Author: Aaron Weber

The before-and-after photos never look quite right

Reading other people’s houseblogs makes it apparent that there’s a great deal of photographic technique involved in taking good before-and-after photos. None of my pictures really seem to convey just how haunted the house looked before we started, or what a shambles it is now.

Despite sweeping and cleanup, everything is coated in dust, and there are tumbleweeds of various kinds of insulation gathering in corners. The kitchen walls and ceiling are open to the studs and joists, and there are several huge holes in the subfloor made for ducts and pipes. In one spot there’s an actual door laid flat over the joists so you can walk across it, but you still have to be careful where you put each foot when walking around the kitchen area.

It actually looks like it’s further away from completion than when we started. Plus, next week our construction crew is not working because not only is Monday a holiday, but Wednesday is the Dalai Lama’s birthday, which is a serious big deal holiday for Tibet. Everyone deserves vacation, but I was alarmed that other people’s vacation might be inconvenient for me. (Yes, I recognize just how spoiled that makes me sound.)

But progress isn’t always visible, and we had a site visit yesterday with the contractor which was incredibly reassuring. I knew the walls were open because we had to shore up beams and posts above and around the kitchen, and add extra fire/sound proofing between the two units in our building, and to replace all the wiring and plumbing. I didn’t realize, however, that all of that work is now complete, and the plumbing and electrical has passed inspection.

In what remains of this week they’ll stuff more fire-and-sound insulation into the open slots in the kitchen floor, then close that up. While the crew is on vacation, the city will come and inspect the structural work.

Also our plumber has put in the furnaces and water heater, and the Tibet crew has replaced the rickety back stairs and rotten back door. We wound up with gray composite stairs and a white fiberglass door, so it’s not much to look at, but it’s done and it’s solid and it won’t require maintenance for at least a decade.

Once the crew comes back from the holiday, they will re-insulate the ceiling and walls in the kitchen, install air conditioners, and start the drywall-and-paint phase upstairs. We are still on schedule for a habitable room by August.

It seems like construction projects in general move like this: It looks like nothing is happening, and then there’s a giant visible change and everything’s torn apart. Then you wait and wait and it looks like nothing’s happening… and then there’s another big visible change. Then you wait and wait and it looks like nothing’s happening, and so on.

So, we’re moving nicely and nobody’s vacation is an inconvenience to me. Happy 4th of July, and happy 81st birthday to His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

Haunted Bathtub, Shower, and HVAC

Well, we have a tub surround, sort of.
20160619_120202

There’s lumber around it, anyway, where the tub surround will be. There’s also an underlayment and a drain where our shower will be, and large boxes of HVAC equipment attached to the ductwork in both the basement and the attic.

We have 96 days before we have to be out of this apartment and, I hope, into the Haunted Money Pit.

Construction Setbacks

Electrical was roughed in and some drywall was about to go up when we realized we needed better insulation on the exterior portions of the roof, and better sound insulation between our unit and the other half of the building. So, we’re holding off on putting walls up to put up better insulation. It’ll be a little extra, but not cripplingly expensive. And it’ll be worth it to have pipes not freeze and have some soundproofing between us and the neighbors.

Meanwhile, the structural engineer reported that one of the beams was sagging on the flat portion of the roof, so that needs to be reinforced. Fortunately that’s not going to be too expensive either.

The old water heater was suspect, and we got confirmation from the plumber this week that it’s as bad as it looked and needed to be replaced. This also isn’t going to be too expensive.

Of course, all the “not too much here, not too much there” is going to add up.

But I did find ceiling fans that look just as nice as the ones we had initially planned on, are still highly rated, and cost about $75 less each. So, that’s a nice savings.

Plus on our last site visit the contractor was joined by a friend of his who is a Buddhist monk, and he gave us his blessing. Apparently they know each other from back when our contractor was a monk for a few years. The stories from this house should be a novel.

Distraction

While I’m fussing over tile and cabinetry (did you know there’s such a thing as GOLD GROUT?)

… here’s something to actually think about, on memory and justice and society and all the big things:

In liberal democracies, and especially in this one, there are so many distractions and so many options and so much media that the corrosive effects of the loss of the power of memory can elude anyone’s notice until something important comes apart all at once….
We knew from our long involvement in the Middle East where the sources of the rage were. We forgot. We knew from Vietnam the perils of involving the country in a land war in Asia. We forgot. We knew from Nuremberg and from Tokyo what were war crimes and what were not. We forgot that we had virtually invented the concept of a war crime. We forgot. In all cases, we forgot because we chose to forget. We chose to believe that forgetting gave us real power and that memory made us weak. We even forgot how well we knew that was a lie.

