Like just about everyone else in the country I went to the movies recently to see the Star Wars. The movie itself was great fun, but the previews before it unsettled me: Two big-budget movies about alien invasion, and a couple others about the glories of vigilante justice.
It matches up in an ugly way with the whole Donald Trump subtext of horror and fear and nastiness.
Work continues. We’re now halfway through the initial exterior work on the house.
Our contractors have also started on the basement. After an initial cleaning of thyey, scraped off loose mortar from the foundation stonework in the basement and put down a new layer of concrete and I believe some kind of vapor barrier as well. One side of the basement was low and damp and our contractor said water was probably coming up from below the floor, so we went ahead and had them jackhammer through the floor there and dig better drainage under the house, then fill it with gravel and lay a new concrete floor on that side.
In photos the basement doesn’t look like much right now. But before all this work it was like a mildew-smelling horror movie set and now it looks like the sort of place where you would not be terrified to go searching for spare lightbulbs.
Still to do in the basement: Adjust/repair basement windows, replace any insulation that’s compressed or missing, shore up a couple under-supported beams, level out a section of the floor that’s a trip hazard, replace HVAC and water heater, replace waste outlet pipe, replace utility sink…. probably some other stuff.
The scene ends badly as you might imagine, in a cavalcade of anger and fear… I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me.
The fascia/soffit area is now all closed up on the side of the building, and the rotted wood around the windows has been replaced. The shingles are off on half the front of the building, and new housewrap has been applied. Next steps, presumably, are replacing the missing/rotted wood around one or two more windows on our half of the front of the building… and continuing this process all the way around. And then on to basement, heating, and plumbing.
More than a few parents think this whole “Santa’s Watching” thing is creepy. I’ve probably said it before, but I come down firmly on the side of lying to your children about it. When they figure it out, children learn that adults are not to be trusted and that imaginary beings are not out to help them.
This Elf on the Shelf trend that’s been going on for the past few years is an especially good brand extension not despite but because it prepares young ones for a nightmarish surveillance state.
This is all standard good parenting, as far as I can tell. Even our most saccharine advice authors agree with me that pet ownership is an important childhood lesson in death and suffering, in the same way that you make them do busywork in school both to keep them out of your hair and so that they’ll learn early on that life is a series of tedious tasks performed in exchange for symbolic pieces of paper.
Over Thanksgiving I flew down to Richmond and rented that epitome of “perfectly adequate transportation appliance,” the Chevy Spark, to go visit my parents. I didn’t opt for the upgrade to the fancy satellite entertainment system, so I got to listen to local radio the whole way.
And on Richmond’s best source for hip-hop and R&B I heard an ad for a beauty supply shop featuring two women talking about getting a great deal on hair extensions. At least half the airtime was given to talking about how you could get low low payments when financing your hair, even if you had bad credit. I know that it gets super expensive but holy crap, when the beauty supply shop is selling weaves on credit, your economy is in a bad place. And what happens when some of the clients inevitably can’t pay? Does someone come and repo the hair?
I sort of forgot about that until I saw this article in the Guardian about how Americans can’t generally afford to die, and so we’re all crowdfunding funerals.
And of course first example is a young man who actually did have life insurance, which would normally cover this sort of thing, except that his death is still in litigation: he was arrested, hogtied, and suffocated in police custody, so insurance may not actually be available for his family.
I don’t even have a conclusion here. It’s just awful.
So, we got some good news: The crew from Tibet Construction started on the roof, and the plywood under-layer is in great shape and doesn’t need to be replaced. Some of the joists are damaged and to have support sistered in, but not all of them, so that’s non-awful news.
We also began planning the basement repairs. It looks like we’ll need to dig up some concrete in the basement to get better drainage, but at that point we can apply waterproofing on everything and have a dry basement. We hope.
Kitchen planning is almost done. There are an innumerable number of fiddly little decisions, and also some big decisions. One of them is that there’s a closet/wall type thing we don’t much like. However, since we’re opening up so much of the space, we have to be careful to preserve some amount of lateral walls or the building will go all floppy. Basically, we have a loadbearing closet we want to shrink, and need to get a structural engineer to sign off on shortening it by about 18 inches. If we can do that, though, we can have a gloriously huge kitchen island.
Priority one on the Summit House is fixing the exterior before winter comes. After a few hassles and delays, we now have a permit and construction should begin any day now. We’re going with a light gray CertainTeed Carriage House shingle on the mansard roof, and white trim. We’ll worry about painting the exterior in the spring.
Meanwhile, the planning on the interior is moving along. We’re still flip-flopping on a few things but the designs are approaching completion and we have a list of Completed Decisions. One of those decisions was to use a 30″ range rather than a 36″ cooktop and wall ovens. Even as much as we love cooking, the giant cooktop isn’t that helpful. And if we find we’re short a burner once or twice a year we can always go for a portable one that plugs in.
Today I took a half-day at work and met up with a guy from our utility to do an efficiency audit. He gave us some really good news: the house already got cellulose blown-in insulation on all exterior walls and in the attic, which means we don’t have to pay to have that done.
In other good news, the fridge is old enough that we’ll get a rebate for replacing it. And trust me, I have no intention of using that old fridge. Nick the Efficiency Guy opened it to check and I jumped back and said DON’T OPEN THAT. But it had been cleaned/emptied before being abandoned so he didn’t wind up unleashing fetid doom on the house.
Then I did a little demo.
This is about halfway through today’s smashing of the walls between the dining and living room. I got most of it out, although I left the studs and chimney stack in there. Clearly. I’m excited to smash stuff but anything that looks important I’m leaving to the experts:
I also knocked off some drywall around a chimney stack in the kitchen that we’re planning on removing. Behind the drywall we found some interesting 70s-ish wallpaper:
More relevant to the work that needs to be done most immediately, I tore off some ivy from the edge of the house, and then leaned on the exterior back stairs railing a little too hard…
Which means I guess we can add “replace exterior back stairs” to the to-do list.
But that’s OK. Our contractor (shout out to Lobsang at Tibet Construction, he’s a seriously good guy) is pulling permits today to replace the roof and repair the window sills and so forth. Looks like we’ll have the house weatherproofed before the really cold weather hits.
Tomorrow I’m going to try to get over to the city archives but in the mean time I’ve found some interesting details. The house was described in the listing documents as built in 1900. But that’s a suspicious date – that’s what you put when it’s “at least 100 years old but we don’t know and can’t be bothered to get over to the archives to check.”
Also, my sister-in-law saw the place and she says it is absolutely built before 1900 just looking at it. And she’d know these sorts of things.
And sure enough, the building appears in roughly its present shape on this 1895 map, so we know it’s pre-1900 already. This is simultaneously one of the best and most frustrating things about knowing my sister-in-law: She’s so frequently right, and I want to be the one who’s right all the time.
This map from 1874 shows a building in the same location, although it looks like only half the duplex was built at that time. Also interesting to note that Summit Ave didn’t go all the way through from Walnut Ave to Vinal Ave.
Looking back a little further, in 1852, neither Vinal Ave nor Summit Ave existed at all.
So my guess for now is that the first half of the building was built in the 1860s or so, and that it was expanded into a duplex some time in the 1880s.
Secretly Ironic 