goodbutnotgreathouse

[goodbutnotgreathouse]

Paint! Round 2.

Last time, we left off with an unpainted upstairs and stairwell. I’m here to say, it’s officially done!

First up, ceilings!

A had used joint compound and a sander to smooth out some of the ceiling patches that were left after we scraped the popcorn. I then went through and painted the ceilings. Started with our office as that has been our test room for everything we have done so far. I didn’t bother cutting in since we needed to paint the walls still, so I just rolled everything in little squares til it was done. Honestly, neither of us remember how the guest bedroom went down, many things got out of order because of problems we had in that room. The master bedroom was done just like the office, but looks way better since I had finally figured the whole painting ceiling thing. But it’s no Sistine Chapel.

We had decided on wall paint colors about the second day we were in the house. We ran to our closest Ace and grabbed samples: Grey Owl for the office, guest bedroom, and stair/hall thing. Then a rather daring (hopefully awesome) color for our own master, Marine Aqua. It’s a gorgeous blue green that plays with the light.

We had taped off the ceiling in the office and painted the walls and we were so excited to take the tape off and have a room finished! Except as A went to take the tape off, part of the ceiling came with it. Sigh. When we scraped the ceilings, there was still some paper/dust that we just couldn’t get off, so the tape had enough stickiness that it took the new paint with it. I quickly went over any patches with paint and declared the room DONE; with paint…

With this new found knowledge that we couldn’t tape the ceilings, I needed to cut in the walls around the ceilings on the rest of the rooms. So I started with the guest room. Going very slowly, I eventually got the hang of it, and the guest room was finished as well! It took me one more day to to cut in the master and do the first coat of Marine Aqua, then the second coat, and that one too was done!

A went down to Iowa for Friday and Saturday, so I took it upon myself to paint the bathroom. We had decided on painting everything in Simply White, so I started cutting in everywhere. I got the first full coat done Friday night, and then finished Saturday. If anyone ever asks you what color they should paint their bathroom, never suggest blue. The bathroom had previously been the color of painters’ tape, so going to all white took two coats. It seems HUGE now, walking in you don’t feel like you’re cramped in this space, you now have some elbow room!

Sunday morning we decided it was time to start packing. And by that I mean, we decided to start tearing our lives apart in both the house and our apartment. The house (while sooo close to being done) looks more like a work site than a home, and now, our apartment has empty bookshelves and a big pillar of boxes. Soon. Two more weeks of this and we will have things in the house!

Now that painting was done, we could move on to our next easy feat: the floors! There is carpet in the three rooms upstairs, but it was cheap and we just don’t like carpet, so away it goes. On the day we closed, we had torn back the carpet in the master closet and found hardwood. Over the past two weeks we were hoping that when we pulled up the carpet in all three rooms, there would be gorgeous hardwood without fire damage.

Fortunately, dreams do come true! A took it upon himself (he came home early from a weekend trip) to peel back the carpet and lo and behold, pristine hardwood floors! We found original ~100 year old red maple floors in the master and guest bedrooms! In the office, we found a really beautiful parquet floor; so we think the fire in the 80s did most of its damage just in the office.

We then spent 2 days lovingly spraying, scraping, and cursing our gorgeous floors. A little bit of Goof Off, a little bit of Goo Gone, a lot of wrist and shoulder work, and a LOT of pulling random staples, nails, half nails-half screws out. I swept, vacuumed, and cleaned them today and we called them done. They are absolutely perfect; they creak, they have scratches and dents, they are not level, but, they are 100 years old. When I get to be 100, I’m sure I too will creak and have some scratches and dents.

For about 4 hours, while I was at work, came home, cleaned the floors, and went to go get dinner, A stayed at the house putting the first coat of white paint on our stairway trim! This included all the baseboards, two windows, the stair risers, and part of the old railing. Oh my goodness, it’s gorgeous. I can barely believe it’s the same house as two weeks ago, let alone OUR home. It needs one more coat to even out the color, but otherwise it will be done!

I really can’t believe the amount of work we have done to this house. We’ve put blood, sweat, and money into it, and it’s feeling like our home finally!

—T

ANDREW ADDENDUM

Here's the thing about carpet over hardwood. On the one hand, it preserves floors really well. These things look like they were refinished and then carpeted in the same day! The problem is that now you have to scrape off all the foam adhesive and pull all the tack strips. And because our house is our house... It's a nightmare.

