Like a Ghost with a machine...

We have 14,000 square feet of surface to paint in this building…

That’s the math!

It’s a couple of weeks worth of painting work with a team and rollers and brushes so… we bought an airless sprayer with the hopes that it would make things go faster…

Well “faster”... what does that mean, really? Victoria and Xan spent a full day masking off the floor upstairs so that no paint would end up on the wood…

Then I assembled the sprayer (how come nothing from the hardware store ever arrives in one piece?) and read through the instructions that assured me that I would get gangrene and have parts of my body amputated if I made even the slightest error. Apparently the spray has enough pressure to cut through cloth and flesh if it’s pointed at wrong moment at the human body! We decided to use it anyway…

First thing first, I went through the house and dusted all of the walls and ceilings with a dry mop so that any of the drywall dust that was left from the sanding would not be under the new paint job!

To use this machine you actually have to strain all of the paint that you use- yuck!

And then you have to use the death gun!

Low and behold, after about 7 hours of spraying, cleaning, and straining, and spraying, and cleaning (the machine parts need to be very clean all of the time) we went from this:

To this:

I know it’s just the primer (a pale gray that allows the final coat to have greater hue density) but, ZOUNDS!, this spraying thing has something to it!

On the other hand, after the machine is completely disassembled and completely cleaned, oiled and put to bed, the operator ends up looking like this!

Like a Ghost! (good thing I wore a respirator mask!)

Up, up and Away…

Duwayne was kind enough to lend us his snorkel-lift- a wondorous machine that unfolds itself to send an operator to great heights without benefit of a classic ladder.

It took a moment or two to figure out how to drive it in and out of all of the obstacles that are on the ground and how to actually get the extension part to unfold so that you ended up where you thought you wanted to be, but after a few experiments, I was off!

When the siding and the windows went up, we did not caulk the seams… so now we had to do it before it gets too cold and wet (winter)…

Here we go… up and up and over and Bingo!

Caulking is so much fun!

Windows on the World (or Neighborhood at least!)

When we got this building we'd spent all of 20 minutes in the winter, walking through with penlight in hand because the windows were boarded up.
When we unwrapped this gift, we discovered that the windows themselves were not as well preserved as we had hoped...

Oops!
We had some possible options here:
a) take apart each window and rebuild it (ooh... what about the dry rot in the surround of the windows that announced itself when we were able to lay a finger on the inside around the window frame!)
b) replace the windows with new sashes (but the wood holding the windows up is leaky and soft and new windows without new support would be like putting lipstick on a pig...)
c) strip out the windows to the brick and start from scratch...

Oh! is it C? Can we choose C?

well, we did choose C... and we made a bit of a mess in the process...

We pulled out everything that wasn't a brick and threw it on the ground... then, because the structural brick is so thick, and we added the 2 x4 to the inside of the walls for the added insulation, I had to come up with a new way to hang these new windows.

The new method: make a plywood sleeve the full depth of the wall width and hang it on the studs that we installed for the insulation!
As we built each sleeve, we included the 'stops' in outside edge so that we could slip the new windows in from the inside instead of lifting them from the outside (too heavy and god-forbid-we should-drop-one!).

I want to say something about the windows themselves.

Because our building is in the Historic District... we have a special group of rules to adhere to if the work has to do with the visible part of our structure! Soooo! When we had to replace the windows they had to be EXACTLY like the windows designed for the house when it was originally built... has to be wood- has to be the same number of panes- has to be exactly the same dimensions... we had to negotiate to get energy efficient glass! By the time we found out what kind of windows we were required to order they became $550 each! Ouch! Except for the one that goes in the bathroom which was $990 (because it is tempered).
They arrived! (after about 4 weeks) and moments later... they were installed!

Then we managed to trim out the exterior of each of the windows so that it looked better than when the place was fresh!
Looks great, doesn't it?

The painful part of this was that meeting the materials requirements for the windows tripled the cost of this part of the project... very tough on us penny pinching artist types... the additional $10,000 could have gone a long way!

On the other hand, they do look faboo and will be there for the next 100 years for us to enjoy, piercing the envelope of our private world and filling our universe with light and the sound of all our friends and neighbors.

Snowing in the house!

This post is a quickie... I prepped the site for this part but then just got out of the way!

We decided to 'over insulate' this old lady of a house... with three layers of brick on the ground floor and two layers of brick on the second floor, this house was pretty well insulated by regional standards but...

I'm thinking:

• the cost of energy is not going down...
• My ability to make more money every year may not be going up...
• It is waste-feul to heat and cool that much space thoughtlessly...

so we added an entire 2 by 4 wall around the entire exterior of the building so that we could add another R-17 to the building...

We spend alot of time looking at the different options : fiberglass batts; foam of various kinds; and blown insulation of various kinds and ended up choosing a totally green option...

We are using a cellulose blown in insulation made entirely of recycled material (old news papers... who says there's no good news?) They blow it out of this giant truck
and they run out big hoses that look like giant vacuum cleaner hoses... now this is neat... while one guy is shooting the material against the wall, the other guy is sucking up the stuff that falls down and it gets instantly recycled!

Trent is putting it in here...
and his brother in law is sucking it up here...


