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Ever since I was a little girl, I've dreamed of living in a big creepy Victorian, the type with turrets, secret staircases, and dark wood interiors. I'm finally realizing that dream, as my fiance and I closed on a big (but turret-less and not particularly creepy) Victorian last month. This will be the thread where I talk about fixing it up and making it awesome. Out of all the houses we looked at, this one definitely had the least amount of crap done to it over the years, which was a plus for us because it means less major stuff we have to unfuck. The original floor plan is intact, so NO open concept (one of our requirements in house hunting was NOT open concept - luckily that wasn't too hard because the housing stock is old as gently caress here - majority is prewar). Original woodwork, floors, and doors are mostly intact, which is awesome. On the other hand, the single bathroom is in pretty bad shape and needs to be redone and the kitchen is pretty much just a room with a sink (probably original!) and a stove and a fridge in it, so it needs to be redone so it can be functional. Also plenty of typical old house poo poo, and then also weird mysterious stuff like the dumbwaiter to nowhere, random capped-off pipes sticking out of the floors/walls in various rooms, complete lack of chimney caps, and the murder room in the basement. Anyways, here are some pics of what we're working with:  The house from the street. Creep factor reduced because the exterior's been cleaned sometime in the last thirty years - would be way creepier if it was still black and filthy  Oh my god just look at the gloriously uniform setback on our block   The foyer. One of the selling points of the house for us, though lots of paint stripping in our future. Also check out that awesome floor  The living room, or at least part of it (somehow don't have any good pics of the living room in general). Very apricot. Also mantelpiece has been kinda ruined by white paint and I'm not the biggest fan of this particular style. Either stripping it or replacing it with a different Victorian mantelpiece. One of four sealed fireplaces with mysterious detritus hiding behind the plywood panels.  Dining room ceiling. This was another selling point. Seems to be original finish, with only minor paint damage from sloppy paint job  The useless kitchen. On the other side of the stove and stove chimney there are three cabinets and like five square feet of counters space. This is going to be difficult because there are six loving doors in the kitchen, as well as a radiator in prime lower cabinet space, a huge low window, and the old stove chimney  The pantry wall. Dumbwaiter compartment (I think?)  Inside the alleged dumbwaiter. Don't see any mechanicals (or anywhere on the other floors for it to go), so maybe it's a secret hidey hole for pies or something? Or decommissioned in an old remodel and they kept the cover?   Upstairs hallway from one of the bedrooms. All original doors with original hardware and transom windows. All those transoms are gonna be great for thermal management in the summer. Transom hardware present in every room except for the bathroom, all of it painted over but shouldn't be too hard to get working again and get a replacement for the bathroom.  Gas light fixture - I guess this house was built in a transitional period between gas lighting and electrical wiring - downstairs and main bedrooms have original electrical, but servant and attic rooms have the gas light fixtures. Wonder if they'd still work if you got the paint off...  The triple laundry sink in the basement. This thing is original to the house and amazing and I'm keeping it (and restoring it) no matter what anyone says. The middle sink has a washboard built into it. Also all the faucets work. More on the basement later. This is probably the least creepy part of it. We have a few more months left on our apartment lease, so we'll try to get some improvements done while the house is still unoccupied and empty. It's a little over a mile away from where we are now, so it's no big deal going over there whenever. I'll make some more posts that get into different parts of the house in more detail, but here's a preliminary to-do list: Kitchen: - Completely renovate kitchen with the help of professionals (huge sub-list I'll go over in a future kitchen post) Bathrooms: - Convert under-the-stairs hall closet to tiny powder room - Gut and redo main bathroom (with professional help) - Possibly convert some attic closet space into an additional full bath (maybe at least plumb it while the main bathroom is gutted for later addition) - Resurrect PIttsburgh shitter (would make excellent fortress of soliturd) Interior surfaces/detailing: - Add railings to butler stairs and attic stairs - Repaint walls (paint job looks relatively recent but the colors all suck and it's sloppy) - Rip out grody old carpets - Refinish most/all of the floors - Strip paint off of most woodwork (especially the fancy stuff on the main floor) and refinish - Replace missing doors on main floor - Fix pocket doors Electrical (definitely hiring this out): - Consider rewiring entire house (which would include shelling out to repair plaster), but if not, - Add safety features like new junction boxes to remaining knob and tube circuits (which are in good condition) - Add grounding to some newer circuits that for some reason are not grounded - Add GFCI outlets Basement: - Add drainage outside of walkout door - Repoint and parge foundation walls - Add cement floor to murder/body disposal chamber - Restore awesome Victorian laundry sink Fireplaces/chimneys - Add chimney caps - Get chimneys cleaned - Have a fireplace/chimney guy come check everything out and see if we can restore the fireplaces at least to the point of being able to put some good inserts in them (I've seen some hyper realistic ones that I'd be more than okay with) Windows/Exterior/Yard - Immediately repair a busted window (original) that won't close all the way - Eventually replace a couple of ugly contextually inappropriate replacement windows with nice windows - Eventually restore the rest of the original windows - Eventually find/commission a stained glass window for the stairway landing (house used to have one, either got broken or was removed and sold off at some point). - Train myself in exterior house painting so I can do a cool painted lady paint job on all the intricate trim. Eventually. - Build garden bed, fire pit, and small patio in the backyard. - Plant some apple trees, flowers, and herb/veggie garden Wow that was super long. And I'm still going to write most posts (with more pics). This is going to be a huge project and it's pretty daunting, especially since we're also planning a wedding. If we're not able to start on major projects until after the wedding (late summer), we can at least aim to knock out some other projects, like basement updates, floors, paint stripping, and yard stuff. Welp, enjoy.
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Mar 18, 2018 23:52
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My fiance and I bought a 120 year old house just under a year ago, we some of the same issues like the randomly capped pipes and painted over original wood work. Our house was unfortunately turned into a rental with 2 units at some point in its life and then converted back into a single family home. As a result we have 2 furnaces and 2 water heaters and 2 breaker boxes, 1 central AC unit which only provides cooling to the back of the house. In our creepy basement there are the remains of a kitchenette, a bathroom and frame work of drywall. Not sure who lived down there or how they lived down there because it is not even close to livable. Oh and of course, because it is an old house, we have a murder room. Our Attic has a mystery room. It's a painted room that looks like it was a bedroom complete with closets, but there is no stair case up to the attic. The only entry to the attic is by using a ladder to get up to a small (2.5ft x 2.5ft) hole in the ceiling, which is hidden in a small closet in the back bedroom. Good luck with all of the projects, I'm looking forward to following a long and maybe stealing ideas/courage from you!
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Mar 19, 2018 01:14
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Love that ceiling, basement, and other old oddities  Looking forward to seeing the rest of the basement, and progress in general!
