Day 5-ish (of 3) of the Laminate Flooring Install
IT'S DONE!!!
Yes, you read that right...we're finished with the floor!
Mike will probably regale you with pictures and witty anecdotes later... here comes the stuff for the boring people like me!
We took the night off last night because it was just too stinking hot and by the time it cooled off a bit, it was too late to run the saw. We got up today and just kicked it out and got it done in about 2 hours. You know, bay windows and nifty wall structure look really neat, but it's a pain in the ass to cut around for flooring!
We're not putting any molding up yet because we still have to tear down the walls. We have no idea what thickness the walls are currently and what they'll be after putting up drywall so we don't know if the flooring is close enough to the wall to not show after that's done and molding is up. We've decided that if it's not close enough, we'll get a darker color and do a wide border around the outside to butt up against the new wall thickness and then put the molding up.
We also realized that we have no idea what kind of molding we want, whether we want it stained or painted, simple or ornate, or whatever. One thing we have decided is that we aren't painting the downstairs whatsoever until we are ready to finish it off. It's the last thing that we'll tackle before we move to upstairs.
I know that after this entire project, both Mike and I feel a lot more comfortable with the house and our ability to actually succeed in fixing this house on our own. I know that I'll be able to work on and fix the floors upstairs with no problems and Mike is feeling a lot more confident about the electrical work.
We've made some changes in plans for what needs to be accomplished before the rainy season. We're going to run new electrical under the house to the places that currently have the knob and tube. We are going to brace up the section under the house that we are going to put the walls on in the living room including new cement footers. We are going to seal up around the chimney stack that is on the house and finally, we're going to make sure all the gutters are clean and the ground has the right grade going towards the house.
We figure that this way, we know that everything under the house is safe and prepared for the on slaught of the rains. The work in the living room itself can be done during the rainy season because other than some cutting, it's all done inside. We're also going to rip out the office walls at the same time since the only thing that needs to be done in there is drywalling, closing up the door to the closet in the room and then opening up a new door to the closet in the hallway.
We are also amost completely in agreement on the layout of the walls and doors for the new living room and dining room since we're opening up the wall between it and the kitchen. We've also decided that we're going to set it up as close to the Victorian layout as possible with doorways and portiers entering the public areas and actual doors to the private areas (i.e. kitchen and office). We'll see how well we can pull this off when we start to put up the walls. I'm thinking this will take us through the end of the year. I don't want it to and I think that we can get it done in a month's time, but I know the old saying of twice as long as I think it'll be...most times though, it's three to four times.
Day 4 (of 3)of the Laminate Flooring Install
Yep, we're still at it. Once again, we ran out of daylight and couldn't keep running the table saw or risk pissing off the neighbors. We've got maybe and I mean maybe an hour's work left consisting of 3 full rows, 2 weird ends to cut, 2 normal straight end cut and a rip row, then it's done. We are so close, we can taste it!
Tomorrow, it will be done. Then we can put the living room and office together for the first time since we've lived here. I miss the entertainment center and my computer so much it hurts!
Day 3 of the Laminate Flooring Install
Holy crap! We finally got to put down some real laminate!
We've got about 1/2 the living room/dining room done and we had to stop. It was getting way too late at night to run the table saw because of the noise. Halfway through getting this stupid thing started last night, the blade that I had on the table saw decided to die. It wasn't cutting anything, all it was doing was producing tons of smoke and just not cutting. So, off Mike went to Home Depot at like 9:30pm to get me a new blade so we can at least cut a bunch of starter pieces to put in more rows. I figure that we would cut the end pieces tonight out of the other half of those rows but each one of those takes time and serious measuring. Anyway, he came home with a 2 pack of blades from DeWalt. At first, I was freaking out because DeWalt = BIG$$$, but they were acutally the least expensive ones there in the size and type I needed. Put that thing in and started ripping boards....OH MY GOD! It is the mostly heavenly blade! No chipping, nothing...goes through like butta'! So beyond worth the money...WOW!
We're back at work now but tonight we're going to bust out as much as possible since it's supposed to hit 100+ degrees here for the next couple of days and we need the floor to be down so we can break out the air mattress and sleep in the living room since it's the only room with an AC unit in it.
