The Saga of the Wood Paneled Shower - Part II

In The Saga of the Wood Paneled Shower - Part I, out came the paneling in the shower, the walls, etc. Now, the downstairs bathroom is fully gutted minus the sink. That means the tub, mold, walls behind the shower, fixtures, door, hardwood floors, everything. Here's how it went down.

First, the mold remediators came in. They taped and plastic’d everything up and sprayed, vacuumed and sealed all of the mold into submission, ensuring it won’t return. I can’t say enough good things about their work, even if it did cost me $1000!

I got back to work once it was clear and I called in a contractor to hang the cement board and greenboard in the bathroom since the walls weren't plumb. Cement board goes behind things like shower enclosures and is “superior mold protection.” The greenboard (pretty much treated drywall) goes above the shower enclosure and is mold resistant. While I can’t say that I love the work the contractor did, the good part is that I then had insulated exterior walls and we managed to save the plaster in the rest of the room so I can just paint it.

Once the walls were up, my sister and I also worked on pulling the rather un-level hardwood floor out in the hopes that I can use some of the ¾ inch spruce or hard longboard pine to patch some of the floors in the rest of the house. They really don’t have hardwood like that anymore – it took over an hour and several specialized blades in an oscillating saw to get the remnants out flush to the wall. There was smoke in the air from how hard the boards were on the saw blades.

My dad mudded, taped and sanded down the seams (see my last post for more about how he’s a magician with those supplies), and managed to get us a surface we could lay tile on that would actually stick.

After that was all finished up, Laura and I waterproof membrane’d the heck out of those walls using a product called RedGard. You brush it on hot Barbie pink, it dries to a bright red and it blocks water. Have I mentioned that I never want to see a hint of mold in my house again?

So, that was the extended demo of the bathroom all the way down to the studs and the subfloor. Up next – the rebuild!

A twist in the story - two units become one

The family has come and is on their way back to Detroit and the Isthmus House is looking better! I didn’t have a spare minute to write on here so thanks for your patience and get ready for a shower of posts this week (small pun unintended).

The bathroom is still in progress. I know, it’s a little bit of a teaser right now, but I promise it’ll be worth it. That’s what I keep telling myself, anyway!

Something that was done this week though is… drumroll please… the downstairs living room/porch!

Now, if you’ve been reading to this point, you know that the porch was my bedroom.  That's changed and I’m making Isthmus House a single-family home now instead of in a year. If you’re wondering why, well, I have plenty of reasons.

#1 - I’m an introvert (true story!) who likes just a little of her own space – and who doesn’t like a little more living space for everyone?

#2 - the cost to make the porch private enough for a bedroom was roughly equivalent to a month’s rent from the upstairs unit. Broken down over the year, it wasn’t a big difference financially to just rent out the remaining bedroom instead.

#3 - We’re going to have to renovate the kitchen in the next 6 months to a year and it’s a major hassle to not have a kitchen – and I doubt The Roommate would appreciate that much. This way, we can use the upstairs kitchen during that time!

There are other reasons, but I won’t bore you with them all. Getting back to the point, I moved upstairs so the porch is now open except for my box spring that was not going up those stairs without being sawed in half. That might be a project for this weekend but we’ll see.

With the shared space now being more important, the living room also got a face lift. First, my little sister, Laura, dad and I replaced the ceiling fan with minimal cursing and throwing of things like brackets (I’ll take credit for both). Fancy, no? It even has a remote!

 My dad pretty much finished the rest himself. He’s incredible – especially with joint compound, a putty knife and some paint – and he really wanted the living room done this weekend.

While the extra light switch, vent and thermostat where nice, open doorways with casings belonged were problematic, the bigger issue was the severe damage. As I suspected in my last post where I pulled off the paneling, the damage from the paneling or that it covered on the walls was pretty bad.

Around a vent, we found smoke damage. That's not surprising since my neighbors told me there was a dryer fire about 18 months ago but it would have been good to know before I signed on the dotted line. The original baseboards were apparently ripped off, taking large amounts of plaster with them and there were large cracks elsewhere.

On the bright side, we also figured out when the paneling was put up – somewhere around November 1963 – the oldest piece of mail we found behind it! I loved getting a little glimpse into some of what Isthmus House held before this.

