amber waves of pine

The floors in the nursery/future master bath have been done for a month or so now, and they managed to become the longest single project in working on the space.  Longer than running the plumbing.  Longer than building (and unbuilding and rebuilding) walls.  Longer than stripping the woodwork.  Longer even than restoring the windows.

Yikes.

The story of the floors began when we bought the house.  Despite the absence of working roofs, plumbing or electrical, the bank decided that they also required us to finish the floors on the second floor under the terms of the 203k.  In this room, the floor was a mix of layers including vinyl sheet flooring, cat piss, 9 inch asbestos checkerboard tile, cat piss, two layers of marble contact paper, cat piss, black linoleum adhesive, cat piss, and the original faux grained painted border.  The cat piss issue is important since it almost caused us to walk away from the deal.  While the whole house was fairly saturated with urine, this room was by far the worst since it had the most exposed bare wood.  The first few inspections the weather was quite cold and wet and the smell/moisture wasn't obvious.  However, on the final walk through it was warm and dry and we could immediately see the wet pervading the floors - we thought we must have another leak from a mystery source until I put my nose to it....

So, we stripped the floor, did a quick sand and many soaks with the various urine destroying solutions and three coats of waterlox (not sufficient on pine, just enough to make them look doneish for the bank).  Now the intention was to be able to come back later, scuff sand the floor and put of a few more coats of waterlox.  The reality is that my roofer decided I was not capable of sanding the floors on my own and did me the enormous favor of coming in with his edger and sanding the edges - gauging them so badly that fixing them to be level with the rest of the floor would take off half the sandable wood.  So that's how they sat for 3 years.

At 8 months pregnant the room was done enough for me to revisit the floor, so I conned my friends into carrying the big ez sand  machine up the stairs for me and joyously got to work.  Only to stop 10 minutes later after realizing the machine had a metal burr on one of the sanding pad bases that etched curlicues deep into my pine.  I may have cried.  I swear it wasn't the hormones.

The manager at Home Depot did what he could to help the crazy pregnant woman, and ended up giving me over $100 dollars worth of sanding disks for my handheld Dewalt because I decided I was going to do the floors BY HAND.  I almost finished them too, and then Toren arrived two weeks early.  

After a month and a half of recovery I was ready to revisit the floors.  The room had been locked up, covered in sawdust, with our closet tarped off (yes, we had no access to our closet for two months when we had planned on a week).  Finished the 80, did the 120, spent two days dental picking the gaps between the boards and vacuuming and was finally ready for Waterlox 2.0.

It went down beautifully.  And there is much evidence of the whole menagerie memorialized in the floor... The first two coats are Minwax red oak and dark walnut (8 oz each in a gallon of waterlox), with three more coats of straight waterlox.  And given I was doing this with windows open in early December I think I owe global warming a big thank you!

the future master bath

There are times when words just don't cut it, and I'm afraid the last post was one of those times.  So, floor plans, drawn just poorly enough to still be useful!

First, here's how the room was originally...  The largest bedroom in the house, southwest exposure (stunning in the evenings), overlooking the original front of the house all the way down the hill which used to be part of it's estate (now filled with small infill 20's homes).  Judging by the size and masculine fireplace, I'd guess that this was Mr. Kelly's room.  His wife Agnes' likely adjoined on the left (our current master, and the smallest of the main bedrooms) given the art nouveau fireback, gas sconces, lincrusta, tower and feminine wallpapers.

Next, the room as it was when we bought the house...  Drop ceilings, no working electrical or plumbing, leaking badly, saturated with cat piss and missing moldings.  What else, hearth tile missing where the wall was built on top, rotted corner where they had ripped out a window and not properly closed up the hole, missing flooring and burst pipes from the radiator freezing when the house was empty, caving in plaster and badly damaged double hung windows.  I'm sure there's more, but that's enough to give me nightmare flashbacks.  It's also the list for most every room in the house I suppose.

And now...

