The House

Another beauty in Hungary

2011-12-09T11:57:00.000-08:00

Drainage again: dry well

2011-12-05T18:59:00.000-08:00

Still haven't found the time to post pictures of the ditch project, but we've got it most of the way out to the street and - key - getting the water away from the foundation and basement. Quite successfully! Only one problem; one of the neighbors (one of the good ones who fixes houses instead of being the problem) came by and noted that the city doesn't actually allow you to route water onto the street.

Well.

This pipe effort was already due to the fact that the city doesn't allow you to use existing drainpipe (that drains into the sewers). Which is entirely understandable, as the city's sewer system is roughly the same age as the house itself, and a combined sewer, and during heavy rains, combined sewers are not a good thing. And they overflow into the Whitewater River anyway, and frankly, there's just too much E. coli there nowadays.

We can't just drain the water into the yard, because there simply isn't enough yard. So it's time, boys and girls, to explore the concept of the dry well. And you know, a small one with a plastic barrel is really not too hard. And as the ground still hasn't frozen, well, next week I'm going to put in a dry well down towards the street. There will still be an overflow into the street, but it will only be an issue in really heavy rain, and that's not a problem; the dry well will still buffer the flow.

More later.

Parlor doors

2011-11-18T11:32:00.000-08:00

So the kids cleaned up the big house (well, did some cleaning) and decorated for Halloween. Part of that effort was to put a lamp down in the parlor and stack all the book boxes against the walls. And then we found the most fascinating cabinet-or-whatever (actually it might be the head of a bed, I can't tell) in the alley out back, and it fits oddly perfectly above the fireplace there, as you see here.

And right above the parlor is my office, and I have purchased my ventless heater, so I can route some gas to this fireplace, too - I just need a heater to put there. There are some gas logs, but I don't imagine they're going to do much.

Actually, I'm pretty sure this is the way this house was designed anyway - point heat where you actually needed it, with lots of gas fires. It's certainly the way the Robinson house on 15th was designed, the in-laws of E.B.Swayne, who built my house.

The only problem is that there are no parlor doors. So I need some parlor doors, clearly, and I'm not sure how to solve that quickly and easily; I'd really kind of like to have a heated library this winter. I'm going to go ahead and put a proper gas stove there, and it will certainly make a huge difference, but it's still going to be drafty. Pictured to the left is an example I found on Google; I think maybe it demonstrates my oddity that I look at this picture and marvel at the salvageability of the house pictured, but still - it does illustrate how parlor doors work.

Longer-term plans, by the way: we will be leaving for Europe for at least a year this spring/early summer, and we will put The House on the market - but our compromise is that we'll put it on the market for $40K. As it's tremendously unlikely to sell at that price, that means it's win-win for me - either I get to keep my house until I'm emotionally ready to move on (which means I'll have another interesting house somewhere else), or I have a large enough profit from it that I'll still feel good about myself.

Drainage again

2011-10-24T18:20:00.000-07:00

I was shocked to realized that I had taken no pictures of the marathon ditch-digging session I engaged in during last week's steady rain. Everybody laughed - they laughed - but nobody could withstand the withering force of my logic: if it's already raining when you dig your drainage ditches, the water will show you its level without any work at all on your part.

So this drainage ditch is on the north side of the big house, where most of my downspouts are (by design). It drains to the northeast corner of the property onto the street, over a wall that I'll have to protect with a trough of some kind. And it's not deep enough; it's probably around 8" deep, but this page recommends digging your trench 12" to 14" deep for 4" drainage lines.

I've also violated the recommendation of that page by including one right angle - but logistically there's just no way to avoid it. I'm going to put in a cleanout there just to be safe.

Anyway, given my recent success in getting all the wet dirt out of the basement, it was immensely satisfying to know just how much water would not be seeping in through the walls. (Not that seepage is a major problem - but seriously, if the downspouts discharge against the foundation, you're just asking for trouble.)

I'll slap in a picture later. ... I've said that before, haven't I?

The basement

2011-10-20T06:31:00.000-07:00

I borrowed my dad's pickup and paid a guy from the neighborhood $150 to shovel out all the rotten stucco on the floor of the basement in the big house. He carried it all up the steps in 5-gallon buckets and it took him only two days to produce the pile you see here.

It took me and my son about two hours at my dad's farm with shovels and rakes and implements of destruction to push all that dirt into a gully (there was already a pile of garbage at the bottom of it, and rather than bring that pile up, we figured we'd just put our pile with it).

Anyway, for the first time since we bought it, the air in the big house actually smells pretty good now. That rotten stucco had a lot of earthy mold smell to it, and I had hoped it would make a difference to remove it, but essentially it seems to have entirely eliminated the smell, which I hadn't really dared hope for.

So what's stucco, you ask? Turns out that stucco and plaster and mortar are all pretty much the same thing, which surprised me. Anyway, the basement walls are stacked limestone that had had stucco on it, but the utter lack of drainage for so many years put most of it on the floor. Now that it's gone, I'd really rather put some back; that's the point of having the gutters, after all.

Making windows

2011-10-18T20:58:00.000-07:00

OK, so I know how to make brick. I can cut beams and joists. How do you make windows? Haha, Mr. Google, is there nothing you can't tell me? Here's a nice link, [taken from a house blog not unlike my own: post 1 and post 2] the short answer being pretty much what I expected: with a table saw, a router, a mortiser, and a tenon jig. I'll bet you could fake the mortise-and-tenon stuff without specialized tools, too.

In addition to the longer-term pipe dream of building my own 19th century house from scratch, though, I had the epiphany that these 4'x8' classic double-hung windows that have such a poor R value could easily be fixed the same way Hungarians do it in older buildings (and this is surely the same in older buildings elsewhere in Europe) - simply provide a second layer of casement windows on the interior of the window. In fact, with a bar 5 or 6 feet from the bottom of the window, you could have a tilting horizontal casement window at the top that could let in a nice breeze without scattering your papers on the floor and being proof against minor rain, while still leaving the larger bottom part for opening in full when you want to lean out.

I've tried to find a picture of these interior casement windows, with no luck. I don't even have any that I took myself. Just picture it in your mind, and trust me: it would be the perfect modification for the windows in this house.

Bricks

2011-10-14T15:08:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking hard about just what it is that I find attractive about Richmond's brick houses. Because it's specifically the brick ones that reach out and grab my heart and make me love them. I like some of the gingerbread on a nice big wood frame Victorian, but it doesn't really get me in the same way.

And you know, I don't care about modern brick structures either - bank buildings or what have you. It's slowly dawned on me that there's something about the 19th-century brick houses here quite specifically. And it's not just architecture, either. There are little single-story boxes built in the 19th century that I look at, walking past, and think, oh, how charming.

I finally figured it out.

The bricks I like were handmade.

That's it. That's the whole reason I like them - they're irregular. So I figured I'd find out how to make them. After all, I might end up marooned in the Caribbean and have to build a brick Italianate house myself, from scratch. I know it's technically possible. I just need to find out how.

So there's a guy in Delphi, Indiana who makes bricks and blogs about it. Colonial Williamsburg actually fires a batch of bricks every year. When it comes to laying brick, moreover, here's a fantastic overview. Richmond masons seem to have adhered to a Liverpool bond (correction: nope, it's an American common bond). I can take a picture of the carriage house that illustrates it if you're interested. I worked out the necessity for bonding just from observing the interior and exterior of the carriage house last month, finally struck by the epiphany that there were rows of bricks through the wall to hold the layers together.

That same site has a nice 19th century scan about brickmaking.

So this blog may eventually morph from restoration of a Richmond brick house to construction of a replica in Puerto Rico. There's no way to know! Update: here's a link to a preservation document from St. Thomas, not terribly far from Ponce. (If you take the ferry to Culeibra, which is a Puerto Rican island, you can see the Virgin Islands from it - it's often called the "Spanish Virgin Island".)

The bricks in the picture are on the south wall of the ballroom. My heart skips a beat just looking at that picture. Seriously. I'm done for in terms of loving these bricks.

Plaster downstairs in the carriage house

2011-09-29T19:42:00.001-07:00

So I've been intimating for some time that the plaster on the walls downstairs in the carriage house has some water damage. Here's a little indication of how much damage I mean: this is on the northeast corner next to where I replaced the termite-eaten door. [from last year]It's easy getting the rotten plaster off - but you'd better be wearing a mask, because the dust it releases is nasty in many different ways. I've found that it makes me cough for a day, but then makes me truly ill for about three, by which I mean feeling feverish and having troubles with depression. Clearly there's things in it that Just Aren't Good For You.

Anyway, after knocking all that off about two weeks ago, last week I knocked off the rotten plaster in the southeast corner, the so-called "closet" (because it naturally should be a closet). Problem there is that on the east side of the south wall, that was all the plaster. I suspect this is because of the gutter downspout they routed across the face of the wall to the alley [original post from 2009]- I think that leaked and dissolved first the mortar on the outside, then (as night follows day) the plaster on the entire inside of the wall. Probably took it ten years. Note, by the way, the steel rail still hanging there; I'd bent the last bolt holding it on last year and gave up in disgust; this year, not tired by having my arms above my head for the previous five bolts, this one came out pretty easily.

This is probably most of the plaster I'll have to remove. There's a little at the bottom of the wall behind the washer and dryer, but that's it. The north wall was more protected, it appears.

So tonight I got started on replacing the plaster. Here's the amount of plaster added after two episodes of Star Trek Voyager (thanks, Paramount and Netflix!). You can't see it well here, but the base coat is about a quarter-inch thick in most places; there are places where the bricks project a little more where the base coat is only an eighth of an inch or so.

The amount I got done looks kind of pathetic, but I'm getting quicker as I go, and it was tricky maneuvering the plaster trowel in the corner, so I think the rest of the wall will go faster than this makes it look.

But worst case, Voyager has a lot of episodes.

Anyway, I'm pretty pleased with how this is coming out. The resulting base coat is pretty bumpy because I'm really not very skillful applying it yet. I'm going to try a top coat and see if I can't do a little better with that, but I'm not going to be all broken up if it's not perfect. The rest of the plaster down here is pretty sad, having been modified and patched a lot over the last century. This base coat's already about as good as the rest of it. So this is great practice!

More houses in Hungary

2011-09-22T20:08:00.001-07:00

A half-hour search on ingatlan.com for houses requiring renovation with 5 rooms or more turned up about ten houses I consider "interesting", in parts of town with decent infrastructure, and all really quite affordable. The most expensive is about $80K.

Maybe it's going to be cool, having to go to Europe.

OK, house in Hungary

2011-09-22T17:59:00.000-07:00

Still haven't found a really rockin house in Budapest, but this one is close to Kecskemét, so I'm getting closer. Built in 1907. Has a freaking name, a name that is written on it. So history-wise it wins. I give you the Juliána-lak: price, a mere 5.8 million forint, something like $30K.

Do want!

(Update: the town it's in, Nagykörõs, is where my wife's maternal grandfather was from - I knew I'd heard of it somehow, but had no idea how. Anyway, she's got some cousins there. She's not sure whether that's good or bad, but does clearly remember the place being a dump when she visited as a child - but then she's from Budapest, so nearly everything in the world is a dump.)

House in Germany

2011-09-18T18:08:00.001-07:00

I think I have a house problem. This house is currently available for a mere 14.2 million Hungarian forint (about $70K), in Jöhstadt, Germany. It's 12 rooms, needs work, 5000 square feet or thereabouts, and I freaking want it so bad.

But no, I gotta look for stuff in Budapest. All the good stuff is taken there. (Not entirely true; prices are way down this year. I'm hoping we can find something interesting - if nothing else, we may be able to buy my wife's old family home if we can persuade the current owner to do a deal.)

Wiremold on-wall wire channel

2011-09-04T19:33:00.000-07:00

Wiremold makes a nice, attractive line of surface-mount channels and boxes for adding wire to existing masonry structure, and so in preparation for a couple of different projects of this nature, I bought some.

Let me just state for the record that Wiremold's documentation is some of the worst I have ever seen in my life, and their Website was obviously built by moderately-trained monkeys in the 1990s. Their online catalog plays paper noises when you turn pages. No, seriously. And there's no entry at all on their site for the "On-Wall" line, even though they went to the trouble of registering the trademark. In fact, their entire site consists of an undifferentiated bucket of PDFs with some kind of AJAX-y search-ish functionality in a side bar, and the results it returns are essentially useless.

I finally found the only published instructions for how to use their channel system on page 11 of 17 of a sales brochure for home products, consisting of a single 2x3" box with four blurry pictures. It's like living in a Douglas Adams book.

So anyway, lousy documentation, pretty nifty series of products. I'm going to use them in a couple of places, like the lights I'm putting on the back staircase in the big house. (Yes, I actually started doing something in the big house this year. Amazing, ain't it?)

Aromatic hydrocarbon outgassing

2011-08-01T10:25:00.000-07:00

OK, so as you may know, the Midwest has basically been baked for about a month now under a heat wave like few others in history. Here's the unexpected consequence: even though the carriage house is air conditioned (with four small window air conditioners, which do a surprisingly fantastic job for only about $100 a month), the heat and humidity is still steaming out all manner of aromatic hydrocarbons.

That apartment was built in 1945/1946, so the only aromatic hydrocarbon worth talking about is the redolent odor of sixty years of stale tobacco smoke.

Now, I have to tell you, tobacco smoke only adsorbs to a certain range of surfaces, and the plaster walls are not among those surfaces - except inside the interior walls, which are an early form of plasterboard on wooden studs, with plaster on top. So there was a certain amount of stench wafting from all the outlets, particularly the old-construction boxes I installed myself (because they had more gap around them). Caulk, some ozone treatment, and a judicious amount of urethane foam and a free hand with the Zinsser 1-2-3 primer (which, I believe I have stated before, I love like life itself) solved most of that, although the effort is still ongoing. Which is good, because, for example, painting the bathroom cabinet was on my mighty list for the carriage house [a brief aside here: some items on that list are checked off! But I've been too busy to write.].

Once the outlets were solved, we noticed that all the cracks behind trim around the windows and doors stank (bare wood inside). The shelves in the hall closet stank.

But the place that only started outgassing yesterday (that I noticed) is the fridge nook.

So - and this is really disgusting - I'm sitting here working, and the ice cubes in my Coke taste like cigarettes.

Local history blog

2011-07-21T16:06:00.000-07:00

I've been careful never to mention where The House actually is, but this local history blog by Dan Tate is too fine not to post. We're in Richmond, Indiana. So there.

Gentlemen, start your engines

2011-06-24T03:51:00.000-07:00

It's 204 miles to Chicago, I got eight days, no cigarettes, the sun just came up, and I can't find my sunglasses.

Hit it.

(I like jet lag because it makes me a morning person for a few weeks. I got up at a lazy 3:30 AM this morning and felt well-rested and refreshed. I should just keep moving westwards by a couple of time zones every couple of weeks and I'd be the most productive person in the world.)

Why not move to Massachusetts?

