Category Archives: Remodeling Old Homes

Remodeling Old Homes #3: My Favorite How-To Books

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I love books.  Not just any books, mind you.  I love How To books.  There is something empowering about a How To book that I find very satisfying.  Consequently, I rarely part with any of the DIY books I’ve collected over the years.  They’re usually filled with so much info that even though I may never re-plumb an entire bathroom or stucco a wall, I can’t bring myself to get rid of them.  Maybe I’ll loan a couple out to some friends or family, that I don’t mind at all, but you won’t see me sell any.  That is unless of course there’s no way I’ll EVER use it for ANY project at ANY point in history… which, is doubtful.

I’m categorizing this post as Remodeling Old Homes simply because they are probably more useful on the whole for people who are renovating, but they are just as applicable to owners of new or already renovated homes that need to make small repairs or major upgrades.

Here’s a list of my favorite How To books…

1.  Reader’s Digest Complete Do-It-Yourself Manual.  This book has EVERYTHING.  Wanna know about what glue to use for each project?  It’s in there.  Repair a faucet?  Yep.  Pour concrete?  Mmm Hmm.  Fix a hole in the Titanic?  You betcha!

2.  Home Improvement 1-2-3.  This book is a little more focused on the home, while the Reader’s Digest is a little more varied.  There’s not as much info in this Home Depot book, but it explains projects nicely and there is still a ton of info in here.  You can pick this one up right at the Home Depot.  I first bought this book immediately after I bought my first home and it was very helpful.

3.  This Black and Decker home wiring guide is the best electrical how to book I’ve read.  It’s a wealth of basic wiring info.  For your average home owner that’s attempting a small project, this book is perfect.  It shows you how to setup circuits in a varying number of situations (single switch, 3-way switches, 4-way, receptacles, etc).  It provides enough general theory that you’ll get a lot out of it.  This book is pretty much how I learned how to wire a house.

4.  Drywalling is hard.  Hanging the wallboards is the easy part.  Getting seamless tape joints takes a lot of practice and experience.  I’m OK at it, I still need some practice.  This book lays out the fundamentals to get you on the right track.  If you’re thinking about tackling a drywall job yourself you can save yourself a lot of money.  Consider reading this book if you don’t have a lot of experience with it.  It’ll save you a lot of aggravation.

5.  Plumbing is another area where you can save some dough if you do it yourself.  I picked up this book because I re-plumbed my first house and I wanted to know where all the supply and drain pipes go relative to one another.  Another really solid Home Depot book.  There is a lot of info on repairing faucets and toilets, which can be helpful.  Toilets I will fix, but if a faucet is leaking or giving me fits, I just replace it.

6.  If you REALLY get into home improvement and DIY projects and you need a kitchen facelift, then consider building your own cabinets.  If you’re intimidated by that whole scenario, start with a small book shelf and see how that goes.  Cabinet construction is not that difficult.  You’re basically making a box.  Read this book before you start.  It goes a little over the top in terms of planning and layout, but the basic theory behind it is excellent.  Nowadays you can plan your cabinet layout and cutsheet in a decent cabinet software program.

I think I have a few more books yet, but I think I’ll save them for another post.  Do you have any quality reference books that you value? 

The Rest of the Shore House

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As promised in yesterday’s countertop post, here’s the rest of the before and after photos from our shore house renovation.  Keep in mind that most of the before photos are kinda crappy in quality because we weren’t really thinking we’d be putting them on the web one day.

I’ll start where I left off yesterday… in the kitchen.  This is obviously the before.  The floors were stained.  The look was dated.

We removed the cabinets and painted them.  To do that, we cleaned them really, really well first.  Then we applied some deglosser so the primer would adhere.  They were then spray primed with a BIN primer I bought at Lowes.  The finish coats were a furniture grade white lacquer, which was followed up with a couple coats of clear.  It was like painting a car.  I used a different technique for painting the cabinets in my first home, which occurred after these shore cabinets.  We also ripped out the linoleum flooring and put in hardwood.  The soffits were taken down as well as the cabinets under the peninsula.

