we seem to have an expensive elephant in our living room. the elephant part is metaphor, the living room is literal. it’s in our living room, and our other living room, and the dining rooms, and the bedrooms…the issue is the condition of the walls. see, if you don’t heat a house for four 4 years, in chicago, it gets very cold and damp inside. the bricks expand and contract, and the plaster cracks, and the paint peels off in giant hunks. now the walls look like they have leprosy.

let me back up a bit and explain how exactly we’re paying for all of this work: we bought the building with an FHA 203k renovation loan. it’s a government-backed lending program that allows people to buy an uninhabitable house that a normal mortage lender would never underwrite, and then provides a loan on top of the purchase price to cover necessary renovations, all rolled into one neat mortgage payment. it’s great, in that it’s a way to allow mere mortals to buy and repair homes that would otherwise just sit empty, or be purchased by cash investors who would knock it down and replace it with new construction. it’s a nightmare, in that it’s government-backed, meaning that the paperwork and red tape is spectacular. we’ve made it most of the way through that process – the loan closed, the house is ours, and we’re now plowing slowly through the renovations. but the deal is, when you rehab with a 203k, there is an FHA inspector who decides what exactly is required to make the house habitable, and the terms of the loan require that you do follow through on all of those items. everything that falls under the terms of the loan must be completed by a single general contractor within a particular time frame and on the agreed-upon price. you can add extras, but you have to do the original set of work.

in our case, our inspector determined that scraping the peeling paint on the walls was necessary to make the house habitable. so our contractor has to do that and it’s paid for through the loan. however, patching, sanding and repainting the walls is NOT in the scope of required work. now, neither of us is afraid of painting, nor are we deterred by the charm of plaster-and-lathe walls with the occasional crack, bow and surface imperfection. but we’re talking about 100 years of wall archaeology. layer upon layer of paint and wallpaper. in some areas it’s scraped down to bare plaster, and there’s as much as 1/16″ in depth change. you can’t just prime and paint over that. so we started inviting painting companies to give us bids for picking up where the contractor left off.

the first guy bid $21,000 in order to replaster nearly every wall, then prime and paint. then he emailed back the next day, said there was an accounting error, and raised the bid by $4k. he was clearly trying to price us out of he job. he seemed offended at the condition of the house. then we called a plasterer. this is a vanishing trade, and these guys are true artisans. we knew it would be expensive, but we needed to know just how expensive. that guy was an even bigger jerk. after stomping around the apartment for a while, he left and then texted me to say he declined to bid the job. what are we doing wrong? how do we keep offending tradesmen with our icky peeling walls? when the 3rd painter arrived, i caught him on the doorstep and explained the basics of how the 203k process works, and the history of the house, before i even let him in. prepping him for why we were looking for someone to pick up the job midstream seemed to help to diffuse the situation somewhat. he at least bid us a price that suggested he actually wanted the job.

our contractor had also given us a bid for painting the apartment. we weren’t sure how much patching he would do and so we asked for his painter to come in and explain the bid in detail. painter came in and said, “i can’t paint over this. you have to drywall it. i’ll give you a quote for drywall.” what the hell?

it gradually dawned on us that there is an intermediary step. after scraping off all the peeling paint, and before adding new paint, that is this HUGE job that no one mentioned that we’d need to do. not our 203k inspector, not the regular housing inspector, not our contractor. in retrospect, this was a massive rookie mistake on our part. because apparently it was so !@$%-ing obvious that no one thought it was worth discussing. so for the moment we’re weighing the options of drywall vs. patching the plaster.

also, i broke the furnace. and more of the kitchen ceiling disappeared. the carpenter got this far through building the basement stairs and then took 3 days off for no apparent reason.

on the brighter side, we got the first two refinished doors back from the door refinisher and they are gorgeous:

we rehung the one, and is the only shiny, finished thing in an otherwise complete disaster of a construction project. it’s kind of a boost to encounter it every time i come into the house.

so while i was breaking the furnace (installing programmable thermostats and blowing fuses in the process), ben spent saturday afternoon taking the mortise lockset on the newly-refinished door apart and fixing it*. i had nearly convinced myself that we should have the mortises in the old doors patched, and then install vintage reproductions with modern lockset mechanics. but the old mortise locks are just built so much better than the modern hardware [that is in our price range]. they’re made of solid metal, not flimsy hollow bits. with a little cleaning and fiddling, ben got this lockset up and running again. and the vintage repros i’d been looking at online all just look so cheesy. so, like with so many things about this house, we grudgingly accepted that the only way we want to do things is the right way, and we’ll be sourcing the mortise locksets and door plates and knobs from salvage yards. ben will fix the locks, i will clean and scrape and polish the doorplates and knobs.

*having a husband who had summer jobs as a lock smith and vacuum cleaner repairman? awesome.