Our New Old House

Hi all,

I haven’t written here in a very long time and I’m so sorry to have left you hangin’. We rushed up on a deadline to have the house appraised last month and so we did TONS of work but I haven’t had time to blog about it until now.  But don’t worry, I took pictures!  I have no idea what order anything happened in now, so I’ll just go room by room and get you up to speed.  Let’s start with the bathroom today.

When last I blogged, the bathroom looked like…  this!

There was still some wallpaper residue on the walls so Brandon scraped it off.

Then he scrubbed the walls to make them ready to prime.

With this latest push to get work done on the house, we’ve had to cut some corners in the short term so we could have it appraised. We haven’t abandoned all our long term plans yet, but in the interest of time and sanity, we had to just give many things a quick going over to make it look clean and finished for the bean counters. Hence, everything got painted white and we had to come up with some quick fixes for some problems with the walls.

For example, in the bathroom we want to put beadboard paneling on the wall below the wood trim that splits the top and the bottom half of the wall. We didn’t have time to do that so my friend Tiff (who’s a GENIUS!) suggested that we put contact paper on the walls as a kind of temporary wallpaper. So that’s what we did.

I guess it’s time for a before and after look, huh?

Before:

…and AFTER:

Oh, I just noticed that the spot under the sink where the pipes go into the wall looks a lot better now in real life than it did in this picture.  This was before we did a little more work to clean it up.

But anyway, that’s the bathroom, getting close to being done!

And here’s a bonus photo of Brandon scraping the hallway wall (coz I don’t know where else to put it.)

[tags] bathroom, wallpaper, ceramic tile, paint, paneling, photos, future plans, flooring [/tags]

I know it’s still a little ways off, but I have a whole list of projects, some of which I’d like to complete before winter, some that MUST be completed.

• Install gutter apron (PRIORITY ONE, ASAP)
• Finish landscaping wall
• Transplant hostas and ferns
• Make kindling bundles out of the sticks in the backyard
• Borrow a chainsaw and cut the logs that are too big for the wood burning stove
• Finish the shed or at the very least gather all the pieces and move them inside

Let’s see how many of these I can finish before the first snow.

[tags]wood burning stove, gutters, yardwork, retaining wall, landscaping, future plans[/tags]

Last week I had a visit from an energy efficiency specialist from our local energy company, MidAmerican. MidAmerican has a program called EnergyAdvantage: Save Some Green. Homeowners who get their electricity and natural gas from MidAmerican can call for an hour long appointment in which a specialist will walk through your home with you, take notes on the current state of your home’s insulation and energy usage, and then make suggestions on how to improve the energy efficiency.

He started by going over a printout of the last year of my energy bills. He gave me an idea of the averages used by other similar houses and let me know where our usage for the past year falls on that scale.

When I told him were looking at the possibility of replacing our furnace and adding central air, he explained to me the factors that go into determining the size of units we need.

1. Square footage to heat and cool
2. Number of windows and doors on exterior walls
3. Existing value of insulation

With that in mind, he figured that our house probably needs a 60,000 BTU furnace.

Now, one important thing about the existing furnace is that the home inspector we had to look at it wrote down the wrong date for when our current furnace was installed. He accidentally wrote down 1983, which is correct for the water heater. But the furnace was installed in 1997! Keep in mind that three contractors came out and looked at our furnace and also didn’t notice what year it was, or did notice and didn’t choose to point out that our furnace is supposed to last 20 years and probably doesn’t need to be replaced. We were thinking of replacing it based on it being nearly 25 years old! With this new information, we’re not necessarily bent on replacing the furnace part. It’s still under consideration.

He went through the house and helped me identify the weakest spots in our insulation. A lot of that was painfully obvious, but it was good to get a few suggestions on how to most cost effectively repair those weaknesses.

One major weakness is the coal chute. He recommended bricking it up with hollow glass bricks. That way we can let in light, but it’ll be a good insulation for the spot.