Current view…

The mini pendant lights I believe are from Kichler, but these would probably be the closest match today.  The peninsula is made from poplar 1x4s and turned legs from Osborne Wood Products.  I whipped it together using a beaded router bit and a couple mortises made from my crappy drill press turned mortise machine.

The dining room faces the kitchen and it was also in need of a face lift… I should just save myself the time and say the entire house needed a lot of cosmetic work and why do these five year old photos look like they were taken in 1977?

You may notice that we put the hardwood throughout the house except the bathrooms and bedrooms.  We also ripped out the old baseboard heater and added a central heating furnace. That was an adventure!

The family room was pretty heinous.

Every surface need to be washed, painted or replaced.  There was a good deal of discoloration from years of smoking by the prior occupants.  We used this room to stage all of our supplies during the renovation.

Check out this bedroom…

Kinda random.  That chair looked pretty creepy from down the hall too…

Here’s that bedroom today…

Another bedroom…

The “Flip-Flop” room…

So that’s our near-the-shore house.  It took a ton of work to get to where it is today.  Can you believe it’s Wednesday already!  Anything fun planned for the weekend?

 

My Old Front Door

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When I got home from work, I didn’t expect to be writing this post.  I was hoping to finally write a celebratory post about our sliding drawers.  Not surprisingly, it remains unresolved pending some hardware I need to ship back and exchange for what is hopefully the last pieces I need.

So, not having a planned post to write, I decided to write something about my first home’s old door.  I was always planning on writing something up about this anyway, but for the life of me I couldn’t find any photos of the front of the house right before we sold it.  Why is that so important?  Well, I didn’t really finish this project until then.  You could say this one really hung around for a while.  A couple days ago, I bumped into a picture of the finished door in a random folder on our hard drive.  So, now I can better illustrate this process…

Here’s the story of the door:

I bought my home back in 2003 a couple years before I met Lisa.  The entry door was a stained glass piece (I actually mentioned this before in a post here) that was in need of a major overhaul.  Not sure if it was original to the house, but if it was, that meant it was 100+ years old.  The entry actually had the outer stained glass door, then there was a small vestibule followed by an inner door.  The original owners had added a screen door over the outside of the entry and judging by it’s condition it was probably there since the Kennedy administration.  One of my first acts as king owner of my new home was to rip that nasty screen door off.  Under the screen door was the original exterior molding that ran up and down the outside of the doorway and over the arch.  Not really sure of how I’d replace it, but knowing it had to go, I ripped all that trim off.

The exterior photos above show the original door with the trim ripped out and the side panels exposed.  I filled the space between the panels and the masonry with some expanding foam.  Couldn’t hurt right?  To correct the molding situation, I used a simple PVC brick molding that you can pick up at any home improvement store.  The brick molding is very similar in look and thickness to the molding I had just ripped off.  To add to that, I also installed a full light, brand new storm door.

Looks good right?  Much cleaner.  The space between the door molding and the house ended up getting filled with some regular mortar to give the appearance that the door was mortared into the house.  I just used a basic baker’s style piping bag to get the mortar into that crack.

The last photo above is how the house looked for about two years.  In 2005, I replaced the stained glass door (but kept it in the basement) with a standard six light solid wood door. The lock in the old door had started to fail and you could literally push the stained glass section right through if you wanted to break in.  You can catch a glimpse of that new door in the next photo..

In 2006, I tried installing a piece of flexible crown molding onto the top of the arch.  It didn’t go so well.  The crown molding ended up being too flimsy.  To correct that issue, I filled the space behind it with expanding foam.  The foam disfigured the molding, so I ripped it down.  Back to the drawing board.

