HoHoHosting Holidays!

I love Christmastime. I love the quiet elegance and coziness found in warm white lights and boughs of holly and evergreen and soft shimmer with carefully chosen, meaningful ornaments on a Christmas tree. I love special, small gifts under the tree for loved ones that aren't at all about the price tag but about the receiver's face lighting up because of the thought that went into any gift. It's not really about the trappings but the time with family and friends in a space that provides comfort and feels welcoming for everyone.

One day, that's how Isthmus House will feel year round, but this year we're working on lots of projects in preparation for our annual Christmas Party. It was a challenge, but I think I've figured out my favorite part of the updates made to make Isthmus House feel as welcoming as possible: the foyer.

The Roommate and I host one big party this time of year to celebrate both Christmas and my birthday and this year we started early on the plans... like a year early.

About a year ago, the foyer was one of the worst parts of the house with cracked walls, chipping paint, and a plastic floor. In Did you just get bored and quit? I pulled all of the plastic tile to get to the tar papered floors. I'm fairly certain this was an improvement from what we had at move in.

That left us at just ugly (which I maintain is better than ugly, cheapy and slippery).

A year has passed and, well, it's time to get started with prettifying.

If you're wondering how you take something like these floors and get to pretty, you're not the first.

It starts with patches.

Directly adjacent to the basement door was an old patch. I think. Or maybe just a mistake. It looked a lot like a trap door but wasn't as cool since it didn't do anything. Besides, a trap door should blend in. This didn't.

First, all of the affected boards had to be pulled up and removed. In Old House Parts: A Tale of Love and Hate, we talked about finding lots of 100 year old Douglas Fir in the right depth and width - quite a coup - which is what we used here for a better blend with the existing floors. If floors aren't the same species and age they'll almost certainly look really patchy. These boards do still look a little bit different but blend in fairly well. I was on a business trip during the patching and feathering part, sadly, but when I returned, we had a patch in place!

To get these in with the tongue and groove still intact isn't easy - it takes a lot of tap tap tapping and finesse. The last one in gets face-nailed down (putting nails through the top of the board to connect it to the joist below - there is no sub floor at Isthmus House).

There are many people that hate the "H" that flooring patches can create but I really don't mind them because they're in several places throughout the original floors.

Once the patch was in, it was time to strip with a chemical stripper to get off the tar paper and then get to sanding with 16 grit sandpaper - the lowest, or coarsest, grit out there. It's like a saw, it's so coarse.

Stripping all of the grime of 100 years, 2,384,092,384 owners and tenants, one set of plastic floors and one pretend trap door took a while with the guys working their way up in grit.

Eventually, though, the floors were clean and ready for their first coat of oil based polyurethane.

Another buffing, getting all the junk off them again (stuff comes out from between the boards - kind of gross, really) and another coat of poly and we had foyer floors!

Walking in the front door, you no longer go sliding across the front hall but you do have to take your shoes off!

The floors will darken over the next year which should help them look a little more like they would if they had just been taken care of over the last 100 years.

Most of all, Isthmus House got a little more welcoming - just in time for Christmas guests.

What about you? What's your favorite part of getting ready for Christmas?

No Asbestos > Asbestos

Asbestos.

It's a scary word, isn't it? For those of you that know what it is, you may have shuddered a bit when you read it.

For those of you that don't, there's plenty of information here. The cliff notes version is that asbestos is a mineral that causes serious complications - primarily with one's respiratory system - from exposure.

When it finally came time to get rid of the upstairs kitchen (as covered in Throwing a kitchen off a balcony...), we found that there was some, uh, interesting looking tile underneath the cabinets.

It was suggested to me that I get that lovely looking tile tested for asbestos so I did.

Turns out, you can't really hire someone to pull samples and test for asbestos around here - you get to pull the samples yourself. Fortunately, you can test for asbestos via the county lab and they give instructions for how to pull potentially contaminated materials on their website. (Hint: lots of water and protection for you.)

Interestingly and fortunately, the tile itself came back as positive for asbestos (fortunately confined to only the former kitchen turned workshop turned master bedroom) but the tar paper under it came back negative.

Once you find asbestos, you have two options:
1. Contain it. Pretty much, leave it alone. Asbestos materials are dangerous when the fibers get into the air.
2. Abate it. This is a regulated process where a professional comes into your home and gets rid of it under really strict bio-hazard guidelines.

If you're thinking I should have chosen option 1 and found myself a nice looking floating floor, well, you might be right but of course that's not what I chose. I'm going for original and that ain't it!

As soon as I got back the results, I made a call to my local abatement company (feel free to jump back to the Saga of the Wood Paneled shower - links are on the right side of this page - for more about their work getting mold out - ew) and took their first available appointment.

