Can you move a 60 ton, ~130 year old home across a lake:

Casey found this in the StarTribune (Minneapolis, MN):

http://www.startribune.com/local/38530692.html?elr=KArksLckD8EQDUoaEyqyP4O:DW3ckUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aUac8HEaDiaMDCinchO7DU

Things have slowed down a bit with the contractors recently. It has been almost a week since we’ve had anyone actually doing anything to our house. However, we have had a couple stop out to get information on how to proceed with a few things.

First, one of the supposed flooring “experts” in town stopped by to check out the flooring damage. He is supposedly the best in the town according to our general contractor. While I wasn’t here to talk to him, Casey followed him around as he looked things over. In our living room, where both the tongue and groove sides of the flooring bowed out due to the moisture, and the flooring buckled in a couple areas, he claimed that it all had to come out. Same with the office on the main floor. He suggested replacing the maple (some of it is birds-eye) with oak because it is stronger and cheaper (price doesn’t matter when insurance is going to cover it, by the way flooring guy as long as it isn’t more expensive than what is in here). Then he looked at the steps going upstairs. He claimed that they were not sandable (which I have a hard time believing since they are a single board per step) and should be replaced.

Next, he looked at the upstairs which is all douglas fir, including the bathroom floor I spent hours and hours stripping of linoleum:

He said it all should come out as douglas fir isn’t a very hard wood.

First off, I put too much work into that floor to yank it out. It doesn’t look pretty in the pictures, but I’m certain it will sand out extremely nicely. Secondly, I don’t care if it isn’t as hard of a wood as, say, oak. Two reasons: one is that it is in pretty darn condition being that it is 80 years old, and the second is that I consider a ding or discoloration here and there “character.” It speaks to you. New flooring just doesn’t do that.

As far as the main floor, erm, floors go, I don’t see why it all has to come out. There are a couple spots that I can imagine the nails have failed and would have to at minimum be pulled up and renailed. Worst case is they’d have to replace the boards in that section. I have a few chunks of maple from when the kitchen/bathroom was turned into one room (granted it has a few layers of linoleum, nothing I haven’t seen before, right?) that could be used to fix these sections.

Granted, maybe he is just trying to give a worst case call for the insurance to make sure we can get what we need fixed without insurance breathing down our necks. However, Casey said he made remarks about how the wood they used for our trim is supposedly garbage. Does he think we are going to go pull the 80 year old trim off the walls and run to Home Depot and grab some crap wood to replace it? Sure… we’ll get right on that on boss.

We have a different contractor who is going to do the bathroom flooring upstairs, and if we are happy with the results there, we will have him do the main floor as well as he seemed confident the majority of the floor could be salvaged and seems a bit more on our side.

Besides flooring, we still have an uninsulated kitchen and bathroom and our temps aren’t supposed to get above zero for the next several days so I really hope they can get in soon to get these walls covered. Our heating bill is going to be outrageous…

All in the life of a homeowner right?

It has been a whole month since the first post on the blog. In a way, it feels like forever, but at the same time, we still aren’t fully unpacked yet. Since that first post a month ago, we’ve been on a bit of a rollercoaster.

We were pretty excited to be a few days away from closing, giving you the low down on our house. Then we talked about our leaning tower of garage. At that time, our big decisions were when we wanted to tear that down and rebuild it, and when we wanted to finish the basement. Boy, were we in for a surprise when our house took a shower and damaged just about everything.

From there, the garage and basement refinishing dropped down to the bottom of the list as we listened to lots of loud fans and dehumidifiers. To help keep our minds off of it, we spent some time showing you our house’s layout. That didn’t help much, as I got quite antsy as you might recall (assuming you didn’t get bored before getting that far back…). We did get a couple good suggestions of out that post though, drinking and then working on little projects (make sure you leave some time between those two activities…).

Then we tried to be house historians and guess how the back stairs might have been. While wrong, it was nice to figure out what originally was set up in that closet (there wasn’t one)…

Then we finally got busy, with contractors showing up, tearing things down, and overal getting things done. That is a good. Thinking about demolition guys taking out the original trim work, well, that is uncomfortable. Don’t worry, all that fretting was for naught as we came home to our gutted out kitchen (at least the exterior walls that had insulation).