For three years, the door and the arch sat.  Admittedly, I had other things going on in my life during that time.  I got engaged.  My dad got sick with stomach cancer and passed away.  We gutted and refinished the interior.  We got married.  Occasionally, I’d call a carpenter to drive by and give me some ideas of how to get this arch finished.  Never had any luck.

After a while, I remembered that the old molding had a small corbel on each side of the arch.  I thought that if I could make my own corbels, then maybe I could find some crown molding to butt into them.  To make the corbels, I glued three pieces of poplar together.  Since the corbels needed to sit on the brick molding, they needed to be as wide as the brick molding.  If I remember correctly, there were two pieces of 3/4″ and one piece of 1/2.” Once the glue cured, I drew the outline of the corbel onto the wood and cut the design out with a band saw. The corbels were sanded, primed and spray painted with an exterior grade paint.  I used some construction adhesive and a finish nailer to fasten them in place.

The crown molding piece I ended up getting was similar to my first attempt.  Although this time, I bought a profile with a solid back.  The solid back makes the piece considerably easier to glue and fasten.  You can see the comparison in the two photos below.

The crown went in pretty well.  I was able to order the crown with a pre-made radius that matched my arch and all I had to do was cut it to length and paint it.  It was also glued and nailed into place.

So, here’s the photo of the finished door.  It appears as though I hadn’t quite finished the mortar on the sides yet, but we did before we sold it.  This photo wasn’t taken with the intention of being a shot of the archway, so it is what it is….

Zoomed in a bit…

Hey, you can actually see that stained glass transom we had made too.  Nice!

So that’s my door story.  It wasn’t until I finished up this project that I knew I was really done with this house and felt ready to move on.  It had been hanging on unfinished for such a long time that wrapping it up almost felt like a thesis or a graduation.  Completing it required the skills I had picked up from every project I tackled as well as the lessons I had learned from earlier mistakes.  Major symbolism going on here if you can’t tell.  Once that door wrapped up, there wasn’t much left to do.  I finished this project only a couple months before we listed the home.

Is there any project that’s racking your brain that you keep putting off?  Does it represent your life in some weird symbolic way or is that just me??

Remodeling Old Homes #2: How to Run a Demo

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Last time we posted on renovating an old home, we discussed how to determine what to keep and what to hit with a sledge hammer and then throw out.  I thought I’d expand on the whole demolition topic and give some tips and suggestions for making a demo go smooth. Because I was a gigantic moron with my first house I ended up doing at least two big demos and probably a couple small ones. I thought I would impart the knowledge gained from my mistakes.

What to do BEFORE the demo begins:

1.  Reserve a dumpster for the date you have the demo planned. If you’re only demolishing one room’s worth of old plaster and trim, then you can probably get away with just some contractor clean up bags and can skip the dumpster. Any more than that and you REALLY need a dumpster. Trust me. A 20 cubic yard dumpster will run you between $300-$500 for a couple weeks plus any additional weight over a certain amount, like a ton for example.  So, so worth it.  I tried the whole bag everything and then just slowly add it to the weekly trash pickup.  I think I’d still be throwing out bags 5 years later.

2.  Pull a permit for the dumpster and the demo.  Most cities will require a dumpster permit if it’s going to be on a city street.  If it’s going to be in your driveway, then you usually don’t need a permit for the dumpster.  You probably still need one for the demo.  Do this a couple weeks ahead of time, because cities are bureaucracies and you know how that works.  This is in your interest.  A building inspector can recommend dumpster companies and contractors if you ask nicely enough.

3.  Mark all the stuff you’re removing with spray paint or tape.  If two plaster covered walls are adjacent to one another and you’re removing one and keeping the other, it would probably be helpful to add a piece of tape that says “Keep” on the good stuff too.  Once people start swinging hammers, extra walls have a habit of getting hit.

