mired

Just a few updates...  The onset of another week of cool wet weather means I've resumed my contortions in the eaves.  I had hoped to finish today, but the discovery of my cat in there with me, and her subsequent retreat deep into the bowels of the house meant that finishing would risk trapping her in there, so, I didn't.  Fie.  Stripping the kitchen built-in continues to suck my soul dry, there is really no end in sight on that front.

6 of these paneled doors to go

Today found us heading out to a rather fantastic estate sale.  We missed these by 15 minutes... *sob*

antique electroliers, 300 for the lot of 6 with shades

And saw things like boxes of antique Steiff stuffed animals leaving as we went in.  We didn't do too badly though.  Some nice hardware, a tall turned floor lamp, some art and such, books (including P.T. Barnum's, Thirty Years of Hustling) and a lovely huge porch swing. But we left some troops behind folks...

antique china low tank toilet under the barn

That would be an antique china low tank toilet under the barn.  I saw it long after they had wanted to leave for the day, and while they were happy to let me crawl under there to rescue it, it had sunk deep into the mud.  There was simply no way for me to dredge it out with what little time I had.  So I have a humble request for all you locals.  Please save her.  It'll be there waiting Saturday for you, keeping company with the house's original huge multi-light windows.  Bring a trowel and don't wear heels... I promise the house is worth seeing too, you know, if original Victorian kitchens are your thing....

http://pittsburgh.craigslist.org/gms/4471131492.html

I spy a tub like mine!

waterworks

I haven't taken much in the way of photos over the past week, so I'll dig back a month into the archives for today's offering. I've mentioned my affliction/affection for antique plumbing before, and this sink was my most recent acquisition.

The sink that came with the house was an early, but somewhat plain pedestal sink that was badly rusted out.

Although I had intended to restore it, the truth is I can replace it with another antique sink much more cheaply - if it were original I'll shell out the cash, but I doubt it is. To fulfill our 203k obligations we had to make this bathroom operational, so we picked up another vintage pedestal sink with working taps on Freecycle to serve in the interim. Those taps had started to fail, and the bad refinishing job on the sink (not our doing) was only getting worse, so when I saw this sink for $50 on craigslist I jumped on it. Of course it wasn't the sink I was interested in, it was those lovely nickel taps...

The sink is an antique barber's sink, that upper middle nozzle is for a hand sprayer attachment which we don't have. Thankfully, tightening those threads shut off the water flow, although it still makes an awful whistling noise we have yet to remedy. Although the sink itself is rather plain Jane (and will likely get replaced when we decide to have the faucet replated), the soap dish is supremely awesome in that it has an integral drain that connects to the main drain. Very cool... Of course simply hooking it up would have been too simple, naturally it leaked from every conceivable spot - I almost wish I had a picture of the waterworks, but you'll just have to imagine the mess on your own. Since there is really no good tutorial on repairing these (let alone picture of the process), I'll bite the bullet and do my best to describe what we did. The article that guided us initially can be found in this Old House Journal Article - it provides the terminology that you'll need to tell your friends what you did with your weekend, you're welcome.

Remove the handle by unscrewing the screw on the end of it (yours may have a cap that needs to be popped off), then use a wrapped wrench to remove the nut.

Take pictures of what you find, usually a decayed washer and/or packing if there have been previous repair attempts.

Put the handle back on and gently wiggle/unscrew as though you were turning on the faucet to loosen the stem. Once it is able to go past the normal on position it should come out easily - this was the hardest part - looking at it you'd have sworn this was all one piece. We used pb blaster and a needle to break up and remove the grime.

Once we got the stem out we cleaned everything, and tracked down the appropriate washers/screws. Skip the big box stores and go directly to a plumbing supply if you have a truly old faucet like we did.

Place the new washer after thoroughly cleaning off the old gunk (tweezers, q-tips, whatever it takes)

Screw in either the original screw if it was in good condition, or a new brass screw

Coat the stem and threads in the lube, this will make the handle easy to turn.

Use the handle to screw the stem back into the seat

Neatly wrap the packing

Use thread dope and carefully place the nut over the packing, then fully tighten.

After the last nut has been tightened, reinstall the handle, making sure it's positioned in it's desired off positioned before screwing it back in.

If there are any other leaking connections unscrew and pack/use thread dope as necessary.

