Out and Back

John and Rebecca

I learned a little something about my house this weekend.  My husband and I headed over to the Lehigh County Historical Society and took advantage of their library to do some research in the old Allentown City Directories, to see if we could figure out approximately when our house was built.  (If you live in an older home and are curious about when it was built, an easy way to get a rough estimate is to pull an old city directory and search for your house number.  Before the days of Yellow Books and Yellow Pages, city directories were cross-referenced by street, so you could search by address or by someone's name.)

We knew that our house had to have been built sometime in the 1890s, but we weren't sure exactly when.  Thanks to the city directories, we discovered that our lovely house came into existence sometime around 1891 or 1892.  The first people to live in our house were a couple named John and Rebecca Hartzell.  John's occupation is listed in the directory as "laborer."  We also discovered that before they built our house they lived just a few doors down, on the corner.

Crazy-Big Casas

I found this excellent piece on Slate yesterday -- it's a great slide-show essay about "McMansions" and why they are so hideous, and it also touches on ways to design large houses so that they actually look good.

My husband has had extensive training as an architectural conservator, so he has a lot of opinions about old houses vs. new houses.  My degree is in art history, so I have a pretty good understanding of aesthetics and architectural and decorative styles.  Put us together on a suburban street looking at a new subdivision, and the trash talk gets intense.

My husband insists that one of the major reasons these new McMansions are so ugly is because they are designed by contractors, not architects (this is something the Slate piece touches on as well).  I think they're ugly because of all the cheap materials that are used (plastics, composites, etc.) and the fact that there is no uniqueness to them at all.  I also prefer homes that are built on a more human scale.

Before and after

I realized I haven't posted any photos of our house since we finished removing the veneer from the front.  Here's a before:

                                                                                                                                                   And here's an after:

The house ate me

Someone help.... I've fallen off the blogwagon and I can't get up!

Seriously... my house has swallowed me whole.  I am painting in my sleep.  I keep needle-nose pliers and a paint scraper under my pillow.  I have gone through a whole bottle of Lava soap in less than a week.  I am obsessing about chrysanthemums, pressure washers, and Murphy's oil soap.

Remember what I said about how I love Martha Stewart and Bree van de Kamp?

I must have been smoking crack.

More posts after Sunday when this freakin' house tour is over.

Ow, ow... OW! OW!!!!!

The house kicked our butts this weekend.  When my husband took the cement stucco veneer off the front of our house earlier this week, we discovered a section up high where the gutter had failed many years ago.  Beneath the veneer, a huge section of bricks (more than 200 of 'em... I'll tell you how I know that later) was bulging out as though our house was trying to blow a bubble.  The mortar had failed, and the bricks were basically up there but for the grace of God.  Serioulsy, folks.  We were staring at an accident/lawsuit waiting to happen.

So my amazingly gifted husband, who has never laid a brick in his life, carefully documented the area and removed the bricks on Friday, numbering each one so we would know where it fit.  (That's how I know there were more than 200 bricks in that section -- 213 to be precise.)  He spent Saturday and Sunday rebuilding that section of the wall, brick by brick.  And it wasn't just simple wall-building, oh no.... the brick arches above two of the three upstairs windows were part of this in-danger-of-sliding section, so those had to be removed and rebuilt, too.  Arches are tricky because if you don't position the bricks just right, they don't fit, and you're left with too much or too little space in your arch.  I suggested we make shims out of cardboard and use those to position the bricks in the vital first course of our three-course arches, and that did the trick. 

My job this weekend was to arrange the bricks in their proper order and load them onto the Genie lift so my husband could put them in place.  While he laid a course, I sat on the front steps and chiseled away at the old mortar still clinging to the bricks that would form the next course.  I scraped off everything from old lime mortar to Portland cement, feeling with each brick like some sort of weird mother hen, cleaning and grooming my little baby bricks so they would look just right in the front wall of our 115 year old house.  After I was done with them, my husband gave them a bath in a bucket of water so they wouldn't absorb too much moisture from the mortar when they were put back into position.  (Other than the care and feeding of our two cats, this is the closest I've ever come to parenthood.)