2011-06-12T15:39:00.000-07:00

Besides the fact that I have trouble spelling it, anyway. You're guaranteed health insurance, and the daughter wants to go to MIT. So pick a town off the map and do a realtor.com search for low prices, and ... voila. Older than The House, has a tower, Colonial-style 4-bedroom. $22,500.

Of course, the economy there is no better than here. But still....

Plaster work

2011-06-05T20:48:00.000-07:00

So I thought I'd share some of my plaster work with you. I'm getting less bad at it, especially when I'm just doing the base coat (ha). Anyway, recall that we just put the gutters on the carriage house - as I mentioned in a comment on the last post, the lack of gutters caused rain to soak the east wall, and result after six weeks of freaking downpour (ask the folks along the Mississippi about the results of that) was a pervasive moldy, musty smell.

One culprit is pictured here.

Over the last 130 years, parts of the east wall have migrated about half an inch further east, resulting in a crack along the side of the stairway and damaging the plaster adjacent to the joists. The result is that air from between the layers of brick, redolent with 130 years of wet spiderwebs and other organic debris, can escape into the interior of the house. At the extreme upper right, you see part of the ductwork that had been nailed between two joists; the problem with this is that the last time the upstairs apartment was renovated, they clearly forgot that there was a register there, and left it covered with linoleum without cutting and replacing the register.

No, the top of the stairs is not a good place for that.

And this last week, the inevitable finally happened: an innocent bystander put their foot through it. Once it was open, the smell from the aforementioned joist flaws wafted up through the register hole... I'd been working on this all week, actually, trying to locate the mold smell and get it under control. The large area of exposed brick you see in the picture up there was after I took a hammer to the loose plaster.

And here you see it after I'd applied the base coat. Isn't that much nicer? Anyway, this picture also shows the wire coming in for the security light. My goal was to put a switch on the inside so I could turn that off without a ladder - so that little arched area was still open. And after all the rain, it didn't smell so hot, either.

The answer was clearly to replace the wooden insert (which I cleverly saved - although it took a 15-minute search to find it, since I'd taken it out about a year and a half ago).

Here's the result - I wasn't sure how best to anchor the wooden insert, so I toenailed it with finishing nails, then drove in a couple of shims at the top to really hold it in place. It seems to have made it solid enough.

I also stuck in some fiberglass insulation. After I get back to Menard's I'll squirt in some foam, too (the fiberglass didn't really get down into the corners at all).

So. My first real post in months. Didn't that feel good?

Storm coming

2011-06-04T17:57:00.000-07:00

I can't wait to see my new carriage house gutters in action!

State of the carriage house

2011-06-04T07:52:00.000-07:00

I just took a spin around the carriage house and listed everything I thought needed done.

Interior:

Upstairs and stairwell:

Door trim - Bondo, caulk, paint
Paint door, some caulk needed
Remount banister, paint
Paint stairs and entry door
Quarter-round next to stairs
Walls in stairwell, upper hall, kitchen - plaster, paint
Register in hall
Top coat on window #2 trim
Hall floor - new linoleum, quarter-round
Kitchen window
Fridge nook floor
Cabinet door and bottom in kitchen
Cabinets - patch with Bondo and paint
Yellow tile on wall: remove, scrape glue, paint
Attic access: insulate, paint
Bathroom sink drain
Medicine cabinet
Blue tile: remove, scrape glue, paint
Paint entire bathroom
Recaulk tub
Realign and finish faucet
Paint interior of closet
Floor: new linoleum, quarter-round
Reglaze hall cabinet
Front room: three places still require plaster patching, paint touch-up
Paint doors in front room and hall (strip old paint, primer, paint)

Downstairs:

Closet nook: remove rotten plaster, replaster, paint, do something with floor
Remove remaining track on S wall, finish sealing and paint above old S door
Plaster at top of old S door
Remove drywall ceiling, insulation on north end of ceiling
SW window: insulated board, a little more plaster.
Replace S window (with screen)
Screen on W window
Finish trimming carpet
1x2"trim on W wall. Caulk, paint.
N wall - plaster, paint
E window - finish wiring of outdoor and indoor outlets, lots of plaster, paint
Wire lights, 2 outlets on E wall, some baseboard heaters in the family area.
Dehumidifer stand and laundry corner shelving, with outlet
Light above laundry corner, switch on shelving.
Paint floor in concrete area
Drop ceiling in entire downstairs

Exterior:

Scrape and paint eaves. (How to get up to them?)
E wall - concrete under threshold, caulk, paint door and trim, paint threshold
Caulk and paint middle door frame (top coat)
Install security light (box already in place)
Mortar in foundation
Caulk under and around window, top coat of paint
N - fix light
Outhouse roof trim - replace, paint
W - tuck-point base
Mortar, caulk, paint old carriage door frame
1x4" trim on S end of carriage door frame
Trim window, paint upstairs window
Mortar at base on SW
S wall - mortar, caulk, paint
Finish patching of sill of SW window
Drive: concrete patch, paint
Dig small drainage pipe for (new!) gutter downspout

I figure that's, what? Two or three days' work?

Seriously, though, I'm going to get as far as I can on this between June 22nd and July 1, when I'll have the place entirely to myself. Then I can put tarps down, move furniture into other rooms, and so on. I'm going to do some of the more cosmetic work during this time; bigger items probably won't get addressed at all (although the remainder of the summer is supposed to be House Time, too).

I don't even have the heart to post a similar list for the big house - but if that list were actually completed, I'd have a fully renovated carriage house on my hands, and it is doable. It truly doesn't need more than this right now - oh, sure, there are things that would be nice if I wanted to sink more money and time into them. But they're not necessary.

Happy Easter!

2011-04-24T10:45:00.001-07:00

Still not dead yet. I am coming out of hibernation, though. So there should be more building, and more posting, soon.

Drainage

2011-04-09T10:08:00.000-07:00

Hello, Gentle Reader! We had record rainfall last Monday, and some water made it into the basement, and so once again my thoughts turn to drainage.

Those of you who have been reading for a while will remember the lakes on the south side of the house, and since installation of the gutters last summer, those lakes are gone. The only problem being that they all go through downspouts on the north side of the house, and those downspouts - while they certainly do a better job than no gutters at all on the south - require proper drainage.

Which I knew.

But the drought last year meant that everything downstairs got bone-dry, and things were doing rather well - until roughly 1.5 Great Lakes fell on us in two hours last week. A quarter-inch of water along the north wall of the basement and a pervasive musty smell throughout are hard to ignore.

So that's one of my top tasks for the coming weeks. AskTheBuilder has a good rundown of what I'm going to do. I'll update this post with a sketch later.

Hibernation

2011-03-08T00:50:00.000-08:00

So the sun keeps poking out, and the crocuses are thinking quite seriously about popping up, and slowly my metabolism revs back up to something approaching human. I have done work on The House recently, really I have - but I'm incapable of normal levels of prolixity when it gets so dark. I pine for the Caribee, I guess.

When we lived down there, I'd stick my head in the ice machine to feel less homesick. Now, I buy full-spectrum light bulbs and search the real estate ads for foreclosures. Puerto Ricans are optimists when it comes to real estate, though. Prices are never going to fall to the precipitous depths of the Rust Belt.

I haven't even posted my glazing article! Rest assured, Gentle Reader, you're not forgotten. The glazing, and the Purple Room, and soon it will be warm enough for me to resume outdoor maintenance - glazing and caulking and mortar.

Oh, my.

YOUR SILVER - USE AND ENJOY IT!

2011-01-23T09:11:00.000-08:00

Found in a mouse nest under the kitchen sink in the carriage house:

YOUR SILVER - USE AND ENJOY IT!

Silver is a wonderful possession - one of the loveliest things of life. With proper care, it grows more beautiful year by year! So USE your silver. Clean it regularly with Wright's for a Buller finish - the soft, lustrous patina that is a mark of gracious living.

WRIGHT'S SILVER CREAM is excellent for cleaning other fine surfaces. Try it on tile, porcelain, plastics, and chrome.

Write us for free booklet on use and care of fine silver.

TRY WRIGHT'S Liquid SILVER CREAM

Not the House again

2011-01-08T14:49:00.001-08:00

This time of year, I always think about Puerto Rico - I'm just not sure why, unless it's, you know, the sixty degrees difference in temperature.

This is a foreclosed house available right now in a neighborhood I know in Ponce. Seven bedrooms (yes, seven!) and it needs "cariño", which I'm good at. Of course, foreclosures in PR aren't cheap like they are up here, but this house is still a steal at $110K. It's tempting. Real tempting.

Back here at The House, I've got the furnace in the big house running and am still here. We keep the carriage house at toasty Puerto Rican temperatures - and I'm still finding and correcting the occasional hole over there - but I'm keeping the big house a lot colder than that, probably something around 60 through most of the house. It's still expensive; missing ductwork in the basement means that not a lot of heat is getting upstairs.

I've got to brick up one basement window, repair around two others, and the ex-window under the porch I'm just going to make an insulated access panel for, because, hey, maybe I'll need to get under the porch one day. Who knows? I'd hate to have bricked it up if that were to happen.

Anyway - happy new year! Either the paying work will taper off and I'll get back to building and posting, or it won't and I'll buy the house pictured above. I'll keep you posted.

Interior insulated shutters

2010-11-26T21:26:00.000-08:00

From SFgate (the paper in San Francisco), of all places, we have an interesting 2008 article about interior insulated shutters. See, windows that are 4'x8' and consist of a single pane of glass have an R value of roughly negative a million, meaning that they actively suck heat energy into the icy blackness of space.

Seriously - if they're puttied and caulked, they're not really that bad. But insulated shutters keep light in at night, too, and the benefit is that they don't affect the outside appearance of the windows, which is really an important issue if you have traditional windows. For me, anyway.

There's a whole long list of energy conservation measures here, including many ways to improve the insulation values of windows. Most of them are lower in priority for me than sealing up the myriad holes in the basement (including several windows that are inexpertly boarded up), but the shutter thing is really intriguing. I have two big pieces of Styrofoam left over from the carriage house family room floor that are serving as insulation right now in my office, but it's not a particularly permanent solution.

What I want to do in the parlor

2010-11-26T20:22:00.000-08:00

Built-in bookcases, how-to courtesy of the ever-bountiful Popular Mechanics. Wouldn't something like this look really good? The only problem there is the 12-foot ceilings. If I take the shelving all the way up, I can't get to most of it, but if I don't, what do I do at the top?

There's also an excellent how-to for a standalone bookcase. Also, not a propos of bookcases but still useful, pro tips on crown molding. Thus concludes my Popular Mechanics link dump.

Back carriage house door

2010-11-24T22:01:00.000-08:00

So towards the end of the summer (August 25), we did some yard work, and one of the things my wife volunteered for, as the only not-yet-sensitive individual in the family, was to carefully extricate some of the old poison ivy from the back door in the carriage house. The ivy itself was dead (I killed it quick upon arrival in 2009) but the dead vines still contain urushiol, and I typically break out just from leaf debris falling on my head.

Well, when the door was freed of its vines and associated leaf mold, we discovered a sad fact: the threshold and lower frame of the door had at some point been eaten by termites. The threshold was entirely gone, leaving a surprising amount of space open under the door once I removed the humus.

This was bad. This is a flashing neon sign saying, "Mice welcome here." Not to mention drafts.

Since we don't really need three doors on the east wall of the carriage house, I figured I'd frame it in and replace it with a window, like the window on the south end of the west wall. That window is pretty cool. So I went and bought a window of massive dimensions (34"x56", only something like $190 at Menard's) and ... there it sat for a while. There was so much other winterization to do, and glazing a window for my daughter's room, and a drain broke in the big house and had to be replaced, and, well, it was November before I knew it.

On November 13, I had had enough, and poured the footer for the new bit of frame wall. It took me maybe an hour. Part of the reason I took so long to get started, to be honest, is that the bottom of this footer area wasn't level, and there was a big gap at the left end of the plywood form. Pretty stupid reason. I ended up taking a bit of brick and two small marble rocks from the garden and placing them there, and just pouring the concrete over them. It worked great and looks great, so ... there's a trick you can use if you're ever in a similar situation.

Well, but I'd opened that door, and as you can see, the frame was no longer really attached to the building. I couldn't close the door again. I did the best I could and stacked some junk against the inside, and let the concrete cure for, um, well, the camera must be lying when it says I left it like that for six days. Right?

On November 19th, the paying work subsided to the point where I couldn't ignore this any further, and so I started removal of the door and frame. I wanted to keep the round wood at the top, and the top of the frame was also still solid, so I basically wanted to cut 2x8s out of the floor framing in the big house basement (long story - but the short version is, the previous owner had some odd ideas about the parts of houses that could be rendered habitable, so I have a great deal of framing lumber for these projects) and fashion a new frame in the shape of a U.

The process of cleaning the old door out yielded a great deal of rubble, and was done by about 1 in the afternoon (I had only started around noon), at which point I realized I had no drill bit for my bottom frame part, which I wanted to bolt into those anchor bolts you see here. (Doesn't that footer look pretty good? I'm feeling like maybe I know what I'm doing, a little, with concrete.)

So I left the house with a big hole in it, to the amusement of the neighbors, and went to Menard's for a drill bit and Taco Bell for lunch (and kind of regretted the latter, although the Wodehouse accompaniment was top-notch, don't you know, old top). Then came the taxi work for the afternoon, and so it was four o'clock by the time I got back to work. Did you know the sun is setting at about five these days? This was frustrating.

But by 7:30, the frame didn't look half bad! It took this long because no matter how carefully you measure a distance in a 130-year-old brick house, the wood you cut will still be wrong. Note the presence of the maul. This frame will be there for another fifty or a hundred years, easy - the middle crossbar there was about 3/16" too big. Rather than cut it again, I pounded the darn thing into place, with the added benefit that the sides of the frame will not drift on the wall. (The original builders didn't nail the sides to the wall, so I didn't either.)

I put a 2x4 at the top of the window to give me something to nail the window to - and then I realized that it was pretty handy for holding the round top of the old door up to the top of the opening. 8 PM at this point, and I had paying work to do - but I still had a gaping hole in the side of the carriage house, and the nights are getting pretty chilly.

I popped the window in, which took about ten minutes at this point (for once, something fit as measured) - here it is on the inside, showing how much plaster work is going to be necessary.

Then I cut a piece of plywood to cover up the open part on the bottom, and worked on paying work into the wee hours, and slept the sleep of the just.

On the outside on the 21st, I framed around the window with 1x2s and painted the whole thing with my oil-based white primer. And that's as far as I've gotten - I want to put an exterior outlet there (it will be the first on the whole property) before framing in and plastering over the whole thing.

But here's a picture of the outside, which save a little more caulk and the topcoat (which at this week's temperatures is looking like it will have to wait for spring) is essentially done. I get a little frisson of pride every time I see it, which is several times a day. (It does make the kitchen window above it look even more ragged in contrast, though.)