If you know me at all, you know making these changes upset me.  After the indignities this house has suffered there is nothing it deserves more than a true restoration.  At the same time, even though we plan on being carried out feet first, we have to think of the house's future, and insure that there is no excuse for future travesties.  It's unlikely that future owners will have need of 9 bedrooms, or be able to fit their clothes in an armoire in the bedroom, so some changes are inevitable.  In the case of this room, it was the only one with access to plumbing, or that lent itself to being split up.  On the plus side, no structural changes are being made, and we've restored a hidden window and added a stained glass window.  Is it a net gain?  Probably not...  But a second floor laundry is certainly all it's cracked up to be, and having a decent shower in the distant future won't be so bad either...

An addition to these plans is Ross' fantastic entry - woe that we couldn't have made it work without major expenditures.  It also brought an issue to my attention - the basis for these drawings were done years ago now, there is in fact NO WINDOW next to the bay window in the bathroom.  It was theorized at the time, and historical photos have proved we theorized wrong.

timber!

Just a brief update between chopping up the tree that came down last week.  While I'm more than a bit disgruntled to be wasting the time when there are so many other things to be working on, I should be grateful.  What came down was directly in between the schoolhouse and the fire pit, and nearly on top of our stored roof slate.  Other than an impaled plastic chair and a cracked cinder block, nothing was harmed, not even the antique iron lantern that was still standing after the tree fell AROUND it.  Mind boggling....

                 

Another plus?  The new chainsaw we had bought and given up on as hopelessly broken three years ago (and forgotten to return) was able to be coaxed back to life now that we know considerably more about repairing tools.  It's nice to know the chainsaw is back in our arsenal.

As far as work on the house itself, we decided the now fully walled and insulated third floor can wait till cooler weather for floor finishing and painting.  Instead, we've turned our attention to the future master bath which adjoins our bedroom.  As I've mentioned before, it was the largest and most beautiful bedroom in the house when it was built.  When we bought the house it was saturated with cat urine (badly enough that we thought it was a mystery leak and almost walked away from the deal), chopped up with walls going across the fireplace tile and had a dropped ceiling -all this on top of the issues every room in the house had with water damage and abuse.

 For now it's just storage, and aside from partitioning the room with the laundry and walk-in closet, and a quick pass on the floors, nothing's been done.  We're many years from affording the bathroom, so for now the room needs some additional plaster repair, a temporary box built over the exposed laundry room plumping, trim and paint stripping.  All of these are in progress - finished is boxing in and blue boarding the plumbing (plastering will happen in the next couple of weeks.  Not exciting unless it's your house I suppose, but I guess that's the case with most things I do and write.  Boxing in the plumbing actually turned into a monumental task after a tiny leak was discovered coming from the washer plumbing.  We thought we were going to have to rerun the pipes, only to discover the leak was coming from the hook-up box in the wall.  Trying to repair that leak lead to the Watts Intelliflow emergency shut off malfunctioning, i.e. no laundry right before having house guests, and a few weeks of back and forth with them to figure out exactly which part was broken.  Thankfully, all fixed now.

As part of the work, we stuffed all the exposed cavities with Roxul Safe and Sound to mitigate the noise from the laundry and bathroom - the difference is amazing, even with the door to the bathroom open and the broken stained glass window on the laundry wall.  Well worth the $50 we spent on the bag, and I'm glad local stores have starting carrying it.

With all this rain we've been having, the yard isn't the only thing growing like a weed, Maugrim is 9 months old and around 90 pounds.  He finally met a dog bigger than him the other day, and wasn't quite sure what to make of him.  

happy birthday to me

Actually my birthday was several days ago, but architectural pieces seem to be the gift that keeps on giving...

