This Incredible Flip This Old House Hunters Wife Swap Fixers

You’ll have to put up with a fair amount of time warp-age here. You’re going to see pictures of this dining room renovation, and notice the kitchen isn’t fixed yet in one picture, and then in the next picture it’s immaculada. How did that get done? When? Why? I assure you that there’s a method to the madness, even though the madness is holding a gun to the method’s head at all times. You see, all these projects are related, and rely on parts of other projects to get finished, or even started. A rising tide lifts all boats, as they say. Perhaps more to the point, a sinking boat drags everyone down with it.

The sinking boat analogy is a common outcome in renovations where the renovators are living in the house while they’re banging on it. In a better world, a project like ours would have a budget, and a time frame, and plenty of subcontractors, and a place for us to live far away from it while the work was being performed. We’re pretty far removed from regular, sane construction like that, simply over the budget. Come to think of it, I’m not sure what a budget is. Some kind of canary, I think.

So you might remember that the former denizens of our house took out a wall between the kitchen and dining room. One that they shouldn’t have. This caused the floor upstairs to sag quite a bit. Before we fixed the dining room, the wall in the kitchen would have to be repaired. Like this:

Of course, you could think of it as before the kitchen could be fixed, the dining room wall needs to be constructed. That’s basically how it worked out. The refrigerator needs to be relocated to a niche formed on one side by the dining room wall, and it wasn’t there yet. This house is like a giant Mousetrap game. All the pieces have to be in place before you can use the apparatus to catch a mouse.

This interconnectivity is the reason why you see so many old houses for sale that are halfway destroyed inside and ten percent put back together (badly). The owners watched This Incredible Flip This Old House Hunters Wife Swap Fixers, figured how hard could it be, and found out exactly how hard it could be. The building materials stacked in the gutted kitchen convey with the house, usually. You have to have a certain amount of flexibility, married to stick-to-it-ive-ness, to prevail.

So we finished this wall and adjacent corner first. We added about two feet of wall to the existing, and framed an opening. I made the oak trim out of some 3/8″ thick oak boards I bought twenty years ago from a lumberyard that was going out of business. They didn’t know they were going out of business at the time, but who did in 2008? Lumberyards generally don’t stock 3/8″ thick wood of any species for a reason. It’s not much in demand. I bought a big pile of 3/8″ and 1/2″ lumber of all kinds for less than the cost of firewood, and figured I’d do something with it sometime. This is something, and sometime, I guess.

In regular carpentry, the door trim and baseboard would be 3/4″ thick. You’d rabbet out the center of the back of the lumber to keep if from curling, and to make it bridge the join between the wall and the door jamb. If you looked at the end of the boards, it would have an upside-down “U” profile, flat on the face, and hollowed out on the back.

Instead of doing that, I cut 1″- wide strips of the 3/8″ thick oak, and glued them to the left and right sides of the door frames blanks, and the top and bottom edges of the baseboard. Then I ran them through a jointer to get the edges nice and flat and smooth. It worked fine, and since we couldn’t afford to buy oak lumber, it made the project possible.

So this was a little milepost along the renovation way. We finished this nasty corner more or less completely, and made a half-decent spot for my wife to sit at and swear at her computer. It’s important to finish certain areas of ongoing renovations like this, little oases of calm in the maelstrom of demolitions, to keep from being presented as a cautionary tale on This Incredible Flip This Old House Hunters Wife Swap Fixers, followed up by a short stint on Divorce Court.

[To be continued]

The Dining Room Real Estate Fandango

Well, I’m tap dancing now. I’d like to show you some action shots of my homebrew insulation blaster, but I can’t get a quorum. It only takes two to do the insulation tango, but we need a band, too, or in this case, a third person to hold the camera. The spare heir is taking midterms and the heir is out doing adult-ish things and can’t come over. But you fine folks deserve some sort of renovation debacle to look at. I guess I’ll need a totally new project to get you scratching your collective heads and wondering why we bought this hovel in the first place. Lord knows I’ve worn a rut in mine scratching and wondering.

Speaking of ruts, how about the dining room? It’s a more recent vintage of renovation project. I think I still have a splinter and a bruise or two left over from it, so it’s got to be from this year, at least. We didn’t plan on doing much how-to pontificating about it on the intertunnel, so the pictures are a little spotty, but they’ll have to do.

