More Wall Tile/Thanksgiving

Pete and I finished tiling one bathroom wall on Monday night. The subways are topped with a white tile embossed with a floral vine pattern, and a black chair rail above that. After we finished we carried the tub in, and sat down to admire the view. Here are some pics:







We hosted Thanksgiving supper last night. My parents, 3 out of 4 siblings and spouses, their kids along with assorted significant others including Anne, Helen's cousin, who lived here at Foxcroft for 3 years. Final head count was 22. We put twelve at the main table in the dining room, and another ten in the living room at card tables. Our seven year old had everyone write down what they were thankful for, and then we read them out loud after dinner. Highlights including the usual "friends and family," as well as "having enough plates," "that we can get along and have fun for a while," and "Equal Rights," (The last coming from the seven year old.)

I think we'll have good success hosting holiday events here.

I can See For Miles... F&L Reunion

We worked hard Saturday to get the tub in through the window opening because on Sunday we would be permanently closing our easiest access to second floor. The window unit was ready to install.

This meant our first full F&L builders reunion since July. Pete Taryl and John all came in in two hours we had the windows installed and buttoned up for the winter. We will trim them out in the spring. The opening was just right and fit quite easily once we had everything prepared. I think the windows look outstanding.

Drunken Tub Lifters

It's all about timing. After the last home game of the football season (A 52-28 blowout of the University of Minnesota) everyone was standing around in the front yard of Foxcroft, in a happy state of mind. The primary activities were lubrication and mastication. Most of the conversation was on where the Hawkeyes would end up in the holiday bowl lineups. "Hey, would you guys want to help me out with a little job? I need to take the clawfoot tub to the new bathroom."

"Hey, no problem! Of course!" And next thing you knew we have carried the tub up to the base of the scaffolding. (I really have thought this all out in advance on how to get this tub upstairs) Six of us easily bench pressed the tub up to the top of the first level of scaffolding with two people above guiding it onto the platform. A few more scrambled up and we lifted it to the next level. From there we took it to the plank just outside the window. We had already opened the window and then put three more inside to get it from the ones outside.

It went off without a hitch, except for the one really inebriated person (Who coincidentally was a Minnesotan) who stepped where he shouldn't. I've been climbing on scaffold so long, I don't even think to tell people NOT to step on a board outside the area of the frame. When Jay stepped on the long board he was damned lucky I saw it and stepped on the other end of the board so he didn't get flipped off.

And if I can get the pictures recovered from a bad floppy I'll have the pictures that prove we did it.

If It's Friday, I Must Be On the Road... & The Bronze Pig

Yesterday was not salvage adventures, however, I actually went out and got some new stuff. I went to Adams Architectural in Eldridge, Iowa. Eldridge is a small town just outside Davenport, about an hour from Foxcroft. They emailed Thursday night to say that our new window unit and the storms and screens for upstairs were ready. I knew this would happen as soon as I wrote about them not being ready yet in And the Aliens Can't Steal Our Brainwaves.

So Friday found me once again in Pete's truck, on interstate 80. I wasn't sure if all 16 storms and screens plus the unit would fit in the truck, so my back up plan was to run the screens to my in-laws in Rock Island (just across the Mississippi River). Fortunately we were able to pack it all in by setting the storms/screens on edge with cardboard packed between. I had to stop three times on the way home to tighten straps, and never went much above 55 mph, but the trip home wasn't too bad, if you don't mind a steady stream of traffic passing you on your left. Here's how the load looked when I got home, it really was packed better than this angle shows:


The F&L building crew will come Sunday and we'll put the window up. Can't do it today (Saturday) because we're all much more interested in:

Floyd of Rosedale

Go Hawkeyes!

"And the Aliens Can't Steal Our Brainwaves!"

Today's title is what I told Pete last week when we were putting insulation over the interior of the window opening in the upstairs sunroom.



Pete was worried that it was getting cold and the window unit has not yet arrived from Adams Architectural. So he brought over some insulation to cover the opening. (On the outside we have a wooden frame with a tarp over it.) Pete put hinges at the top of the frame to open it as needed. This has proved very valuable as a method of bringing things upstairs, most recently Salvaged Flooring. Pete didn't bring enough insulation, and wondered if there was anything else around we could use. I found the duct insulation in one of the storage areas and it fit between the two pieces of insulation.