After about twelve hours of spackling, taping, patching and sanding he got them to the point where they could be painted for the time being. It’s not quite irreparable - it'll just take lots of time and sanding - but my dad took it most of the way and they certainly look good enough for now. Check out the new “delicate pearl” color. It’s so much lighter and brighter than the paneling and navy and it’s still just temporary!

Isthmus House is coming along – slowly but surely – and my family’s trip was a super productive, much appreciated step along the way! Stay tuned for more on what the family accomplished while they were here!

Off with the walls! Or at least the paneling...

As many of you know from our guest blogger (Mom, aka Sita) on Sunday, my family is on their way into town to give me a hand around the house so I'm taking the rest of this week off starting today. Since my circular saw decided not to work as soon as I started the day's initial project, I began pulling the paneling off the walls of Isthmus House's downstairs living room instead. More on the downstairs bathroom tomorrow!

To be fair, the paneling in the living room wasn’t dreadful. It’s just dark in a room that only has one small window. Here’s what it looked like before I got started.

The wood was pretty easy to pull since it was just nailed in to wood slats attached to the plaster. I tried to save as many pieces with both the tongue and groove as possible but only salvaged a few. Behind the paneling was dust. Not mold! But, holy cow, a lot of dust.

Interestingly, it looks like the top portion of the wall was white at one point, then lime green, then white again and now, of course, navy blue. I have to wonder how it did with the lime but I suppose it would have been lighter and brighter than navy. The bottom color is a kind of pinky beige.

 

I vacuumed as much of the dust off as I could, but the room will definitely need a good scrubbing in the next couple of days before anything else happens.

Here’s what I’ve got now that the paneling’s down. You can see exactly where the baseboards used to be (the dark area). I wonder if they were ever painted.

Since the family's around, it seems like a good time to consider adding beadboard or a panel wainscoting all the way around the room in white – what color do you think the top portion should be? Leave me a comment - we're probably going paint shopping tomorrow!

Our first guest blog: Sita

For those of you who don't know, I call my mother Sita. I maintain that at some point I heard "momasita" and shortened it and it stuck. Sita asked if she could write today's blog post (and I couldn't see why not, even without editing!) so without further ado, Terri "Sita/Mom" Furman...

First, let me get this off my chest: I had nothing to do with the title of this blog.  If I had been consulted (which I was not), I probably would have recommended a title that you could actually say three times fast.  Oh well!

Let it also be understood, when your daughter tells you she’s planning to purchase a house built in 1910 (even when you are a history buff, rabid HGTV/DIY Network watcher and doting mom), it’s hard not to let something akin to panic set in.  When you’ve watched Nicole Curtis jack an entire early-1900s house 10 feet into the air to pour a new basement, it’s not a stretch to imagine your daughter having to do the same, but not having paid a buck for the house (like Nicole).   So it’s kinda like treading thin ice sometimes when you hear about mold (mold, WHAT?!?) and deadbolts before you find out that the respirator is mold-approved(?) and “of course” she researched code requirements and lock types before putting in a new lock. Tamping down mother instincts is not for the faint of heart!  Fortunately, trusting my kid’s instincts IS a part of my mothering attributes.

When Katie and I discuss the many, um, “features and benefits” of The House on the Isthmus, it’s usually in conjunction with the finds of the day that I’ve made on sites like Craigslist and every thrift store or architectural salvage place within an hour’s drive off the beaten path between her house and mine.  Our conversations are peppered with statements like, “Of course I wouldn’t hire the kids that were skateboarding down the middle of the street to (fill in the blank) without talking to their parents first,” and “Really – WHO does that!?!?” in response to something new that I see in the pictures she’s sent to me (don’t worry: you’ll get plenty of opportunity to see what’s in those pictures to prompt that kind of response). 

The interesting transition for me personally will be this week, when I get to see my daughter’s adventure house first-hand.  I can hardly wait to walk in that door and get the grand tour!  A designer not by trade, but by heart, I am anxious to heat up my own tape measure for everything from curtains to beadboard, play with colors on the walls to see how they look at various times during the day, and just generally encourage the daylights out of my girl in every way I can.  (I run the risk of this ever getting posted on the blog if I gush all over the place about how proud I am of her taking on this challenge, so I’ll shut up on that part.)

