We Bought a House. We're Going to Die.

We're not going to die because of anything about the house, I hasten to assure you. Other than the Superfund site in the back yard, we haven't discovered anything more harmful than a little asbestos around the odd pipe.

It's more that, having bought the house, we've advanced in our lives, and hence taken another step toward our inevitable mortality. The great wheel of generations has rolled ponderously around and this time we're actually feeling it roll right over us. Or, okay, I am. I don't think Jen is having the same concerns at all.

(Photo note: This alarming vision is what you get when you stand facing a floor-length beveled mirror, with a second floor-length beveled mirror through the doorway behind you. It seemed like an appropriate image for the topic. But just look at all them beveled mirrors!)

I have become a person who has her plumber on speed dial

My electrician and GC too. (FYI, we're using Aladdin, Supercharged, and J Thomas Construction and they're all great. Aladdin and Supercharged are the plumber and electrician that did the work on the This Old House house around the corner from us.)

I realized that we're not actually providing much useful information about the progress of the renovation here - we've really just been amusing ourselves. The short story is:

- We finished the demo on the bathroom, the fourth floor ex-kitchens, and the weird narrow closet on Sunday.

- Today Carlos and Wilson from J Thomas came and framed the reconfigured laundry room and closets in, like, three and a half minutes. Katherine and I were going to do it until we realized how much faster it would be to hire someone who, you know, knew what the hell they were doing.

- Tomorrow and Wednesday, Dave from Aladdin will come and rough in the plumbing in the new bathroom, and plumb the laundry room. RJ and Sean from the fabulous Supercharged will put the electricity in the new laundry room wall.

RJ and Sean are hilarious as well as being really good, careful workers. They speak to each other in a Creole we can't understand at mach 10, and even in another language we can tell they're like an old married couple. We'd been trying to buy them lunch for days, and finally found out that they're very particular about what they eat - they seem to be devoted to an undisclosed Jamaican place - so Katherine gave them a twenty and said for god's sake, let us buy you lunch!

- Friday Carlos and Wilson come back to put the subfloor into the bathroom and do a lot of other stuff I haven't completely organized yet.

Over the weekend K and I will patch and fix and I have no idea what else, and by Monday we should be ready to tile the new bathroom.

That's the news from Lake Wobegone.

We Think We Know Where Jimmy Hoffa Is

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Katherine was out in the yard today poking around in the soil, as she is wont to do, and she made an interesting discovery. You may be able to see in this photo that the land slopes up a bit in our backyard. The back is about two feet higher than the front. Turns out that "land" isn't quite the proper term in this instance. Landfill, more like it. An inch or two down, Katherine found all manner of debris - pavers, roofing material, scrap wood. She found a doorknob sticking up and pulled on it. It didn't move. Why? Because it was connected to a DOOR. Katherine's speculation is that this is that rather than hiring a hauling company, they just buried the debris from the fire in the back yard.

Did we mention the fire?

Apparently there was a fire on the top floor of the building, we think in the late sixties, which is why everything up there is so crappy. If you look at the picture from our April 16th post of the back upstairs bedroom, you can see some of the burn marks on the original wood floor we exposed. It also damaged the rafters, so the roof can't hold three layers of roofing, like a regular roof can - it needs to be fully replaced every time. So we may or may not spend $50k to rebuild the rafters. That's a problem for another day.

In any case, there's a ginormous amount of debris forming a miniature hill in our back yard. Perhaps good for skiing, not so good for gardening. That is a problem for another day as well.

Look Ma, No Floors!

Okay, technically there is only one room that has no floor. We're thinking of trying to sell it to prospective tenants as a feature. See? Exposed brick in the bathroom! And exposed joists! Hardly anyone has those.

Actually, all this will be covered over with drywall, new plumbing fixtures, and a new subfloor before you know it. Not, sadly, before we know it; we will know it intimately. Jen said to me as we finished stripping out the floorboards, "I'm really glad no one told us that we were going to have to gut the place before we bought it."

Here's the same space in December, in case you missed it earlier.

We have also figured out how to patch the many many holes that the electricians are leaving in the walls. (I will post a photo of that when I get back to my own computer.) We are so proud of ourselves we can hardly bear to look at each other's shining faces without sunglasses.

Maybe we're not completely crazy?

The Times says now is a good moment to renovate. And the Times is always right. Right?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/garden/23renovation.html?pagewanted=1&hp

The Makeover Moment


By JULIE SCELFO

Published: April 22, 2009

LAST year, after Michael Perkocha and Tina Stott asked several contractors for bids to remodel a dilapidated bungalow they had just bought for $630,000 in the Glenview district of Oakland, Calif., they decided to wait before going ahead with the project.

Although the couple, both 49, had renovated several houses before and felt sure they would eventually be able to rent this one out at a profit (he’s an architect, she’s an urban planner, and restoring old homes is a hobby and source of extra income), the contactors’ estimates for the renovations were all in the range of $250,000, far more than the couple could afford.

But when Mr. Perkocha sought bids again in January, “it was a really different story,” he said.

