Return of the Prodigal Blogger

OK, once again it has been months and months since I updated the blog. But, here I am, so I will pick up the "power update" of the work that we did during the first few years in the house. After moving in to the house and finally obtaining luxurious amenities like heat and a water-tight roof, our contractor excavated around the patio off the back of the house, and poured a concrete lip to protect the sills (below grade). I can't recall why we didn't just drop the grade of the patio at that point (which we still need to do at some point), but I think it was just a matter of being cheaper and more expedient. Not good reasons, but what can you do?

The early years also saw lots more painting of rooms, but thankfully not any major structural issues. There were a few cool projects along the way. Jenny's favorite story about our house restoration was one of these.

In our second or third year in the house, I found myself with some free time in early December. Having been unhappy with the water-stained drywall that made up our living room ceiling, I had, for some time, speculated to Jenny that there might be some nice beams underneath, like the ones that were exposed in the den. Eventually, with speculation turning to obsession, I had to take a look, and secured Jenny's permission to open a small hole in the ceiling. As Jenny describes it, she returned to our house that day to find me elated that there were, indeed, beautiful beams in the ceiling. She also found my definition of small to be approximately 6'x6'. I maintain that that was the smallest hole that would let me get a good view given the dim lighting, but I don't think that Jenny bought my story. Anyway, the entire ceiling was down within a few hours.

While I maintain that the project was well worth it, I will concede that my timing was less than perfect. This all took place about a week before we were due to have 100 or so of our closest friends descend on the house for our annual Christmas party. Happily, Jud, our contractor, managed to squeeze in the time to sheetrock and skim coat between the beams, leaving is with a ceiling that, I believe, only enhanced the festivity of our party. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

Another key project during this time period was the restoration of our front door. The door is a beautiful, slightly squat, dutch door with eight raised panels. A beautiful hand wrought thumb latch was still in place, as were the original (I believe) strap hinges and pintles When we moved in, the door and its hardware were layered in paint, and the door had cracks in two of the panels that I could slide my hand through. Neither aesthetically pleasing, nor energy efficient. Despite the recommendation of one of my father-in-laws carpenters that we should toss it into a dumpster and buy a nice new aluminum door (Aaaaack!), we decided to have it restored to its original condition. After removing the door and having it stripped at a local establishment, we took the door to Paul Marlowe of Marlowe Restorations in Northford, CT. Paul disassembled the door, cleaned out two centuries of paint and dirt that were embedded around the panels, repaired the cracks with epoxy, and repaired a major splintered crack on one of the rails. The door was then reassembled and re-pegged. The door was primed and painted and I stripped and oiled all of the hardware (including the latch, which we left in place on the door as it was still attached by the original period nails, which we did not want to disturb). Hung back up, it looks amazing, and is a real focal point for the front of the house.

Other interior projects during this time included removing the mid-20th century built-ins in the living room to expose the original beaded wall behind it, and reglazing the old door at the back of our living room with 18th century glass panes purchased from Fairview Glass in Maryland.

Outside, we removed a large amount of rotting firewood from various locations around the property, created a perennial garden alongside the driveway and in a small area outside the dining room, and began the arduous process of reclaiming the property from overgrowth that had consumed much of the property in the preceding two decades. This entailed removing huge amounts of forsythia, poison ivy and vines that had grown unchecked under the not so watchful eye of the previous homeowners. By pushing back the forsythia in the backyard by about 40 feet, I was able to re-expose beautiful stone walls, and give some breathing room to the cherry and horse chestnut trees in the yard that had been largely obscured by the overgrowth. I also uncovered an old well of some sort about 15 feet from the back door. Although it was capped by concrete, there is a small plug that can be removed and inspection showed beautiful fieldstone masonry ringing the well form ground level down approximately eight feet. Definitely something that I want to explore at some point in search of artifacts.

For the most part, that is all of the work that made up Phase 1 of the restoration process, which was basically just an effort to stop the deterioration that appeared to have been taking place for the preceding 20 years, ensure that the house was structurally sound, and make the necessary upgrades to the systems that would let us live comfortably. In total, this took about four years, with the work occurring in fits and starts, as time, inspiration and money allowed. Hopefulyl, i will post an update on Phase 2, the bathroom addition, as well as some pictures in the near future.