More pics and hopefully a "Yay! We're finished!" post tomorrow.
On a different note, we went to the city planner yesterday to find out what permits have been pulled on the house so we could find the person that ripped out the walls and
beat him to a pulp ask him a few questions. There was only 1 permit pulled on the house in the last 20 years and that was to install a new circuit breaker box. Fantastic. That explains a lot about the way things were done.
We also saw arial pics of the property lines and as we suspected, the neighbor is over our property by at least 7ft. The photos also show that this has been like this for less than 10 years, so we have no squatter's rights issues going on at least. Plus, he also gave us the number to a surveyor in the area to contact. I called and left a message for him. He called back within the hour and is going to be coming by on Saturday to talk about the situation.
Finally, we had been waiting for about 2 weeks for an electrician to come by and give us a run down on the wiring situation in the house. He finally showed up yesterday as well and went on a tour of the house. Looks like if we want to get them in to simply clean up all the junctions, they estimate it would take 2 people about 2 days to get it done (this is just the attic work) and would run roughly $2500....ouch! So, Mike is going to be doing a lot of the clean up himself. We also made a deal. Since I go all fritty when it comes to electricity, I'll take care of all the plumbing. Only problem I have now is getting over the buried alive severe phobia I have to get into the crawlspace to work on it. Fun.
Welcome Visitors!
Ok, so it's fun to see where people are in the world or even in the country that read this blog. Here's the latest!
create your own personalized map of the USAAs you can see, someone in just about every state has read something on our blog at least once, except for those states that hate us...you know who you are Alabama, Arizona, Delaware, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota and Wyoming!
We also have a couple of visitors from outside the U.S. in Canada, France, Austria, Italy and the Netherlands. Now, the one from the Netherlands has me most perplexed. This is a regular visitor from just about the very beginning of this blog. Speak up! Tell me who you are! I'm dying to know! Oh, and to the person from Italy...congrats! We won! (yep...I'm one of them Italians as well!)
Can you tell I don't want to start working yet?
Day 2 of the Laminate Flooring Install
Day 2 of the Laminate Flooring Install
Well, as we expected, we didn’t actually get to install any of the laminate last night but we did get the final prep work done. Before I go into that, a couple of things. One thing we noticed was that the plywood that is nailed down over the subfloor is painted green around the borders of both of the rooms (pre-wall removal)…why?
Then there’s the crawlspace exploration and realizing the horrible state of the vapor barrier…had to put some pics of that as well!
Here are a couple of pics of the wonderful wiring that was done for the outlet in the floor and the splicing expertise under the house:
(note from the editor: The preceding picture was posted upside down. Please stand on your head to view properly.)
It took almost an hour to disconnect the wood stove and get it out onto the front porch. We actually wound up going to the manufacturer’s website to see the installation instructions because we just couldn’t figure out how to take one stupid pipe out. We did finally get it disconnected and now we have a nice hole in the wall that will be covered once we rip out the walls and drywall over everything. Next year, we’ll deal with removing the outside chimney pipe and replacing the siding. For this winter we’re just going to seal it up on the outside.
We got the wood stove (all 300lbs of it) out onto the porch with help from the neighbor, his hand truck and tow chain. Not fun, let me tell you. Then Mike and I got the hearth pad out on our own. Granted, it’s sitting in the living room still and we have no idea where to put it. We’re going to put the wood stove, gas stove, chimney pipe and hearth pad for sale either up on eBay for pickup only or locally. It should all mint a pretty penny I would expect which would go right back into the house, of course. The fun part is once we pulled up the hearth pad, we got to see what the carpet did look like before it got all worn out and it wasn’t too bad. However, we did get to see the fantastical 1970’s green carpet that was on the floor before as well, it was in the cutout where the old hearth pad was. Apparently, placing hearth pads over carpet is common place as both previous owners did it.
We also got the floor completely cleaned with Murphy’s oil soap and we can see exactly where the fireplace used to be. There’s the medallion/cover on the ceiling and a soot/creosote stained piece of plywood directly under it. So that gives us an idea of the dimensions at least. I also figured everyone needed to see a picture of my beautiful patch job:
Final thing we did last night was put down the floor leveling skim coat to prep the seams between some of the glorious particle board so that it is all ready for today to start laying the laminate. We also managed to go grocery shopping yesterday, wash and dry all the laundry (putting it away will be for another day), clean the kitchen and start to organize the breakfast nook/inside tool room.