Rubble Princess

In the grand tradition that is our new house, we've found that every time we rip something out we find a new thing that we have to rip out. We ripped out the tile, only to be told by the plumbers that we needed to take out the mortar bed, only to find that the floor underneath will need to be replaced if we don't want our tenants to fall through it.
Here is Jen hacking and whacking (well, actually having tea in the aftermath), getting out the cement that the mortar had been laid on that the tile had been laid on. It could only be better if she were wearing her Princess Leia buns on the sides of her head.

The rubblescape: I'm thinking of doing an art project with the detritus.

Apparently we're still scaring you all

I'm hearing that we're still scaring the crap out of people like our parents and other so-called adults who have our best interests in mind. Why exactly was it that we bought this house? Well, to your left is Reason Number One. That is Central Park. I mean, that is our back yard. As you can see, it is a completely blank slate for Katherine to bend to her will.












I'm a total sucker for beveled glass mirrors like this one. And I love the mill work. This is in the parlor on the entry-level floor.















Pay no attention to that shower in the closet. Yes, this may be the #1 item on the wackadoo list, but next to it is another gem - a china cabinet with (almost all) original molding. And beveled glass doors. Did I mention I like beveled glass? This floor had been being used as a studio apartment, and this appears to be their best answer to getting a shower for the tenants. Needless to say, it's coming out.



This bit of fabulosity is in the tenant's living room. Don't you want to live here? It's for rent. Er, not quite yet though.









Another shot of the tenant's living room. Yum! Sunlight!












This is the entry to the building. Lots of great detail you can't see in this picture, but take my word for it.
















And this is us. We left the closing and went to Target to buy an air mattress so we could spend our first night in the new place. We got to the house and immediately started ripping up the floors to see what kind of job was in store for us. Then we stopped, looked at the whole house, and thought about what kind of job was in store for us. Not long after, our friend Miriam snapped this shot, which pretty much sums it up.

I'm sorry, you did what?

These are pictures from our seder. You might be doing the math and thinking about the demo pictures and wondering exactly how one has 25 people to dinner six days after closing on such a house. And it would be a reasonable question.







You might also note that the table is set with good china and glassware. You see, my mother has had an attic full of six generations of china for I don't know how long, and it has been her life's mission to get one of the three of us siblings to take it off her hands. So when I said I was having a seder in the new place, hell or high water, she loaded a rather alarming amount of it in her Volvo and trucked it on down to Brooklyn.



I'm fortunate that I have both a mother and a partner who long ago learned that, even when I'm doing something that is very clearly insane, it's not useful to point that out to me. So we had a seder, dammit, with good freakin china, in our house with absolutely nothing but a dazzling array of power tools in it. My mother and girlfriend shut up and chopped the stuff I told them to chop, and thank god, because it really wouldn't have happened otherwise.





The guests were very tolerant of fact that I didn't actually get to comb my hair or change out of my pajamas before we started the seder, and that I put them to work chopping swiss chard and setting the table when they arrived. There's a reason I pick the friends I pick.

Self-deprication aside, it was a really really beautiful night, and I can't think of a better way to celebrate the new house than cramming 25 people in it and feeding them until they rolled home.

The demise of the two upstairs bathrooms

Katherine posted a photo of the partially-demo'd back bathroom the other day, so I thought I'd share some "before" pictures.

First is the back ex-bathroom, which we've now torn out. As you can see there's a charming fiberglass stand-up shower that any girl would want as part of her spa treatment. Notice the high-quality plastic shower rings installed above the plexiglass door.










Next we have two lovely shots of the front ex-bathroom. What's really special about this bathroom is the semi-kitty-corner toilet. Like so many of us, it's hesitant to commit to a direction. It's a little hard to see, but the floor is actually concave around the toilet, which is an excellent way to ensure maximum seepage if there is an overflow. The tile doesn't look so bad in this photo, but take my word for it, it's on the wackadoo list.





























Both bathrooms have been well and truly demolished, as is evident in photo number four. Note the attractive angle of this shot. Sorry girls, I'm taken.

We've taken out showers, vanities and toilets in both rooms, gotten out all the tile, and are getting ready to have at the dividing wall. Stay tuned.

The floor plan and the floor plan to be

Jen here.

Here's the floor plan of the whole place. You can see how the top floor was carved into two apartments, with kitchens shoehorned into closet-sized spaces and one apartment requiring the occupant to go into the hall to get to the bathroom.










Next is the floor plan of the tenant's apartment as we think it's going to look when we're done. Kitchens have been removed, and turned into closet space. Some closet space has been reconfigured into a laundry room. I put the areas where we're doing the most work in blue, cause it seemed like a good idea.








Here are a few photos of the front and back ex-kitchens, before demo.

I've had requests for an explanation of what it is exactly we LIKE about this place, after the onslaught of house horror in the first post. (And I didn't even get into the really wackadoo stuff.) Well, here's a couple of things. Right above is the house we go into, and the block we walk down to get to our house. So can you kinda see why we're willing to spend six weeks knocking out old grout and pulling up seven layers of floor? And framing new walls, and rewiring light fixtures?

From bottom: The charm of the top floor's back bedroom, with nasty vinyl flooring; the nasty vinyl flooring, in all its nastiness; the strange discoveries under the nasty vinyl flooring; the top floor bathroom after Jen took her wrecking self to it.