They clearly ran out of fasteners as they went through the rooms, since I have found four differnet types of fasteners (three types of nails and a screw for some unknowable reason), and at some point the adhesive must have run out because it's on half of one wall in the bedroom. But whoever did this did not understand how carpet works, because they used these horrible, awful, worst-invention-ever nail-screw combo things:

All the ease of the nail with all the difficulty of removal of a screw! I get the prybar under one and then put my entire 1/10th-of-a-ton bodyweight on it and it doesn't budge. It takes every muscle in my body to pull these horrible things out — at least 200 pounds of force. On the tack strips. And they're placed about six inches apart! No one has ever, in their entire lives of using carpet, ever applied that much force to a tack strip.

I hate this.

—A

P.S. T was smart enough to suggest just getting a wider lightswitch for the dining room (???). It totally worked and saved me having to bust out the joint compound again. I have dreams where I spend hours cleaning it off my hands only to discover a new place to joint, only to realize that oh god, this isn't a dream, this is real life, how have we already used a gallon of joint compound in this house, good god, help, save us

[goodbutnotgreathouse]

Paint!

Well, we painted downstairs! It took two coats and like a linear mile of blue tape, but we did it! No photos yet, though, because I want to show the entire house once it's done. That, and the entire downstairs still looks like Construction Hell despite our (incredibly half-hearted and tired) attempts to organize and clean up.

Our friends came by and helped us get the first and second coats on, lovingly describing our paint choice as "asylum white." I think T and I think of it as "anything other than that horrible color that was here before oh my god why was it here" and that I thought resembled the color I feel when I am incredibly hungover and have a cold. All that is to say — it looks better now.

So with the downstairs painted, it was time to tackle the upstairs. And that starts on the stairs.

Again, we lucked out — there is basically no lead paint anywhere, and none upstairs, probably thanks to the fire in '85. In fact, the only place I found it was in the small window right above the bottom of the stairs. Originally the plan was to get that abated, but I think we may just paint over it. A lack of lead means that we could clean up some of the nasty, crusty trim and try to get smooth and flat.

I briefly considered trying to strip it, but wound up not doing that because it's really hard just on the built-in and the trim down here was originally painted anyway. So I could claim "restoration!" and save myself like four days' worth of stripping. Instead, I hit it with the sander. In retrospect, I think I should have just stripped it.

As you can see, those images get progressively darker because I sanded for four straight hours. I don't know where the paint for this came from, but anyone looking for bullet-resistant coatings should try it, because it was like freakin' armor. It chewed through 10 60-grit sanding discs (which, as my friend pointed out, is like playground sand in terms of coarseness) and then 10 more 120-grit discs, leaving a pile of fallen disc comrades at the bottom of the stairs.

It also produced an insane amount of dust. I mean, you can see how much paint was removed. In some places there's bare wood! I knew I should expect a lot but I was seriously not emotionally ready for how much dust there actually was. I taped off the doorway with plastic and thank god I did, because if I hadn't the entire house would have had a gentle shade of grey powder coated to it.

Speaking of bare wood, I realize this looks like the world's worst sanding job, but my goal wasn't to get down to bare wood or even color or anything. All I wanted was the major bumps and scuffs removed so we had a nice smooth surface to paint on. It looks like total garbage, but it's smooth and wonderful when you run your finger along it. There were a number of dents and gaps I couldn't sand out (for obvious reasons) so I went back the next day and hit it with some wood filler.

By the way, wood filler is the most disgusting stuff on the planet. It smells horrible, dries really quickly, and is just an overall enormous pain to work with. You have to mix the benzene-with-halitosis gunk in a can with a 1/16th ratio of wood hardener in a tube which is really hard to do with a spackle knife, and then apply it all in 10 minutes before it dries. And then your entire stairwell smells like woodfiller! On later gaps I just used joint compound.

Our friends also helped demo the upstairs! Pretty much everything up here is going, and we got rid of it before painting to make our lives easier. That meant removing all the old oak trim and the doors and the railing (balistur?). The trim was nailed in.. haphazardly, with some pieces barely having enough nails to stay on the wall and some having way, way, way more than necessary. And the nails were actually pins and they were also the wrong size so pulling the trim off basically meant that the nails pulled right through and had to be pulled by hand.

