We’re getting close to our 2-year anniversary as house owners, and it’s starting to show. As every day passes, we grow less and less enthusiastic about the gazillion projects left to start (and finish). The wild crush I had on my house has all but disappeared.
It’s not that the excitement hasn’t faded before; it has, many times over. But usually, one of us will get revved up about some new project and the tingly feelings will spread. Soon enough, we’re back to ripping photos out of magazines and keeping each other up at night talking about our plans. But this time, the restlessness is lingering. I find myself blaming things on the house. The house steals our weekends, our energy, our pocket money. It is like a greedy child, always wanting more. And we give in to it’s demands every time.
We’ve forgotten the cardinal rule of renovating, the one I recognized within weeks of moving in and swore I’d stick to. When you’re bogged down in nothing but boring, tiring, sensible work – the kind that does not make a big splash or physically change your surroundings in a way that makes you smile – you HAVE to make time for some fun projects. In the past few months we’ve busied ourselves with basement jacking, rewiring, demolition and roofing. All very worthwhile endeavors, but all incredibly boring. There was no “WOW” factor to them. No one walked in and squealed with glee when they saw that the floor had been raised a half inch on one end. Refinishing the hardwoods was fun, but also so exhausting and disruptive that by the time they were finished we were too tired to enjoy them.
We’ve been living in plaster-dust hell for weeks now, with no end in site. And our next few tasks are roughly as boring as our last……. plans for fall include insulating outer walls and gutting one of the guest bedrooms. In between all the logical projects, we should have treated ourselves to something fun. New light fixtures, maybe, or a small deck out back. Something quick and easy. But the sad part is, I can’t even think of a fun project that’s doable right now, given how fast winter is creeping up on us!
Maybe when we start putting walls back UP in the hallway it’ll be more rewarding. It will stop bits of squirrels nest and fiberglass from falling on our heads each morning, AND we’llo get to pick out a paint color. Let’s hope that’s enough – we need to get the spark back, pronto.
We took advantage of the long weekend (and the exposed hallway walls/ceiling) to finish rewiring all of the upstairs electrical. This is a major milestone for us. Finally checking “Electrical” off the to-do list, after nearly two years of fiddling, is extremely satisfying. I love drawing a nice thick line through something huge like that. It’s what list makers live for.
From day one, the knob-and-tube situation gave us trouble. It got us thrown off two homeowners insurance policies, for starters. Nothing was grounded, there were bare wires all over the place, and we had frequent shorts and mini-brownouts. I have a phobia about house fires to begin with. Imagining all sorts of nightmarish wiring hiding behind our walls was enough to drive me batty.
Our original plan was to hire an electrician to help us; when our electrician completely flaked, we decided to try tackling it ourselves. I have no idea how much money we would have had to part with to have a professional rewire the entire house. I do know it would have been thousands and thousands of dollars, too much for us to handle. It would have gone undone for years, perhaps. So doing it ourselves, though not the ideal situation, seemed better than no improvements at all. And as it turns out, Teague is great at it!
Lucky for us, New York State does not require electricians to be licensed. (This is sort of scary though – any Joe Schmoe can call himself an electrician.) I raided the library for books on wiring, and we purchased the latest New York State code book.
Though I can neither condone nor encourage our approach to this particular problem, I do want to share what we learned along the way for others who might be in a similar situation.
- It wasn’t as scary or hard as I imagined it would be. We each got zapped a few times when we were wading through old, bare wire – but no permanent damage or major scarring occured. A rarity for us.
- It was, however, extremely time consuming. A single light switch our outlet sometimes took half a day, not including clean-up. Multiply this by the number of outlets per room, and you start to see why it has taken two years to complete.
- Fishing Romex through old walls is a real pain. We fished everything for the first floor, but waited until our hallway ceiling and walls were out to rewire the second floor. Much of the electrical ran up through the hallway and into the attic crawl space, so this made life MUCH easier
- Make sure you get a code book for your state. Plan to add significantly to what’s already there in order to bring it up to code. Our two breaker panels are nearly full now, and we started out with only two circuits!!