Armed with tools out the wazoo, Dad will be called upon for all kinds of brawn and advice, and her equally brilliant and talented sister will now provide not just online and phone design support and critique, but hands-on help as well for several days.  Did I mention that we’re all a bit strong-willed?  Something tells me we’re gonna have a story or two to tell after the week’s done.

Fortunately for everyone, Reilly, our 95 lb. (runt of the litter) black lab will be along for the ride.  Whew!  We’ll all have someone non-judgmental to talk to!

Stay tuned! 

A spoonful of color... or a bucket works, too

Today is a day to think about paint. Not that the Isthmus House is quite ready for it, but it’s still nice to think about and it’s good to plan ahead (see yesterday’s post about paneled showers for more on planning).

I was home sick today and spent a fair amount of time taking in the wall colors around me. Currently, the Isthmus House has a dark navy color in the downstairs living room, The Roommate’s terra cotta bedroom, a very taupe downstairs kitchen and that’s about it.

The Isthmus House is being restored, which means that historically correct colors circa 1910 are a must. What’s the point in hunting down 100 year old doors or patching in hardwood floors if I’m not going to bother getting the paint right?

There’s a sad misconception in pop culture that colors weren’t prevalent in older homes until the “painted ladies” of the late Victorian era. Only in that last several years have “paint historians” (no, not kidding) looked more at the makeup of old paints to determine what colors used to be instead of the faded, broken down versions that were being referenced in paint chips.

This mini-history lesson brings me to my point. While it may be true that the Victorians didn’t even like pink, they didn’t live with only grey and taupe either. I’m sad that so many paint companies (including Valspar and Benjamin Moore, in my opinion) only have muted, sad colors in their “historical paint” collections as a remaining side-effect of early (1920s Williamsburg, for example) archaeological paint efforts.

So, I’ve decided that I’m going with California Paints. They’ve done the research and have collaborated with Historic New England to come up with Historic Colors of America and 20^th Century Colors of America, a line running from deep reds to bright blues to rich purples and lots of colors in between. Truth be told, I’m probably choosing them in large part because they have the colors I want to paint the Isthmus House too.

Now, who wants to help me pick the colors?! I’m loving the Garden Terrace, Seascape Jade and Concord Bloom line under the Arts and Crafts category of the 20th Century Colors (link above). Looks like the Isthmus House is about to get a little more color in it! Tell me which colors you like best!

The Saga of the Wood Paneled Shower - Part I

I love Rehab Addict, the show on DIY Network (and Thursday nights on HGTV) that details Designer/Real Estate Agent/Restoration Expert Nicole Curtis’s journeys through restoring houses like mine to what they once were.  


To get to the good parts though, you’ve got to get through the rougher ones. In my case, that means demoing the vast majority of a bathroom. It turns out that isn’t nearly as fun or therapeutic as it looks on TV.


Let’s start with how this bathroom started when I bought the Isthmus House.

In my opinion, the worst of it was the wood paneling in the shower… and on the walls… and on the makeshift wall and “seat” between the shower and the toilet. And no exhaust fan. Did I mention that among all that wood there was also a window in the shower? Or that the 60s ceiling tiles (please, don’t be asbestos), trim and grass cloth wallpaper were still intact?

This is how it looked when I started. You can see a bit of the paneling under the window on the left.

I started by trying to pry off the paneling from inside the shower because I assumed there was mold immediately behind it. Turns out, the wood paneling was new and had been recently nailed and glued down. To get the paneling off, I had to chisel between the panels to get a claw-hold before prying.

After prying off the paneling, I was pleasantly surprised that there was new cement board underneath and no apparent signs of mold or mildew despite it being obvious no one had even tried to waterproof. Reread my “before” paragraph above and you’ll understand my surprise. Feeling relieved, I took down some plaster above the window to see if any moisture had gotten around the edges and into the walls.

Here’s a pic of the newly exposed lath by the window in the shower. You can see the edges of the new cement board underneath as well as some of the paneling. Both were silicone'd in. 

I had to go on a business trip the next day so I let it go for a week or so while I worked on some other things around the house before digging back in.

This past Sunday, when The Roommate was gone for a bit, I decided that the rest of the bathroom should come down and out while I could make plenty of noise. Back on went the respirator, safety glasses and gloves and out came the plastic to protect the rest of the room along with my claw, hammer and screwdriver.