4.  Get the plaster, insulation, pipe insulation, floor tile adhesive, siding shingles.. anything that may have lead paint or asbestos.. get them tested at a lab.  This kind of testing is extremely important to your health.  You don’t want to find out later that the plaster wall ruins you’re standing on are filled with asbestos.  Most labs can give you results quickly and at a very low cost.  At the end of the day, the peace of mind is worth it.  My house didn’t have any, but I’m glad I got it tested. If you find out you do have lead paint or asbestos, then you need to consult an abatement professional before doing ANYTHING.

5.  Enlist your friends and family to help.  When I planned my last major demo, I knew it was going to be a doozy so I threw a demolition party complete with food and beer.  I recommended to my friends that they hold off on any real drinking until the demo was over.  I probably had about a dozen people or so swinging hammers and loading up the dumpster.  That’s another thing, buy them hammers and disposable masks.  Let them keep the hammers.  The money you pay for the hammers and the food will be worth the labor you get out of them.  Make sure everyone has work gloves and masks if they want them.  Most people enjoy ripping out crappy cabinets and tearing down plaster walls.

6.  Make sure the power is out to any walls or appliances that get removed.

7.  Use trash cans to haul out trash to the dumpster.  Try to have more than one trash can.  Try to get at least one per floor or better yet, one per room.  Don’t fill them all the way up as they’ll get WAY too heavy, max is about halfway filled.  Don’t put any kitchen cabinets or shelving into the dumpster until the end of the day or until they’ve been broken down.  An intact cabinet represents a lot of empty volume that is taken up in the dumpster.

8.  Make sure you tarp off areas of the house that you don’t want covered in layers of plaster dust.

During the demo:

1.  Make sure everyone gets assigned a room or an area to work on.  As the owner of the house, don’t feel too bad if it seems like you’re not working harder than anyone else.  Your job is to make sure everyone is working safely and is demo-ing the right stuff.  Float around room to room and help haul out junk to the dumpster.  No one likes that job anyway, so volunteer for that one.  Invariably, you’ll get a lot of questions about what gets kept and what gets tossed, so it’s hard to stay in one room for a long period of time anyway.

2.  Spare the rod, spoil the demo.  See that large patch of plaster missing from the ceiling in the photo above?  That patch had some water damage from the bathroom above it.  That’s where I left the ceiling at the end of the day.  Do you know what I did a week later after I returned my dumpster?  Yep.  I took the rest of the ceiling down.  I thought it would be easier to just drywall right over the rest of the plaster.  Nope.  Tearing it down sucked, but I got a much cleaner ceiling when all was said and done.  The moral of this story here is, if a part of a plaster wall or ceiling is crappy during a demo, take down the whole thing.

3.  Try to start the demo early, say around 9 or 10 AM and try to be finished within 3-4 hours.  You don’t want to take monopolize your friends much longer than that, besides you’ll need their help putting it all back together.

4.  When everything is out, use a shop vac to clean up.  Brooms are great for sweeping up large debris, but use a vac for the final cleaning.

Be safe and have fun.  It’ll be one of the few times you can smash something with a hammer and not have to apologize. 

Have you done any large scale demo’s?  Would you like to? 

 

Remodeling Old Homes #1: What Stays and What Goes

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A couple of weeks ago, Lisa and I received an email from a reader that enjoyed our site, but wanted to learn more about our first house.  They had just bought their first home and were looking to learn something about rehabbing a very old house, since they didn’t have much experience with it themselves.  About one hundred times a day, I slap myself on the forehead for not taking enough any pictures of our first home as we renovated it.  There are a few photos here and there, but there aren’t many that I can use to generously illustrate a proper post on rehabbing older homes.  I’ll give it a shot though!

As much as I’d love to impart all my knowledge about renovating a 100 year old Philadelphia row home in one post, I think it’d be best if I just break this up into a series.  Oh, and I know our blog primarily focuses on projects for our new home, generally speaking, most of them can be applied to a home of any age, at least that’s our intention.