My other job was mixing mortar.  If you ever need some good hydraulic lime mortar, I'm your gal.  It's not as tricky as it sounds, really.  I just mixed hydraulic lime (try not to inhale it) with play sand (yes, sandbox sand) and added water until it was the right consistency, which in our case turned out to be just slightly wetter than sandcastle sand.  I also added some pigment for the arches, which required colored mortar.  (Nothin' fancy, just tried to match the color of the bricks.)

Needless to say, we are both two tired puppies.  I have something akin to tennis elbow in my right arm from all the mixing, lifting, carrying, and dragging I've done over the past couple of days.  But the house looks freakin'  beautiful.  Let me leave you with a few tips:

1.) If you own a brick house, don't ever repoint with pure portland cement.  I will hunt you down and kill you if you do.  It's just bad, bad, bad to do this... your bricks will crack all to hell because portland cement doesn't flex AT ALL.

2.) When undertaking a project of this sort, cake frosting provides a quick and effective energy boost.  Just don't confuse your cake frosting with your mortar.

3.) Expect odd-colored boogers to come out of your nose for awhile after you've finished work like this.  I've had a veritable rainbow these past couple of days.

4.) During the course of your project, don't be afraid to take a break for a bit and find something good on TV.

P.S.  My husband and I decided today that if we ever have a son, we are going to name him Mason.

Brick dust everywhere

This weekend, my husband began chiseling off the cement stucco veneer on our house.  I don't have any photos but will get out with the digital camera as soon as I can and take some.  He started working on the south side of the house first, scooting up and down in a huge, loud, diesel-powered Genie lift.  This thing is so huge it has to be parked on the sidewalk with the arm and basket reaching over the fence.  There is also a big scary dumpster in front of our house for all the concrete to go into when it's off... we've discovered that said dumpster has become a community dumpster for the entire block.  As long as it's clean fill, we don't care.

He's managed to hack off about half of the veneer on the south side of the house.  He would have gotten more done but it took him about half a day to figure out the best way to wield the electric hammer for maximum effectiveness.  (In case you ever find yourself doing this... the best way, it turns out, is to point the damn thing straight down and let the weight of the tool and gravity do all the work.  Be sure to invest in a good pair of anti-vibration gloves, though, so that your hands don't shake after you've finished your work for the day.) 

On top of that, we discovered that there was a lot of repointing that needed to be done near the chimney, so that took about a day to complete.  Our chimney wasn't lined until we bought the house, so the salts that formed over the years gradually ate away at the mortar.  Much to my husband's terror, he discovered he could yank whole bricks out and stare right into the chimney itself.  And repointing all the way down to the bed takes awhile, as you can probably imagine.

There is cement and brick dust absolutely everywhere.  The sidewalk in front of our house looks pink, and the shutters I so carefully painted now no longer look like the green I painted them.  (Fortunately the paint is dry so the dust didn't stick.)  My job is going to be to paint the trim, doors, downspout, cornice, etc., so I will be riding up and down in the lift before too long, I imagine.   The safety harness you have to wear makes you look like you have a tail.  I guess Genie lifts and their requisite harnesses are the closest we will come to experiencing the life of our simian ancestors... tails and all.

Bargain wallpaper

This is the wallpaper that will go up in our dining room at some point.  I found it yestserday on the clearance rack at Home Depot... on sale for $7 a roll.  And there were ten rolls, which, according to our quick mental calculations, should be enough to cover our dining room's walls.

Since becoming a homeowner, I've discovered that I seem to carry my house -- or pieces of it -- with me wherever I go.  There is a little tape measure in my purse at all times, in case I find a piece of furniture or other object that looks like it will go nicely.  Before I bought curtains, I was carrying a sheet of paper with the measurements of all the windows written down on it.  While digging for loose change or a piece of gum, I invariably find a paint chip or a piece of door or drawer hardware.  The heights of my ceilings and the widths of my doorways are things I know by heart.  I know where the loose floorboards are and where every electrical outlet can be found, and I know what colors I'm going to paint my bathroom as soon as the walls have a chance to dry out.  (See yesterday's post.)

This morning, out of sheer curiosity to see just how much of a bargain I got on the wallpaper, I tracked down the website of the manufacturer, Village.  After a brief search, I found the same wallpaper we'd purchased yesterday and discovered, much to my delight, that it normally retails for.... get this.... $25.99 a roll!  Holy crap, did I get a bargain!  $260 worth of wallpaper for $70.  Not too shabby.