I got through some more plaster and taking down the towel racks when I realized that the pieces of paneling I was removing along the wall adjacent to the shower were coming out awfully easily and seemed kind of soft. If you just said “oh, no,” you guessed it. Water had been seeping from the edge of the tub into the wall and wicking along the drywall that had been installed creating mold and plenty of it.

Since I was wearing a mold-grade respirator and was well-protected (and The Roommate wasn’t coming home for a while), I kept pulling. And pulling and pulling. There was mold under the drywall and that brand new cement board and well embedded in the wall and lath. It went all the way into the beams and through the wall to the lath on the kitchen side.

After assessing the damage and coming to the conclusion that this had seemingly been covered up by whoever had done the work, I called a local company and asked them to come out for a consultation for remediation services before I could leave on yet another business trip. While they made it out for the consult, I learned that the middle of June is the busiest time of year for them so I’ll be waiting until next week for them to come out to take care of this mess to the tune of a cool thousand bucks. For reference purposes, that’s about equal to the entire tile budget that includes a marble basket weave floor.

I figure there are a couple of lessons learned here and a couple of reminders worth noting.

1.   It is not okay for anyone to cover up things that can affect a future resident’s health. This includes black mold and potential structural damage.

2.   If at first you don’t see mold when you expect it, keep looking until all potentially affected surfaces are checked.

3.   It doesn’t matter if building code says you don’t need an exhaust fan in the bathroom because there’s a window. No one opens a bathroom window after a shower in January in Wisconsin. Install an exhaust fan – and don’t vent it to your attic.

4.   Your contingency fund matters. I put aside a little more than 20% contingency in the budget for this bathroom for when issues came up. They did and I’m glad to have “planned” for the just-in-case.
5.   You never know exactly what's behind your walls until you open them. I found this little surprise! Looks like the workers might have left it in the 40s or so!

This is the part where the road bumps happen but we get through them so that y’all can see my new bathroom within the next few weeks. More on the saga of the soon-to-be-clean bathroom to come!

Turning the key and definitely not turnkey

Another day has dawned and it seems pertinent to talk about locks.

Locks are a funny thing. In the great State of Wisconsin, you have to have an automatically locking front door if you have a multi-dwelling home. While that might not sound particularly troubling, consider how many deadbolts you’ve encountered that lock automatically. I’d be willing to bet it’s not many since I’ve had a time finding one, preferably with a keypad and that looks period from a distance.

The original deadbolt was long gone but the door and knob are original and I’m really hoping to bring them back to life. Serving as the home’s security was a “lock” that had a deadbolt keyhole on one side and a standard, if flimsy, latch on the other side. The problem here was two-fold.

The first, and biggest problem, was that this was directly next to a very large window inset into the door. All a miscreant need do to gain access to the house was break the glass and turn the latch. The added problem was that the lock wasn’t even a deadbolt inside the wall, it was just a push latch like the kind you’d see on an interior door.

Here’s my before – the door needs a little love but you can see the blegh lock that was in place.

Since the side kitchen door was similarly afflicted, I clearly couldn’t let these stay too long. As I mentioned, the eventual goal is to add a keypad lock to the front door in the future but since those don’t come in double-cylinder (i.e. locked from both sides) deadbolts, I’ll have to wait until I can order some ironwork for the glass inset.

In the meantime, I found a decent double-cylinder deadbolt for both doors. The one on the front door will probably move to the basement once the iron work is in place.

Once I found locks, I didn’t think it would be particularly challenging to install them. After all, you pull off the existing lock, insert the new one, bolt it in and go, right? Yeah, I thought so too.

While getting the necessary hardware, the salesperson reminded me that the old door would likely be splintery and if I needed to make the opening any bigger for the face of the lock there was a possibility I’d need to hand chisel it.

Naturally, one piece of the lock body was too big for the existing hole and, when I went to expand it, the wood splintered almost instantly. Now, for future reference, the correct tool to use to expand the hole is a dremel on low speed with a sanding wheel in place. Think of this sanding like a haircut, you can always take a little more but you can’t get it back once it’s gone. Since I hadn’t thought of dremeling yet, I set to the rather time-and-energy-intensive task of chiseling out about an extra third of an inch around a hole for my lock haircut-style.

