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Tastic posted:Wow that's a really sweet home. Have you checked to see if the fireplace works yet? Nothing worse than having a fireplace that isn't working. As the co-owner and BFF of Koivunen I'll field this one. The fireplace unfortunately is nothing but a decoration at this point. I doubt it has been used in the past 40 years. The decorative metal enclosure is loose from the wall and there is no working damper. I'd imagine if we used it in it's current state we would have smoke pouring out through the bricks and into the walls. When it isn't maintained the mortar in the bricks gets pretty iffy. That said, maybe a year from now we will tackle that, Its not exactly a "do it yourself" project but maybe we wont have to pay someone to do the entire job. PooBoots posted:A note about stripping paint off the woodwork with a heat gun: You *have* tested the paint to make sure it isn't lead-based, right? Otherwise you're going to be breathing lead vapours. As a rule, all paint that could have been applied before 1970 (I think) should be considered lead-based. Actually I'm sure it is lead paint. In some areas using a chemical stripper is unavoidable. Areas around the window sills and panes of glass can't be heated as they will crack very easily. Heavy ventilation in the way of fans and open windows as well as a lead and asbestos rated respirator is the way to go there. For heat guns, Lead wont vaporize until it gets hotter than 1100 degrees. We are using heat guns rated below this temperature so it isn't really unsafe at all. Still, ventilation and masks are advised.
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Aug 14, 2012 03:23
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CroatianAlzheimers posted:The midwest I reckon. I live in one of the inner-ring suburbs of Detroit and homes, nice homes mind you, in my neighborhood are going from between 25,000 and 50,000 dollars. Very close. If you go on Awful year book you could easily find out so I don't mind saying. We are In Duluth Minnesota on the very nose of Lake Superior. This city at one point had the highest number of millionaires per Capita than anywhere in the world (this during a time when being a Millionaire was even more unthinkable for most of us than it is today. The craftsmen that were attracted by the building boom of the early 1900s were the best in the world, and you can really see it in some of the old homes that haven't been bastardized with vinyl siding and whatever other modern innovations people have tacked on to older homes. You can buy what would be considered mansions on the coast for 100,000 dollars here. Not joking really. We were going to buy an old victorian fraternity mansion for 75k, four stories, huge fireplaces, a really crazy place, but decided it was just too much work. This house was originally built by a well to do Swedish merchant family. They moved back to Sweden right after it was built. Original cost? 6,500 dollars. If you go by inflation, Thats about how much we paid for it in today's money. Duluth's population is about exactly the same as it was in 1906 so I suppose in a roundabout way it makes sense. Rodnik fucked around with this message at 02:41 on Aug 15, 2012 |
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Aug 15, 2012 02:38
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t_violet posted:Wow, that almost makes me wanna cry. I paid almost 4 times that for a house that's probably a quarter in size (so I got, what, 1/16th house for my money?) that was built in 1925 but doesn't have any of the amazing architectural details y'all's does. Location, location, location. But I'll be interested in seeing y'all's improvements. Hey, if you feel you are getting the utility out of it and you love your home and the place you live, that's all the matters in the end! Not an Anthem posted:Wow, looks (except for the barn style) EXACTLY like my old house in Rochester, NY. Same lovely paneling and problems but there was gold underneath it. Same horrible stained glass too. Wait, you don't like the stained glass? Or is that sarcasm? Stained glass rocks, especially when the window looks out at your neighbor's wall.
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Aug 20, 2012 07:07
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Blistex posted:Just love the trim in that place. . . not so much the nicotine coating. You're doing an amazing job, and although I'm not a fan of the colours you've picked (just personal taste) it's miles better than what was there to begin with. Keep the updates coming! I love a success story. Watch "This Old House"? I've been watching it since I was like 2 years old. Hopefully some of it has rubbed off. Yeah, nobody likes the colors when they see them in pictures or have them described. We have heard plenty about it. When you see it in person it's really quite nice though, it feels very warm. I did notice after we painted though, that with the white trim, we look like the inside of an Irish Pub...neither of us are Irish.
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Oct 23, 2012 16:44
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Authentic You posted:My dad has been nagging me to buy my ratty dream Victorian for a while now (despite the fact that I'm way too poor), and advising buying an extra big, extra ratty one with tenants already in it. So many houses here have been chopped up into apartments, which makes them even more insane fixer-uppers, but way more affordable through rent income. We were going to do this, and we found a pretty great place for 130K that was a gigantic victorian with a huge turret with a sunroom overlooking the lake on the top floor, but it being our first house buying experience, we thought the prospect of fixing that place up a bit too daunting. If home prices stabilize at this level I could see us buying a huge drafty Victorian in the next four years. I hope you end up finding your dream place.
