the house, circa 1995

Our new neighbors across the street found a picture of our house in a cabinet.. take a look!

This is what our old neighbors had to look out at every day.. can you imagine?

I made my CSI attempt at beefing up the date at the bottom left (they make it look so easy!) The last digit is either a 5 or a 9, and since the digit before is definitely a 9 and it looks different, I'm going with 5.
So this picture was taken August 3, 1995

Aside from the layer of filth, there are a couple interesting things in this picture. The whole front stair is rotting out and the post which we just discovered is completely rotten isn't even there! That would mean it was put in when the stairs were rebuilt in 1996. We've just replaced the stairs, and we're going to need to replace that post this summer.

This reminds me.. we need to finish power-washing the house so it doesn't wind up looking like this again!

all work and no... work..

Dan and I have both been spending so much time at work that we haven't had much time or energy left to work on the house.. In fact, I started this post 2 weeks ago and just now have a chance to finish it while Dan's off at work! yes, on a Saturday :(

Dan got the floor plans finished to get the heating plan designed, but now we have a decision to make.. On the 3rd floor - our someday master bedroom suite - we're going to carpet the floor, so were planning on installing radiators for heat. There are some fancy new-fangled ones that will work right off the same pex lines as the radiant in-floor heat, so that seemed like our best bet. As it turns out, we can put hydronic radiant under carpet but we'd have to figure out how to get it in there. The 2nd floor (which is where we're living) has finished ceilings, and the 3rd floor has a perfectly intact oak strip subfloor which we're definitely not tearing up. The ceilings in just about every room on the 2nd floor have an awful skip-trowel texture on them, and there would be no love lost in losing them. Plus, from what we were able to pull out from the edges above, the insulation between the floors probably still has some rats nests, which if we could, would be great to get out. The problem is, we're living here! tearing down the ceiling will be a giant mess, and if we'd realized that we'd need to do it before we moved in, it wouldn't've been so bad. Now, however, a shower of rat poop is a little harder to deal with.

We'll put in-floor radiant in the bathroom regardless of how we heat the bedroom and office. There's a 6" step down anyway, since it was originally a covered porch, and we have plenty of room to put warmboard down on top of the existing floor and still have headroom left for tile.

Our heating alternatives for the bedroom and office are:

1. A radiator in each room, probably at the baseboard.


2. Staple-up tubing from underneath, which would require tearing out the ceiling underneath. This is how we're heating the middle floor, but we have nice, exposed access for that. Plus, there would be more the heat would have to go through to get to the room because of the existing wood subfoor
   


3. A warmboard-type subfloor laid above the existing subfloor, which would cause us to lose about 2" in height in the room

I'm a little unsure how effective radiant under a carpet would be anyway, so I'm investigating that first (if anyone has any experience with that, I'd LOVE to hear it!). We'd be limited to a fairly thin pad, because that is an extremely insulating layer, which we'd want to minimize. And I think we'd be a little limited in what kind of carpet we could use. So even after the actual work is done, regardless of if we put it in from above or below, the tradeoff would be thin carpet and invisible heat with no loss in floorspace, or thick, dig-your-toes-in carpet with radiators in the rooms.

It's a beautiful warm day, which makes it even harder to think about heating systems.. but it does mean I can open all the windows and get some fresh air circulating. And the reality of living in a house with exposed studs and indoor/outdoor carpet and throw rugs covering every possible inch of floor my bare feet will never touch, is that even after the thorough spring cleaning it's just about to get, it'll still look like it needs to be cleaned. Maybe instead I'll spend the day on our lovely patio snapping my fingers trying to have the house magically be done.

Our first house-iversary!

That's right.. a whole year has passed since we bought Chez Neumansky! After closing up the very last gaping hole in the side of the house, I thought I'd spend some time outside on this gorgeous spring day and take stock of where we are.

From here, I can actually see a lot of our progress:

• There's not a giant pile of trash or weeds filling the yard, the porch or the house.
• The crumbling pile of bricks has been replaced by a modern, strong foundation.
• The other, taller crumbling pile of bricks has reconfigured itself into a driveway (which I can sorta make out through through the open fabulously gorgeous garage door)
• The back porch, which we had to duck under to get to the back door, is now 9' up, and the back door is in a brand new earthquake-resistant shear wall.
  
• The ground floor, which had about 4 different levels - some of which were concrete, some dirt, some linoleum - none of which would conform to modern height requirements, is now a nice, flat, 9' tall rough space.
• I can see the cleanout for the drainage, which runs all the way around the perimeter and under the slab to a sump pump, which has been doing a great job of keeping everything dry through this very rainy season.
• The beginnings of our first floor are framed in: a bedroom, bathroom and hallway, and then our garage/workshop.
• And finally, our awesome patio, which I'm sitting on writing this!
  

Now for the stuff you can't see from here:

• The house is fit for human habitation. I won't go into too many details.. let's just say it's clean enough to shower, eat and breathe in, and if you missed the time when it wasn't, take a look here.
  
• As I mentioned at the beginning, there are no more gaping holes in the side of the house - no more "walls" of tarp, no more 2' gaps at the bottom of the doors because we lowered the ground level.. Our doors should be here in another week or two, but until then, Dan made us some ghetto-fabulous plywood doors (you can see one in the pic above), which make a remarkable difference in how nice the house looks.. plus, we can actually leave a pair of pliers in the garage without worrying that there are 6 different holes in the house big enough for a person to get in.
  
• The radiant heat for the first floor living area is embedded in the slab, and Dan's inside now finishing up the floorplans for the top 2 floors so the radiant plans for the rest of the house can be generated.
  