While I’ll consider the chiseling a learning experience, it turned out that the lock didn’t require the hole to be larger although it did make it stronger. If your instructions have you insert an extra plate in front of the lock’s body, you might be in a situation like mine where it’s good to have it if not completely necessary. Feel out the security for your own home, but for me it would have been nice to know there was an option to install the lock without an additional plate under the body before spending two unnecessary hours adapting an old door to a temporary lock.

The kitchen door took me about 15 minutes from start to finish including some light dremeling to make it easier for the latch to move. I guess I learned well on the first one!

As for my new lock, I don't have a good (lit) picture of it on my door but I’ll post that tomorrow evening.

This was one of my highest priority fixes due to security needs so I’ll count every minute as well spent. If you’re looking at replacing locks in your home or have done it recently, feel free to pass along other time saving tips and tricks you’ve found!

Let's get it started

Well, I did it. It’s done. Finito. And by “done,” I mean started. I bought the House on the Isthmus, a 1910 American Foursquare I'm hoping to restore to all its … glory?

It was quite the adventure between the inspection (only a couple okay-ish sink traps and a water softener that we knew didn’t work?), the bank (excuse me? what was that number again?) and a last minute just-in-case Power of Attorney (a precaution against flight delays since I was scheduled to return from an international trip 14 hours before closing) but we got here.

The seller, a woman in her late fifties who seemed quite nice, had owned the house for almost 30 years and had some of the original paperwork from the house including the original survey. Granted, it had a couple of present-day pen notations added but I’m just happy it survived the last 100 plus years of being passed from owner to owner. I'll try to post pictures later.

The Roommate and I (not to mention our helpers) moved in last week. Things got a little heated once or twice but that’s bound to happen when you’re moving two households on little sleep until late at night. There were boxes absolutely everywhere but by now we’ve relegated a lot of our boxes and unneeded items to the basement.

The very first thing Laura, my friend who was at-the-ready to act as my just-in-case Power of Attorney/closing buddy, and I did was pull the hideous carpet out of the porch. Instantly, I liked the house better and it wouldn’t surprise me if that 5-minute act alone added equity. The carpet was really, really bad and really, really 60s drab brown. A good cleaning for that floor, which turned out to be parquet linoleum I think took an extra day.

Here's the before...

When we moved in the first night, I had no bed. More precisely, my mattress and the parts of my bed were in my “bedroom” (aka, the porch) but there was no way to get to the door, let alone to the components of a bed. I ended up sleeping on The Roommate’s couch in front of the porch doors. On night two, I dug in and gave my room my best shot at tidiness under the circumstances while The Roommate was out.

All in all, I think I did a pretty good job. My bed was put together on the appropriate wall, the dresser had clothes and linens in it, the shoe-putting-on chair made it under the far porch window and the bookcase was holding everything else. It’s a little cramped at about 6’8”x11’, but working for the time being. Next up for that room is probably either paint or draperies.

Since that first night, we’ve gotten the majority of the house put away – minus way too much Tupperware and some duplicate household stuff that’s probably going to the basement. I sold the chair that had been in my living room to a friend for 70 bucks and Laura’s holding onto my couch for a few weeks both waiting for her new one to come in and pending its sale on Craigslist.

We’ve also gotten most of it cleaned (a truly daunting task). My friend, Kaitlin, spent the majority of our first Saturday in the kitchen with us peeling truly hideous and dirty floral contact paper out of equally hideous and dirty cabinets - both in one picture below mid-removal. Don’t worry; we put down new, non-sticky contact paper before we put anything away. Before I go any further, have I mentioned how great my friends are?

Once that was sorted, I started in on some of the projects around the house. So far, some of the boring stuff has gotten done:

-     I sprayed for bugs – twice, since the skies opened up on a whim about 10 minutes after I did it the first time and they tend to be pretty bad this time of year.

-     I cleared the shower drain upstairs. Shame I can’t get the water to stop running from the faucet even when I switch it over to the shower. Puddle showering should be fixed soon! For now, I’m going to count my blessings that it doesn’t drip.

-     I bought the biggest dehumidifier I could find and hooked it up so it drains right into the sump pump since we were emptying it nightly for the first week.

I also changed the locks on the exterior doors, started gutting my downstairs bathroom and sanded down my vintage lockers to make them into additional counter space for the upstairs kitchen. Each was a new and interesting adventure – more to come on those soon!

I'll be posting on here as we continue the adventure!