Our New Old House

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]

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]

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]

Got a call this morning that the storm windows are ready!  They’re going to wait for the sun to come out a bit and then schedule the installation.  Also the two replacement windows for the attic are ready.  I can’t wait to get them all installed!

[tags]storm windows, windows, attic, replacement windows, awning windows[/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]