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.

June, 2011

In June, 2011, I finally found an end to my frustrating and disappointing 6 month long house hunt.  Most of this information is copied from my thread over at www.oldhouseweb.com since that is where I started documenting my progress before moving to this blog.

I looked at 2 post-war homes (both built in the 1940s) - one super classy but out of our price range and the other was cobbled together and dumpy.

Then here's an example of another "special" place I toured:

A turn-of-the-century brick house in Hawthorne, Pennsylvania.  Needed TONS of work.

It looked fine on the outside but man was it a mess inside.  It didn't take long to decide not to pursue that house (the price was listed at $49.5k and eventually came down to $45.9k before someone eventually bought it).


There was a house for sale just down the road from my apartment that had been listed with a Realtor for quite a while, but hadn't sold. I looked at it online, but didn't really think too much else of it because the price was higher than what I was looking for (and it also looked kind of modern). The seller was an elderly lady who had known my dad's side of the family for many years.

Anyway, my mother ran into the owner in town one day, and the owner said she had some issues with her computer she wanted me to look at. So I decided to make it a dual-purpose trip: fix her computer and get a tour of her house. And as it turns out, her one-year contract with the Realtor was over that very day!

I'm not kidding, the second she opened the front door I was in love. I saw plaster walls and wide old trim and was SOLD. We sat and talked for hours that night, about the house and its history and all kinds of things - and she gave me "the tour". At this point, I hadn't been pre-approved for a mortgage yet so I couldn't make any kind of offer or commitment, but I said I was very interested and would get back in touch once we were pre-approved.

Later that week, I was pre-approved for a mortgage for just $4900 shy of her original asking price ($79.9k). I made my offer of $75,000 and she accepted!

To make a long and boring story short - fast forward to the present and I am are about a month away from closing. Our sales agreement states I must take possession by 30JUN but her moving company comes 13-14JUN so I will be moved in sooner.

Here are just a few of the extremely awesome facts about the house I bought:
- 3 bed, 2 bath, ~1500 sq. ft. (our apartment is 1 bed, 1 bath, 753 sq. ft.)
- Current owner moved into the house with her late husband in 1955. Apparently it was starting to get run-down but they got it for cheap and brought it back to life.
- Current owner is only the 2nd family EVER to live in the house since it was built (she estimates 1880).
- A huge cistern and an old well with an antique well pump are in the basement.
- The house underwent a huge renovation some time before 1921 when the "master bedroom" and living room were added on, and the back porch was enclosed into a kitchen.
- Some of the original baseboard, door trim, and window trim is still present through the house.
- The current owner renovated the old kitchen in 1955 when they moved in, and all of the 1955 cabinets are still present. The cabinets were built in-place and they wrap entirely around the kitchen (even above the doorways). There are something like 47 doors in that kitchen, and it's not all that large. Some of the vintage chrome hardware is still on the cabinets.
- Gas lines are still located in most of the downstairs rooms (from gas lights). Unfortunately, no fixtures.
- Two of the original turn-of-the-century 2-over-2 windows are still present in the living room.
- Modern plumbing (all copper and PVC) and no asbestos coated plumbing.

The house also has all sorts of modern amenities like 200A electric, city water & sewage, 6yr old HVAC with central air. Includes all appliances, and some furniture.

There are a few negatives, but they're things I'll have to live with for a few years.
- Vinyl siding, asphalt roof, and cheesy looking exterior window trim w/ shutters makes the house look very generic.
- All but 2 of the windows have been replaced. Some are Andersen insulated wood windows and some are cheap vinyl.
- Wallpaper all over the place.
- 1970's paneling in 2 of the bedrooms and the room which will be my office.
- Wall-to-wall carpeting everywhere except the bathrooms and kitchen (no hardwood).
- No interior access to the basement (this is both good and bad).
- Some of the outlets are still 2-prong ungrounded but there is no Knob & Tube.
- The upstairs bathroom was completely renovated in 1993. The old cast iron tub is still there though - and it is a decent '90s bathroom - just not period-appropriate.


