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As disinclined as I am to poke fun at someone else’s idea of a stunning remodel, lest my grand schemes be held up for judgment someday, I saw pictures today that knocked my jaw so far down, my tongue just can’t help wagging. I give you, dear people, the worst treatment of a poor, helpless clawfoot that I ever did see.
Are we talking castle fetish, renaissance fair obsession, stoned and overly literal-minded? What!?! But at least they carried the theme around the room.
That sink suggests that this wasn’t even done in the 60s. Was this thing sponsored by Medieval Times, perhaps?
Here’s why I feel free to lambast this loo: It’s in a house in Glenview, Illinois, that’s going to be demolished soon. No doubt in favor of a McMansion. So there is hope for the defiled clawfoot—with any luck, someone attending the demolition sale will free it from its prison.
Also at this sale is a cool, old Chambers stove.
So there was some stylin’ going on at home.
I’ve now got a full tin ceiling in the living room! OK, so we still have to put up the cornice. And seal the seams, and paint the nailheads and miscellaneous (though amazingly few) dings and scratches. But still, the tin ceiling tiles that have been living in my back bedroom for the last 2 years—and the light fixture that has been hunkered down in a box under the stereo table—are now actually on the ceiling!
You can see some seams above that need tightening up. And we installed the light mostly to help in knowing which seams were going to jump out in the finished room. But as impressed as I am by all this, I’m a little irked that we failed in one aspect.
There’s a tiny amount of plywood visible around the light fixture! Argh! We were so careful in measuring and cutting the tin to fit around the electrical box—but not careful enough. I’m really rather surprised that these fixtures aren’t made with a generous circumference that is guaranteed to hide mistakes of this nature. Because we weren’t way off—just too far off. Grrrrr. We’ve got some ideas to camouflage this, but it’s just a little depressing right now. Sigh. Though it doesn’t stop me from being thrilled to see how well the ceiling and fixture go together. This room originally had a gas light, then a pull-chain electric bulb that was put out of commission by the drop-ceiling installation of the early 60s. It’s such a kick to be able to walk into the room and poke a push-button light switch and be bathed in luminescence.
When you hear a story that combines the terms plumbing and surprise, there’s usually nothing delightful going on. But today I heard a wonderful exception to this rule: In the Italian town of Marino, near Rome, homeowners turned on their taps to find sparkling white wine flowing forth, according to this story from the BBC. Only in Italy!
As summer sinks below the horizon and the cold times begin their sneaky but inescapable creep, I’ve really got to figure out what to do about the front door surround. Figuring out how to replace the missing door itself is simply too much, so I’m putting that off for some distant future. But I’ve been moving ever so slowly through trying to restore what the front door region once looked like. This is what’s been facing the street for many years now:
Obviously, that’s a replacement door, and the right side is a cover-up.
Looking at the inside, I had a naive hope that the cover-up hid a narrow door that could be opened sometimes and latched other times. Though really, that’s not what the inside suggests. I guess I hoped that middle piece of wood was added later. But the alligatoring of the shellac is consistent with the rest of the wood trim.
When we started removing the aluminum cover-up outside, here’s what we found, which indicates it was not two doors but a door and a stationary light—and also something chopped off above:
After removing all the aluminum, we have this:
So some detail was chopped off at the top and the bottom of the wood divider.
Having worked on an old house with old paint and old problems for 8 years now, I understand the urge to cover it up and have everything seem nice. But why oh why couldn’t they have simply covered up? Wasn’t it more difficult to chop off than to cover up? I mean, was it ornate and huge in profile? I really doubt it, considering the rest of the house. Now I need to figure out what’s appropriate for the area and determine how I can add it. Any ideas? I need to dig through my 1910 Sears catalog.
So I’ve stripped off all the old paint and found oak underneath:
It took a few weeks to strip all the paint. It was kind of easy because the bottom coat seems to have been shellac. But also kind of hard because the finish was very weathered and had been painted over with brown paint and several coats of other colors, some of them very resistant to removal. Now I am working on how to showcase and preserve the oak for Chicago weather.
And I still have to pry off all the old caulk. But wow it’s going to look so much better when I’m done—in 7 years or so …
It’s the seasonal rituals that fill me with joy—hanging the wreath, gathering photos to send with the holiday cards, cramming caulk into every cranny so I don’t feel like I’m skiing every time I walk by one of the vinyl windows the previous owner installed upstairs.