Today, we really really get to start putting down the laminate! We need to get as much done as possible because according to all the weather stations, tomorrow hits 93 degrees, Friday is set to hit 101 and Saturday 97. We’ll need to have the floor done so this way we can bring the air mattress back out to sleep in the living room where the AC is again just to make it through those 3 days. So, we’re going to be seriously pushing today to get a veritable ton of it done.
Day 1 of the Laminate Flooring install
So today was the first day we worked on the flooring. We figured it would be simple, tear out cut up particle board, put down new piece, clean floor and it's all ready to go. Ah, well, not so.
First, we tore up the piece of floor that was cutout only to find that the tongue and groove floor underneath had not only been cut but they didn't put all the pieces back. They just kind of placed some of the pieces in there spaced out and nothing was nailed down. I guess that would explain the squeak.
Second, this is our own fault, but we forgot about the electric outlet in the floor and needed to do something with it. Off to the hardware store for the particle board and a junction box so we can seal it up. Since none of us have done electrical before, this was quite a feat. Mikey did a wonderful job splicing all the ends together so we still have the circuit to the other side of the room and mounting the junction box on the joist so we can just cover it over and not have to deal with any outlet again in the middle of the floor.
My job was finding some flooring up in the attic that matches the missing board. Well, I found something similar but had to rip it down to size. Apparently it was some seriously hard wood because the circular saw just refused to go through it at all, like the blade would stop and I had to use the table saw with the largest most coarse teeth I had. I got all of it in and sealed up the hole. This time I did something just totally crazy and nailed the boards to the joists! Then I had to cut out the particle board by taping together the one that I carefully tore out and using that as a template. It was mostly right. With a little shaving here and there, it all fit in. I got it all nailed and screwed down now.
Best thing of all??
THE FLOOR DOESN'T SQUEAK!
Next up to still finish off tonight is to get all of the staples out of the floor from the old padding and finish vacuuming. At that point, we're going to call it a night. Tomorrow it'll be on to cleaning up the floor and doing the skim coat. If all goes well, we'll be able to start laying the laminate tomorrow night.
Wish us luck!
*twitch*
Apparently, in Oregon, if you ask someone if they have coveralls, it's apparently the same thing as bib overalls. Last I recall they were two totally different garments.
Oh and am I the only person in the world that knows what a pole jack is? I must be because I kept getting that "you must be an alien" look whenever I was asking for help trying to find it in the store.
How Dare They!
I have never felt so much anger towards an unknown person in all my life.
Last night we got the carpet ripped up in the livingroom so this way it can all go in the dumpster that is being picked up this morning. We knew we would find some nasty flooring underneath and that walls had been ripped out but I know I never expected this! The previous owner hired some guy that completely butchered the house. I know about remuddling, but there was just no reason for this even if they were tearing down a wall.
I had to make a drawing to illustrate what I'm talking about.
As you can see by the little key everything that is blue is linoleum. In the kitchen, it's normal linoleum put down by the previous owner. In the other areas, it's the old linoleum put in before her and covered with carpet with glued down padding then the carpet was ripped up and the last owner put stapled down padding and carpet over it. So right now it's linoleum with black padding glued to it with little dots of stapled padding everywhere. The office, as you know is already done with the laminate.
Now we move on to the contention points.
- We knew a wall was taken out and we figured once this came up we would see the footprint so we could put the walls back exactly how they were. This is where I'm not happy. Other than a load bearing wall, some load bearing studs were also removed. Note the 2 green squares...those are supposed to be part of an open doorway with a transom that HOLDS UP THE SECOND FUCKING FLOOR! *breathe* Ok, no biggie, we'll just put those back.
- We can see where 2 doorways used to be, they are illustrated in yellow as original wood and are the 2 strips on the supporting wall. That's good, except the one all the way to the right is because they cut the floor there for some unknown freaking reason and put all that subfloor particle board crap everywhere.