- If you’re a team effort, buy two wire strippers, two nice needle-nose plyers, two utility knives, and two wire cutters. You’ll need these with you constantly, so trying to share doesn’t work very well.
- Buy the biggest rolls of Romex you can find. You’d be amazed how much you’ll go through. It’s sorta like insulation or mulch; you’ll think you have enough, but you never do.
- Be patient. Expect slow progress. Relish the small accomplishments. Over time, they add up to a major achievement!
Now that we’re done wiring, we’re ready to start…….. INSULATING. Yee-freaken-haw. We’re planning to do blown-in for most of our outer walls. Any pointers/warnings/suggestions?
As of tonight, every upstairs bedroom has an overhead light that runs off of a switch. While this may not seem exciting to most, it means we’ll no longer have to enter pitch black rooms with our arms flailing above our heads searching madly for a tiny little pull chain.
The propeller-arm era has officially ended! We’re celebrating with ice cream.
Though we’re stubbornly leaving the windows open at night and resisting long sleeves, it’s evident that fall is closer than we think. I could see my breath this morning, and had to wipe the dew from my car windows. The air is crisper; sunsets are earlier. Our (half-unhooked) radiators are blissfully unaware of how soon they’ll be called back into commission!
I love fall in Upstate. It is, without a doubt, my favorite season. Working at a University, I get to watch that first-day-of-school excitement unfold. I miss that feeling, the opportunity for a fresh start and the energy of all the possibilities the year could bring.I need some of that energy if we’re going to get all our fall projects done before the snow flies!!
Teague ticked one off the list last night though; our cupola now has 8 fully-intact window panes. We got our custom panes from Madison Glass, a small little shop right in town that takes very good care of us. They also run a dry-cleaning service out of the shop – which seems an odd pairing. How many people need glass AND well-pressed pants all at once? Gotta love small town life.
The cupola started out boarded up, so it has come a long way. Here is the “before”:
And some “durings” – I’ll call them during’s because next year we plan to paint the house and will restore any rotted woodwork on the cupola at that point.
Sometimes, it’s really hard to explain something with just words and photos. Static text is limiting! At some point we’ll probably get all fancy and add some how-to videos to our site. Until we get our act together, check out the DIY section of VideoJug for some great tutorials, including gems such as:
There aren’t enough videos to satisfy me just yet, but they seem to be adding to their collection fairly regularly. Since it’s pretty easy to add video to the web these days, I suspect that we’ll be seeing more and more good tutorials. Hallelujah!
I’ve been a Flickr addict lately, as you may have noticed. We finally went “Pro” so we could share all the photo-album goodness with you guys, since the photos I post here tend to be smaller and you have to dig around to find them.
So here it is – the Fixer-Upper Flickr gallery:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/fixerupper/sets/
This weekend was rather sloshy, so many of our outdoor projects remain unfinished. Teague did get a chance to replace 4 out of 5 broken window panes in the cupola; the last pane should come in some time this week. This is good news, since I’ve been waking up at night CONVINCED that a bat has flown in through the broken windows and is now flying around the room. As of yet, I haven’t been fearful enough to bother getting up or turning on a light, but I do cover my head with a blanket. You can’t get rabies through a blanket, right? (Just kidding, Gram)
Instead of making good progress on our to-do list, we ended up spending half a day at the New York State Fair, and the rest of the weekend recovering from Fair food and puttering away at our favorite rainy day activities. For me, that meant painting. Trim painting to be exact. Oooh, the joys. For Teague, it meant more electrical work. The upstairs hallway and one bedroom are now completely rewired. Only 3 bedrooms and one bathroom to go; piece of cake. Prior to yesterday, we’d never had an overhead light in the hallway – and this one has A SWITCH. It’s amazing the joy such small changes can make. It’ll also result in fewer stubbed toes.
The fall-like temperatures have us nervous. It’s almost September. What happened to our nice long summer? We’re running out of time!