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Oct 26, 2012 20:34
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Aw, I was going to suggest you go with the cement board, I've seen a few homes done with it and it really does look excellent. I even prefer the 1940s-70s asphalt shingle siding next to vinyl, that is how much I hate it. We live in Minnesota so there is no shortage of lumber around here and if you were to side your home in pine or cedar it isn't that expensive. How much would it cost for pine siding by the foot there? And hey don't worry about being a heretic, there isn't really a thread dedicated to fixing up old homes so post as much as you want here.
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Nov 6, 2012 07:20
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If you find something you like the look of, then that is all that matters. Around here pretty much every house that has gone over to vinyl has chosen grey-blue or tan siding and it's tiresome to look at. Another complaint I have is that if its improperly or cheaply installed it looks warped and and wavy. Maybe the contractors in our area just do a terrible job. I'd kill for a woodshop or any workspace at all. Its not easy getting materials into an already cramped basement.
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Nov 7, 2012 00:01
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Blistex posted:Cheap vinyl, even when properly installed looks warped and wavy because it's super thin. It's the kind of stuff that shatters when a snowball hits it, or starts to droop if you BBQ within 30 feet of it. Contractors love to install it because they cut costs, and most subdivisions are wall to wall cheap stuff. Well that is at least refreshing to know. Kind-of.
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Nov 7, 2012 10:49
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Yeah things are getting pretty soap boxy. Koivunen and I are just aesthetic purists I guess. Some real estate developers were going to demolish a Frank Lloyd Wright home in Arizona a month ago and I almost had a heart attack and I worried about it for days on end. I get pretty militant about this stuff. I feel as though, when you buy an old home that was built before cranes and machine tools, you are literally inheriting the hard work and sweat of the people who built it. In the older neighborhoods of America, these were tradesmen and professionals who lived before the era of constant entertainment and television. Their lives were their craft, literally, they had their craft, and their family. Sure you paid your own good money for it, but you aren't really an owner, you are a custodian of the land and the structures built on it. In our town, so many opportunists buy up old properties and rent them out, and do absolutely nothing to enhance the value, or improve the home. They just subdivide them to make them convenient for rental and place an ad in the paper. After 40 years of people not giving a poo poo and just treating homes as temporary places to live and then passing them onto the next person, our neighborhoods might as well just be bulldozed and turned into trailer-parks and high rises. For people who actually put work into the places they buy, good on you, and whether you slap in some vinyl windows to save on heating costs, or you spend countless hours researching and finding great contractors and suppliers, at least you are taking some amount of pride in the place you call home and doing the best with what you can afford.
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Nov 8, 2012 09:56
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Yeah, historic districts are tricky. If you can't handle the price of the renovations to the standard of the council you really shouldn't buy a home in a historic district. I don't want to sound like a dick after the fact, but what attracted you to the historic neighborhood in the first place? If it was the historic charm, that charm is maintained by the council, and compliance is a pretty big responsibility.
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Nov 9, 2012 07:47
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Seat Safety Switch posted:Even my '89 house is going to get a pretty big dose of insulation next summer (hopefully with less vermiculite involved). Whose blue truck is that in the yard picture? That thing is awesome but I can't make out what it is. That would be my 1962 International Scout. The front end has a welded on plow mount and its missing the original grill. One of my poorer decisions of this past year. It needs way more work than I had originally thought. I was driving it around town during the summer but in September the wiring literally caught on fire and none of the lights work. A man can still dream, and I hope to get it functional again sometime in the next year. Working on a car is a bit more expensive than I thought. Koivunen has been saintly in not ridiculing me too much about it. A small but welcome blessing. On the house: Insulating an older house without a vapor barrier is tricky business and after researching like crazy I've pretty much realized without tearing out the walls entirely there isn't much you can do. The house was built to breath, so moisture from the inside escapes through the walls and damp doesn't rot away the wood framing. You can't use loose fill insulation as that will just get damp and dry out poorly, leading to all sorts of nasty side effects. I've heard some people recommend closed cell foam insulation, but you need to use the low expansion stuff so you don't pop out the walls and then that makes rewiring in the future tricky because you can't feed wired through the walls without cutting huge holes all over the place. The closed cell will also trap moisture in the house even though it doesn't absorb moisture. The best we can do at this stage is insulate the attic space as we have, and then insulate the basement and the spaces where the sub floor meets the wall as best we can. One problem with the shape of our roof, is that there is no way to get insulation under the portion of the roof that has the steepest pitch, and even if we did somehow stuff insulation in there, it would block the airflow in the attic and again cause moisture problems. I love this house, but old construction techniques are like PCs and newer technologies are like Macs, they speak different languages and are incompatible. Rodnik fucked around with this message at 13:38 on Dec 24, 2012 |
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Dec 24, 2012 13:16
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