Day 7

July 30, 2010- aka Alok's older sister's birthday. Happy Birthday Purvi!!

Hello. Alok here with my first post. So, I think I may have underestimated the amount of work that the house needed...but I'm looking forward to all of it, well, except the mold. I am concerned about the mold. As Jessie has said, once the roofing is done we can tackle that monster.

I am excited to start working on the garden. I found a good deal on a hedgetrimmer and chainsaw, and now I'm armed and dangerous (mostly to myself). There are a lot of really great things to work with in the garden, and I can tell that a lot of care was given to the garden, well up until about three years ago. Initially, I will just try to get the front yard presentable. Okay, here is Jessie with an update.
-Alok


Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.... sorry, I think I just fell asleep reading Alok's post. When he saw me write that, hesaid "how rude" in true Michelle Tanner style. I think maybe the mold spores sucked out his sense of humor. As Alok said, the work on this house may have been underestimated by us. As Casey said, when you have a 100 year old house, you have 100 years of people cutting corners and messing stuff up.

My main concern right now is that Alok and I have watched WAY too many B rated horror flicks to live in this house. He had a nightmare about a crazy chainsaw massacre (due to the new chainsaw purchase) and I jumped because I thought I saw something in the creepy mirror. May seem silly to most of you, but try watching House of a Thousand Corpses and then see how you feel.

So here is the progress for today. We did a lot of wallpaper peeling (we= me for the whole day and then Alok and my mom after work). Here is it before:



Dining area

After:




Before (front room):



After:



Here is before (foyer):


And after:

This is the foyer. Alok decided to move the massive mirror, which had this substance under it:

As well as grasspaper. We don't know what it is, but it's very hard to get off.


Alok scrapping away.

Look what was discovered under the wallpaper in the dining room. Children's drawings or a secret message? You decide:



There were a lot of initials of the Brown kids who lived there before the Kaufmans and in this last picture it says '64.

Alok worked on the laundry room (aka the tetanus room) today. He ripped out the desk. Here is before:




And After:




BTW, did I mention that we have a fire alarm that will be set off if any smoke detector in the house goes off (see the horn in the upper right hand corner in this picture?). We should probably figure out how to work that in case it goes off.


Alok's bent screwdriver..... it was taking out by a nail on the floor

BTW, when I came in today the massive air conditioner had mysteriously made it's way from the roof into the yellow bedroom.



Hmmm.... no one was home at the time. Glad to know our place is secure.

Last random find of the day. Look at the wall on the right in the picture below. Notice anything?



Wall in west side of front room

Why the heck is it curved?

Oh, the roofers also made progress today, although it rained which I'm sure helped feed the mold and ever growing water damage.

Off to sleep to prepare for tomorrow....

Jessie

Day 6

July 29, 2010

Well, today was a bit more productive than yesterday. We still have the mold issue (shocking that it just didn't magically disappear) and found a few more areas in that room with water damage. Not surprising and there isn't much we can do until the roof is finished. My cousin's husband was going to cut out the mold today, but said that there would be too much additional water damage if we did that. So, hopefully the weather can hold up for the roofers.


View from our attic. They're laying on the new OSB board.

When the contractor and I went up to the attic to check out the mess in the attic/progress on the roof, he stuck his head up and said hi to the roofers who were standing on the boards you see in the picture above. They weren't expecting to see him and one of them screamed like a little girl. Maybe it's not such a good idea to scare people who are on the very top of a very steep roof. At least they have signed waivers.


The view of the mess. They cleaned up most of it and you can't really see what's going on, but they are making progress.

Today there were actually about 8 or 9 guys on the roof instead of the 2 or 3 from yesterday. It was also a bit cooler so they worked for quite awhile.

My mom came over for about 3 hours before work and we worked on getting more wallpaper off. I stayed for another 4 hours or so and made some progress.

Here are the comparisons:


Before



After



Before


After


Before


After

In the picture you see above, we're having a heck of a time getting the paper off from above the front door. There's some substance that is making it difficult. We'll trouble shoot later. Oh, my mom was on that ladder in front of the front door. She about got knocked down when someone came in. Mental note to lock the door if you are using a ladder in front of it.



Before


After

We also finally had all of our locks changed and Casey stopped by at lunch to check on yazoo. Alok is allegedly working tonight on the house while I'm at roller derby, so hopefully he'll have a chance to post.

In the meantime, we decided that we are gutting our downstairs bathroom that is in the apartment area so that we have a sanitary place to bathe when we move in. Here it is in its current state:



Suggestions? We know we want to get the vanity out (it's WAY too big for the space) and we want to keep the lights on the wall, as they are original. Oh, we are definitely NOT keeping the carpet in the bathroom. Every bathroom in this house had carpet. Yuck.

Oh and to answer a question, yes, it's as small as it looks.