Our must-do before freezing temps list looks something like this:
- Finish the upstairs electrical
- Insulate the outer stairwell wall
- Hang drywall in the hallway and stairwell, including the ceiling
- Insulate as many other outer walls as we can before winter (using blown-in)
- Re-varnish the french doors with a few coats of spar varnish to protect them this winter
The want-to-do’s are:
- Wash all window exteriors (they’re nasty)
- Strip and stain the other front-door (I did the first one last fall)
- Replace the side door with something a little thicker and prettier that actually closes without a rough hip-slam (we have the door already, just need to put it up)
The list goes on, but these are the major ones! Is anyone else feeling that oh-my-god-it’s-almost-winter panic?
Christiane of Erwin House brought up a particularly interesting topic: Is there an ethical way for house lovers to “flip” a house? She and her husband, David, have been bitten by the renovation bug and daydream about possibly doing it all over again in another house, but they don’t want to be branded with a word that has such ugly connotations (in house blogger circles, at least!)
The comments people have left are very insightful – and the answer, essentially, is yes. One commenter writes – “Be serial restorationists, not flippers.” By definition, flippers are only undertaking the renovations for profit. They are not emotionally invested in the house; they usually don’t live there, aren’t tied to the neighborhoods, and cut lots of corners to keep costs down. But we have alot of problem houses around here. Houses that sit neglected for years and years. If someone is willing to take on a rundown house that your average homeowner wouldn’t buy, clean up the worst of the mess, and resell it (therefore greatly extending it’s lifespan and usefulness), can you really hate them for it? While I don’t condone half-assed repair jobs, half-assed is sometimes be better than not at all.
On the other hand, un-doing remuddled patch jobs is harder than doing it right the first time. So, as always, there’s a flipside to that coin if a true house-lover comes in and has to undo flipper fixes.
This discussion is particularly interesting to me because we talk about doing some type of house-flipping all the time. I know we couldn’t just slap a coat of paint over wallpaper and call it a day, so we probably wouldn’t be the most profitable flippers. We just really love renovating, and know that eventually we’re going to run out of things to do here!
Because our curiosity was killing us, we had a real estate agent drop by the other night to check on our renovations. We wanted to see what kind of value we’ve built with all our sweat equity. Based on her appraisal of the place, it’s safe to say we’re headed in the right direction and could make a great profit (a year or two from now, when the exterior is repainted and the upstairs is as pretty as the downstairs) if we were ever to sell it.
Most of the time I cannot imagine parting with our house, and all the memories we have already made in it. I doubt we’ll ever tear ourselves away from Dirty Gert. But a profit big enough to pay off our student loans, credit cards, and car payments in one swoop and still have money left over for a downpayment on our next fixer-upper? That is mighty tempting!
What are your thoughts on flipping? Good, bad? I guess it depends on the area you’re living in, and what type of houses are being flipped.
For many years, I’ve wondered just how hard it was to make a stained glass window. I’ve got an insatiable need to learn new things, especially artsy things. I’ve heard rumors that it’s not so bad, especially for someone craft-inclined like me. And oh, the loveliness you can produce if you’re good at it….
I finally gave in to temptation and signed up for a beginner class. It starts in September. I didn’t really need another hobby to keep me busy – I have plenty I don’t have time for already – but this is something I’ve always wanted to try, so dammit, I’m trying it!
In my wildest dreams, I’ll someday get good enough to make sidelights for our entry door:
(this is an older pic, so never mind the random uglies hanging around – we’ve done some work since this photo!)
If I were to get good enough to do this, I’d stick to something fairly simple. I’ve seen a few houses around here with art nouveau style windows, like these designs:
Have any of you tried your hand at stained glass? If so, share your results!!
Looking at me today, you’d think I’ve either been smoking dope or crying uncontrollably. My eyes are so bloodshot it’s ridiculous. The real reason for this beautiful look? We finally finished gutting the hallway ceiling yesterday, and I have enough plaster dust in my eyes to build a new wall.
I used to enjoy demolition, but now that what demo we have left involves plaster (and the mess that ensues) I pretty much despise it. We have a few walls and ceilings upstairs that we used to think we were going to gut. Now? I am all about skimcoating. And better safety gear.
Just thought I’d share this crusty, watery-eyed, black-booger blowing moment with you all.
PS: Want to feel better about the state of your half-demo’d house? Check out the pics in this photo gallery, and add one of your own: http://www.flickr.com/groups/demolitionart/pool/
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