstore employee, prior to finally becoming a professional graphic artist about 10 years ago. So, in that vein, here is my book geekery for those who care to read it:

Dover Books offered me a Presidents' Day discount coupon ( I saved a whopping 10 bucks, but I had wanted to get some more books for a long while now) and I took advantage of it to buy some references.

The 1912 and 1915 Gustav Stickley Craftsman Furniture Catalogs

Aladdin "Built in a Day" House Catalog, 1917

just in case

Easy-to-Make Arts and Crafts Lamps and Shades

Arts and Crafts Designs

Since I am reviewing books here, let me list several (also Dover books) that I already own and like:

Making Authentic Craftsman Furniture: Instructions and Plans for 62 Projects

Authentic Designs from the American Arts and Crafts Movement

Art Nouveau: An Anthology of Design and Illustration from "The Studio"

Art Nouveau Animal Designs and Patterns: 60 Plates in Full Color

A Treasury of Art Nouveau Design & Ornament

And, finally, some I'd like to get:

Limbert Arts and Crafts Furniture: The Complete 1903 Catalog

Arts and Crafts Stained Glass Coloring Book

Arts and Crafts Stained Glass Pattern Book

Floral Stained Glass Lampshades

Arts and Crafts Furniture: The Complete Brooks Catalog of 1912

Stickley Craftsman Furniture Catalogs

Craftsman Homes

More Craftsman Homes

Craftsman Bungalows: 59 Homes from "the Craftsman"

Historical Society

2006-04-04T10:13:00.000-05:00

We went to the monthly meeting of the local Historical Society last night. I was volunteered for the position of webdesigner/pet technogeek a month or so ago by my mom, so, last night I presented them with three options for hosting and stood there explaining basics about putting together a site to a roomful of people who all stared at me like a dog listening to music.

All lovely people, of course, but not websavvy at all - this town is still in dialup country, though the library has a few computers and a scanner. We have huge piles of resources and content, small amounts of funds, enthusiasm and an upcoming event. We have a month for everyone to submit the content that was waved at me last night, and I have promises of some photos of my house prior to the porch being squashed by the tree and its subsequent reconstruction as a closed porch.

Long story short, I've got something to do in the evenings now.

some progress on the "Placebo Room"

2006-03-31T20:38:00.000-06:00

What's the "Placebo Room?" you may ask. Or, you may not, but I'm going to tell you anyway.

It's the room I can work on to feel like we are making real progress on the house, while I'm stewing in slow-electrical-upgrade hell. The kitchen is all cosmetic, and cheap cosmetic, at that, work. I can feel like there's hope when I look at it and see real change. It's a mental health thing.

So I call my kitchen the Placebo Room, as it has the effect of maintaining hope for the rest of the house, as a sugar pill might have "effects" in a medication study.

Now that I've bored you, on to the real stuff. No work today, but yesterday, I got half the kitchen floor laid, all the cabinets painted except the upper doors, and got to see how the Red Drawers with Newly Polished Chrome Handles looked on the chalkboard black cabinets.

Oh, and I forgot my camera. Again.

But they looked really snazzy. I'll post a plan image, when I can get my butt in gear and transfer it from the other computer (no network, natch - it's the stone age here at mom's). Then, at some point, when I finish enough to remember the camera, we might get a sort-of-after picture.

And, we decided that the upper cabinet doors should also be Saftey Red. Because, it looks really cool like that in my cheapo home design program. And also in real life.

So we have to buy another can of spraypaint, but I think we can elbow 5 bucks into the budget.

Superficial kitchen facelift

2006-03-29T18:37:00.000-06:00

Today was the day I worked alone. SO, in an effort to prevent injuries, I worked on our temporary kitchen facelift (we budgeted about 200 bucks for this, just to make it livable until we can do the Big Kitchen Renovation, say, 5 years down the road). Let me just say that I LOVE appliance epoxy - it makes old, ugly kitchen fixtures look at least acceptable, if not fantastic. Our stove now matches our fridge, and the 1930-1950's steel cabinets are well on their way.

Things I got done:

Painted the drawers red.
Painted about half of the lower doors steely metallic (it got windy and I had to quit).
Primed and laid sticky tile on a test patch of the floor.
Painted the first of three coats of blackboard paint on the exposed ends of the cabinets (both for adults and the kids).