• The main sewer line from the house to the street has been redone, which is a city requirement when a house is sold - we have another 25 years (once the plumber gets the papers into the city, that is) before we have to have it inspected again.
  
• We have 200 sparkly amps of modern electrical service coming into the house, with a subpanel on each floor.
• We have new front stairs that are not in danger of disintegrating under a person walking up them.

Looking at the plans for 2008, we're making pretty good progress. We still have 3 1/2 months before the anniversary of actually living here.. by that time we hope to have a functional bathroom downstairs, which means all the plumbing, wiring, and heat for the whole house has to be in place so we can close in some walls (as willing as our friends are to dive into anything for us, they still seem to be a little finicky about wanting walls around the bathroom.. go figure).

And here we are.. one year down, 65 to go!!

we've got the Power!

200 Amps of it!!

With 3 floors of living space, plus a workshop with a plasma cutter and welder, our rickety 100 amp service was not gonna cut it.. Plus, only the middle floor had anything resembling modern wiring, or working outlets for that matter.

We knew we needed to bring more power to the house, and since there was an existing subpanel on the middle floor already, it worked out very nicely to have a separate subpanel for each floor.

<-- Here's the subpanel in the garage/workshop.

Not sure if you can tell, but all the circuits are labeled correctly!! Ok, so there's only the one for the sump pump so far.. but it's very exciting that there's not a long list of wrong mappings to sort through, and since we'll write down each circuit as we run it, it'll always be right. For the rest of our lives!!! (if you don't think that's exciting, my explaining wouldn't help










<-- Here's the new main panel, with a shiny new meter too!

Now, if only that would stop spinning so fast we'd be in good shape. It's starting to warm up a little, and haven't had jackhammers running all month, so this was the first month our electric bill inched down a little.. but it's still waay higher than it should be. By next winter we'll have the radiant heat up and running, so all our space heaters can be retired and donated away. In the meantime, I stand by the decision that the our crazy electric bill is well worth tradeoff for not being able to see my breath in the bathroom in the morning.

Here's Dan framing in the roughout for the subpanel on the top floor -->

<-- And here's the subpanel for our master bedroom suite, aka the top floor.

It's kinda nice that when our bedroom and office are done, if we blow a circuit while say, both blow drying our hair and microwaving hot pockets in the bathroom, we won't have to go down one or two flights of stairs to reset it!

We tried to get a permit to start running the wiring and installing outlets and lights downstairs, but no luck. We need to work on the plans and try again.. maybe next week..

a half bathroom??

I can't tell you how excited I am about the work Dan did over the weekend!! we totally have the beginnings of a bathroom downstairs!

I'm tempted to install the toilet soon, just so we could really call it a half-bath, even though it'll be awhile till we get to the finishing touches. Like walls..


I guess it wouldn't make much sense to have the toilet until we get the water lines run.. and if we're going to do that, we might as well go ahead and run some electricity too.. and by that there no sense not going the full monte and having walls and a floor.. maybe a sink too..

Well, it's still exciting. This is the beginning of the structure and renovation of our house. The foundation, and even the driveway was really just fixing what was here so we could get started. This feels like really getting started.







And Dan got to play with his toys!

This laser level has saved our sanity on many occasions (when we get to the kitchen I'll tell you about the 2 different types of people in the world: people who want the cabinets to be level, and people who want the cabinets to look level.. ne'er the twain shall meet)

Once the walls were up, we measured and chalked out where all the fixtures will be.. turns out the plumber that did the work with the foundation job put the stub-out
for the toilet a few inches further from the wall than it was supposed to be (the green lawn chair in the last picture is our stand-in for the toilet), which in a bathroom this size might as well have been a mile.. so we're going to have to move it. So much for paying other people to do the work..



The framing nailer made such short work of the walls that Dan went through and put blocking in for the grab bars. We're making this bathroom as ADA compliant as we can in such a small space.. When we're too old to get up to our master bedroom suite in the attic we're planning to move in down there and live out the rest of our days, and we want to make it as comfortable as possible for our parents in the meantime.

And now the hallway looks like a hallway :)

it holds the car

The pattern gets a little wonky at the end there, but it's done!!

Instead of renting a vibrating plate compactor to settle the sand we just jumped up and down a lot and stomped on all the bricks.


Then I drove the car over it a couple times to really settle everything in. I'm sure I'll need to resweep it with sand one or two more times, but hey - it totally held up the car, and that's pretty much all I can ask for.

<-- You can see the new bricks on the bottom right here, because they're still wet from washing. That last little corner took awhile to try to get it to hold to the pattern.

Speaking of pattern.. Dan doesn't think I should mention it, because if it had worked it should be obvious.. but since we had so many different colors I wanted to make a plaid driveway! does it look plaid at all??


And then I parked the car on it, and you pretty much can't see it at all.. since we almost never drive this is about the most you'll ever be able to see! sigh..

















Meanwhile, Dan was inside framing in the new bathroom!!

More on that exciting development tomorrow!

midweek brick update

I managed to get home with a little bit of daylight left, and was determined to finish the driveway. Wouldn't you know it, I RAN OUT OF BRICKS!!! A whole chimney and a foundation, and I didn't have enough bricks for a measly little driveway!!?


I filled the sand in on what was there though, and it's amazing how finished it looks!


You basically just sweep sand over it to fill in the gaps, and it acts as mortar and holds everything in place. Plus, it instantly looks like it's been here 100 years!






So close, and yet so far away..


One of the neighbors said she has a pile of bricks in her backyard that I could have if I dug them out.. so it looks like this Saturday is another powerwashing day..