Thankfully this year we were aided in this wintry rite by the battery-powered caulk gun we’ve got on loan from my father-un-law (sic, cuz we’re happily unmarried).
It’s a Ryobi, and I love it—though I will admit I’ve not tested other power guns. After caulking a magnificently painful mile in the last few years, this thing makes me feel like a slacker. A slacker who doesn’t have a cramped, flaming arm and hand.
Now I also love the Seasonseal caulk because it sticks tight when you need it but peels right off in the spring when you want to fling open that sash. Though I love it a little less after the tube you see up there burst its casing and started chugging out the side of the tube. That made neat work tricky.
But I don’t care anymore. The new vinyl windows are ugly, and they don’t keep the chill out, and I can’t even ignore them by looking through them because their surface is foggy and impossible to get clear. I just need to save up so I can replace them with something that won’t be useless like they are in 10 years.
Here’s some comparison info from the October 2007 issue of Old House Journal that I hope will inspire you to think twice before dumping your old windows:
Assumptions for all examples: 3×5 window; gas heat @ $1.09/therm
Storm window over single-pane original window
Cost for storm = $50
Annual energy savings = 722,218 Btu
Annual savings per window = $13.20
Simple payback = 4.5 years
*Nothing sent to the landfill
Double-pane thermal replacement of single pane window
Cost $450.00
Annual energy savings = 625,922 Btu
Annual savings per window = $11.07
Simple payback = 40.5 years
*Original window in the landfill
Low E glass double-pane thermal replacement of single pane window
Cost = $550.00
Annual energy savings = 902,722 Btu
Annual savings per window = $16.10
Simple payback = 34 years
*Original window in the landfill
Low E glass double-pane thermal replacement of single-pane window with a storm
Cost = $550.00
Annual energy savings = 132,407 Btu
Annual savings per window = $2.29
Simple payback = 240 years
*original window in landfill
Now, I know there are a lot of pressures in the world, and the personal timeline, that make it seem better to buy new windows. I respect each person’s assessment of the state of his or her house and ability to restore various parts, but I feel the need to point out that those new windows you think are solving your problems may just be the start of a whole new, expensive set of troubles. It may be slow going, but at least you can fix the old ones.
More testimony can be found from the Cornell Cooperative Extension, the Lakewood Heritage Advisory Board and Gail Wallace of Restoration Works Inc.
This evening I have a tale of success following failure and how even my most basic instincts don’t always kick in—to the detriment of a beautiful piece of old, wavy glass. But the good news first:
That piece of glass, which is going to live in the top sash of the north window on the east side of the first floor of my house, is intact! After being cut to size from a larger pane that my father decided to ditch when he (cringe) replaced the old windows on his 1915 house. I brought that sash and two others to my house a couple years back because I was about to start renovating my windows and because the glass in his was uber-wavy. I found out in trying to remove it that it was also thicker than my glass and still fitted snugly in its sashy station. I’m used to removing glass from cracked, falling-out putty; this stuff was tight and put up a fight. Having got both panes out, the man of the house and I set to cutting them to fit our sashes that had broken glass when we got here. I was too chicken to try, having been convinced I was going to break the glass in removing it. So he, who had successfully cut glass before, gave it a go. And things were going well enough until the final cut, when the pane exhibited a rebellious streak—sideways, ruining the piece for our hopeful use. So we didn’t even try on the second pane and thought maybe we’d take it to a professional in the neighborhood who we’d gone to when it came time to replace a glass shelf in my 1948 Hotpoint refrigerator. In the meantime, I searched the Old House Web boards and Google for tips on cutting wavy glass. And this is the point where I don’t understand myself because I usually research the bejeezus out of everything before taking any action. I found the advice to clean only the line to be cut with mineral spirits and to use the beady back end of the glass cutter to bang the back of the cut before setting the glass back on the table and snapping it down to take off the excess piece. None of these things had we done when we tried to cut the first pane. So I got curious, did a test run on one of the ruined pieces and decided to try again. And it worked!
The worst breakage we got was this little bit of cratering and uneven edges, which were easily cleaned up later with a diamond bit on the Dremel tool:
So here’s the newly cut piece in its new home, along with the rebellious piece on top:
So I’m just going to go ahead and be pleased about the second piece and chalk up the first piece to education (it’s also good for my co-worker who has a broken pane in a multi-light sash and has been looking for wavy glass to replace it). Next time: Stick with my usual inclination of research first!
