If you're going to let someone in your house...

I can’t believe I’m putting this in writing, but I can’t actually complete Isthmus House entirely on my own. Now, I know, some of you have heard me say that I don’t do the stuff that’s more likely to kill me (electrical, plumbing, etc.), but that’s not what I’m talking about in this case.

My family, friends, and the lovely proprietors of the salvage shops I frequent from various regions of the country are a few of the many contributors to Isthmus House that come to mind but there are times that these assemblies can’t give me the kind of help I need. (If you’re thinking “a shrink probably couldn’t either at this point,” shush.)

Once in a while, I have to call in the big guns – the contractors. We all want to work with only the good, but I’ve worked with a few dogs now (I mean no disrespect to our furry friends) and a few that have turned out great.  

 

This would have been more helpful than a few of my past experiences...

 

What makes the difference and how can you (probably) figure it out before you hire them?

 

Good news, I’ve developed something of a systematic checklist (hey, remember, project management funds Isthmus House):

1. Use Angie’s List or get referrals from friends/family. Angie’s List isn’t a hard, tried-and-true step, but it’s a good place to start and see reviews from other real people in your area. If you Google promo codes before signing up, you can usually get a membership for about 40% off. My membership was under $20 for two years.*
2. Pick a list of 5ish that you’ve heard good things about. If they have websites (still not that common for contractors), check them out. There might be samples of their work that can give you a better idea of how well you might fit as contractor/client.
3. Call and schedule times for contractors to come out and see the site, take measurements and get a better idea of your vision. Ideally, put them in back to back time slots to keep you efficient, keep the same scope of work and remind them that you have plenty of options.
4. Ask lots of questions and give detail about what you want including magazine tear outs, renderings, materials, etc. Are permitting fees included in their bids? If permits are required for anything you’re doing (check with the city), your contractors should be more than prepared to pull one. If you’re planning to provide some or all of the needed materials, they need to know the specifics to give you correct numbers. 
5. Establish clear expectations of timelines. Should you expect their proposal tomorrow, next week or next month? If they’re unresponsive or late, you may not want to work with them.
6. Remember, you don’t have to be friends with your contractor but you do need to respect and want to work with them and vice versa. Once the detailed bids come in, it’s okay to discuss the numbers further - many are willing to work with you to match or split the difference between bids received from competitors to win your business. The lowest bids might not be on par with the work others are offering so be fair and find middle ground you can both be happy with. 

*Side note: I don’t love the Big Deals (kind of like a Groupon) they offer. Yeah, they can be a good deal but I’ve seen more than a few of the contractors drop pretty hard in ratings shortly after one’s offered.

 

Once you’ve made your final decision, sign your accepted proposal (should be detail of the work that’s happening, when, by whom and costs) and get your house ready for some work!

Before they come in, make sure you follow through with what you said you would complete. If I tell my plumber that I’ll have the demo of a wall done so that he can get in, it’s not very nice (or professional) of me to add that work to his day – assuming they have the extra time, they charge by the hour and you’ll be paying a pretty penny for that demo.

When I pay anyone to do something around my house, I follow them around to learn – heck, maybe next time I can figure out what they did. If that’s never going to happen in your world, then at least pay attention to what’s happening so you can prevent a hole being cut in the wrong wall or something equally irritating. If you have questions, ask – it’s your home and you should always be comfortable in it.

I should probably own this shirt

 

If problems do arise, steer into the skid… so to speak. One general contractor’s statement has stuck with me, “We’ll do our best not to mess up but, if we do, we’ll do everything we can to fix it.” Work with your crew so that you’re happy with the final product.

Finally, once the work is complete, have a walkthrough with your contractor to make sure you’re good with the work completed. Once you are, write the check promptly (in the words of my dad, “fast pay makes fast friends”), get a receipt and write a review reflecting your experience. If they have a website or are on a website like Angie’s List, they may also really appreciate before and after pictures of your project.

And there you have it, my tried and as-true-as-possible formula for finding a reliable contractor and living to tell the tale.

Tune in again next week for more on our most recent adventure (which does involve a contractor!) at the House on the Isthmus!

 

You think it'll take that long? Nah...

This was never intended to be the long-term fix. When I first started looking into refinishing/painting/somethinging my kitchen cabinets, the estimates said it would take several weekends. I scoffed.

To be fair, I had my reasons. The best reason was that we have somewhere in the <10 sq. ft. range of counter top space. It would seem that that means not a lot of cabinetry too, right?

