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Home renovation

Sept 24, 2007 - How it all began: Fall 2005 to December 2006
We bought the house in the fall of 2005 knowing it needed a bunch of work: replace the roof, Refinish the floors, fix some water damage upstairs, get rid of the smelly carpet in the entryway and in the basement. And redo the kitchen & bathrooms. Well our adventure began in the first week after moving in when a minor plumbing fix turned into a flooded basement and we had to replace all of the old brass pipes in the basement. when we bought the place, the home inspector had in fact mentioned that we would probably want to replace the pipes at some point. but we weren't expecting it to be in the first week. So this moved up our schedule for ripping out the carpet in the basement and led to the complete demolition of the 40 year old moldy paneling and dropped ceiling that was down there. Interesting side note about the basement demo. Cliff found a bunch of stuff stuck in the dropped ceiling. Aside from a lot of mouse droppings (yuk!), there were notes from the principal of the local school advising that Mr. & Mrs. Martinez should come in to discuss their son John as soon as possible. LOL! Looks like The Marinezes never got those notes! We actually bought the house from the son, John. . .	The house, as bought [click for more pictures like this]

Nealco asbestos abatement	as it turned out, what was suspected to be asbestos insulation on the heating pipes in the basement, did in fact turn out to be asbestos. And so we had an asbestos abatement company come in to remove the carcinogenic stuff. Some weeks later, it was time for the roofers to come and replace the shingles in order to put a halt to the continuing water damage upstairs. We were feeling pretty good, despite the thousands that seemed to be gushing out of the bank and into the pockets of local tradespeople. We got 4 major projects out of the way. plumbing? check! basement demo? check! asbestos removal? Check! Roofing? Check! And then the rain came and we found another big puddle in the basement. Well, Cliff fixed the majority of the problem by fixing breaks in the gutters and extending the down spouts away from the house. but still we found that in heavy rain we'd have a bit of water in some of the corners of the basement.

And so began the "seal the basement" project. We bought some masonry sealer for the walls and an epoxy finish for the floor. We decided on a sunny yellow color for the walls to try to get rid of the dungeon look. but before we could apply anything to the walls or the floor, we had to clean them and fix the cracks! What a project that was! 80 years worth of dirt, soot and coal dust was caked on the fieldstone and cinder block walls. Some of the stones still had dirt and caked mud on them from when they were originally quarried! We had to get really busy with the wire brush and shop vac and spent many hours on hands and knees scrubbing in the cracks and even pulling roots and soil out of some of the corners! The masonry sealer went on really thick. Sometimes it seemed like spackling, but it still needed 2 coats. The result is a much more pleasant basement, but we still do ocasionally get a small amount of water in the basement during heavy rains. We only have the epoxy finish on half of the basement floor as of this writing. turns out we decided to replace our oil-fired steam heat system with gas-fired forced hot water so we paused on the project until we could get the new furnace. But by the time that happened, other projects loomed so this one remains unfinished! Oh yeah, I almost forgot. We replaced some of the windows in the basement and Cliff trimmed them out with poplar wood. It looks very nice!	sealing the basement

During our first summer in the house, Cliff spent it mostly on the ladder and the roof, rebuilding the dormer in the attic. HE replaced the window, got rid of some rotten boards, trimmed and resided the outside and put up a bead board soffit around the roof line. This was our first experiment with fiber cement siding and we decided that when we're ready to side the entire house, that's what we'll use. It looks just like wood clapboard and looks really neat and clean. I spent a lot of the summer weeding and taking inventory of what landscaping we've got. I also managed to plant tomatoes, eggplant, bell peppers and a bunch of herbs in pots on the porch.
Our first summer porch garden	sunflowers in the front yard

Heat? Who needs heat! Apparently, we don't! Hand me the sawzall!	So I mentioned that we replaced our heating system, right? Well, that's partially true. It's only partially replaced, that is. We pulled out the old steam radiators throughout the house and put baseboard heaters in on the first floor but then we began demolition of the second floor, so there is no heat upstairs. Ah, the 2nd floor demo. But I'm getting ahead of myself. before the demo began, as you can imagine we had some concerns about insulation, especially since we were pulling the radiators out. as it turned out, there was nothing in the walls and only 4 inches of insulation in the ceiling of the 2nd floor. we decided we ought to put some extra insulation in the 2nd floor ceiling to get it up to R30. But we wanted to keep some kind of floor in the attic for storage, so we had a problem. The R30 insulation is 9 inches thick which put it much higher than the rafters between the 2nd floor ceiling and the attic floor. So we'd have to add some sleeper 2x4's to the tops of the rafters to get the height up so that we could put some plywood down on the floor in the attic without smushing the insulation. That also meant we had to take out the existing, filthy fiberglass insulation, and oh yeah, we had to pull up the existing tongue & groove flooring in the attic. guess: what happened next? at some point along the way, somebody (I will mention no names) was bound to put their foot through the plaster & lath celing, right? Right! And so began the 2nd floor demo project.

We didn't take too many pictures of the 2nd floor demo. Too much dust would ruin the camera! Lots of dust, lots of debris, lots of hauling and 2 or 3 dumpsterloads later, we're down to studs, rafters and sheathing. Check out the walls (right)! No insulation and look at these gaps in the sheathing! I wonder why it got so cold in the house in Winter?!?! We'll be filling in those gaps with caulk and of course, insulation in the stud bays. We moved our bedroom into the dining room downstairs and so we're living in 3 1/2 rooms again, just like the old apartment in West Roxbury! I don't expect we'll have the upstairs livable again until next spring at the earliest...