in the owner’s unit, we combined two bedrooms to make a larger master bedroom and closets. when the dividing wall and closets were ripped out, it left a track in the floor where there weren’t any floor boards. our floor refinisher did an amazing job repairing it. he felt like it was a compromise to leave a vertical stripe, but i sort of like it. it tells the story of the house’s history. i’ve lived in many rental apartments with inconsistencies like this, and i love trying to guess how the house might previously have been laid out based on clues like floor board patterns, mismatched moulding, bricked over windows or doorways.

so…we didn’t quite make it. the painters fell behind, then caught up, but in the mean time we’d pushed the sanders back, and then there was a more extensive bedroom floor repair to be done, and we decided to add another step to the floor refinishing to better mask some stains, and then the floor guys made off with the keys and the painters had to wait in the rain…and the end result is that tomorrow we are moving OUT of our apartment, but we are not moving into the new house for another week. all of our stuff is going into the garage and basement, Eddie is off to live with our friends Chris and Carly, and Ben and Zeke and i are moving into the basement apartment of our friends Mark and Collette. where would we be without the generosity of friends!? (living out of our car with two cats who hate each other, is the answer). if all goes accordingly to plan (what could go wrong?) we’ll move into the new apartment the following monday.

this is what the floor looks like after the first pass of the sanders (the old color can be seen around the edges which hadn’t been touched yet). we had hoped to do a clear coat and leave the floor in the pale natural oak color, but as predicted, a 110-year-old floor has some stains and damage that is best masked by adding a deeper color. sunday i had the following conversation with one of the guys sanding the floor:

him: “see, there’s a stain here.”
me: “what is that, do you think? is it grease?”
him: “pee pee.”
me: …
him: “might be dog, or human, or cat. it’s pee pee.”
me: “right. can you sand it out?”
him: “nope, can’t get it out. it’s like a cancer. a cancer in the bone.” indicating his elbow joint.

most people are usually more euphemistic about the source of stains, but i appreciate his no-nonsense approach. however i admit that my first attempt to parse the cancer analogy just led me to think, “will this spread? is my house going to die?!” though i realize that he was actually saying, “don’t ask me to get it out because i can’t.” it’s not as gross as it sounds, like, there isn’t actual PEE soaked into the floor. the boards are just a darker shade and it goes so deep into the wood that they can’t sand it away.

still, stain or no stain, i continue to be amazing at how well the bones of this house – the wooden beams, the floor boards, the sandstone and brick – hold up over more than 100 years. even after all the work we’ve put in, and will continue to put in, this house will have it’s imperfections and quirks. i’m okay with this. pee stains and all.*

* seriously, don’t be grossed out by the floor. i promise it’s sanitary.

so in the last two weeks, the house has gone from looking like this:

to looking like this:

that’s actually just a corner of the pantry; but it was the cleanest, whitest, smoothest surface in the entire house.

i spent some time narrowing down the paint color selections:

and the apartments are being painted at the time of writing. and i’m amazed but delighted to discover that, so far, i love all of the paint color choices i made. it’s a nerve-wracking process, color selection. ben left it up to me aside from retaining veto power, which he exercised only in minor ways. it feels a little wussy, paying someone else to paint. but it will take 3 professionals 7 days to paint both apartments. the two of us, working nights and weekends, would have taken a month to complete the painting, and that’s another month that we’d be paying rent on three apartments. in the end, it was cheaper to pay someone to do the work quickly. i’ll have to settle for painting the closets fun colors later.

the contractor is finally out of our hair, minus a few lingering issues like the pipe that is still seeping in the basement. and the rodent problem, as evidenced by the little rat foot prints left overnight in fresh concrete:

we got to see ben’s basement stair design fully realized (rat prints and all)

and more importantly, the inspector signed off on it.

the new windows went in, and watching those go in (from our usual spying spot in the cafe across the street) was amazing. the window guys were like cats. or, like cats who are really good at installing windows, that is. perfect balance, zero fear of heights. if there was an olympic event for tearing out and re-installing windows, i would totally sponsor these guys:

Ben installed shower curtain rods. I fixed the bathtub faucet only to have someone else snap it off 2 days later. I razored every sticker off every surface in the building. Ben installed some more door hardware. i boiled door hardware. there was some paint archaeology.

we still don’t know if we’ll move in on time, or be homeless as of next tuesday.

We have a clean white box!

so much to do! No time for blogging! So, I leave you with this portrait instead:

there is a threshold for how much time we can spend in the house on any given trip. before the gas was on, we could only stay in the house as long as we could stay warm in coats and hats in 10 degrees (about 20 minutes). then, without water service, we could stay only as long as the next bathroom break (about 4 hours, if you planned your beverage consumption appropriately). now the water is finally on, which has extended our threshold for spending time in the house considerably.

currently we are able to stay as long as daylight lasts, because most of the power has been temporarily disabled again. it’s a two steps forward, one step back kind of thing. we can stay for > 4 hours, but only if those 4 hours fall into the daylight set. (can someone tell me how to write that in math notation? i wish i still knew.)

for weeks we’ve been asking when the water will be turned on, and not really getting a good answer, until now. it turns out the problem was that there was one bad solder joint left to repair, but it was in front of the first water shut-off valve. so the water needed to be turned off at the street level before it could get fixed. it has been slowly leaking into the ground against the front wall of the basement for who knows how long. the complication was that the ground was so frozen that no one could get to the water valve. once the ground thawed, they dug up most of the front yard looking for the valve before giving up and calling the city. who came out and apparently only pretended to off the water. sneaky city services. but someone attempted the repair anyway, failed, and left the joint basically at a steady trickle (like, at the same rate as a water fountain) overnight while they waited for the city to come back and really turn off the water. for an additional service fee of $40. because that’s how chicago does business. Ben and i go by the house most nights after work to check on progress, and on Thursday we discovered the basement floor covered in puddles, and water basically running down the pipe into a hole in the floor. and by floor, i mean, the place where the concrete basement gives way to bare dirt. we raised hell, and the foreman was sent out, and a call was placed to 311 for overnight service, but nothing really got fixed until the next day.