This is only half the nails I pulled. Later my mom came and got hte rest of them, except for a few that were right next to hinges and JUST NOT WORTH IT.

The doors were something else entirely. They were all attached with a seemingly random series of screws, none of which were actually the kind you'd want to use to hang hinges with. Each hinge had room for three screws, and by god, there were three random screws in each hole. You also generally want to put long screws on the top part of a hinge to help keep the door from pulling out of the wall, but they were not to be found. That is, until I unscrewed the strike plates and discovered that the 3" long screws that you're supposed to put in the hinges had actually been used to hold on the strike plates. Look, I want my house to fall apart less than probably anyone, but the strike plates are the part I am least concerned about — but apparently the previous owners had some sort of strike plate destruction phobia. Who am I to judge? (I am the person trying to fix the mistakes of the past.)

I was hoping that maybe we could salvage the hinges at least, since the door jambs already have rabbets cut in them that are the right size and (in most cases) shape. Unfortunately — because nothing in this house can ever be done right, and instead insists on being done just wrong enough to make me want to tear my hair out — every single hinge was glued to the door, in addition to being screwed to it! I guess because they put the wrong/bad/random screws into the hinges they had issues with the doors falling off, so instead of reassessing the fixation method that works on literally every other door ever, they decided they should glue the the things to their hinges! So all the hardware had to go because I was not going to spend an hour prying old hinges off crappy doors.

I'm trying to not say too much bad stuff about the previous owners here. Look, I'm sure they did the best they could — but sometimes it feels like nobody bothered to do any research of any kind (including just asking someone) before the dove right in and did something wrong. Thank god no one ever decided to take down a load-bearing wall or something...

At the top of the stairs there used to be an oak, builder-grade railing which was inoffensive enough but didn't match the rest of the house and also was wobbly as heck. Basically I assumed it was going to fall over for any reason at any minute, so it had to go. Turns it it was toescrewed in through the 100-year-old, survived-through-a-fire floorboards (!!!) and then randomly and haphazardly nailed along its base. It was then nailed in a cluster of five finishing nails into the trim on the side of the wall, as if this was a good method of attaching it. It took some force to take it out (a mallet + a prybar) but significantly less than you'd want to remove a railing over stairs.

Now we just have a big hole there (through which you could see under the floorboards into the intrajoist space!), which I might leave until after move in. I have to say, having a big open space there will make it 10x easier to get furniture upstairs. Eventually we'll build a new craftsman-style railing to take its place, but I have to figure out how I want to attach it to the floor. I am of two minds: after dealing with all the shoddy craftsmanship and stuff that isn't to our taste, I want to make it easy for future homeowners to take it out if they want to. But I also want to make it structurally sound, nice to look at (i.e. no exposed fasteners), and reasonably easy to attach. Just screwing it down to the joists and covering the heads with caulk makes it easy for me, but not so much for future homeowners (or future us) to remove or repair later.

T and our friend also started painting the ceilings in the bedroom, but we quickly discovered why you'd want to get a professional to come scrape the popcorn off — after the huge mess was cleaned up, paint quickly revealed the areas that weren't perfectly smooth and made them stand way out. It was especially bad in the guest bedroom for some reason, so I spent an hour or two throwing joint compound up onto it to cover all the scratches, leftover popcorn texture, and lumps we left behind. I did it in a few spots in the master, too, but not the office because the paint was still drying there. My shoulder was dying afterwards.

But not as much as it did after I sanded that thing. It produced a prodigious amount of dust — way more than sanding the trim. It was really fine, too, so it was like a fine mist in the rooms. I opened the windows and you could see the air blowing through and making little convection circles in the air. It would have been beautiful if not for the fact that every single surface upstairs and within 10 feet of the downstairs stair door got covered in it.

I also started painting the walls in the hallway, which is a bit of a nightmare because there's probably 15 feet between the landing and the ceiling, and there are a lot of little corners and areas that are hard to reach even if you're standing on an eight foot ladder. I had to climb to the VERY top of that thing and brace myself against the walls to get it all painted, and at one point I had to tape a brush to a broom handle so I could get some edges. There are no pictures of this part because my mom reads this blog and she would kill me if I exposed myself to another head injury. Anyway, I got it done and I did not hurt myself.