I love finding stuff like this, especially considering how much we spend on our house in a given month.  Not long after we moved in, we figured out the kind of wallpaper we wanted in the front hallway, living room, and dining room.  We knew from the beginning that the dining room needed to be papered in red -- either a floral/vegetal print or a more subtle damask.  Red is a good color for a dining room because it stimulates the appetite.  The living room will have blue wallpaper (there's this asian-inspired print I've been lusting after), and the front hallway will have a chair rail with textured wallpaper below (painted a beautiful color called "wild manzanita") and brown horse toile wallpaper above.  And then, like a gift from the heavens, a perfect example of the kind of wallpaper we want in the dining room materialized before us.

It was a strange twist of fate that I happened to notice yesterday's wallpaper as we were passing by, and even stranger because there are two Home Depots in Allentown and we were at the one that we don't normally go to.  (We happened to be on that side of town yesterday morning which is why we stopped there.)

I guess that yesterday the patron saint of homeowners was smiling on us.

My life as a house

Folks who own older homes soon discover that they spend a lot of money on them.  Our house, built sometime in the 1890s, is no exception.  We are always doing something to improve or beautify it, whether planting bleeding hearts and hostas in the garden or painting shutters (as I've been doing today.)  We like to joke that we have our paychecks direct-deposited to Home Depot.  One time, Home Depot's stock went down a bit and a friend emailed me to ask if we were between projects!

Unlike some older houses, though, ours was pretty much move-in ready when we bought it.  The people we purchased it from were what are commonly known as "flippers" -- people who buy up properties cheap, fix them up, and re-sell them at a profit.  Our sellers were the perfect flipping family -- mother and daughter were both real-estate agents, and dad was a general contractor.  So our house had a newly-redone kitchen and bathroom, a quarter-bath added in the basement, a fresh coat of paint on all the walls (and, to our dismay, the interior wood trim) and beautifully-refinished softwood floors.  They even replaced the old coal-fired boiler in the basement with a gas one. 

Our place has not been without its problems, though.  Some time ago (probably in the 60s or 70s) a cement veneer was put on the house.  (One of the brand names for this kind of thing is Brickote.  It's the masonry equivalent of aluminum or vinyl siding.)  The logic goes something like this:  you slap a cement stucco that is sculpted to look like brick over your existing bricks and voila -- you have a maintenance free exterior!  You'll never have to repoint your mortar again!  Woo hoo!

That's the theory.  It doesn't seem to work in practice, though, especially not on our house.  On the northern wall of our house, moisture from rain has seeped in through the cement veneer and into the underlying bricks themselves.  As the moisture evaporates, it can't get back out through the cement.  So it pushes its way through the brick and into the plaster of our interior walls.  We have a horrible paint-adhesion problem on the interior walls of that entire side of our house.  There are huge, ugly blotches on the walls in our front hallway where the moisture has caused the paint and plaster to bubble out and crumble away.  As I type this, my husband is outside chipping away at the stuff... we're hoping to get it all off in time for our neighborhood's annual house tour in October.  (Our house is going to be one of a dozen or so featured on the tour.)

In addition to the aforementioned practical reason for removing the cement crap, there is an aesthetic one, too.  The mortar joints on the front of our house are absolutely gorgeous.  They are very narrow and expertly done.  I get tears of joy in my eyes every time I see them... they are that pretty.  On top of that, we've discovered that there are bricks above the front door and the windows that have designs pressed into them.  So our house, which can generously be called folk victorian (read: mostly vernacular with a few high-style elements) actually has more decorative touches than we originally thought.  The experience has been like uncovering hidden treasures.

As my husband chisels away at the cement stucco, I've been busy on the back porch painting the shutters that will be put in place once the original bricks have been restored to their former glory.  I picked a beautiful shade of olive green for the shutters and window surrounds and so far have two coats of high-gloss enamel on three of the six shutters.  This super glossy enamel paint looks wonderful but it is a pain to work with -- you have to slather it on thick to get good coverage, which when dealing with louvered shutters means you soon find yourself in the midst of a dripping paint nightmare.

I know it will all be worth it when it's done, though.  We'll take five minutes to reflect on our sweat equity, and then it will be on to the next project.

I wouldn't have it any other way.