Another important aspect of our insulation that’s lacking is the attic. Everyone thusfar has described the attic as a “half story” but on account of the insulation properties he noted, the MidAmerican guy said it’s just a converted attic. The things that indicated to him that it’s never been considered “living space” are that the floor and crawlspaces are packed with insulation but there’s no insulation under the roof. He said I can change that and then it’ll be more efficient, but it will require tearing down the plaster and lath ceiling, insulating that space under the roof, and then putting up drywall. I suppose that’s an option, but I think we’ll go ahead and improve the window insulation, put doors on the crawlspaces, and see how well the place stays heated and cooled this year before deciding to add that task to our list. It may be possible to remove some of the insulation from under the floorboards in the meantime, but I don’t think that’s really even necessary.

Finally, he was satisfied with my intentions to fix the windows, but told me it would be wise to insulate the walls. They currently have nothing inside them. He recommended hiring a contractor to blow insulation in from the outside. They’d have to take off the top strip of siding, drill the holes there, blow the insulation in, and then put the siding back. Also, his suggestion for agreeing on price was to say we’ll pay you for the labor, plus we’ll count up the bags of insulation at the end of the job and pay you according to that. That way they have more incentive to use more insulation in our walls so they can get paid more for it, thus doing a better job of insulating the place.

Now that I have specific recommendations for improving the insulation, I can qualify to have MidAmerican energy pay up to 70% of the cost of insulating my house, up to $600. We’ll probably apply that to having the insulation blown into the walls.

So with all that information in mind, we’re going to contact back the people we got quotes from, ask them to adjust the quotes for leaving the current furnace and just adding A/C and ductwork and then see what we’re facing as far as cost. I’m guessing it’ll just be as simple as deducting the cost of the new furnace from the total and probably adjusting the labor cost a bit, but I guess we’ll see.

[tags]insulation, furnace, air conditioning, contractors, energy usage, attic, coal chute[/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]

Alright, so I’m a bum and we didn’t go to the Union Park Neighborhood Association meeting Tuesday.  Just too much going on this week and Brandon and I needed a dinner and evening at home together. 

Part of what’s got us so busy this week is that we’re gathering quotes to replace our furnace and add A/C. We were planning to wait until the weather warmed up to replace our furnace.  No, I lie.  We were putting off replacing our furnace indefinitely.  But an ad we received in the mail for a local company reminded us that it’s the off season for purchasing a new furnace, so we’d probably get a better deal doing it sooner than later. 

We called the company in the ad, Leechman Heating and Cooling, a Service Master company, to come over and give us a “comfort assessment.”  He had a worksheet to fill out that asked about what’s comfortable about our house, what’s uncomfortable, and what we’re looking for as solutions.  He measured all the rooms, walked through the house recommending new supplies and changing around returns in most of the rooms, checked out our existing unit for us, and took all this information back with him to his company.  We scheduled a time for him to come back this week and discuss what he put together for us, so he came back last night. 

He came back with two options.  One with a heat pump, a 92% Amana Distinction furnace, a builder’s model humidifier, and added duct-work in our house is $7891.  The other with a 92% Amana Distinction furnace, a 14 SEER A/C and a builder’s model humidifier (plus additional duct-work) is $6824.00. 

 Both options include a really good warranty, and their own company’s service warranty is included with the installation.  Also, they provide a digital, programmable thermostat.

We’re getting two other quotes from two other smaller, more independent companies later this week/early next week. 

 One of the big questions I have for the other two people coming to look at our house is whether the additional duct-work and supplies/returns are really necessary or all that beneficial.  Another is about heat pumps vs. air conditioners. 

I’d welcome any advice, links, or wisdom from my readers on this topic (as always!)  Leave me a comment or email me at kelli@ournewoldhouse.com.

[tags]Amana, furnace, air conditioner, air conditioning, thermostat, budget, future plans, duct, heating, HVAC[/tags]