We're painting the master a really lovely dark green-blue color ("marine aqua" claims Benjo Morrison) which looks great in the light and dark and sort of subtly shifts throughout the day. With the white trim everywhere it's going to look stellar in there. To make sure we get a really good, even color that doesn't blend with the previous wall color, I took some of the leftover grey we used upstairs and used it as a primer on the walls. Regal Select (fancy) already has a primer built in, but I really want the color in there to look good, so I figured it was a good idea.

The back wall in the master was (is?) an accent wall painted really dark and covered with floor-to-ceiling wainscoting. After popping it off and sanding the whole thing down smooth (my aaaaaarms), I primed it with the grey. And this right here is why you spend the money on good paint: one coat haphazardly applied basically covered the wall completely. A single coat!

My parents came over this weekend, and while my mom was helping with the painting and pulling the ten thousand tiny nails stuck in the walls where trim used to be, my dad helped us replace a bunch of outlets and light fixtures. At least, that was the plan until he discovered this horrible little nightmare in the dining room:

No, it's not that there's a hole in our ceiling. Let me explain. See, we live in a 100-year-old house, and back in 1919 they didn't have electrical boxes. You just mounted light fixtures directly the joists or studs. Which is fine when you do it right, because those are really strong and can hold things like 50-pound fans and light fixtures. When it becoems a problem is when you don't affix those things to the joists, and instead attach them to the lath which you then split with the screws you attached.

Plaster walls are composed of three parts: the studs, which hold the wall up, the lath, which are thin strips of wood attached to the studs perpendicularly and form a sort of wooden screen, and the plaster, which is laid on top of the lath. The lath's only job is to hold the plaster — each individual strip of wood is like 3/8" thin and not strong enough on its own to hold anything. Together they make a good surface for the plaster, which is heavy, but the load of which is spread all over the lath in the wall and not in one central spot.

The problem with the fan is that it was attached directly to one of these little strips of lath, which is not capable of holding it up on its own. On top of the lath there was a small piece of wood clearly designed to act as a space, with two drywall screws driven through it into the lath. This might have worked if the lath was super-strong, but it's not, so it didn't, and there was the extra little problem of the wood splitting. See, old house are made out of dense wood, and the screws were put into the grain without being pre-drilled, which caused the wood to split right along the grain as you can see in the picture above. Horrifyingly, my dad could just pull the screws out by hand — they weren't actually screwed into anything! And they were holding up a big, heavy fan. At least in theory.

In reality, the excessive amount of caulk surrounding the fan was the thing actually holding it up. If you've been paying attention, you've reached the same terrifying conclusion that my dad and I did: this big, 50-pound fan was basically just glued to the ceiling from the outside. It's a good thing we never turned it on because it could have come crashing down at basically any minute. So the end result is that we have to call an electrician in to install a box that is properly attached to the joists so that we don't have to worry about our light fixtures falling apart. And that means he's probably going to have to make a bigger hole and tear into our beautiful, century-old ceilings! We are pretty pissed about this.

There was one little piece of nice good news. Despite being so tired I basically fell asleep in the camp chairs set up in the (newly safe from falling debris) dining room, I insisted on putting an outlet cover over the box. Because nothing says "this room is not done yet" by having a gaping hole surrounding your outlets.

We were so proud! So excited! So it was pretty crushing when I discovered we couldn't cover the lightswitch because the hole was too big.

I'll probably joint that, but it also turns out that the faceplate screws are too short to reach that far back (thanks to 100 year's worth of paint and plaster layering up), so we have to figure that one out too.

Houses, man, I tell ya. They never work out like they're supposed to.

—A

[goodbutnotgreathouse]

Prepping for Paint

This was a crazy weekend. Friday morning we closed (hooray!) and we celebrated with some nice shampaggin and barbeque from the fried chicken joint in Saint Paul, Revival. Man alive was it ever delicious!

Then came the one thing that was stressing me out more than anything else — testing for lead. Our house was built in 1919 and nobody really know about how totally nasty lead paint is. I mean, like really bad. SCIENCE ALERT I minored in neuroscience, and we covered lead and why it's such a dangerous substance in my neurobiology class. There are a number of ions involved in neurotransmissions — the big ones are sodium (Na+), potassium (K+) and calcium (Ca+), which are used to send electrical signals to other neurons. Well, to these cells, lead looks just like Ca+ and they happily absorb it, where it starts to do all sorts of damage to the cells. It will really screw you up, so I was terrified we'd find it in our walls.