Since this is the first post on this topic, I’m going to start with the most important lesson I’ve learned: Deciding what stays and what gets thrown out.  If you’ve just purchased an older home and you’re trying to develop a strategy for the renovation, you’re probably thinking…”well, I want to try to keep the woodwork, or the windows, do minimal damage to the plaster” etc.  There are things worth keeping, and things that aren’t worth your time.

1.  Keep the features that attracted you to the house and make it unique.  Why did you buy the place?  Did you like the original built-ins in the kitchen?  How about the stained glass windows?  This is usually a no-brainer.  You want to keep the big items that you love that would be really, really difficult to replace.  For our first house, that was the stained glass front door and the stained glass transom above the front bay window.

When we bought our house, this window was cracked and in rough shape.  I hired a stained glass company to restore it to it’s original glory and it only set me back around $800.  Is that a lot of money for a dang window?   You bet.  Does it add more than $800 to the value of the home?  Absolutely.   It would have been a lot easier to just replace it with some modern Pella window, but I would’ve lost all of that 100 year old charm.  I never got around to restoring the front door.  I replaced it with a Home Depot basic wood front door and kept the stained glass door in the basement.  We sold the house before I could get back to it.  We did leave it with the new owners and they were appreciative that I kept it

2.  Demo the things that are between you and your dream home.  Once you’ve identified what you absolutely must keep, now it’s time to start planning the demise of everything else.  Don’t waste time trying to salvage deteriorating plaster walls and beat up, painted woodwork (stained woodwork is another story).  It’s tempting to try and save some money and perhaps some of the home’s character and attempt to scrape, sand and maybe strip down those old painted baseboards, trim work and bruised door jams.  You’re dreaming!  If you need to rewire your home because it’s knob and tube throughout and you’re trying to save the plaster, you’re wasting your time.  If you’re plaster is crumbling and you’re making repairs, you’re wasting your time.  Your best bet is to DEMO the plaster on the entire wall, do your wiring or plumbing or whatever and then drywall it.  You’ll end up with a perfectly smooth, clean wall.  In older homes, the plaster can be rough to the touch.  Smooth Walls = Modern Walls.  Same goes for the trim.  Yes, older homes have non standard trim that adds a lot of character to a home, like 10″ tall baseboards for example.  Well, guess what?  You can have that same trim look by combining two separate pieces of trim from Home Depot or Lowes and get the EXACT same look.  The only difference is your new trim won’t have any dings in it and it won’t be covered in 37 coats of lead paint.   It will look 1000 times better and it won’t subtract from the character of the home. 


Often times when you’re hiring an electrician or a plumber, it’s immensely cheaper for them to do their work with a wide open wall then trying to work around a touchy plaster wall.  Plus, when they’re done, you can either use your savings to hire a drywall pro or do it yourself and save even more money.  Most important thing about dealing with contractors: time is money.  If you can make their job faster and easier, you’re going to save big money. 

3.  Plan on renovating the entire house at one.  I’m not saying you need to finish every room in the house at once, but if you’re having the house rewired or replumbed, it doesn’t make economic sense to do one room at a time.  You certainly can take your time with painting and decorating on a room to room basis, but you get more bang for your buck if you do as many rooms as possible if you’re installing new utilities or hanging drywall. Suck it up and do it all at once.

If I had to renovate my first house all over again, I would have done things much differently.  I would have gutted all the plaster in every room immediately.  I could’ve wired the entire house more easily and all the doors, drywall and trim would’ve been replaced at once instead of piecemeal.  BTW, by the time I figured out all of this, I was knee deep in my third overhaul because I had left some rooms out of the original upgrade.  Generally, this kind of renovation talk doesn’t apply to homes that are younger than 30 years.  Most of these younger homes have modern wiring and plumbing, so generally speaking these types of upgrades are cosmetic in nature.

So that’s my two cents on starting a renovation on an old home.  Next time I post on this topic, I’ll talk strategies for making your demo go smoothly.  Are any of our readers in the process of buying a really old home??