Old house parts: a tale of love and hate

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again; I have a love/hate relationship with old house parts.

You see, it’s a catch-22. Aside from being really cool, I need old house parts to finish Isthmus House because there’s so little original left (thanks a lot 1930s-80s). The problem? To get them, they have to be taken out of some other house that, all things being equal, I’d rather they not leave at all. This is not something I take particularly lightly.

I explained this inner tangle to The Roommate one Saturday as I prepared to go look at a house my mother found on Craigslist that had baseboards I need for most of the downstairs.

After getting to the house, I found a couple of very important details:

1. The house, build somewhere between 1890 and 1912 (the guy gutting it kept changing the story) was being controlled burned and had recently been looted. There was almost nothing left of it.
2. Almost nothing left = something. I went for baseboards and left $20 poorer and 20 feet of baseboards richer (minus one large chunk taken out for a heat vent).
3. There was something else really important in that house - flooring. 

Being converted into a two-unit building has not been nice to Isthmus House. Where a wall was moved to make a bedroom downstairs from what was likely a den, small blocks of not-Douglas Fir were put in.

By the added archway, the wood now looks vaguely pinkish with bad stain and polyurethane on it. There are a few other, similar patches elsewhere in Isthmus House too that aren’t as egregious but are still pretty ugly.

 

All of this means that I need to feather in old, salvaged 3 1/4 inch wide Douglas Fir tongue and groove planks. Did I mention that those planks are up to 16 feet long in places? Good luck finding those nowadays and, even if we somehow could find it new, it doesn’t look the same next to old wood.

Aside from looking in every salvage shop I stumbled upon and online, I visited with my friendly hardwood floor repair experts and they couldn’t find extra flooring for patches either. I was looking at maybe 20 square feet of flooring salvaged from Isthmus House itself to cover a much greater total area and hoping I’d get lucky enough to not have to patch when moving the walls back where they belonged.

But, as they say, hope is not a plan and I clearly didn’t have one other than scouring the seven seas or stealing from somewhere else in Isthmus House if worse came to worst.

For once, I didn’t need a plan because the floors we needed so much were about to be burned to a crisp inside this little farmhouse in the boonies.

After speaking with the aforementioned guy-gutting-the-house, I was the tentative owner-to-be of some pretty awesome floorboards. Why tentative? They still had to come up intact and old floorboards don’t always like that plan.

This past Saturday, a full day before they were due, the guy called and said he had them ready and would even deliver (have you ever tried to fit 16-foot boards in your truck? I don't recommend it.). A few hours later, we unloaded over 200 square feet of the prettiest, dirtiest floorboards I’d ever seen straight into the basement. The total cost for floors that could have set me back a pretty penny? $180 – and another $20 bought me three period light fixtures that were probably on their way to the dump solely because they need to be rewired.

The boards do still have several nails so, Madison friends, let me know if you're looking for some cheap therapy hammering out nails!

Under normal circumstances (house not being destroyed), I’d never have been able to take these floorboards. In this case, though, it feels a little more like saving a great, old piece of a great, old house to live another day.

Helping old get back its integrity

 A friend of mine once said that plaster’s easy, it just takes forever. He had a point.

To take a break from our plaster work of weeks past in the sewing room, I revisited the kitchen cabinets.

We left off with the kitchen cabinets being challenging to decipher to say the least. In the last month or so, we haven’t been able to figure out what they’re necessarily made of throughout – the face frame might be a mixture of whatever nice wood that was available at the time but the boxes themselves are plywood (that’s a really good thing). One has a wood back and the other is built right up to the plaster wall behind it.

Another thing we learned is that no matter how much stripper I put on those cabinets, the end panels weren’t going to be able to take stain; it looks like they were originally painted. This meant that my options were to leave them alone until I find a new location in my home for them (with very mixed up finishes), paint them again or wait in general until I do the kitchen entirely.

After a few weeks of deliberation, I decided to paint instead of trying to figure out another option with the end panels.

First was choosing the color. My mom recommended Coastal Beige from Behr after their cabinet refinishing project a while back.

Now, I don’t know about y’all but when I hear “coastal beige” I think sand or Nantucket (is that weird?) which sends me to slate-y blues.

It turns out that Coastal Beige is a pretty off-white that meets the 3 C’s: crisp, clean and classic (yes, I did just make this up). Wanting to get to work, I picked up a gallon of semi-gloss premium primer + paint on Saturday morning.

Once I got home, I had to prep. Cabinets are not like other pieces of furniture. If you’re going to paint them, you need a really clean surface to start with.  Trisodium Phosphate (TSP) is a heavy duty cleaner that helps achieve that starting point – but it’s worth noting that gloves are, as always, your friends. I mixed up a batch (1/4 c. to 2 gallons of warm water) and got to work scrubbing down the cabinets. Remember, mine were already stripped and sanded (and we can all remember their first major cleaning in our first-ever post)!