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Mar 19, 2018 01:22
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Behotti posted:My fiance and I bought a 120 year old house just under a year ago, we some of the same issues like the randomly capped pipes and painted over original wood work. Our house was unfortunately turned into a rental with 2 units at some point in its life and then converted back into a single family home. As a result we have 2 furnaces and 2 water heaters and 2 breaker boxes, 1 central AC unit which only provides cooling to the back of the house. Thanks! I love project threads, especially for old/weird houses, so I figured that since I now have a project house, I could post an interesting thread and hopefully get some advice and such along the way. And good luck on your house too! Actually one of the cool things to do in these parts is buy the old houses chopped up into apartments, move into a unit, and let the tenants in the other units pay down the mortgage for a few years and then restore the house to one unit again. SO many old houses here have been converted to apartments - my fiance used to live in one, and the houses on either side of ours are triplex rentals (haven't figured out if either is owner-occupied). We got lucky with this house, which had somehow NEVER been converted to multiple units. But the neighborhood we're in is on the up and up, so it wouldn't surprise me if houses nearby (many of which are subdivided) started getting restored back to single family again. Oh, one house we looked at (another Victorian) had a super weird upstairs layout, with lots of space dedicated to a sitting area open to the hallway with bedrooms off it. Our agent suspected the house was designed to be utilized as a boarding house - husband would go off to work and the wife would manage the house and tenants for extra income. (I liked that house, but it was way too expensive for us due to its primo location (100 yards from one of our favorite restaurants) and would have needed way too much work.) That does sound creepy.. sounds like there was a gross and cheap basement unit down there? Is the murder room down there? I think what makes our basement so creepy is that it's pretty much unchanged from when it was built. The only changes have been the coal-burning furnace getting replaced with a natural gas one (we have a coal delivery hatch and everything) and the addition of a hot water heater and a washer and dryer. This basement is probably the creepiest or second creepiest out of the houses we looked at, with the other one belonging to that boarding house Victorian (similar, but with an exceptionally low ceiling). Re: Attic room. So a buddy of mine and some of his friends needed to rent a three-bedroom place close to campus. They toured this old rowhouse, and couldn't find the third bedroom. Landlord told them that the third bedroom could be accessed from the secret staircase in the closet of one of the other bedrooms. So one of the guys would have to walk through his friend's room to get to his own room. The attic was for storage (really common to have access in a closet), but finished and outfitted as a bedroom to add to nominal bedroom count for marketing purposes. Wouldn't surprise me of that was the case in your house. Nosre posted:Love that ceiling, basement, and other old oddities Thanks! I'll probably find more oddities, so I'll be sure to post them. And since you guys are interested in the basement, I'll post some more pics:  The main area of the basement. Camera being out of focus (because it's super dark before the flash goes off) makes it look a still from an old horror film or something. I'm certain those partitions are original. One in the back was probably for containing coal and/or the old coal-burning furnace. Not sure what the other partition is for - designating storage areas?  Pittsburgh shitter. Lower half of the toilet is missing. Long turned off, but it's still plumbed, and there's a spigot I could turn... Also, this one was fancy because it has a door. Note the original plank door and rusty hardware.  The murder room. The only thing lighting it up is the camera flash, otherwise it is pitch loving black. Note the dirt floor and the crumbling parging with black dust (probably soot from the old furnace) settled on the stone protrusions in the wall. This is where one would murder and bury people. Back in the day, it might have been a root/booze cellar or something. The dirt floor makes the basement damper than it needs to be (overall basement is not terribly damp, considering its age and the dirt floor murder room, so we definitely want to put a floor in it. Until then, I might advertise it as a potential horror film location for indie film makers.  Other end of murder room (backside of basement stairs). Note the uneven lengths on all the wood pieces - appears that they finished off the backside of the stairs with scrap. Finished basements were not remotely a thing in the Victorian era - it was just a place for the furnace, boiler, laundry sink that the servants would use, and some storage, so appearances didn't matter (except that rusty door hardware I found was very pretty).
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Mar 19, 2018 05:25
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Welp, another week and not much getting done, other than our free promotional basement inspection (we went to the massive home and garden convention earlier this month and got several pounds of house-industry-related catalogs and business cards plus the free inspection and some swag - totally forgot about free inspection until they called to confirm) getting rescheduled last minute because the inspector they were sending out had a family emergency. Rescheduled for next weekend. We're also still trying to figure out how lay out the kitchen (so many goddamned doors and windows in the way), and the order of operations for other projects - I want to at least do SOMETHING, like start stripping woodwork, tearing out carpet, refinishing floors (aka stuff I can do myself without hiring help), but fiance is all about having meticulous plans for everything before we start. Sigh... So when we were over at the house this weekend to grab mail and shovel the walkway so the house doesn't look so blatantly vacant, we met one of the neighbors, who was very excited to finally meet us (we've been extremely elusive). Turns out she is a local landlord and also a flipper (but not in a bad way). She and her husband own and manage several rentals in the vicinity, and will also buy up other old abused houses that have served as hacked-up multi-unit rentals and/or crack dens and revert them to livable single family homes. They'd recently bought one of the houses across the street as a project and were working on it when we swung by. She gave us some really good insight on the neighborhood - it's definitely revitalizing faster than we'd expected, with all the other flippers she knew already running out of houses to flip and moving on to other neighborhoods. Turns out she also fixed one of the other houses across from us that was one of our comps - it's probably the prettiest house on the block now, and it used to be a crack den. She said lots of very nice things about the neighborhood - it's one of those close-knit places where folks sit on their porches and are buddies. I think we lucked out with our house because it was in a weird dead zone of price/state, causing it to sit on the market for a long time despite low inventory in the immediate area. It was too expensive to be attractive to flippers, yet it was in not in a remodeled state/good enough shape for a typical buyer looking for an updated turnkey house, even with updated houses selling for substantially more. And then after talking about all the woodwork restoration we were looking at, she invited us over to the house she was working on to show us around - she was in the process of meticulously stripping decades of paint off the gorgeous old front staircase when everyone was telling her she was crazy for not just painting it. We reassured her she was not crazy and that restoring all the woodwork was totally worth it (we're going to do the same - gently caress painted woodwork). The house was otherwise down to studs (it had been hacked up into multiple units so lots of reconfiguration needed), so it was a massive project. She pointed out that the floors were totally shot so she was replacing it all with solid oak. They seem to be doing good high quality work and know their way around old houses, and are very interested in the work we'll be doing on our place - good friends/neighbors to have. We will no doubt be picking their brains on our own projects. All in all, it was interesting talking to a benevolent flipper who's actually invested in the neighborhood (figuratively and literally) and cares about it. First flipper I've encountered who's doing stuff like restoring all the nice woodwork and installing solid wood floors - we looked at plenty of houses that were obvious flipper jobs, with bullshit like laminate floors, poorly conceived open concept layouts and other badly done HGTV-inspired design choices, and hilariously overpriced for their respective neighborhoods. We ran from those houses. But I guess if you're doing good quality work and turning crack dens and lovely triplexes back into the lovely single family Victorians they were meant to be and not snapping up all the already serviceable market rate houses and turning them into market-distorting unaffordable hipster pads, then that's fine by me.