For documentation purposes, here are the Google Maps photos of the property:

The seller said other "potential buyers" who came to look with the Realtor disliked things like the small kitchen (not an eat-in kitchen because there is a formal dining room), and the fact that it does not have an open floor plan. People also thought the price was steep for this area for such an old house, but what they didn't realise is that it includes appliances, HVAC, and furniture.

I absolutely LOVE the small kitchen, in fact, I prefer a non-eat-in kitchen and formal dining room. I love the fact that it is NOT an open floor plan, and I love the old house charm that some of the rooms still have.

She said that underneath the vinyl siding, there is a layer of foam insulation, then a layer of Insulbrick, then tarpaper, then wood clapboard. My vision of the future exterior is painted wooden clapboard, grey metal roof, and grey/off white trim. Probably no shutters. I want to keep the simple, clean, and sturdy look that this house was meant to have.

02 June, 2011:

I got another "tour" of the house and had time to study all of the little details and things that I didn't get to focus on before.

Bad news first... there are a couple of cracks in the plaster in the living room where the plaster has come off of the lath (it is a bit loose). I saw the cracks before but didn't thoroughly inspect them. There is also a similar section in the dining room, though I'm not sure if the plaster is loose or it is just the 100 layers of wallpaper. Won't be too bad of a fix though, I hope. Time to learn how to do plaster repairs!

Good news now-

1. She decided she is leaving one of her nice china hutches in the dining room, including some wine glasses and another type of glass.  Here's a shot of said piece:

2. The railing in the upstairs landing is original to the house! The balusters have a coat of white paint on them, but they're old and they're oak.

3. I explored the crawlspace a bit and found some old plumbing still under there which used to connect to the cistern. Some of it goes up toward the front of the house, which is odd because there is nothing in the front of the house requiring water. Further investigation required.

4. In the basement, there is a table which was part of the ORIGINAL KITCHEN !! It is very sturdy wood, painted white, with an enameled metal top. It has at least 2 drawers, one of which was stuck and the other opened. She is leaving it with the house!

5. Also stored in the basement, an old basement window with wood frame and (I think) wavy glass - appears to be in great condition. Not sure if/where it would be re-used but a good find nonetheless.

13 June, 2011:  CLOSED ON THE HOUSE!

14 June, 2011:  First pics!

The house is now mine and I have already begun cleaning, removing wallpaper, and removing the PO's junk!

I have taken quite a few pictures so far, but I'm going to post a few of the key ones for now - the rest will come later.


Walk in the front door.  Note the unique angled wall to the right.

This is the casing around the doorway to the office.  This is the only place in the house with this trim.

Here is the living room.  I have new paint for this room (grey) but have a bit of plaster repair to do first.  The beams are false, and I learned today they are actually foam, not plastic.

This pic shows the detail in the window/door casing.  It only seems to be present in this room.

The living room also has the two remaining original windows (w/ storms).

A very old gas line - yes, this is actually a WATER valve:

These are some of the features of the dining room.

Built-in closet under the stairs.

This stain on the wallpaper seems to be caused by condensation/moisture coming from the old chimney (it is cut down and capped off at the roof).  You can tell where the flue was from an old stove.  This whole room is something I want to tackle very soon after moving in.

Moving on to the kitchen!  This will be one of my favourite parts of the house, for sure.

View from the back door.  These cabinets were built in-place in 1955.

This is the ugly wallpaper that is in the kitchen.  It is a thick, rubbery product and it has to go!

Started scraping the wallpaper.  What I found beneath it was a huge surprise...

This is the product underneath the wallpaper.  I believe it is Formica.  Check out the retro pattern.  Not really sure what is beneath this, so I am not going to remove it at this time.  This will all be painted red.

Very sweet vintage chrome hardware:

And an integrated double-stack recipe card file!

This is the small downstairs bathroom and a cool old casement window with interior screen.