Things still to do:

Wire the kitchen
Install new light fixtures (will probably stay after the BKR)
Install the new faucet set (will probably stay after the BKR)
Paint over the beigy-marbled tile-patterned wall board (white, I'm thinking, and probably with Kilz.)
Finish laying floor tiles ( the test was successful so far)
Fix broken/missing drawer rollers in sink cabinet
Patch and reskim the two plaster walls we've revealed, then paint.
Paint cabinet frames black, pull and paint upper doors black.
Pick the six least shiny chrome handles and paint them black (for lower doors)

That's a lot of stuff to do yet, for this superficial makeover. I did, however, discover that the nylon washers I bought to replace the several missing drawer wheels in the sink cabinet were the wrong size - I need 1 1/4 inch washers instead of 1 1/8. Grrr. That's a long drive to return 5 bucks worth of nylon washers. But I also need to buy another can or two of epoxy paint. I sense that I'll run short if I don't.

Enforced Inaction

2006-03-28T14:44:00.000-06:00

Mom's at her Physical Therapist's office today, and Chris had to go in to the office to interview a couple of applicants (even though he's supposed to be on medical leave until tomorrow, interviews aren't exactly physically strenuous), so that means NO SITTER for the boy.

I've been stewing in my creative juices all day. I'm just DYING to get in and get the kitchen worked on, or the boy's room, or SOMETHING. Argh.

My house is only a few blocks away. It's maddening. I want to work, dangit.

Fortune Cookie Fu

2006-03-27T19:52:00.000-06:00

We ate at the local Chinese buffet tonight, as it was declared a "no cooking" night here at Mom's.

C got the following fortune:

Be patient. Good things come to those who wait.

And I got this one:

You are capable of extremely hard work and dedication.

I don't know if the above is a blessing or a curse...

Score!

2006-03-27T12:49:00.000-06:00

Went to Lowe's yesterday, and scored several lovely bargains. In other news, my blog doesn't seem to be showing up on Houseblogs' feed. If you see it there, please comment, so I know I'm not going crazy :) Also, I just noticed (okay, it was actually on Friday) that the banner for Houseblogs shows a lovely old deadbolt that's shifted slightly. Just enough to not work ... I'd seen so many of these over the years that it just went right over my head every other time I'd looked at it. Mom saw it and laughed, saying something about how emblematic that was of the whole rehab experience.

Bargains, itemized, sort of:

2 cans of paint in a nice mossy Arts & Crafts green, off the "orphans" rack in the paint dept: $5.00 each

1 can of a nice sky blue for The Boy's room, again an orphan: $10.00 (higher end decorator brand)

4 rolls of paper appropriate for placing above the borders in the livingroom and dining room (in the "frieze" area): $1.50 each

A new chrome bakers rack for our kitchen: $40.00 (down from $80.00)

And ... A cool Deco-streamline style white and chrome vanity 3-light fixture (like what my husband wanted) for the bathroom: $10.50 (down from $80.00 - discontinued, and it had all its parts)

I got some other stuff, too, but those were the nifty bargains.

Progress!!!

2006-03-25T21:12:00.000-06:00

The new light fixture (a flushmount with stars, moons and suns areound the edge) is up in my son's room, and it has a functioning switch. Looks great.

The last vestiges of the enthusiastically nailed dropped ceiling in the dining room and hallway are GONE! Gonegonegone! Yay! Now the repair of the cracks in the plaster can actually commence.

There is no longer a vast swath of stained, old, glued-down, blue indoor-outdoor carpet in the kitchen - I ripped it out with shouts of glee this afternoon. Now, of course, the inexplicably ugly linoleum (no pictures) can be seen, in all its blue-green, grey and red glory. At least it gives me a guide for laying the new sticky tiles.

The kitchen cabinets have had all handles removed, and the doors and drawers are off in preparation for painting. We even fixed the wonky hinge on one of the cabinets that's been bothering me since we walked the house initially.

The wall of the long, narrow (and unusable) pass-thru closet that we're incorporating into the master bedroom is now completely stripped down to studs. Interestingly, the studs all have pencilled notation on them. We also have a HUGE pile of plaster & lath debris to dispose of now, and some nice mouldings to use in places where original mouldings or edgings were damaged. There's also about 50 pounds of plaster roughcoat that dripped down onto the plate when they were coating the walls, and that's just peachy-keen to chip out.