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Mar 27, 2018 03:44
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That's one good lookin' murder room.
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Mar 27, 2018 04:04
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spinst posted:That's one good lookin' murder room. Hell yeah! Honestly, a not-so-small part of me is loathe to do anything to it, because I love seeing the bowels of old places in their original state, and the old places, especially the mundane ones like my dumb basement, are quickly disappearing and/or being remade into new places - turned into finished basements, modernist lofts, just outright demolished, etc. You just can't get basements with stone walls and dirt floors anymore. At the very least, once we do get around to putting a floor in, I'm putting a bunch of skulls/bones in the dirt just to troll future homeowners/archaeologists.
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Mar 27, 2018 04:36
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If you don’t want the time/expense of preparing the dirt floor for a concrete pour, you could consider basement/crawl space encapsulation techniques with thick plastic sheeting. I’ve got an old house with a mud floor murder room that had decades of coal and construction material piled in it. I’m in the process of installing peripheral drain tile and sump pit, then I’ll encapsulate the floor and walls with 10-20mil sheeting to prevent evaporation into the home. Add a dehumidifier if necessary. You can also add a radon mitigation system that draws air from under the sheeting and the drain tile system. You could also add foam board insulation along the walls, though inspectors may require you to add a fire barrier like drywall if they consider the basement a living space. It’ll be behind the plastic sheeting so they may not notice it.
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Mar 27, 2018 17:04
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I'm actually pretty leery of doing anything with plastic sheeting on the walls - from the research I've done so far, you generally want to avoid vapor barriers and sealing on the old stone walls (especially if it's limestone like in this house) because the moisture still comes in from the ground but can no longer escape into the basement, gets trapped in the wall and degrades the mortar and eventually can result in damage to the stones themselves. I've gathered that my options for a limestone foundation are to seal it from the outside, which exorbitantly expensive and effectively impossible in our case (houses too close together, porches to work around, etc), or just repoint with soft lime mortar as needed (and boy does it need repointing), run a dehumidifier, and not consider ever making the basement into finished living space. Luckily, we have no plans to ever finish the basement - it'll just be storage and eventually some workspace for anything too dirty for my attic studio. At the very least, I want to put a real floor in the murder room to make it more suitable for storage and help mitigate incoming moisture. Either the concrete pour (so it matches the rest of the basement) or bricks/pavers on gravel and sand (practice for my patio). I'm curious about using some further moisture barrier methods on just the floor (not the walls), so I can research further /inquire. On radon - we did do a radon test with our inspection, and the average reading over the three-day test was 1.2, which is slightly below average and seemingly below the level at which radon mitigation systems are effective (they are good at getting you down to 2.0 if it's high but then it's diminishing returns).
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Mar 28, 2018 05:39
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n'thing that that is a good looking murder/rape room. It has a very Marc Dutroux look to it.
Dance Officer fucked around with this message at 09:33 on Mar 28, 2018 |
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Mar 28, 2018 09:30
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Fortunately my basement, front porch and porch columns are all solid fly ash concrete. No footer though. Once you’ve repointed your foundation stones, can you give the whole thing a parge coat to contain the mortar and keep it from leaving dusty piles all around your basement floor? I’ve not read much about stone foundations, but have avoided them when looking at homes.
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Mar 28, 2018 13:52
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Yeah we can parge or whitewash (as in real old-school limewash, not diluted white paint for a shabby chic look). The original parge coat is in the process of sloughing off and needs to be torn off and replaced with similar old fashioned parge that is sufficiently breathable. The old stone foundations need some different upkeep and considerations than modern foundations, but they will last a few hundred years if you take care of them right. We were specifically looking for old houses in a city full of old houses, so stone foundations just come with the territory. I focused on dryness/leaks and watching for bowing and cracks and potential structural issues (and pestered the inspector a lot about the condition of the basement and foundation walls). I think all of them are limestone, too. Local geology is all limestone and shale.
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Mar 28, 2018 14:58
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So we had some friends for dinner at the house tonight, which was fun - just some takeout and whiskey we brought from our apartment, because there is nothing in the house besides the appliances and the very handy dining room table and chairs*. We'd previously gotten some paper plates and plastic cups/flatware so we could pretend to have dishes. Seriously, the logistics of having a dinner party at a vacant house that you don't live in yet are kinda complicated - you need to import everything from ice cubes to doormats to garbage cans, all the sorts of stuff you completely take for granted in an established household. Anyhow, friends were impressed with the house - essentially saying that it was amazing, and also, holy poo poo you guys have a lot of work ahead of you. Still concerned about the basement. It's been snowing/raining a shitton here, so everything is wet and the ground is totally saturated (both front and back lawns are super squishy and muddy). While showing friends the basement, I was observing certain sections of the foundation walls that were wet and leaching moisture onto the floors in damp patches. It was substantially drier when we toured the house and had it inspected (inspector still noticed some leaching though). Murder room floor was dry and hard then, now it is soft and muddy. Even with all the rain, the worst is the visible dampness, but we've yet to see any dripping or puddles or anything. One of the worst spots is below a basement window, with constant dampness and some spalling. The basement windows have been replaced with those glass blocks, so maybe they hosed up the flashing or sealing or something on that one window, because it's exceptionally bad in that one spot. I'll be sure to ask the basement inspector guy about it this coming weekend (hope he can give us some useful insight and not just sell us on basement repair/improvement services). So I've been researching installation of weeping tile systems to mitigate some of the moisture in the ground, both around the house and in the basement (namely the dirt floor section). Oh! And we met a new catte friend . While in the basement, we looked out one of the windows (one of the few not replaced by glass block things) and noticed a critter under the porch. Thought it was a rabbit at first, but it was a kitty! Went out to the porch and the kitty came out, initially ran off to the porch next door, but then I persuaded him to come back and he was super affectionate and friendly - would rub up against your legs really aggressively, let you pet and pick up and hug him, etc. Gonna pick up some cat treats for next time. Also, feel bad and dumb because i did not get a pic. I'm super happy there is a cool neighborhood cat - I need my kitty fix because I can't have a cat because fiance is allergic (he's totally getting the shots after we get married), also good to know that there's some local pest control.Also, a new mystery: Got the mail, and Comcast Xfinity sent to our house three identical advertisements - all were addressed to our house, but Apt. 1, Apt. 2, and Apt. 3. There are no apartments in our house, and it was one of the few on the block to never be subdivided into apartments. We''re under the impression the previous owner and her family occupied the house, and they'd owned it since like 2001 or something. It's possible it was rented before, but as a share house. I've had friends who lived in huge old rental houses with 6+ bedrooms - house was one unit but the landlord would pseudo-subdivide it into "units" with different leases and mailboxes because of rental laws or something, but not actually ever turn the house into multiple independent units. I mean, I did spot several different coax cables strung around the outside of the house going to various rooms... Or it could be that the neighborhood is full of triplex houses and some mailer algo made the assumption that our house must be triplex also. Still, *Side story on the furniture: The POs left some furniture. They put the house on the market last summer and promptly moved out of state, taking most of their poo poo with them. Remaining furniture is the pretty nice quality dining room set and then a bunch of lovely Ikea wardrobes in the bedrooms. A few days before closing, our agent texts me about how the seller wanted to sell the furniture that was still in the house. We communicated back that if they wanted to sell the furniture, the seller could arrange for the furniture to be removed from the house in the next 48 hours, or else forget about it because we would have no part in accommodating furniture sales from the house after we took possession of it (at which point the furniture would become ours anyway). We met the listing agent at closing, and he was super cool - he bitched about how the seller wanted him to help sell the remaining furniture, and he was like, "uh I sell houses, not furniture, wtf man". Super nice to have the table over there, but we're going to have to sell it ourselves once we move...
