Rehabber’s Rehab

Unfortunately the snow in Chicago is usually gray rather than white, just like the blown insulation in our backroom.  Taking down the ceiling in the backroom was something I was dreading because I could see the sixteen inches deep insulation that was in the ceiling from my kitchen view of the horribly sagging back roof.  But it needed to be done and I had the day off in the middle of the week with no car to go anywhere.

So, I put up the plastic barrier, opened all the windows, and donned my mask.  One by one I took down the rows of 1inch furring boards running perpendicular to ceiling rafters.  The Snow began lightly as their is less ceiling where the roof slopes off at the exterior of the back room, but as I worked towards the kitchen, the insulation fell harder until a complete Gray-Out blinded my vision and I stumbled through the three foot deep drifts.

After a lengthy fresh air break, I started picking up the insulation.  After an hour, I felt I had gotten nowhere, but eventually I found the floor again.  In all I filled up forty trash bags of insulation!  Alas there are no pictures of this adventure as Liz had taken the camera to work.

We were asked the question about our previous post “A Window of Opportunity”

What’s wrong with the old windows?

My answer started to get so long I decided to make it a post instead of a comment.  To answer the question: They’re pretty old, and don’t work well anymore - particularly the storm windows and screens.  On some of the windows it’s impossible to pull the storm down.  Some don’t even have a storm window, a must here in Chicago.  Especially since I don’t fancy putting up plastic sheeting every winter.  Some don’t have a screen, another must since mosquitoes are highly attracted to me!

If you look at the current “lastest pics” picture, it shows the backyard, and you can see the metal frames on the windows are pretty unattractive.  This is even more true on the front of the house.

For the sunroom, we are cutting in entirely new bigger windows in some places, and so want the rest of the house to match these so they don’t look like such an addition, but are integrated with the rest.

It’s a good question.  It made me stop and think for a minute, did we really need that?  I think sometimes you get so caught up in remodeling, it can be easy to change things without a purpose or consciously thinking about why.  But change for change’s sake is not always improvement.

I enjoyed his post about this at the blog “Keepin’ It Real“  and I agree, that if you can restore you should (hence the many man hours spent restoring the trim around the house).  Particularly in these older homes, the stuff around your house is of far better quality than you could get today even if you wanted to spend the money.  If our windows were nice wood windows (the kind of casements shown in the windows post), or old counter-weight double hungs we would definitely keep them.  I have reglazed and restored windows before with the Martin’s at Greene & Burke, so that is not the daunting task.  But ours are aluminum inside and out, were cheap to begin with, and in my opinion, not worth the effort.

Our windows are supposed to arrive on Friday, so i thought I’d update you with what we’ve ordered.  When Matt and I got together I already had an idea of what I wanted and what style.  The front and back windows would be the same - a picture window with two casements on the side.  The casements would have mutton going across about 1/4 of the way down with a line dividing that rectangle.  Matt has started calling this the cottage style.  Although I love prairie style (a wide grid that runs just inside the frame) - I didn’t think it would be right for our house.  We also both agreed that we would add trim around the windows and on the house.  Currently the windows are just set in the stucco.  Along the side of the house, the double hungs would be replaced with double hung windows, but the ratio of the two panes would be 40/60 instead of 50/50 with muttons running down the middle of the top part.

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We wanted to go for a walk around the neighborhood to see what we liked, and literally the exact moment we stepped out the door it started raining.  We were pretty confident with our choices, though and Matt ran home to add them to the drawings.  We are both really happy with the way things turned out.

Windows in the back/North side of the house with bedrooms

North side of the house with bedrooms

If all goes well and there is enough time this weekend, in addition to putting a new roof on the back sunroom, we’ll also be able to start putting the windows in.

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This weekend I finally finished the first in the great door reclaimation project, our bedroom door, which I’ve been working on since the Martin’s were here last.  All the doors are now down but the most important one (the bathroom of course).  All I can say is that doors are a lot bigger than the trim I’ve been stripping so far, and that there is a lot more of them than you think there is.  And they have two sides.  Ugh.  Far more time consuming than my previous projects.

Although it is just the two of us, in our house we are so close to your neighbors that you need the privacy a door can give you.  Especially since we have no blinds up since we’ve taken down all of the trim that you could hang them on.  We have one spot in our bedroom that you can stand in to get dressed in without being in the line of sight of either of our neighbors, and we’ve definitely gotten tired of sneaking around in our own house.

I started by removing all the hardware from the door and throwing it in a bucket, screws and all, since I didn’t want to lose any of it.  Then it was time to bring out the trusty ole’ heat gun and to strip the paint off the flat outside and inside portion of the panels on the side of the door that faced into the bedroom.  I got this done in about two sittings (or hunchings). The edges of the panels took considerably longer.  I couldn’t really go at it with the metal scraper because it was too easy to dig into and gouge the door.  I finally found a use for all those chemical strippers on this part of the door, and they worked pretty well at getting a bulk of the paint off.  I still can’t stand the smell and it is much messier compared to the heat gun, but seems to be quicker and less damaging to the door.  After getting most of the paint off with the chemical strippers, I went over it scraping with a small screw driver the spots of paint that were still left, and using the Dremmel in some places. (more…)

This past Sunday was likely part of the last great beautiful weekends for the year here in Chicagoland (if you ignore the Bear’s spirit crushing loss).  Knowing we had better enjoy it while we can, after Thor woke up at noon after working all night, we had an awsome brunch at a place with a beautiful outdoor patio, and then I got to work out in the garage on our bedroom door - more about that later, probably when I finish up on Tuesday (I hope).  Meanwhile Thor took a nap and watched the game.

Once nap time was over we were able to get to work on my real goal for the weekend, which was to start to clear out the pine bushes from the yard, particularly the front.  As you may know, I’ve had my eye on that bush from the very beginning, and this weekend it’s time had finally come.  I want to get the front ready so that come spring I can just go out there and plant, and I am not trying to dig up bushes and rocks in the cold and half-frozen ground.

Thor set about sawizawing the giant bush down while I started picking up the white rocks.  Yes, those white landscaping rocks were basically covering the entire front planting bed underneath the bush.  I am cursed, they seem to follow me everywhere.  I spent about 2 years getting rid of them from the Rice Street house, and now they have found me again.  There is no easy way to scoop them up, they are everywhere, make it hard to dig, and most importantly they are so very very ugly.  If anyone wants some, however, just send us an e-mail.  I have about 8 buckets for you.  Thor is annoyed because it has just created more trash for us to start trying to get rid of.  In the end I created a make-shift sieve using a doormat hung across two buckets to try and shovel out the rocks from the dirt.  It did a pretty good job, but was also more time consuming.  Once it started to get dark out I just gave up, and there is definitely at least 3 buckets worth left in the planting bed still. (more…)