General Update

I haven't updated the blog in a while, so I thought I'd write a general update. Right now we're feeling a little defeated - there's so much to do that it gets overwhelming. This winter seemed especially cold and dark, so it was hard to be motivated. So things are happening very slowly.

We are in the middle of adding a half-bath to the first floor. There was a large closet in the kitchen under the back stairs, but the shape of the closet really just made it a black hole of junk - it was easy to shove things to the back of the closet and damned near impossible to retrieve them. We decided to go for a 1930s feel and found a great sink from 1936 at Construction Junction. It took me months to pick out hardware. I knew I wanted cross handles but finding ones that were just right and didn't cost $500 was a challenge. I ended up getting great hardware at Overstock.com. We did blue and white hex tile for the floor, and are planning for a blue accent wall behind the sink and blue trim. We found a great deco-looking light fixture at Lighting By Eric - which I recommend highly if you're in the Pittsburgh area. They have great prices and a huge selection, and the staff there are fantastic.

The bathroom required new wiring to be run. John climbed up into the drop ceiling in the kitchen to start the wiring. We've looked under the drop ceiling before, and all we saw was styrafoam insulation. The previous owner must have had a good styrafoam connection because she used it for everything. Anyway, when John started pulling the styrafoam down to run the wiring, he discovered a tin ceiling! We started pulling some of the drop ceiling panels down and took a closer look, and there is a complete tin ceiling in the kitchen. It's a mess - it's covered with liquid nails and styrafoam. But yes, we will do whatever it takes to restore it. It's the the ultimate treasure.

But first we have to finish the bathroom. That involved doing some plumbing. John was comfortable doing some of the basics, but not so sure about tying into the sewer line. We found a guy on Craigslist who had been laid off and needed some work, so we gave him a call. It worked out really well; Tom did a great job and he worked fast. However, finding the sewer line turned out to be more of a challenge. There are two main stacks in our house, one at the front, which drops down from the upstairs bathroom, and one at the back, below the kitchen sink. It seemed logical that those two stacks would come together somewhere and all the wastewater would go out of the front of the house. Not so. Tom had all these huge trenches dug in the basement and he couldn't find the line that should logically be there. I'm the one that figured it out - there are two stacks and they don't join and leave the house together; the one in the back runs out through the back yard, and ties into our neighbor's sewage line and then out to the alley in front of their house (when I say neighbor, I mean the house directly behind ours). And this was done because both our house and the neighbor's house used to be owned by the same family. The house was built before modern plumbing. When it was plumbed, they probably figured digging up the yard would be less of a mess than digging up the basement, and since they owned both properties it made perfect sense. Fastforward to 2009, where we don't have that much common sense, and instead dug up all this concrete and mud and made the biggest mess I've ever seen in my life. The entire house was filled with dust from cutting through the concrete. It was unavoidable - the dust was actually filtering up through the floorboards. All for nothing!

That was in January, and we're still cleaning up dust.

Another interesting find - an old shutter in the basement has a hinge on it that's stamped "1876." So our house could be a little older than we thought. All of the houses of this style in Lawrenceville are recorded as "1890s." Another plumber that did work for us about a year ago explained that the deed office in Lawrenceville burned down and all the records were lost, so no one really knows when any of these houses were built. The plumber said he owns an old house in the 10th ward, and when he pulled down an old mantle he found a letter that must have slid behind it, postmarked in the 1860s, which specifically congratulated the previous owner on the purchase of the home. Now we have this 1870s hinge, so maybe our house is a decade older than we thought.

Finally, we found a replacement for our front door. The door that's out there now isn't in the best of shape. The wood is kind of splintering and shredding, making refinishing it not really worth it. It's not that nice of a door anyway. We found an 1870s door at Construction Junction that fits the style of the house really well, and is only about an inch too tall. Our front door is an odd size, so finding a door that's only off by an inch is pretty exciting. John did some research on how to refinish it. It's solid black walnut. It's going to be incredible when it's finished.

Treasure!

At last! Some real treasure in this old house. We had taken all of the upstairs doors off to do the floors. In the process, one of them broke in half. Months passed, and I finally demanded that the doors be rehung, but we needed to replace the broken hinge. We went to Construction Junction where we found a very close match, but it was encrusted in layers of paint, as were our original hinges. So we decided to strip them while we had them off the doors. We soaked them in some kind of solvent, and then had to go after them with a wire brush and dental tools. It took over two hours to do one door's worth of hinges, and we have a couple more doors to go. But I think it's worth it. The hinges turned out to be incredibly beautiful.

Bamboo floors

Finally, after lots of messing around with wiring, John was able to get back to the new floors in the bedrooms. I haven't taken many pictures yet. These are from October. This is the master bedroom; the same flooring is in the other two bedrooms and will eventually be in the hallway as well. We're really happy with it. The color is great, and it works better in this old house than we thought. I had been slightly concerned that bamboo flooring might seem too modern for a victorian house, but then I decided that really, it's my house and I'll have bamboo floors if I want them, and if the next owner of this house doesn't like them, let them tear them out!

