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Hello there, fellow goon homeowners! My fiance and I closed on our first house two weeks ago, so we are very new to this homeownership thing, and excited and terrified at the same time. The house in question is a 1910 Victorian largely in its original state, which is both good and bad - good because we're not dealing with decades of fuckups and shoddy/ugly work by previous owners and we have pretty much all the original details intact, and bad because that leaves the major updating to us. Our apartment lease goes for another few months, so we won't be moving in till late summer. This gives us some time to fix some stuff before we move in, which is nice. We're only a mile and half from it (just the next neighborhood over) so it's super easy for us to swing by after work or whenever we want/need. I'll be making a project thread in DIY & Hobbies pretty soon because this house needs its own thread - we have a huge loving to-do list. Also might post in the home buying thread about our experience looking for and purchasing an older house and what weirdos we were about our criteria (e.g. open concept floor plan = deal breaker). edit: goddamn gotta get this account an avatar
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Feb 28, 2018 04:54
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And I thought ours from 1998 was old. It may or may not be in the process of dying - we ended up showering for a couple days at our house (which we haven't moved into yet) after the not-as-old water heater in our apartment crapped out, and the water was barely warm enough running it at 100% hot. Turning up the temp made it better, but still, I think its days are numbered. Re: mower chat: agreed that mowing/blowing before 10 am on the weekend is horrible and makes me hate you too. Also agree that using leaf blowers too early in the morning should be legal grounds for murder. We just bought a reel mower (lawn is pretty small) and come fall, I'll be raking because gently caress leaf blowers.
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May 14, 2018 14:30
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EAT FASTER!!!!!! posted:Yard work starts at 8 AM my dude. If you want to sleep in like a degenerate get yourself a white noise machine. Otherwise we've got kids, we're up for the day and I don't want to die of heat stroke running around in the yard. On weekdays, 8 AM start is dandy because I'm up and getting ready for work, as are most folks. 8 AM on weekends is not very nice, especially when we have the windows open and want to sleep/relax a bit longer. 9 AM on weekends is a bit more polite. It was honestly the worst when I was working from home on weekdays. I currently live on a block full of rentals, so the landlords' yard crews would all come around mid morning and run several of their loud lovely machines at once. I'm not working from home now so I don't care anymore, but god it was awful. The multiple leaf blowers were always the loving worst. Our new neighborhood isn't the sort of place with hired yard crews given the prevalence of lawns made out of overgrown dandelions, so we'll see how it goes on weekends. Yards aren't that big here so at least they wouldn't take too long to work on.
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May 14, 2018 16:33
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Hello fellow homeowners, I'm in the market for a general purpose ladder for doing work around the house/yard. Our house has high ceilings (9'8" on the main floor) and there are some decent-sized trees that need some maintenance (immediate and then ongoing), so I'd probably want to be able to reach 12 feet up or so safely and comfortably with tools and poo poo. Is one of those taller Little Giant ladders worth it, or would I be fine with an old school fixed-height aluminum ladder?
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May 21, 2018 00:28
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baquerd posted:Lots of things that matter here - how much do you weigh and how tall are you? What is the maximum you will be carrying? Will you ever want to go beyond ~12 ft? I'm 5'9" and like 145 or so, and I guess would probably want to have up to 30-40 lbs of tools/supplies (I guess? I have handsaws for tree trimming (not quite enough tree to bother investing in one of those little chainsaws on a stick) and we might want to be doing painting and work with light fixtures and crown molding inside). My fiance is 5'11" and around 170. So we are pretty standard height/weight and not fat. I'm not sure I'd need this ladder for much greater heights, but it would need to be one of those freestanding ones. If I ever needed to get up the outside of the house, I'd need a super tall extension ladder:  I think I'll just hire professionals with their own ladders for that sort of poo poo. TooMuchAbstraction posted:The Little Giant-style ladders are heavy and awkward (and expensive) for what they can do. That's the price you pay for versatility. The A-frame/freestanding mode is occasionally useful, but it doesn't work well if the ground isn't level or at least flat. Yeah the Little Giants seemed really expensive. I might get a standard freestanding one that's medium-ish height, and if I ever intend to do my own work on the exterior of the house, get an extension ladder (I might want to repaint the trim eventually). We already have a three-step stepladder, but it's barely tall enough for reaching the ceiling downstairs (and I couldn't reach the light fixture on the porch).