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Mar 29, 2018 04:33
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So the promotional free basement inspection/consultation happened last weekend, and goddamn. The company does waterproofing solutions and stuff, and we have a damp creepy basement made out of porous stone (probably actually sandstone instead of limestone, it would seem). And since it hasn't loving stopped raining all spring (and it is raining at time of writing), the ground is saturated and the foundation walls are leaching moisture like crazy, although not outright dripping. Anyhow, inspector recommended a French drain solution with some fancy sump pumps and gave us a quote of a bit over $19,000  .I think some of the line items were bullshit, like $400 to disconnect, temporarily move, and then reconnect the lovely water heater from 1998, so I guess we could haggle it down or shop around, except luckily, this isn't an imminently needed repair, because the foundation itself is perfectly fine and has been for over a hundred years, it'd be more about making sure the foundation stays good for the next hundred years and also so the basement isn't damp and musty. I'm inclined to just see how it is once the ground dries out a bit and start with some smaller cheaper repairs that can hopefully mitigate the dampness, like fixing/redirecting the downspouts so they don't dump water right next to the house (actually one of the downspouts fell off the house the other day, so yeah, we gotta fix those) and fixing the lack of drainage outside the walkout basement door. Water is truly the enemy.
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Apr 4, 2018 04:28
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Queen Victorian posted:Water is truly the enemy. No more problems. Total cost (which included removing a solidly-built brick landing and rebuilding it in the same, expensive fashion) was in the $19k range as well, for probably around 90 linear feet of excavation. I'm glad we did it.
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Apr 4, 2018 12:14
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After watching a lot of home improvement shows, I think basements may be the enemy.
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Apr 4, 2018 13:06
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angryrobots posted:After watching a lot of home improvement shows, I think basements may be the enemy. Leaky roofs and walls are things that are things.
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Apr 4, 2018 15:16
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Queen Victorian posted:So the promotional free basement inspection/consultation happened last weekend, and goddamn. My old house was a 1900 farmhouse (I'm in northern VT) with the original stone foundation. The basement was originally dirt, but then someone poured a slab on the floor at some point (water still came in but was harder to get out). Spring time was always fun when all the snow melted, meaning several inches of standing water in the basement. I forgot how much I originally paid, but I had a team come in, and do something akin to what you're talking about here for significantly less (maybe like 8 grand total on the high side, but I also shelled out for battery backup/dual pump system - it was kinda overkill, and I can't imagine why it would be THAT much more for you cost wise). Absolutely do what you can to mitigate it because every little bit helps. I would even argue you could do most of the legwork on a sump system yourself - though codes/permits may be an issue? For me, it was a time/convenience to pay someone to do it, and watching them - it's not that hard, just a bit labor intensive. Happy to answer any questions if you have any.
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Apr 4, 2018 20:24
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angryrobots posted:After watching a lot of home improvement shows, I think basements may be the enemy. Basements are awesome, it is definitely water that is the enemy. Our walk-out basement can effectively function as an apartment, which is great since my parents have been staying pretty frequently to help with child care. It's warm, still gets good light, and they can come and go without waking me in between night shifts. But water? Water is the enemy. If this were a new-construction home it'd be no problem, but it's a house from 1925 built out of Wissahickon schist, which serves as basically no barrier to water.
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Apr 4, 2018 21:21
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If there's a door to the shitter, does it really count as a Pittsburgh toilet?
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Apr 5, 2018 03:44
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House with awesome potential, I'm looking to live vicariously through you. How does the attic look, any room up there? ed: And do you have any yard / access in the back? Pigsfeet on Rye fucked around with this message at 19:23 on Apr 5, 2018 |
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Apr 5, 2018 18:47
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It's been a pretty bad and miserable week at work, and also pretty bad and miserable weather-wise (rain, thunderstorms, snow, fierce winds, and now more rain - keep imagining that the house is all by its lonesome springing leaks everywhere that we're not catching in time because we're not occupying it yet), but now I have time for replies. Hopefully we'll be able to spend some time at the house tomorrow (to make sure it hasn't sprung any leaks or anything).tetrapyloctomy posted:It sure is. Our basement started leaking in heavy rainstorms, and then after the third literal hurricane in a season the finished side got water as well. At the front of the house the first floor is just above ground level, and in the rear the basement is at grade, so we had the left half of the front elevation and half of the left side (could have done more but there was a tree I wanted to save) dug down to the foundation so a liquid membrane and then a plastic sheet could be applied, and a french drain installed. That worked great (we only got water incursion when a gutter extension slid off and the fieldstone above the waterproofing got saturated), so we did the right half of the front elevation and the entire right side done as well (in this case for some reason they also mortared over the fieldstone before applying the membrane, which is fine by me). Glad you got that fixed! Our basement inspector said that generally the exterior seal and drainage system is ideal, but not feasible in our case for the reasons I'd already suspected (too close to the other houses, porches to work around) and also because of liability due to being so close to the other houses - if they excavate and the disturbance causes damage to the foundation of another house, then we're all hosed. Hence the interior perimeter French drain solution. Thankfully, our basement has not sprung any leaks, water just leaches through the stone and the interior becomes visibly damp. Currently, the ground is completely saturated. Walking across the very established front lawn felt like walking over a field of wet sponges. Also it snowed last night. angryrobots posted:After watching a lot of home improvement shows, I think basements may be the enemy. Some friends of ours were house shopping in another city at the same time we were. We closed a couple weeks apart. Their house was new construction, with a no-basement slab foundation, and yet the slab had a premature crack in it. I"m guessing it wasn't bad because they still bought it after inspection, but still, new house with no basement still has problems. Houses in general are the enemy. I am actually happy about this house not having a central AC system because it means we don't have to deal with maintaining one. It's just another point of failure and money pit at the end of the day, on top of the much larger money pit that is your overall