Stuff

2010-11-22T17:51:00.000-08:00

Ah, Gentle Reader, I'm not neglecting you or The House, it's just that I've been embroiled in longer-term projects (well, the way I do them they're longer-term) and so you'll be getting longer posts about the replacement of the back carriage house door with a window and some glazing I did in the big house.

I got two more first-floor windows primed during this Indian Summer heat wave, so that was good!

I'll leave you with a picture of one of my favoritest things I've ever owned.

Ventless gas heat

2010-10-27T08:26:00.000-07:00

There are now gas-burning heaters with efficiency sufficient to eliminate the need for vents and flues: they burn the gas completely.

So I had an epiphany: our fireplaces here were actually made to burn gas; their chimneys have been mostly blocked off, though. The obvious fix: ventless gas heat.

I'll want to install all new gas lines to them if I do that - I really don't trust the old stuff, which is half-rusted, half-incompetent, all-scary. Apparently working with steel pipe is considered extreme how-to. But you know? I've learned masonry and glazing - I can learn to cut steel pipe (not to mention my dad did his original apprenticeship working with steel pipe - so I have an expert teacher, for once, instead of just relying on Mr. Google and his billion friends).

Neighborhood cleanup

2010-10-02T00:37:00.001-07:00

One of the corollaries of buying a house for $8000 is that your neighbors are frequently not of the most desirable nature. They have a tendency to be loud at night and quickly turn the dome light off in the car when they see the police arrive after being called at 2 AM because they were seeing a whole lot of people, one after the other, each having about one to two minutes of business to transact.

[Note: (1) the view here is to the south from the upstairs sunroom, where I had a commanding view of the entire affair, and (2) this new camera is really fantastic - nighttime shot, no flash, through a window, and it's not Time/Life quality, but definitely passable as documentation.]

Anyway, what blew my mind wasn't that I got to see my first drug bust. What blew my mind was that the police had to call the mother of the children in the back seat so she could take them home. I'd estimate their ages at 10, 5, and asleep under a blanket. But at least they had the booster seat for the 5-year-old! I mean, they weren't irresponsible.

Three guys were handcuffed and taken away, and there was at least one large plastic bag of some sort of substance on the top of the car at one point in the proceedings. I couldn't see a color, but from its apparent density (low) I'm guessing it was marijuana, not coke.

So that's one lot that won't be waking me up any more. Honestly - I don't care if people engage in a little free-market trade, just as long as they do it quietly when they're outside my window.

Update 10/5 from the police blotter of the local paper: "[cool name], 24, [some other town]: Possession of marijuana or hashish (Class D felony), Saturday, [the street outside my south windows]"

And you thought I wouldn't post in September

2010-09-30T20:02:00.000-07:00

Sorry. The paying work has been insane this month - really, the first busy month I've had all year.

I wanted originally to say that there wasn't much to say about September, because I haven't done much on the house. But then, thinking back, I realize I've done a lot in bits and pieces. So here's a roundup:

Lots and lots of tuck pointing, including that one bit on the west wall of the carriage house where three bricks had fallen out entirely. They're back in, now. The carriage house is now tight enough that the mouse problem is gone. While cleaning the mortar out on the southwest corner on a windy day, I was surprised to find mortar dust blowing out of the wall - it was blowing in on the other side of the corner... That tells you you really need to get to your tuck pointing.
We cleaned up around the northmost door on the east side of the carriage house. I'd been putting it off because there was lots of poison ivy and I don't have a full-isolation environmental suit. Anyway, so we did that, only to discover that the bottom two feet of the door frame on both sides and the sill plate had an argument with some termites sometime in the past. And lost. So that entire frame has to come out. The plan is to put a new vinyl window there and frame in under it, like the west window on the carriage house.
The cast iron drainpipe from my one working half-bath in the big house is cracked. A lot. This is on the same drain system as the flange that rotted the parlor floor, so I started by cutting that pipe out. I'm still in the midst of my second cut; those big cast iron pipes take a lot of hacksawing. Anyway, so I'll be taking plastic nearly up to the wall and discarding a lot of drain that is solely of historical interest.
The little boarded-up window on the southwest of the carriage house (inside; outside [it's to the left of the red wall that used to be the garage door]) has gotten some attention at last. Its sill was egregiously rotted (and they'd nailed some aluminum siding over that to make it look less so), and the bricks had pulled about a half inch away from the frame. I've got the old paint off and filled the worst of the sill rot with mortar. I'm using Bondo for the rest. More on that effort later. I also filled mortar in to the half-inch crack on the side; we were losing a lot of heat there last winter. (It's already plastered on the inside, but still.)
Good Lord, I never even posted in August about the plaster fixup and paint job in the carriage house living room. It looks pretty good, although I'm obviously still learning how to use Plaster of Paris. Still - better than it was, and that's the primary goal.
We've been getting primer onto trim - the downstairs windows of the big house, and the doors of the carriage house, so far. It's slow going, but really makes the whole house look so much better.

So I'm way behind on writing. Hopefully October will be better.

Long live the camera

2010-08-26T14:39:00.001-07:00

Meijer had a great clearance on $40 GE cameras. I love the technology curve - I spent $100 on my last clearance camera and it was nowhere near as good as this one.

Anyway, the plaster patches on the back stairs are dry now - well, they were effectively dry even as I was putting them on the wall - and you can see how rough they are. A lot better than the holes they replaced, granted, but a disappointment.

The new camera can only hold ten pictures at a time (I haven't bought memory yet) so I needed to get this out of it to take pictures of today's plaster triumph. I started patching the front room in the carriage house. Here's what it looked like after removal of the previous owner's drywall mud. Click for the bigger picture, of course.

The upshot is: you can't really effectively patch cracks in plaster and brick with tape and drywall mud, so the patches are cracking, roughly three years after they were applied. I'm stripping off the worst of them and patching properly with plaster.

To mix the plaster, I started with a clean container: a Teflon-coated breadpan that had already been repurposed for geode cleaning. No stick = no crystal formation. I also added a splash of vinegar to the mix. The upshot was that it took a good half-hour for the plaster to start hardening in the pan, which was enough time to actually, you know, use it. I also cleaned my painter's knife and plaster trowel thoroughly before starting (and again after finishing).

And it worked! I've been scared of plaster's reputation as being a lost art mastered only in historical times by towering giants of the construction industry. It may very well take years to get good at it - but it took me two tries to get acceptably OK. I think some more tries will make me confident.

Pictures later. I'm going to go take them now.

How not to apply top coat plaster

2010-08-23T19:18:00.000-07:00

Well, the camera is officially dead, so no pictures until I get a new one, but I took my first stab at applying top coat plaster to some of the patchy areas on the back stairs, and I have some recommendations about how not to proceed.

First: I'm using plaster of Paris. Here's the thing - if there's prehardened plaster (i.e. something with crystals already in it) in your bucket? The crystals will catalyze the new plaster into hardening really, really fast. So I mixed up just a little - and it was too hard to apply within five minutes, I kid you not. And that doesn't leave much time for smoothing. Of course, on that wall, any amount of smoothing is an improvement, and nobody says I can't take several stabs at these patchy bits, either.

After seeing how well that didn't work (well, it was exciting to try my new big steel trowel, and it was my first top coat attempt, and that was fun) I went back to the Google drawing board. The chaps over at diyplastering.co.uk have some nice information about plastering, and bucked up my courage in thinking maybe this is something I can manage. And the guy at brooklynrowhouse.com swears by his Magic Trowel, so maybe I'll try that - but he also adds a little vinegar to his plaster of Paris to keep it softer longer. That's a good idea.

But one thing everybody says - keep your bucket and tools as clean as humanly possible. I didn't. For mortar or basecoat it just doesn't matter - but plaster of Paris cares.

More later, after I have time to experiment some more. I'm going to need the practice, because after I started peeling the paint off the walls in the upstairs sunroom, huge patches of the top coat came off, too. So I have most of a wall to do in there. And of course there's lots of top coat repair in the dining room, too, and I'll be seeing any flaws there for years.

I'm back!

2010-08-12T19:07:00.000-07:00

Well, I kind of expected to blog a little about the architecture in Budapest, of which I have copious photographic evidence, as you can well imagine. But (1) I ended up being pretty busy with work this summer and thus never got around to writing much on architecture, and (2) I've been writing more about software instead.

But, exhausted, we rolled in today after a marathon drive back from JFK (itself following 8 hours in the plane from Geneva after a three-hour drive from Zurich, where the train delivered us in only 12 overheated, poorly air-conditioned hours between 7 in the evening Monday and 7 in the morning Tuesday). Rewind the chronology on that, and you'll see it was planes, trains, and automobiles for three days, one of which was a 30-hour day.

Anyway, we got in, stripped two months' worth of spiderwebs off the front door (seriously), managed to remember the alarm code (whew), and walked into the carriage house. Except for mold in the fridge, there was no damage from two months' disuse, and the air smelled clean. This is literally a first for us; we've had horrible things happen during these summer absences; once the entire house sprouted mold - different colors of mold, including in the carpet of the car in the garage. We sold that house at a ridiculous profit in 2004, and laughed all the way to the bank. I miss the tree house there, though.

All summer long we've been thinking seriously of selling the place and getting something in a little less grungy part of town. It would kill me, but the family would like it. But you know? A house that doesn't get moldy when you leave it alone for a couple of months is kind of a keeper.

The big house smells a lot better now, too, now that the gutters are fully functional. The basement is still damp; the dehumidifier will only run for a few weeks before its bucket fills, no matter how tightly I tighten the hose. Not to mention a lot of the basement floor still has its plastic vapor barrier on it, which I really should remove soon.

Anyway - we're back. I was surprised how glad I was to see this place.

Narrow escape!

2010-07-19T07:44:00.000-07:00

Somebody was talking about making an interesting offer on The House, but I haven't heard anything for a few days. Whew! Bullet dodged!

Venice

2010-06-16T15:25:00.001-07:00

Is it wrong to go to Venice and take pictures of the infrastructure? (Just kidding; I have lots of normal pictures, too.)

Housebuilding hiatus

2010-06-07T15:06:00.000-07:00

"Oh, sure," you say, "You already went into hibernation once this year!" Well, Gentle Reader, this won't be hibernation; it'll be estivation. We're off to Budapest tomorrow for two months, and so there won't be any House work completed during that time.

Not to say I won't find something else interesting to post here (Europe does, after all, have the occasional attractive old building), but it won't be about progress on The House.

So I guess this would be a good time for a planning post, wouldn't it? Here's something like the current list:

Windows in big house

Finish painting first-floor windows
Glazing work; several missing and cracked panes here and there, lots of putty replacement

Winterization

Carriage house

Weatherstripping around two downstairs doors
Insulated board for small window on south corner
Still a little caulking/plastering above the south wall and in the closet area on the southeast corner
Insulated board for attic access panel

Big house

Urethane in obvious holes in basement walls (mortar later)
Boards over vents under first back addition
Board up two basement windows on east basement

Tuck pointing on both buildings

Carriage house bathroom

Attach and plumb vanity

Carriage house electrical work

Replace stolen ground wire outside
Overhead light for washer/dryer area
Separate circuit for bedroom to permit use of air conditioner

Carriage house paint and trim

Paint walls and trim in bathroom
Finish trim on remaining windows (three)
Fresh plaster patching and paint in living room, then hallway, stairs, and kitchen

Equipment closet in big house

Reroute incoming DSL into closet in dining room
Add an electrical outlet there for the Linux box

Carriage house garage area

Remove superfluous fiberglass insulation (40% complete)
Still some miscellaneous plaster, and more paint, aye!

Dining room

Remove and scrape wallpaper (60% done, thanks to daughter)
Remove damaged drywall from ceiling
Finish restoration of plaster on walls (base coat's on)
Drywall ceiling
Paint (I'm still liking that semi-gloss ultra white)
Clean and maintain the woodwork and buffet
Shore up under floor (soft spot from long-standing leak in roof fixed in 90's)
Polish floor

Carriage house kitchen window

Carriage house roof and gutters (the last big money job to save for)

Porch restoration

Paint all pillars
Cast duplicates of scroll work on pillars to replace missing bits

Big house heat (not so crucial now)

Ductwork as needed
Probably baseboard heat upstairs, at least in my office

Remainder of big house

Upstairs bathroom plumbing (got a good plan to reroute this)
Addition of sink in kitchen
Cleaning
Finish plaster patching in back stairs area, paint
Reroute supply wire to blue room electrical (that's the one running outside right now)
Think about plaster on basement walls, a big job
It would be nice to insulate and finish the attic space
Tiles in the master bath?
Hardwood veneer in the Blue Room?

Breezeway/swimming pool connecting buildings

Well, I can dream

Plaster!

2010-05-28T20:56:00.000-07:00

So now that I'm in the big house, I walk back and forth a lot between the front of the big house, down the back stairs and out the back door, into the carriage house and up those stairs to the apartment, which is still where the bathroom, kitchen, and remainder of the family is located. Not to mention, downstairs in the carriage house, the family room and my shop (actually just tool and materials storage, as I don't have a proper workbench).

I go through this door a lot, which is between the mudroom and the back stairs. It was originally the back door to the one-story back addition, probably originally the kitchen, and the "mudroom" is basically just a later back porch that has been enclosed - one wall still has the siding of the earlier back room, and the other wall is the brick of the earlier earlier back room. (This house tended to accrete back into further and further back rooms.)

Now, the problem with this door is that the frame had somehow managed to move to the east (that is, into the house) by about 3/4". The problem had obviously been of very long standing, because it had been caulked and some plaster added, clearly in an attempt at winterization. So naturally I popped the trim off, nailed a couple of 2x4 bits to it, and took the maul to it - which worked wonderfully! In about five minutes, I had it back where it was supposed to be!

Unfortunately, all the plaster around the door frame kind of fell off; the old box gutters were attached to the eyebrow that had a squirrel living in it last year (scroll down), and so there was obviously a great deal of leakage through the wall.

So I took the opportunity to go to Menard's and make an exciting new purchase: a bag of base coat plaster!

Anybody who's been reading this blog for any length of time (a year already!) knows that I favor solid construction and masonry. The only problem is that I've never done any of it, so I'm learning as I go. This was therefore a gulpingly novel step. My first real plaster job.

Incidentally, the old basecoat plaster on this wall probably dates to about 1890 (the date I believe this back room was added, along with the dining room bay), and yes, it is mixed with what appears to be human hair for strength. Which I'd read about, and is only marginally creepy.

Lesson #1 about plaster: you need a lot of it. A base coat about half an inch thick over a couple of square feet of wall is a lot more plaster than my usual half-hour tuck pointing quantity of mortar. So this first bag of base coat is going to go fast.

But the first part of the base coat turned out extremely satisfactory in terms of solidity. Here's a picture. I'll update you when I try the top coat - right now I'm knocking out all the crappy bits of plaster on the back stairs and putting a base coat into those (rather extensive) gaps.

I'm in the big house

2010-05-18T20:48:00.000-07:00

A hueueuege milestone, one year and two days after my arrival - I moved my office into the upstairs front room of the big house.

