Our New Old House

First of all, I’d like to thank the members of the Des Moines Rehabbers Club who kindly offered me advice this morning.  I sent a rather panicked email to the mailing list this morning and got some really excellent responses.  It helps so much to have someone to turn to in a crisis like this! 

The flooring company has secured the right color grout, but they didn’t order enough tile for the bathroom.  They will finish the parts under the tub, toilet, and sink and finish the rest when the tiles are in.  They’re going to cut the tile to fit around the pipes in the floor, rather than some other way.  I’m glad of that because it didn’t seem right to have to cut all the pipes down and redo all that plumbing. 

When I talked to Brandon (who’s at the house today while I’m at work) he said they’d laid the subfloor in both the kitchen and the bathroom and were going to get the kitchen done today.  That was earlier this morning, so I hope there’s been some good progress made.

 While the flooring guys were working in the house, Brandon took the ladder out and broke the rotted fascia off the roof and removed as many nails as he could to prepare for new gutters being installed.

 Our quote from the gutter company arrived.  It is over $2000, which for a single story, 1000 square foot bungalow seemed ridiculous.  Our neighbor down the street with a similar house had theirs done for $450 or so.  Will keep looking.

We’re heading out to the Iowa State Fair this afternoon to blow off some steam.  Pictures coming soon of all our adventures!

[tags]gutters, thanks, ceramic tile, bathroom, Des Moines Rehabbers Club, contractors, plumbing, kitchen, flooring[/tags]

Here it is folks!  I edited together the video I took of Angela Thorne’s demonstration at the Des Moines Rehabbers Club meeting, April 5, 2008. 

The video is 50 minutes long, so give it a few minutes to buffer. 

In addition to this video, Steve Wilke-Shapiro is working on an update to the Des Moines Rehabbers Club website explaining Angela’s process with photos.  Don’t miss that!

[tags]windows, double hung, video, demonstration, Des Moines Rehabbers Club, glazing, reglazing, wood windows[/tags]

What a perfect day we had for our meeting today! It was sunny, breezy, and warmer than it’s been all spring so far.

The host of our meeting was Aaron who is working on the finishing touches on an early 20th century transitional house (Victorian to Craftsman I think) in the River Bend neighborhood. Back in the early 2000s the house was in total shambles. The owner previous to Aaron did the hard work of making the house livable again and now there are smaller, but time consuming projects to finish to make the house complete. The biggest project on the agenda right now is the windows. They’re all original and badly in need of new glazing, weather stripping, and refinishing.

Lucky for Aaron, an experienced window rehabber lives right next door! Angela Thorne owns a house built by the same architect that built Aaron’s house, and works with a restoration group. She did us the honor of demonstrating from start to finish how to remove old double hung windows, take them apart, repair them, and put them back together. It was a detailed lesson in window maintenance that everybody who attended the meeting just soaked up.

As we went around the room, nearly half of the people introducing themselves are facing a project with their own windows right now, and many of us are inexperienced at window maintenance. Fortunately, in addition to Angela’s expertise, we had Jack Porter and some other more experienced rehabbers there to offer their insight.

I took quite a lot of video of Angela’s presentation, so rather than describe the whole process in this blog post, I’m going to edit together a complete video and post it here on the blog. It was just so much easier than trying to write down all the jewels of wisdom everyone had to share. Thank goodness for hand held recording technology!

So stay tuned! Video will be up shortly. In the meantime, check out www.renovatedsm.com for more information about windows and to see some photos that other members took today.

[tags] windows, glazing, Des Moines Rehabbers Club[/tags]

I’ve been so busy with other things that I forgot to write about replacing the storm windows.  We’ve decided to replace all the storm windows with high-efficiency storms and repair the interior sashes rather than replace them.  Someone from the Des Moines Rehabber’s Club recommended the Corn Belt Aluminum company so I got a quote from them and then took that quote and compared it to a quote put together at Lowe’s for what it would cost to install them ourselves.  Corn Belt with the installation and hauling away the old windows beat the Lowe’s quote hands down, and in my opinion had better windows. 

The total job is going to cost about $2800 to replace all 20 of our storm windows, including the porch, plus replace the old attic windows completely with new awning windows that actually vent all the way.  We’ve paid the $1400 advance payment and they’ve given us a 3-4 week lead time to manufacture the windows (here in Des Moines!) and schedule the work.  I’m so excited!  And I gotta say, it feels good to be going with a local company.  They’ve been completely professional and helpful all along the way, including letting us try out all the features of their windows in their showroom. 

 I’ll come back with more on this in a month or so when the work begins!

[tags]storm windows, windows, budget, Des Moines Rehabbers Club, future plans[/tags]

This month’s meeting was at the home of Jack and Meghan Daugherty.  They bought the house next door to theirs and rehabbed it back from a deteriorating apartment house into a beautiful single family home.  The Des Moines Register did a story about them:

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080207/NEWS/802070329/1001/NEWS

Jack discussed the biggest parts of the project: the woodwork, leveling the floors, and pulling down all the plaster and lath to insulate the walls and put up drywall. The woodwork had all been painted a horrible orange and turquoise combination, so he pulled it all off the windows and doorways, labeled each piece, and sent it off to a furniture stripping company in Valley Junction. We all had a chuckle about Jack’s mild panic when he realized that the stripping solution also took off his pencil markings that told him how to put all the pieces back together! It added an extra day’s worth of work for Jack to piece everything back together based on the position of nail holes and other little imperfections that matched up to the original placement. The floors in the house were all warped and wavy. Parts of the foundation had settled and joists had sagged over the years. He hired a company to raise the house, re-build the foundation, and level it all out. Jack described this as the most difficult part to watch because with every creak and squeak the house made, he thought the whole thing was going to fall apart. He needn’t have worried. The floors came out perfect and the rebuilt foundation looks better than ever!

What struck me the most about these home rehabbers was their sense of humor. They were able to keep a positive attitude through some very stressful challenges, including the arrival of a surprise baby girl!

 Here’s our host, Jack, discussing the project:

A young guest listened attentively.

A couple of details about the house stood out to me. For example, this corner sink was fascinating.

An example of Victorian love of symmetry:

Jack is also the president of our neighborhood association, (http://www.unionparkdsm.com/) so of course we’ll be going to the meeting tonight!

[tags]Des Moines Rehabbers Club, photos, Union Park, woodwork, foundation[/tags]