house. Though at least with our basement, it's unadulterated and in its original state, so nothing is hidden from us. When we were looking at houses, plenty of the old ones had nicely finished basements. Now that I've read more on old house basements, I'm glad that ours is unfinished with all the stonework exposed, because there are so many ways you can gently caress up your stone foundation walls and then hide said fuckups behind a veneer of finished basement that you won't notice or think to look for until something goes seriously wrong. Beverly Cleavage posted:My old house was a 1900 farmhouse (I'm in northern VT) with the original stone foundation. The basement was originally dirt, but then someone poured a slab on the floor at some point (water still came in but was harder to get out). Yeesh, several inches of standing water in the spring doesn't sound good. So far for us, it's just visible dampness coming through the stones and mortar when the ground is totally saturated. Some water comes under the walk-out door, but that seems to be because the nice-looking basement steps are concreted in right to the threshold with no drainage for rainwater running down the steps. Dumb oversight because someone was being a cheap rear end in a top hat. Will look into fixing this myself and save money for the interior French drain system or other moisture mitigation solutions. The expense for us was a lot of things added up, the bulk of it being the installation of the French drain system, which involved a lot of jackhammering, materials, installation of materials, etc, and we needed like 120 feet of it on both sides of the house. We allegedly need two fancy sump pumps because the amount of French drainage we need exceeds the capacity for one fancy sump pump. Still don't know if a pair of "smart" sump pumps and their installation is worth three grand though. Additional charges ranged from understandable to complete bullshit and padded the final quote. If we find that it's imperative to deal with the basement moisture (so far I have not gotten indication that it is), then I'll go get additional quotes/opinions. Not sure about permitting on sumps, but I'm going to at least see if I can fix the drainage on the exterior basement stairs at least - just need to bash out some concrete, dig out a bit, and put down some gravel and a grate so rainwater can go into the ground and not under the door. Also I think reinstating the old slanted cellar doors would be helpful as well. I'll be sure to ask any questions should they come up.  Sockser posted:If there's a door to the shitter, does it really count as a Pittsburgh toilet? So I've been in a lot of Pittsburgh basements, and it seems that a lot of the old basement toilets at least had a little hutch/partition built around them. Sometimes with doors or at least the remnants/evidence of doors. In my apartment basement, there's the remnant of a Pittsburgh shitter, and what's left is the hutch and plumbing hookups. Pretty sure it was built with a door. But I get the sense that the doors were not nice doors like upstairs, just planks nailed together with some hinges attached. I've not actually personally seen the fabled toilet out in the open in the middle of the basement. Also, I guess our house was super bourgeoisie back in the day because the basement toilet was in its own room (this is actually rare - I've not seen one quite like this before). I did hear about a Pittsburgh shitter that was a stack of tires centered around the sewer pipe where the old toilet used to be. A friend had seen it while looking at a house to buy (pretty sure the house was in the same vicinity as ours). Pigsfeet on Rye posted:House with awesome potential, I'm looking to live vicariously through you. How does the attic look, any room up there? Attic is huge, awesome, and finished. Would make excellent quarters for children and/or servants. There are three good-sized rooms plus assorted closets in the attic. Eventually we'd love to combine a couple of the closets that are wall to wall and make a small full bath. For attic room use, fiance and I are each claiming one for an office, and then the remaining one will be a secondary guest room and/or weight room. Or fiance will put the weights and weight bench in his office room (big enough for a desk area and weight area), we keep the one room for a guest room, and then I have my attic room for office/studio - would have enough space for my Steelcase desk AND a drafting table. And all my arts and crafts poo poo too. Here's a pic of one of the rooms:  This is the side room. The strange and wonderful thing about Victorian houses is the hidden beauty - you can't see these gorgeous windows from outside the house unless you're on the neighbor's roof. There's also amazing brick work on the chimneys, that you can't see unless you're walking in the four feet of space between the houses. The attic floors are all shot, so refinishing them will be a project. Kinda funny that they painted the upstairs and then completely neglected the floors (and actually tried to paint a portion of it - it's horrible and all it did was make more sanding work for me). Also, doorway up to attic:  As for backyard, yes, we do have one. It's not very large, but enough space for a little patio, fire pit, lawn, garden, some apple trees, laundry line, and flowers. Plenty good for me. Here are some pics:  I took this of all the adorable little flowers popping up everywhere All the crap strewn about came with the house and I've since rounded it up for disposal. A couple of the pots had standing water in them and it smelled sooo bad. Will save fallen dead branches for eventual fire pit. Might use some of the smaller flowerpots to distribute some of those flowers to friends because I want to avoid murdering them with the lawn mower   Another view of the yard from upstairs out of the bay window. This is the side of the yard where I'd install a garden bed and also the clothesline. You can see the old pole in the yard (there is a corresponding hook on the back porch column. Just need a nice rope and some clothespins and then I can properly line dry all my line-dry-only lady clothes. The neighbors still hang laundry - everyone still has their old laundry line poles. I dunno, I think it's refreshingly old school. The backyard in general is pretty cool - the houses on the block are situated like circled wagons, so the backyards are all enclosed and facing each other. This block does not have a back alley, which even though it means there's no off-street parking for us, it means that the houses-turned-apartments won't have asphalt parking pads for yards. I give no fucks about the fire escapes and unkempt renter yards as long as I don't have to do my gardening and fire pit sitting next to a goddamned parking lot.  Back of house from yard. It's a really tall house. From the bay window you can see straight over the privacy fence around the yard opposite us. Dunno why they bothered. Gonna people watch so much from that bay window.
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Apr 8, 2018 05:37
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The little details on your house are gorgeous. Our house is ... handsome? Solid-appearing and traditional, but even though much is original it lacks small touches found in the high-end homes of the era. At two approximately 24×40 floors (including the center hall, though) plus a 24×10 sunroom it is huge compared to the "average" house in 1920s Philadelphia, but it's more a cheaper version of the 50% larger Chestnut Hill mansions than a nicer version of the average contemporaneous home, if that makes sense. A 1925 McMansion. The interior drainage solution will be fine. It was not feasible with ours, since the basement is 2/3 finished. In both our cases, the pre-slab basements probably just got damp and drained down slowly, and now the slabs trap the water. What baffles me us that the person who renovated the house in 2001 excavated out and poured a slab, but PUT IN NO FLOOR DRAINS OR PERIMETER TRENCHING. What the gently caress?