In case you're wondering, that dot on the wall between these two windows appears to be the fitting for the original gas light. I mean, I can't be sure, of course; I can't find the pipe where it starts, but that's my assumption. If true, it's the only such fitting I've found in the house.

One room spiffy and clean

2010-05-16T16:24:00.001-07:00

One room nearly done (the carriage house bedroom). First picture is the picture my sister took the day we closed; the second is the one I took just now after lots of paint was applied, the new window is trimmed and painted, and a new light fixture is in place. I guess you see the baseboard heater as well. (The door is still stripped here and needs a new knob, but it's always exciting to paint things and the room won't be this empty again any time soon.)

Remember that first window?

2010-05-14T20:56:00.000-07:00

My first window removal, June 11, 2009. I finally trimmed and painted it, May 13, 2010.

Progress!

The bathroom window! Trim! Paint!

2010-05-07T20:26:00.001-07:00

According to my notes and project documentation (digital cameras timestamp your pictures - who knew?), it was August 31 when I started the replacement of the bathroom window. The sill was a sodden mess of humus, obviously not having been maintained for decades - and north-facing, so never getting properly dry. Here you see the initial state immediately after removal of the remainder of the existing sashes (they had no glass in them when I bought the place - just some exterior Visqueen, sigh). I doused the whole thing in bleach and dried it with the heat gun; it smelled like wet dog.

I scraped off everything spongy, leaving a 1.5-inch-deep cavity under the inside sill which I filled with urethane foam. I painted the outside sill with a Zinsser fixative-slash-primer - I plain love everything Zinsser makes, really a better life through chemistry kind of company!

The result was something pretty sturdy for the next few years; the wood that remained was still pretty solid. Here you see that intermediate stage after about three coats of that primer. It's thin stuff that soaks into the substrate and makes a solid surface. I love it.

That's the view from the outside before any paint was applied (I don't think you've seen the north face of the carriage house yet, and that's the top of the outhouse, which is built exactly like a brick outhouse). Once this much was done, I filled in the cavities with caulk and painted the heck out of it; two coats of my oil-based exterior trim paint. The result looked like it hadn't been neglected since the Nixon Administration, so I figured it was time to pop in the window.

Then I went into hibernation.

Well, fast-forward to now. Unfortunately, I got a little out of the habit of photographing everything, and it appears I didn't take a picture of the untrimmed interior - suffice it to say it had yellow foam sticking out, and you can see what the interior trim looked like. My wife put down the imperial foot, and beautification thus became the order of the day. Fortunately, the paying work had come to an abrupt halt on April 16th, for the usual lack of any discernible reason (the translation industry acts seasonal - but scaled to a year from some other planet, perhaps one in a binary system without a stable orbit). The upshot: I had both motivation and time. It was time to trim.

Trimming was complicated by the fact that the window was actually an inch too narrow for its frame (I didn't want to spring the extra $100 for a custom size for one lousy inch). So instead of a simple quarter-round trim on the edges of the pocket window replacement, I used 1x1s left over from the roof job last summer. You can see here that the trim paint had to be stripped, too - like all the trim in the carriage house apartment, it's latex applied on top of oil. Sigh. Without primer, of course, so it just peels off. Here you see it peeled off.

After much heat-gunning, the oil coat underneath was also removed (well, mostly), and the fully-trimmed window is now ready for painting. An unfortunate lens artifact makes it look like the carriage house is a lot less square than it actually is; the window does not actually bulge like this in real life.

Here you can also see the blue plastic wall tiles of the bathroom. A much later followup job will be to take those off, scrape their glue, and paint the entire wall with a resilient bathroom-appropriate paint. They're pretty horrendous.

Zinsser 1-2-3 primer sticks to anything, including the residual oil paint left on this trim, and since I'm using an interior latex, priming is important. Priming also shows us just how many nail holes have been knocked into this window over the decades; so I caulked them all up and laid down a thin bead along all the seams of the trim as well.

The next day, the topcoat - et voilà! A lovely trimmed window just like Mama used to make. Now I only have one window (the kitchen window) to replace, and a total of four to trim and paint; I've started stripping the paint on the bedroom window this week.

This window is literally so nice it gives me a thrill to look at it, even a week later.

Basement cleanup

2010-04-16T20:39:00.000-07:00

One of the things that has been on my to-do list for about six months or so is to remove the raised floor from the basement in the big house; you may remember that we started that last fall to get 2x4s to frame in a similar floor for the downstairs family room in the carriage house.

Well, this week was a neighborhood cleanup drive - the city comes by every couple of days and hauls off whatever you put in the alley. For free! So it was judgment day for the basement floor.

I have never been so bone-tired in my life. Every one of those horrible sodden pieces of particle-board flooring (yes, in a basement) had to be lugged up the stairs and out to the alley. About 40% of them had various colors of mold on the underside, especially on the relatively wet east end of the basement. Fortunately, the moldier they were, the softer they were, so the maul made short work of ripping them off the frame.

I donated the 2x4s back to the guy that originally installed them; he's still running two houses across the street. He was happy to have them back, too; they're building a deck between the houses, apparently. I tossed the 2x4s out one of the basement windows into the south yard, and my 11-year-old earned $10 carrying them from there onto the front porch for intermediate buffer storage.

At any rate, I took a few pictures of the (now cleaner) basement, but frankly, except to me, it still looks the same. The only real difference is that it is now drying out, because all those spongy sheets of particle board are no longer trapping moisture under them. Double-plus good!

Spring

2010-04-10T09:03:00.000-07:00

Turns out there are a whole lot of tulips in our yard. I got here too late last year to see them, but wow - they are nice!

Plaster and mortar

2010-03-18T12:00:00.000-07:00

The work in the carriage house "basement" is proceeding apace, and as promised, here are some pictures of my technique, first a before on the right side of the central east door:
Then the after, which is the other side of the door, which actually had a much larger chunk of plaster missing:

The way I've been doing this is to fill most of the void with mortar (you can see some new mortar in the hole in the top picture, but that was a little extra from my last batch), leaving just about an eighth of an inch of space. Then I put a "topcoat" on with patching plaster. On the corner I push it around to be vaguely square, then after it sets I go back with a knife and straighten it up. The result is not as strong as proper topcoat plaster, but it's easy to work with, and the mortar underneath is so strong on the bricks that it seems to work just fine. Ask me again in twenty years, I guess.

But I'm reasonably proud of the appearance. I don't really care how smooth the end result is, because the rest of the wall is so irregular that truly regular plaster would look odd. But it's a pretty strong corner and square enough. Once it's all painted I think this is a pretty good look, and it's already better mortar and plaster work than I was doing in the fall. Another couple of years of this and I'll be good at it!

Possible Caribbean venue

2010-03-18T11:57:00.000-07:00

We may be on the trail of a fixer-upper opportunity in Puerto Rico. Definitely my kind of house! On which, more later if we do anything with it. This one's not actually finished - besides landscaping, it needs windows.

I'm good at buying houses without windows, though!

So we'll see.

Update on the dining room and upstairs plumbing

2010-03-18T11:41:00.001-07:00

You may ask yourself why the dining room and upstairs plumbing share a post, but I'll bet you can figure it out from this picture - yes, the upstairs plumbing is all above the dining room ceiling.

It's spring! And besides resumption of the drainage work (more on which later), that means it's time to finish the plumbing in the big house. And that means pulling all the water-damaged ceiling down from the dining room to expose said plumbing.

Looking straight up from the ladder, we see the supply lines to both upstairs bathrooms. We're standing under the toilet in the blue room's bathroom (the one with the microtub). I'm sure you'll be seeing plenty more about both bathrooms in the year to come.

At any rate, I was pleased to discover that the plumbing appears to be in pretty good shape. I found a leak in the shower in the microtub (or it looks like it - it's been dry for a year, so we'll see, this week, when I hook up the water again). But there doesn't appear to be any freeze damage from the foreclosure period, so ... we'll see what we see. The plumbing in the kitchen, which is on the same branch of the supply, froze badly and I've had to knock out a lot of wall to find it all, so it was a pleasant surprise that I wouldn't have to fix any plumbing thirteen feet above my head.

I do need a taller stepladder, though. I won't be able to fix this ceiling with my little one.

The structure of the ceiling is horrible. You can't get a good impression of it from the picture above, but there has been a lot of sagging. The previous owner just nailed drywall to it all and it was utterly invisible (I guess a ten-foot-tall man would notice, but the rest of us are so far from that ceiling that three inches of sag are literally unnoticeable), but I'm going to try to do a more solid job of restoration than that.

More on that later. I just wanted to prove I'm not dead.

Historical film

2010-03-10T12:46:00.000-08:00

One of the neighbors clued me in on the existence at the public library of a short documentary of the neighborhood ("perhaps one of the finest still remaining in the Midwest" and that's the closest description of our location you've seen on this blog yet) and I gave it a look.

The house looked pretty much the same in 1989 as it does today, except the odd green color of the window trim was not yet in place and the porch was in better shape. It's shocking to realize that's been twenty years ago already.

At any rate, there wasn't much new information to be had, except that the house is a "typical Italianate of the type built between the 1870's and 1880's" and that the owners at the time, probably wanting to remodel due to the new Queen Anne houses being built, added the porch in that style around the turn of the century.

In terms of house building, it's been quiet on that front, hasn't it? Basically, it's the same plan today as it is every other day, Pinky: masonry and plaster. I did manage to get the bathroom sink anchored to the wall, but the drain pipe is clogged, so it's still not functional. But on the masonry/plaster front, things are rather nice, as I've been working on the east wall of the carriage house and getting rather good at it, in my humble opinion. I'll take some pictures soon.

Heat!

2010-01-24T21:41:00.001-08:00

Heat's on in the big house, now that the weather is in the 50's. Ah well. It's still progress.

Finally back to building!

2010-01-20T20:29:00.001-08:00

New target: the east door on the carriage house. The ultra-frigid weather of two weeks ago is gone, but there are still some serious drafts howling through our nice new family room, so this effort is important.

For orientation, note that you can see the sunroom roof through the transom of this door, and the Japanese maple that's between the buildings. In the backyard picture from July, this door is to the far left of the picture, and it is directly under window #2.

The cord hanging down is my quick-and-dirty wiring for the security light outside; part of this project will be to wire that properly and insulate the arched space above the transom.

As always, the first order of business is to fix plaster. First, I removed the inner board of the arched space (look at those arched bricks - aren't they neat?) to see what fell off. The large chunk of plaster at the right above that arch did so, and so I took my caulk/adhesive and glued it back in place. I caulked the right side of the door (light showing), then I mortared the missing plaster there, right on top of the caulk. The left side of the door is in better condition, for whatever reason.

This is getting to be my pattern for this plaster. I'm using mortar as a base layer, then patching plaster as the top layer. I'm sure the patching plaster isn't as strong as a true plaster top coat, but this is working OK for smaller areas like this. And you can't beat mortar for strength, assuming you mix it right. (Ahem.)

Anyway, that was yesterday's work. Today, I put a deadbolt on this door. The old lock was missing, so there was a 1-1/2" hole in it. This is not what we in the building trades consider winterized. So now it's better.

Friday, my HVAC friend is coming, and we'll have heat in the big house for the first time. (Ahem again.) Then we can get back to plumbing over there. So more on that in the days to come.

The pipes froze anyway

2010-01-10T19:40:00.000-08:00

Dammit.

The good thing is that since I had at least shut off and drained part of the plumbing, the part that froze (in the big house's kitchen) didn't harm any of the pipes. Judicious application of space heaters has thawed some of the problem - but still no water to the carriage house yet.

I clearly should have wrapped these pipes with heat tape.

Not The House

2010-01-02T18:02:00.000-08:00

Even crazy house people need a vacation from time to time, so we're visiting friends in Puerto Rico. This is a picture taken at the Campamento del Caribe, which is run by some of those friends, who happen to have an apartment free until the 10th. We had to drive to Atlanta to get affordable air fare, but it was so worth it.

In the meantime, back at The House, nighttime temperatures are down to 9 degrees or so. Yeah, I drained the plumbing in the big house as we were leaving - I haven't gotten that flue replaced, so no heat there yet. So far it hasn't been an issue, but as cold as it is, I think it most certainly will be now.

So - happy New Year to all! In lieu of resolutions, I just have a to-do list.

Big house heat

Flue and chimney liner (to be done by an HVAC friend of mine)
Ductwork as needed (to be done by me)

Winterization

Carriage house

Weatherstripping around two downstairs doors
Deadbolt on "utility door" to replace present 1" hole
Insulated board for small window on south corner
Still a little caulking/plastering above the south wall and in the closet area on the southeast corner
In the event of warm weather, the most urgent mortar replacement work

Big house

Urethane in obvious holes in basement walls (mortar later)
Boards over vents under first back addition
Board up two basement windows on east basement

Gutters, sometime prior to the spring thaw

Carriage house bathroom

Attach and plumb vanity

Carriage house electrical work

Replace stolen ground wire outside
Overhead light for washer/dryer area
Separate circuit for bedroom to permit use of air conditioner

Carriage house paint and trim

Paint walls and trim in bathroom
All window trim

Equipment closet in big house

Reroute incoming DSL into closet in dining room
Add an electrical outlet there for the Linux box

Carriage house garage area

Remove superfluous fiberglass insulation (40% complete)
Still some miscellaneous plaster, and more paint, aye!

Dining room

Remove and scrape wallpaper (30% done, thanks to daughter)
Remove all damaged plaster on walls
Remove damaged drywall from ceiling
Restore plaster on walls
Drywall ceiling
Paint (I'm still liking that semi-gloss ultra white)
Clean and maintain the woodwork and buffet
Shore up under floor (soft spot from long-standing leak in roof fixed in 90's)
Polish floor

Carriage house kitchen window (after spring has sprung)

Remainder of big house

Upstairs bathroom plumbing
Addition of sink in kitchen
Cleaning
Electrical systems: oh the humanity!

Merry Christmas to all!

2009-12-25T13:38:00.001-08:00

And to all a good night.

Fencing

2009-12-13T12:16:00.000-08:00

No, no, not épée or foil, but wrought iron - if we're going to be out of town this coming summer, the more security mechanisms we've got, the better, right?

Here's another company.

The Floor: done!

2009-12-05T22:35:00.000-08:00

OK, so the latest in the southwest corner saga has been the decision to put in a raised floor covering the southern half of the downstairs in the carriage house. Once we started painting those walls, the prospect of a family room kind of area there just sort of leaped out at us.

That effort is complete.

The first step was to frame in the section of floor we wanted to use. The layout of the upstairs of the carriage house actually shows this pretty well; the new family room area is the square on the south end of the downstairs, with the stairway to the east of it. That turned out to be an area just shy of 16'x16'.

Since we were using 2x4s taken from the big house's basement, they smelled rather moldy. So as you can see, we decided to paint them with a Zinser sealing primer after dousing them with bleach. After the bleach, they actually no longer smelled moldy, but man, some of them had branching mold structures etched on their sides, so we just didn't want to play around with them. Plus the kids did the painting, so it was no extra work for me.
This framing work took about a week.