- Holes: This is what I am most livid about. See the 2 areas with stripes? Yeah, both of those are cutouts in the floor that were screwed back down. Notice the one is through the ORIGINAL WOOD! The other is in the area where the wood was ripped out and is also not subsquently nailed to ANYTHING and moves when you walk on it. It appears that the only thing holding it even close to in place was all the carpeting. We have no idea what we are going to find under the particle board one and it's got to be repaired before we even do the temporary laminate flooring. Fuck.
- Ok, so I don't know how most people put down carpet, but I know that when I do it, if I come to an obstacle say a post or a hearth or something, I'd just cut around it and properly tack it down. Not in this house apparently....when we put down a 1 piece, just sits on the floor not glued in hearth, we just sit it right on the carpet! Also, when we build a box in the closet to contain the plumbing from upstairs that is screwed up, we just put the box right on the carpet.
- Apparently, no one had ever heard of sealing a house against the elements that's lived here. First, there's that box that's around the plumbing that's sitting on carpet. We cut through the carpet and Mike was able to stick his hand down through the floor there. Then we looked at the pipe that goes into the wall from the wood stove. First, the gaps are stuffed with regular insulation, you know the very flammable pink stuff? Yeah, that stuff. Plus, we can also see daylight through the gaps as well.
All of this stuff has changed the work we need to do in the livingroom. We've decided to tackle it this way:
- Repair the section of the floor with the cutout so that it's sturdy.
- Use the old footprint to put the walls back including the 2 new beams we discovered should be there.
- Remove wood stove, hearth and pipe from the inside of the room. Put up plywood on the exterior facing portion of the wall, insulate the area, drywall over it and then caulk the holy hell out of the pipe outside. This is just for this winter, we'll deal with removing the outside portion and fixing the siding next summer.
- Remove box in closet, verify that the pipes are only for the upstairs bathroom. Cut/cap off plumbing, close off the floor. The plumbing upstairs is so fucked we can't use the bathroom anyway. This way there won't be any pipes running through the livingroom.
Wheee.
*seathe*
In-a-gadda-da-vino baby!
Tina and I have been very busy. (I guess anyone who's ever bought an old house would read this and say "Yeah, duh!")
As she already mentioned we went to the country fair and I got cooked. Not baked, more like broiled. Every weekend stuff happens here, and in between stuff we're finding things we can do on the house with our limited funds.
We already bought the laminate flooring (at $.99 a sq foot. What a deal!) and have been laying that down in the office. We've finished that room and will be starting on the living/dining room this weekend. We plan to have it finished by Wednesday.
We've decided that our office is going to be the coolest room in the house. We put some furniture in there while we were moving everything out of the living room to rip up the carpet and it looks great, even though it's a disaster area. We envision the way it will look with our desks in there and the light fixture replaced, drywall and painting completed, decoration done and light streaming in through the French doors (Freedom doors! HA!) as we sit and update the blog. I hope the reality is as good as our vision of it.
One of our ongoing and inexpensive projects has been struggling to kill certain things in the garden, to no avail. There are some things currently growing in there that aggressively cling to life. This is bad because a lot of those things are things we don't want to grow. It's also good because the things that we DO want to grow are doing pretty well considering both Tina and I have black thumbs.
Our rose bushes got sick about a week after we moved in and we had to cut them all back to "stick bushes". Now they're thriving and blooming like mad. There are so many buds on them I can't count them all.
I think if someone brought by a dead animal we could bury it in our yard and a few days later it would come back to life. Take that Stephen King!
Now the pics!
Since we both have black thumbs, we decided we needed black plants so they look like they're supposed to be that way. :)
Luckily we also read that the Victorians were obsessed with black plants so it's appropriate for the house! Our neighbors are going to LOVE us!
Check out this cool plant we got at the Saturday market!
It's called a Black Mondo. It's even got a cool name!
We're also planning to get some black calla lillies in the future.
We will have the best Halloween house ever!
Next up is one of the aforementioned stick bushes.
This rose bush has gone from nearly dead to completely mad.
It's alive!
ALIVE!!!!