Before we left for Chicago a couple of weeks ago, a mantel showed up on craigslist.  While the lower section was quite plain, the overmantel was a spectacular aesthetic movement piece with a rainbow shaped beveled mirror, fretwork and floral carving.  My original overmantels were likely something similar (although ghost marks indicate they were substantially larger).  The price was far higher than anything I could afford, but I sent off my usual e-mail then put it out of mind.  After all, I had plans to hit all the salvage stores in Chicago and was hoping to find something to bring back.  Well, the salvage yards, while great, had nothing to offer me, so I was amazed when just a week later the owner of the mantel accepted my offer.

photo from craigslist

I was momentarily terrified when she said the mirrors would have to be replaced (I was certain they had been broken as the mantel was being removed, but luckily she just thought the foxing was undesirable.  Having to replicate that mirror would cost more than I paid for the mantel!

Not surprisingly, the house it came from was beautiful, and I'm more than a little sad that I'm responsible for making it less so (but if I didn't buy it, someone else would have I suppose).  The icing on the cake was that the majolica tile was falling off the wall, and she happily gave it all to us so she didn't have to pay her contractor to remove it.  We've attempted to salvage tile from a number of houses that were being demolished and have never had much luck - meanwhile, we were able to get 95% of these off intact with just a putty knife...

Now a disclaimer, I must have worn my camera out in Chicago because these pictures are terrible, but if I keep putting things off I swear I'll never post anything.

Despite the work remaining in the room, it's certainly a far cry from where it started...

listing photo

chim chiminey

well, hello...

Have you ever had a nightmare it which you're frantically trying to do something, but everything's moving in impossibly slow motion?  That's been the past few weeks here.  Slow.  As.  Sludge...

But there are people on my roof now, we saw the Decemberists a few nights ago, and the chimney is done.  Betcha didn't even know we were working on the chimney eh?  Well, we have been.  For months.

We're lucky enough to still have all five original chimneys, 4 on the main 1886 house, and one on the 1890's kitchen addition.  All were in danger of collapse when we bought the house, and we rebuilt the four main ones immediately because they tied into the slate roof work and flashing.  Not to mention had they collapsed they would have done major damage to the new roof and gutters.

The one on the end of the kitchen wing on the other hand was willfully ignored.  We weren't working on that section of roof yet, and other than someone parking under it, nothing would be harmed if it came down of its own accord.  Unfortunately, the spalling bricks impacted the plaster walls all the way down, but that damage was done long before we came into the picture.

the moss is a nice touch isn't it?  This is not what the inside of a chimney should look like!

So long story short, we met a new mason, he was willing to do our bidding (it's quite a bit harder than you'd think to find people willing to use the proper materials for restoration), and he didn't think we were strange for wanting to put our "collection" up top.  You see, when the top of this chimney had partially collapsed before we bought the house, it lost it's massive sandstone cap, which would have been very expensive to reproduce.  It was also the ugly stepsister to our other chimneys.  So, two house demolitions and one freecycle pickup later (all over the four plus years we've been here), and the forgotten chimney has a bit of eclectic British charm.

nicely bedded down in 4 inches of mortar

Perhaps the happiest part of all this is seeing yet more of my "clutter" get incorporated into the house and out of the way.  Unless you're in the enviable position of being Scrooge McDuck, the only way to tackle a massive project like this is to grab materials as you find them, even if it means storing them for years.  Yes, your friends and family may seek professional help for you (even though in this case I am a professional), but just remember, they're not the ones taking on an impossible project (I mean, if they truly cared they'd offer to pay right?).

two years

Two years seems awfully long for something I started on a whim, but yes, I've been writing this blog for two years and we've been chained to this house for over four years now.  I still can't manage to keep up with what's going on here, let alone everything we worked on before I started writing (most of that was just me running around screaming looking for the next leak, but whatever).