Once the framing was done, it was time to start laying the plywood, a 3/4" moisture-treated subfloor. This stuff was heavy; I could lift a sheet, but since all sawing had to be done in the big house (to minimize sawdust propagation), it all added up to a lot of physical labor. As you can see, we also laid down Styrofoam insulation board under the floor. It's about R8, so I don't know whether it's going to have a huge impact, but the completed floor is indeed comfy.

As I went, I tried to insert shims under the 2x4 frame to make sure it was solid on the concrete. I found that attaching the plywood warped the frame somewhat, but the final floor is still pretty solid and has no places that bang when you step on them, so I call it a success.

Here's an extremely important trick I learned from disassembly of the floor in the big house's basement - as you lay the plywood, take a 4' straightedge and draw a line over the joist. Now, you know where to put your screws. I forgot this on one sheet of plywood (until it was too late; I'd already put down the next row) and kicked myself repeatedly as I sank screw after screw into empty space.

Finally, though, yesterday, eight pieces of plywood later, it was done. I don't know if you can see this, but the plywood is cut to fit into the irregularity in the south wall (also the west wall) where the doors used to be. I'm pretty proud of this floor, actually. It's kind of silly - but this is really the largest carpentry project I've done. I actually ran through a box of screws for the first time in my life.

Anyway, today's project was to get the carpet down. What you say? Carpet? Yeah, even with the dust allergies, we decided that a thin, easily cleaned carpet with no pad was still a better choice for the floor than a cold linoleum - and we can't really afford a wooden surface here. I'd love a laminate or plank floor, but it's just a temporary house for the winter, not the main show. This picture, by the way, shows the carpet cut in under the west window (remember that first picture of that window with the Truck 'o' Stuff piled next to it?)

So here's nearly the final result for the southwest corner. I still want to put a bit of drywall over that exposed brick section, and the little window needs sealing and insulation, and there still needs to be some caulking done here, and painting of the trim and repainting of the dings and scrapes from putting in the plywood. And the trim's not finished yet, and actually I still have about six feet of tacking on the east wall, but:

The tree is up in time for St. Nicholas Day. And the shoes are in the window. Happy Holidays.

Not dead yet

2009-12-03T10:09:00.001-08:00

I've been quiet again - we went to Chicago to the museums for Thanksgiving, and I've been hard at work on that raised floor in the carriage house downstairs, so I haven't had much time for blogging (I kind of want to finish a given task before posting about it). I'm close to done with that, so soon, Gentle Reader, all your patience will have paid off.

Trust me.

Gutters

2009-11-18T18:37:00.000-08:00

I believe I mentioned that I'd gotten quotes for the gutters. There is exactly one part of the roof with working gutters: the sunroom. Those gutters leak, but they at least guide water to a downspout. (Said downspout being on top of the second floor back room, whence the water plummets twenty-five feet down to splatter against the foundation, but that's why we need more gutters.)

The cheapest quote was $1480, for 5" seamless gutter throughout. Why? Well, to answer this question, the kids and I clambered all over the roof and measured the entire thing. This was made far more convenient by the fact that you can climb out windows onto any point of the house except for the top roof, and you can climb from the sunroom's roof up onto that by means of the stack of bricks I put there after disassembling the back chimney during this summer's roof project.

Anyway, not including the sun roof, we have 385 linear feet of gutter-needing roof. 60'2" of that is the front porch, which will need not only gutters, but some reconstruction; the existing box gutters are just as bad as neglected box gutters always are.

The drawing you see is a work in progress - turns out that at a scale of 0.5cm/foot the house needs three sheets of paper - but you can see the three back sections of roof. (1) is the dining room embayment, kitchen, and back rooms; (2) is the upstairs back room (the Blue Room); and (3) is the sunroom, which has an independent roof. The dotted lines are adjoining brick wall.

At any rate, I have more or less decided not to hire the gutters done. I might change my mind for the top ones, but if I can manage to do the work from on top of the roof (with a safety rope) I'm going to do it myself. Only if I give up will I call the men with ladders.

I'm probably just going to go with dirt-cheap aluminum K-profile gutters (i.e. your "standard gutter"), but a mention on This Old House pointed me to a place in Michigan that sells some much, much prettier ones: Classic Gutters - who knew gutters could be so snazzy? Maybe in a few years I'll replace the cheap-o gutters I'll be putting up now. These make me salivate.

Anyway, cheap gutters (and not-so-cheap gutters, but not like the classics above) can be had online at Gutter Supply - the link goes not to their gutter page, but to their finials. Finials are those little pointy things on the peaks of roofs. I'm considering some finials here and there on The House - maybe sometime after it's rendered habitable. But this way, I don't lose the link.

(By the way, the reason you don't see more finials is that the really slick ones are ungodly expensive. The Carousel finial on that page is $1489.23 "each" - I'll take three!)

The basement

2009-11-14T21:34:00.000-08:00

So our plan for the downstairs of the carriage house is to take that clean white area and put in a warmer floor. My first wish would have been to put down heating elements and then a floating hardwood surface - but pricing that out for a 15'4"x15'4" area, I realized it would cost upwards of a few thousand dollars.

Not an option.

Remember how that area was boxed in to install a floor when I got here, though? Well, we decided to duplicate that. Unfortunately, a lot of the long 2x4s used in that structure have been built into the roof, though. But fortunately, the entire big house basement also has a wooden raised floor.

Now, that basement is not yet as dry as it should be, not by a long shot. So that wood is decomposing pretty badly in some spots and it has to come out. Mold is not an option for us. (Indeed, mold isn't actually an option for anybody, but our son is particularly sensitive to it.) So I'm killing two birds with one stone. Today's job was removing the plywood from the floor in the eastern room of the basement (or at least, from about a quarter of it).This, plus the area not yet covered but boxed in, under the leaky window on the south wall of the basement, pictured here, will give us enough lumber for the section of the carriage house we want to box in. That, plus eight sheets of plywood, will give us a nice family room area with a floor that wet feet won't freeze to this winter. We need a little more space to watch movies that isn't cluttering up our living and working area.

And at the same time, less mold-susceptible organic substances in the big house's basement! So it's a win-win.

It felt good doing something other than software installation this week. Especially the part where I took the maul and destroyed some plywood that couldn't be unscrewed due to rust and wood expansion. That was fun. (You can see the debris in the first picture.)

Virus attack!

2009-11-10T21:27:00.000-08:00

In case you're wondering why I've gone silent again, this time it was Win32.Virut.56. I honestly thought it was under control - in the twenty-five years I've worked with computers, I have never been bested by a virus or hacker before; over the five or so times I've encountered them, I've been able to figure out the means of entry and seal everything off, root it out, and enjoy another year or two of bother-free existence.

The full blow-by-blow is probably less than exciting, but suffice it to say that I shot myself in the foot with a thumb drive I took myself from an infected machine and only realized about 0.05 seconds too late how colossally stupid I'd been - I saw the drive infect my laptop. I was up until 4am that night researching and whacking, mostly with Dr. Web, a marvelous tool that almost did the trick in combination with Comodo Internet Security and Malwarebytes scanner. The next day I tried Dr. Web Live CD (it boots into Linux and removes Virut while Virut can't infect more files) and honestly thought I'd beat it.

Today, though, after three days of lost work, I broke down and bought two new computers. One is a new Windows desktop, and the other is now a Linux box currently working on pulling the files off my infected drives in a safe, non-Windows environment. I'm actually going to have to wipe my dear old laptop; it finally just ... stopped booting. Yesterday. Nothing more I could do for it. I can start it up on a Linux rescue disk and copy the files onto an external drive, but Windows has left the building.

About two hours before the end, I realized that although things looked superficially calm, my machine was actually and literally on one of the Russian botnets. It was phoning home to St. Petersburg and the Ukraine as I watched it, downloading and spawning new viruses as fast as my new blocking software could stop them. Finally, after one scan-and-reboot to remove the quarantined files, the machine started hitting the blue screen of death during every boot cycle. Windows had self-destructed. I am almost 100% certain the Russians did this on purpose to make it impossible to deconstruct the botnet code. Not personally, of course - but I think it's one of their preprogrammed failure modes if an owned node starts getting too "smart".

Bastards.

But I did get a sweet new machine out of it. Two, really. My wife said if I wanted a new office setup for my birthday, I could have just asked. Ha! Also, it was fun in a horrible, high-stress, panic-laden way. So I can't say it was altogether a negative experience.

That said, I'm looking forward to getting back to nice, safe plaster, although the whole dining-room-by-Thanksgiving thing is looking way less probable now. Thank Pyotr and Dmitri if you see them.

Southwest corner update

2009-11-04T10:06:00.001-08:00

Well, it's not done yet, but progress is definitely being made. I'm pretty happy with how this is coming out.

I've been looking into plaster lately. It's not all that easy to find plaster, for sale I mean. But I want to learn how to do it right. There is a store for plaster-specific supplies about an hour and a half from here. I'm thinking of visiting soon. For instance, there's a nifty material called "plaster bond" that you can put into cracks before refinishing. The carriage house has lots of cracked plaster (the big house, not so much, for some reason). I'm eager to give this stuff a try.

In the dining room by Thanksgiving, afterthought

2009-11-02T10:59:00.001-08:00

So who's coming? Potluck makes sense, don't you think?

In the dining room by Thanksgiving

2009-11-01T13:35:00.000-08:00

Here is the original picture of the dining room from this May; things haven't really changed much since then; the focus has, of course, been carriage house livability. As you'll recall, one driver for the roof project was leaks above this room; there is some damage to the late-period drywall on the ceiling and the wallpaper was basically a loss, as you can see even in this picture.

But it's a fantastic room; all the woodwork looks like this, very little of the molding is missing, and the floor, while chopped up a lot from the room's use as the kitchen of the apartment in 304 during the 70's and 80's, is still attractive.

So we've come up with the goal of making this one room usable by Thanksgiving, and having a good-sized meal there. A collateral goal will be the installation of a sink in the kitchen, which is the room to the west of the dining room which was last used as a kitchen in the big house (it was a bedroom for 304 in the 70's and 80's, and it is currently my sawing shop, because the generation of sawdust in the carriage house has been denied approval by the household environmental management commission, a body whose membership comprises my wife).

This picture, taken in August while the roof was off (hence the bit of light showing at the top of the wall) shows what we're going to have to fix up in terms of the ceiling. Actually, it doesn't show the worst of it, which is just off the top of the picture - that entire sheet of drywall there is rotten and moldy around the edge, reportedly due to an overflow in the bathtub upstairs. Which I take to mean repeated and egregious overflow; a single incident would not account for the damage I see.

So anyway, I guess I haven't posted a to-do list recently!

Carriage house livability

Garage area livability

Remove superfluous fiberglass insulation (40% complete)
Caulk everywhere (a lot is done; more to be done)
Some plaster patching (done on southwest, need to move everything out off the east wall to continue the process)
More paint, aye!
Seriously considering laying down a heating pad and hardwood veneer on the south end of the downstairs; the white walls certainly make the area look like a place you could live in

Windows

Kitchen window is the only one left

Bathroom

Attach and plumb vanity

Carriage house electrical work

Replace stolen ground wire outside
Entryway lighting
Overhead light for washer/dryer area
Separate circuit for bedroom to permit use of air conditioner

Carriage house paint and trim

Paint walls and trim in bathroom
All window trim

Dining room (target: Thanksgiving. Yes, 2009, pipe down over there.)

Remove and scrape wallpaper (30% done, thanks to daughter)
Remove all damaged plaster on walls
Remove damaged drywall from ceiling
Restore plaster on walls
Drywall ceiling
Paint (I'm still liking that semi-gloss ultra white)
Clean and maintain the woodwork and buffet
Shore up under floor (soft spot from long-standing leak in roof fixed in 90's)
Polish floor

Remainder of big house

Upstairs bathroom plumbing
Addition of sink in kitchen
Cleaning
Winterization, a lengthy process
Heat
Electrical systems: oh the humanity!

Drywall!

2009-10-26T20:57:00.000-07:00

Back on October 5 when I started the southwest corner, the initial picture showed that the south wall fill-in where the garage door used to be had no drywall. (That's where the ants were on October 13.)

Two days ago, I finished that. It's not sanded or painted yet, but it's not fiberglass hanging out, either. After cleaning out the ants, I replaced the insulation, and then it was time to start.

The first sheet took way too long. I'd measured the height of the sheet at the front of the frame on top of the opening, but nothing in this opening is even close to square. So I ended up cutting off another half inch or so, a little bit at a time. Ugh. But finally it was in place.

This is the first time I've used full sheets of this mold-resistant cementitious wallboard. It's heavy, way heavier than conventional drywall. Still much lighter than a wall made of bricks, of course. In comparison with the rest of the building, this wall feels distinctly flimsy.

For the second sheet, I measured the height of the first sheet, determined not to make the same mistake. So naturally, this sheet was an inch too short on the left side. Oy. It didn't even come up to the 2x4 frame-in. The answer: lots of spackle, oh well.

The wall as she looks today - I spackled in around all the edges, and the result is pretty darned nice. My next trick is to sand all the spackle and paint it, along with the frame of the old garage door.

I'm using "Ultra White" latex paint for these walls. I like white, a lot - and I have to say, I'm really liking how it looks in this basement area.

Concrete is our friend

2009-10-25T19:13:00.000-07:00

The floor of that southwest corner was pretty grotty - but when I really got in there with the Shopvac and sucked out all the loose dirt and brick dust and humus, it turned out to be a honking huge hole about four inches deep. The original plan was to patch it up with patching cement, but that stuff just isn't made for large volumes, and besides I just had a 10-pound bag, which would probably just disappear into that hole and never be seen again.

Bigger guns were necessary, in this case (gulp) actual concrete, which I had never actually used before.

So today my daughter and I learned how to work with concrete - turns out it's just like mortar except with gravel instead of sand, and probably some other differences. The important thing is, just like mortar, if you mix it with enough water and you're patient, it is a very forgiving medium. Here's the corner after we lugged in an 80-pound back of Quikrete from the car (good God 80 pounds is heavy) and mixed it up a bucket at a time, troweling it into place with our mortar trowels (which worked fine).

Then, what the heck, we kept right on going along the west wall, which had a lot of weirdness in it, including the bottom of the white window featured last week or so, pictured here. I had been wondering how best to seal up the base of that door fill-in; as always, masonry is totally our friend.

Well, flush with that success - remember back on July 26, when I finished the washer/dryer hookup and right at the end of the post I mentioned there was a truly big hole right in that corner where somebody once obviously fixed the drain stack but found refilling the hole just too much trouble?

Well, they were right. It was a job of work, let me tell you. First, we wheelbarrowed in six loads of dirt; two left over from the drainage ditch, and four from next to the cold frame where there's kind of a little hill built up.

It was a weird feeling, bringing load after load of dirt into the house, with a wheelbarrow, and it felt like a crime to use this lovely dirt to fill in a hole in the basement, but we got lots of this dirt out there, so there you go.