Tuesday night's forecast was for 35 mph winds from the NW with temps in the 20's. It had been raining all day and about 5:00 turned to snow and ice. At 9:30 PM Pete called to say he was coming over to put screws in the lower part of the exterior frame to make sure a gust of wind wouldn't catch under it and blow the thing off. It was quite exciting to stand on an ice covered scaffold and hold the flashlight while Pete was up screwing the frame down. Fortunately I had left the roof jacks attached with a board to facilitate putting up the window if it ever arrives. Since that board is under the protection of the eaves, there wasn't any ice on it. Ten minutes and we had it done, but we both agreed we are getting old for this sort of stuff.

Burn, Baby, Burn!

Since it has finally gotten cold out, its time to light the fireplace. The fireplace is gas, having been converted quite a while ago. We brought over a mantle hood that Lisa and I had bought a number of years ago from a University of Iowa surplus auction. Rumor was that it was taken from the UI president's home on campus during a remodel. It wasn't the right size for our old fireplace, so we just leaned it up against the hearth. We have done the same at Foxcroft. I believe it would fit the opening here, however there are glass doors over the fireplace that prevent that from happening. We can't get rid of the glass doors, because the damper to the flue has been removed!

I knew that Helen had a great deal of trouble lighting the fireplace, and after I opened the doors, I could see why. There was over a foot of ashes and soot covering the entire firebox. Obviously they had been burning papers and what else, and no one ever cleaned. Thinking back I know the fireplace ran a good 10 hours a day, and now I'm guessing that it probably ran all night on a regular basis too. Yet another marvel that this place never burned down. After cleaning for an hour with the shop vac fitted with a HEPA filter, I could actually see where the pipes were. I lit a fire successfully and we all hung out in the living room the other night. Since then daughter number 2 wants at least one bedtime story by the fireplace.

So here's a series of pics of the fireplace:

The fireplace in 1928 when the house was built

This was our first visit to look at the house, Nov. '03

Shortly before the estate sale in Feb. '05

Right before we started renovation April '05

You can barely see the fire going Nov. '05

Dining Room: New Buffet!

What can I say about Lisa? Not only is she a wonderful parent with a busy and successful professional career, she certainly does more than her share of restoration at Foxcroft. She was tired of the "half done" look in the dining room, so she has been working on stripping the windows, by far the worst in the house. This weekend she wanted to finish them, so she completed sanding, stained and got two coats of varnish on. She also is nearly finished with the corner cupboard too.




Since this was nearly done by Sunday afternoon we decided to get the new buffet off the porch before trick or treaters arrive tonight. Once again, what can I say about Lisa? She can move furniture. We took the old cupboard upstairs:


It does break into three pieces thankfully.She also helped me get the new buffet, that I salvaged from Evanston, IL, last week, into the dining room. We got rid of the crappy old carpet (last unwanted relic of previous occupants) and put the buffet where it will eventually be. We put the doors back on and shelves, and immediately ended up piling stuff on it, oh well.


She is thrilled at how it looks there, and I am glad she enjoys it. When upstairs is finished and we can move things up, we will be able to complete the dining room: paint and strip and re-do the floor. With luck we'll have the plaster put back where we had to addd the support columns for the gable before we move upstairs.

Road Warrior II: Still More Salvage

After last weekend's perilous but successful journey to Evanston for the buffet, I ventured a shorter distance on Friday: going to Dubuque. While a shorter trip, it was a much larger haul, as I brought home 750 sq ft. of 2.25 inch wide oak flooring. I was a little nervous as this would be the first trip towing with Pete's truck since my fateful "Ever Lose a Ball Hitch at 60 MPH?"" saga as part of the "My Ebay Doors" excursion.

I took Tarryl's trailer, which I last used to haul brush to the landfill last May. On my return from that trip the back gate fell off. We removed it this time, before I left, because I was under the impression (which was to be mistaken, much to my chagrin) that since the floor was on pallets in the warehouse, and I had seen a forklift, that those two items would mean it would be easy to get the flooring onto the trailer.


It turns out the bundles weren't banded to the pallets, that pallets are in very short supply at Mid America Salvage and can't leave the building, and that the forklift belonged to someone else. To top it off, the young kid helping me load was complaining about how much work it was putting the boards onto the trailer. I pointed out that this was my day off, and that when I got home I'd be carrying all of this up to second floor. He quit whining for a while.