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May 21, 2018 02:08
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A tilt up garage door? Those are pretty old school but definitely still a thing that you can easily buy hardware for (if you want it to be automatic open then you'll need the new hardware, or just easier manual open). My parents have them on their garage. The garage is not old (90s) but my dad insisted on them when rebuilding said garage, and his friend said that he'd cave and get the sectioned sliding ones like everyone else, so they bet on it. My dad won, obviously. The doors look fantastic (way better than sectioned ones) and work fine 20 years later, but you have to be careful about placing garbage cans and stuff in front of it (can't tell you how many times I've knocked the garbage cans over trying to open the garage).
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May 31, 2018 05:52
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I have asbestos pipes in the basement with the intact diamond-shaped Keasbey & Mattison stickers advertising the asbestos pipe insulation patented in 1891. The town where that poo poo was made is a Superfund site now. I'm on my phone, otherwise I'd post a pic, but the insulation is cased in what looks like white-painted canvas or some sort of material. It's contained and in good condition, so no risk of it being disturbed. I have no idea what it'd look like inside of that casing. What year was the house built? Are the pipes for the radiant heat? (In our building, only the radiator pipes have the asbestos insulation.)
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Jun 1, 2018 05:35
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Oh hey a handy guide: https://inspectapedia.com/hazmat/Asbestos_Pipe_Insulation.php Yours doesn't look like asbestos from a cursory glance but I am not an expert/home inspector. Also, my apartment building was built in 1915. Kind of amazed at how well the pipe insulation has held up over the last century. Some of those pics of deteriorated asbestos insulation were terrifying.
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Jun 1, 2018 06:03
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We bought a Fiskars push reel mower because we have a small flat lot with not very much lawn, and the gas-powered mowers in the $200 price range were pieces of poo poo that generally tended to fail within a year or so. I really like having a mower that is not noisy and smelly, but my fiancé whines about how it doesn't do well with some weeds and those hard grass seed stem things (we let the lawn get out of control before we got the mower and are still dealing with the repercussions - haven't moved in yet so we're not over there all the time) so we're going to get an electric weed whacker for overgrown lawn mitigation and edging and stuff, which I think is a nice compromise. I don't know much about lawn mowers, but I think the push reel mower is nice for small flat lawns. Also we can mow whenever the gently caress we want because it's quiet. There was a gas mower that came with the house, but we couldn't get it started due to the choke line (?) and some other cables/tubes having had disintegrated while the thing was sitting outside in the harsh PA winter. Queen Victorian fucked around with this message at 13:13 on Jun 6, 2018 |
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Jun 6, 2018 04:26
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Oh yeah, that's the other thing - we don't have a garage or shed, so the mower lives in the basement (with exterior walkout door). Easier to lug up and down and also probably a good idea to avoid storing gasoline engines right in the house.
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Jun 6, 2018 13:16
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QuarkJets posted:What the gently caress do I do with this stump? Do you have small children? Hollow out some rooms and passageways in the sides to make it into a circular forest dollhouse for tiny gnomes or something (and get some little plastic gnome/elf/animal figurine toys to live in the stump). When My sister and I were little, we had a blast making a rotten stump we found into an epic forest dollhouse playset (this stump was so rotten we could make hollows in it with sticks). If you don't have small children, I'd try the stump out rot acceleration stuff or get a twisted log splitter wedge and a sledgehammer to split the stump apart in several places, which should make it easier to break apart and pull out of the ground.
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Jun 11, 2018 12:43
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Ours is like 1,900/year, but if I recall we got a bit of a discount when we rolled in auto insurance. But we are insuring a huge Victorian with tons of original woodwork and poo poo, so, for example, if a drunk driver crashes his car into the front of our house, we want our fancy porch and vestibule to be rebuilt exactly as they were, not replaced with builder grade stuff.