The next step was pea gravel, for a nice solid base after tamping down the dirt with a short length of 2x4 for a while. This part was much easier; no wheelbarrow was harmed in the taking of this picture.

Then it was on to the concrete itself. We finished off the first bag, then carried the other in from the car (I carried, she made sure the dog didn't get out).

We still ran out of concrete before we ran out of hole; this is the second bag of concrete. Turned out to be a bigger hole than I thought.

So we went out for Mexican (I had the burrito/taco/rice/beans combo, which was on special and quite good), and bought three more bags of concrete, each of which I now feel in every muscle of my body, and it took another bag and a half!

But the lovely result is what will soon be a solid floor for the washer and dryer:

Southeast side drainage complete

2009-10-24T20:56:00.000-07:00

So back on July 25 I posted about the drainage ditch I dug on the south side of the east end of the basement; sometime in August or September, I dug the ditch out better and buried some 4-inch corrugated PVC pipe in it along with many bags of pea gravel. For some reason I can't find pictures, so I don't have an exact date (I suppose my Menard's receipts would tell me, if I'd kept up that database, but I didn't, so they stand mute).

At any rate, Thursday I finished said ditch, after rain threatened (thereby causing my wife to threaten). The fear was that the rain would come and stay until the entire pile of dirt froze in place for the winter, which would suck.

I'd been putting it off because the ditch would have to terminate at the retaining wall on the sidewalk, and the logical next step would be to punch through that wall with a clay pipe - but nobody sells clay tile pipe any more. But Thursday was the day. Above, you see my crowbar inserted into the aforementioned wall. Amazingly, I was able to lever a couple of stones out of the bottom of the wall.

Here's the front of the wall, showing the hole at the bottom. It's about two inches high and six wide. Well, once I got things to this point, I realized that this was already a large enough opening for a drain, so I tamped the dirt down and put a large flat limestone rock on the bottom to prevent erosion out of the hole, then I thought: dammit, Jim, I'm a bricklayer now.

So I went and mixed up some mortar, and built a little brick structure to hold the pipe in place; the light was starting to fail a little, and the rain had started, so this picture is blurry, and the last in the series out at the ditch; after this was built and I'd slopped mortar all over it, and next to the floor of my drainage outlet, I dumped in ten pounds of pea gravel and buried the whole thing.

Well, but then I had some mortar left over, so I used it up on some experimental tuck pointing on the carriage house, and mortaring up the seam between the wall and the entry door.

Here's a picture taken the following morning - see if you can tell which joints are tuck pointed. This little bit of work represents maybe half an hour. I'm getting much better at it (it took me most of the day to do the bricks under the window, remember?) but it's still time-consuming work.

Worth it, though. I'm really starting to love masonry.

Carriage house door

2009-10-17T20:45:00.001-07:00

The "front door" to the carriage house apartment is actually on the east side of the building, directly opposite the door into the "above-ground basement". As you can see, when closed, it shows a lot of daylight at the bottom and lower left. Moreover, it doesn't close well (or didn't), having to be lifted into place, effectively, and the deadbolt could only be locked or unlocked while pulling in and up on the door, making it impossible to get into the carriage house while carrying anything.

Irritating. And cold! So my wife mandated that this was to be the task today, and so mote it be.

Before weatherizing the door, though, I first had to rehang it so it would actually close correctly. The culprit in this case was the top hinge, pictured here. Oy. My guess is this hinge was damaged by a tenant trying to gain access after losing a key, and the "obvious" way to fix the hinge was to use longer screws, and drive them in with a drill, thus tearing hell out of the heads. Note the attempt to angle the screws, because the wood under the hinge is splintered.
So we take off the door, and the inside trim; wow! The frame is really not very thick! And shows the imprints of lots of historical hinges; my guess is this frame is original. Certainly it's older than you or me, anyway, and as we can see, there is a lot of open space behind it. Also a lot of dirt; really, to clean a house thoroughly, it has to be disassembled first.

Note, incidentally, the view of the sunroom of the big house in the background. Just to orient you here.

Anyway, here's why these screws didn't hold the door up; the threads are mostly not in the wood. The screw was long enough to extend into the bricks behind it, but probably not long enough there to get sufficient purchase, and the outer two screws are just hitting the plaster anyway. Useless.

So all I did was to remount the hinges with reasonable screws, using a trick I learned from my uncle: coat a toothpick with Elmer's glue, and stick it into the stripped hole before inserting the screw. Works a charm.

The bottom of the frame was also loose for lack of support, so I put a brick under either end of the threshold and drove in some shims to force it up against the frame, and thus the frame up against the bricks above it. Much solider now (oh shims, is there anything you can't improve?)

Once the door was rehung, it turned out that the strike plate was in the wrong place (it was right for a modern doorknob, but this door has antique knobs, so the strike plate needs to be about a quarter inch further into the frame). So I moved it, and adjusted the strike plate for the deadbolt.

As a result, amazingly, the door is now square to the floor. Wow. It's actually a pretty good door, although clearly it needs some paint. As you see, after I removed the threshold, there's actually a lot more gaping space there (a problem to be resolved tomorrow) - but instead of closing laboriously with a squeak-BLAM, it can now be pushed closed with one finger, and stays closed, and you can unlock the deadbolt even with your groceries and the umbrella in your other hand.

This is the kind of thing that makes me feel successful in this endeavor.

Ants!

2009-10-13T11:40:00.000-07:00

So there I was, just now, cleaning up the south wall of the carriage house in preparation for drywalling it, and there was a lot of crumbly dirt at the base of the wall. I pulled out the fiberglass and - have you ever seen an anthill in your house? No? Me neither, until today.

Nope, they're not carpenter ants, just bog-standard large-issue black ants whose anthill happens to be in a place that stays miraculously warm through the winter. I feel almost apologetic kicking them out.

More on that southwest corner

2009-10-11T21:26:00.000-07:00

But picking up where I left the narrative in the southwest corner: after jamming in Styrofoam as a base, I squirted in urethane foam to fill in the spaces. This part of the wall has sustained a lot of water damage both inside and out, so there's a lot more space inside it than there should be. From the outside, it will need some bricks and lots of mortar, but I'm getting better at masonry. (So more on the outside later this week, I hope - but first there will be some plain old drywalling, probably tomorrow.)

At any rate, the next step in providing a real wall was mortar into that crack. This took place concurrently with the window patching of the last post and the result was less blurry in person than this picture would indicate. Note also that I've started to patch the cracks in the plaster to the left of the window.

Above the window, the plaster had come loose from the wall, but was still relatively solid, so I used my adhesive caulk to glue it back to the wall. Not a technique that I would recommend for a wall that is intended to be smooth at the end of the process, but for my purposes, a nice white wall that gives some indication of its history, it's probably ideal.

Here's the corner as it appears today. There's plaster in the cracks above the window, I'm using plaster to smooth out the mortar, and the south end of the west wall is almost done; there were some seriously large cavities there, but not really large enough to justify mortar, so I'm filling them in with multiple applications of patching plaster. And obviously, the white paint has already encroached on the corner area.

I'll sand all this plaster tomorrow and see where it needs more fill. Also tomorrow, I hope, will be drywall on the frame section of the south wall (where the garage door used to be). Above the dark beam (that supported a rail for the garage door) the plaster is in seriously bad condition, again having disengaged from the wall and cracked. I'm not yet sure how I'll handle that. Probably more caulk and plaster patch; it's working very well elsewhere.

This corner is going to look great.

Beautification II: before and after

2009-10-11T20:10:00.000-07:00

Just to the right of the picture I took last week of the southwest corner, there is a window on the west wall. Here is the picture I took in May, just after the arrival of the Truck 'o' Stuff, showing its ur-state.

Here is what that window looks like today. Actually, in person it looks slightly better; those grayish flecks on it are caulk, which must have a slightly different infrared reflectivity than the paint, because the flecks are utterly invisible to the human eye.

At any rate, I'm pretty proud of this, as it's really been teaching me a lot about masonry. At the corners of this window, there was serious plaster damage; here's an intermediate picture after some paint was already applied (I wish I'd taken better starting pictures) showing the hole. Further down is some urethane foam, my initial stopping of the myriad holes this window contained.

Now, on the south wall of this area, there's a large patch where missing plaster had been replaced by mortar. I was impressed, never having considered mortar in this application. But it works! It's ugly, but rock-hard.

So I mixed up some mortar and stuffed the holes, then the next day I cleaned out the mortar and did it again, because had I screwed up the first batch; it had become friable and sandy and could be flicked out by hand. I hadn't put enough water into the mixture, so on my second trial I was very careful: I mixed a much goopier starting mixture, carefully sprayed water onto the brick in the hole, then applied the mortar. To be extra-careful, I sprayed water onto the mortar again that evening - the longer mortar takes to dry, the better it cures (the crystallization process stops when the mortar dries, you see).

The result was incredibly solid, and adhered very well to the edges of the hole. I also applied mortar at the top of the old door frame (this window was set into a door frame), where there was about a 1/2" crack. I'd long since squirted urethane into the back of that crack to seal it, but it was still ugly.

Once I was satisfied that my second batch of mortar was going to set properly, I used plaster patch to smooth it out somewhat. It would have been a waste of time to make it too smooth, as the rest of this wall is anything but - so I just slapped some plaster onto it and painted it.

Once you gain a little physical skill working with mortar and masonry, I have to say, it is a very forgiving medium. I'm really starting to like it a lot.

Cory Doctorow's "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town"

2009-10-08T20:58:00.000-07:00

I ran across a mention of one of Cory Doctorow's books that I had never really noticed before (Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town), and the first chapter (at least) is about house renovation. Amazing. Cory gets it.

Windy night

2009-10-06T23:15:00.000-07:00

No drafts in the carriage house apartment.

Bit by bit.

Beautification target: carriage house "basement" southwest corner

2009-10-05T13:04:00.001-07:00

So here is really the first wall we're looking at fixing. This is all kind of bound up with the ongoing winterization and caulking effort; since the outside of the wall needs tuck pointing, the cracks you see to the right of the little boarded-up window are actually letting air in. Yikes! But much more importantly, there was a 1/8" slat nailed to the right side of that boarded-up window, and behind the slat was a really honking big crack from the wall settling.
Here's the crack in its native condition, and forgive my repeated use of Irwinism, but crikey, he's a big one.

Big enough, in fact, that my first step was just to cut up a bunch of leftover Styrofoam (from the box from the overhead light, actually) and jam them in.
That basically fills the crack, so it's a good start. There's a lot of extra air space between the brick layers in there (I believe they've moved a little), but there's not much we can do about that, beyond urethane foam to fill in some of it.

I'll post more on this endeavor later.

Roof complete

2009-10-02T21:22:00.001-07:00

As promised, the roof pictures. From the south, compare with the earlier pictures with the lower box gutter falling off the house. We had originally intended simply to remove that eyebrow, but it turned out that its joists are the ceiling joists of the brick section. When we took it off, we could see the stairs.

So we put it back.

The north side of the house looks even cooler, I think. These eaves hang pretty far out, and the contractor was pretty frustrated that I wanted them wrapped in metal instead of vinyl. (The width made the metal hard to handle without it buckling.) But there's no other plastic in this house, and I don't intend to be the one to start.

I'm thinking some horizontal boards similar to the ones on the eaves on the sunroom (the very top right of the first picture up there) might look nice, and tie the whole thing together visually. Opinions?

So given my recent strides in electrical work in the carriage house, here's my rough to-do list:

Carriage house livability

Garage area livability

Remove superfluous fiberglass insulation from the ceiling and around heating ducts (we're going to heat the garage area, after all; we're living in it)
Drywall the south wall where the garage door used to be
Caulk everywhere (a lot is done; more to be done)
Some plaster patching
More paint, aye

Windows

Finish bathroom window
Kitchen window

Bathroom

Attach and plumb vanity

Carriage house electrical work

Replace stolen ground wire outside
Entryway lighting
Overhead light for washer/dryer area
Separate circuit for bedroom to permit use of air conditioner

Carriage house paint and trim

Paint walls and trim in bathroom
All window trim

Big house

Upstairs bathroom plumbing
Cleaning
Winterization, a lengthy process
Heat
Electrical systems: oh the humanity!

Heat!

2009-09-30T13:43:00.000-07:00

I was right. Overdimensioning your heaters is a good idea. I like fast response times.

So the carriage house electrical list is almost taken care of. In the last week, I've:

Finished installing all the baseboard heaters
Put an overhead light in the front room and un-switched the switched outlet
Moved an outlet (today) because it was over one of the heaters
Fixed all the outlets in the kitchen (a GFCI outlet had been wired wrong)
Put an outlet in the bathroom
Moved the switch for the downstairs lights next to the door we actually use to enter the downstairs
Fixed two more overhead lights in the hallways

The only things left on the list are to replace the stolen ground wire and fix the entryway light next to the door downstairs. And maybe put some more outlets into the downstairs area. I'm just not sure where to put them, given the solid-brick nature of the walls. So that needs thought.

But: serious progress, especially the whole not-cold-anymore thing.

Cold weather masonry and masonry sealing

2009-09-29T16:35:00.001-07:00

Since Fall is impending but I still have roughly three million man-hours of tuck pointing before me, I Googled "mortar temperature range" and found a page on cold weather masonry. The upshot: 40 degrees (F) and up, I'm fine. Below that, things get tricky, so I'm just not going to mess with it; it's not like there aren't plenty of things to do on the inside of the buildings.

But it occurs to me that the utter need for tuck pointing in the big house is another serious flaw in its heatability quotient. Cracks in the outer wall equate to drafts on the inside of the house. So ultimately, tuck pointing is going to be absolutely necessary over the coming year.

The other topic in the world of brick that has occupied me of late is how to seal the bricks before the weather. Most of my bricks are still in incredibly good shape for baked clay that's been out in the weather for 120 years, but some are not. Turns out people use a sealer on bricks nowadays, and I think it makes sense.

Opinions differ, but the key is that a sealer for masonry has to soak into the brick and chemically bond with it, while not sealing off all the pores (water vapor inside the house has to be able to escape, or it can freeze within the brick, leading to spalling). There are two camps: the silane/siloxane camp and the silicone camp. Silicone tends not to penetrate the brick as well, but there are some silicone masonry sealers that do, and if they do, their lifetime tends to be far better than the organic silanes and siloxanes. Better enough, actually, that they don't have good data yet, because their test masonry hasn't degraded enough yet. That sounds about right to me.

There's a decent link here (Masonry Magazine). A silane/siloxane link is here - silicone-based sealers operating with stearate would be an example of something Not Good. (I'm guessing Thomson's Water Seal is one of these.) It's OK for wood, but not masonry.

The old box gutters on the back section

2009-09-28T22:37:00.000-07:00

Here's one of the pictures I took while destroying the box gutters, about three weeks ago. I just really like the way it turned out.

It kills me that I don't have the resources to restore the box gutters. I really like the roof we put on, don't get me wrong - and it does have the advantage that rain doesn't come through it - but it's bland. I'm thinking of ways to de-bland it, and maybe next year we'll talk about that in more detail. The proximate goal was a dry house.

