Dirty Jobs

 So when we started working on the house, it had zero usable electricity or plumbing. We had to use the gas station bathroom across the street. We could only work while the sun was out, because we didn't have any lighting. A lot of the work we did was pretty nasty, dirty work. And, that first summer was pretty hot outside, so we were sweating also, which made us smell as bad as the house! There must have been several animals in the house when the people lived here, as well as all of the squirrels that took over when the house was full of stuff but empty of people. 

One of those stories that you say "some day I will look back on this and laugh" happened when we were working on the kitchen. 

The floor had 2 layers of peel and stick vinyl squares that I had to scrape up, there wasn't really any usable appliances or cabinets, so we started from scratch. To the right of this picture was a chimney for the servants to do the summer cooking in the basement, and it was between two windows. You can see one of them in this photo with the green and white curtain. The squirrels had chewed up a lot of the window framing, and the other window was boarded up because the glass had fallen out. We decided to close up those windows, remove the chimney and put a big window in the center of the wall. I can distinctly remember framing in that window so we could cover it back up. As I leaned into the window frame with my pneumatic nailer, I lined up my 2x4 and pulled the trigger. The impact of the nail shook the wall and years of.... lets call it dust... fell down from inside the wall and landed on me. A big portion of which fell down the back of my t-shirt. Oh, and it was like 90 degrees outside and I was sweaty. It was disgusting. And remember, we had no running water there, and it would be the evening before I was able to go back to mom's house to get a shower. 100+ years of dust, grime, dead bugs, squirrel droppings and who knows what else was now "glued" to my scalp, neck and back. Good times.... sigh..

We closed up that window, closed the right butler pantry door, and that became the corner for the stove and cabinets. When we took out the chimney, we wanted a big window over the sink. I had priced out what we wanted, and it was about $1700 for what I was looking for. Feeling kind of bummed because that wasn't in our budget, I started searching Craigslist. I just happened to find someone selling this window complete with the leaded glass on the top. 

Pete! It's our window!! I practically yelled. He said Get the details and we can see if it will work. It turned out to be a perfect fit for that space. It was part of an old house in another town over, that was being torn down. The city had the fire department take everything usable in the house and sell it. So it was a 100+ year old window with leaded glass, just like the other windows in our house. I bought it for $200.  Another example of God and the Universe finding us what we needed. We have so many of these stories that I try not to forget all of them, and express gratitude whenever we seem to "get lucky" with a find. It's more than luck! 

The How's and the Why's of Victorian Architecture

 So in the first few months, my days were filled with cleaning the house, and the evenings were filled with researching Victorian architecture. We wanted to bring the house back to it's glory. I studied interior design for a few years, and I was always interested in the "why" something was the way it was. 

A lot of Victorian homes from the early 1900s have a similar layout.  The outside of the house would have a front porch that would only wrap around one side of the house. There was an entry vestibule, and then the formal parlor.  The front third of the house was formal, the middle was a bit more comfortable, and the back third was usually quite plain.  The reason for this was that the front of the house was where someone would welcome their guests. It had the best furniture, the beautiful woodwork, and the most elaborate decorating. They homeowners would entertain their guests in the formal parlor.  The middle sections of the house were the family room and dining room. This would obviously be where the family would relax and eat. So the decor was a bit more comfortable, the furniture a bit more worn, but still a very pleasant space.

The back of the house was usually the kitchen, the butler's pantry, the mudroom, and often times held the servants staircase. That staircase allowed the servants to get from the basement to the top floors without being seen by the family. The kitchen area was usually painted wood, bare floors, small windows and completely functional versus beautiful. 

The front door was elaborate to show off to the incoming guests. The porch, as I said before, would wrap around to one side of the house. That gave an additional entry into the house for the family. Since the streets were dirt during that time, the family entered the middle of the house to save the rugs  and wood floors from tracking in all the dirt to the formal area. Because remember, there weren't any vacuum cleaners at the time, so the rugs had to be taken outside to be beaten and shook out. 

The servants would then enter from the back of the house usually into the kitchen area. The kitchen was the access point for the basement because usually only the servants would ever go into the basement. It also had a staircase that lead all the way to the 3rd floor, which was where the servants slept. That staircase wasn't usually seen by the family either. 

The term "Victorian" has been modified and watered down a lot in the last century, to include many different types of houses. Some even add gingerbread designs to the gables of Colonial houses and instantly they are called Victorian now. So my explanations are more about the true homes from the late 1800s to the early 1900s. 

