NunkProTunk or Now as Then

Who am I kidding? We’ve been out of money the better part of a month, and I haven’t posted. Maybe just posting tonight will get me started again.

Tonight, Don is on his way home from returning his mom to Chicago after we borrowed her for a couple of weeks, and the Little One drew her own bath and is splashing around so I’m writing. (He was there on Election Night, but didn’t go to the City.) We took her to see various sights, from War Eagle and Applegate craft fairs (where the Little One bought more than we did) to Terra Studios to the Fayetteville Farmers’ Market to Little Rock (zoo, art museum, Flying Fish, the Arkansas River from both North Little Rock and Little Rock sides, a couple of estate sales,* and the Riverfront Park). I don’t think she’s going to move here, but we had a good time and good weather.

Although we may expand on our past house doings later, in sum, we have:

• a new foundation,
• a new roof (with reflective sheathing),
• new exterior walls on the back third of the house,
• most of the framing done (including a lot of new old walls due to the extent of the fire),
• missing windows on the front of the house,
• no plumbing (unless you count the Potty House** out front),
• a storm shelter,
• one set of outlets,
• lots of extension cords,
• a new electric service,
• three fewer trees, or maybe four,
• fewer Japanese honeysuckles (invasive creatures),
• new kitchen subfloor,
• a design for the front yard (middle only; I can’t cope with planning the woodland sides of the front yard)
• lots of estimates for everything that’s left.

We’ve been working with two banks to see about getting a construction loan. (Yes, we waited until the market tanked to run out of money.) The most recent issue has been that we started work without them. I think they wanted to get their construction loan recorded ahead of any sub-contractors, but then the loan would have been bigger since they want it to be finished in 9-12 months, no matter how much work lies ahead. I think one of the banks has found a title company willing to insure over the subs, so we’ll probably be back in the money one way or another. Once we have the money, we’ll do plumbing. Otherwise, Don can always rebuild windows.

*I bought some more half-size cupcake pans so I can make a full recipe of yellow cake cupcakes*** in the tiny pans so I don’t have to eat a full cupcake when I want to sample other desserts, too. Also, a big white round casserole (like my ramekins, only big) and a liquid tablespoon measuring cup, and an Ozark Do-Nothing for the Little One. I didn’t buy two club chairs that I quite liked. We took the Honda to Little Rock, and they couldn’t possibly have fit, and Don and his mom were leaving the next day for Chicago, so those will be the chairs that got away.

** The Potty House is serviced weekly, and the service apparently includes setting it upright when it gets tipped over as an early Halloween trick.

*** Here’s what the cupcakes looked like in mid-October. Our neighbor burned a bunch of our brush, we grilled hotdogs and marshmallows, and I brought cupcakes for Don’s birthday. I made another batch for my office’s birthday later in the month, and I made some for the Little One’s birthday party. I’m looking forward to having enough little pans.

One of the places I went during our prolonged blog silence was a field trip to UT-Galveston Medical Branch. (Umm. Before Ike. Right after Dolly.) My dad and his brothers (and their father) all have (or had, in the case of Poppaw) a spinocerebellar ataxia that hasn’t matched anyone else’s ataxia genes as of yet, so we went to visit my uncle’s neurologist. The neurologist was not as helpful as we had hoped, but the visit was great. (A lot of driving, however, from Fayetteville AR to College Station TX and thence to Galveston. And back.) We had creamed corn, purple hull peas, corn bread, two desserts, and some sort of meat, along with great company for dinner. And more great company when we visited my Houston cousin and her son. (Memory fades on the details.) My uncle called dinner a Floy meal, and he was right.

(Lisa, The Uncles and my mom)

We left, however, with a small mystery. One of the two stained glass windows (above) at my uncle’s house is from the Jackson Street Methodist Church in Magnolia AR. The other is not. None of us are sure which one it is. (My folks bought it for my grandmother long after the church was replaced by Asbury UMC.) So, I’ll need to share this post with my cousin who remembers more than I do, and who has cleaned that window more than I have. I have a feeling I know the answer, but I don’t want to bias her.

a crummy t-shirt? No way. The days of buying t-shirts* four souvenirs are long over. Now we buy architectural salvage when we travel.

When we go to Howard County in south Arkansas for Duckett Decoration (first Sunday in June and the preceding Saturday), we always stop at Ri-Jo’s salvage place in Mena (in Polk County, but nearer to Duckett than most places in Howard County). This time, Richard sold us a light fixture.

