Our New Old House

I told you about scraping the wallpaper in the front bedroom. Here’s a picture of my progress so far:

I also told you about Grandma persevering at scraping the wallpaper in the living room and dining room:

Yesterday and today she worked on that and now she’s only got one little section left before she’s all done. Unbelievable!

Yesterday I sallied forth to Menards to find the coupling I needed to hook the shower extension onto my tub. Silly me, I thought I could measure both ends, walk in, find the piece I needed, and have made a successful trip. Not so. Trouble is I suck at measuring, so I bought the wrong size coupling. I had one coupling that had been used to attach a hand held spray nozzle and I knew that one end of that fit into the faucet. So when I went back I took that coupling with me. I also took the shower extension with me since I didn’t trust myself to eyeball it any better. I couldn’t get the threaded end of the shower extension to fit any of the couplings they had! So I asked a trusty Menards associate. He scratched his head, tried to fit the threaded end into a few more couplings, had no success, scratched his head some more, and consulted with his youthful protege. “Looks like garden hose thread, not pipe thread,” the lad said. “Maybe it’s metric,” the elder pondered. I took back my shower extender and took another close look at it. I scraped away some of the pipe tape that had crustified around the joint and discovered that the oddly threaded coupling was actually screwed into what appeared to be 1/2″ pipe thread! “Have either of you got a wrench handy?” I asked. We found a wrench and the stronger of the two associates gave it a few good turns and sure enough, the odd coupling (sorry for the bad pun) came out and I was left with a perfectly standard 1/2″ pipe thread which would fit perfectly onto the coupling I started with in the first place!

So here it is connected:

As swimmingly as that all worked out, it is actually a little too short for my tallish husband so I’ll be looking for another section of pipe to extend it a bit, but for now, he’ll just have to stoop a little.

So now on to more recent developments:
It rained in Des Moines today. A lot. When I got home one of the downspouts had come detached from the gutter and was streaming water straight down at my foundation! I got up on the ladder and hammered a nail into it as a temporary fix, only to find that the downspout was leaking a stream of water from the elbow. I took the elbow apart and surprise surprise, it was totally clogged with years of composted leaves. Yummy. In the process I re-sliced open the cut on my hand from the razor blade, so I’m putting that wound on infection-watch. Don’t worry, I’m current on my tetanus shot. After I got that whole contraption put back together I still had a big pool of water threatening to seep down into the foundation, so I took the bricks the chimney sweeps had removed from our chimney and used them to displace some of the water. I don’t think it really did all that much, but it was a way for me to at least feel like I was trying in a futile situation. When I got back inside I looked like a soggy sewer rat. BUT! I noticed when I was changing into dry clothes that a mud splatter had landed on my face and looked JUST LIKE Marilyn Monroe’s beauty mark. My grandma said I should leave it on, but I had to wipe my face.

The good news is that there wasn’t much water in the basement at all. Just a couple damp spots on the inner foundation wall where water was starting to seep in, but nothing like the puddles we found when we first bought the place.

While Grandma worked away upstairs I went down to the basement to start picking out the recyclable copper wire from the pile the electricians left me.

That was a dirty job because the cloth covered wires were all coated with several decades’ worth of coal dust.

Mmm sooty:

Here’s a really scary connection I found in the wire I was untangling. Remind me again why my house didn’t burn down long before I ever had a chance to buy it…

My bucket o’wire for Craig. He’s going to burn off the insulation and take the remaining copper to a metal recycle shop and they’ll apparently give him money for it. Can’t be that much, but hey, recycling rocks in all its forms. I admire his motivation.

Since I was already in the basement with my camera I thought I’d poke around some of the nooks and crannies that having a digital camera makes it so much easier to explore. Most of the original foundation of our house was built of these hollow cinder blocks. Where they come together at a corner or at the end of a wall, they often open sideways into a series of little pigeon holes. My grandfather used to store tools and owners manuals and things in the ones in his house on E. 14th St., so I thought I’d see if there were any little treasures left behind in my walls.

I found a spool, or something resembling one:

I found a ginormous rusty nail:

And I found several pockets of coal left behind in the furnace room:

Once I’d grown tired of spelunking in my basement I went back upstairs to clean up a bit and feed the cats before fleeing to my mom’s house to take a shower. I actually found a pre-made shower curtain rail that is big enough to encircle my WHOLE tub, but I need help installing it so until that’s up, no showers at my own house yet.

Phew! This post has been a doozy. I’m ready for bed.

P.S. Happy International Talk Like a Pirate Day! I wonder how many people will blog in pirate-speak today.

While Brandon is in San Antonio for two weeks training for his job, I’m making a lot of little steps of progress that will hopefully amount to a lot of transformation by the time he comes back.

On Friday after work I drove up to Clear Lake to take care of some cleaning, check on the state of the yard, and swap many of my summer clothes for winter ones. I’d been listening to the weather report all week and when they told me it was supposed to get down into the low 30s at night I decided it was time to light the furnace. Most people don’t like the smell the furnace puts out the first time it’s lit for the season. But for me, it’s got some sort of nostalgic quality. I dug a frozen pizza out of the freezer and settled in for the night.