There are 4 rosebushes in our yard in total. All of them were near death. My favorite (and I think Tina's too) is a creeper near the driveway. We need to get an arbor under it because right now it has nothing to crawl except for the tree next to it. It was also nearly dead and lived as a stick bush. Now it gives us beautiful deep red roses. You really can't appreciate them by the picture. They're much different in person and the color is a lot deeper.
Here's another of the roses, this was the worst of any of them and has been a little slower in coming back to life.
In addition to the roses, we have TONS of lillies. We have white calla lillies, and then a bunch of other lillies that I don't know the names of. I think some of them are day lillies but I don't know which. As I mentioned, we will also be adding black calla lillies to the mix at some point, but it's going to be after a complete re-landscaping. Tina and I really like the dark reddish ones. The orange and yellow ones have only been allowed to live because they have neat dark bits on the insides.
Parade of lillies!
First up we have orange with reddish and yellowish bits inside:
Next we have dark orange that looks stupid pink in this picture, but it's not:
Here's the yellow with the dark bits:
This one is our favorite. In person, it's a dark reddish-purple:
And another view:
We have no idea what the heck these are, but we LOVE them!
They're not usually this blurry in person:
We're not sure what this is, but it's a neat color, so it lives:
And finally we have a neat little flowery thing that looks blue in person. The leafy stemmy bits are so dark purple they're almost black. It looks much different in digital reproduction:
This is what happens to plants we don't like:
That was a huge pile of random growing crap. We didn't like any of it and could barely separate plants from weeds on that little hilly spot, so Tina destroyed it.
Tina is the bringer of death, scourge of the garden,Dark Angel of Frenzied Loppers!
All of you plants better shape up! Just ask the rhododendrons!
Before we took an axe to them, this picture would have looked like a great big bush. You really would not have seen any ground at all. It's amazing how much land we lost to that thing.
Also of note is the great big slate boulder in the corner. I'm trying to figure out how to move it somewhere we can enjoy it a bit more. I like to sit on it and I think it needs to live near a fire pit. It's just in a rotten place and I think it weighs about 2 tons.
I think that the grape vines are planning on staging a revolt. I have nightmares that one day we will be walking by and they'll reach out and grab us and squeeze the people juice out of us to make renovator wine.
We've also sent the wisteria to a better place. No pictures to honor it because I didn't want to get a view of the horrible abomination of a house next door to us. This is in keeping with history. Any of the pictures we've seen of our house from 189x also cut off right at the point of showing the corner of the house next door. Although I'm willing to bet that back then it actually looked like a proper Victorian and not a doublewide like it does now.
And just so this doesn't turn into a garden blog we have pics of the new floor!
We've been busting our asses on this and we finally have a room finished! Those cuts around the bay windows have been super tricky, but I think we did a good job. Now we have to do the living room and dining room, which together are about three times the size of this one.
We also have a new roof!
Unfortunately it's not the wood shingle roof that it should be, but it's waterproof and that's what's important right now. Because of the pitch of the roof and the difficulty involved, this roof is much more expensive to cover than your average ranch would be. Typically, asphalt roofing would run somewhere in the are of $5k. Our beautiful Mansard roof? In the area of $9k+! Wood shingles can wait until I win the lotto, or have a rich relative kick the bucket.
The house is also much straighter now. We had a beam (or two) beneath the house replaced and it shifted the entire house. It may not be as obvious if you haven't looked at it everday and it doesn't help that our last picture of the house before the repair was already crooked and at a weird angle. Trust me when I say there's been a vast improvement. Our bedroom door wouldn't close at all before. Now? No problem. Saves me the work having to plane and rehang it.
Also of note: No satellite dish on the roof!
When the roofers were bringing in the materials, the guy in the supply truck backed into my car.
Fortunately for both of us, they were really cool about ordering the part for me on their dime, so it's as good as new now.
Random picture of hungry birds!
And with that, the camera is empty and I end this post. Happy now Robin?
Woohoo!
We have floor!
Ok, it's just in the dining room/office but it's a start. Tonight is going to be moving stuff out of one half of the living room, cutting carpet and padding, moving that to the dumpster then moving all the stuff to the other half of the room, ripping up that carpet and padding and moving that out to the dumpster. Can you say tiring?