I keep forgetting to take a picture of the new roof(s) from the south side. Once I do that, I can officially cross the roof work off the list here on the blog; the actual job was finished on Saturday.

Heaters and overhead lights and outlets

2009-09-28T17:12:00.001-07:00

Oh my.

So except for actually installing the circuit breakers, the baseboard heat is installed, and not a minute too soon; the wind was getting a little chilly today. The carriage house holds heat rather well, I'm pleased to say, but it still needs some heat to hold. (I believe I mentioned that I had an HVAC guy - who happened to graduate high school with me - examine all three furnaces on the property; happily, they're all in pretty decent shape. The two in the big house need a new flue, though; the old one is horribly corroded because there's no liner in the chimney. More on that later.)

So the electrical inspector will be here on Wednesday, after which: heat.

But as long as we're doing electrical work, my wife says, "You know, a civilized apartment's living room should have an overhead light." Given that the carriage house apartment was built around 1948, they had gone with the newfangled idea of putting a switched outlet in the living room. Sigh. I hate switched outlets. They're really irritating for use with computers.

So this weekend's big task turned out to be: into the attic! The goal: unswitch the switched outlet, and use the switch for an overhead light.

The access to the attic is outside the bathroom door (remember the carriage house floor plan), and so up I went.

The view looking south explains rather well why the carriage house holds its heat: there is about eight inches of blown-in cellulose goodness up there. Makes it really dirty to do electrical work, though.

And of course that shot has a flash, so it doesn't really do justice to what I have to work in, which looks more like this picture here, taken with flashlight lighting only. We have better flashlights. Somewhere. In a box downstairs. So I made do.

Anyway, I didn't take thorough pictures, but after some thought and experimentation, I pulled the old box out of the wall for the old outlet, leaving a hole large enough to reach in for the wires down from the attic. I spliced the switch wire onto a new wire going up, and ran a new power wire down for the outlet. Left the old wire in the wall.

By "old wire" I mean old wire. It's about the size of a garden hose, but the gauge of the actual wire seems smaller than the 12-2 I'm using elsewhere. The remainder is tar-soaked fabric on each strand, a layer of paper, two strands of twine (for tensile strength?), more paper, and another layer of tarry fabric. Even the electrical tape was fabric. No plastic at all; fascinating!

It still spliced nicely with standard electrical nuts, though. Here's a nice shiny electrical box, showing the old wire coming in on the top and the switch wire on the right side. The coil is still attached to the top end of the power line I pulled down for the outlet. I had to buy a longer drill bit to make it down through the top of the wall -- most of it was two 2x4's on top, but of course over the outlet box it was three.

In the process of drilling through the top of the wall, though, I managed to look down on the box of one of the thermostats I installed last week. That was kinda cool!

Anyway, once that was done and the wires fished through, I drilled a hole in the ceiling and poked a wire up through it so I could find it in the attic. Then it was back to the attic, keyhole saw in hand, and eventually, I had a nice square hole to insert my light box in. This was surprisingly tiring.

Once the box fit, I cut a 2x4 to length and hammered it between the joists. It fit so tight I didn't even bother nailing it in place; it's never going to move again.

Here it is from the bottom side, on the ceiling of the front room. It ended up being a tad too low, but I kid you not, I couldn't move the 2x4 back up. It's in that tight. And it's only about an 1/8 of an inch too low, so it isn't really worth the effort. Besides, the light fixture mounted to it OK, so I guess it is officially Good Enough.

Made a nice little mess on the living room floor. Not the first, probably not the last.

The result is well worth it. Also, having one outlet in this place with a ground prong is a good start.

New dining room roof

2009-09-22T17:05:00.001-07:00

The new dining room roof has actually been done for a while now (about three weeks), but since work is still underway on the blue room roof and the outer edge and eaves of the roof on the back rooms, I haven't thought to blog this part. Looks better, doesn't it? But much, much more saliently, it also keeps water out of the dining room.

Construction history (1896 and 1909)

2009-09-17T20:35:00.001-07:00

So the main insurance company in this state kept records of the construction of each and every house in most towns and cities - to the level of having diagrams of floor plans, every five or ten years. And the library has all that on microfilm.

I'm pretty sure some of my scans are of the wrong street, in retrospect, because they don't match any of the houses around me, let alone mine. So I screwed up (I did the first scans pretty early on, and I was still a little confused as to the street number, it appears.)

But I got May, 1896 and April, 1909. Here is the house (and carriage house!) in 1896:
And here it is in 1909:
Between 1896 and 1909, the dining room was built out on the north, and the porch added on the east. A larger porch was put on the south side (where the sunroom is now). The 1909 plan indicates that the upstairs above the dining room was frame, not brick as it is now (that's where the master bath is) - but I think that's inaccurate. The attic stairs go up there and the attic structure sure looks continuous. So I think that little square there was part of the original structure of the house, as is shown in the 1986 plan.

The back porch is where there are two small rooms now. Since those rooms are divided by a wall that was external at one point (I can tell from the siding in there), that porch has been removed, then replaced, sometime after 1909. I'll poke around some more later.

Progressive ran away

2009-09-14T07:40:00.000-07:00

"Our underwriting guidelines currently do not allow us to insure properties whose replacement values are significantly higher than their market value. Sorry for the inconvience."

And I didn't even tell them about the carriage house!

Which makes me wonder: just how much would it cost to replace this house? The mind boggles! Millions, I'm sure.

They have a couple of (not so beautiful) houses in the neighborhood slated for demolition. I'm hoping I might be able to snag some floorboards if I figure out who to ask.

Then (1905) and Now (2009)

2009-09-12T10:57:00.001-07:00

Specifically, summer of 1905 or thereabouts (the pictorial history was published in 1906, reprinted in 1991 by the local historical society, and the photography was taken for the edition, so we're talking the previous summer, I figure).

Here's a shot as close to that as I can make it. Notice the back porch where today's sunroom should be (which matches the historical plans I've found so far) and the fact that the carriage house had already been built (which contradicts the tax records). I had been assuming 1909 for the carriage house, but it looks as though they'd already built it by 1905.

The porch and trim were brown! I don't care for that myself; I prefer the white they show today. There's no railing on the front stairs, and no wall around the yard, and their gardener was clearly better than mine.

But what really amazes is that the house is basically identical, but today's massive sycamores had not yet been planted. Wow.

Second-story frame roof

2009-09-11T20:04:00.000-07:00

The roof of the blue room and the back stairs is the roof we're working on this week. Here is the original picture from May. The brick there is the upstairs sunroom; the window in the frame part is a small hallway window at the top of the stairs, currently half-hidden behind a door which is nailed open. (This is because the upstairs was heated with wood using a stove in the downstairs back room. The heat went up the back stairs, then the return air came down the front stairs. I'm told it worked pretty darned well. Looking at the layout, I can only shudder and think "Fire hazard," but that's just me.)

Here's the same roof yesterday. We've basically taken off the box gutters. You can't see it in either of these pictures, but there was a brick chimney at the back of the blue room, blocked off at the first-floor ceiling. We removed it - it was essentially a stack of bricks with some sand between them. It caused me some significant fear thinking that the rest of the house is also basically a stack of bricks with sand between them, but mostly the mortar in the house proper is in kinda-sorta good shape. Still needs lots of tuck pointing, though.

Like the dining room roof, this roof was structurally pretty sound, with basically mulch where its box gutters used to be. We put another layer of plywood on top, but the rafters and planking were in fine condition. As you can see, this bit of roof really doesn't have much of a pitch. Ah well. It keeps the rain off - or rather, it didn't, until today.

As of today, by the way, my house has a fully non-leaking roof.

See that hole in the roof? There was a flue there.

It was long since blocked off, of course, but it had softened the planks around it to the point where we had to take them off. And I realized - now is the perfect time to insulate! See the ceiling plaster from the top? Actually, that ceiling is concealed now; it was in bad enough shape that they just framed in four inches below it and insulated below it, but more insulation never hurts!

So, $90 and two hours with a rented blower later, we got one warm room in the big house.

So that was today's progress. The roof is closed up now, with tar paper on it. Shingles go on Monday. Over the weekend, I'll continue work on the baseboard heat. There are four more heaters to install, and three wall thermostats. Textbook electrical work.

Baseboard heat #1

2009-09-11T12:11:00.000-07:00

To install baseboard heat, of course, we first remove the baseboard. Wow! Now we know why we have baseboards!

On the other hand, it made it way easier to get that wire down into the downstairs area. (We've been calling it the basement although it's above ground. Sort of a well-lit basement. It feels like a basement. It's not a garage, because it has no garage door. Must be an above-ground basement.)

The finished product looks good and warm.

I answered my question with this: "How do you attach things to a brick wall?" Answer: nail it or screw it. I used drywall screws; they just zoop right in and hold fast. (Well, I twisted the head off one.) It was pretty impressive, and that heater is well-attached.

Bathroom window

2009-09-08T08:35:00.000-07:00

The bathroom window has been almost easy - except for one thing. Here, the sill plate really is rotten. Here's the sill just after I've removed the sashes (last week).

I scraped all the spongy rotten wood away, doused it all in bleach to kill whatever was growing in there, and painted the entire thing with Zinsser Peel Stop primer.

Peel Stop is kind of cool stuff. It smells just like Elmer's Glue, and it soaks into peeling substrate and binds it. They do warn (duh) that this is no substitute for proper surface preparation, and I'm sure this is true, but since proper surface prep in this case would be replacement of the sill plate - a project I can't afford to repeat this fall - this approach will have to do. Ask me again in a year or two how important that surface preparation was.

Note that there are three levels of sill plate. The outer one is rotten on top, but the rot has eaten into the gap between the outer plate and the middle one that is probably the sill plate proper - by "eaten in" I mean there wasn't shelf fungus on it yet, but there was white mold with hyphae, and it had eaten a spongy cave about an inch into the wood under there. I filled it with urethane foam (yes, it is Great Stuff), cut it roughly flush, and painted over the entire thing.

The result, especially after caulking in some of the pits on the upper surface of the sill plate and painting over that, looks surprisingly functional. This is an oil-based glossy enamel; I'm using it on all the external trim. I want something that will shed water and last years. We'll see how well this lasts.

The window itself is a charming one; note that it has the same arch over it that the doors do. I assume that when the carriage house was originally built, this may have been the only actual window; the others were haymow doors, or cut later (that's my theory).

This picture also shows the roof of the outhouse. I might reshingle it, just to match, but since this is the only roof on the property I don't really care about, its priority is rather low. A bit of paint on the trim wouldn't hurt, though. Perhaps this will be an October project, weather permitting.

Anyway, I'll post a finished picture of the bathroom window after installation; right now, the final coat of paint is drying.

Front windows

2009-09-07T18:46:00.000-07:00

I think I mentioned I finally finished the front windows last week. No trim, of course (that's not a functional to-do point), but they're tight and they work.

These windows, what with the need to rebuild the sill and reset the bricks under the old sill plate, really set me back longer than I had wanted. I wanted to have the heat under control during the month of August. But life does these things to us.

The current plan would have to be this:

Carriage house electrical work

Replace stolen ground wire outside
Baseboard heaters
Entryway lighting
Second switch for garage area overhead lighting
Troubleshoot outlets in kitchen (none work)
Overhead light for washer/dryer area
Separate circuit for bedroom to permit use of air conditioner

Carriage house livability

Garage area livability

Remove superfluous fiberglass insulation from the ceiling and around heating ducts (we're going to heat the garage area, after all; we're living in it)
Drywall the south wall where the garage door used to be
Caulk everywhere (a lot is done; more to be done)
Some plaster patching
More paint, aye

Bathroom

Attach and plumb vanity
Touch up paint on walls and paint the trim

Windows

Finish bathroom window
Kitchen window
Interior trim on all windows

Big house

Roof work proceeding apace
Upstairs bathroom plumbing
Cleaning
Winterization, a lengthy process
Heat
Electrical systems: oh the humanity!

Dining room roof Before

2009-09-07T09:38:00.000-07:00

Boy, posting has gotten sparse, hasn't it? Sorry about that (especially to you, Mystery Seventh Follower). But it was all up to technical problems - specifically, I'd taken the Before pictures of the dining room roof with my daughter's camera, and we couldn't find the cable. Today, I found the cable! So here's the before on the dining room roof.

I've uploaded this at 1MB, twice the resolution I've been stingily using here on The House, because there's a lot of information in this picture. (Click it for the big version.) But the upshot is: this roof on the embayment on the north side was raining through the ceiling to a serious extent, and it's the first work I've paid to have done on The House. So it's a landmark decision.

The roof was covered in tar, over shingles, over tin (sigh), and the box gutters were rotted, as is the general case throughout the building. On the left point where the box gutter is flush to the brick, you can see a gray line running upwards, then to the right. That, my friends, is a live power wire, which leads out the basement window, over the dining room, and through the brick wall into the bathroom of the blue room. !! No, this is not compliant with code anywhere except possibly in Nigeria. It is dangerous. I'm pretty sure that's the power to the Blue Room, though. I don't know yet. Wiring will therefore be figuring in my life in the upcoming months.

This picture also shows the interesting vertical crack down from the second-story bathroom window (the leaded window in the upper left). That was obviously another full-sized window, probably another bedroom, that was bricked in with a smaller window when the bathtub was put in. It - like the rest of the house - is crying out for tuck pointing.

I have bought a grout bag (a $5.26 investment at Lowe's) for said tuck pointing. Way easier, I'm told, than troweling it all in. I'll update you on that when I get started.

Here's a view from the top of the left-hand end of the box gutter. Sigh. I can only feel good about the fact that all this is historical now; it's already history. But this nice little hole is responsible for a three-foot-wide strip of moldering plaster and sagging wallpaper in the dining room below it. Also, if you're into flashing, you can cringe with me looking at the upper right of this photo. If you've never considered how roofs are supposed to interface with brick, please have my assurances that this is not it.

Flabbergastingly, the underlying structure of this roof was sound. It was all original timber, dating to about 1910 when they built the embayment and presumably put in the buffet and the woodwork. We had to replace some of the 1x planks in the roof and shore up two rafters that had suffered water damage, but otherwise, this roof just got a new surface. At the edge, we replaced the old box gutter with an angled affair which I'll show you later (that camera is in the car, and not here right now). Turns out that the brick goes right up to the top corner on the roof, so we couldn't substantially change its shape.

Anyway, more later. I've nearly finished the bathroom window, and the current top item is baseboard heating (I've bought the heaters and gotten the permit - halfway done! Ha!) But as it is Labor Day, work is calling.

It's raining

2009-08-28T21:02:00.000-07:00

But the dining room is still dry. I have pictures of the original dining room roof on my daughter's camera, so until I find that cable, I won't post on the roof project, but I will say this: sometimes it's a hell of a lot faster to hire some guys. It cost me $1000 in labor and a few hundred in materials, but one of the two leaky sections of roof is no longer leaky. One more (to be done after Labor Day) and the roof is done, baby, done. That, and gutters, and we'll have a dry basement.

