July, 2011

As much as the old wiring in this house scares me, part of me is glad it wasn't fully re-wired recently.  I'm sure it would have been a hackjob.  The 200A service entrance and panel were installed in 2006 (does look like a pretty pro job), but they didn't touch the rest of the house.  But none of the electrical/plumbing in this house is to code at ALL.  I'm no master electrician, but I do know what not to do.

Well here are a couple of exterior shots since I haven't posted any yet - I've been working pretty hard at getting the house and property ready for the tomorrow since the house is basically right on the 4th of July Parade route (ignore my ugly car in the one pic, forgot it was parked there).  The hedges need a little more work and that huge laurel needs pruned, but I am going to wait until spring.  The sky is beautiful in these pics!

I trimmed the cedar tree up about 6.5 feet from the ground, and like the effect.  I need to get a little taken off the top since it touches the power lines.  I originally wanted to remove this tree, but I suppose I'll keep it.

By the way, the 3x5 flag hanging on the porch is VERY old - the PO left it since it belongs with the house.  I will only be using it on the patriotic holidays.

One of the 4 cats, Neeko, found a home in one of our kitchen cabinets the day we moved in.  The shelf liner I chose kinda goes with the somewhat retro kitchen.

Just figured I'd throw a couple pics up of a few of the decorative cover plates the PO had here in the house.  They are very solid feeling metal.

Here are two very heavy covers, quite similar in design but very different finishes.  Manufacture date is 1963.

This one is my absolute favourite, and I wish I could find more somewhere.  I don't really know what "style" one would call it, but it is really cool.  Age unknown, and it feels like it has been spray painted black.  Stamp on the back reads "WILLIAM SPENCER RANCOCAS WOODS N.J."

And THIS is inside one of the old three-way switches controlling the upstairs hall light.  Talk about scary!  Look how close those wires are to the box.  But I know this was how they did things back in the day.

Today I got around to starting on the walk-in closet in the guest bedroom.  It was still jam-packed full of the PO's garbage so my goal was just to remove that and replace it with our garbage.  However, when I was moving stuff out, this happened:

One or two of the nasty little carpet squares pulled up.  Yes the walls of the closet are cedar chip OSB...

So I kept going.

Found some pretty funky lino underneath, but as usual it was not in good shape (had paint all over it plus the black adhesive from the "tiles" of felt stuff).  I started to scrape the black adhesive off, and it was going OK, but I discovered that the linoleum ended halfway back and the rest of the floor was some nasty tar-paper stuff.

So I ripped it all up.  T&G floors in awesome condition - painted yellow though  :| .  Those nasty felt squares go back underneath the orange carpet in the bedroom too.  I can't even imagine living in a bedroom with that on the floor.  Someday it'll all go away!

But for now, I leave you with these two pics.  First is one of my babies, Bella, perched on the dining room window sill.  Second is what I found when I was fixing a messed up downspout drain this morning... mmmmm!

Here was my project last night and this afternoon:

Before:

After:

That was all done with a recipro saw, bow saw, and hedge loppers and was about 9 loads of branches and debris.  I'm still not done but I feel that I have made tons of progress.

And check out what I scored today...  a beautiful old door!  This door belonged to my grandpa who removed it from his old farmhouse just down the road from here.  He stashed it away amongst some junk in his barn that he was eventually going to have hauled away.  His house is much larger than mine and was built by a slightly wealthier family, though still a simple farmhouse - built in 1892.

Of course it has like 100 layers of paint on it, but it seems like it is in awesome condition.  This will be a restoration project of course.  I need a back door (currently do not have a proper back door, just a storm door), so that's probably where this will go even though it is really more appropriate as a front door.  Some of the old decorative hardware is still there, embedded under all the paint.  The doorbell does not currently work.



The exterior face stripped very easily, but the interior face is not going as well.

I found this really nice pattern hiding under all the paint.

Here is the interior side.  One of the reasons it is more difficult to strip is because of this faux bois layer, which is the second layer on the door.  The first layer is a gooey pale yellow which matches my floors upstairs!

Overall, I found yellow, the faux bois, green, blue, lavender, and white on the inside of the door - and I found green, blue, and white on the outside.  The USMC sticker on the window represents my dad, who served in the Marines in the 1980's.



I got started on my laundry room rewire project and made some progress.  I have decided that what I am going to is this:

1.  A 20A circuit with a single GFCI outlet which will serve the washer and gas dryer.
2.  A 15A circuit with a switch/outlet combo device.  The switch will be for the overhead light (basic porcelain fixture with a CFL) and the outlet will be for convenience.

Here is a pic of what I have to work with.  You can see why this configuration scares me.  Yes, that is old, unprotected NM cable fastened to the wall.  In the end, that ancient outlet and unsafe wiring will be gone.  Lucky for me, the only other thing on the same circuit as this is the basement lighting, which I plan to rewire anyway so they are on a single switch.  The laundry room light is not on the same circuit, and I can only assume it is tied into the bathroom circuit.