Closing the Terrifying Gap

Not long ago there was a hole in our house where we’d removed a chimney. It wasn’t actually that big, but it went all the way through from roof to basement, and looking down on it from the third floor was kind of terrifying. I sent pictures around and the response, uniformly, was “don’t fall in!” It was only about 12×12, so it would have been hard to fall through. But still.

It’s gone now. The old pine flooring from what will become the main bathroom has been taken out and used to patch it. So now instead of the wall of awkward closets that was there originally, and the dangerous-looking hole that replaced it, we’ve got this totally normal looking old wood floor, just waiting to be refinished:

Floor-Update

While that was going on we had several days of house madness. The flurry of decisions seems to be messing with our heads, and we have a hard time thinking or talking about anything else.

This week, Megan went over to the tile shop and got samples, and I think we’re just about done picking tile, including this black hex tile for the 2nd floor bathroom:
Black-hex-tile

Neena’s Lighting is closing their Cambridge store, so we stopped by and picked up a 19th-century style pendant lamp for our front hall.

We’ve also been over to Ikea to choose cabinets; with that done we can finalize appliance locations and request a price on fancy cabinet fronts from Semihandmade.

We also stopped at two different places to shop for a back door, which has become far more complicated than we expected. We found a hideous prehung fiberglass door at the big-box shops for $250, and one that was acceptable as a special order for $1,000, and then we went over to the salvage warehouse to look at rescued wood doors, figuring we could put on a storm door and it’d be almost as good. We didn’t find any that fit. So, our door quest continues.

To go with the doors, we’ve had to pick new handlesets, which is what hardware stores call exterior doorknobs, apparently. The folks over at Commonwealth Lock have firmly identified the broken one we have as a Schlage G-Series, which was discontinued in 1981. Anyway, we found some pretty ones that fit in with the overall look we’re going for and actually look like they’ll hold doors shut.

Picking Tile Sounded Fun At First

Oh god. Tile. There are so. many. kinds. of. tile. I’m really feeling Yellow Brick Home’s post about indecision.

Early on in our pinteresting, we found some really sweet large hexagonal tiles in a rich cobalt blue. Of course, they’re $35 a square foot. So, that’s right out. And where would we even put them?

We’ve got a lot of different places to pick tile for:

  • Half bathroom: We’ve got plain walls here and all-white fixtures so we can choose something fun and bold here.
  • Pantry: This can be plain and neutral. It’s just the pantry, we’re not showing off. Or we could just go with the same tile that’s in the half bathroom, since they’re next to each other.
  • Kitchen backsplash: This is a small space, so we could pick something kind of expensive per square foot and not break the bank. Or we could pick plain subways and put them in a neat pattern and just let it hide behind all the other stuff going on in the kitchen. It doesn’t need to be a focal point.
  • Full bathroom, floor and tub surround: This is the hard one, since there’s a lot going on in this room and a lot of surfaces to tile. There’s a brick wall on one side, the vanity cabinet is wood veneer, the rest of the fixtures are white, and we’ll need to choose a few bits of marble or other stone for some other spots. The goal here is to keep it subtle and mostly neutral since there’s a lot of other stuff going on.
  • Full bathroom, shower: Do we pick one kind of tile for the whole shower, or do we do one thing on the floor and another on the walls? Either way it needs to be reasonable when seen next to the other tile in the rest of the bathroom.

Back Door Man

The back door needs to be replaced. M is lobbying for real wood; I’m lobbying for fiberglass. She wants character; I want something low-maintenance with good insulation that doesn’t warp in humid weather. So, we’re going door shopping this weekend. Therma-Tru or salvaged antique? Stay Tuned to Money Pit and find out!

Tonight, on Haunted Money Pit: The Structural Engineer Visits

Last week I met with the contractor, structural engineer, and architect all at once. Structural Engineer Dan B looked in at the joists and pronounced them quite sturdy and not in need of any modifications. So, that’s good. The oddities that had been seen in initial demo were, it turns out, related to something else entirely.

Then we went into the downstairs neighbor’s unit and we got slightly less-good news. There are three places where we need to put posts made of quadruple 2x4s so that our unit can transfer its weight all the way down into the basement and foundation and ground, rather than, say, directly into her living room. These spots are all inside of already existing walls, but we do have to open her walls up to get to them, then close them back up and paint them again. Downstairs neighbor is, fortunately, OK with this disruption.

Next time on Haunted Money Pit: Choosing appliances, paint, kitchen sink and faucet, tile, and molding. PLUS: Is decision fatigue a real thing? Eh, I don’t really care anymore, let’s just assume it is.