More this weekend; the paying work's been frantic this week.

Heat calculations

2009-08-24T20:44:00.001-07:00

We had a bit of a cold night the day before yesterday, and so our minds turned to heat. Our plan now is to go ahead and get the furnace in the carriage house running (it is reputed to work, but I want it cleaned and inspected before flipping the switch), but only to use that to heat the work area downstairs.

Upstairs, we're going with electric baseboard heat. This has several advantages, chief of which is that forced air is not good in combination with allergies, and our son has allergies. The second advantage is the flexibility; you can heat just the rooms you're using (granted, in this small an apartment, this is not such a huge advantage). Electrical heat, of course, is not the cheapest. If we had unlimited funds, I'd probably go with water radiant heat under the floor on both floors. But we do not have unlimited funds, so we calculate our BTU requirements.

(Of course, most of the heat from downstairs will waft up to the apartment anyway, so the baseboard heaters are really just for convenience and comfort. In May we were still living in the tropics. I don't expect November to be easy for any of us.)

To calculate BTU requirements, we first measure the carriage house. I've been wanting to get that done for three months, and here's the result! A man, a plan, a carriage house, esuohegairr a canal, Panama! We're going to heat the front room, the bedroom, the kitchen, and the bath. Using the area of each room, we use hearth.com/calculator/btucalc.html with its most pessimistic settings to get a maximum BTU requirement for tropical people living in the wrong part of the planet, use the conversion factor of 1kW = 3143 BTU to get a rough kilowatt rating, then use the rule of thumb of 250 W per foot baseboard heat to find out where we can put our heaters.

The front room is 15' x 13' = 195 sqft = 7800 BTU = 2500 W = 10 feet.

The bedroom is 14' x 11.5' = 161 sqft = 6700 BTU = 2000 W = 8 feet.

The kitchen is 11.5' x 10.5' = 121 sqft = 5300 BTU = 1500 W = 6 feet.

Finally, the bathroom is 7' x 7' = 49 sqft = 2200 BTU = 750 W = 3 feet.

We don't actually want 8 feet of heater in the bedroom, because we only want about 6 feet under the window. And we don't want 6 feet in the kitchen, because the north wall is the stove and cabinets, and there's really only room for about 3 feet under the window (but we cook a lot; the kitchen will never be cold). To compensate, we'll put 6 feet into the hallway between the bedroom and the kitchen.

In the front room, we'll put 6 feet under the window, then the other 4 feet onto the north wall opposite.

There's good insulation in the carriage house attic; with the new double-glazed windows and a whole lot of caulk and Great Stuff urethane foam to stop all the drafts, I really think this is going to be a really cozy little building for us. If we cranked all the heaters to the max, our outlay would be around $300 per month - but that would bake even us out of here if the outside temperature were anything above 25 below.

I think this will work.

Roofs

2009-08-21T09:14:00.000-07:00

There's one thing I'm going to pay people to do - or two, really. That's roofs, and gutters. I have decided I'm just not cut out for getting on ladders, and until I build an access stairway to the roof, that means hiring help. Ha!

Anyway, so we brought in a contractor to quote us two sections of roof (I'll document them later; I'm running kind of late with the blogging lately). Then after we got that priced out, at a reasonable $3400 for the two parts needed on the big house, it rained a bunch.

Turns out the carriage house needs some work. Well, I thought I'd have another year or two on it, but uh-uh. It's at least twenty years old, if not older, and the shingles are basically gone.

But there's no money right now for that. So we're slapping a tarp on it, and maybe next year the money will be there. We shall see. In the meantime, I kind of like the blue look. What do you think? It's way better than waiting for the ceiling plaster to erode and fall on our heads, anyway.

Paint!

2009-08-16T17:06:00.000-07:00

We painted the wooden walls on the carriage house, which were put in place to cover up the garage doors. The wood is just a rough-surfaced plywood, so another year or so and it would have started to disintegrate; we put a coat of primer and a coat of barn and fence paint on it, both oil-based.

Dammit, Jim, I'm a bricklayer, not a surgeon!

2009-08-16T16:44:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned last time, the bricks were loose under the front window. So I mixed up way more mortar than I needed (well, I started with too much water, I think) and set to work.

Here are the tools I ended up using the most. You're actually supposed to use a big trowel (which you can see in my mortar bucket up there) but I found it far too ungainly. I'm sure if I were bricking up a wall of 10,000 bricks I'd appreciate being able to slap the mortar onto each one with a big trowel, but I'm just doing detail work here, and I found the smaller one much easier. The slightly S-shaped thing is a jointing tool, used for pushing mortar between bricks and for shaping the joint after the mortar has gotten "thumbprint hard".
I started at the left, and worked right. You can see this, to a certain extent, in the regularity of the mortar. It turns out that working with mortar is hard. My wife said, "I told you it was going to be hard!" To which I answered, "I told you it was going to be possible!" And it was, both.

The finished product, though, doesn't look half bad. It's not terribly straight, but - this is the important point - today, these bricks are no longer falling out. My next brickwork will be better, and this will be basically invisible, once the windowsill is in place.

What I learned about masonry: mortar dries fast. Also, bricks soak in moisture like little, heavy, clay sponges. I used my detergent bottle to squirt water on continually, but a sprayer would be better. I also kept adding water to my mortar in the bucket. It all hardened up fine, so this must have been OK.

You're supposed to put your mortar onto the bottom of the brick, and the end of the brick which will butt up against the last brick placed. When I tried this, the mortar fell off. So instead, I put the mortar onto the bottom, put the brick into place as quickly as possible, then sort of post-tuck-pointed the mortar between the bricks on the sides. Since the bricks are pretty solid today, this must have been OK.

Also, these bricks are actually too close together (not my fault, they're laid that way; I was just putting them back where they were). There were gaps of only about 1/8", instead of 3/8", which is the minimum jointing tool size, thus presumably the minimum normal gap between bricks. Anyway, this made it tough to get any mortar into the gaps.

So my first bricklaying endeavor seems to be at least good enough: the bricks aren't falling out. I call that a success.

I don't think it's supposed to do that

2009-08-07T12:47:00.000-07:00

So I started poking into the front window sills a little. After we tore out the sill, we found that it was leveled by inserting chunks of brick under it, then caking lots of mortar over the whole thing. Well, it worked for a long time, so I'm not arguing.

So I bought this vinyl windowsill profile to put in there, and decided to chip out the mortar to make room for it. It was kind of loose, though.
By the time I got done cleaning out loose mortar, the top row of bricks was out. So I think that probably needs to be fixed...

Aside on the front window

2009-08-06T21:54:00.000-07:00

So for the last week, House work has again come to a screeching halt, having been replaced by my tech hat. My wife will be teaching three classes this fall at the local colleges, and so it was the mandate that her old laptop, whose cooling fan has been making very worrisome noises lately, be phased out, while one of the other family laptops (the one normally used for Lego video games and YouTube searches for fan-made Transformers knock-offs) be co-opted, a new user created on it, and the latest in required software (meaning Office 2007, LaTeX, and the like) installed.

All of this duly complete, I got excited about Office 2007, installed it on my own laptop without thinking, and immediately realized that (1) Microsoft obviously didn't consider my macro collection important, deleting it without a trace, and (2) Word 2007 isn't compatible with TRADOS 7, my translation tool, and the budget can't afford an upgrade to TRADOS 7, and my old installation media for Word 2003 are mysteriously absent.

Havoc ensued. Fortunately, translation work was in a lull. So I did something I've wanted to do for a while now; I wrote a little Python COM object script that sits between Word and TRADOS and by-God forces compatibility by massaging the text segments on the Clipboard as they fly past. The jaw-droppingly amazing thing is that it actually worked, and only took about four hours to write. (Python just makes that stuff so ... not easy. Possible.) Oh, my goodness, but I have plans for that little object. But this is the wrong venue for that; I'm just explaining why no building has happened.

Except I tore the front plank off the post between the front windows. This "post" is actually a roughly square structure consisting of one-inch planks, and it's hollow, providing a place to hang the counterweights for the old window.

The problem is that it's none too stable, and doesn't really provide enough support for the pocket replacement windows, so I'm going to shore it up with some small pieces of 2x4 inside the hollow part, then insulate the entire thing with foam before closing it all back up and installing the windows for real. This has to happen on the sides of each window, too. And of course I still haven't addressed the fact that my dad and I ripped out the old sill. So the windows are more complicated.

Here's a picture of the counterweights themselves, just for historical reasons. Kind of neat; I'm keeping the weights.

So after pulling this plank out, so far I've left it hanging. My wife asked, "Um, so why did you pull out the middle of the window again?" So I started to tell her about the 27 8x10 color glossy photographs with circles and arrows on the back of each one in four-part harmony, and she stopped me right there and said, "Kid," she said, "Just put it all back together someday, OK?"

I live to serve.

Phone, and cleaning

2009-07-31T20:49:00.001-07:00

The landline was turned on today (to the carriage house) and, of course, the wire needed a little work. And it turned out that:

Two wires had come loose in the inside terminal box
The terminal box itself predated the new wiring, and so its cover could not be removed until I unstapled the arm-thick 50A-rated 6-3 cable to the stove and moved it out of the way
Where the phone line (and an old cable wire) enter the carriage house, there is an inch-wide gaping hole to the outside with no attempt to insulate or seal.

So it was par for the course. I moved the inside terminal box (shown in the photo in its new position), restripped and fastened the phone wires, restapled the stove cable, and vowed to visit that wire entry on my Big Sealing Project later this month.

Cleaning: the last of the major carriage house cleaning is now complete, after today's marathon push to finish the mopping of the ceiling and walls in the front room. I still don't really want to know what process could have scattered organic material so thoroughly and with such even distribution onto the walls and ceilings here; I am merely grateful that it comes off this excellent enamel paint so easily.

So. Progress today, however slight.

Updated plan

2009-07-28T15:50:00.000-07:00

Fourth post today: I know the planning posts are less fun, but for me they're the most useful, because they're my actual to-do lists I'm working from. The carriage house livability point is still the focus, although we're moving in on the big house, too, at this point (the books are living there, after all, and the WiFi access point).

Carriage house livability

Garage area livability

Remove superfluous fiberglass insulation from the ceiling and around heating ducts (we're going to heat the garage area, after all; we're living in it)
Drywall the south wall where the garage door used to be
Caulk everywhere, the previous owners had no idea about winterizing, it drives me berzerk, there's daylight all over the place
Some plaster patching where it'll do some good
More paint

Bathroom

Attach and plumb vanity
Touch up paint on walls and paint the trim

Windows

Front windows
Remaining two 28"x54" (kitchen and bathroom)
Trim on bedroom window and window 2

Cleaning

Finish mopping ceiling and walls in front room

Big house

Some more plumbing, perhaps the upstairs bathrooms
Cleaning
Winterization, a lengthy process
Heat

That's a pretty truncated big house list, but it's all still vague and just looming on the horizon.

Book storage

2009-07-28T14:22:00.000-07:00

So here's the first actual use of the big house for anything: the books are in the parlor. I'm telling people that we have a 760 square foot apartment with roughly 8000 square feet of storage.

South side yard, before and after

2009-07-28T13:56:00.000-07:00

The yard cleanup crew has moved beyond the back yard between the buildings, and is now encroaching on the main house. I don't have a really good before picture, but my picture of the south side from May shows a little of the now-absent disorder.

The lumber is from the remains of a dog fence that I took out yesterday. I started unscrewing the 2x4 cross-pieces, and the whole neighborhood ended up helping rip out the 4x4 posts. They were all pretty excited yesterday; the alligator that lives across the street had escaped and everybody got on the news.

Laundry!

2009-07-28T13:52:00.001-07:00

Success! My $50 Craigslist washer/dryer set is functioning perfectly (well, the dryer is really loud due to what sounds like a wobbly bearing, but it's functional, and whaddaya want for twenty-five bucks??).

This was the first actual improvement I've made so far. Everything else has just been refurbishment, i.e. replacing broken bits and cleaning. This is new functionality. It makes me inordinately proud.

Washer hookup functional!

2009-07-26T20:20:00.000-07:00

The dryer outlet's circuit breaker isn't installed yet (because I bought the wrong type of circuit breaker; they all look the same but are subtly different, and there are at least three types; mine are Square-D) - but other than that, the washer and dryer hookups are a go!

I glued the drain yesterday, then installed the trap for the utility sink this morning, and then the Building Muse took over and I cut and glued the entire plumbing to the washer hookup in one session lasting about four hours, time I really hadn't intended to spend on building today. Also, I had to visit Menard's because I ran out of 3/4" CPVC elbows (just one freaking elbow) - but as I had to return the circuit breaker and get the right one, that means I don't have to go tomorrow to get the dryer finished, so it all evens out in the end.

At 7 PM, after returning from a short hike with the kids and dog, I turned the water back on, and discovered only one leak - and that one not in a glued joint; I'm on a 100% roll on glued joints so far. The leak was in my homemade washer hookup.

I'm really pretty proud of this, even though it looks like a school project. I just bought the shutoff valves, drilled two holes in a bit of 2x4, and screwed the CPVC connectors onto the other side. The only problem was that the stem of the valve was juuust too short to make that final turn on the cold valve, and when I turned the water back on, it leaked copiously. So I scraped off a little wood on the bottom of the 2x4, and tightened the valve one more turn, and it was fine, crisis averted.

The only fly in this ointment is what my pictures haven't shown you yet: for some reason, there is a large hole in the floor around the drain stack, leaving me no easy way to put my washer and dryer there. I'm going to put some plywood there for now, but obviously at some point I'm going to want to fill in that hole and put concrete over it.

Dryer vent

2009-07-25T21:42:00.000-07:00

On the carriage house livability list, things are moving along, with the successful installation of the dryer vent today (along with gluing of the drain and installation of my washer hookup - not plumbed yet, but installed).

How to install a dryer vent:

1. Cut a hole in the wall where you want the vent. Check.

2. Drill through the other side of the wall, then go outside to find out where your hole is.

3. Fail to find hole.

4. Drill a hole from the outside at the measured point you expect the inside hole to be. Go inside to check where you came out.

5. Fail to find hole.

6. After much headscratching, realize that the wall is two layers thick - remember how the carriage house was built in 1909 of brick? And how its walls are therefore about a foot thick? The structure of this wooden wall, which replaced a garage-door thing, is plywood - insulation - more plywood - more insulation - third layer of plywood.

7. Go to Menards and buy a keyhole saw to cut out the hole in the middle layer of plywood.

8. Discover that the studs on the two layers don't line up. Now what are the odds that the more-or-less random spot I chose for my dryer vent should be precisely centered on a stud on the other side? See the hole I drilled?

9. Cut another damn hole three inches to the right. Plan to buy a little cover panel for this one.

10. Success! I can finally drill a hole from the outside that I can see on the inside. So cut out the hole on the outside.

11. Don't forget to lay a bead of caulk under the vent hood on the outside before fastening it to the wall.

12. Bask in the glory of your finished dryer vent!