After bumming around on the couch for an hour to allow for plenty of dry time, I decided to also run a tack cloth over everything to get just that last tiny bit of dust that might be hiding out. This turned out to be a good choice since it didn’t come off completely clean.

Once everything was super squeaky clean and dry and I’d protected my floors and taped off my painting area, I pulled out my really nice roller and paint brush (invest in these, people, good tools make a world of difference) and got to work – priming.

 

That’s right! Quality primer – I used Zinsser – is a must if you want your end product to look great. Even though the paint includes primer, the finish looks its best with the added layer and effort. I did the entire cabinet surface – inside and outside. If you could see it, I primed it.

Once the primer was dry – a few hours – I added the first coat of Coastal Beige.  Still a little splotchy, I’d always expected to need at least two coats of paint. This is a really good reason to always get more paint than you think you’ll need – running out and buying more might not actually provide you with the exact same color – plan ahead.

I got the second coat and mostly final coat up before church on Sunday morning and I think they’re beautiful. The kitchen certainly looks newer and maybe a little brighter and bigger and I know The Roommates love them! And, as always, I love that these were here, old and cost me so little money for a great update. Next up – the other set!

 

It's a bedroom? It'll need a door! Part II

As I mentioned in last week's post (and I'm sure other hints have been dropped here and there), I have a mild preoccupation with doors. Don't believe me? Take a look at the profile picture to your right - it's a picture of a door I saw on a recent trip to Lisbon, Portugal that reminded me of the basement door at Isthmus House!

The one at Isthmus House is an original there though so, to be clear for those that are Facebook friends as well as readers - I didn't bring the door home! I did, however, finish installing one at Isthmus House this week!

When we left off in last week's update, we had electrical in the right place, most of a hole in the wall finished for the doorway and a bit of a mess.

It was time to get started on the actual opening.

Eric, my carpenter, and I got started by cutting out the lath. Which promptly didn't work because, as previously discussed, plaster stays on walls by holding on with little teeth to lath that's connected on both sides of each little strip to a stud. If the lath isn't stable, the plaster won't be either. 

To add stability, we ended up removing the plaster and lath to the nearest studs to be patched in later. That old light switch to the right of the opening in the picture above had to go into my old house relics collection (along with the hologram from our recent duct cleaning and some old papers from our paneling removal).

From there, the door took shape in just a few hours!

In removing the beams, a couple of small pieces (we're talking maybe an inch) of the beautiful floors that ran right under the wall did splinter. Some were easily patched but one just might require me to feather in a piece salvaged from somewhere else in the house.

Once the wall was out, Eric added beams for the rough opening and furred out the new walls to make them flush with the pre-existing walls before patching in drywall. 

So we have a beautiful door and now all that's left is to finish off this story and project is to get all of those sewing room walls looking smooth for paint. Can't wait to show y'all when it's done - stay tuned!

It's a bedroom? It'll need a door!

Everyone talks about demo. I'm not really sure why. People - I'll speak (or write, in this case) in generalizations - talk about how they love ripping some stuff out and crashing into other stuff with sledge hammers.

It's not that it's not fun for the first few hits. In fact, I, too, think of it as a bit of free therapy for a little while. But when you're precision-demoing a wall, for example, it's not just wailing on it with a sledge hammer and a crow bar and hoping for the best. You need a little finesse.

If you've been hanging out here for a while, you know that I have a bit of a fixation on doors. I think that's because I've had a bit of a time finding the perfect ones for Isthmus House along with the right hinges, hardware, etc. I'm fine with that though - leave your nice, original hardware where it is people! I'll take mine from the houses that actually can't be saved (few and far between) or get it made.

There's one door I needed that didn't already exist. The door to the sewing room from the hallway! To be clear, I actually needed to start with a doorway. I didn't have one of those either - and I'm not one of those people who thinks that a room with a window and a closet constitutes a bedroom if you can't get to it without going through another bedroom.

With electrical in the way and not being positive it wasn't a load-bearing wall, however, some pros were going to be necessary.

First up was moving an outlet so that it wouldn't fall precisely where I needed the door to go. I have a great electrician - who happened to have a scheduling mix up the morning I needed them there. We got it worked out but the uh-that-might-take-a-while made me a little nervous on arrival since there was no additionally budgeted time post-mix-up.

 Fortunately, we were able to thread the wires up and over a beam so that they didn't have to go up to the attic to thread back down and through the walls. I guess it's helpful having a 6' 4" apprentice (so nicknamed Shorty by one carpenter)...