I also took hi-res photos of the wallpaper fragments. Might get to reconstruct the stuff now :)

Still to tackle:

Bathroom. We're almost avoiding it, because it MUST be gutted and re-done. All the fixtures and associated bobs have been bought, but we still must buy Wonderboard, tile, adhesive and grout.

Dining room posts, beams and ceiling. We need to figure and purchase lumber, as well as figuring how much drywall is needed. That'll come this evening, I think.

What to do with the paint in the master bedroom... So far the only input my husband has given is "Warm. It should be warm and cozy." Which I agree with, and which really doesn't help much. The lights for the master bedroom and the dressing room are an antiqued copper. That should help, but it doesn't. Quandary.

We survived the cold snap..

2006-03-24T17:15:00.000-06:00

And so did our plumbing. I have been suffering from nightmares involving flooding and house collapse (as seen in The Money Pit), but the house, which seems to be under a Special Dispensation from Above, is just fine.

I was going to go over to the house today and rip up the glued-down carpet in the kitchen (it's on top of perfectly good but hideous linoleum), but got distracted by my gestational diabetes test. I won't, of course, find out whether I "passed" or not until monday, when my next OB appointment is. Whee. I'm probably fine, except for having to drink what amounts to concentrated flat orange soda :P

We've got a sort of a tradition of buying and rehabbing houses during pregnancy in my family - my parents did this too, with their first project house in 1975, and the next one in 1977. I've got a goal of moving in on or around Tax Day - we'll see how well it goes. As long as we can get moved in before I have a baby in my arms, we're okay.

Practical things:

The breaker box should be going in (well, at least dry-fitted) tomorrow. I'm charging our saw batteries right now. After that, we'll be able to really get the several outlet circuits in from below without losing our places ;)

I've figured out an elegant, Anglo-Japanese style arrangement for the necessary support beam and its attendant posts in our dining room. It'll go nicely with the planned false beams on the ceiling. I'll post a drawing as soon as I have it scanned. I'm also considering building box-type window seats into the two ends of the bay - they would be ideal, and perhaps some nice Stickley-style wall-hanging shelves would be good, too. Or maybe we can scrape up another 30 bucks and get two more sconces ... Hmmm.

I'm debating making a plaque to mount our new house numbers on - perhaps wood or aged hammered copper? I hate it when I can't make up my mind.

I'm still working on my reconstruction of the original paper I found bits of. So far, it looks fairly neat, and I may send what I've got off to Bradbury and Bradbury for their archives once I get it done. If they're interested.

I've been toying with paint colors for each room, and how to use the edging papers I found, and whether I want to make a freize ... So far, we've got greys and blues for the living room, and greens and browns for the dining room, and red/black/white with steel and chrome in our unavoidably 1930's kitchen. Possibly deep blue with white and chrome in the bath, with or without black accents. Nothing yet for the master bedroom suite (bedroom and dressing room will be done the same), and we're still juggling ideas for the boy's room.

putting the brakes on

2006-03-21T16:35:00.000-06:00

... my frustration, that is.

We had some good things happen, we accomplished some stuff.

We're on Houseblogs.net (waves at the legions of other housemad people out there).
We got several things we need for the house, including a nifty lockset-positioning thingy for installing our new deadbolts.
We finally remembered to pick up a couple of smoke alarms.
We also finally remembered to get the new digital thermostat that ought to make our gas bill less horrible, once the gas is back on.

And the sun finally came out, to at least partially melt the snow.

note to weather gods

2006-03-21T16:27:00.000-06:00

Dear Weather Gods,

Normally I love snow. I love taking my son out into it to play, I love throwing snowballs at my husband and running away. It looks cool. My dog even likes it.

However.

We'd Really, Really, like to move into our house before the middle of April. We are being somewhat delayed by the low temperatures and inclement weather, as there is currently little electricity and NO HEAT in the house, which makes working in it near impossible.

I can't even lay sticky tile in the kitchen right now. My freind who is generously giving of his small quantity of spare time to help us rewire probably won't willingly venture into the frigid attic where all the lighting circuits are.

Please, PLEASE, allow us to get some work done this week. Please?

Thank you,
the Slaves.

Cursed by the weather gods

2006-03-20T16:23:00.000-06:00

The gas is off, as is the electricity, which means no heat.

We are having a last-of-the-season cold snap, INCLUDING SNOW.

Visions of broken pipes and a flooded cellar are currently dancing through my head.

I can only hope that the low-tech method of leaving all the taps dripping (okay, I was a touch paranoid so they're actually trickling, and from both hot and cold) will save us from unforseen disasters.

