Down Come The Walls

I’m not one of those HGTV homebuyers who wants everything perfect at the onset. Each of the houses I’ve purchased has needed work. None were falling down, but all had design changes I wanted to make, as well as updates that would change the function of the house, make it more livable.

When I looked at The Coming Home House, the furnishings were very definitely not my style, paint colors were not choices I would have made and the kitchen and bathrooms, which had likely last been updated in the 1990s were in need of updates. But what I saw beyond the cosmetics was good. Walls and ceilings were in good shape without large cracks or sags, the roof was newer and in good condition, the HVAC was relatively new and seemed to be in good shape, and the floors were in excellent condition without any staining or significant sways or unevenness. The way I saw it, The Coming Home House had good bones.

I made my offer to the seller contingent upon a home inspection. The inspection turned up very little except for some minor fixes which the seller took care of and a slight grading problem (easily fixable). I moved in pretty sure that all was in good shape, but also aware that problems could be hidden behind the walls. In a house that was almost sixty years old, I felt certain that I would find some problems here and there, but generally I was optimistic.

Significant changes were needed with
drain lines and line venting. Fortunately,
 it was the only significant problem
 we found.

From the get-go it was clear that there were likely some plumbing issues that needed attention. The toilets in the house didn’t always flush properly and the water pressure in the kitchen was very low, particularly relative to the bathrooms and laundry room sinks. I feared, based on the age of the house, that water supply lines were galvanized metal rather than copper.  Could that, I wondered, be the reason the water pressure in the kitchen was so low? Was there a run of corroded galvanized supply line impeding the water’s flow? Or was it a different problem altogether?

I knew that once demolition began, any problems would show up. No matter how many times you remodel or rehab, you don’t truly know what you’re getting into until you start opening walls. Sometimes, as in my first house when we found signed (by the workers) raw plaster walls under three layers of wallpaper, the things you find are fun and interesting. Other times, they leave you scratching your head. What you hope for most is that you don’t find anything that tells you that there are systemic problems in the house because of shortcuts or other knucklehead moves previous contractors made. So when demolition began, I held my breath.

When drywall was pulled from exterior walls
it exposed that there truly was no insulation.
.

For those who may have been hoping I’d hold my breath until I stopped breathing, no such luck. So far, other than the expected plumbing problems – which were by no means small either in physical or monetary scope – the demolition turned up little in the way of problems. It did, however, expose some interesting things about my house.

Drywall with a skim coat of plaster
over metal lath. Not easy to
 cut through!

I'd heard from neighbors there was little in the way of insulation in the exterior walls of the house. Little apparently meant none. The cinder block exterior walls were covered on the outside with a brick or stone veneer (different things in different places) and on the inside were furring strips onto which a drywall/plaster combination layer has been affixed.  This type of construction, including the lack of insulation, was not uncommon in a house of this type and this age.

The house's interior wood frame walls are covered with a drywall/plaster combination as well. Taking walls out was quite a process as lying on top of the drywall is a metal lath onto which the plaster was laid. Cutting through the lath was not as easy a process as either drywall alone or plaster on top of a wood lath would have been; it had to be sawed through and several times sparked enough to make everyone stop and take serious notice. The plaster, which we found in depths varying between 1/4" and 1/2" was generous in the amount of dust it gave out when pulled down, in part because the lath had to be sawed through and kicked around the plaster dust.  (Ah yes, dust. Part of construction. On some projects more than others. Yes, dust. A later post.)

At first you feel like demolition will
be orderly and neat . . . .

The door framing in my house is unusual in that there is no face trim. The actual door frames are mounted in such a way that the walls "surround" them rather than the frame being laid on top. As such, you can't remove a door frame without seriously damaging the walls. And retrofitting new doors into existing walls is not easy either. Finally, the outside corner beads on the doors are slightly beveled rather than a hard 90° or a curve. All in all, the doors, while they look incredibly simple are proving to be quite intricate and vexing to the contractor. I'll talk more about doors in a later post.

....and then reality sets in.

Demolition is actually a small part of remodeling and rehab and it leaves your house a mess, but it leads the way to the next step. No matter how difficult it feels, I guarantee you, it's not the worst part of the process.  That is yet to come.  That said, with it done, it is now time to move to the next step . . . putting it back together again, but the way I want it!

The Backstory on Finding That I Love Remodeling and Rehabbing

NOTE: Please forgive the long delay in between postings. There have been some "issues," some technical, some less technical to which I've been attending.

Before going directly into demolition, allow me to give a bit of the backstory on how I came to this point in my remodeling life.

The Coming Home House is not the first house in which I’ve done a lot of work.

