History Lesson

I ordered old property record cards and photographs from the City's archives.  Check out the old photos of the house. 

1936 Photograph (The house was 8 years old).

 A photograph from the 1980's.

Tree Cutting #1

The house has great symmetry and design features, which were of course covered by overgrown trees.  Time for them to go.   Here are the before and after pictures.

BEFORE

AFTER

 

 

 

 

Now I just need to cut back that White Oak that is hanging dangerously over the whole house.   That's not a Sunday afternoon job like this tree cutting enterprise.  More to follow.

Insultation- A glamorous affair

The house has major knee wall open space and significant water damage from  a leaking roof caused by ice damage in the knee wall area.  The source of this problem is a complete lack of insulation in any of the knee wall areas.  This was causing damage to the roof, the plaster, the fascia and overhangs.

It appears that everybody has a conflicting opinion about how to properly insulate and ventilate knee walls.  I am sure that someone will think that I did it all wrong and that the house should be torn down.  All I know is that the current system (with inherent flaws with ventilation) is surely better than 8 foot tall ice dams and plaster damage from leaking water.  With the improvements, snow sits on the roof and does not build up.  The process to get there, however, was terrible.  As you can see, the spaces were confined.  In certain parts, I crawled through a 2x2 hole to access secret rooms in the house.  It was dusty, dirty, hot and miserable.  I am glad it is done

Knee Walls

1).  We removed the existing "insulation" which consisted of wood dust on paper (a very old form of insulation) and occasional spots of vermiculite (which is processed in the same facility with asbestos).  We wore respirators and protective equipment, but this process was miserable. 

2).  We used spray foam to seal any cracks to the outdoors and cracks along masonry.

3).  Then we pulled up the floor boards and insulated the floors with faceless fiberglass bats.  We pushed it as far under the floor as we could reach. 

4).   We put paper faced batts on the outside walls and in the roof rafters. 

5).  Over top of the batts, we used 1" extruded polystyrene board.  We used foam on the cracks and used exterior house tape to seal out the air.

6).  The pictures don't show it, but I am going to finish up by using more foam board on the floors.

Attic

The house has a nice attic, but it is accessed by a ladder, so we elected to blow it full of insulation.  We don't need the storage space and blown insulation is much easier and cheaper than the process for the knee walls. 

1).  We pulled back insulation from the side walls and removed vermiculite.

2).  We blew insulation down the side walls accessing the walls from the attic.  This enabled us to fill some of the walls in the living spaces.

3).  We blew the attic 15" deep with cellulose insulation and sealed up the hatch.  Now I hope to never go in the attic again.

 At the end there was a large space where I could stand up, but I needed to crawl through to get there.

 This is one of the five knee wall spaces in the house.  I accessed this through the ceiling of the living room.  This area is about 3 feet by 8 feet of floor space by 8 feet tall.

 The stink pipe had caused the leak and the water damage.

This is the window seat in the stairway railing.  Don't ask me what lives back there.

This knee wall space doubles as a huge closet. 6x10 feet.

 Here is Saki nailing up the board and batts.  This was the easiest knee wall to access and work in.  It was also the cleanest.

Foam and tape applied.  We are going to do the floor after I replace the plumbing in the bathroom. 
I built an access door in the event I ever need to get into that space.

 It worked.  You can see the additional snow accumulation in the knee wall areas, which means the snow is not melting from heat escape.

Once the attic is fully insulated I hope the rest of the roof will also be fixed.  The icicle buildup is very minimal now that it is all fixed.  It appears to be a huge improvement.

Light Fixtures

The open staircase is very large and tends to be dark with the existing light fixture.  The old fixture was about 12 inches tall, and looks very small in the large space.   The ceiling is about 25 feet high from the floor in that area of the house.  I wanted a light fixture that cast more light and filled the space better.

 

This stairway is clearly missing an ostentatious 4 foot tall light fixture.

So I found this gem on ebay.  It is an old church light made of cast iron, copper and bronze.  It weighs about 25 lbs.  The wiring was bad and all the glass was broken.  It is 12 inches wide and 24 inches tall (without the chains, which add another 2-3 feet of height).  It has three sidelights and one down light, which is perfect for casting light in all directions.

I sanded the rust and painted it with rust converter, then I top coated it with a  metallic paint.  I ran all new wiring and sockets and had new glass cut at Prestige Glass in Grand Rapids, Michigan (on Cherry near Eastern).  With a few hours of work, I brought this light back to life.  I am doing drywall in the stairway , so I can't install it yet (it will get too dirty).  Pictures of the installation to follow.

 Ugly.

Not my motorcycle.

 Disassembly required.

 New paint.

 New glass.

Finishing up the Bathroom

This project has been long with a lot of attention to detail.  The key was to maintain the historic elements while updating and cleaning the bathroom.  Finding colors that worked was challenging with the wild tile color.  I think the room evokes a love it or hate it response.

Cabinet

As you can see from the previous pictures, the existing makeup counter was terrible.  The wood was sticky and was never very nice to begin with.  There were several layers of caked paint and the top was not tiled.  The cabinet had a built in laundry chute to the basement, which was fun.

The cabinet was built into the tile as you can see from this demolition picture. (See the black base tile).  I was able to order exact replicas of the base tile from http://www.heritagetile.com/.  Their product is very nice and is indistinguishable from the old tile.  They were approximately $20.00 per tile.

 

 

I got some prices on custom cabinets (they were a very odd dimension).  They were going to cost $1,600.00 or more without the top, so I decided to make my own.  I ordered the boxes from cabinotch http://cabinotch.us/.  You can order any size cabinet in any variety of combinations.  Then I built the doors and drawers out of Curly Maple.  Here are the pictures of the cabinet construction.

I made the drawers with a porter cable dovetail jig and router.  I cut the faces out of the curly maple, and finished them with 100% dewaxed shellac mixed with antique maple dye (called toning).  The finish draws out the figure of the curly maple, and looks great.  Just don't spill a gin and tonic on it.  As you can see, I built in electrical boxes and rebuilt the original laundry chute.

The measurements were correct and I had to rebuild the tile around the base of the cabinet.  This was tricky.  I had to patch the mosaic tile floor.  I robbed a little bit from the back corner and replaced it with matching black tile.  The change was not too noticeable.  Here are some pictures of the tile process.  As you can see, I affixed metal lathe to the cabinets, which was secured with staples. 

 Here are the installed drawers, doors and pulls.

 Here is the grout.

A nice picture of Patra and Babu.

The Rest of the Bathroom

The cabinet and tile work was extremely time consuming and careful work.  The rest was fairly easy.  I had the mirrors resilvered at Frank Wright Glass in Detroit.  I purchased new light fixtures and installed a ventilation fan.  There was very basic plaster repair and paint.  All of the original brushed nickel do dads were covered in paint, and needed to be stripped and polished.  I replaced the toilet.  Saki scraped the floor about 5 times to get all the glue off of it.  The overall impact is great.  here are the final photos. 

 Black marble countertop for the makeup counter.

 Vicki Slot made the very fashionable curtains... thanks Mom! 

 ( I am still going to replace the sink with a 1954 Crane Diana sink with chrome faucet and chrome legs and towel bars).  The "new" sink is in perfect condition and will look great in this retro bathroom

Here are the photographs of the new sink, which is much bigger and has cool chrome towel bars on the side.  All done in the bathroom, now there is just the rest of the house to do.