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Jun 24, 2018 16:01
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Re: windows: I'm in the process of trying to find new windows for our house. House is over a hundred years old, with half original windows and half vinyl replacements. Some of the original windows are in bad shape and need repair or replacement. Many of the vinyl replacement windows are ugly and incongruous and need to be replaced because they are super ugly and I hate them. The rest of the vinyl windows are just incongruous and eventually need to be replaced. I don't necessarily hate them but they don't work with the house. Most outfits I found either only do vinyl or if they do wood, the wood windows they carry look like rear end. The antique window restoration placed I found had gone out of business. Then I finally found a place that does historical replica windows in wood and everything in their portfolio looks amazing. And expensive. I hope they respond soon. Another thing I've learned is that there are also levels of vinyl window quality. Our house has a high quality custom-made vinyl replacement window in the dining room. It's gigantic and has an arched top. Both the inspector and window guy we had over mentioned that a previous owner definitely paid a lot for it. It's fine for the time being (still eventually want a nicer wood one in its place - though if I wasn't such a giant sperg about having historically/aesthetically appropriate windows, I'd leave it). There are also some vinyl windows in the house that are complete garbage - ugly and poorly fitted side slider windows that buck up in their frames if you push too hard/from the wrong angle, and the excessive ruts and grooves and whatnot inherent in their design are great at collecting detritus while being difficult to clean. I think going to showrooms for stuff like windows would be totally worthwhile - so you can look at and operate the windows on display.
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Jun 28, 2018 05:38
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We kind of have the opposite problem with our bathroom - I estimate that it was last remodeled sometime in the 1930s, and the only aspect of it that's still good is the pipes (and the sweet Art Deco tub). Everything else is literally crumbling and falling apart. Gotta get the tub unclogged though - while doing flooring work, stepfather-in-law dumped a mop bucket full of ultra fine sawdust down the tub and stopped it up pretty good. Drano only did so much. Has anyone gotten their tub clogged with sawdust before?
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Aug 7, 2018 07:02
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Ghostnuke posted:I believe murder is the solution to that problem, wtf If it weren't for the fact that he and my husband's mom were staying with us for the week to restore all the wood flooring in the attic (which now looks brand new and amazing and not buried under multiple layers of paint and filth like was when we bought), I'd be a lot more angry. A lot more. Especially since we have a perfectly good triple basin laundry sink in the basement that will guzzle up anything you dump down it. Small price to pay for tons of free labor, I guess. I'll check out that Glug stuff. Will try snaking tonight, but something tells me that might not do much good.
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Aug 7, 2018 15:52
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Yeah, I know from my old apartment full of corroded lead drain pipes that Drano and whatnot is not good for them - basically maintenance boss told us not to use pipe cleaner chemicals and to attempt to snake it or call them to come with a bigger snake. So I knew better, but at the time, we weren't able to get our hands on other options and the tub was stopped dead. Now it drains super duper slowly. Hopefully our silly consumer snake will reach enough of the blockage.
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Aug 7, 2018 16:45
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Leperflesh posted:Wait, the sawdust down the tub was on purpose??? Why would you put sawdust down any drain? What's wrong with the trash? The actual solution was to skim/decant out the water from the bucket (into the laundry sink, not the tub) and then when it was mostly wet sawdust pulp remaining, dump outside into another bucket and let the leftover water evaporate or shop vac it or something. That's what we did for subsequent mop buckets. I still don't know what possessed him to dump a whole bucket full of sawdust slurry into the bathtub. He felt pretty bad about it, but tub is still hosed (granted, we only just moved into the house and need to take regular showers, so now it's actually imperative to deal with it properly.
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Aug 7, 2018 19:05
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Eh, if it was clean sawdust I would have just dumped it outside, but depending on the batch it was loaded with paint and/or polyurethane. Once the sawdust was waterlogged, it was easy enough to skim out the water and not get anything in the drain. I'm just worried that our little pipe snake won't be enough and that we'll have to call someone and spend money we really don't want to spend. However, the situation isn't nearly as bad as the worst I heard from a friend. He lived in a ratty college house with a buddy and his buddy's girlfriend. The buddy was doing some painting repairs to help out the elderly landlady in exchange for a discount on rent. Then the idiot girlfriend goes and dumps the leftover paint down the kitchen sink when he isn't looking. Neither the guy or the girlfriend or the landlady have the money to tear out and replace the now-ruined kitchen plumbing, so my friend just moved out.