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Apr 8, 2018 13:44
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tetrapyloctomy posted:The little details on your house are gorgeous. Our house is ... handsome? Solid-appearing and traditional, but even though much is original it lacks small touches found in the high-end homes of the era. At two approximately 24×40 floors (including the center hall, though) plus a 24×10 sunroom it is huge compared to the "average" house in 1920s Philadelphia, but it's more a cheaper version of the 50% larger Chestnut Hill mansions than a nicer version of the average contemporaneous home, if that makes sense. A 1925 McMansion. Wow, those are huge rooms. What's the total square footage? Your mention of it being a 1920's McMansion immediately reminded me of Gatsby's house - from the descriptions, down to the unused library full of never-read leather bound books, it was totally a proto-McMansion. We didn't really look at any legit 20's houses. Around here, the available ones built in the 20's were either simplistic prairie boxes or huge ultra-high-end Tudor Gothic mansions that were well out of our price range. We did look at some very interesting 30's houses, though. There were several huge castle-like houses with stone walls, tile roofs, and turrets and poo poo. Earlier castle-inspired houses were just stone Victorians with maybe a turret and some battlement details, but the 30's houses were their own thing and seriously doubled down on pretending to be castles. I don't know the motivation behind these designs - trying to be elite, or maybe revivalist architecture in the 30's just got really weird and eclectic? We did not pursue any of these because the maintenance requirements seemed atrocious and none of them were in good locations (i.e. on extremely busy streets, surrounded by dumpy little ranch houses built decades later, way out in the suburbs, etc.). Around here, I've observed that houses come in four general tiers of design/build quality: working class, middle class, upper-middle class, and robber baron class. I would place our house at the low end of the upper-middle class tier. It's huge for the time period (around 3,000 sq ft), has a ton of nice details, but it's also on a pretty cramped lot and there are some interesting idiosyncrasies about it that wouldn't happen in an ultra-high-end house, like the flooring design in the foyer being part diamond pattern and part Greek key pattern, the baseboard in the dining room abruptly changing style (like they ran out of one cut of baseboard and finished the room with a not-quite-matching variety rather than go cut more of the right kind), the marbleizing job on the slate mantelpieces being low quality (looks like half-assed scribbling and not like marble veins), things like that. Still, it's nicer than the working/middle class houses we looked at - these houses are generally much smaller, with the working class ones being wood and very nondescript. We looked at one working class Victorian in a working class neighborhood, and while it was very plain looking, it was exquisite on the inside. It was very small though, and was 40k more than the house we bought. I loved the neighborhood - it's bleak-looking, but it's so friendly and everyone who lives there loves it. It's interesting - the tier of house build doesn't have much to do with price - the demographics and wealth has moved around so much that you have yuppies flocking to old working class neighborhoods and rich fancy neighborhoods fallen to blight, which gets you steel workers' houses selling for more than giant fancy Victorians. quote:The interior drainage solution will be fine. It was not feasible with ours, since the basement is 2/3 finished. In both our cases, the pre-slab basements probably just got damp and drained down slowly, and now the slabs trap the water. What baffles me us that the person who renovated the house in 2001 excavated out and poured a slab, but PUT IN NO FLOOR DRAINS OR PERIMETER TRENCHING. What the gently caress? Yeah that just sucks. Like our previous owners putting in brand new steps to the basement but failing to put in drainage. I'm much happier dealing with the house being old and unimproved so we can go off the original construction and do it right, rather than having to tear out all the past "improvements" and deal with all that poo poo on top of the standard old house problems that we'll have either way.
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Apr 8, 2018 18:26
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So the water heater at our apartment literally just up and died. Went down to do some laundry and was greeted by a gigantic puddle from streams of water dribbling down the sides of our unit's water heater. Called maintenance and they had a guy out promptly (landlord can be slow as molasses about a lot of repairs, but they don't gently caress around with active leaks) and he shut the thing off and said it was totally shot. We'll be getting a replacement water heater tomorrow... ...Which means no hot showers until then. Fiance was like, oh poo poo which friend can we call to borrow their shower?? And then it occurred to us, OH WAIT there's this huge empty house with hot water and an available shower THAT WE OWN. Except when the 20-year-old water heater inevitably dies in the near future, it'll be on us to replace it. Edit: water heater at the house is a weak piece of poo poo, probably due to a combination of being super old and sitting unused for eight months. Running 100% hot water was barely warm enough. Queen Victorian fucked around with this message at 04:01 on Apr 9, 2018 |
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Apr 8, 2018 19:52
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Queen Victorian posted:So I've been in a lot of Pittsburgh basements, and it seems that a lot of the old basement toilets at least had a little hutch/partition built around them. Sometimes with doors or at least the remnants/evidence of doors. In my apartment basement, there's the remnant of a Pittsburgh shitter, and what's left is the hutch and plumbing hookups. Pretty sure it was built with a door. But I get the sense that the doors were not nice doors like upstairs, just planks nailed together with some hinges attached. I've not actually personally seen the fabled toilet out in the open in the middle of the basement. Also, I guess our house was super bourgeoisie back in the day because the basement toilet was in its own room (this is actually rare - I've not seen one quite like this before). My old house had one. It was referred to as the Fight Club shitter, because it was in the middle of one half of the basement with a single bare lightbulb hanging over it.
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Apr 10, 2018 11:28
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The back yard is snug and sensible! I'm concerned if the kitchen can be fixed at all... I know it's from a different time when dishes were often stored in the dining room, but it just looks like a bathroom with a fridge. Can you take more photos of that half of the house? What's the room next to it with counters? Can you sketch a floorplan? If you're calling in a pro plumber anyway, and doing counters and cabinets from scratch anyway, how about converting a nearby room into a real proper kitchen? And the current kitchen could be a badass laundry room, with access to the yard for line drying...
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Apr 11, 2018 12:59
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I loving love Victorian houses.  Old houses in general are pretty great. So much better than the hideous post-modern poo poo people build today.