I have been struggling with the Arts and Crafts vision for our house. Nearly all the lights I look at don’t suit my vision of the house. Don finally nailed my problem: I’m afraid it will look like 2008 when we’re done instead of 1908 (or 1916 in our case). Everybody is doing Arts and Crafts now — the new houses, the old houses, Renovation Hardware, the Home Depot. They’re all doing it. Plus, I still haven’t made it safely to the 20th Century, what with our last two houses being solidly in Queen Victoria’s reign.

We’re compromising with a transitional look, a hybrid between Colonial Revival and Arts and Crafts. What does this mean? It means we are buying fewer square light fixtures with divided lights, and more classical ones, while still having plenty of beams in the ceilings*** and nice oak trim. Here’s the fixture we bought from Ri-Jo … along with the great shades we bought from Rejuvenation. I love the iridescent look to them plus the shades were on clearance at Rejuvenation! (Sorry, I think they’re all gone now.)

Now we just have to figure out where it goes. Dining room? Foyer? Living room? (We might need a pair for that room.) Oh, we also need an acceptable canopy.

Meanwhile, here’s the Little One doing her part for Duckett Decoration, before dinner on the grounds. Don thought that eating at the cemetery sounded quite odd when he first joined me for Duckett, but he doesn’t hesitate these days. (I made her dress and hat.**)

We also went to the swimming hole at Cossatot State Park, where the Little One made s’mores. (I think this was Don’s first time to eat s’mores. I didn’t know that s’mores were a southern thing, but I can’t explain his lack of experience otherwise… By the way, when you search for s’mores, you discover that s’mores are a southern food. At least according to the recipe index on about.com. They may have inspired or been inspired by Moon Pies. I like s’mores better, of course.)

And we stopped by Duckett Schoolhouse, which was a one room schoolhouse for grades 1-8, which my grandfather, his siblings and many of his cousins attended. It’s in about the same state of disrepair that it has been in for thirty years.

* I think the Little One may have wound up with three Vacation Bible School t-shirts this year. Episcopal, United Methodist, and Bible Church. She was explaining heaven to me yesterday afternoon. Streets paved with gold and lots of magical thinking are involved.

**Shortly after we came back from Duckett, the Little One lost her hat. She must have been worrying about it for weeks. When we packed for Chicago in mid-July, I asked her to find her hat so I could pack it. She burst into tears: It was lost, lost forever! She lost it at Central one day, and maybe it blew away in a storm or somebody saw it and thought it was paper and thought it was litter and thought she had littered and threw it away! Or some other implausible event. Oh, the tragedy of it all. After the wailing and gnashing of teeth subsided, I offered to make her another hat, which I did while we were in Chicago, and then I made matching tops for her and her cousin. When we got back, Don checked at Central’s lost and found, and found her hat. (He says that the director said that lots of people complimented the hat while it waited for the Little One’s return.) These are the matching tops. I guess I didn’t take a picture of her new hat.

*** The Johnson Brothers are adding some functional beams in the living room in the next couple of weeks so the upstairs won’t fall down once we get the bathrooms installed. As many beams as they’re putting in, I think we won’t need any decorative ones.

Sometimes I help my dad work on the house. It is fun. (The Little One wrote and typed the part above, and dictated the following.  She did ask how to spell bought and house.  The title is her own.)

I get to write with chalk and rocks. I have lunch there sometimes. I find marbles sometimes and I get to play outside in the backyard. It is sheltered by trees and I can play with my neighbor Sally. I find bricks and wood and I find fireflies and rolypolies. I help him meet with architects. The End.

Sorry about that pause. Don was posting for us, and then we drove to Chicago, and then I drove my folks to College Station, Texas and back, and then we spent a day in medical maintenance, and, well, now it’s August. The foundation work is done, the tornado room is almost done,* and we have a basement full of extra cement blocks. And a tandem bicycle,** and a tag-along bicycle,*** and my freezer is full of produce (blackberries, blueberries, raspberries, peaches, purple hull peas, only not as many purple hull peas as I expected because it turns out that my office is filled with Southerners who love purple hull peas, especially when they’re already hulled. Next time I’m in College Station and the Farm Patch is selling, I’ll buy a five pound bag for each of them.)

I have been wanting to buy expensive reproduction wallpaper for a while. I’ve been watching EBay for Bradbury paper, and the couple of times I’ve bid, I’ve been beat.  Don’s been hesitant, probably because we don’t have walls yet and may run out of money before we have walls. Rational enough, but I still look at the wallpaper.