As y’all have already seen, stripping the first bank of cabinets was pretty easy. Surprisingly easy even, if a little exploratory. I’m really not sure what would possess someone to paint their cabinets bright orange…

When I got started on the second bank of cabinets one afternoon, I kind of expected to find orange paint under a few layers of paint again. Haha. Hahaha. This time, it was… 70s children, you should be expecting this… green!

The lower cabinets still had contact paper in them too so that had to go – it was wellllll past grimy (interestingly, this was previously our cleaning supply cabinet).

 

These cabinets weren’t too much harder than the last, although they were more challenging to get to in their own little corner and in a little worse shape than the others. This round meant lots of time on either ladders or standing on counter tops for me!

Like the other set, once they were fully stripped, I scrubbed them with TSP, tack clothed the heck out of them and gave them a coat of primer.

 

A couple of coats of paint later, and we were in business. You know… so long as we were open to having everyone and their cousins knowing all of the business since there were no doors.

With the doors sitting in the dining room with the rest of the kitchen stuff, it was time to get started.

Taking all of the painted on hardware off of 11 doors was the first bit of fun.

 

The hinges got lots of TLC from me with time in the crockpot (that’s just water, no chemicals!), a good scrubbing with an old toothbrush and toothpicks, another crockpot bath for a few, scrubbing in a baking soda and vinegar bath for a while for a few, some brass darkening solution and some additional rinsing.

I think it was worth it and I love that they look old and a little weathered – what do you think?

 

After sanding the doors down outside and with a mask and eye protection on (hint hint), washing them and waiting for them to dry, I spray-primered them. This was a first for me but seems to have still worked well to get the smoother finish I wanted. I would recommend that you have a clean paintbrush ready in case you get any splatters like I did.

 

It dried really quickly but I gave all of them a little extra time before adding 2 coats of new paint to match the cabinets themselves.

 

Some new handles (just interim!), reattaching the hinges, and the doors were ready to go back up with the help of The Roommate. 

In the end, it took several weekends – about 4, I think, if they’re added together – but I think it was completely worth it and made our kitchen feel much more livable until we complete the whole thing later this fall.

 

What do you think?

P.S. If you were concerned about these being original, so was I. We learned during this bank’s refinishing that they’re not original. This is a picture of the back of the base cabinets (and that’s a piece of baseboard in the back that wouldn’t have been there if these were original):

 

 

 

 

I think they had it right the first time...

I find it surprising how hard it is to find information about a house style that’s considered to be the most common American home style of all time - the Foursquare.

If you’re anything like me when I started this, you might be wondering what that means. Let’s take a mini-trip back to the origins of The House on the Isthmus.

Contracting and construction began on Isthmus House in 1908 and continued through 1910. It was one of the first in the Schenk-Atwood neighborhood – which I’ve learned in large part because I talk to my neighbors and their houses were all built a decade or two later. Somehow, magically, the original deed has been passed down all the way to me.

In the early 1900s, American Foursquares were becoming rather prevalent in large part because of the popularity of architect Frank Lloyd Wright (he has lots of projects in Wisconsin - one of the most well known locally, albeit newest, is the Monona Terrace only a few miles away).

Also known as Prairie style and available in a kit from Sears Roebuck (yep, you could totally order your house out of a catalog, complete with options for things like different flooring), they came with all of the pieces you needed already cut. Seems to me that the definition of some assembly required has changed rather a lot in the last hundred-ish years!

Can't say I'd mind spending $2243 on a house!

The Foursquare home is just that – four squares or quadrants on the top floor and four on the bottom in many cases. There are some variations on a theme, but it’s a pretty good general rule.

This one is pretty similar to Isthmus House’s layout – check out more layouts like this one here.

 

 

These homes were meant to be cozy family homes – they were never intended to have open layouts and expansive spaces. If you’re not sure what to do with some of the rooms these houses offer, check out The Not So Big House by Sarah Susanka. It features lots of Wright-esque homes like Isthmus House.

On the outside, many Foursquares also have dormers (windows that stick up vertically from a roof line) and open, full front porches like in the kit house add above. Isthmus House isn’t one of those though.

 

Despite having lots of renovations completed between the 1920s and 1960s, the House on the Isthmus remains an excellent 1910 example of a simple Foursquare with a hip roof and a small front porch. Sometimes it’s nice to remember that simple can be a good thing – and can maybe even make us think back to simpler times and ways of life when things were done well the first time. Maybe, just maybe, they had it right.

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?