We got almost all of the stuff outside into the dumpster except a few things that we are going to put on top of the padding/carpet from the livingroom. We got the place cleaned up as well last night in preparation for having to move some of that stuff into the office so we can actually work on the living room. Plus, we have a bunch of boxes that we need to go through since the movers decided to do weird things like pack electronics with storage room stuff or clothing or miscellaneous stuff. Once we go through the 8+ boxes, we'll probably end up with a small stack of electronics and a bunch more stuff for the storage room. This way we won't have to move all 8 boxes around repeatedly because they're really freaking heavy!
We'll get some pictures done once we get the living room floor done as well. Once this batch of flooring is complete, all that'll be left of the flooring downstairs is to put up moldings around and transition pieces. We're not going to do that though until we jack up the ceiling and put up new walls because we'd just need to tear all the molding down to do that.
Some point in time soon, we're going to need to go get a ladder so that we can get up on the roof and paint all the new flashing that's up there to seal it against water damage. Unfortunately, we're going to have to paint it that nasty green or it'll look really out of place. It'll get painted the good color once we get around to that part of the house.
Yep, we're slackers....
We got absolutely nothing done on the house this weekend. Instead, we went to the Oregon Country Fair where I watched Mike get burned to a crisp and had a fantastic time. Karin came over on Sunday and did the grand tour of the house and Brownsville.
To make up for feeling like we got nothing done, we've been screwing around on the computers playing with the layout of the houseblog and getting some graphics together for it.
Work on the blog counts as work on the house, right? Right??
Now we get to bust our asses tomorrow night to get everything into the dumpster before they pick it up on Tuesday. I think I'm just going to call them and see how much it would be to keep it until the Friday pickup instead.
This state needs to stop having cool stuff go on for just one weekend so we can get stuff done here without being pulled away to go do something that rocks instead of lifting rocks!
It's official
We are official old house renovators now...they dropped off a dumpster for us this morning. You just aren't official until you have to rent a dumpster.
Sometimes working with an old house is no fun...
So, ask we toil through putting in this temporary laminate flooring, we discovered there was a reason we were having so much difficulty with boards popping loose and such. You know when you frame up a wall and there's a 2x4 on the bottom all the way around for the studs to attach to? Yeah...we don't have those. So we had to make all kinds of weird long spacers out of scrap wood so that we could have those press against the studs so all the crap would stop shifting. Once we figured that out, the rest has been running smooth. Of course, running smooth is a relative term. If you mean, smashed fingers and bruised knees from bashing them as smooth, then it went very very smoothly.
*ouch*
Quick update...
Roof is finished! Now we will not have rain on our heads. They did a great job.
Finally uprooted the evil rhododendrons. Man those things are hard to get out of the ground. My cool across the street neighbor let me borrow an axe. I axed all around them, in some places I actually had to wiggle the axe quite a bit to dislodge it from the roots. Once that was done, much digging and some skillful pick wielding by Tina later they were all up.
The neighbor asked what I wanted the axe for. I said "Well, Tina really pissed me off today." Without missing a beat, he said "And it's her time, huh?"
Cool neighbor. :)
We went out and bought a ceiling fan to put in the master bedroom. Tina and I believe that with the exception of a few days a year, the tiny AC unit downstairs combined with a ceiling fan in our room should be sufficient to keep the house a bearable temperature. Could never say that in Florida. ;)
We took down the old fixture in the bedroom (a very old but very ugly 4 light ceiling lamp) and cut all the wires connecting it (after killing the power at the breaker box, duh!). At about that time we realized that this is one of the dreaded fixtures powered entirely by knob and tube. So now we have no light fixture AND no ceiling fan. (For anyone wondering, we HAD to cut the wires to even get the fixture down to see that there was knob and tube behind it.)
I plan to do some reverse fishing-fu and tie good wiring to the bad wiring and find the connection in the attic and then pull the shit through. I hope this will work and we can just attach the correct wiring with ground and be done with it, at least temporarily. We also learned that most of the fixtures in the ceilings of the house are on the same circuit. Upstairs AND down! Interesting mess of wiring. I'm pretty sure this isn't standard procedure. This is going to be quite a chore to fix.
Other than that, I took the psuedo shutters that Joanie hated off of the house. Quick and painless, and then I patched all of the boo-boos with wood filler.