Then things got dirty for me as I began removing linoleum from our hardwood floors in our bathroom, which was the root of all our water problems. All the while, it got cold here, record cold. Around that time, we asked the (apparently four… minus me, makes three) readers of this blog if we should paint or not paint the trim in the bathroom upstairs. While those four (ok, three) people were voting, I was working my tail off on gutting out the bathroom walls.

Once the walls were out, I worked on finishing removing the linoleum from the hardwood floors. While I was doing that, Casey had her own projects she was working on.

Overall, it has been one heck of a month here in our new home. It wasn’t what we had expected, but in the end, we’ll have the house the way we want it, and will knock off a few items from our long term goal list that we weren’t expecting to get to for a long time (like getting our bathroom back to hardwood floors, or putting a clawfoot tub in).

While I’ve been slaving working away on the bathroom, Casey has started up a couple projects of her own.

The first project is one that she has been wanting to tackle since we first lived in this house while attending college years ago: the upstairs newel post and railing. As with the rest of the trim in the house, it had at least half a dozen layers of paint on it. Thankfully, there was a very shiny layer of shellac or varnish of some sort that allowed the heat gun to make quick work of it.

Her other project has been stripping paint off of door hardware. It wasn’t until I started reading house blogs a few months ago that I knew the easy way to strip metal hardware. Before I knew the easy way, I was taking a heat gun to them and doing the best I could with that. In case you don’t know what the easy way is, you just simply remove the hardware from the door, and place it into a pot of hot/boiling water with some dishwasher soap in it (or even dish soap works). Let it sit for 30 minutes or so, and the paint will practically fall right off. Once you have the majority of the paint off, use some denatured alcohol in a cheap spray bottle with some steel wool to clean it up. If you don’t want new looking hardware, don’t spend too much time with the steel wool otherwise it will clean it up a bit too much.

And lastly, the other “project” Casey has been working on is getting the house turned a bit more into a home, given the state of construction it is in constantly. For the first few weeks, we mostly stayed in the very small upstairs, as the main floor was dusty, dirty, and simply, a mess. After going after the floor several times with a mop, she was able to get furniture positioned in a more comfortable way. She also brought some of our son’s toys down to make it easier to keep him entertained. Due to the fragile paint, nothing is on the walls yet though.

For now, I’ll start out revealing the upstairs that I was supposed to do a while back

First off, our temporary “master” bedroom:

Our son’s bedroom before his bed was placed where I am standing:

And a picture of half of the insanely tiny upstairs kitchen (with half fridge) and my son helping (un)load the refridgerator:

It is done. After a week of much sweat, tears, and blood, it is done. Between the lead paint and asbestos, I’m sure to die according the CDC, right?

New tools list:

1. Small flat bar
2. Large flat bar
3. Paint scraper
4. Heat gun
5. Lead & asbestos respirator
6. Safety glasses

I wish I could say this is the last time I have to remove asbestos backed vinyl, however, both rooms upstairs have the vinyl tiles that will eventually be coming up. It was by far the most undesirable job I have ever done. I would rather strip 10 layers of latex paint, 5 layers of lead paint, and a layer of milk paint, and proceed to clean up the remnants, and finish by sanding, staining, and polying trim for a week than remove one bathroom floor’s asbestos linoleum. Especially when the said bathroom has the strongest heat vent in the entire house and you are wearing a respirator. Supposedly when you remove asbestos, you are supposed to spray it down with water to keep the dust down. I just lean my head over and douse it with sweat.

Starting a little more than a week ago, and enduring a terrible cold in the process, I removed all the shower tiles (new tool #1 + hammer), gutted the walls of drywall and plaster (new tools #2, #5 and #6), and stripped the entire floor of asbestos (I have to say that as much as possible to show how manly I was to tackle it, right?) linoleum (new tools #3, #4 and #5 + putty knife and gloves). After finishing this afternoon, I got my hair buzzed and took a shower. I’ve never felt better. What a glorious day!