It was very much like a rich New England snow at midnight-- everywhere bits were flying, and the silence was deep and comforting...
at the end, because everything is hosed up during the installation, there is very little waste and the material has packed itself around all of the plumbing and the electrical... it looks like this just before we hang the sheetrock...
Suddenly the house has become quiet. It has become softer. It is changing from the construction zone into the home we are visualizing... ooh!

Inviting the World Properly...

When we found our lovely home it had a fairly new Lowes-issue glass door that replaced the original... the first step was to remove that door and all of the jim-crackery that was pushed in around it to make it stick-
until we had a perfectly empty place to start! The problem with this particular project is that you have to be able to begin and end the project in one day- otherwise there's a huge hole in the front of the building... not so good!

One of our neighbors, (Pat Blue), had in her yard sale a 120 year-old door that she had acquired with and eye toward installing it in her house... that never happen so now it gets to live the next phase of it's life attached to our house!

It's resting here, for a moment, before I trim it up to fit in the new opening... Because we added a whole new layer to the inside of the house for all of that wonderful insulation and electricity, we have to create a pocket that now reaches from the outside of the brick face to the inside of the new wall.

I decided to do this with layers of A/C exterior grade plywood as soon I as figured out that even though the walls that I put in the interior of the house were plumb, the brick walls on the exterior of the house were not! By using the plywood I could cut a trapezoid that gave the appearance that both sides were level and true!
This also allowed me to attach the wood to the fairly random places that were allowed for in the brick and the nice and secure places in the new framing.

Next it's all about the chisel! I suppose that there is some new fangled thing that makes a bunch of noise and dust that zips out the insets for hinges and the door hardware but... we did it 'old school' with a mallet and chisel.

This takes a while and has to be done, tested, done again, tested... Kind of like adding salt to the soup! You can always do a little more but you can't take it away once you've done it! So... no stopping for lunch today!

After re-milling the door to match the new opening (the door was previously in a space that was not square and so I had to trim bits off of the sides, top and bottom to make it square again), and with a little help keeping the door vertical, I get to attach the door to the new opening:

If everything is as it should be then the door will 'hang' (without moving) in any position open and will swing smoothly to close with a 'snick' when it reaches the jam...
a little primer, a doorknob, a little molding and some doodads that came off of an antique wardrobe that someone trashed...
and it looks like it was that way from the very beginning! Later, if we can, I'll replace the door mechanisms with some of the antique stuff that I've been collecting... we'll certainly paint the door something fun!

Welcome y'all!

A Hole in a perfectly Good Roof...

One of the artifacts of our nifty old building was an additional set of 'service chimenys' in the old kitchens... Just an 18" square column that served the ovens and the 'trash burners'(the alternative heating at the turn of the previous century- waste not, want not).

They appear to be right in the middle of rooms that we were hoping not to be burning trash in so we have to take them out! This is a brick-by-brick process that starts on the roof and creates a serious hole that goes right through the building in two places!
That's the Sky!
That's our basement... well our crawl space... well, calling it a crawl space is a bit grandiose... it may be really a slither space...

So Victoria and I came up with the crazy idea that we had a hole anyway, why not put in a skylight (or two)? There is, of course, no standard skylight size that fits this situation but that hardly even slowed us down...
We created a wood light-chase and painted it with three coats of heavy duty white oil based primer which will grab any sunlight and send it into the house... Then, up on the roof, we secure it to the old chimeny penetrations...
and make sure that the banding has alternating, overlapping ends so that water has to really, really work to get into the house...
Now we put the skylight on top, using lots of goop and goo that promises complete weather-proofness, and it looks like this:
Getting it centered is the only option in this moment... once that goop sets up there's no going back!
Looks good from here! (Of course, I also went down, off the roof, and checked from the inside as well- had to...) Then, we attach the skylight for the rest of its natural life...
and, just to be sure, we put even more goop over the screws, just because we can!
So now, even on an overcast day, we have a flood of the sky coming into our home...

Slow News Day....

The streets were cordoned off and the prisoners were desperately attempting to elude capture...

well, not exactly...

Our friend Duwayne was working the little backhoe for the electricians and the folks who had come by to mark on the ground had done their deal... but they did it with a certain 'lack of precision'...
Here you can clearly see the yellow line indicating the gas line, well centered in the grass area next to the sidewalk... if you look at the top, right hand side of the picture, just below the edge of the sidewalk, you can see the gas pipe in question... not exactly even 'close' to the line!

Duwayne managed to nick an inch long tear in the plastic pipe, the first one that he's had in 30 years of this sort of fun, and when he heard the hissss...

The electricians were gone in a flash! and people were called and the cops came and asked folks in the homes nearby to grab their pets and wander away for a little while. Then...
The news anchor, one of our neighbors, came and then
the camera guy showed up and the interviews started and the newspaper guy came over with his giant telephoto camera...

While all this was happening, the guys from the gas company dug up the pipe about 10 feet down the line and clamped it off (pretty simple trick with the new soft pipe stuff) and made a repair...
and everyone had coffee and went back to work... but it was on the Channel 6 news 3 or four times that day and in the paper...

We went to a fundraiser for a local councilwoman that evening (or the next) and in the course of everyone giving me a gentle hard time about shutting down the neighborhood, it turns out that there have at least two other gas leaks within a couple of blocks- within a couple of weeks!

Must have beeen a really slooow News Day...