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Aug 7, 2018 19:53
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So I got the access panel open but there's no drum trap.  I hope we're not screwed. Then again there's a PVC U-bend in the drain pipe so I'm hoping the clog is just sitting there and not further down and that we can pull it out with the snake/shop vac.
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Aug 8, 2018 01:47
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I never have to worry about my outdoor furniture fading because it's covered with a protective layer of rust.
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Sep 7, 2018 23:56
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Thesaurus posted:I'm convinced thst nextdoor regulars are the living stereotypes of the mean old neighbor lady who's always sourly peering out of her blinds at unknown cars and pedestrians I ended up joining Nextdoor after reading @bestofnextdoor on Twitter and was almost disappointed to discover that my neighborhood is chill as gently caress and not full of paranoid racists. In fact, there was an incident a few weeks ago in which a resident black kid was riding his bike in the neighborhood and he was accosted by a white lady driving by in a car who accused him of stealing the bike and then told him (lying) that she was an undercover cop and that she was watching him. The kid's father posted about the incident, and then the neighbors all rallied around the kid and started sharpening their pitchforks to hunt this racist bitch down. And they reported her to the police, naturally.
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Sep 8, 2018 03:41
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EAT FASTER!!!!!! posted:I'm cooking a lot and I hate the smoke, but my stupid range is on the island with high ceilings over it. What are my options? Oh hey, I'm in the process of redesigning my utterly useless kitchen and the new design hinges on putting the stove in an island (there is literally no where else to put it that works). Ceiling is 9'8", and there is no existing stove ventilation other than propping open the door. My plan is to have a cool hanging range hood with heavy duty pot racks around it. My dad wisely insists on consulting an engineer on the design to ensure it's rated for 400 pounds of hanging cast iron skillets. The range hood would vent into the gigantic immovable stove chimney via duct between the joists. We'll have to go into the ceiling to install ductwork and mount the thing to the joists, but then again we're going to have to gut everything anyway, so ripping open the ceiling and poking a new hole in the chimney is no biggie. No sure where you'd put the exhaust if you don't have a chimney or exterior wall nearby.
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Sep 10, 2018 19:11
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totalnewbie posted:That's something I'd also thought about, but I would also consider carefully about the possibility of your pots being coated in a thin layer of oil from hanging up above your range. Even though it should be outside the hood, some oil vapor will still be there. I've thought about this as well, and decided that it can work if you only hang frequently used cast iron and keep stainless/nonstick/enamel in the cabinet. My parents keep a huge stack of cast iron on the back burner of their stove and it's never gross because they use it all the time. With cast iron, any oil spray that gets on it gets polymerized into the seasoning during cooking or scrubbed off during cleaning with frequent use. Wouldn't work with any other type of cookware.
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Sep 10, 2018 20:44
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New homeownershit achievement unlocked: BEDBUGS! gently caress everything, we have bedbugs. Shoulda ripped out all the grody carpeting the second after closing, but we didn't because we were dumbasses. Ever since we moved in, husband had allegedly been accosted by mosquitoes every night (but not me, because they don't like me that much, even though I'd get bitten plenty when outside). We removed sources of standing water outside and sealed off openings into the house, even got one of those UV light mosquito traps... no good, any of it. We both did more research, and it seemed our problem was either fleas or bed bugs, not mosquitoes. Then tonight we found a live bedbug on the box spring. Calling the exterminator when they open tomorrow. What scares me is that I have no reaction whatsoever to bedbug bites (there's no way they're not biting me also - even mosquitoes bite me). If it weren't for my husband waking up every morning with new red bites everywhere, then I would literally never know and the infestation would just persist and get worse and worse.
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Oct 5, 2018 02:21
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StormDrain posted:If a person has bedbugs they don’t see and don’t react to, do they have a problem at all? Even though as a nonreactive person I wouldn't be affected, anyone who stayed at the house overnight would be potentially hosed. We were supposed to have friends up this weekend but now with the bad news we are postponing. If I didn't know, they'd have risked infestation to their house if they'd stayed with us. We are getting an exterminator ASAP, and probably ripping out the carpets, which I'm totally fine with because they are gross and hate carpet anyway and would rather have subfloor, but steam cleaning them is acceptable too. Pillows are all in the dryer right now. Will probably have to dispose of 2/3 mattresses (they suck anyway, no great loss, even though they were clean before being in this house).
