Singing in the Rain

The tarps are down. After two years of keeping the Cheney Cottage as dry as possible (which often was not at all possible), the house is waterproof.

We don't actually have a finished roof yet - we still have to pick shingles and have them installed, along with the drip edge. But the roof now has building paper, carefully installed and tacked down. The attic is dark: no light seeps in through the hundreds of cracks, no gaps let in the sun and the pigeons that have been roosting there.

The shingles will go up soon, in the next week or two. But for the first time in two years, we can listen to the rain, and not worry that the house is being slowly ruined. Another milestone!

Anniversaries and Injuries

Today we celebrated our 32nd anniversary by working at the Cheney Cottage. We got a lot done: Tom put up siding on the east side, and I worked on cleaning up plaster dust in the laundry, then stripped paint in the living room and all the way up the stairs.

But we had a little problem: Tom was cutting a piece of siding on the table saw, and it kicked back and hit him in the arm. It put a pretty deep hole in his arm, and he was bleeding like a stuck pig. But we remained calm, and bandaged his arm, and then he went over to Kaiser to get it checked out. (We just got the 66 Mercedes running, and since it's an automatic, he could drive himself over with no problem.)

The result: 5 stitches. He's actually feeling pretty good, even though his arm is sore, and we're still planning on going out to dinner to celebrate our anniversary.

This week, the roofers are coming to finish the roof, so by the end of the week, the house will be completely waterproof - first time in years. I also spent some time today sorting all the pieces of the front porch, and have it all figured out. Hopefully, next week we can start building the porch, and then the house will be a lot easier to get into and out of.

With the porch in place, we can bring in the kitchen cabinets and the stove, and try to get the kitchen finished. We still will need counters, some kind of finished floor, and a refrigerator, plus an 18" dishwasher - but we're making progress there.

We'll also start seriously patching plaster. Now that the house is watertight, we can hang blueboard and start plastering, without worrying about it getting ruined.

The stripping paint goes on - the living room ceiling is about the only thing left to do - but there is still plenty of scrapping to do. And then we have to finish the woodwork. And install the bathroom fixtures. And the plumbing. And the heating system.

So, two weeks.

Still no financing - the banks are being unbelievable. I'm not sure how we are ever going to have an economic recovery if people can't get access to capital. The banks are making money hand over fist and sharing none of it with the people who are trying to invest.

But we're pushing on. This project is going to take longer than we ever thought. But we're not going anyplace. We will get the Cheney Cottage and Delaney House done!

Now Get Back to Work

Tom and I bring a new meaning to the phrase "stay-cation" For us, our vacation meant working harder than we work at work. But we got a lot done.

Almost all the wiring in the house is done. We have a couple last things to do (the sconce in the downstairs bathroom, the laundry room outlet, lights outside) but everything else is done. I hope to install the fuse box next weekend, and hook up all the wiring I've been running.

All the trim on the outside of the house is back in place. The band board on the west side, and one small piece of trim, are still not there, and there is a piece of missing bandboard in the front - but everything else is in place. The house is ready to have the painting finished.

We cleaned up the house and the site. All the plaster we removed is gone, the house is mostly organized, and all the roofing debris has been either removed, or raked up into piles to be removed. And Lisa stopped by yesterday and spent some more time scrapping paint in the dining room, so the dining room woodwork is nearing the point where we can finish it.

Still no building paper on the roof, though. We brought two rolls up to the roof, and decided we just weren't up for risking our lives climbing around up there. So that is still on the "to do" list, hopefully to get done by someone other than us. We have one estimate for finishing the roofing, but as that estimate was kind of outrageous, we are going to get some others.

We need to get the new water service brought to the house, and get the gas meter installed so we can hook up the gas.

We need to do the front retaining wall and walkway, so we can fill in the front yard and do some landscaping. And we need to build the porches.

And we need to install a heating system. We're now thinking we'll do a gas fireplace in the front room to heat that space, and then radiators in the bedrooms, kitchen and dining room.

Oh, and there's lots of plaster to patch, every room needs to be painted, and the floors need to be refinished. We need to finish the stripping of the woodwork so we can shellack it.

And then we'll be done. And ready to turn our attention back to the Delaney House.

Laboring Toward Labor Day

Since we've both been on vacation this week, we've gotten a lot done. We worked on Sunday and Monday, then took Tuesday off (Tom helped Sabastian move in Davis, and I had work to catch up on here). We spent Wednesday, Thursday and Friday at the Cheney Cottage.

And a lot has gotten done. We took down the ceiling in the kitchen, I finished all the wiring in there (lights and outlets), which was a huge job. Running romex in a new house is probably not a lot of work (we've never had the pleasure) but in an old house, the problem is always getting it to go where you want it. So, for example, the light switches in the kitchen took 5 hours to run the romex - it was almost impossible to pull the romex through from the crawl space, but we finally succeeded. Opening up the kitchen ceiling also has greatly simplified the second floor wiring, so I expect to finish the upstairs bedrooms this weekend. All that is left after that is the upstairs bathroom and WC, and the downstairs bathroom, and the porch lights.

Tom has mostly been working outside, putting up trim, and there are very few pieces left to go. The band board is still missing on the west side, and one other piece of trim, and we have a couple pieces under one of the windows on the south side - but then it's all done. This weekend Tom hopes to put up more of the siding on the crawl space, and finish the watertable installation on the east and south sides.

We're also putting up the building paper on the roof this weekend, which will make the house truly watertight. We're still discussing if we're going to shingle the roof ourselves - the estimate we got for shingle installation was completely outrageous - so we may be up there roofing the place yet. But at least, after this weekend, we'll have the roof sealed and the rains can come.