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Apr 11, 2018 20:30
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Liquid Communism posted:My old house had one. It was referred to as the Fight Club shitter, because it was in the middle of one half of the basement with a single bare lightbulb hanging over it. That sounds awesome. One of my first encounters with a Pittsburgh shitter was when I got here for college and went to a house party at a grubby college rental house. It was against the wall in the middle of the basement and had old wood partitions around it and a half-assed saloon style shutter door on it, so it was great for dudes and puking/rallying, but not too great for us girls. As for the shitter in our house's basement, I'm all for restoring it, but my fiance and probably everyone else ever is all about capping off the (uncapped) sewer pipe where the bottom half of the toilet used to be and forgetting about it. Actually the house I grew up in, which was a disintegrating summer house in northern California, had a quasi-outdoor lean-to attached to the back that contained the washer, dryer, and a random toilet. Not the same, but hey. peanut posted:The back yard is snug and sensible! Oh, nothing in the kitchen is salvageable. We will probably tear out just about everything that is not the wainscoting (I want to strip and reuse the wainscoting in the redone kitchen). I love the aesthetic of the huge cast iron sink, but it's a corner sink and goes up in front of the window, and doesn't really fit with what we have in mind, so it'll go and I'll likely replace it with a nice big farmhouse sink. I'll try to round up some more pictures and find the floor plan I drew. I've been meaning to make a whole post about the kitchen and our plans, but life/wedding planning/work being poo poo keeps getting in the way. Also been meaning to make some designs in SketchUp or something, but that hasn't happened yet either. Still though, the kitchen room will stay the kitchen, because there's no other place to put it. The general plan of the first floor is the typical "foursquare" layout you see in late Victorians and later prairie boxes, with foyer, living room, formal dining room, kitchen (plus assorted staircases and a coat closet) on the main floor, with bedrooms and bathroom on the upper floor(s). And with it being a Victorian house, each room has a strongly designated purpose. The foyer with its fancy parquet floors and carved stairway is the entry point and the first thing your guests see (so it has to be impressive), then they go into the living room for conversation and Victorian pleasantries and poo poo, then move onto the formal dining room for dinner, and then maybe they go back into the living room for a smoke and nightcap or something. The kitchen is adjacent to the dining room, but it is never seen because it is a work space for the servants. I did some reading on Victorian kitchens, and while I knew they were utilitarian work spaces, I also learned that the configuration was totally different, hence all the weird poo poo I get to deal with like huge low windows and tons of doors on all the walls. Victorian kitchens didn't have built-in countertops or cabinets or anything. They had the sink, stove, and icebox along the walls, with some free-standing storage furniture, and then a big work table in the middle of the room. There was also a pantry for food/dish storage (we have a decent-sized pantry). We will be inheriting a breakfront for the dining room for the fancy china. Generally, I aim to play into the Victorian kitchen configuration to make the kitchen efficient. Trying to turn it into something it was never designed to be (contemporary kitchen with all the counters and poo poo along the walls) is just going to make it awkward (and probably require that I sacrifice the one huge window, which I refuse to do), so I'm trying to design something with the old configuration in mind, with the primary work space being in a center island with most of the storage in the pantry. Another thing, I am not going to try to make this into an eat-in kitchen or "open it up" so it's combined with the dining room (that would be a crime, given the exquisiteness of the dining room's coffered ceiling), so it'll be formal dining room for all meals, and the kitchen for cooking only. Here's a reconstructed Victorian kitchen for reference:  Probably what the kitchen in our place looked like when the house was built, then went to poo poo when all the original furniture disappeared and the fridge was stuck into the middle of the room. I'm not interested in doing a fully accurate historical reconstruction of an authentic Victorian kitchen, but just taking some clues from them. As for laundry room, the current hookups are down in the creepy basement, but we want have an upstairs laundry room so we don't have to haul laundry so much (still going to haul laundry outside for line drying). Off one of the upstairs rooms (the southern-facing one that I think was a ladies' sitting/sewing room), there's a weird little room that I think was a servants' prep room and the alleged former upstairs terminal for the dumbwaiter in the pantry directly below it (except there's no opening...). It has two windows and is juuuust big enough for a washer and dryer and maybe some raised shelves for storing linens and an ironing board. If not for an upstairs laundry room, I would have no clue what to do with a tiny room with two windows. A meditation chamber? Tiny room:  I'll try to write up the kitchen post in the next few days/this weekend. Dr. Gitmo Moneyson posted:I loving love Victorian houses. Me too! Like I said, it's always been my dream to live in one. I could go on a huge tirade about contemporary residential architecture and why it's bad and how we've lost our way as a society architecturally, but that's a rant post for another day, and it's getting late, so I'll call it a night and try to do a comprehensive write up on the kitchen with pictures.
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Apr 12, 2018 04:19
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Queen Victorian posted:Actually the house I grew up in, which was a disintegrating summer house in northern California, had a quasi-outdoor lean-to attached to the back that contained the washer, dryer, and a random toilet. Not the same, but hey. Outdoor toilets are great. We still had an outhouse when I was growing up in the middle of nowhere, and it was great when you needed to use the bathroom, but didn't want to get out of your boots or track mud through the house just to use the john.
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Apr 12, 2018 07:12
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A tiny room, you say? http://www.oldhouseweb.com/how-to-advice/the-little-room-upstairs.shtml
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Apr 13, 2018 02:01
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Pigsfeet on Rye posted:A tiny room, you say? Oooh very interesting... I've read a bunch of stuff on that website, but hadn't yet stumbled upon that particular article. I think dressing room makes the most sense. It's off the chamber with the bay window, so not accessible from the hall. This room with the bay window is kinda small and oddly shaped, and also has the kitchen stove chimney coming up on one wall, so due to its shape, you couldn't fit much more than a twin bed and a couple pieces of other furniture. Out of the four rooms (chambers) on the second floor, it's definitely one of the lesser ones, because of its smaller size and lack of fireplace. The two large prominent rooms have the marbleized slate fireplaces (one's going to be the master bedroom and the other is going to be a swanky as gently caress guest room with a dry bar). I thought the bay window room itself would have been a sewing room or sitting room with the tiny room adjacent to it for something or other. Or maybe it was a more desirable bedroom because of the bay window and southern exposure. All in all, I would LOVE to get my hands on the plans for this house. I wonder if the city has them archived somewhere. Seeing the schematics would be super handy. Also we could figure out what all these rooms are for. Currently, my bet is on dressing room. I found this house plan with the same chamber/tiny room config (even down to the bay window):  In these plans, it is labeled as a dressing room. I looked at a few plans, but not all of them had the tiny dressing rooms. Our house is not nearly this grandiose, but that bay window chamber with the attached dressing room is a dead ringer for what we have going on.
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Apr 13, 2018 04:10
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Queen Victorian posted:Electrical (definitely hiring this out): I don't think anyone else has addressed this bit yet, and admittedly my info comes from a lot of lurking in the crappy construction thread. But from what I understand, if you're opening up the walls to touch the wiring at all, you're probably going to be required to bring all the wiring up to code anyway. Just budget for rewiring the house, it'll be less stressful. From the way people in the crappy construction thread yell about it when knob and tube wiring shows up, I don't think you want to keep that stuff even if it's in mint condition. Edited to add: also, my best guess at the flowers in your yard is that they're probably field violets. I can't really see them very well in the photo. But if they are field violets, don't worry too much about a lawn mower taking them out. My family had field violets in our backyard when I was growing up, and nothing short of completely replacing the turf would have gotten rid of them; they grow back pretty fast, even though they don't bloom for very long. tinytort fucked around with this message at 08:45 on Apr 27, 2018 |
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Apr 27, 2018 08:34
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That's a beautiful house and you're going to need to post a billion more photos pretty please. Also looking forward to seeing what you do to the kitchen.
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Apr 29, 2018 09:49
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Queen Victorian posted:
I am still very curious about this. I've been wondering if it was an ice-compartment or special cheese storage.