Smile, you're done. Take an "after" picture that doesn't show the item in question...

Penelope the towel wench

Our third floor bath seems to have taken a decidedly nautical theme.  Meet Penelope.  She holds towels.

I'm not entirely sure if she's a Victorian original, but she's solid brass, weighs a ton and came out of an old house (Van Dykes Restorers has the reproduction of her here).  She's somewhat grotesque to be perfectly honest, and reminds me of a ship's figurehead - which is obviously fitting given our predilection for pirates.  Paired with an antique double wall-hung livery sink (with original brass fuller taps), navy paint, and a brass and nickel mirror with medicine cabinet (perhaps from a barbershop?) and we have the beginnings of a theme. 

I think this shower curtain will help...

From Urban Outfitters

Now here's to hoping we can find this stuff when we actually start working on this bathroom years from now, because right now, this is the space in question...

that sinking feeling

So with all the talk of schoolhouses and trees and foundations, let me demonstrate how my little scatterbrained self operates, "Oh no," she says "my paint strippers have eaten through the craptastic $99 vanity the previous owner installed! And it's just a week until 60 people descend upon my house, they won't eat my food if they think I wash things in this sink! I'd better just rip it out, I have all the parts to assemble the new one anyway!"

more vinyl to remove, the bracket on the floor is from the long
gone pedestal sink, and while ruining the sink was my fault,
that disgusting clog has nothing to do with me

About two years ago, in my search for antique exterior crown molding I came across an artist who was as obsessed with architectural salvage as I am, only he had a warehouse. Most of what he had stashed there wasn't for sale, but he liked to sell what he didn't plan to use to fund more purchases. In addition to piles of nearly the exact trim I needed, I brought home bundles of beadboard, some miscellaneous hardware, and a rather glorious old sink, although it's original purpose is unclear. A few readers that have seen my basement in person know that I am a hoarder of old porcelain (at one point I had no less than six enormous antique sinks in my basement), but this sink trumps all the others in that it's china, and that it was made the same year as my house was built.

AFO, brand, initials, anyone know?

When I bought it I saw that drain wise it would take 2 modern kitchen sink drains (literally the most important thing other than condition, at worse, you can use a single tap faucet, but without a drain you don't have much of a sink). Despite the fact that we could have used single tap faucets (which it may have had originally), the trained monkey is a fan of warm water (as opposed to hot and cold), so we had a bit of a standoff. Enter DEA Bathroom Machineries - a few years ago they produced an adjustable width bridge faucet, where the bridge sections could be cut down as needed to fit unusual antique sinks like this one. When I first contacted them (best customer service anywhere by the way, they respond to crazy people like me right away via e-mail, even when I'd never bought anything from them) they said they'd be producing it in a few additional finishes in the following year, including the raw brass I was interested in, so I decided to wait, because faucets are expensive. I randomly checked their website a month ago, and to my horror couldn't find the faucet. I finally tracked it down in the clearance section, where they had one left in oil rubbed bronze with flaws to the casting/finish. In a panic I e-mailed to find out what was going on and was told this was the last one available as California had passed new lead laws. Needless to say I ordered it (it being 2/3 off the original price was a plus). As it turns out, it had no flaws what-so-ever, and it was a beautiful antique brass color.

So now we had a sink and a faucet, and as it turns out we had a base too, in the form of a machineless iron Singer sewing machine base. I'd like to say these three things were instant friends, but I'd be lying. The faucet is designed to be deck mounted, not wall mounted, so we had to knock out some drywall behind the sink to accommodate the supply lines. The drains were also a bit reluctant to play nice, the bottom of the sink was nearly too thick for standard drains, and too irregular for a good seal with the drains designed for fireclay sinks. After much cursing and saying it couldn't be done, we got it done, but we have a convoluted mess of pvc underneath which will hopefully be less of an eyesore when painted black. If we ever find a decent plumber the pvc will be tossed in favor of brass or copper.

All this, just so our house guests could wash their hands . . .
And no, DEA Bath has no clue who I am, or that this blog exists...

march of the clawfoots . . .