I drove very carefully, and was extremely worried going up and down the hills out of Dubuque but everything went smoothly. I got home and started unloading. I got all the medium boards in Friday night, and left the 10 packages of long boards (10+ feet long, one package of 15 footers) for Saturday morning along with all the bundles of short pieces that we had put in the bed of the pickup truck.

In the morning I put all the long bundles against the scaffolding and opened the window. Lisa tipped the bundles up to me and I put them in the sitting room and then took them into the bedrooms. Then I unloaded the pickup and returned the trailer and truck


Now Rowan and Laurel's rooms each hold flooring stacked a minimum of 8 boards deep. Maybe in the next week or so I'll start getting it all down.

We've Got Power (Well, some places do)

Tom, our electrician, is just about finished. Lots of little details have been taken care of in the last two days. While Bess generally had wonderful plans, there were a few things that have us wondering "What was she thinking?" when she built the house in 1928, and I'm talking about things that were strange even for those times. Two big ones were electrical: While the living room has six electrical outlets, the dining room had one. We now have three, which should be a big improvement. Also, we moved one of the sconces in the first floor bathroom. Originally there was a sconce on either side of the corner sink, but strangely they were not centered in any way, nor really useful since the mirror is on the medicine cabinet to the right of the sink.


We had Tom move one sconce so they are centered on the medicine cabinet. Our next plan is to remove the corner sink and put a salvaged pedestal that we have under the medicine cabinet. I look forward to being able to shave and not leave shaving cream on the floor as I won't have to move between the sink and the mirror.


Another great step is that we have a back porch light, which we haven't had since June. When we removed the closet bump out wall into the kitchen we lost the kitchen overhead, back porch, and garage lights. We got the kitchen overhead back a few weeks ago, but not the porch since we had also removed the very scary hanging wires (I could reach up and touch them easily, if I dared) between the house and the garage. The porch light switch was a three way that could be turned on from the house or the garage. Now just the garage light needs to be wired back up

More Homes from my Childhood!

The photo above is our house in North Liberty. We lived there in 1964. I remember (as a four year old) that we had a party line telephone, and the lady across the street (Myrtle Werk) didn't have indoor plumbing. For more of these reminisces see:
Homes of My Youth

Sadly, the first place I remember living, 641 S. Lucas Street, has been torn down and replaced with bad apartments for university students. It looks like this now:


Here is the house across Lucas Street that had kids my age:


Here's the house we moved into when I was 8, I lived here until I went away to college. My parents sold it in 1988 when they couldn't get a permit to put a porch across the front.


While I'm searching, how about this one:


This was my paternal grandparent's home in Northwest Iowa. They moved into it in 1950 and it was sold when my grandmother passed away in 2002.

Now if I could just find a picture of the house we lived in when we moved to Oklahoma City for 2 weeks in between the North Liberty house above and the one on Seymour Street. I kid you not, we moved from Iowa to Oklahoma City when my dad took a job as an editor with a textbook publishing company. He hated the commute so much he put in his week's notice at the end of his first week. We moved back with most of the boxes never unpacked.

Have Salvage? Will Travel

I don't consider myself the "Road Warrior" type by any means. But this weekend was an excception due to two different exceptional salvage opportunities. As mentioned in the last post, I did go to Mid America Architectural Salvage on Friday to check out flooring. They did NOT have any 1.5 inch wide oak flooring, but did have exceptional 2.25 inch boards, so I went ahead and put a hold on them, and will pick them up this coming Friday. There is nearly 750 square feet in the lot I'm getting, which along with what I already have should be enough to do second floor. The store was impressive, it is two floors of an old warehouse on the Mississippi River, lots of very cool things, and reasonable prices.

