Hitting the crack pipe

When you don't see updates, that generally means that we're really busy on the house.   We've been going in early and staying late, and getting a lot done. 

Most of the second floor has been painted, ceilings included.  A lot more drywall patches have been made, thanks to Ryan.  One on the third floor and one on the first floor. 

While patching up the drywall on the 3rd floor, we noticed there was no insulation in the attic.   So we decided to get some insulation and throw it in there, but I noticed that there was some older knob-n-tube wiring up there.   Its probably the last of the knob-n-tube in the house, but that means that you can't insulate over it.  So we called an electrician and got a quote to get it out of there.   As we discussed the price, she told me that I could save some money on the job if I was willing to run the wires through the walls myself.  So I spent nearly a day running wires inside the wall from the basement to the attic.  I also ran a line to the second floor kitchen so we could relocate our refrigerator and have it plugged in safely.   The electrician will come soon to hook these wires up. 

Meanwhile the heating and plumbing is not finished, but its getting closer every day.   The photo below is Contractor Rick working on one of our heaters which is actually fired up in this photo.  Unfortunately there is a problem with the thermostat, so it didn't stay running. 

We have been able to test out a few sinks and toilets in the house, which means that water was now going down the drain.  Which unfortunately showed us that we had a cracked cast iron drain pipe.   These pipes weigh about 50 pounds (25kgs) per yard (meter).   They were all that was available 100 years ago when our house had the plumbing installed, but nowadays PVC is more widely used.  It's cheaper, lighter, easier to install and seems to clog less.  So with the news that we had a crack in our pipe, we decided to replace as much of it as we could get to.   Some of the old cast iron had already been replaced by the former owners, so we were able to join our new PVC easily to this old PVC.   Ryan and Rick took out the old cast, and Rick and Dad put in the new PVC one day and Rick and Effie put in the PVC the second day. 

In the end, we took out about 300lbs in cast iron pipe and replaced it with nice shiny new PVC.  We also took out some old steel pipe which happens to get clogged up real easily, so after 50 years this 2-inch (5cm) pipe was so clogged with debris that there was a hole smaller than a pencil going through it. 

We also found that the tub upstairs does not drain out AT ALL and we cant replace the pipe within the wall, so we'll need to run some new PVC through a new hole that we're going to make in the floor.  . 

And all of the windows in the house are new-ish vinyl double-pane windows except the ones in the upstairs laundry room which were old wooden single-pane windows which did not even shut all the way, so we went to Habitat and found a window that fit on the openings for $28 and put it in and sealed up the other opening. 

The other big news is that we now have a new back wall.  Dan Coy of Coy Carpentry took out our rotted joist and rear wall and put in all new wood.  They were in and out in 3 days and we're efficient, clean, and did awesome work.   Couldn't recommend them more highly.   Now, tomorrows job is putting on new siding. 

Things are heating up

We took a stop by the Habitat store this morning-  not for work, but just to shop.   We found a couple of very nice toilets for $20 ea, so we bought them both and a range hood for $15 so we got that too.  We installed one of the toilets today and we'll do the other one soon.

We got the hot water turned on in the house today, and then turned on the water for the heating system, which opened up a whole new set of leaks.  The contractor started fixing them, but needed to get some more parts, so he'll be working on that tomorrow.

We've bought and replaced a few outlets, which isn't so easy due to our wiring type.   A few of the rooms in the house still have the old knob-n-tube wiring, which means that they only have 2 wires to them.   Most modern electric outlets since the 1960's have a 3rd ground wire.  Finding the old 2-wire outlets is not so easy.   But we managed to find a few and got them installed.   The old ones worked. but they were just so worn out after 50 years of service that the plugs just wouldnt stay in.  We'd like to update some of them to the newer 3-wire, but that might mean a lot more work. 

Other than that, we put on a few more coats of paint and dad picked out another room of staples.

Small victories

I flushed a toilet today.   It's amazing how much work it took to complete such a simple little task.  All of our pipes are installed.   The cold water ones are working (hence the flushing toilet), the hot water ones are done but need to be checked, the heating system ones are in, but one radiator still needs to be worked on before that can be turned on.

Our contractor checked the heaters and neither are working.  They look fixable, but it's going to take an extra day and maybe some more cash thrown at it.

And the toilet that flushed showed us that we have a small leak in the sewer line so thats going to need to be fixed as well.

I'm not too surprised at these little hiccups.  I sort of expected them.  Just so long as they get fixed as we find them and we don't find too many.

Meanwhile, we're still busy painting.   I removed a couple of the radiators, just because there was so many years worth of dirt and crud behind them.  As I was cleaning one off, I noticed some of the paint had come away on the back side, so I repainted it with some high-temp engine paint. 

