Greatest Hits of 2011 INSIDE

Since I was very remiss in not posting about projects as I worked on them last year, I'll just have to cover them now in a "Best of" fashion. Here is one project that gave me great satisfaction in completing: The final door in our upstairs.

A brief recap: in 2005 we started converting the 1200 sq. ft. attic at our home into a liveable second floor. My goal was to make it look like it had always been finished, and I matched the trim, etc. from the 1928 first floor by using our original blueprint profiles. I bought 8 matching doors in jambs on ebay to use upstairs and wrote about getting them here: Ever Lose a Ball Hitch at 60 MPH?

Eventually I put those doors in, as detailed here: A Major Hang Up

The only problem was that we had NINE door openings upstairs. Older daughter has gone 5 years without a closet door until she went away to camp last July.

Unlike the other doors, I had to build the jamb for this one. I got Pete to come over and re-live old times. The photo above shows Pete at the start of the project.

We constructed the jamb first and then built up blocks to hold it into the opening. Thank God for 1 x 4 door trim to make up for a lot of extra area:




We set the door in place and marked for where we would need to mortise the jamb to inset the hinges:




I used Pete's "Toolwerks" reciprocating saw that I also borrowed from him when I worked on this: An "Outside Mushroom Factor" Tale. With it I cut a lot of bits into the wood and then went at them from the side. Eventually I smoothed it out with a wood chisel:





And here is how it looks with the hinge in place:



I used a similar process to mortise in the door strike plate:



After cutting all the casing to fit I stained and varnished it as well as the jamb and put it in place. I love the grain in the wood above the door, I call it the "Sunrise" pattern:





And finally with all that together I could cut the baseboard to fit and attach it to the wall:



By this time, oldest daughter's week at camp was up so I still have to wait to install the quarter round and trim the inside of the closet...

War Council

Last night I got my architect, builders, and geothermal contractor together to talk about our plan for finishing the upstairs and renovating the heating system. I think it was time well spent. We now have the beginnings of a timeline and are able to think out what needs to happen when. The first step will be to bring in new electrical service, the geothermal needs 200 amp, even though it won't pull nearly that much. We'll put in a 200 amp 40 circuit box. The builders will start on June 9th and open up the back roof for the 2nd floor gable. That will need to be framed and covered by June 20 when the roofers will arrive. I will start pulling radiators on first floor as I am finishing floors downstairs, and once the framing is in place upstairs ductwork can be run throughout the house. Drilling for the geothermal pipes can happen any time this summer. Now the plan is in place we can begin to watch it fall apart!

A Lifetime Supply of Cardboard

I just came back from lunch, and got today's topic. "Lunch" this week has consisted of going to Foxcroft, flattening cardboard for 30 minutes, and driving back to dump at the recycling plant next to my office. The picture above was taken Dec. '03 right before we bought the place, and shows a small portion of the west side of the unfinished upstairs which contains every cardboard box to ever come throgh the front door since 1928. The area filled with cardboard is 10 feet wide, 34 feet long, and the head of the knee wall pictured is 5 feet high.

We didn't do anything upstairs until Helen passed away and now still seem to have barely made a dent in the accumulation. I need to empty the cardboard section however, since that is where the new gable will go. A sane person would drive up under the north window and pitch, so that's NOT what I am doing.

I am looking at the boxes as they go, and have found some pretty cool stuff. As an aside, in the picture above the bottom box that says "chocolates" on it contained all the correspondence between Bess and the architect (30+ letters) the original house contract, letters to the realtor (15+ and he ended up building next door) catalogs: house plans, millwork, plumbing, carpets, fireplaces, wallpaper etc. AND the notebook Bess sent to the architect complete with her idea for the floorplan and all built ins, room colors, and more.

Some of the boxes I've hung onto include:

• Swaner's Dairy butter box, Iowa City
• Hand's Jeweler's, Iowa City
• Piper's Candies, Iowa City
• Russell Stover Campfire Girls candy box
• Abraham's Chocolates, Moline, IL - the house plans box
• Softasilk Flour Minneapolis, MN box- This had a label indicating what it held when Bess moved in!
• Metal Kodak film cans
• Various greeting card boxes with cool pictures
• Marshall Field's Christmas box

What I'll do with any of this I have no idea...

-Mike