Also on Friday, I put down the high bid on a built in buffet at the Chicago based home demolition sale site Murco.net. I have lurked at Murco for nearly two years, but have never gone to one of their sales in person. Check out their website, log in as user name "murco" and password of "murco". This buffet didn't go at their on site sale last week, so it was put up separately. I had showed it to Lisa and she was all for getting it. The one thing we have missed here at Foxcroft was the big buffet we had at Van Buren St. Here is a picture of our "old" buffet:



In the Foxcroft dining room we currently have a rather primitive cupboard that my great-grandmother's brother had built in 1900. It's a wonderful piece, but we'll find better use for it elsewhere. Jodi Murphy called at 5:07 to say the buffet was mine and that I should come get it this weekend. I was hoping for a little more time, but oh well. Let me say that Jodi turned out to be a wonderful person, very knowledgeable and helpful, and I recommend her to the Chicago folks looking to buy salvage materials. Here were photos from their website:



I left Sunday morning at 6:30 and got to Evanston at 10:45. When I arrived I phoned Jodi and she told me how to get into the house. I was alone with my tools, but had several possibilities for help in getting the buffet into the truck once I removed it from the wall. I am used to working on salvage sites since I am a board member of Friends of Historic Preservation, and have worked on buildings locally before they have been demolished. I brought plenty of hand tools, (no electricity) a flashlight, and wore my flannel lined jeans (no heat either.) I didn't drink too much coffee on the way in, voided myself at a gas station in Evanston, and brought no water since there's no plumbing as well.

I'd never removed a buffet before. First I removed the doors and drawers and put them in the living room far away from where I was working. I next removed the shelves and shelf brackets. All loose hardware went into my Ziploc jumbo two gallon freezer bag. Then I took off the quarter round and discarded it.

Now I was ready to figure out what to do. Fortunately the back of the buffet was in a pantry closet, so I had a pretty good idea of what the back of the piece consisted of. I had to removed painted beadboard paneling so I could access the mirror. I pried it off, and then got the mirror out and set it with the doors. I then knocked enough plaster off the left back to exposed the top and removed the nail holding it in and got some wiggle on that side. I knew the other side would be much tougher since it was in the basement stairwell, but by going back and forth I eventually found the anchor nail, and got some wiggle there as well. When Jodi stopped by to introduce herself we talked about how to go at the final removal. She thought it was nailed to the floor at the front. Given the way it was bowing when I pried on the ends, I knew she was right. I took the blade off my hack saw and worked it along under the front and found nothing anywhere along the front. Finally I realized it was nailed at the back, hidden under the plaster debris. So in a little over two and a half hours I had the thing out from the wall.

Now came the really hard part loading it into the truck. I had not been able to persuade anyone to come with me (understandably) and had put calls out to two people I knew in Chicago when I arrived, but neither panned out. Jodi came through with a referral and Nick said he'd be there in 45 minutes. That gave me enough time to wrap the doors and mirror in blankets and shrink tape them up. Shrink tape on a roll is an absolute must at a salvage. After that I walked the street a little to look at the neighborhood.

I will admit that I was quite preoccupied with how to load the buffet into the truck, I hadn't slept well the night before because the measurements on the Murco site showed it to be longer than the truck bed. I brought a LOT of straps and rope in case I couldn't put the gate up. I measured as soon as I got there, and realized that that while the top was longer than the bed, the base was not, if I could slide it in and then tip it so that the back rested on the passenger side bed I might be able to close the door. My other worry when I got there, was how to get everything else into the truck. I thought I could put the drawers back in once the piece was tipped, and that the doors and mirror could fit in the extended cab behind the front seat. While I was fretting on all this, did I mention that it was raining? Of course I had left the plastic tarp in the garage at home.

Nick is a big strapping Australian, not what I expected in Chicago certainly. I laid out the padding on the side of the truck and we got the piece out of the house easily. It was a bit more work getting it lifted onto the truck bed, but we did it, and slid it the length of the bed. When tipping we broke the wood rail for the bottom drawers on the back of the buffet (not visible and easily reapairable) and got it tipped, the door closed. I thanked Nick and paid him and he and the family took off. I was ready to starting strapping and loading. Then the sleet started.

I managed to get blankets over the buffet and strap the whole thing down. Because of the break in the bottom, I couldn't get the bottom two drawers back in, I put them in the shelf area, one on each side, I'd already packed the shelves in the front seat and piled all my tools in too. At 4:15 I took off. It was raining hard.

It rained about 3/4 of the time on the way home, I was lucky there was so much construction along the way so everyone was driving slower. I'm also quite lucky that I-88 is MUCH smoother going west than it is East. I checked by straps at Dekalb, IL and again in Davenport. Everything was tight, and nothing broken. I got home at 9:30. I had called ahead and Pete was there, along with Mike from next door. We unloaded the truck and put everything on the font porch. Seeing Lisa's face when she unwrapped the doors made the whole trip worth it.