Say, what did it look like when we moved in? Here you go:

Whoa. We didn’t even own the place in this picture. My wife and the real estate agent are wandering aimlessly in the living room, while I take a picture of the dining room. This is the end stage of the real estate process where the agent is staying fourteen arms-length away from me at all times. She’d tried to perform her real estate fandango on us several times, waving her arms and extolling the virtues of licks of paint and ceiling fans, while intoning, sotto voce, that there was a polymath handyman interested in this house, too, just like the last house she showed us, and the house before that, so we’d better jump on it right away. I said, “Great, what’s his phone number, I’d like to hire him,” and that shut her piehole right quick. Her bandaged finger wobbled back to the real estate candle a few more times, but after a while she’d just let me look around in peace.

There’s lots to love in the last picture, besides my wife. Someone wanted something heavy and oily from the basement, and dragged it all the way through the house, leaving a minor trench in the birch strip flooring. I’m sure the apparatus was worth ten cents, and they wrecked 300,000 pennies-worth of flooring to get it, but then again, they got the thing out, whatever it was, and they’re not dumb enough to buy this place (again), so the gouge in the floor is filed under: Accounts Payable – Never.

Turn to the left and look through the milky sunshine at an abandoned greenhouse in the neighbor’s yard. It was a ruin left from a florist who had decamped long ago. The glass was mostly gone, and in the summer whatever plants that could take the temps around here had naturalized and blended in with the local stuff. Very picturesque.

That baseboard heater was also a ruin. Like all the other heating stuff in the house, it was left with water in it, which froze, and burst the pipes. It would all have to go.

Turning to the right, you can see the entry to the master bedroom. If you have keen eyesight, you can spot shingles on the far wall in there. The two largest walls in there were shingled. I have some theories about what prompted the former denizens to do such things, and they involve Timothy Leary and Johnny Walker in equal measure.

Hey look, there’s a thermostat on the wall. You know what that means. Right! Absolutely nothing. We didn’t get a thermostat that does things when you operate it for another ten years. I left it there anyway, to mock my dreams of heat, and because it covered a hole, which is not nothing in my world.

Here’s the ceiling. Those are cardboard tiles. I measured the distance from the floor to this ceiling, and then compared it to the living room ceiling, which was the original plaster. It was several inches lower, so I knew the ghosts of ceilings past was still living above it.

You might have noticed this in the floor earlier. It’s a very heavy cast iron grate. The old oil-fired boiler was located underneath this spot in the basement. Most people assume that grates like these are to let heated air pass upwards through a house. Most people are mistaken. It’s nearly impossible to get any substantial amount of heat to go through a vent like this. Heat rises, it’s true, but it’s like a heavy woman trying on jeans. It fights to continue its convection loops, and doesn’t like to be forced into small spaces. That’s why there’s a big fan on a furnace. To force the issue.

That’s a cold air return. If a furnace makes hot air, and pushes it around, it needs a way to gather the same amount of air back to heat it again. Otherwise, it’s like trying to blow up a balloon that won’t expand (your house). It draws air back to itself, reheats it, and sends it back in a continuous loop.

But this house had an oil boiler. That’s a closed system, and air is heated by passing over pipes and fins in the baseboard units. What’s the return air for, you might ask? Well, the boiler is (was, it was toast) burning a mixture of oil and ambient air, and then sending the smoky remains up the chimney. The air has to come from somewhere, and if you suck it all out of the basement, the only way for the basement to get more is to pull it in from outside, where it was currently just above zero when these pictures were taken, if I remember correctly. That’s because it wasn’t winter yet, when it really gets cold.

I’ll leave it to you whether it was smarter to pull heated air out of the dining room to burn in the boiler than getting it from the basement. I imagine that the previous owners didn’t think about it very much, and simply cut a huge hole in the floor because the boiler downstairs felt hot, and maybe the heat from it would go up through the grate, and ended up colder than before for their troubles. Me, I’ve got other plans for that baby.

[To be continued. To support Sippican Cottage, feel free to leave a comment, tell a friend about us, buy a book if you already haven’t, or hit the Donate button. And thanks!]