GAH.

Still alive!

2006-03-18T13:11:00.000-06:00

We're still alive. The computer had a heart attack last week, so yesterday we had to buy a new power supply so I can continue boring others with my ranting, and here we are.

We have been working like mad on the house, despite C's minor surgery this week, and wiring is going apace. So far, several lengths of scary old wiring of various kinds have come down out of the attic, and we have one circuit up and running.

I found more wallpaper, same room. It's the field paper, with enough of the motif to figure it out. Pictures later.

There's a sag in the diningroom, at the join between the bay and the original construction. Things Must Be Done About This, as it is just sort of hanging in space. I see beams in my future, and screwjacks, and pain.

Bought vinyl tile for kitchen - real kitchen renovation isn't happening for a few years, but it doesn't have to be vile until we do the Big Renovation. I painted our perfectly functional almond gas stove silver and black using appliance epoxy and stove paint. Ten bucks for a matching appliance certainly isn't bad to me!

More later - I have to get overalled and head over to the new place. Pictures, too.

Archaeology and evidence

2006-03-08T19:02:00.000-06:00

Well, went back today for a short tour with my mom - she's helping us buy this place, and I inherited my love of old things that need repair from her. Someday, I'll blog her current mania, the Wolfe-Tucker house, built in 1857. But that's another story, and a long one :)

What we mostly did was to take photos. This is but a small sampling, and I'll add narration between them. The rest are here. One of the things that really gets me going when working on an old house is the archaeology factor - there are always surprises, and sometimes, hey are even good ones. These are mostly good ones.

This really doesn't look very interesting, but it is probably the original olive color in the kitchen. I was thrilled to find it so easily.

This was lurking in the closet, and had been recycled as a closet hanger rod from the original bath or the kitchen (both were olive). It's an original towel bar, and will be going back into the bath.

Not much to say here, except: LOOK! spare original floorboards! There are actually 4 - one is in the car, in case we need to match them.

Here's what I promised pics of a couple of days ago - the small fragment of original paper in the dining room. It survived by virtue of having been papered over and then plastered over when the bay was put on the house in the 20's. Thank God for old, bad DIY sometimes. I'm going to try to excavate more of the pattern - there's a good half a square foot of plaster roughcoat that overlaps probable wallpaper remains. Mom is farily sure that's a WWI era paper. Once I've chipped enough away, I'll reconstruct it in Adobe Illustrator and post an image here. The inks are bronze and sliver iridescent on a cream paper, and they are still reflective after 90 years and being buried under plaster. Amazing.

This doesn't look very interesting either, but it's a closeup of the probably 1920's siver&grey paper over the earliest layer - an ochre yellow, very Arts & Crafts.

The small bedroom was originally a bright cerise, probably because the family that built it had a little girl - it was from her that the PO's parents bought it in 1950. That makes us the third family to live in it, and all three were young families with a kid or two. Oh, another cool thing - the family who built the place? They were related to the family that built my mom's place.

This just keeps getting cooler and cooler.

Tomorrow: Escrow closes! WooHOO!

Planning

2006-03-08T09:54:00.000-06:00

So, as we don't have the money this year to make over the front of the house, we sat down and made some sketches. I've been researching porches for a week now, trying to figure out what I want to do, what would be appropriate, what would keep the finished porch part of the year-round living space and still come out looking Craftsman-style.

Currently (this may change, of course), we plan to go from this:

to this:

This will obviously begin with the much desired removal of the plastic siding (admittedly, they attempted to be harmonious when they picked this stuff, but it's still plastic) that wraps the front porch monolithically, and makes it look rather like a Very Tall Doublewide. This will be followed by (or preceded by) the ripping out of the front steps and the remains of the old iron railings (there are currently a couple of uprights left). I'm glad the back door is closer to our driveway. The windows will stay, but they and the door will get appropriate trim, while the door will be replaced with either the restored original front door and a nice full-glass storm door or a harmoniously designed modern steel door (if we can find one).

The bottom of the porch will be faced with brick tiles - the kind that are cast off actual antique bricks - laid over a concrete board underlayment. This is admittedly a cost saving measure, but the porch was reframed about 10 years ago and is quite solid. The front steps will be concrete based, with full brick facings, and the piers will be brick (we plan to use recycled brick) with concrete caps and a painted wood railing.

