Renovations

We looked behind the wall

Posted by on Dec 9, 2011 in Parlors/Dining, Renovations | 3 comments

We agreed with all y’all making comments and decided to have at ‘er last night. We went to home depot and bought a crowbar and started to pry it off:

At first we thought we might be in luck, plus we were having fun, because it’is always fun to break things. (All the little flakes that make it look like it’s snowing in these pictures are the dust/plaster/asbestos that started flying around. So I insisted we put masks on to carry on).
The top row of paneling that brought it to that extra height came off relatively easily and behind it was plaster wall. Hooray!

Then we started to pry off the stuff below and it got a lot harder. It wasn’t coming off easily at all because despite having issues, it was put together the “hard” way, ie in separate pieces and tongue and grooved together, so it wouldn’t come off in one piece. We started to look behind it and confirmed what we feared… no wall!

So we got more off but couldn’t get the bottom off properly, it’s really seriously attached behind the baseboard that we need to save. Once it was mostly off we discovered:

  • No leprechauns, bags of gold or dead bodies
  • No wall either
  • Some really dirty insulation (though not behind the outside wall siding we could see, just between this room and kitchen!)
  • More damn cast iron pipes
  • Some wiring on different circuits for no apparent reason

It was then we stepped back and realized that we had kind of broken our dining room:

It wasn’t until today during daylight, after asking the painters to please give us an estimate on all three options: Drywall, Plaster, Get a woodworker to install new baseboard, that we realized we have a bigger problem. That damn cast iron pipe, is cracked:

This would make at this point pretty much all cast iron pipes we’ve met so far cracked. And now we’re quite worried about that big vertical drain pipe in the middle which we have to assume will crack eventually, but replacing that might very well mean a true world of hurt, and destruction of plaster all the way up as well as the floor of the ensuite bath upstairs.

On the plus side we are trying to view this as a true stroke up luck, because if we had not opened this wall up, we wouldn’t have known about that cracked pipe. And who knows how long would have gone by, perhaps with an eventual unpleasant smell of sewage right behind our brand new dining room wall…though it might be a vent stack and thus not as big an issue.

That said – 90 degree bends, cracked cast iron, shitty plumbing job (pun intended)… it’s a world of hurt and Dave is not pleased. We are calling a plumber to investigate our options immediately.

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Wainscoting Mystery

Posted by on Dec 8, 2011 in Parlors/Dining, Renovations | 5 comments

After much discussion we are seriously considering taking out the after-market oak wainscoting in the dining room:

Dining Room with lots of extra added wainscotting

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s taken the brunt of years without a/c and bows out in places. It also has a very suspicious ability when pushed back in to go further than where a wall woud be – almost as if it is hollow behind the wall to the kitchen:

Seems a little too flexible

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is a big risk though. No one knows what’s behind this wainscotting and it could be a world of hurt as Dave frequently reminds me. And once we rip it off, we can’t really put it back up. But if we’re going to take the hit and deal with it many factors point to doing it now:

    • The wainscotting is damaged and isn’t going to get any better
    • It’s too tall, well over code and makes the room feel small and makes me have to look at wood at eye level

You can see the extra panel row they added on top of normal wainscoting height rail

Normal height wainscoting
    • It doesn’t match the wood of the rest of the house
    • We would like to move the sconces further out and we need to get into the wall somehow
    • We need to enlarge the light switch but whoever did the last one cut into a stud already so we can’t cut further and need to move the switch over to do it right:

    • Most importantly: painters are about to paint/wallpaper in this room and if it’s going might as well take it out so they can fix the plaster and/or wallpaper the full height of the room

The question is: do we have the balls to just rip the bandaid off now and see what’s back there? If there’s nothing behind there and we half-ass it and just drywall there’d be a seam – and then do you seam tape and wallpaper over it? Would it look like a big line around the dining room? Or do we plaster it from the floor?

Ed: I think we are decided and we are with the commenters – yes, it should go.  Hopefully this afternoon we will be in there with crowbars and I’ll take some pictures and post here what we find.  How exciting!  Our first wall!  I thought about posting a poll: Do you think we will find:

– Leprechaun with pot of gold

– Body of Jimmy Hoffa

– And expensive hole in the wall

– Mouse poop

– A doorway to another dimension.

 

I’m hoping for option 5.

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Moved in

Posted by on Dec 3, 2011 in Renovations | Comments Off on Moved in

After one starts a blog with a huge amount of detailed information and then stops blogging for a month to move in… one might feel a great deal of pressure to come up with something suitably informative and important to start blogging about. But I will resist the pressure, and instead post some “Before” pictures!

We have been moved in for 2 weeks now – we’re living piecemeal, sleeping and watching tv in the one bedroom apartment out back and working in a makeshift office in the den and using the kitchen in the main house.

Unfortunately at this point the fridge (which we fixed) is in the one bedroom while the kitchen is in the main house. The sink in the one bedroom bathroom is leaking so we brush our teeth in the kitchen sink. There’s hot water in the one bedroom but no shower, there’s a shower upstairs in the main house with hot water but no toilet. There’s no hot water in the main floor of the main house so that’s meant no hot water to do dishes. And that means that Dave finishing installing the hot water heater this weekend is directly on the critical path.

But despite the stress and annoyances, we find new details and discoveries about this beautiful old house every day and take time to periodically remind each other that even without reliable HVAC or hot water this is a fantastic adventure.

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