First up was pulling off all of the cork floating floor that had been laid over the carpet.

Wait. What? Carpet?

Oh, yes. What I couldn't see under the cabinets was 1970s carpet in all its glory:

Naturally, that carpet was glued down so that was part of the asbestos remediation process. This is probably a good thing since the glue holding it down could have been asbestos and it all needed to go anyway.

Jason got right to work and we went from the ugliest carpet around - covering about 200 square feet of asbestos - to this:

We don't really know what all was under there - it's not like I can take photos while it's locked down in a negative pressure area. But later in the day, we had some beautiful floors - and no asbestos!

Trust me on this one; those are beautiful! You'll just have to keep watching to see just how beautiful they can become.

Happy Thanksgiving!

This Thanksgiving, we're focusing on family and being grateful for what we have.

At The House on the Isthmus, we have a lot to be thankful for - not the least of which is all of you wonderful readers. Thank you for your support throughout this project!

As we're about to start the holiday season, allow me to encourage you to spend all of tomorrow with loved ones considering all we have to be thankful for and not begin shopping until the day after.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Throwing a kitchen off a balcony...

In recent weeks, we've been talking about the demolition and reconstruction of the bathroom. Simultaneously, I'm working on the upstairs kitchen.

I mean, workshop. I mean, master bedroom.

Needless to say, this room has gone through a few lives already since I bought Isthmus House last May. When the house was a duplex, it was a kitchen and when we moved in I made it my workshop almost immediately.

A while back, I had the house looked at by my realtor, Tobi, to get a better idea of how restoration efforts were coming from a value perspective partway through the process. One of the things she felt I should prioritize was removing the kitchen to make it a bedroom. It made sense since, if something did come up, it would probably be challenging to sell a house with three bedrooms, two kitchens and one living space.

Once I made the decision to pull it, we got right to work pulling out the range and gas line and capping off the plumbing.

Plumbing and gas lines gone, we could get to work pulling out the cabinetry. The goal was to salvage them but it turned out that they weren't particularly well built but they were built right in place.

Since they weren't going to leave in one piece, we got to work dismantling them with some friends who agreed with chucking building materials over a balcony sounded like fun.

After much prying and minimal anything else, we ended up with one very, very torn up wall and one partly torn up wall and a giant wood pile in my backyard (because, really, we did throw everything over the balcony).

Now, normal people would probably say, "Great! Cabinet demo's done - let's rebuild!" An old house person might say, "Uh, what's that green tile?" To which I would respond, "Wait 'til next week and you'll find out!"

No shower drips here!

Another week and we're getting closer to having a done bathroom upstairs!

Last week, we finished demo and roughed in some plumbing once the wall was moved eight whole inches. A little unorthodox to be sure but still got the job done - and inspection passed!

Next up was getting in electrical rough ins. You know, light can be important when it's going to be dark half the winter! Once that was all set and inspection passed, we were ready to move on to the base and waterproofing.

While generally I likely would have done this myself, I planned a complex tile design for the back wall and my tile guy only raised the price slightly to do the whole wall and floor including backer board (kind of like drywall but cement so it doesn't get wet and moldy), waterproofing and one very large surprise for later.

Once my plumber was done with the newly cut holes in my bathroom floor, the tile guy had to patch in with 3/4 plywood where my plumber had cut out the floor.

Once the patching and leveling of the floor was complete, he hung the Durock using special hardi board screws - these are important so that water doesn't follow normal metal screws and rust out....

And waterproofed! This membrane, similar to the Red Gard we used in the downstairs bath, protects from lots of water damage inside and out of the house.

Suddenly, we were ready for tile! Stay tuned next week for the beginning of the pretty part of this new saga!

How to get a 400 pound tub out of a small bathroom

It's hard to believe how close we are to "done."

There are a few reasons that word is in quotations. The biggest is that, well, I really don't think it's possible to be done. Underline, italics, bold, period, whatever, I feel fairly confident that done is an unattainable goal in any home.

Our version of "done" however, is not even done for us - it's done upstairs, with perhaps some small tweaks and mostly done downstairs. After all, even all done for us would lead to a bored Katie and then what would y'all read about every Thursday?

Last week, we talked about making a gaping hole between two rooms while trying to just move a wall out a tiiiny bit to make my upstairs bathroom a tiiiny bit bigger. Then the wall had to go back up so that we had someplace to put the fun stuff like plumbing and electrical where, naturally, we encountered a few surprises.

Let's talk plumbing:

First off, you need permits. Don't be one of those people who learns after the fact that they paid a few thousand dollars for shoddy work that has to be redone. Then you'll be one of those people who has to pay for work to be done twice when then city finds out - and you'll probably have a nice fine too. You should only pull the permit if you're personally doing the work - otherwise, your licensed plumber/electrician/HVAC person/contractor should.

