Our New Old House

This weekend, one of my new friends, Dan, came over to help work on the house. Dan’s a librarian (as I hope to be someday!) and appreciates learning about history through learning about my house. We actually got some work done while Dan was here, but once I started on a project in the basement, we got a little sidetracked. I’ll come back to that.

I can’t believe I’m still working on that first door I started stripping, but I am, and I know how to do it more efficiently the next time around. I didn’t get all the paint off the carved edges with the heat gun so I asked Dan to apply some CitriStrip to the areas where there was still paint around the edges. While he did that, Brandon installed our new gas dryer. The heating element went out on the one my uncle gave us and the belt broke on the one that was in the house when we bought it, so rather than pay just about the same amount to repair either one of those, we bought a new one at Sears. I can’t believe how quiet it is! Brandon did a great job, even getting creative with duct tape to make a different sized vent tube fit the existing vent hole. Red Green would be proud.

Meanwhile, I started work on another round of insulating the basement walls. If you remember at the beginning of winter I put some foam insulation around the cracks in windows and spaces in the foundation. There was a large amount of cloth stuffed into an area of the coal room that I just assumed was to keep the coal dust from traveling into other parts of the house. Well, I was wrong about that (and it was really an assumption made out of laziness. I didn’t want to have to deal with pulling down those rags.) The rags were actually put there originally to keep out drafts. When my sister’s boyfriend came over last weekend, he laughed and pointed out a bad gap in the foundation. “Why would you go to all the trouble of putting foam around the window when you’ve got daylight coming in over the foundation?” Well, that’s what comes of having tall people around to give me better perspective. From his point of view he was seeing a gap several inches wide that was leading directly out to the front yard.

Pretty embarrassing. So this weekend I added to my list another round of insulating.

Here are the rags stuffed into the crack.

As I started pulling them down one by one I realized that these were mostly whole pieces of clothing. They had rips and tears, but were pretty much intact. The first couple of pieces turned out to be a woman’s slips that she’d wear under a dress. I tried to guess from the cut of the slips when they were from. They had that beautiful “on the bias” shape and so I figured they must be from the 30s or 40s. The next pieces I pulled down were baby clothes: a felt jacket with a safety pin still attached, a little girl’s dress sized for a two year old, and a pair of button-up pajamas with an elastic flap in the back for using the toilet. There was a large wrap-around summer dress in a bright red floral print that must have belonged to the mother of the family, and a dirty old pair of jeans that must have been the father’s.

Dirty old jeans:

Mother’s apron (top right) and baby’s felt jacket:

Little girl’s dress:

Little girl’s pajamas:

Father’s boxer shorts:

After I got the clothing down, I unwrapped a water pipe that had been bound in denim and newspaper. To my delight, the newspaper was in excellent condition and was largely intact. There were two dates on the newspaper: 1934 and 1942.

Dan caught me taking a few minutes to read the news from 1934.

After all the fun we had in the basement, we went upstairs to work in slightly warmer conditions. Dan and Brandon scraped wallpaper in the hallway while I wet sanded some of the plaster in the front bedroom.

Also, I scraped another little section of the dining room floor. Inch by inch, we’re getting this house done!

Sorry for the few days’ downtime, folks.  I committed one of the classic newbie mistakes and tried to update my blogging software without running a full backup first.  Lost my formatting but that should be back soon.

Thanks for your patience.

My mom is getting married and moving in with her fiance, so she gave most of her furniture to me! Yay furniture! Boy, I really need to get crackin’ on that living room and dining room now.

Meanwhile, I’ve been sick with a horrible sore throat and cough for a week. I was in bed all weekend (except for the Super Bowl) so no work done on the house. Sheesh.

 This month’s meeting was hosted by a charming couple, Hal and York. Well, York did all the actual hosting. Their house is a late 1880s Victorian mansion in the Sherman Hill neighborhood. The people who built the house were Jewish and kept Kosher, so they had the house built with two kitchens, one for the Kosher food, and one for the food prepared for guests. This is the first house I’ve seen built like that, but I’m sure there must be more of them out there. It’s something I never thought of until now.

Here’s the house from the outside:

Here York (on the right inside the doorway) and Steve (on the left inside the doorway) introduce the house and give some of its history. The house had been built for a family with ten children (4 girls, 6 boys), then had been a rooming house, then a nursing home for around 60 residents! This is a big house, but NOT big enough for 60 people of ANY condition. Most recent history includes hosting parties for Barack Obama’s staff, family, and friends around the time of the Iowa Caucus. York told some great stories about Sen. Obama challenging his secret service detail to keep up with him as he made his way around the house.

The highlight of the house for me was the set of stained glass windows in the staircase.

York had really done his homework in researching stained glass and he told us that red and purple glass is the hardest and most expensive to make because it uses gold in creating the color. He also pointed out three round pieces that are pretty much priceless because they are blown with lead and the lead makes them crackle like spider web. The third coolest thing about these windows were the hand painted pictures. He explained that those pieces were probably fired six or seven times each because the artist would paint one color on, then fire the piece, then paint the next color, the fire the piece, and so on and so on. Can you imagine? Here are some close-up pictures:

York also had some good insight for other projects around an old house. For example, he explained how to use linseed oil to condition wood. He also explained the difference between using shellac and polyurethane. I was especially interested in that part because I’ve never used either and I’ve been trying to figure out which would be better for the woodwork inside my house.

The most surprising thing about this house was the third floor. The main floor is mostly functional for hosting parties. The second floor has comfortable bedrooms and living spaces that are decorated tastefully in a way that keeps the period style intact but displays the couple’s own modern tastes. The third floor was like stepping into a totally different building! Back in the 1980s whoever owned the house had the third floor redone as an apartment. (Originally, the third floor would have been used as a ballroom.) Whoever they hired as a carpenter to build all the cabinets, closets, and living areas was a genius! The whole area had a very modern feel. You’d never know you were in a Victorian home. Clean lines, modern furniture, and bright, neutral colors made the space feel amazingly open and fresh. I took a few pictures, but wanted to be a little careful since they do rent it to someone and I wasn’t sure how they’d feel having their living space shown all over the internet.

One of the coolest things I got to see from the third floor were the wooden shingles! Plus, a pretty neat view of the Des Moines skyline.

This trip had a bonus house in it! York’s friend owns the house next door and had given permission for us to look around in it too. The most beautiful thing about this house was the staircase. It amazes me that in over a hundred years of families and tenants living in this house, moving furniture up and down the stairs, and probably kids living here, this ornament never broke off!

The rest of the house is in pretty bad condition, having been split into several cheap apartments over the years and suffering a sorry fate of particle paneling and drop ceilings.   It’s going to be fixed up and converted back to a single family home soon though, so there’s hope for it!

One final note: York mentioned that when a house has been split up into multiple units the law requires there to be exterior fire escapes.  These tend to become eyesores after a while and are one of the main reasons people like to return houses to single family residences.  York explained that one of the things he recommends to people buying houses in Sherman Hill to reconvert back to single family houses is to tear off the exterior fire escape right away.  For one thing, it’s just one less access point inviting vandals if the house is vacant for a while.  And also, the house can’t be listed as a multi-family residence without that fire escape, so it’s sort of a back-up insurance that the house won’t be split up again if you have to sell it or something.

I always learn so much from these meetings!