And we're starting to think about plumbing. I'm hoping we can get some of the supply pipe installed so we can have a working toilet and sink in the not too distant future.

We've also started planning the landscaping. We plan to build a low retaining wall in front, with one step, and then bring in some clean fill to raise the level of the ground around the house (and give us some good dirt for plantings). The retaining wall will be concrete, so when we have that poured, we'll also pour the front path and the walkway back toward the Delaney House.

It's been a lot of work. But we're taking the day off (mostly) and relaxing. Then Sunday and Monday, we'll be back, making progress. This project will be finished, one day.

Finish Work At Last

When we bought the Cheney Cottage, there were only two of the original light fixtures left. The University had replaced all the regular lights with large florescent fixtures (probably back in the 60s, judging from the fixtures). We took them out while the house was still sitting on its original site, so they're long gone.

But two original fixtures were left in place. One was a wall sconce, on the wall directly opposite the top of the stairs. The other, a hanging pendant light, hung over the stairs. They had both been painted white (the University painted pretty much everything in the house white).

The pendant stayed in its original location throughout the moves. I remember standing under the second floor, after the first floor had been pulled out, and noticing it hanging there. I also remember seeing it through the window as the house made the turn from Bancroft to Shattuck, as the second floor moved toward Albany Village.

The sconce didn't stay in place: we took it down during the prep of the house, before we cut the second floor free of the first, and put it in the china cabinet downstairs. It stayed there until the first floor arrived on 62nd Street, and we found it waiting for us. (We also found two bags of Milanos, that had been in the house for the full year - still edible).

Once the house was reunited, we finally took down the pendant, and brought both fixtures back to Parker Street. During our free time (when we weren't working at our jobs or working on the house), we'd scrape the paint and polish the fixtures. We finally finished them on Saturday, and rewired them.

The pendant light originally had a glass globe, which was long since gone, so we went down to Ohmega Salvage to buy a new one. Ohmega is an odd place: Some of it is incredibly over priced, but there are still deals to be had, particularly if you aren't looking for things that are totally finished and in perfect shape (which is exactly what most of their customers are looking for - we're definitely in the minority).

We saw two glass fixtures that would work and were the right size. They were priced at $150 - each! Tom and I said "no". But then, out back, behind the main Ohmega building, they have lots of broken light fixtures, dirty shades and odd mismatched pieces. We found a globe there that fit. It was substantially cheaper: $5.00 plus tax. So we saved $145.

Now the two restored fixtures, plus the new globe, are back on 62nd Street. It practically brought me to tears to put them in place. Installing light fixtures definitely qualifies as "finish work" I hooked the fixtures up to the new wiring. They're done.

And if I do say so myself, they look great.

Compact florescent bulbs, natch

Today was a clean up day. As the new roof is going on, Eric's truck is sitting out front, loaded with all the layers of the old roofs. We also took the bags of broken plaster, old wiring and broken sash cord, and threw them onto the truck. Tom worked out in the yard, hacking away brambles and getting to debris piles, and sorting through them, throwing out what was unusable and salvaging the good stuff.

Tomorrow is a day off, but Wednesday we'll be back. My plan is to finish the kitchen wiring, and hopefully finish the lights on the second floor. Plumbing is next. And, with a new roof, we can start repairing plaster and refinishing the floors.

The Week

So we're facing it: we're not getting anywhere doing this on Saturdays and Sundays. The Cheney Cottage, though a small house, is still a lot of work.

The house is getting a new roof, so it will be waterproof. And we've got the siding up, most of the exterior trim is back in place. But the punch list of things left to do is incredibly long.

So though we're making progress, we need some concentrated time. So this is the week. Tom and I are both taking the week off work, and we're going to put some serious concentrated time in and work on getting the place done. The wiring, the plumbing, the heating system, the plastering.

We were going to start today, but we decided to spend the day on Parker Street, a somewhat restful and quiet day before the big push. We spent the day doing some small chores for the Cheney Cottage - like finishing cleaning up the two light fixtures that were left in the house. It was mostly the calm before the work.

Still no financing in sight, but we have to just push on and get the place closer to done. Stay tuned for updates.

Scraping

I haven't been writing much on the blog, because we've only been working on two projects. They both involve scraping.

Inside, the stripping of the dining and living rooms continues. The dining room is totally stripped, but the scraping is still underway. In the living room, everything except the ceiling and the rest of the baseboards is done. On the stairs, the railings are stripped and scraped.

More progress scraping the wainscoting in the dining room

On the outside, we're working on putting back all the missing trim. All the tirim has multiple layers of paint on it, and all of it needs to be scraped. So we scrape the trim down before installing it on the house.

But we see progress being made. The trim is done on the east side, and on the front, all but one piece have been re-installed. The west side has new siding, and now all the trim, except the band board and a couple small pieces, have been replaced and are ready for paint. Even on the back, most of the trim is done.

The west side of the Cheney Cottage, with the new siding and much of the trim re-installed

Every week, when we observe Garbage Day, we've been putting out bags of paint scrapings. It's amazing to see how much paint we've removed, both inside and out. It's also still shocking to realize that, when the trim inside the dining and living rooms was originally painted, it was painted bright orange. We still can't understand why someone thought bright orange paint was more attractive than shellacked redwood.

Next weekend, we hope to complete much of the wiring, so the electrical box can be installed, and the wiring hooked up (we still have the temporary power pole and an extension cord running to the house). Then the plumbing work begins in earnest. The radiators will be re-installed, and we'll work on getting hot and cold running water.