 

Once the electrical was moved, I could get to work on making a hole in the wall. The goal was to try to save the old light switch in the top photo above. Even though it wasn't original, I still thought it was kind of cool.

Now that I knew where my electrical was, that I had dead knob and tube wiring in the walls, and the parts of the wall I wanted to save, a stealth approach was needed to create a doorway without losing a wall's worth of plaster and lath.

The cliff notes version of plaster and lath walls are that plaster (often combined with horsehair for strength) is applied wet in coats to individually nailed on pieces of lath (the wood slats in the picture above) to cover a wall. When it's still wet, the plaster squishes into the seams between the slats and dries into "keys" latched into the wall.

If you're careful when you pull it off the wall, you can sometimes take it off in some giant chunks.

 Again, protective clothing, glasses and gloves are a good choice since this is essentially rock that's coming off your walls. Another helpful hint - don't fill a kitchen trash bag when you take down plaster. Since you're toting rocks, you'll want to use a construction trash bag and only fill it partway before filling the rest with lighter materials.

For me, it was worth it to use a hand saw, pry bar and hammer and manually take down the plaster. It's a little cleaner than using a reciprocating saw (aka Sawzall) if considerably more time consuming.

 

 

Next up, getting a doorway and - dare I say it? - even a door!

 

 

 For prep work, it wasn't bad at all and it saved me plenty of money for not paying someone to rip holes in my wall before putting in the door. After all, why should someone else get to have all the fun?

Floors, as written from the airport floor

The sewing room (aka the small bedroom upstairs) is getting closer and closer to done.

My most recent project? Pulling out the carpet!

Normally, I wouldn’t pull the carpets before I finished the construction in the room – which isn't done yet due in large part to contractor scheduling difficulties. Considering it isn't complete yet, you might be wondering why I’d pull up carpets that were also acting as a drop cloth for my wall ministrations…

We got the ducts cleaned!

It didn’t take long at all (maybe 45 minutes) and even though I think it’s a little on the expensive side considering how little time it takes, I’m definitely glad I did it!

Isthmus House wasn’t originally heated as it is now, it had coal, complete with a coal room (don’t worry, you’ll hear more about the coal room later). The ducts were added after the fact and are in funny places like inside an added archway between the living room and dining room and inside the upstairs shower.

See? Sadly, I really wasn't kidding about the vent in the shower.

 It also looks like they might not have been cleaned since they were originally installed.

From the grate we found under the floors in the upstairs hallway, to the one that’s shared between the upstairs kitchen/eventual master bedroom and The Other Roommate’s bedroom/kid’s-room-to-be, the ducts were dirty. We found some old kids building blocks, old construction scraps, a plastic tile of the letter O, and a really cool hologram - any guesses what era it's from?

It reads, "JET PROPELLED MISSILE DESTROYER: This pilotless jet propelled missile has a nuclear warhead and is radar controlled. It can track down and destroy another missile traveling at very high speed."

There was one return almost directly over the furnace that took almost 20 minutes alone to clean. There are only two in the entire house - these returns feed air to the furnace for it to heat and push back out to the rest of the house. The filter the crew used had to be cleaned three times - more than the rest of Isthmus House combined - before the one downstairs return (and only about six feet of ducting) was actually clean.  

Pretty, no? It makes me glad I change the furnace filters regularly.

This all leads up to why the carpet in the sewing room had to go.

Carpet is dirty. It holds dirt and grime and germs and it’s generally pretty gross. Consider that these carpets definitely hadn’t had much cleaning since their installation and that they were old and you can see why I’d want to get rid of them before cleaning out the dust and dirt from the house’s ventilation.

So, before the cleaners came, I got to work ripping up the carpets.

If you remember the sneak peek from our post about the sewing room walls, I had some pretty good reason to think the floors were in pretty good shape upstairs. I didn't think I’d get as lucky as I did with The Other Roommate’s bedroom floors, but it doesn't hurt to hope!

Cutting it with a utility knife because I couldn't find my carpet cutter (my workshop is currently a bit of a disaster), it took a little longer but in a smaller room, that wasn't a big deal.

Once it was in strips, I rolled them up and taped them up for easy disposal.  

After getting them pulled up, even I was a little surprised by just how much dirt was under them (that’s all the tan).

Once it was vacuumed up though, the floors look pretty! They’re a little torn up because there was no carpet pad under the carpet to protect them from the carpet binding (the scratchy backing) but they’ll look beautiful once they’re refinished.

The funny thing? The duct cleaners missed one vent – the one in the sewing room – but it’s clean now.

So, for those who want to know what’s coming up next with the sewing room, we’re getting a door! Once that’s done, I’ll be able to finish skim coating the last wall so I can be done with the room and eventually even paint. I guess with the carpet gone I’ll need a new drop cloth… but I think it’s worth it.