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Oct 5, 2018 03:30
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StormDrain posted:Oh hell no you don’t have to justify it like that, getting drained of your blood every night by invisible creatures is awful. Little bastards hide in the creases and sleep all day, then ambush you while you rest. I’m itchy just thinking about it. I think what bugged me (lol) was not knowing. If my husband were also unaffected, we'd be prime vectors for spreading bedbugs far and wide because we have people over to stay a ton because we'd never have any reason to suspect that we had an infestation. Until the exterminator can exterminate the problem, no overnight guests, and also, topical Benadryl is a gift from the gods.
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Oct 5, 2018 03:57
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Elephanthead posted:One of my clients wanted to install a hot box so tenants could put all their stuff in it before moving in to kill all the bugs as an amenity and the housing authority said that was discriminatory. So now they get to spend $10,000 month treating apartments and everyone rent is $200 more a month. Science! Wow that's terrible and dumb. How would it be discriminatory if it's an amenity or you straight up make all new tenants use it? If I were a building owner and wasn't able to take measures to prevent new tenants from bringing in bedbugs because it's "discriminatory", I'd be loving pissed (and would find grounds to sue to implement said measures). Bedbugs give no fucks about socioeconomic status or cleanliness anyway.
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Oct 6, 2018 19:04
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MrYenko posted:Nest/Smarthings chat: There’s a custom Nest SmartApp to get Nest integrated into SmartThings, but it’s a bit kludgy and kind of a pain in the rear end to setup and keep updated. For all the conveniences smart home things offer, I know I can depend on my 50's Honeywell round thermostat to never need a firmware update or any of that stuff, never poo poo itself over a wifi/power outage/integrating with other smart home things, and never be hacked. Also, I can count on it to never break. Not having to worry or even think about all that stuff (ever) is a fair trade off for it not being programmable, in my opinion. Take this with a grain of salt though because I'm a giant Luddite. Except I'm probably a Luddite because I work in the tech industry.
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Oct 10, 2018 23:13
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:There's plenty of basic programmable thermostats that have those properties too. What you want to avoid is the smart thermostats, because they don't have 30+ years of refinement behind them and aren't being used to leverage a multi-thousand-dollar ecosystem. Yeah if I want to go programmable, I'd get something like what my parents have, a dumb but programmable self-contained (not internet enabled) system with a little LCD display installed in the mid-90's when we remodeled the house. There have been no issues with it for 20+ years . I'm happy with the ancient Honeywell for now because we have so many more pressing issues to deal with at the moment, so the fact that it can reliably heat the house with zero input or fiddling (other than giving it a set point - doesn't even have on/off functionality) is a nice comfort.
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Oct 10, 2018 23:30
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I guess I should add that I really don't need anything fancy because my heating is a simple hot water radiator system that's as old as the house (updated boiler thankfully - no more shoveling coal) and no central AC.
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Oct 11, 2018 00:15
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Fallom posted:I'm planning on getting one or two of the Nest sensors so I can finally get my upstairs bedroom to heat properly Your hot water radiators aren't zoned, are they? If not, you might just need to bleed the radiator(s) in the room that's not getting getting sufficiently warm. We have just been dealing with our radiators (refilling the system and extensively bleeding everything) so now I know a good deal about them.
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Oct 11, 2018 00:54
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I am not a tree lawyer, but I believe it's usually okay to trim parts of a neighbor's tree that cross the property line. Definitely check your city ordinances. I need to look into this as well, because one of my neighbors has a huge walnut tree, part of which overhangs my property, complete with a giant dangling dead branch. I enjoy the tree very much, but would just like the dead branch gone, so I need to make sure I can cut it off myself and not have to make the owner (cheap landlord) do it, which means it'll never get done.