Here is the floor from a couple angles (feel free to call it dirty names for being such a pain…):

Looking at the pictures, the darker spots are either discolorations (near the toilet drain), or linoleum backing that is in between the slightly raised grains in those locations. Both of which should hopefully be taken care of with a light sanding (which someone else gets to do!). The actual color variations between the boards is due to some still having their last finish, and others not having any finish left at all. I’m pretty certain this is shellac. From what I know about shellac, I should be able to wipe it away with denatured alcohol, and if it goes to unfinished wood, then it isn’t stained. Either way, I’m anxious to see the floor sanded and refinished. I’ve got my hopes set high.

Tomorrow morning, Casey is going to call the contractor who is going to fill in the floor and do the insulation/drywalling to let him know we are ready. When we talked to him last (Thursday), and we told him we’d be done by Monday, he seemed reluctant to believe us. Who’d blame him? The walls were still up and the floor still had linoleum on it. If it were a normal contractor, it’d probably take a couple weeks . We’re really hoping they can get in and either finish the floor or the walls by the end of the week.

To finish this off, I found one picture from several years ago before my father had actually renovated this exact bathroom showing the lovely tub (or the top of it) and the sink. The toilet was the same color in case you were curious:

Someday I hope to find the pictures I took of the initial walk through before they purchased it in 2002. Someday.

I almost wish I let someone else take out the plaster in the bathroom. Even though I knew it was in terrible shape, and that I didn’t have the time to fix it myself, nor the money to pay someone else at this time, I still hated the fact that I was pulling out 80 year old plaster and perfectly good lathe. While it will be nice to get the bathroom done the way we envisioned it before this water damage ordeal, if I had all the time in the world, I would have left the lathe on and replastered.

But since this is what I currently am showering in, I need to get this upstairs bathroom done as soon as possible:

Anywho, this is what the upstairs bathroom looks like as of this morning:

See those two holes on both sides ? Those are openings to the area under the roof behind the bedroom closets. Like all the rest of you lucky home owners that have opened that one spot that hasn’t seen the light of day since the house was built, I was hoping to find some momentos from the builders or original home owners.

This is the closet to the left:

And the closet to the right:

All I get is a Smörgåsbord of insulation… unfair? I think so. So instead, I’ll spend the rest of my day scraping away at the floor, removing the lovely asbestos vinyl flooring from our Douglas fir hardwood. I did stop by Ace Hardware the other day and picked up one of these though:

How does it look on Casey?

I also picked up a giant roll of duct tape and a plastic drop cloth to seal myself in with the fumes and asbestos dust. Hopefully that’ll make it so only I get cancer and not my wife and son.

One nice thing about demoing the room is we were able to see how parts of it were originally set up. There were two wall sconces (which we are looking for if you have any to sell ):

And we could see the outline of the original sink in the paint:

You can also see the line around the room where the original trim was half way up the wall:

With the fake plaster tile, do you think they would have done a wood trim piece, or actual tile?

Lastly, we had the contractor out here who is going to do the insulating, drywalling, and the floor come look at the bathroom floor for his input. He is from a local outfit (Simonsons Lumber) and he claims to have old growth, vertical grain Douglas fir on hand. While I would prefer salvaged, I don’t have the time nor the extra funds at the moment to justify it. I will be asking for a sample first to make sure I am comfortable it will match close enough.

The trim in our bathroom was originally painted from what it seems like. Sadly, all we have left of the original trim is around the door and around the window. We do not have any of the baseboards left. When I lived in this house for my first few years of college (when I thought I’d never buy the place — go figure) we had stripped the trim around the window. I wish I could remember if it was painted or not, but I can’t. Was it common to have windows left unpainted while the rest was painted? We are thinking of stripping the door and the actual sash, leaving just the baseboards and the trim around the door painted, but we haven’t fully decided yet.

So I’ve created a poll. Please leave a comment too if you have any other ideas.

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I’ll be posting more demolition pictures of the bathroom tomorrow evening hopefully. I’ve removed all the plaster (shed a tear with me… it was just beyond repair in the timeframe we have). I still have to remove the fiber type board that was around the tub area that the plaster was stuck too. I’ll go into details on that in my next post…

And to go further off topic, we had a contractor from a local lumber company over today to look at the floor in the bathroom. It sounds like he has (new, unfortanetly) old growth, vertical grain Douglas fir that he can put in. I am hoping to get a sample of it to make sure it won’t look out of place with the old stuff before committing to it.

