Hair Teeth and Eyeballs On Easy Terms

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.

The roof, the roof, the roof is actually in pretty good shape

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.

roof-off

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.

Status Update: Permits and Planning

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.

Good News From the Energy Audit and Some Demolition

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.
Aaron-in-mask

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:
Drywall-demo-2

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:
Kitchen-stack-demo-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…
Back-Stairs-Fail
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.

Dating The Building

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.

House Status: Step 1

We’ve moved some things into the house on Summit but we don’t want to put too much there yet – anything moved in will have to be moved around as we renovate, and it’ll get filthy.

But this morning I met with the architect for detailed measurements, and the contractor for a phase 1 estimate. He’s going to get us samples of the material he recommends for the roof, and a permit, and an estimate for the exterior work, and contact his plumbing guy about getting the gas line turned back on. In the mean time I can use an electric heater to keep the pipes from freezing.

To the Summit!

I haven’t written this up yet because I didn’t want to jinx it, but Megan and I just bought a new house, in Union Square, Somerville. It’s a great location and it’s structurally sound, but it needs a lot of work.

What we know of the history reflects the development of Somerville as a whole. It was constructed some time around 1900, probably earlier, but we aren’t sure yet. It may have been at one time a home for unwed mothers, or a boarding house, or just one of those Prospect Hill duplexes.

By 1970 it was a dilapidated 4-family, and some people who met during a consciousness-raising workshop in the summer of ’69 bought it to turn into a collective living space. They added on to the back and converted it into a single-family home for about 12-14 hippies, all of whom kept day jobs – they turned on and tuned in, but didn’t drop out. In May 1971 they were profiled in the Boston Sunday Globe.

The commune turned it into a single-family home with one kitchen and two bathrooms, each with triple sinks. Membership changed over the years, and we’re a little vague for a couple decades. Eventually the building was owned by a couple who ran it as a collective rooming house. That arrangement ended when the couple broke up. One person stayed and one left, prompting a condo conversion in the 1990s.

The sold condo was purchased by James Welborn, who left a tech job at Akamai to open Hub Comics, just down the hill. He died in 2011 after what appears to have been a struggle with mental illness.

The condo was unoccupied from then until the time that we bought it. The commune’s mouldering triple-sink single bathroom is still there, along with a depressing kitchen, bannisters that appear to have been gnawed by dogs, and a fridge with magnets holding both a child’s artwork and a divorce-related court order.

Thanks to the work of Banco Santander and Century 21 Real Estate of Fall River, it was more than 3 months from the time we signed the Purchase and Sale agreement to the time we were able to close. That means we’ve got a tight timeline to get the building weatherproofed before winter sets in.

The list of tasks that must be completed in the next 30-ish days includes but is not limited to:

  • Replace roof and fix holes in siding
  • Replace back door
  • Replace front door locks
  • Reconnect gas service
  • Replace furnace
  • Restore rotted window sills
  • Clean & sanitize basement, install dehumidifier
  • Sage-smoke building to remove any and all ghosts

Once that’s done, we can begin the renovation proper.