Drainage again: dry well

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!