Our house does have the porch wrapped around one side, and the servant areas and separate staircase. We even have the original servant's bell behind the swinging kitchen door. We have a door to the porch roof that was the "dust porch" where they would take the rugs from the second floor to shake them out, rather than drag them down to the first floor. 

Architecture has always fascinated me, so I hope you enjoyed these explanations.

Some Before and After photos

 So I'm not normally one to toot my own horn, but I am really proud of the transformation of this house. This post will show you some of the great before and after pictures.  

I want to open the blog up to a Question and Answer post for next week. I will post answers in pictures, or I will make videos answering the questions. So start asking away in the comments section, and I will do my best to answer them.

Some Before and Afters...

The Living Room is one of my favorite transformations. When we got the house, there was literally zero usable electricity. So we got the panels installed in the basement and fed an extension cord up through a hole in the living room floor. That became our workroom.  So we basically took turns using the one electrical source for our power tools. We didn't waste it on lighting, we just worked when the sun was up, and went home when it went down. The floor had the gorgeous stripes in it, but was so dirty, you couldn't see them.

 

Quite the transition!!! 

When we bought the house, it was a duplex. Sometime in the 20s, they had converted the house from a single family into a duplex, we figured to make more money by renting parts of it out. They removed the staircase in the foyer and made that a bedroom. We had to open the ceiling back up and recreate the staircase.  The foyer also had a drop ceiling, and parts of the ceiling were missing because pipes had burst throughout the house. It was a huge mess..

and now...

The last set of pictures for this post are of the attic. It was just one giant open space, no walls or anything. We figured out that the female servants would live up there.  We wanted 4 guest suites, so we made the front 1/3 of the attic a suite, and the back 2/3 are our personal space.

If you look closely at the before picture, you can see the electric panel. The wires came in through the window from the street. It had a 30amp/120 system to run the entire house. We joke that someone had to turn off their hair dryer so someone else could run a microwave. It had the original knob and tube wiring throughout the house, and sometimes the insulation was peeled back and lamp cord was wrapped around the wires to add electricity somewhere. Surprised the house didn't catch fire!! 

So.. next week will be Q&A time.. get me those questions to answer!!

The work really begins

 In the fall of 2017 we closed on our beautiful (well, not exactly beautiful yet) house, and began the cleaning and renovation process. We knew going into it that we would have A LOT of work to do, but we could see the potential. We saw the fantastic pocket doors, the 8 foot doorways, the original hardwood floors, and we knew it could be beautiful.  The house was almost 120 years old at that point, so it had been through many, many transitions. It was turned into an upper/lower duplex in the 20s, and split off to different rental areas in the years that followed. 

We began opening everything back up to restore it as a single family home again, and started the renovations.  Some of the hardwood floors had, unfortunately, been covered up with indoor-outdoor carpet glued down.  The kitchen hardwood was covered with 2 layers of peel-and-stick vinyl. There were drop ceilings in many of the areas, because the plaster wasn't taken care of.  And the squirrels had taken over much of the space, so several windows were missing because the squirrels had chewed enough of the frame, that the windows had fallen out.  When the house was a duplex, it only had a very small powder room on the main floor, so the previous people had placed a bathtub inside the Butler's pantry.  This caused the pantry floor to rot and almost completely disintegrate. We could peel up the hardwood with our hands, it just crumbled. You could look down into the basement from the pantry, and had to watch your step or you would fall through.

The house still had the original knob and tube electricity coming in through the 3rd floor window. The system was a 30amp/120 system to run the entire house. We joked that someone had to turn off the hair dryer so someone else could use the toaster! In the basement, the insulation from the wires was peeled back, and lamp cord was wrapped around the wires to add electricity to rooms. It's a wonder the house never caught fire! Obviously, we had to start all of the electric from scratch. So for the first few months, we had the electric from the street to the panel in the basement, and then one electric extension cord from there to the living room. That became our work room. So if Pete needed to use an electric tool, I had to wait my turn to use mine. We didn't want to waste that cord for lights, so we only worked when the sun was up, and closed it down when the sun went down. No heat, no lights, no running water.. we went to the gas station to use the bathroom. We worked like this for the first 6 months of this project. 

But all through this, we knew this house was special. We felt it every day when we arrived. She was happy we were here making her beautiful again.