And yet! Nothing to be found at all. We used about 40 of these really great 3M lead swabs and found nothing! I checked all the walls in the main floor, the trim, and the varnish, and nothing! (The little bit of red you see on the wall there isn't a positive lead test — that's blood from my finger) I was thrilled, and immediately started scraping out the at-least-30-year-old adhesive stuck to the bottom shelf of the built-in. It was sticky and digusting and horrible.

Right as I finished, it occurred to me that I hadn't spent any time checking for lead in the kitchen. And unfortunately, the news there wasn't as good.

Shoot! It turns out the trim in the kitchen, which had been painted over and over and over, had some lead in it. So now we have to track down someone who abates it. I was bummed, but tried to look on the bright side: no lead anywhere else in our century-old house, which meant we could start tearing into these walls.

But first — upstairs. A fire in '85 cause the entire upstairs to be remodeled, and while they did it right and correctly... they also did it as cheaply as possible. We're talking 2" oak trim, small windows, carpet, and popcorn ceilings. They're inoffensive enough, but they darken ceilings and they're not period-appropriate. They had to go.

Since we know we're repainting, removing the trim, and tearing out all the carpet, we weren't super diligant about taping the plastic up to the walls. We just did it a few inches above the floor, and thank god we did it. Because holy god, what an enormous mess. I read a lot about how messy these things are to take down but I was not prepared for the sheer amount of dust and garbage we wound up creating. It was everywhere.

We did the 'ol spray'n'scrape method, which worked pretty well once we realized that our sprayer wasn't spraying. We were probably about five minutes away from calling in a professional before I realized that water wasn't coming out of it and we were basically dryscraping. Once we got the water up there it started coming down in sheets. We knocked out all three bedrooms in about three hours, getting progressively faster as we went along. Then we went home and had beer and ice cream.

Saturday I aso started cleaning the trim. The previous paint had accumulated all over the wood, and there was a horrendous caulking job that was far from square and accurate — at some points, there was about half an inch of the sill missing and painted over! So I spent a couple hours scraping out all the garbage from next to the trim and cleaning it up so we had nice tight corners everywhere. We used these amazing Goof-Off wipes which, after some scrubbing, took off basically all the old paint left us with clean wood. That, coupled with the amount of crap we pulled out from behind and next to the trim, led to windows that actually look like they sit on top of the wall instead of being sucked into it!

Because I am bad at this, I have no pictures of this process, but I do have this one that shows how much crap was hiding the wood on just one window:

We went from this:

to this:

It's not perfect, but it's a lot better. We did this on all the windows, and most turned out better than this guy, which was by far in the worst shape out of any of them.

My folks came over on Saturday to help out around the place: my mom spackled the numerous holes in the walls, my dad installed new locks, and we just got a lot of the stuff done we needed to do before painting could occur. Right as they were about to leave, I showed my dad our new thermostat and he got excited about trying it out. So he popped off the old thermostat and the horrendous plate it was sitting on, and lo and behold, it was like a time capsule of the house:

We think the light green is the original color of the house, which was later repainted that slightly darker green. The brown goop everywhere is from our lead test, which (re-)confirmed that there is NO LEAD PAINT in these walls! I'm not sure what thermostat technology was like in 1920, but it seems to me that they added something, then changed it out sometime in the 50s for that BIG circular one. The Nest is three inches in diameter, and that big green circle is probably five or six. It must have been there for a while, too, since the white plaster went around it at some point. Then someone installed that faceplate that you can see the outline of, and have been painting over it ever since. No faceplates for us! I patched the whole thing with some joint compound Saturday night, then hit it with spackle Sunday morning. Once it dried I sanded the whole thing and gave it a test coat of paint, and now you'd never guess it was there.

My mom is a huge gardener, and Sunday afternoon she turned our fenced-in weed zone (not as cool as it sounds #blazeit) into an actual, honest-to-goodness vegetable garden! She was out there a long time, and since she's an organic gardener, she pulled all the weeds by hand. I'm really impressed. She planted carrots in the sun (the patch in back) and lettuce, potatoes, and spinach in the front. T and I are happy, and our guinea pigs are going to be very happy.