This is the only mostly-untouched bedroom upstairs (also the smallest).

Two built-in closets.

And a creepy outlet in the floor.

There are quite a few of these creepy surface-mount outlets and light sockets around the house.  They look cool, but I will most likely be replacing these as soon as I can.

15 June, 2011:


Well here are a few more pics from today.  Nearly all of the wallpaper is scraped from the kitchen.

I'm not all that happy about the Formica on the walls (yes it is glued on with construction adhesive) but I am not in any kind of position to pull everything and re-drywall.  I peeled back one of the sheets of Formica and it started pulling the drywall apart...

But I think once we glue the Formica all back down, sand, prime, caulk, and paint - it won't look TOO bad.  It will at least hold me over for a few years.  Was this product on the wall a typical thing to use?  My parents' house has a bathroom that is covered in the stuff, but I've never encountered a Formica kitchen.

And here's a shot of my laundry room.  It was packed full of junk and shelves and had about 100 nails/hooks in the walls.  This room will eventually be re-painted white.  The only thing worth saving in here was her stash of leftover paint.

17-19 June, 2011:

Caulked all of the seams and cracks last night so it will look much better once primed and painted. There is evidence in several places that water was getting through some of the gaps, and I don't want this to continue happening.

Also last night, I skimmed the two drywall wall sections in the kitchen to smooth them out a bit. The wall behind the fridge needs another skim coat.

I will be priming all of the Formica walls tonight!

I also am going to start mapping out and documenting the electrical breakers and trying to figure out where to put a GFCI in the kitchen. Hopefully the refrigerator is upstream of the outlets, but who knows. I did test the outlets in the kitchen last night and they do all have a proper ground!

A few updates:

Kitchen all in primer (yesterday).  You will also see one of the three "old" doors left in the house, and yes they are exterior doors in the interior of the house.  I don't know how old they actually are, but they are in excellent condition.  The one on the laundry room has a "cat door" cut into it though.  I like the doors - very industrial.

Also yesterday, came in to find this mess in the basement!

The 8 year old hot water tank had sprung a leak.  It was leaking somewhere out of the bottom, not from any of the plumbing connections.  I also realized that the old tank was vented WAY improperly.  Since it was so tall, the vent run actually pointed DOWN instead of up.  Either way, my dad and I installed a new one that day.  Unfortunately, not tankless, but definitely more efficient than the old one.  Vented correctly, too.

Here is what I got done today - 3 coats of red.  Needs a little touch up in a few places.  The plastic and tape comes off tomorrow so we'll see the finished product then.

Pulled all the tape and plastic off the kitchen this morning.  The curtains were left by the PO but we are going to use them since they match.

I also took some time to clean up the old outlet covers and reinstall them (for now until I get GFCIs) - before and after.

Next, I started on one of the upstairs bedrooms.

Before (floral print paneling):

Tinted primer:

After one coat of paint (you can also see the other old door in here):

Finished up that upstairs bedroom today.  Next step here is to paint the ceiling white.

And then got started on the living room!  Masked everything and then filled in all the nail holes in the walls and smoothed out a couple of the cracks.  I will do the actual plaster repair later, after we are all settled in.

Before:

In primer (tinted):

Already we can see that the grey makes the ceilings appear taller and the room in general appears larger.  Much better than the PO's light lemon yellow.  She said the room has been yellow for 50 years.  Paint comes tomorrow.



Got more done today.

Living room painted and it looks great!  Also replaced 4 receptacles because they were loose and scary.  Now they are safe and blend into the baseboards much better than the old ones.

I then started to clean out the closet under the stairs.  It was like peeling back the layers of time.  First, I removed the PO's latest piece of sheet vinyl (not attached) to find this linoleum.  It was pretty cool, but it was also not attached to the floor and it was in bad shape (torn up/cracked).

This was what was underneath - the original 1880 pine flooring.  Great shape in here.  There is a linoleum border around the outside of the closet, and it actually appears to be in half decent shape.