Today I spent the entire morning tidying up, then cleaned all the floorboards which I just couldn't stand to look at any longer (we've been cleaning rooms as we get ready to paint them - but just walking past the gunked up trim in the other rooms was driving me a bit nuts).   Then I painted a couple closets and called it a day.

Buggin out

A good day at the house.  Ryan built some shelves, Rick installed the bathroom fan, Effie painted the trim in the hallway and living room.  A few other minor bits and bobs were tackled here and there.  Caulked and spackled the bathroom window getting it ready for paint, installed a light, met with an electrictian (all is good with our electrics - the work needed is minor and stuff we can handle). 

The cool-factor of our house has gone up since Ryan has been driving over in his newly 99%-restored 1970 VW Bug.   Not that the house wasn't hip with a 92' Previa in the driveway, but the Bug might be slightly cooler.   And I say it's only 99% restored as it seems there may be some more work to be done on the gas gauge if this mornings events are any indication.  :)

Patriotic pipes

Wow - its only been 4 days and it feels like its been forever since we've update the blog.

We've been putting in a lot more hours, but to be honest, it seems like Ryan is putting in more than us.  Theres been a few times that we've shown up to the house to find him working away on something.  It's great to have the company and nice to have the help too.  Dad has been making some regular visits as well, picking out about 1000 staples left over from our carpet removal.  It's tough work which yields an appearingly small amount of debris for hours of work.

We've really been enjoying finding little treasures here and there in the house.  Every now and then I'll pull something out and find an old squared off nail like they used to make at the blacksmiths back in the 1800s.  And things like the radiators are very decorative and cool.   We're also in the process of restoring the old wooden spindles on the staircase and it looks like they may be original as well.  

A couple of before-after photos of the brick work.

Ryan framed out the pass-thru window much nicer than we had planned on doing it.  I really cant believe that someone had just drywalled over this.

Now that the big upstairs bedroom is all finished, we've turned that in to our little chill area.  We got a bed and light from Freecycle, and threw in a carpet remnant and heat the whole thing up with a heater from Ryan's mom. 

With the 3rd floor being 99% done, we've moved in to the second floor.  We're working our way from top downwards.   We pulled out the 2 radiators in the front room because they were so close to the wall it was obvious no-one had painted behind there in decades.  So while the water was still off, we figured it was a good time to pull them out and scrape off the years of junk and baked on paint and make it look pretty behind there.   We also replaced all the wiremold behind there as well.   We've decided to carpet this room even though the floor is pretty decent.  It'll keep it quieter downstairs and should be quicker on us. 

The biggest news is that our pipes are going in.  Our plumber has been here for the past few days running all sorts of red, white and blue pipes.  Red and Blue for hot and cold, and white is the super high-temp stuff used for the heating system. 

Look-  theres water pipes sticking up!!!  Also, note the cool handpainted wallpaper we found behind the cabinets.  Theres not enough of it to restore, but we just think its so cool.  We're going to try to save a piece.

From floor to ceiling

The coat of varnish we put on Friday night turned out pretty good despite the temperature. So on Saturday we decided to put another coat on for extra protection. We also made a Home Depot run to pick up a can of dark brown paint for the ceiling's exposed beams. We wanted to keep them white but the wood color kept showing through so we decided to embrace it rather than fight it... Then we removed the blue tape, picked up  our tools, finished a few odds and ends and voilà ! the room is finally finished :

We're happy with the way it turned out, especially the floors (shiny, huh !) and the beams. It feels great to have that one more room done, with the small bedroom, that's 2 rooms down, only 11 to go ! We still have a few bits and bobs to finish in the hallway and closets, but overall the 3rd floor is almost done. The contractor is coming today to start installing new fresh water / heating pipes so hopefully by the end of the week we should be able to turn the radiators on and have heat up there !

These days we have also had a great deal of help from our friend Ryan : drywall, wall insulation, window framing, paint, nothing scares him. He is coming to help so often that we made a key for him so now he is coming even when we are not here ! Talk about a good friend...

Night shifts

After my last post (which was Tuesday evening) I headed back over to the house.  Effie and I have been getting in to more of a rhythm with the house.   We go over in the morning, then come home to go for a run and to eat, we warm up a bit, and then we go back at night.  We usually get cold after 3-4 hours, so doing 2 shifts gives us a longer work day without getting too cold.