Sunday and Monday were a bunch of odd jobs to get ready for painting, like sanding down spackle, cleaning up holes around trim, caulking the trim, and taping everything out. I also put a big hole in the wall of the sun room:

There was an old outlet cover there, one of the kind that you screw on when you remove the outlet. When I popped it off (after removing several coats of paint) I discovered that not only was there never any outlet there, there had never been any kind of electrical work there at all! In fact, the electrical box was just nailed in to the studs. I was horrified but not surprised — that's par for the course with this place.

That weird stone-looking material at the back of the hole? I poked it and as far as I can tell, it seems to be the old insulation! There's foam around the hole and behind the wall, but I'm guessing they put this box in first and sprayed around it, leaving the old stuff in place. According to the plans, it's something called Linofelt, about which I can find next to nothing except this cool logo:

Anyway, since the lath was missing, I had nothing to adhere the plaster to. I considered buying some and putting it in there, but it's such a small space with just those two little studs on either side, I figured I could probably only squeeze two in there without making the hole a lot bigger. Plus, that seemed like a lot of work for a four-inch hole. Instead, I got some of that drywall mesh, screwed it into the studs, and then put plaster patch on top of that. I kept adding layers until it was about a quarter inch from flush with the surrounding wall, and once it dries (today, I guess), I'll joint on top of it and put some texture on so it matches the surrounding wall. Then it's just a matter of sanding it down and boom! You'll never know it was there.

With everything patched, caulked, sanded, and taped, it was finally time to start painting on Monday. Here's what it looked like after our first coat Monday at 9:30:

You see the crappy splotchy paint on the big wall to the left? That's where I started. T is secretly a paint master, so I quickly moved to cutting in the edges while she kicked ass with the roller. We only had the time (and energy) to do one coat on one side of the living room, but it already looks so much better and brighter in there. We took the Sweethome's advice and went with Benny Moore in Simply White. Tonight we'll finish the first coat, and tomorrow we start the second. Hopefully we can get the whole ground floor done by the weekend!

—A

[goodbutnotgreathouse]

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

[goodbutnotgreathouse]

98-year-old Plans

Inspired by a post over at McMansion Hell (aka the best architecture blog on the internet), I wanted to see if I could track down our home's original plans. It's a bit of a plain (good, not great!) house, so something told me that I'd be able to find it in one of those old Sears catalogs where you send them a thousand dollars and they send you a house, some assembly required. After poring through a couple of catalogs from around 1919, I came across an article in the Star Tribune that had this to say on the subject:

Are there many in the Twin Cities? No, although kit homes were popular in many other Midwestern cities. Hunter spent several days driving around the Twin Cities looking for kit homes and found very few.

Well, that would have been great to know beforehand. The article goes on to discuss how the "strong local labor unions and powerful developers" kept kits out of the Cities in favor of local builders. Local builders, you say — I bet the Hennepin County Library has information on that. The library has a fantastic resource for finding out the history of Minneapolis homes, including house plan books! Unfortunately, there's no information about which houses are built where, so with my permit card in-hand, I dove into the pre-1920s plan books.

Boy, they have a lot of plans. I think it's actually going to be a great resources when we work on the exterior of the house because they show what the original craftsman- and foursquare-style homes actually looked like in the area. Mostly beautiful, occasionally boring, and sometimes hideous.

After digging through for a little while and pulling out some plans that looked similar, I found one that looked suspiciously similar to ours. Same end-gable front entrance with dormers on the side, same balcony on the second floor, a very similar layout, a staircase on the right! Looked like a match.

We knew that at some point the front porch had been closed in to build a sunroom and an enclosed front entryway, and it looks like when they did that they straightened the bottom part of the stairs out into the old vestibule. Interestingly, the butler pantry and mudroom — which we thought were original — must have been added later, because here they're shown as another entry way and.. stairs. My guess is at some point, someone enclosed that rear entrance to add some extra storage to the kitchen, and then much later, someone else added the mudroom. The left-hand wall of the mudroom has a window into the pantry and stucco on it, so that's my best guess.

In 1985 a fire destroyed the upstairs, and we assumed they had completely reconfigured the space to allow for three extra bedrooms, since they are spacious but slightly awkward (an L-shaped master suite?). We were totally wrong! Those bedrooms and windows were completely original, in thier current form, with those closets tucked under the gables. I was really excited to see how close it was to the original, because it'll make restoring (and improving!) a lot easier and cheaper. No structural changes!

We close on Friday, and then the work begins.

—A

[goodbutnotgreathouse]

It's a good house, but not a great house.

The Inspector