*If you're wondering about the name of this post. I'm literally posting as I sit on the floor of the Denver airport. Can't wait to see Isthmus House tonight!

Chipping away to get to the character

One of the first things I wanted to do when we moved into Isthmus House was see some brick. It's not like it was hard to figure out where it was and, when we first moved in, I was still considering keeping it as two units for a while longer and brick adds interesting character to old homes. 

When we'd lived there just a few weeks, I got to work one afternoon when The Roommate wasn't home. As always, if you're working with nice floors (I wasn't) protect them from dents and scratches. You should be wearing protective clothing, gloves and safety glasses at a minimum. Earplugs and a mask for dust never hurt either!

It wasn't exactly the prettiest thing when I got started. Using a chisel, pry bar and hammer, I gradually started pulling the plaster off the brick. Chip. Chip, chip. Chip, chip, chip... Plaster doesn't like coming off of brick but it did - just at a glacial pace!

After a while, I'd gotten the middle chunk pretty clean. 

After a few more days, I got started again and got a little further!

So now we have some beautiful character in the upstairs hallway! Would have been exposed originally? Absolutely not, but I think it's lovely and gives a nice point of interest in a formerly boring area!

Oooooh, pretty!

Old houses have issues but they aren't its fault (I know, I talk about them rather like they're sentient but go with me on this). Old houses also have lots of really great things in them that usually have to be uncovered. I've learned that I’m not fighting the house, I’m fighting for the house to make it a real home. More than anything, I think I’m fighting the people who did all of the crap to kill its homey spirit and trying to prevent it from happening to another one.

As you may recall from our first post about the kitchen here at Isthmus House, it’s a pretty traditional 1910 kitchen. At about 120 sq. ft., it has a door on every wall, a pretty good-sized window, the main stack for the house and some brick that’s covered in plaster jutting into the room.

One of my sorority sisters, Chrissy, is a kitchen designer in metro Detroit and has been helping me figure out exactly how to deal with all of the fun that comes with such a kitchen. Kitchen designers are fantastic resources for kitchen redesigns because they know all of the caveats and considerations. Chrissy is no exception to that rule and came up with a bunch of good ideas for dealing with the odd layout.

While we were discussing and finishing up preliminary plans, I decided that the kitchen was too dark and dreary for me to wait for the full restoration to make some changes. It’s going to be a expensive to do completely and I’m having trouble with opportunity cost (i.e. if I do the kitchen, I can’t do much else around Isthmus House for a bit).

The obvious solution was to repaint the cabinets I already have until I could replace them. A relatively quick project, I got to work this past weekend. With all of my supplies compiled to get the doors down and to get all of the grease and grime off of everything, I got started. Taking off the doors wasn't too challenging even with the hardware painted over. With the first one off, I realized that there might be something interesting underneath.

Underneath all of the grimy paint was what looked a whole lot like decent wood grain. After texting a few pictures around and thinking about it, I took one of the door upstairs to my workshop (aka the former upstairs unit’s kitchen) and got started on stripping the paint off the back so I could get a better idea of what was really underneath the 29340823* layers of paint.

There’s one really important PSA when working with paint stripper: read the directions. You need to wear protective clothing, chemical-resistant gloves and glasses at the very least and sometimes a special mask too. I was using stripper that’s specifically made to be used indoors but stripper contains some really heavy-duty chemicals you don’t want to play with.

After working on the back of the door for a few layers, it occurred to me that the doors might just be replacements and the cabinets (dare I think it?) original.

I came to the conclusion that I couldn't just add another layer of paint to the cabinetry; I needed to know what was underneath all of the layers.

So downstairs I went to start brushing paint stripper on my cabinets.

One layer down, the wood was indeed as pretty as I had hoped.

The end panels, it turned out, have been lots of colors over the past many years including whatever the color is called that they were when I moved in – I’ll go with taupe, a biscuit-y yellow color, bright orange, and white.

Really, they remind me a little of the paper we pulled out of the cabinets when we first moved in. We took a lot of paint off:

Once I got down to pretty clean wood, I sanded them down lightly (fine grit sandpaper, friends – soft woods are easy to gouge!). 

What I found is pretty astounding.

The cabinets are nice quality wood although I’m not sure what kind – maybe multiple kinds. Guesses are welcome!

What I’d like to do eventually is move these cabinets over to the other side of the door out to the foyer. The range is in front of it still (you can see it in the very top picture above), but it won’t be forever! 

This particularly happy find might save me a few thousand dollars (custom cabinetry is a schwee bit expensive but often, as it is in my case, less expensive than stock). Let’s hope it’s the start of a beautiful kitchen!

*numbers are approximate