To pull your permits, you need at least a pretty good idea of what you're doing. In our case, I'd planned and replanned and replanned and replanned the layout.

Don't most people's living rooms look like this? Spoiler alert: this was one of the failed plans.

Despite originally thinking that we were going to put in a walk in shower, the associated costs just got too high. All of the fixtures (toilet, sink [or lavatory in plumber speak - lav for short], and tub) were going to stay where they were. In many cases, it's cheaper to move plumbing four feet than four inches but it's almost always cheapest to keep it where it is.

To start the plumbing once the permits were pulled, we had to get everything out and I do mean everything.

Out went the pony wall, plastic floor tile, medicine cabinet plaster, vanity, everything:

And then there was the 400 pound tub.

Let me preface this with a disclaimer: this tub was not original to Isthmus House or even close. Even so, I would have preferred to salvage it for another house but couldn't for several reasons I'm not going to get into here.

The only way to get a cast iron tub out: smash it.

Here are some step by step instructions:
1. Put on long sleeves and pants (not shorts), gloves, eye protection, a mask and hearing protection. Do not skip any of these items. Trust me on this.
2. Disconnect the drain and the water supplies.
3. Pick up a sledge hammer. The Roommate and I are both pretty strong women so we used a ten pound sledge hammer. Using a pendulum motion (i.e. let gravity help you), hit the edges of the tub in as small an area as possible until you see a crack. A lot of men can crack a tub in a few swings with a bigger sledge hammer but we were more comfortable with it taking 6-10 swings before things really started moving.
4. Break the tub into movable pieces. There will be shards of the glaze flying - it's why you're wearing protective gear. I've heard of people using wet blankets inside the tub to dull that effect when they do this.
5. Clean up the little pieces as much as possible - if you use contractor bags, you'll only be able to fill them a little before they get really heavy. Double them up at a minimum - the shards are sharp as glass and can go through one layer pretty easily. Gorilla bags may work better for this but we didn't have any. I also used a filter that was close to trash-ready in my shop-vac to remove the dust and tiny pieces the broom didn't catch.
6. Take the big pieces to your local metal scrap yard. Our tub was worth about $45 in scrap - that's two boxes of basic subway tile!

Finally, the room was completely clear and we were ready for plumbing!

In went new water lines and a new, bigger drain for the tub and sink. Naturally, it couldn't be easy and we ended up needing to replace a lot of the drain line to meet code.

No matter how you cut it, this bathroom is coming along. Now what do we do with all of those holes in the floor?!

Eight inches of angst

Generally speaking, it's really easy to pull a permit as a homeowner.

That said, your contractor should pull permits for the work they perform on your property (assuming permits are necessary). If you curious about why that's necessary, here's one article of many to illustrate!

I'd worked with my contractor in the past with few issues and wanted to work with him again to move the wall for the bathroom about 8 inches further out. As a 5' 6" by 6'6" bathroom, a transformation to 6' 2" by 6'6" makes a surprisingly big difference!

Planning a complete gut and remodel of a bathroom takes a while to plan. Think through the dependencies - the things that need to happen before something else can - well in advance!

This is what the floor looks like when you're planning for fixtures

During my planning phase a few months back, I spent plenty of time looking through the layout with contractors, planning fixtures, etc. We figured out the most space I could possibly add for the bathroom (from an adjacent bedroom) was eight inches if I still wanted enough room for casings on both doors into their respective rooms. The door into the bathroom then moved as close to that wall as possible, about six inches to the right.

It was rather painful to get the permit with my contractor but well worth it. Eventually, with about 5 hours, a to-scale drawing of the entire second floor (yes, to move a wall eight inches), adaptation for a bigger door to meet code (because it makes sense to have a wheelchair accessible bathroom on a non-wheelchair accessible floor, right?) and lots of questions from the city, we had a permit and could get to work!

This is where we started:

No, it's not normal to have cracked, paint-dripped beadboard on your walls, an air duct in the shower or a tub with the taps on one end and the drain on the other but these were all real-life scenarios in just this bathroom, I promise you.

To move the right wall over, first I had to take down the medicine cabinet (wired into the wall - those sconces are built into the medicine cabinet) and detach the plumbing for the sink. Because the sink was an S-trap (where the drain goes straight into the floor instead of looking like a P that goes into the wall before dropping into the ground) I could mess with the wall without having to get everything out first. For the record, S-traps are illegal because they could allow sewer gases in),

Starting with the closet in the room we were making slightly smaller, I got demoing. If you're taking out a closet like this, remove all of the wood pieces and hooks first using a screwdriver or drill and a hammer and crow bar and remember to wear a mask, gloves and eye and hearing protection!