Wednesday, Charles Rupert emailed me … only I didn’t know it was Charles Rupert because they’ve changed their name to Historic Style.  Their private wallpaper line is using Charles Rupert, and the rest of the business is using Historic Style. Anyway, they emailed a newsletter that included their private sale for email subscribers only. I opened it up Thursday, and saw a mess of paper that I liked.  Small volumes (hence good prices).  Don and I went through it when I got home from work, and agreed we both like the paper. Then, we measured rooms on our plans, and hypothesized about how much wainscoting we would use so we could buy/afford enough paper. Then, we waited. Why? Because Charles Rupert is in Victoria, BC (a city I loved when I visited on business even before I owned an old house), and the paper couldn’t be bought online and they keep regular business hours. So, I tried  to prepare myself for someone else pouncing on the paper — there were only three or four that came in sufficient amounts to even do a small powder room and we wanted some of all of them. But, as it turned out, Don scored for us.

So, since I love sharing a bargain after the fact, here’s the link to the newsletter. We bought the brick on brick mallow (Kate Faulkner for Morris & Co., handprinted, regular price $250/double roll) for our dining room. A splurge at $89/double roll. And the blue Jugendstil Craftsman ($19/double roll!) for my sewing room. And the pink acanthus ($19/double roll) probably for the powder room, but I think Don may have bought more just in case. And a couple of pieces of the Standen paper, possibly for behind the Murphy bed. Wow! Good thing we’re good at hanging expensive paper together…

Now, if we could just get some walls to hang the paper on.

* The door still needs installing, and the ceiling needs to be put in.  I guess our foundation guys are coming back to do that and put in some beams to hold up the second floor.

** Don and I took the tandem (Craig’s List score) out for a spin today.  In the 94 degree heat.  I haven’t been on a bike since I was too pregnant to balance.  She’s almost six now.  I think this will be fun once I quit with the death grip on the handlebars.  I figure that since we can paper together, we can probably ride the same bike.   We practiced in an abandoned subdivision where no one could see us and the roads were very good.  Tandem biking is tricky, although it will probably be even trickier once we put the Little One on the end with her tag-along bike.  She’s enjoying riding with Don — lots of stares and comments.

In addition to bad electric, we had some bad trees. We had three old oaks, probably as old as the house - maybe older.

I’m sure these were grand specimens at one time, but by the spring of 2008 they were just old - mostly trunks with a few large branches jutting out precariously over our neighbor’s belongings. I was afraid a spring storm would blow up and knock one of them into a neighbor’s house, or car, or cat, or child, or child holding a cat… you get the idea. So, we hired some tree guys to cut them down and haul them away. This is definitely NOT a good DYI project!

They made quick work of it - a couple of days. I especially like this sequence.

I’m sure you can tell from the pictures that this work was done in the spring. We had a rough spring here in Arkansas. About two weeks after these trees were removed, a big storm took out several large trees in the neighborhood. Timing is everything!

As a sidebar, we found this little guy hugging a large stump.

One of the tree cutters thought it was a black widow. Lisa’s mom thought it wasn’t. Any ideas?

This is Don again. I’ve decided to catch up on some of the things I’ve been working on since we started our current renovation, meaning, this stuff was done weeks or months ago!

Lisa may have posted this before, but this was the state of the electric service when we purchased the house.

Yes, it was as bad as it looked. It wasn’t at all clear how to match a particular panel to a particular room in the house. Some of the fuse holders were broken, and some of the switches didn’t seem to work. Every morning I felt compelled to look out of the second floor window of our rental at the second floor of our new old house (we live on the next block, and you can see one house from the other). I wanted to make sure it hadn’t burned down during the night.

Now the electric service looks like this.

During the past few weeks, I have removed most of the old electric wire and accessories from the house - a non-threatening task since the juice is shut off. I’ve even made enough cash with a couple of trips to the local salvage yard to pay for my Craig’s List band saw! Until further notice, I’m running everything off of that two-gang receptacle in the garage.

Yes, I still check the house every morning as I descend the stairs for that first cup of coffee. However, I would be really, really surprised to find a smoldering pine and cedar carcass looking back at me.

The Little One found this guy hanging out about three feet off the ground, in a large bush (or small tree thing), in front of the dining room window.

Not being a native southerner (this is Don again), I mildly freaked out (the Little One just thought it was cool). I held it together enough to get the photos, then headed home to ask the native southerner I’m married to exactly what I had taken a picture of… apparently not poisonous, and I am apparently a snake weenie (which I already knew, and I freely admit). I haven’t seen it again.

Incidentally, that bush/tree thing is coming down! (ETA by Lisa: It’s a bush honeysuckle, an enthusiastic invasive.)