Jessie

Day 5

July 28, 2010

Today was a short lived work day. I am having some allergy problems.... hmmmm... I wonder why! Our new plan of attack for the mold is to go ahead and have it cut out of the plaster now, even though the room is still leaky. If more mold grows, so be it. The problem is, we need to find someone to cut it out. Alok swears it's still growing. I don't think it is. Let's let the pictures decide. Here it is 2 days ago:



Here it is today:



Looks the same to me. The only difference is the better quality pictures from today. Isn't mold exciting? I'm hoping that someone will be able to cut it out tomorrow.

I did very little peeling today. My mom came by again and lunch and helped. Here was Alex again:


Alex being very confused by what is going on and what smells so bad. She won't even eat her bone at the new house. Probably too unsanitary for her. Although, she did try to eat a piece of wallpaper yesterday.

I kept working on the backing in the foyer. I was also very sore from roller derby, which slowed me down and I kept burning myself with the stupid steamer.

Here it is at the beginning of today:



And at the end:


So impressive, huh?

I also working on peeling the gold grass paper off of the front room with the ugly built in bookshelf. Here it is at the beginning of the day:



And at the end:





Again, the backing is virtually the same color at the wallpaper, so you can't see the difference that well.

The most exciting thing was that our roofers started today. We went with JDS construction (Jim Sanders). So far he's been great to work with. We'll see how that progresses. Here is how it looks today:



This really doesn't show you much, but you can see the debris that is falling down from the roof. I'm just happy they started. The bad news is that they have a shortage of guys to work on the house. They had 6 guys not show up today and many people won't do it because of the heat. Know any roofers out of work? Let us know :-)

Oh, remember the air conditioner that caused the window debacle yesterday? Here it is still sitting on the roof:

The air conditioner on the balcony of the fire escape

They were too short manned today to try to get it down.

So, not too exciting today on the internal work, but some progress is being made on a non-leaking roof. Let's hope more guys show up tomorrow!!

Some people have been asking what our plan is. This is a great question that keeps evolving. As it stands now, our goal is to get the place health hazard free so we can move in. What that means is the roof has to be completed, we need new gutters (we're going with Peters on that), then we need to fix all of the water damage on the 2nd floor and in the closet in the apartment (first floor) area. We also hope to have a new heating system put in the house, as well as air upstairs, but that is actually more expensive than our roof, so we may have to wait.

Our goal for downstairs prior to move in is to get rid of all of the wallpaper, wash down and kilz the walls downstairs (kilz is a product that gets rid of allergens/odors, etc- we'll paint later), rip up all carpet on the 1st floor, refinish the hidden oak floors, and make one bathroom more usable. Then, we'll live downstairs, making the apartment our bedroom, while we work on other areas of the house. That's the plan, we'll see what really happens.

Jessie

Day 4

July 27, 2010

Before I start, I wanted to give you all more context for the wallpaper debate (as requested). Here are additional pics:


Parlor wallpaper


Close up on the men/sheep

Today started with more wallpaper peeling. I was there by myself again since most other people are working. I got pretty far in pulling of the first layer of painted gold grasspaper in the dining room area. This pictures don't show much because the backing is virtually the same color as the wallpaper.


Sorry. I wasn't by myself. Alex was there.

Here it is before starting:




Gotta love painted light covers

Here it is after:



Most of the gold is gone, you just can't tell. I just need to finish the south wall, then one that is in the front of this picture.

Then, I moved back to the foyer where I worked on getting the backing off of the wall from the green grass paper.

Here it is when I started this morning:

Foyer before


Here it is after:


Not too impressive. There were a few reasons for this. Basic ones were talking to the roofers (who are starting tomorrow, the materials were delivered today), getting quotes on windows, as well as another air conditioning/heating quote. Oh, and the people came to cut the box springs apart so they could move them out of the attic. That wasn't what took the most time though. When talking to the roofers, they pointed out a rather large air conditioner that was basically sitting on the roof. It was at the landing of the inside stairs. This air conditioner needed to moved from the window so they could easily work on the roof. Plus it looked like it was from about 1970 and shouldn't be turned on anyway. Air conditioners on windows also cause water damage, so we figured we should go ahead and have them move it. Sounds easy, right? Wrong. Very, very wrong.

Here it is before



Here they are trying to remove the unit:



And here it is after:









Here is is now

So, basically the window frame was cut bigger than the window so that the unit would fit. It had completely rotted the window frame, ruined the window, and the wall under the window. That is probably why that had wood paneling underneath the window. Sigh. The bad news is, our wall is ripped up and we have no window. Also, they can't figure out how to get the unit off the roof since it's so heavy so right now it's just sitting on the roof (we're going to try to get it back through the window and out tomorrow. The good news is that I had Doors and More measure that window earlier in the day and we discovered hidden mold (not good that it was there, but good that we know). I guess we'll start by replacing that window. Oh, they also got rid of the nasty curtains that was covering it.

That's all from me for today. Maybe one of these days Alok will post. I'm off to roller derby.

Jessica