I wasn’t joking about how cold it was going to be today. Looks like we set a record this morning:

A new record low temperature of -37 degrees was set at the Grand
Forks International Airport Tuesday morning January 13… beating the
previous record of -31 degrees set in 1979. Records at Grand Forks
Airport date back to 1941.

And our walls in the kitchen still aren’t insulated. On top of that, at the bottom of each void between the studs, there is a small, 1/2″ vent hole. That hole is currently venting in some -24* air into our kitchen.

I’m onto day two of (attempting to) removing the linoleum flooring from our bathroom floors. It is an extremely time consuming and tedious job. I think the part that is the worst about our situation is that we only have the hardwood on part of the floor. If I take a couple steps over, I’d fall down into the kitchen.

I’ve been emailing a couple companies in the region that specialize in reclaimed lumber. I’m really hoping I can find someone who can get me wood that will fit into our bathroom, otherwise I’m just wasting my time. Well, not really, as I could always use the stripped floor to patch up the second floor kitchen when that comes out as it will need a few boards replaced where the sink is at.

Here is what I am dealing with a little closer up:

And what it looks like after being stripped:

And the tools I am using to get the lovely job done:

Also, I think I mentioned this previously, but the “tile” in this room was actually plaster that was made to look like tiles:

And the last floor related picture… does anyone know what I can do here to get the floor back flat again?? I’m stuck…

While I was inhaling the lovely tar (and asbestos?) fumes from the floor, Casey was unable to resist working on the bathroom door. Since we first moved, she has been dying to get a heat gun so she could start stripping. Stripping anything. I had to talk her out of stripping part of the upstairs railing as I knew she wouldn’t have the time nor patience to finish it right now . While I wasn’t looking though, she started working on the bathroom door. I should have videotaped it. She was able to take a putty knife and slide it under most of the paint without even using the heat gun. It just popped right off.

I’d write more, but I have to be at work early tomorrow and I want to have time to spare getting there as this is what we are looking forward to tomorrow:

Wind chill readings 36 below to 41 below zero.

A perfect time to not have any insulation at all on our main floor kitchen walls!

We decided we wanted more of an “open floor plan” that is all the rage today. Cabinets, refrigerators, stoves, who needs those? They only get in the way, and provide places to stub your toes, or for mice to hide in. Kitchen sink? Naw, those just provide another place to leak. And who needs plaster or drywall when you can just look into the studs.

All joking aside, this is where the demolition folks left off. Ironically, an hour or so after I wrote about how uncomfortable I was with them doing it, I received a frantic message from Casey telling me they threw away the original window trim. As I sped home, I pondered where in the world I could find wood to replace it in the event I couldn’t find it in the dumpster. After I parked my car, I looked over the dumpster from the top. Full of wainscoting. No kitchen cabinets, or appliances. So, avoiding having to climb into it, I took a peek into our porch and garage. Luckily, they had actually saved it and put it into our porch. Phew…

As Casey had mentioned in her post about the roots and stairs, we had originally wondered if the rear entry had been in that back right corner in the above picture. However, it appears what my father had seen behind the plaster when he remodeled wasn’t the framing of a door, but a window:

We would consider putting a window back in there except for two things. The first is that the odds of finding a window that matches the rest are slim. The second is that we’d just be looking into our neighbor’s kitchen, so it wouldn’t give us much of a view.

However, I can give you the back story on why the window was closed up. When my parents first purchased the home, there actually was a standing shower right about in front of that closed up window. To the left was a pocket for a refrigerator. That little window was in a small bathroom that was accessed by the door on the right. There was also a small pedestal sink and toilet in there. I’m assuming it was added pre 1950, but I’m not certain. It had metal lathe, but it was still plaster. My parents took the bathroom out as the kitchen was simply much too small. The bad thing is that leaves us without a main floor bathroom, but I think we’ll live with it.

And in case you are wondering what that big thing on the bottom right is, it is an abatement system used to contain the lead dust. My office is directly through that door on the right and there isn’t a bit of dust on my monitors (which show every bit of dust imaginable). So far, so good.