Once all of the wood's out, the easiest way to break out drywall is to kick it out. After making a small hole to make sure you're not directly on a stud, take the flat of your foot and kick straight out at the wall. 

After removing the wood and drywall and carting them out to the dumpster, down came the plaster and lath, then the plaster on the other side of the wall.

A little more yet...

No, it's not load bearing, yes, the electrical was off!

And we had, well, no wall!

In my personal opinion, this took about 3 times as long as it should have but, occasionally, we hit such bumps.

Once it was all down, I could get to rebuilding.

The wall took no time to get up (top piece, bottom piece and studs every 16 inches on center) and pass inspection!

Now to get the rest of the room demo'd... how does one remove a 400 pound tub exactly?

The dirt pit in the driveway...

Things at Isthmus House are good these days. There's lots going on upstairs and we're really excited to be closing in on being done upstairs and getting that much closer downstairs.

This week though, I think it's time to look outside.

When I bought Isthmus House, I didn't think much of the outside. Considering there was still snow, that's not overly surprising.

I did notice that the gaping dirt pit in the middle of the driveway, but my attention to said driveway didn't stretch too much further. Lesson learned.

Really, the driveway was terrible. I figured this out when:

1. Water ran straight down the incline to the foundation and into my basement when it rained... or when I washed my porch
2. My car inclined down when I pulled into it
3. Shoveling snow started to resemble an ice chipping expedition

It took ages to deal with all of the pricing and contracting but finally we got the plans in place for replacement of the driveway from the sidewalk to the side deck stairs where the existing concrete leveled out. 

After grading for our new level, we started digging out the old stuff. 

Once the rock was all out and carted away for recycling, it was time to level the remaining dirt and put down a bit of gravel. 

The next morning, we were ready to pour concrete!

To prep the surface, the crew lightly wet down the gravel before truck arrived mid-morning. 

To work from the back of the house to the front, the wheelbarrows got loaded up and carted back.

Two workers brought back all of the concrete and dumped it for another worker in galoshes to spread it and smooth it out.

I will say, while the process was pretty quick, it was pretty impressive watching them get the concrete to just the right level and pitch using a float and trowel. 

Concrete smoothing complete, I learned that it's really important to cut joints so that when your new concrete cracks - and it will in a freeze thaw cycle like we have in Madison - it cracks on the pre-determined joints.

To cut the joints all the way across, the crew had to use pads that don't sink into the concrete so they can kneel on the partly dried surface.

Once the joints were embedded, the concrete was re-smoothed of any imperfections.

Finally, it was time to brush finish the surface by, you guessed it, dragging a horse hair brush over it.

And we were done! It's hard to believe just how much of a difference it makes. Granted, it's about a $3000 investment but it's worth every dime in not chipping ice away and the way it makes the front of the house feel.

We're on a painting roll...

Things are rolling at Isthmus House these days. Some days, it feels more like they're about to roll over me but mostly it's just progress.

We left off last week with one beautiful foyer and stairwell. At least looking up when you walk in my house is nice! The stairwell has gotten a little beat up the last couple of weeks with demo upstairs (hmmm, guess that's a story for another time) and contractors coming up and down the stairs. It's okay though; we'll fix it because that's what we do!

Two weeks ago we talked about drywall downstairs on the walls that had lost a lot of the plaster and didn't have any trim on them. My general rule of thumb for choosing which walls were drywalled and which weren't was the presence of trim (there's trim? let's get plasterin') and the amount of damage to the plaster (uhhh, it's hanging off the wall, there are no keys and the lath is broken... that might be a problem - although not an insurmountable one).

The moral of this story is that the downstairs of Isthmus House ended up with a pretty decent sprinkling of old plaster walls with new drywall.

One of these walls is plaster and one is drywall - can you tell the difference?

Once all of it was done, the walls primed and the foyer and stairwell painted (which required things like scaffolding on stairs) it was time to start on the downstairs paint.

As it turned out, almost all of the paint I'd purchased a while back looked waaaaaaaaay different (I think it changed) now. Grey was mauve, sage was dirty olive, it was just bad.

And so we went back to the drawing board and found new colors - half of which I mixed myself because, well, I'm picky! I learned (for once, the easy way!) that it's best to stay in the same sheen and brand and to always use really high quality paint for any project.

Fortunately, my painters were able to work with my eventual choices.

I like light, non-pastel colors and it's incredible how light and bright the rooms look and feel now with them on the walls.

We're down to just baseboards, casings and trim paint now but it's a wonderful change already.

Check out our before and afters - what do you think?

Original Living Room Paint

New Living Room Paint

Old Dining Room

Now you can actually see the trim!

We still don't know what to call this color...

New study!