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Oct 13, 2018 18:07
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All four of my fireplaces are boarded up, but it looks like they all had gas inserts at one point. Also I peeked behind the board on one and it was full of bird skeletons (really need to get the chimney guy out for some chimney caps). Ultimate goal is to have four working gas fireplaces with the hyper realistic log inserts (there was a historic building I was in during wintertime and they had these merry fires going, and, despite having extensive fire building and tending experience, it took me a couple hours to realize the logs were fake). We'd love wood burning downstairs, but I'm not sure that's possible since they've already been rigged for gas and they'd be sharing chimneys with the upstairs fireplaces, which we want to be gas (because gently caress hauling firewood upstairs).
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Oct 26, 2018 04:14
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QuarkJets posted:why do you have 4 fireplaces It's a Victorian, and Victorians just have buttloads of fireplaces because they can. There's a perfectly adequate hot water radiator heat system (original to the house) so the fireplaces are superfluous for heating, but are there because back then, you'd expect fireplaces in your living room and dining room for atmosphere, tradition, and perhaps supplemental warmth, and then the ones in the bedrooms are a sweet bonus (and easy to add because they're stacked on top of the downstairs ones and share chimneys). Also, the more fireplaces you have, the more awesome mantelpieces you can show off (all four are different).
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Oct 26, 2018 04:44
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Leperflesh posted:Imagine asking someone named "Queen Victorian" why they have 4 fireplaces, haha. I bet that doesn't even count the one in the servants' quarters! Oh crap, forgot to account for the servants' quarters! Those are up on the third floor, which is legit cold as balls because there's just one radiator in the hallway. There are no fireplaces up there, but nooks with ports into the chimneys for little Franklin stoves (long since gone). Definitely need to put something up there to account for no radiators in the rooms, especially if we want to use one for an additional guest room or a future kiddo room. So yeah, each chimney will have to do triple duty. Third room in the attic doesn't have a stove port, even though I guess it's close enough to the kitchen chimney (yeah we have three chimneys overall - kitchen chimney is currently just being used to vent the hot water heater, and we will use it to vent our eventual extractor fan. There is no kitchen fireplace - it was just the chimney for the old wood stove). This third attic room is southern facing so it gets sun warmth, but not quite enough. Might consider an electric baseboard unit or see if an as-needed space heater is enough. This room is my office/studio right now. Droo posted:You probably have real fireplaces with flues and stuff, as opposed to the fireplace-in-a-box thing that is more common in new houses. If they have already been converted to gas, your best bet is to take pictures of every setup and go to a fireplace store and discuss getting fake log sets for each fireplace. With a real chimney that has been converted to gas, you will have tons of options and can pick the log set you want for each one. The only downside is they are less efficient and you will still need to get your chimneys cleaned and inspected occasionally (although not like if you burned wood in them). Oh yeah, they're very much real fireplaces. Given the lack of chimney caps and the deteriorated, neglected condition of the old gas inserts, they are by no means in working order, for gas or wood (after removing inserts). All I know is that the chimneys haven't been plugged up (seeing as there are bird skeletons). We guess we'll be spending several grand to get the chimneys and fireplaces up to snuff and operable again - it's one of our splurge areas. Our flipper neighbor is rehabilitating another Victorian across the street (that had been made multi-unit and completely trashed by decades of renters) and they kept all the original mantelpieces but will be doing ventless inserts (probably a good option for them because that house is overall way more hosed up than ours). Those are definitely the cheapest and easiest (no chimney restoration/venting poo poo), but I don't think they're right for us fire-lovers. While wood-burning fireplaces downstairs would be great, I think I'd also be fine with the vented had one because zero effort for having nice-looking fires.
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Oct 26, 2018 14:17
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Ashcans posted:We somehow have two chimneys and no fireplaces. There's one that comes up through the kitchen that I guess might have vented an old stove in there, but any connections in the room were removed/hidden so it just serves the water heater. The second one comes up between the dining room and a side room, but again there's nothing visible in those rooms except some weird shaping in the walls. I dunno if someone in the past remodeled to hide it? Seems a little odd because mostly the house seems to have been preserved on its original plan. That chimney venting the boiler for our heat. When we were shopping for houses, we came to realize that it's pretty common (depressingly so, in my opinion) to remove fireplaces to make more space in the room for whatever reason. Is that second chimney coming up in the middle of the house? And no fireplaces or walled-off protrusions where they would have been? If that's the case, you might want to make sure you don't have a huge column of bricks sitting on top of your upstairs joists... If the chimney is on the exterior wall and in between the rooms, there might have been corner fireplaces.
