Our New Old House

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]

 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!

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.