For the past few weeks, Johnson Brothers Construction has been under our house, in our basement, digging, pouring, and propping. As will happen over 90+ years, our well-built house had developed some rather significant dips and sags. The original stone foundation needed some help. We hired Johnson Brothers based on several credible references, one calling them “the Click and Clack of foundation repair.” They brought lots of neat tools, and yes, that is a tractor in (really under) the house.

Then there are the “while you’re at it” sub-projects. Such as, “while you’re at it, why don’t you put a safe room down there,” or “while you’re at it, why don’t you dig this section of the basement out deeper so I can use it as shop space.” Actually, these are both good ideas, and added less than 20 percent to the cost of the initial project of stabilizing the house. We’ll keep telling ourselves this.

The concrete trucks have been out 3 times, first for the footings, then the walls, and late last week one more load for the new slab. The most impressive structures are the three-foot thick retaining walls that went up on the south and east sides, holding back the hill. They were designed to be so wide in order to wrap over the top of two original stone retaining walls that were failing. While taking a break from digging the footings, the guys heard a loud noise. Yes, one of the walls had collapsed. While scary, no harm was done. I’ve now got a nice pile of project stone in the back yard.

They use a concrete pump to get the concrete into the house. This saves them time and agravation as compared to trying to get the huge truck behind the house, close enough to use the chutes, or even worse, hauling by hand.

A French drain was installed under the new walls, piped into a new sump pump. Heavy plastic was placed under the new slab. It should be a dry place for my wood shop.

They are also installing several new beams supported by steel posts. The most impressive of these went up last week – the main beam for the house. They raised the center of the house five inches! My front door actually locks now!!

They plan to wrap up the project this week. All that remains is the installation of a few more beams (there will be a total of 9), and the safe room. It will be constructed of concrete block. The concrete truck will be out one more time to complete the safe room.

Once all is done the basement will contain roughly 800 square feet of shop space, a 3/4 bath, the safe room, new stairs up to the family room (from the existing garage), and a dumb waiter. I’ll post again when the safe room is complete. I know, it’s only a basement, but it’s the first real construction we’ve done.

(by Don)

Don and I pulled the oak strip flooring from one of the bedrooms in Apartment 1 on Saturday.  We did half the other bedroom today.  I thought about his dad some while we did it. The last time we did this together, his dad cut church and helped while his mom kept the Little One for us.  I miss his dad.

Start by sweeping up the room. If you’re the floor puller, you will spend most of your time scooting around, and you don’t want to scoot into splinters.

Then, find the side of the room with the tongues exposed. Because the floor was nailed down through the tongue, it is easiest to pull from the tongue side. Start at the end which is exposed. Don uses two pry bars, and rocks them toward him to help loosen the nails. We like to work left to right, perhaps because the tongue end is on the right, perhaps because we are right-handed.  If there’s room, tap the pry bar with a hammer to encourage the pry bar to slide under the strip. Move the pry bars down the strip until the strip is removable.

When the strip is mostly loose, pause while wiggling the piece loose so your wife can take your picture with her slow-as-molasses camera. Wear protective eye gear and gloves like Norm tells you. The first few pieces are face-nailed, and much harder to de-nail than the later pieces. (So I left them for Don to do.)

After an hour, we had about a quarter of the room done. .

This photo illustrates the tongues on the short ends of the strips. The other ends have grooves.
After a couple of hours, Don’s cell phone rang, so we took a break. You can see that sometimes, the nails stay behind, stuck in the subfloor.

What was I doing? Pulling nails and taking pictures. The still life below illustrates my equipment: a pair of bullnose pliers, a flat place, and a coffee can to receive the nails. (By the way, Don says our local IGA now carries Stewart’s coffee. He had been buying cans of it from Chicago whenever he went home.) I like to align the board with the groove near me since the nails are pointed toward me that way. Then, I pull and pull. Sometimes I use that piece of scrap as a fulcrum, but mostly it doesn’t help. I was able to keep up with Don’s floor pulling until I started a blister. Then, I slowed down. (Managed not to pop it.  The blister.)

Then, we went back and swept up. I pushed all the debris into the bathroom and left it for another day. Don pulled the nails that stayed in the subfloor.

Then Don folded up the tar paper (and helpfully posed for my slow-as-molasses camera).

Isn’t it interesting that the subfloor was laid diagonally? I suppose that decreased the odds that a strip would line up with the joint between the subfloor pieces. We left the room broom clean (another round of sweeping), and all nails pulled. (We even sorted about eighty percent by size and put them on one of Don’s carts.) The job took about five hours.

We got about half done with the other room today.  We have about a dozen ten-foot pieces, and, as the official floor layer-outer, I’m starting to think about the focal point of the floor that this is  destined for.  (Somewhere upstairs.)