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Oct 26, 2018 15:01
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We've had that happen when there's a cold downdraft in the chimney that prevents smoke from going up and pushes it back out your fireplace. My dad's solution has always been to roll up a couple sheets of newspaper, light an end, and hold it up in the flue to burn for a while to warm up the air in the chimney before lighting the fire. Or sometimes fireplaces are just poorly designed and smoke a lot. We've had that misfortune too.
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Oct 26, 2018 16:02
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Ashcans posted:You mean like they cut out the chimney stack in the middle and just left the top half hanging? Pretty sure it's not doing that, the chimney runs all the way from the basement up through the roof and the boiler is hooked up to it in the basement to vent - if they cut the stack it would be venting into the walls, which, uh, I really hope isn't happening! There is still room for the full chimney to run in the structure. Ahhh ok - yeah I think you'd be fine structurally since it looks like you wouldn't have to compromise the integrity of the chimney stack to get rid of the fireplaces. There was definitely a fireplace in the dining room, probably one in the lower level bedroom, but I'm not sure about the upstairs rooms. There could have been stove ports, which are trivial to remove and wall up. Any patched areas on the floors? Could have been a hearth/stove platform at one point. Or small fireplaces. Also, love the super weird servant's quarters in the back. Do the butler stairs go straight into the bathroom?
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Oct 26, 2018 17:00
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I think when you remodel you just don't touch them. Not sure if you'd need a permit to redo that back bathroom if you ever wanted to and if that would create problems for the butler stairs. (Hopefully not - I think here we just need permits for adding new bathrooms) The real problem, I think, is that if you ever take those stairs out, you'll never be able to put them back in (unless you rat them in) because they're totally not up to code. Ours definitely aren't either (steep, narrow, no railings). Also our basement stairs are even less up to code - narrower and you have to limbo to not hit your face on a joist going down. Also rotten where they touch the perpetually damp foundation wall. We need to reroute these stairs for the kitchen remodel (from kitchen to hallway so we have room for the fridge) and rebuild the rotten section, so I hope we don't get hit with any code adherence poo poo over trying to fix them. This is the second biggest reason I put my foot down and stopped any talk amongst my dad and husband about removing our butler stairs - if we take them out, we can never have them back (legally). And now that we've been living in the house for a few months, it's abundantly clear that we use the butler stairs more than the main stairs - holy crap I love having stairs going directly into the kitchen. They don't beat secret stairs in the bathroom - that owns (especially for kids).
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Oct 26, 2018 18:06
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| # ¿ Apr 20, 2024 04:53 |
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Ashcans posted:None of it is very exciting, but by the end of the year we'll be able to think about more comestic/fun stuff to work on instead. I love a lot of things about these old houses so it's mostly a matter trying to clean things up and bring them back to former glory. We're lucky no one came through in the 70s and gutted it. Yeah we are in the exact same boat. Gotta fix some of the circuitry, especially the overloaded bullshit circuit that covers half of the main floor, including the entire kitchen and all its appliances (minus the pantry for some reason), and do moisture mitigation in the basement so it stops being damp and gross. That's an expensive job that's pretty much invisible, but necessary long term if we want the house to stand for another hundred years and be able to have a workshop and storage down there. Other than poo poo like that, there's the fun visible stuff like kitchen and bathrooms, and then plenty of cosmetic stuff (mostly stripping/refinishing and repainting). We bought this Victorian because we want to live in a loving Victorian, so yeah, tons of straight up restoration to how it was before. We are also lucky that no one trashed this place in the 70s. It had the same good owner from the 40s to the 90s, so I think that's largely what spared it. Owner who came after that guy had terrible taste and ideas, but thankfully was too cheap to do much more than hire lovely painters to paint the walls dumb colors and install lovely carpeting upstairs. I'm also incredibly glad this house was spared the more recent "open kitchen" update that's been plaguing old houses. We still have the separate closed kitchen and wonderful formal dining room (which would be totally ruined by being opened to the kitchen).
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Oct 26, 2018 22:25
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