Tonight we did something that we don't do much of around here, we went out. We socialized with strangers and drank beer for God's sake. What was the occasion that we left our dark hovel you ask? It was for Ron Tanner's (of Houselove.org and From Animal House to Our House) talk at our local reuse store, Construction Junction. While the talk was nothing I hadn't seen and heard before, it was lovely to be out and talk to people for a change, especially since with the storms we have no foundation and still have a tree in the way. Local beer and good cheese soothes the troubled soul . . .

While we wait for the big stuff we're in a bit of a holding pattern. We will have a house full of guests in about a month, and it doesn't look like we'll have the schoolhouse up like we planned, which is hugely disappointing. It also means we won't we able to re-stash everything in it like we had planned, which makes cleaning up "complicated" . . . Although I'm not one to solicit advice, with people commenting regularly (which makes me giddy, so thank you) I'll be brave enough to ask for some tips - how have you managed guests (let alone made them comfortable) in a house that's torn asunder, with all the filth and clutter that goes along with it?

Now that I've begged you for advice, want to see something that two people shouldn't be able to do on their own?

Luke is modeling his top of the line tarp-on-the-roof tin 
protecting the clawfoot dog bed

behold, a tub

these feet were made for walking

we put clawfoot in a corner

We were given this tub shortly after we bought the house, stashed it in that corner, tarped it, and haven't looked at it since. Even worse, that corner has been full of stuff since the day we first looked at the house, stuff that hasn't been touched in 2.5 years. Cleaning it out revealed 3 enormous multi-pane windows, trash, a huge bimini top, trash, a vintage rolling edger, trash, trash and more trash. The windows are awesome though . . .

revenge of the open windows

With all the gorgeous weather we've been having I took it upon myself to open some windows and put in our window fans a few days ago, so it goes without saying that this cold snap is my fault, and is mother nature's revenge for my audacity. Between the cold, and my stubbornness about not closing the windows and turning the heat back on I haven't done too much other than throw temper tantrums about misbehaving projects. Instead, lets take a look at an old project that's somewhat completed (for now at least).

When we bought the house we had passed off the 1st floor bath as a modern addition, as it was one of two rooms with drywall, and was a vinyl monstrosity (albeit a small one), and was carved from space stolen from both the dining room and front parlor (we could see traces of the coved and stenciled ceiling when we tore down the drop ceiling to work on plumbing, sadly I can't find those pictures, and the ceiling has already been patched).

At the same time, it had a working toilet and shower (some of the only working plumbing in the house), which made it possible to hole up in a few rooms on the first floor while we tackled the rest of the house. We had asked the heirs that were selling the house if there had been anything of note to the bathroom before they remodeled it, to which they said no. So imagine my surprise when the pink toilet failed a few months ago (the pink toilet was installed used by the people selling the house), and in the process of replacing it I found a surprise under the rotting sheet vinyl under the toilet.

Umm, hello hex tile. What are you doing in my cheap 90's bathroom? Needless to say the vinyl came up (or is still coming up actually, we haven't pulled out the vanity yet). Came up may be a generous term though, as they used concrete floor leveler over the top of it - luckily hex tile's pretty indestructible and nonporous, so it hasn't minded my hammer and chisel. Sadly, it turns out that a good portion of the floor happens to be in the backyard.

For some reason they removed chunks of the hex tile (and the six inches of mortar it sat in) and chucked them in the backyard - funnily enough I was using the chunks of concrete (the pieces were upside down) as places to sit while I dug up a bathrooms' worth of baby blue, yellow and black tiles from Mt. Trashmore in the backyard (I assume they came from this bathroom, hence the newly sheetrocked walls, however I just started finding original subway tiles in the pit, so who knows?). Had I bothered to turn over any of those pieces I would have ripped up the bathroom long before I did looking for their origin . . .

Even though I knew I could grind out the concrete that had been used to level the floor and retile those sections, the plan is to eventually rip out this side of the bathroom and return it to the parlor. Instead, I got busy with the sharpies . . .

That's right, I drew hex tiles. First I scrubbed the concrete, then matched a white floor paint to the hex tile, then bought five gray and silver sharpies and went to town. It took a disgusting amount of time, and there's a good chance I could have retiled it more quickly - things to keep in mind next time you want to draw your floor . . . I sealed it with clear polyacrylic, and it has held up well (obviously no one's walking back in that corner). Here's where we're at today - the mirror is a story in and of itself, so I'll save that for another day!