Lights! Outlets! Action!

Tom the electrician has been here the past three days and now we have working ceiling lights/fans upstairs and all our outlets are live too. Yee Ha! It will be nice not to have to run extension cords from the laundry. Tom also got our main ceiling light up in the kitchen, and outlets there too as well as increasing the number of outlets in the dining room by 100% (now we have two) He'll come next week and get the back porch light working again, and bury the lines to the garage which have been inactive since June.



I also nearly finished painting the tub feet. I had already painted the "balls" of the feet the same shade of dark gray that the underneath of the tub is, now the claws are silver. One more coat and they will be ready. The blue in the pic below is painter's tape. The girls were watching me tonight and want to have the toenails painted red.


I am going to drive to Dubuque tomorrow to check out Mid America Architectural Salvage. They said they had one and a half inch wide oak flooring, if so, I'll get enough to for the rest of upstairs, and the trifecta of accomplishments for the week will be complete.

Exterior Color

Just in time for all the trees turning in our neighborhood I finished painting the trim on the new gable in the back of the house. Since the window isn't here yet it looks like we'll wait until spring to put shingles on the walls, but oh well. Here isn a picture of how it looks with the three colors I used on the trim:

The additional colors will be the dark brown of the shingle siding and the buttery yellow of the window and door trim. We will likely use a lighter brown for the storms and screens.

The electrician is working today upstairs, perhaps by tonight we will have ceiling fixtures and fans. When those are in place then he can make the wiring up there "live" which will be great.

Mr. Inside, Mr. Outside

I managed to come home after work yesterday and begin to paint the rafter beams and the barge board. The color is a custom one mixed to match the drip edge on the barge board and is some kind of "weathered bronze" color. This is a darker version of a color we used at our old house called "Putty." The old owners of my favorite paint store, said that "Putty" was really the same color as an old Mautz Paint, that honestly was called "Doesn't Show Dirt." We used that color on our foundation, rafter beams and porch floor at Van Buren St. and it really did live up to its name. The beadboard in the overhang at Foxcroft is the same color as what we did our clapboards at Van Buren, "Lambswool." We will use that color on the wooden trim at the gable ends as well. I think we'll also re-use the butter yellow on the window trim too. That one is called "Chamois." The lookout beams will be a dark brick red, perhaps we'll re-use the "Burnished Mahogany" that was on our old storms/screens. Can you tell we really liked the colors of our old house? Lisa picked them all.





Pete came over last night and we started to grout the upstairs bathroom's tile floor. He did all the hard work in spreading and working the grout, I kept him supplied with fresh water at the wiping stage, which meant a steading hauling buckets up and down the stairs.





My plan is to paint after work again on Wednesday, and to finish grouting on Thursday evening.

Caulking on Mt. Everest

OK, so it's not that high, but getting to the top of the gable still gives me a feeling of accomplishment. I primed the trim yesterday and today I started topcoating the beadboard. I then caulked all the seams on the lookout posts, and the bargeboard. The first two pics are from yesterday. The last two are from today.






Frequently while teaching I will make the statement "There are two types of people in the world, those who divide people into two groups, and those who don't." Today I was thinking about the two types of people who restore old houses: those who fix up one house until it's perfect and they stay forever, and serial remodelers. I always thought we were in the first category, until we found Foxcroft. While I don't plan to move from here in quite a while, I like being able to do all these projects with the knowledge of what I did on Van Buren St. Given that the houses have nearly identical floor plans makes it even better. I knew exactly how to lay on my back on the roof with a foot on the eaves board to paint the beadboard overhanging the sides of the gable. I knew exactly how to caulk the lookout posts. Even though I'm older, I'm still working about twice as fast as I did when I had to puzzle through everything. It's a great feeling.

There are plenty of things yet to do upstairs inside that I've never done before, but that also makes it interesting, so that it isn't entirely monotonous. I did finish the tile on the bathroom floor on Friday. It looks great. My next step there will be cutting a 45 degree angle on the 1x6 for the trim. I'll need Pete's saw for that, then I'll start painting and cutting trim to length. My evenings will be full for a long time to come.