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May 1, 2018 17:18
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Ugh guys we've been so busy with wedding planning and stuff, so no time to do any work on the house, and also no time for me to write posts about (not) doing work on the house. We got some contacts for general contractors (one of whom is Amish - hope this guy is what we want because I want to get hooked up with Amish quarter sawn oak floors and Amish cabinetry) but that's about it. Also my dad's been nagging me for drawings for the kitchen, which I need to do (I have design skills and also drafting skills - thanks college!). Still arguing about the stove, but we miiight be able to get a vintage stove because we saw an awesome 30's stove in a friend's house and my fiance was like, "actually okay that's pretty cool" - I think he was just having a hard time visualizing one of these things installed in a kitchen and in use. Let's just hope we can have a cool awesome stove. And the farmhouse/vintage sink, because having an undermount stainless steel sink just feels insultingly anachronistic for this house. Also, one of my fiance's friends suggested (facetiously?) that we could try to get on Restored by the Fords, an HGTV renovation show in the Pittsburgh area. I don't really like that idea, especially after watching plenty of HGTV and seeing how seemingly little input and involvement the clients have. Also don't want to come off like gentrifying interlopers and dick over future buyers by putting a spotlight on the neighborhood and attracting yuppie assholes. And I don't ever want to be on TV anyway, or have our house on TV. Might be funny to apply for shits and giggles and post a trip report about the application process and if they write back, but I don't know if fiance would be into pulling that kind of joke. cakesmith handyman posted:That's a beautiful house and you're going to need to post a billion more photos pretty please. Also looking forward to seeing what you do to the kitchen. Thank you! I'll try to post more pic series soon. I've been working on a kitchen post for a while but just got super busy. Still chipping away. It'll come with plenty of pics. I also need to get more pictures of the bedrooms. The bedrooms and attic rooms just need cosmetic work for the most part, including repainting because most of the paint colors are bad. Honestly, the idea of figuring out colors for all these rooms is kind of daunting because I grew up in a house with pure white walls/trim. More recently, my parents repainted so that it's not white (a really nice pale gold color), but it's ALL that one color. Took them ages to find that one color (they ended up going custom), and now I have to find several excellent colors because I don't want to live in a monotonous house again. Oh yeah, need to post about (and post pics of) the bathroom. It sucks and is dingy and falling apart (though probably looked pretty nice when it was brand new in 1938 or whenever it was last redone). It has a nice bay window in it but doesn't get much light because it's shoved against the other house. tinytort posted:I don't think anyone else has addressed this bit yet, and admittedly my info comes from a lot of lurking in the crappy construction thread. But from what I understand, if you're opening up the walls to touch the wiring at all, you're probably going to be required to bring all the wiring up to code anyway. Well, any rooms we extensively redo (more than repaint), we will be updating/replacing whatever wiring we find, so new stuff for the kitchen, bathroom, and closet-turned-powder-room, which has a glorious knob and tube fixture in it right now. Definitely gonna put an old-timey Edison bulb in it and take some cool pics before ripping it out. Actually I just had an idea - take out the wiring/fixture, put in new wiring, mount the now-dead knob and tube stuff and hook up the cool turn-knob switch for appearances and freak people out. And if we had an extra mountain of cash lying around, I'd go ahead and rewire the whole house like yesterday (and also get rid of the unsightly add-on conduits all over the sides of the house). We did get a quote for a whole rewiring, and it was 17k (probably bloated a bit because the quote was a bargaining chip during negotiation). And I'm not sure if that quote included patching the plaster. I definitely want to fully rewire at some point, but we kind of need a kitchen first. Until then, definitely getting everything checked out and up to speed safety wise. Still though, all the housing stock here is super loving old, so knob and tube everywhere. Getting insurance wasn't an issue (or else there would be nothing to insure), and the attitude is generally to just not do anything stupid/dangerous with it until you eventually get around to updating it, but no rush. quote:Edited to add: also, my best guess at the flowers in your yard is that they're probably field violets. I can't really see them very well in the photo. But if they are field violets, don't worry too much about a lawn mower taking them out. My family had field violets in our backyard when I was growing up, and nothing short of completely replacing the turf would have gotten rid of them; they grow back pretty fast, even though they don't bloom for very long. The flowers are actually some sort of monocot - possibly little purple crocuses or something related. Anyway, at this point they're all overgrown and not flowering anymore so we can mow the lawn now. I've seen them around in gardens, so they might have started out as something planted intentionally in the flowerbed and then escaped and multiplied.
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May 2, 2018 04:37
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spog posted:I am still very curious about this. Oh hey, took three days to write that last reply and then there's another post! I honestly have no clue what this little compartment is. It looks like a dumbwaiter to nowhere (the cover is very Victorian dumbwaiter-like), but there's no evidence that it was ever actually a dumbwaiter. It wouldn't have been for ice - there were freestanding iceboxes (which were super insulated) that had two compartments - one for ice on top, the other for food. You'd put a block of ice in the top and the coldness would descend into the rest of the interior and keep your food cold. Then when the block of ice melted, you shoved another one in. Given the lack of insulation, it wouldn't have been for ice. As for cheese, I dunno - I'd think that cheeses would either be stored in the aforementioned icebox (soft cheeses and such) or in the open air, or perhaps in the basement. I'm not sure of the advantage of having it in a special built in compartment...
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May 2, 2018 04:46
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If video games have taught me anything, it's that you put a painting in front of it and then hide guns and a turkey dinner in the wall.
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May 2, 2018 12:34
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If you're interested in antique stoves, there's places like this: http://stovehospital.com/ Or modern versions: http://www.elmirastoveworks.com/
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May 3, 2018 00:59
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| # ? Apr 25, 2024 20:53 |
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Hey guys, it's been busy with wedding stuff, so not much house time or posting time. I'll try to have a good photo post up later this week (have stuff going on the next couple evenings). My fiancé's mom and stepdad are coming out next month to help us with some work, probably floors and painting and stuff, since we won't be far enough along with any other projects to allow for cabinet assembly or tile work or anything. Also, will be nice to have upstairs rooms in a decent finished state before we move stuff in, even if we can't get the kitchen done (we will not get it done before we move in in two months because lol. We did manage to do some yard work and soil testing. Unfortunately, we have a moderate level of lead contamination in our topsoil, so I'll have to build a raised garden bed (was going to do this anyway) and wait a year or so to plant my apple trees and do some mitigation in the spot where I want to plant them. Lawnmower that came with the house was DOA and a cheap piece of poo poo to begin with, so we ditched it and got a push reel mower, which will be very nice once we get the overgrown grass under regular control (we let it get way too long). Pigsfeet on Rye posted:If you're interested in antique stoves, there's places like this: Wonderful! I love the stuff in that first site. I've seen the Elmira stuff before, too. Even if we have modern stainless other stuff, I'd love to have a vintage stove. Anyways, phone posting on the bus isn't very fun so I'll stop here and try to make some more better posts soon.
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May 15, 2018 14:20
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