Our New Old House

Another evening in the library, another few bits of information added to what I know about my house and my neighborhood. You can see the document with the obituaries I found on the About Our House and About the Neighborhood pages. I’ll keep updating the documents there as I find more info.

Just a quick note to say that the huge hulking heap of an old air conditioner that we left on the curb a few days before garbage pickup was actually taken away by some wonderful air conditioner elf! I hope whoever it is gets good use out of it. It actually worked really well when we got rid of it, we just had no more use for it. Bless you, magic air conditioner elves!

This month, Jennifer James (co-owner with her husband, Larry, of the supremely cool Mars Cafe) presented a lesson on resources for learning the history of your house and neighborhood. She got me so fired up to get started that I went to the library today!

Some of you may know that I am an aspiring librarian. I plan to go back to school and get my Masters degree in Library Science sometime in the next two years. So researching the history of my house and the neighborhood is a special treat for me because I get to expand my knowledge of the library collections and research materials at the same time I’m learning so much about my house! I spent several hours in the library tonight (after working all day in another library) and compiled some data from the Des Moines City Directories.

I’ve put a link to a PDF of my data on the About Our House page and the About the Neighborhood page. I’m not putting one here because as I get new information for the spreadsheet, I only want to update the link on static pages. But they’re right at the top. You shouldn’t have any trouble getting to them.

Thanks a million to Jennifer for all the fabulous information and inspiration! I know I’ll be in touch for additional wisdom.

For more information about the Des Moines Rehabbers Club, visit RenovateDSM.com.

This weekend my college friend, Chantell came to visit. She’s from Chicago and is going to grad school at Syracuse. She took the train all the way from Syracuse to Chicago for the holidays, and took the train from Chicago to here for a weekend visit. As soon as we made plans for her to come, she asked me, “Do I get to help work on the house?” Clearly, she had no idea what she was getting herself into! But Chantell’s a good sport and is one of those crazy people (like me) who can find fun in even the most mundane and tedious tasks, so we put on the radio, sang some crazy songs, and got some work done around the house.

First she finished up the last bit of scraping wallpaper in the front bedroom:

While she did that I helped Brandon take the air conditioner out of our bedroom window. (More on that in a little bit.) Next I helped Chantell scrub the walls to get the last of the wallpaper residue off and get them clean and prepped for plaster patching. There aren’t any pictures of me helping with this part, but I was there! She’ll vouch for me.

Look what a difference washing the wall made! The paint almost looks nice enough to leave alone! The spot in the middle has been scrubbed.

In this picture, the left wall has been scrubbed, the right wall has not. Like you needed me to tell you that anyway.

While Chantell and I were scrubbing, Brandon took the closet door off its hinges and took all the hardware off the woodwork so I can start stripping the paint. Apparently, when the previous owners put up a new style of curtains, they never removed the old hardware, just added more and more brackets, hooks, and screws as they went. So here’s the bag full of hardware he took off two windows:

Some of the brackets had been painted over multiple times. Here’s Brandon’s screwdriver and putty knife stuck behind one bracket:

He also took the register off the heat duct and removed the hardware from the door so I could put them into ammonia and soak the paint off.

When the previous owners were getting ready to put up the wallpaper, someone scratched some math problems on the wall in pencil.

Like I said before, Brandon and I also took the air conditioner out of our bedroom window. This project was a BEAST! First of all, the thing had been there for like 20 years. It weighs a ton. It leaked condensation all over the window sill, causing water damage to the wood and the plaster below. That will have to be repaired later. Our first challenge was undoing all the crappy insulating they had done all those years ago.

Brandon popped the front cover off so he could get a better grip. What a mess!

After wiggling it around a bit, we figured out it had to go out and not in, so we let go from the inside and let it sag dangerously off the side of the house.

There are no pictures of the next few steps because it took all three of us to get underneath it and haul it down to the ground. I’ll admit, we dropped it the last foot or so. I brought up the dolly and hauled it to the curb.

 We closed the storm window and I cleaned up the inside of the window as best I could.  The paint is all flaking off and the accumulation of dead bugs and cobwebs was disgusting.  But our bedroom is now just a little bit more insulated from the cold.

 Since it was really nice outside on Saturday I took the opportunity to spread some mulch around the back door to cover up the mud back there until we can get a new concrete slab poured.  While Brandon and I were working on that we found the coolest spider underneath a bag of mulch!   

It’s called a Woodlouse Hunter Spider and it only eats what are known around here as “roly-polies.” (They’re known in other places as woodlice, pillbugs, or armadillo bugs.) It’s perfectly harmless to humans, but sure doesn’t look harmless! I looked it up to be sure. I learned a lot about woodlice too! They live in damp places in the dirt and eat decaying plants and wood. You’ll find them under logs, in wood piles, and in this case, under bags of cedar mulch. They are also harmless to humans, but can indicate a dampness problem if they’re found near the foundation of your house. Like earthworms, they help enrich the soil.

EDIT: A kindly reader named Ron informed me that Woodlouse spiders are in fact dangerous sometimes because they are aggressive.  They’ll bite and the bite can be painful and nasty and all sorts of terrible things!  So don’t mess with them.  Thanks Ron!

Ok, moving on from backyard biology…

After we went down the street to Grandma’s and had a Mexican meal that couldn’t be beat, we came back home and I taught Chantell how to use the heat gun.

First, I made sure she was protected from the lead paint fumes.  That meant fitting, adjusting, and testing the respirator.  Hilarity ensued.

Then we got down to the serious business of stripping paint. Here Chantell waits eagerly while I plug in the heat gun.

Chantell listened carefully to instructions.

And watched me demonstrate.

Then I turned her loose!

She almost finished the whole door!

We did have some time to relax this weekend too. The cats got the whole futon to themselves while we were working.

Scratch didn’t mind sharing though.

Well, really Washington came to us. Being in Des Moines, these past two months leading up to the caucus have been exciting. I was stranded in Detroit on New Years Day and got to spend some time talking to journalists from all over the world who were on their way to cover the caucus. Since I was an Iowa caucus goer, I seemed to be rather interesting to them.

The caucus itself was mind-blowing. Nobody expected the huge number of people who showed up, but everybody was super calm and polite. Here I am in line to check in:

And here’s one side of the room voting on something:

It was fun negotiating and cajoling people to come join our group. Counting the number of votes for each candidate was tense, but I was super happy with the results. It was also a great opportunity to meet some people from my neighborhood. A few people in my precinct had been at the first Des Moines Rehabbers Club meeting that we hosted at our house back in November, so it was nice to catch up with them. They all asked how my house was coming along. I was thrilled to meet the lady who lives in a house across the street from mine. My grandparents lived in that house for 15 years or so before they bought a bigger house across the street and that’s where my mom and all her brothers and sisters grew up. The lady who lives there now is excited to show it to me and wants to know about my house too, so it’ll be nice to have another friendly neighbor on this street.