I am using an inexpensive wiremold type product to surface-mount everything.  Future plans for this room include a complete gut so I can combine it with the bathroom (don't worry, nothing's historic in here) so I'm not going all out with the hardware.


Here is a pic of my panel.  It's really clean and professional considering how the rest of the place is.  A professional would surely be able to point out some code violations but I'm happy with it.

This is the old laundry room light fixture which I eliminated.  I understand what they were going for here, but really?  Those are two #10 or #12 ground wires used as jumpers between the junction and the fixture.  The wiring in the box is old #14 ungrounded BX.

Here is a shot of the conduit system I used - it was cheap at the big box store.  As I said before, this is only temporary and has to last a few years.  This circuit is simply for the overhead light fixture and a 15A convenience recep (for a shop vac or whatever).  This is a standalone circuit run straight to the panel with new wire.

And here is a shot of the new light fixture on the ceiling (you can't really tell in the pic but the ceiling is really uneven, causing slight warpage of the plastic conduit.  I screwed all this down and did not use the garbage adhesive it came with.  You can see the old box up on the ceiling where I tied the junction back together (didn't test what the junction actually joins) and capped off.  I don't like this as a permanent solution of course, especially since it is not grounded.  I'll have to get that up inside the ceiling with an access panel.

Next step in here is to acquire some #12 wire so I can do the washer/dryer recep.  Then I can remove the rest of that wallpaper and paint everything white instead of that nasty smoker-yellow!



I got a package in the mail from the PO... she sent along 4 old photos of the house!  Check these out.


Captioned "Early 60's, perhaps late 50's - Brick siding, front porch had a wall all around"

Captioned "Taken in the 70's (after new hardware store was built in 1972).  Window on left was in the laundry."

I almost hate to say it, but I am happy for my vinyl siding - it looks a million times better than Insulbrick.  The house was vinyl-sided in 1985, so it looked like that for a very long time.  I love the original windows, dual chimneys, standing-seam metal roof(!), and details on the porch posts.  That stuff is long gone.  I also wish the full-size window was still in the laundry room (I wonder if it's buried in the wall).

I am a little disappointed to see that there is no nice trim around the windows/doors, but not too surprised - this house has no traces of "fancy" except for the trim in the addition.

Believe it or not, there are actually a lot of houses in this area which still have Insulbrick exteriors, so it could still fit in.  That stuff just makes the place look run-down.



I got a lot of things done today here at the house.  The wallpaper borders from the front foyer and the staircase walls have been stripped - surprisingly it came off with very little effort, and it looks great.

I also cleaned and scrubbed the front door, and took the "muntins" off to spray paint them white (once again they were a nicotine yellow).  It's a newish steel door, but I hope to do a few little things to improve the way it looks.

Then I continued working on my rewiring projects.  I picked up some 12/2 and got the washer/dryer circuit completed.  Also used some of the leftover to replace the furnace circuit.  Upon closer inspection, I noticed the furnace's breaker was actually a 15A, not 20A as I stated before.  But it was NOT grounded (because the run of old NM cable was 14/2 with no ground).  I feel so much better about the laundry room since there was no grounding/GFCI before and because the outlet would get hot when both the washer and dryer were in use at the same time.  I did discover the old NM cable in the laundry room was actually #12, not #14 as I had thought before.  It was in great shape too, not corroded or anything.

This was the junction (once again inside a light fixture box) which connected the laundry room outlet to the basement lighting circuit.  [b]Twisted and taped and shoved in a box.[/b]  The connection to the porcelain light fixture was poorly executed, so I replaced that as well.

After all that was done, I started cleaning up the basement some more.  I removed a bunch of the wiring which was no longer in service, including one branch of BX which was previously LIVE, never properly "abandoned", and could have easily electrocuted someone.  I collected all of the antique boxes and fixtures - I can't exactly put them back in service but I didn't feel right just throwing them out.

Here is a pic of a light switch which was on one of the abandoned circuits in the basement (which I can only assume was an old furnace circuit because there was an old transformer connected to it).  Somebody double-tapped the line side of the switch!  The piece of BX which was the 2nd tap had been cut off right at the box so I have no idea what it used to do.

This is the inside of one of those old surface-mount lighting outlets just for everyone's reference.

I also put a new plug on the dryer, because I noticed the old one had a cardboard insulator which had pretty much disintegrated.  This was what I found when I took the plug apart and unwound everything - that is totally unnecessary!

Going back to last Tuesday... I was outside cleaning up when I got the urge to rip the indoor/outdoor carpet off of the front porch.  I found a treated deck in great condition underneath - just need to wash off the rest of the glue.  The carpet was disgusting and never completely dried.  The same carpet is on the cement patio in the rear of the house and it will be coming off before winter this year.  Nasty stuff.

Removed the wallpaper border from the foyer and staircase:

And here is a cool old switch cover that I found in the basement yesterday.  I wish there were more of these!  I installed it in the stairway, even though we never use that light.