The top of the porch will be framed up to suggest beams, and I'm still deciding what to do about thae little bit of non-"beam", non-window and non-trim space. I'm thinking stucco, as it's an easy solution, but it'll clash with the original siding. I don't want to use clapboard there, though. I'm stuck.

Good thing we have couple of years to think about this.

Wallpaper!

2006-03-07T17:28:00.000-06:00

I, typically, forgot my camera. No pictures were taken today, which is just a Murphy's law thing as I discovered a fragment of an early paper under the textured skimcoat that I've been chipping off since Friday.

Pictures tomorrow, though. I promise.

In other news, nearly the entire hallway is crack free! Less work for me, yay!

More excitement! Good, bad, ugly...

2006-03-05T20:11:00.000-06:00

First, out with some more fug, and eventually, in with the beautiful, restored bathroom. So far, I got about half of the plastic tile off before eau-de-puke scented adhesive (what is that stuff?) drove me out of the house.

Yes, out of the house. Bleh. No pictures, maybe Tuesday. I'm busy all during those precious daylight hours Monday, so I get no cathartic de-muddling joy.

Which brings us to our next subject of discussion: Why "precious daylight hours," you may ask? Well, one of the main reasons this house was such a deal (I'm not naming numbers, here, as we're still in escrow until Thursday, but our home loan is an amount normally financed for buying a new car), is that the wiring is, uhm, eccentric? Very DIY? Very much in evidence of having been done by several people who had no idea how to wire things?

All of the above, really. Twist-tie style connections, poor or no use of electrical tape (try masking tape!), connections completely lacking in caps of any kind, no boxes, 2 circuits, perhaps 10 outlets all told, at least one fixture hanging by the aforementioned twist-tie style connections, a mixture of knob and tube and more advanced types of wiring ... I could literlally go on and on, but I'd like to sleep tonight. Essentially we have ruled it unsafe to turn any lights on, plug anything in, etcetera, until such time as we have rewired everything. That's scheduled for next weekend, when we will have a workparty including some good friends that are also experienced rehabbers over for a day of slavery and pizza, followed by beer.

We've spent about 2 grand so far on materials, but that does cover the replacement tub and sink for the bath and all the fun electrical bits and bobs, including budget-but-acceptable replacement light fixtures. Whee! Bye, bye, money! Thanks, Uncle Sam, for allowing us a tax refund that will make our house livable!

Our dining room is now full of debris, but I did find that the ultra-fashionable 1930's sandtextured skimcoat (badly cracked) under the fuglyfuglyfugly 1960's panelling was poorly applied. Why is this good? Our house isn't a 1930's house, it's a 'teens house, and I really never have liked that sand-stucco-effect stuff, everever. So, being badly applied, it comes off with little resistance - apparently the walls were not washed properly after the original wallpaper was pulled down, leaving a nice coat of paste between the beautiful original smooth perfect (except for a few easily fixable cracks) fine plaster finish coat and the later texture. I practically did a little dance of joy when I saw how easy this was going to be.

Oh, and the plaster? It also shows where the border paper was placed! Whee!

Then, we found a strange mold (not black, some other mold) was growing on but not destroying the lath in the DR bay. Weird, and time to whip out the ol' Lysol.

See you Tuesday.

Good bone structure, bad makeup

2006-03-03T21:02:00.000-06:00

Well, to get things started, we are buying our first house. Escrow closes next Thursday, and we have worked out an agreement with the current owner to get started on the restoration ASAP.

We think it might be a Sears kit, probably built in 1916 or 1917. The coal bin in the cellar is papered with newspapers from both years. It was remodeled slightly in the 1920's to provide interior cellar stairs, a bay on the dining room, and a larger kitchen and back porch.

It's a great little house, 2 or 3 bedrooms depending on who you talk to, small but servicable bath, nice sized kitchen, closed in front porch, large living and dining rooms, etc. Gorgeous woodwork, which is, mostly, unmolested. Great hardwood floors which have escaped wear mostly by virtue of being hidden under the VILEST of wall-to-wall carpets ... and an inspired abuse of "wood" panelling (six kinds. Of the variety that is real wood made to look fake. The world is a strange and dark place sometimes).

The bathroom is a case of fabulous 1950's plastic-tile fugly. Out it goes, though we're trying to salvage it for someone who may want it for a 1950's house. The adhesive used on this stuff has mostly let go, which means I can scrape it off with a putty knife, but it also smells like essence of vomit. Yay.