Tuesday night Effie was a bit too cold still, so I went back alone and put up the door in the small bedroom.  We bought this modern door (which doesn't match any other door in the house) despite the fact we could have bought an older one for the same price at habitat, because we didn't think we could find the antique handle to go on it.   Well, we found the handle at an architectural salvage shop, and then the door was sold by the time we went back.  This one looks just fine.  Although when you're working with an older house, the doorways are almost never straight.  This job took 2 hours with all the shaving and cutting required, and the door is now anything but square. Anyway, with the door on and all the walls in this room painted, we were able to make a break room out of it with a couple chairs and a little heater. 

We volunteered in the morning at Habitat for Humanity as we do most Wednesdays.  And afterwards we took care of some other things and never made it over to the house.

Thursday was a pretty full-on day.  We finished up almost all of the painting on the top floor.   I fixed the bricks and patched a few holes on the floor.  My brother gave me some wood scraps from a project he did with his stairs and the wood he gave us happened to match our floor exactly.  And its good hard solid wood, not just floorboards, so it should last a while.  I used a power saw to get a rough piece, then a chisel and scraper to make it the perfect shape and then banged it in.  All in all, it turned out ok.

Later that night we puttied up every single seam in the room and left it to dry overnight.

Today we met with a carpenter to get an estimate on fixing the back wall.  At $1800, its not as bad as we thought it could be.  That includes replacing the joist in the basement and replacing the entire back wall.  The carpenter can start as early as Monday, provided we can get the permits.  Which as we know is not always easy.  We went to the boro and once again they said we needed more info than we had.  Wish they would have told us this the last time we were there.

We spent the majority of the day getting the floor prepped for a clear coat on the wood floor.  It was a lot of cleaning and sanding and more cleaning.  In the end, we got the coat on at about 6pm.  It says on the can to apply it between 60 and 80 degrees, so either we ignore that rule or we wait until July.  We gave it a go.  We'll see how it looks tomorrow.

Working in the freezer today

Very short day today, as opposed to yesterday.   Yesterday we did our first night shift and went back to work after dinner.   We actually got a lot done by doing that.

Today we started early and worked until mid afternoon, stopping only because it was waaaay too cold.  Effie did 3 ceilings and I did some odd jobs and scraped the side of the stairs.   I think that's going to be the thing that makes this project go longer than we thought.   See, the stairs is a good example.  The plan was to throw a coat of paint on the trim on the side of the stairs.  But as we wash down the trim its obvious that the paint which is on there is in bad shape.   It's cracked, peeling, and it has paint runs and some chips.   So I start to scrape just a little bit of the really bad areas.  Then those areas make the other areas look bad so I scape more and before you know it, you've spent 2 hours scraping the stairs when you didn't plan to do any scraping there in the first place.   I think it will all be worth it.  We're trying to find a nice balance between doing things perfectly, and doing things to the level of the tenants we expect to have.  I wouldn't say we're perfectionists, but we are the type of people who have a hard time not doing a good job on something.

Later on I worked on the bricks a bit, trying to repair some cracks in the mortar.  Unfortunately, the mortar that's there is very gritty and it was like trying to glue something to a big pile of sand.   I think a second application should work better as it will be able to bond to this first coat.

Al Capone's other secret vault.

So the past 3 days have been mostly painting.

Saturday:  Second coat in small 3rd floor BR, First coat in large 3rd floor BR.
Sunday:  Second coat in large BR and lots of trim.
Monday:  Lots more trim, plus 2 hallways and a stairway.

Effie has been doing most of the painting while I fix things and stare blankly at walls for hours on end.  She's much more methodical than I am, whereas I can get distracted pretty easily.

However, thats all about to change.  We just bought a Wagner Turbo Rolller.  This thing is awesome!!  It's a roller where you fill it up with paint.  It makes the rolling part go so much faster.  But as Effie pointed out, the trim still takes the longest.

We also started fixing up some of the brick that was looking a bit old.  And we 'fixed' 2 missing spindles in the bannister by removing 5 good ones and spacing them out where 7 used to be.  We looked at a couple of salvage places and didn't find any spindles even close to what we had.   I found one guy whose willing to make new ones for $25 a piece - which we'll do for the nice wooden ones on the stairway.   But for the painted ones upstairs, this re-spacing fix looks just fine.

We bought some varnish for the floors, which we're going to re-do.  We're not going to sand the whole thing down to bare wood - just take out the imperfections, seal the gaps, and then varnish.   While prepping the floor, I noticed two boards cut in such a way that it would conceal a little hidden area beneath the floor.  I was excited!!!  I pried them up with a screwdriver, took my flashlight in the hole and.... nothing.  Empty.  So much for the stacks of gold bars hidden in the floorboards.  

Ryan has been plugging away at the kitchen drywall (almost done) and some other patches in the living room.   It looks awesome.  He pretty much came over every day of his holiday week off.   Thanks buddy!!

And can you believe this????....