My first house, which I owned with my ex-husband, was a 1911 classic American Foursquare. In the almost eight years we lived in the house, there was not a room we didn’t touch. The first thing we did was to pull up 1970s orange shag carpet and nailed down linoleum floors to expose original and beautiful pine and oak picture frame wooden floors. We finished the third floor and turned it into a family room/office combination with wide plank ash floors, built in desk and media center, as well as its own heating and cooling system. In the front hall, we stripped alligatored shellac off a gorgeous quarter-sawn oak staircase and refinished it. Opening directly into the dining room was a ridiculously small full bathroom (with a bathtub even my two year old could barely fit into). So as to make dinner parties much more comfortable, we moved the entrance from the dining room and divided the space, turning it into a powder room and a needed front hall closet. We added a fence, painted the exterior of the house and, last, we gutted and redid a cavernous kitchen.

When we moved from House #1 in search of a second full bathroom for our growing family, we moved into a completely different type of house. House #2 was a 1987 center hall colonial that we bought from its original owners. When we bought it in late 2000, it came with all its original parts. The kitchen and both bathrooms came with identical builder’s grade cherry cabinetry, and every piece of wood trim in the house was painted the identical color, that of the BandAids in a box that has been sitting in the medicine cabinet for 10 years. Before even moving into that house, we pulled down extensive wallpaper and painted almost every room. I thought, foolishly I retrospectively understood, that would be enough. Shortly after moving in, I realized the kitchen was not a “cook’s kitchen,” but rather one that had been designed by a builder using the formulaic work triangle. Yes, the three main stations – the cooktop and oven, the sink and the refrigerator – were in the right places, but nothing else in the kitchen was where it should be and it functioned poorly. So began the work on House #2.

Before finishing, we’d gutted and redone the kitchen, redone the master bath and moved the laundry room from the first floor to the master bath. The second bathroom on the upper floor got a full redo, and the powder room and mud room got the same treatment. We'd moved a large closet and created a wet bar, and, finally, completely finished the basement, including adding a large wet bar area, a guest bedroom and a full bath. We had added windows here and there, replaced windows here and there, pulled up carpet and replaced it with wood floors, moved interior doors and more. Fairly extensive landscaping was also in the mix.

My time in those two houses told me that I loved remodeling and rehabbing, and it also, sadly, brought the end of my more than twenty year marriage. It was time to breathe deeply and move on.

Closing on The Coming Home House was emotional. Not only would this house bring me back to my hometown, but Chicago and I had each changed a great deal since I’d last lived there. I was now the divorced mom of two amazing young men who would shortly make me an empty nester. This also was the house I intended to make my last house and I would live here by myself except for those times my sons came for extended stays. Finally, since leaving Chicago, both my parents had passed away and coming back to live without their physical presence in town meant that the rhythm of my life in Chicago would be greatly altered from what it been twenty-three years earlier. As I walked out of the closing with my attorney and drove to my new house, I had no one with whom to share the excitement. It was bittersweet moment. 

After closing, I walked silently through the now empty house, checking each room, each system, making sure each was in the same good shape as it had been at my final walk-through the night before. After surveying the whole house, I unloaded my car of the things I’d brought for those first several days: a coffee pot, clothing and toiletries, some bath and bed linens, cleaning supplies, a few dishes and a bottle of good red wine. A new bed was coming that afternoon. My plan was to pretty much camp out in my house those first two weeks and decide on my next step. Later that afternoon a dear friend arrived with a bottle of Prosecco that we used to toast my new life. It made the day a whole lot more sweet and much less bitter. That night, tired, I fell into bed and slept deeply.

Those first two weeks I spent doing a lot of standing and staring. One day a friend dropped by and found me standing in my front yard just staring at my house. I’d been there long enough that I’m sure the neighbors had already begun to comment on their new neighbor, the crazy woman who liked to stand in her front yard. I explained to my friend that I was just trying to take it all in, figure out what to do and when. And eventually I did that. By the end of those two weeks, I not only had a plan, but a sort of mission statement. I knew the many things I wanted to do and in what order, but underlying every decision I would make was a desire on my part to be respectful of the architecture and style of the house while simultaneously making the house livable for 2014 and beyond.

What specific things did I want to do? Here’s the list:

•  Pull the nasty carpet on the front porch up, clean and seal the concrete.
• Clean up the garden and then do some pretty extensive landscaping (including hardscape changes).
• Paint, inside and out.
• Change and enhance outdoor lighting including changing all current fixtures.
• Pull the cracked and discolored vinyl siding and replace it with something more appropriate to the age of the house.
• Figure out how to get the many tennis ball dents out of the garage door without completely replacing it.
• Remove or replace the front door storm door.
• Replace the front door . . . or make changes to it.
• Remove current rusted window blinds in the bedrooms and replace them. Find and install window coverings in the living/dining room.
• Replace the dining room chandelier.
• And the list goes on . . .  and on . . .  and on and on.

So in addition to the substantial changes I wanted to make in the bedrooms, bathrooms and kitchen, I had a whole host of other things I needed and wanted to get to. My plan included extensive demolition and construction. I’d been there before and I was ready to begin again, ready to begin on a new house and new life.