That said, I feel like I owe you the truth.  I've done a terrible thing.  I actually HIRED someone to do work I'm perfectly capable of doing myself.  I'm ashamed.  And overjoyed.  The last of the destroyed rooms (and then some) will be done in the next month or so by our lovely plasterer (I'll admit, I let him do the staircase ceiling two years ago).  

most of the plaster under that wallpaper was missing or rotted out

That plastic sheet was one of many water funneling
devices designed to get water down the stairs

50's (?) era plaster board that had never even been finished,
which illustrates how long our house has been derelict

These include the two biggest bedrooms on the third floor, the recently opened up butler's pantry, and maybe the back of the laundry room if we have enough materials left over.  The reality is that I taught myself how to do three coat and veneer plaster when we bought the house, and I did all of the work on the first and second floors.  We lied to the bank and told them the third floor was "just attic," and convinced them not to force us to finish it before closing out the 203k loan we were required to have to get a mortgage.  There was simply not enough time or money to have done the work up here in the 9 month time frame the bank gave us.  

Three years later, the thought of doing two more destroyed rooms brings me near tears, and while I did a bunch of smaller plastering jobs on the third floor over the past year, I haven't been able to bring myself to start in those rooms.  So our house has been wide open, bags of insulation for the attic have filled up two rooms since the first winter we've lived here (you can't blow in insulation when you have no ceilings as I keep having to remind people), my white cat is brown from sleeping in the sooty eave spaces and our house is an uncleanable dust bowl.  

In addition to not having to do the plastering myself, lets face it, not having to carry 27 sheets of blueboard and many 50 pound bags of plaster up to the third floor is worth paying for.  Even better, I'm not the one that will be cleaning plaster buckets in arctic temperatures.  

I'll be scraping the last of the wallpaper, washing the walls we're patching, and doing the last bits of demo, insulating and adding nailers over the next few days while the plasterer finishes up the butler's pantry.  Too bad we didn't have this all done a few weeks ago before the sub-zero temps moved in.  Better late than never I suppose.  It just means I'll be spending the first weeks of good weather insulating a pitch black attic instead of playing in the dirt and sunshine.  

paint by the foot

These past few days have been beautiful, and it looks like we'll be getting more of the same in the upcoming week.  I've been using the time to wrap up some painting I started much earlier in the summer - the plan had been to be much further along, but sick dogs, a spike in paying work and a troublesome neighbor managed to throw a wrench in those plans.

This part of the house was in wretched condition when we bought it.  A window had been removed, and the hole filled with fiberglass insulation covered with a piece of plywood.  The rotted built-in gutter and leaking downspout were pouring directly into the hole, which made a lovely spongy home for a colony of carpenter ants.  On the interior, this space had been walled off from the rest of the bedroom to form a kitchen of sorts, with a collapsing drop ceiling and a nice 50's steel sink cabinet that had never been installed.

and yes, they removed tile to build that wall...

braving the plywood and temporary tar paper

We have no idea why this window was removed, although I did pull out pieces of broken glass from under the floorboards - our best guess is that it's one of the windows used to fill in the doorway and stained glass window in the original entry from when the house was divided and the entry moved.  We think the other window in the entry came from our office - which has a little wood replacement window.  When we restore the entry we'll move the two windows in there to these two spots - for now I'll count my blessings that I found a used replacement window with the perfect dimensions at the Habitat Restore for $15.  While I'm usually the first to expound on the evils of vinyl, there's a time and a place for everything.

When we installed the window we jerry-rigged a new sill and trim that will be replaced when we re-install the correct window.  Since the restored window will be slightly different dimensions, it didn't make much sense to spend too much time or money on it.  Same goes for the cedar shingles, we replaced what we had to when we put in the window, but the rest are at the end of their lifespan and will get dealt with later.

None of this had been painted, caulked, stained or primed though, so three years later I conned the flying monkey into helping me set up some scaffolding.  Convincing him wasn't too hard being that water was making it's way in through the un-caulked window.  Half a tube of Sika-flex bronze later, this section of the house is water tight (why can't they make a brick color though!).  Many hours of scraping, sanding and filling later and I was able to prime everything, although it wasn't until yesterday that I actually got paint up.  

the flashing had to be re-glued and clamped

primed, stained and caulked

two months for 15 feet of trim...

from the inside, just need to finish plastering

 Hopefully this slow progress isn't how the rest of the painting will go, on the other hand, I bought scaffolding casters, which may have been my best idea ever.