I got a lot done there and got a good night’s sleep. In the morning I drove back to Des Moines to fulfill the commitment I made to volunteer for Habitat for Humanity that afternoon. One of the attorneys I work for babysits for a single mom who has two kids. She’s trying to qualify to receive a Habitat for Humanity home. The program requires that anyone receiving a home put in a certain number of hours’ worth of sweat equity. They will accept volunteer hours done on that person’s behalf to go toward the quota, so this attorney put out a call for people to volunteer on the woman’s behalf. Since they already had enough help working on construction projects, they sent me to the local ReStore, the Habitat for Humanity version of a Goodwill, St. Vincent DePaul, or Salvation Army thrift store. If you’re a house rehabber, or if you’re just doing some small jobs around your house, it really pays to find your nearest ReStore. They receive donations of both new and used home improvement items ranging from antique doorknobs to professional kitchen ranges. It also pays to check back with the ReStore every couple of weeks or so because they’re constantly changing their stock. The location near my house even keeps a log of special requests customers are looking for. If there’s something you really need and they don’t have it in stock, you can sign up and leave your phone number and if they get a donation that fits what you need, they’ll give you a call. When I arrived, the volunteer coordinator put me right to work cleaning the grease and dust off a professional stove, grill, and steamer that had been torn out of a huge home out on the west side. When I was done with that, she had me dust and find the shelves for a fourteen foot tall book shelf that came out of the same house. I put in 3 hours of work and then grabbed a cart and did some shopping. I found a shower extender for a clawfoot tub, EXACTLY what I need, for a dollar! Yes you read that right, the thing I’d budgeted $200 for cost me one little greenback dollar. I do need to find a connector piece for it, but I figure it shouldn’t be too tough to ask the local hardware store for something to attach a 3/8 inch fixture to a 1/2 inch faucet. In addition to that little gem I found two 24″ bathroom towel bars and matching washcloth hooks and a robe hook for the door. All those cost me $40. So my total purchases were $41. I was expecting to spend $80 on the towel stuff, so I was just as happy as a pig in slop over my little adventure! Additionally, I scoped out their selection of pedestal sinks (one top half was only $15!), their cabinetry (I’ll definitely take measurements and check back for upper cabinets for my kitchen), and asked about the likelihood of finding landscaping materials. Holy cow, it was an awesome adventure!

I pretty much called it a night after that. Today I got up late, took a leisurely shower, and drove out to Johnston to have a birthday lunch with my Grandma, the original east sider of the family (along with Grandpa, who grew up in Highland Park). It was great to catch up with the family, and after the party was all cleaned up I headed back to our new old house to unload my car and tackle a couple of projects I’d assigned myself for the weekend.

One was to hook up the washing machine to make sure it and our plumbing work. I’d never hooked up a washing machine before, but everything went pretty smoothly. I do have one leaky spigot, but it’s convenient enough for me to turn it off when it’s not in use and turn it on when I need to run a load of laundry. Check that off the list!

Next I wanted to see how far I could get with scraping the wallpaper in the front bedroom. If you’ll remember, there is a layer of paint over that wallpaper, which makes a seal that the Downy/water spray can’t really penetrate. So I have to sort of hack away at the paint layer first and then use the Downy on the remaining wallpaper residue. It’s rather laborious, but luckily for me I have another Grandma right down the street who makes these kinds of tasks go much faster. She called me just as I was sitting down to start scraping above the baseboard and told me she’d seen me drive by and could she come over and work on the dining room wallpaper? When she sets her mind to finishing something, by golly she gets it done, and I could tell it had just been bugging her that she hadn’t finished a room before she left for New York on an American Legion trip. So I set her loose in the dining room while I tackled the bedroom. We both made a ton of progress despite my breaking two razor blades and slicing my finger open on the second broken one. Once I stopped the bleeding, I took a trip to the grocery store to buy band-aids, Neosporin, and more Downy. Grandma and I worked on the wallpaper until 8pm.

Tomorrow my goal is to get down to Menard’s and take care of two things: 1) the fixture to attach the shower unit, and 2) find pieces of pipe and the necessary mounting brackets to make a full sized shower curtain rack. All the pre-made kits I find are just big enough to enclose half the clawfoot tub in a circle. I want a shower curtain around the WHOLE tub so I’m going to have to build one myself. Thanks to the $50 gift card from Menards and the $25 one from Home Depot that my super generous friends gave me as housewarming gifts, I’ll have that project covered as a freebie!

I’m off to a well-earned shower now. Pictures soon!

Well, Brandon’s out of town for two weeks and I feel like I’m coming down with something, so I’m afraid the updates may be few and far between for a little while.  But here’s what I’ve got from the past week or so:

 The bathroom lights are finished and they look and work great!  The one in the ceiling has a ventilation fan.

My Grandma gave me a couple pieces of furniture to get us started. The bed is nice and comfy and the vanity is an antique that belonged to my great grandmother who came from Mexico.

Once our bedroom was nice and comfortable, I caught Brandon taking a snooze on the bed.

This is always going to be a problem: Brandon’s too long for the bed.

But he’s just right for me.

We stayed in our new old house on Saturday night. I took Brandon to the airport on Sunday morning, and I slept at the house by myself last night. It’s nice and comfortable with the windows cracked open to let the breeze in. The cats love it too. Oh yeah! I haven’t posted about the cats moving in! That’s coming next. Stay tuned!