Lazarus

Yes, my blog is back from the dead. After a meager two year hiatus (I know, not an auspicious beginning to the blog), my wife Jenny has cajoled me into reviving the blog on our house.

As you can imagine, there are a few things to update since my last post way back in 2006. Most importantly, we have a new addition to the family, our beautiful daughter Brooks, who was born in August of 2007. She's now a year old, and running around the house like crazy. She seems to like the old house just fine, and definitely loves the yard.

The baby's arrival of course spurred on a frantic round of work on the house, primarily focused on converting our decrepit office into a suitable nursery. I also powered through the vast majority of the paint scraping that was left in the house, in an effort to get rid of the last lead paint vestiges before Brooksie arrived.

Ok, in the interest of actually sustaining the blog from this point going forward, I will run very quickly through six years of restoration work to bring the house up to date. Some of these were biggies, and I will try to revisit these in more detail later. More or less in chronological order, we have:

• Gutted the crumbling plaster walls and ceilings on the second floor (still kicking myself for this, but we had no idea what we were doing, and it seemed like the way to go). With the walls opened up, we installed modern insulation to replace the decidedly non-modern insulation that had been in place - lots and lots of dessicated corn cobs that were shoved in the voids between the timber framing. We then had the walls sheetrocked, and skimmed in plaster with a historic texture to match the original walls.

• We also used the opportunity of the open walls to upgrade the electrical on the second floor, adding a fixture over the stairs, and adding and upgrading outlets.

• Painted pretty much everything. The previous owners were smokers, and every surface in the house had a "patina" of smoke and dirt. I am a decidedly bad painter so focused my efforts on removing wallpaper, but Jenny and our families managed to get a fresh coat on most rooms downstairs.


• Had all of the painted floors on the second floor sanded down to bare wood and polyurethaned. In hindsight, another mistake. The sanding messed up the nail heads on the old floors. Still bugs me, but live and learn. If I had it to do over again, I would have hand scraped. Of course, I would still be working on this project all these years later.
  
• Had the chimney relined. We have 4 fireplaces, all off of one center chimney. The fireplace in our bedroom was boarded up, and the ancient Hercules boiler (coal converted to oil) vented through that flue. We opened up the fireplace, installed a dedicated vent pipe for the boiler, and reclaimed the fireplace. The other three fireplaces had been used over the previous 50 years to varying degrees, and it is a miracle that no one died. The fireplaces were lined using the Golden Flue process. Basically, they lowered someone down our massive chimney to chip out the old flues. They then inserted enormous bladders to each firebox. The bladders were inflated, and a special concrete was poured into the chimney. When it cured, the bladders were deflated and removed, and we were left with cast in place flues. Very cool, and provided the added benefit of making the chimney extraordinarily strong. The process works very well, and I highly recommend it, but our chimney guy was a nightmare. Lots of cut corners, sloppy, did not ask the right questions, and lost seven expensive bags of the concrete which he claimed went into our bricked up beehive oven (which he then insisted that we pay for half of). Anyway, it all worked out in the end, but thinking about it still makes me careen off into a rant.
  
• Replaced the old Hercules boiler with a modern oil burning boiler. Unfortunately, between the boiler and chimney work, we spent our first few weeks in the house without heat during an unusually cold October. Brrrrr.
  
• Replaced the roof, which the previous owners had assured us did not leak. This proved to be an optimistic assessment when a storm during the first week that we owned the house led to leaks everywhere. Our neighbor across the street kindly informed us that the previous owners kept a ready supply of buckets and pots to spread around the house whenever it rained.
  

All of this work took place during year one, with most of the messier items frontloaded in the weeks between closing and moving in.

The culmination was our hosting of Thanksgiving for both of our families. We were very proud to show off our cleaned up house but in retrospect, it still looked like a disaster. Our contractor managed to remove the table saw, and the rest of his tools from our living room only the day before our big event. I have a distinct memory of Jenny and I passing out on a big chair immediately after dinner. It may have been partly the tryptophan, but more likely it was the shock of our new endeavor catching up with us.

Ok, that's pretty much it for September-December 2001. Next post I will make some more progress on the next few years. Hopefully it won't be another two years before I get around to that entry.