Oh, and we finally got the wireless up and running! I'm writing this post sitting outside on the porch. It's 69 degrees outside and partly cloudy. I love this place!!!
That's about all I can think of to post for now. Next on the agenda is finishing up laying the flooring, ripping down the storage room to uncover the back porch and door (which has to wait until we buy a new lock) and replacing all of the outlets outside. There are currently three outlets outside that are all technically inside outlets, just on the outside of the house. And two of them don't even have roofs above them.
Construction codes? Bah! To hell with them! No waterproof outlets for us, thanks!
History's Mysteries
So, apparently Mike has made it mandatory that I put in everything from the town historian. Here it is:
We met up with Joani over at the museum and she gave us a bunch of information that she had on the house and now we have a real time line for the place with only a couple of holes...
November 26th, 1890 A.S. MacDonald and E.C. Standard bought the property in the exact lots as it is now.
May 14th, 1892 E.C. Standard sold his half to A.S. MacDonald
1893 A $300 improvement was put on the property (aka a house).
1894 The first time there is tax on the house.
September 25th, 1897 F.M. Jack bought the house at a sheriff’s sale
August 3rd, 1900 There is another record of sale, but no indication as to whom it was sold to. It is surmised that the sale was to another of the Jack family as Martha Jack lived in the house until the year of her death, 1922.
1922 - 1950's...unknown owners
1955 or slightly before The McFarlin's moved into the house. This date we aren't sure of yet. We found an article about their son drowning when he was 11 years old in 1966 and it said that he was born in 1955 and lived in Brownsville his entire life so we are making the assumption that they were in this house from at least the time of his birth if not before that. We are still researching that part.
1996 Anita Esquival bought the house
2006 We bought the house! We then headed over to the house for her to walk through and tell us what the deal is with some of the oddities in the house. Once Joani got over here, she started in right away. The little fake shutter things weren't original and had to go. Plus the trellis on the porch needed to go as well. Those 2 things disturbed her greatly along with the little frilly things on the porch posts. She didn't say exactly that they needed to be taken down because she is of the opinion that it's our house and we could do what we wished, but she really REALLY hated them.
The mystery of the low windows is basically solved, that's actually how they built houses back then to allow for the outside facade to look balanced and the inside didn't matter as it wasn't the public areas. Along that same vein, the differences in the moldings from downstairs to upstairs make sense as well as only the nice expensive moldings with intricate detail would be in the public areas. Next thing she said is that putting the walls back would be appropriate to the house. Also, the stairs are definitely original along with the balusters, banister and newel posts. The area that looks like it was an addition (the bathroom/pantry area) is not. It was actually the kitchen because they would always build a single story kitchen off the back or sides of the house so that it wouldn't be under any living spaces in the main part of the house. Basically this confirms the suspicions that the current dining room/office and the kitchen were actually downstairs bedrooms, that there were no bathrooms and that the addition is original. Also confirmed is that the windows in the kitchen are not original and that there was only 1 window on the side of the house. We actually saw in old pictures that there was the one tall window in the kitchen (bedroom) and only the bay windows in the dining room (bedroom). We knew that the outside of the house under the kitchen window didn't look right. The breakfast nook and porch was definitely not part of the house. She also confirmed that the house was lower because when you look at the bottom of the house there are supposed to be 3 different levels of water protection and then the foundation and we have none of those just the more modern T-111 as skirting. If we put it back the way it was, the house would have to be at least 4 feet higher to accommodate it all.
So that was the visit with her. We went yesterday to the Pioneer Picture Gallery and that's where we saw pictures of the house dating in the 1960's and 1970's when the McFarlin's owned the house. Even at that point, the house was higher than it is now. Plus, we saw the breakfast nook on the house at that point, so we know they were the ones that added that. With all the shortcuts they took and all the not caring about detail, I'm really surprised that they bothered to match the siding on the outside, but they did. We also were able to see that the porch was not there, so that was from Anita's time. We also saw that there was a different shed or outbuilding behind the house during their time. Finally, they had one thing then that we are bound and determined to bring back to this place...orderly landscaping with GRASS!!!!!!
More history and detail as we go along and find out. Maybe next time Mike will post it as this is really his deal. :P