Unexpected wiring

These pictures are actually from August. All of our plans got completely screwed up when John tried installing the new flooring. He plugged in the air compressor and it blew a fuse. Further investigation revealed that the entire second floor, the attic, half of the basement, the ceiling light in the dining room, and one or two outlets on the first floor were all on the same breaker. Not good.

So here's a somewhat unflattering picture of me swinging a hammer like a girl. That's where we pulled the new wiring up from the basement. The new flooring was on hold while John and his dad rewired the entire second floor.





We ended up with a lot of holes in our walls, running from outlets, to switch plates, to ceiling fixtures. It messed up the whole house. In fact, I'm still cleaning up from this "project," which is still on-going -- the attic still has no electricity, and the outlets on the first floor that were tied into this circuit are still non-functioning. The second floor is mostly done, but there's still some detail plaster work and then paint.

The Attic

My great uncle asked about the attic, and I realized that I so far haven't even mentioned it. It's probably not what you'd expect. The previous owner did a lot of work to the attic, and the carpeting was installed right before we looked at the house.

The attic is very fresh, clean, lots of light. There are two rooms; the picture is of the large room and then there is a very narrow room on the other side of the house which is being used as "art storage." The big room is going to be my office/studio once the electicity has been updated.

When we looked at the house, we were feeling pretty good about it as we looked through the rooms. When we got to the attic, I knew it was my house. Not just because it's a great space, but for the views. The house is situated on top of a hill in the Lawrenceville section of Pittsburgh. There are two windows in the attic, one facing north towards Troy Hill and the Allegheny River, the other looks south at the Hill district, but if you look to the right you get a tiny glimpse of the top of some of the skyscrapers downtown. If you didn't already know this about me, I am obsessed with weather, and from my new vantage point I have fantastic views of approaching storms.

These two images are from the north window, taken last night as a terrific storm came through. That's my chimney. The rooftops are mostly residences in Lawrenceville; the large building on the right is a retirement home.

Here's the south view. Not as impressive. But if you look carefully above the large roof you can see two little gray rectangles - one is the Mellon building, the other is the US Steel building.

So, to answer my uncle's questions, there were no old treasures in the attic. However, in the front bedroom we found the old fireplace hearth under the carpet, with some newspaper glued to it from 1934. This headline was particularly amusing.

The Floors

So here are the long-awaited photos of the completed floor. These were taken right after we finished the polyurethane but before we cleaned, so there's still some dusty footprints and such, but you get the idea.


This one is looking from the living room to the dining room.
That's the living room. Here's some of the hallway. I suck at this stupid blog website so if this page looks dumb it's because I don't care enough to learn how to do HTML good and proper.



The photos don't quite do the floors justice. For pine, they came out very dark with a hint of red in them. They look more like cherry than pine. They're a little uneven and distressed-looking, but we like them that way. Kind of unusual and a little funky.

Upstairs

A few images of the upstairs. Nothing too exciting. Here's the "master bedroom," which we chose for our room because it is at the back of the house and has the biggest closet. Drawbacks - this is the only room in the house that doesn't have the original woodwork, and is very far away from the one and only bathroom. It is, however, very private.




Here's a few looking from the front bedroom (future guest room), into the middle bedroom (future music room), with our bedroom through that last doorway.





This is the long, long hallway that runs from the top of the stairs to the very small, ugly bathroom. It might not be apparent from these photos, but the floors in the upstairs aren't worth refinishing, unfortunately. The master bedroom has a bunch of bad boards and boards that have been replaced with what appears to be pieces cut from furniture, the music room has linoleum and roofing felt glued down so thick it could survive an atomic bomb, and the hallway would be lovely refinished but sanding around the railing would be a bigger pain in the ass then we're willing to deal with. So it's new floors for the upstairs. These pictures are from about 6 weeks ago. We've moved in since then, but haven't really unpacked anything for the 2nd floor that we didn't have to. You pretty much need to wear shoes at all times (I keep flip flops by the bed for middle-of-the-night bathroom trips) unless you're John, in which case you bitch about the occassional splinter. We've already ordered the flooring - bamboo from Artemis, which should arrive any day now.

Another flooring challenge awaits in the two stair wells.

The top photo is the front staircase, which will probably be painted and have a carpet runner installed. John has a pretty wild idea for the paint job on the external wall; he's calling it "deconstructed victorian." I'll let that remain a mystery for now. The bottom photo is the back staircase, leading into the kitchen. There's a door to the outside directly at the bottom of the stairs. That crap on the walls is sheets of styrofoam that the previous owner was using as insulation. There's some gorgeous (read that sarcastically) linoleum on the top landing. Our bedroom is through the doorway on the right. This staircase is pretty low-priority, but it needs some basic clean up for now, and a light might be nice.