Interior insulated shutters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.