the water in the basement evaporated/drained pretty fast, but i am concerned about what is under (or rather, no longer under) the house in that area. the next day when the contractor called to say, “your water is on!” Ben translated that to, “your sinkhole is ready!” i do kind of worry that someday soon the front of half of the house will just sink 6 inches or a foot without warning. we should probably get a foundation guy out to look at it. but for the short term, the joint is fixed and we at last have water service. toilets that flush! sinks with running water!

the power is mostly off because electricians are working seven days a week to finish what is turning into basically a completely new electrical system. it was regrettable that we had to do it, or rather that we started this project without knowing that it was necessary, but i am glad that this will now be this:

the other success for this week? the burrito is gone!

one of the things that drives me bonkers is how filthy the house has gotten. the construction dirt is one thing, but the garbage is another. the tradesmen leave in their wake a spectacular trail of half-eaten food, takeout containers, coffee cups, wrappers, tools, boxes, discarded bits of wood and wire and conduit and receipts and whatever else just falls to the ground. has it occurred to no one to bring in a garbage can? or to repurpose a plastic bag? or to sweep up at the end of a work day? i am a deeply cluttered person myself, but there’s a difference between clutter and pure slovenliness. it speaks of a lack of respect for the job and the work that is being done. theatre carpenters may leave a trail of sawdust behind them, but my guys clean up their shop every night and put away the tools and through that, demonstrate respect for the space in which they work. and in turn, it raises the quality of the work that they do.

(i’m still getting to the burrito part, bear with me). of particular note was a big box that had become a trash box. someone had thrown the remains of a lunch in there, and it got rotty and more and more smelly. and the worse it smelled, the more stubborn i got about NOT TAKING IT OUT MYSELF. we worked every night for a week pulling moulding down amongst that burrito smell, but still i did not cave. in the end i won. i waited out the carpenters for more than a month. but, when we came in this afternoon, no more burrito! i win!

actually, everyone wins now that the burrito box of horror is now gone.

today we made what is becoming a regular weekend sweep past two of our favorite salvage shops (reBuilding Exchange and Salvage One) and picked up a few more bits of door hardware. i am about to start boiling these door plates in a solution of hot soapy water, as the internet tells me that is a good way to get the layers of paint off. or make a deadly soup for your worst enemy. either way. for obvious safety reasons, the directions recommend that you do not use cookware that is used for food prep. that’s okay, because i have pots for cooking food, and other pots for making fake blood in.*

we also went to home depot and bought all the door locks and had them rekeyed so the various apartments and common areas all coordinate. it was easier to do it ourselves than trust that the carpenters were going to buy the brand we’d spec’d or coordinate the right keys with the right doors. ben is installing them now. because he’s awesome. and we’re really impatient to get into the house, there are less than 3 weeks until moving day, and this is something that we can do.

we started packing. ugh. because when all the stress of the house renovation becomes too much, what we really need to do is come home and worry about having to move. but i am kind of excited about trying out this reusable moving box service.

this week we also began the dance of scheduling the window replacement, the floor refinishing and the painting. all of those things we bid out to other contractors, so this is where we’ll begin functioning as our own general contractor. which honestly, can’t be any harder than chasing down our contractor and trying to get him to actually communicate the information we give him to his foreman and crew.

the really good news is that we found a place to stay for a few weeks in may if we can’t move into our new apartment by april 29. a friend is working out of town and generously offered us use of her apartment and will even let us bring the cats. so while i am not psyched about possibly having to move twice (while in tech for my biggest show of the year) i am thrilled that we won’t be living in our car with two cats who hate each other.

it wasn’t looking so good around Thursday (burrito, flooded basement, possible homelessness), but by the end of the week the balance was looking to be in our favor. the basement is dry again, the roof is done and the neighbors only said one passive aggressive thing about all the nasty creosote that got all over their porches, the burrito has gone to a better place, the toilets flush,** and probably the house won’t burn down in a tragic electrical fire.

* i also have a very patient husband.
** which means i no longer have to wonder where the workmen are peeing.

When last we left our heros, it was Sunday night, we’d returned after a weekend trip to find that the drywall had been installed and was ready for taping and sanding. No more leprosy!

We figured that last week’s question (just how ugly CAN the house get?) had been answered. We’d bottomed out.

We were wrong.

This was a very expensive week. Expensive for our bank account, our dwindling reserves of patience and emotional fortitude, our remaining confidence that this was ever a good idea.

On Monday morning Ben got a call from our contractor saying that the electrical inspector had come for his scheduled approval of the kitchen and basement electrical work. The drywall in those areas was still open so that all the work was visible, just like it’s supposed to be. The inspector signed off on everything that was on the permit, but proceeded to accuse the crew/contractor of throwing up drywall in the rest of the house to hide shoddy electrical work. He insisted that all the newly-installed drywall be torn down, the plaster walls underneath demo’ed, and all new electrical conduit and wire be installed throughout the house.

You can imagine how much money that we don’t have that that was going to cost. After all, if we could have afforded a gut rehab we would have done it in the first place. We sure can’t afford do a cosmetic drywall, then UNDO all that drywall, and THEN do a gut rehab on all of the walls and conduit. The BX conduit that runs through the house is not current code-wise, but both housing inspectors we had come through assured us it was safe. It’s still standard all over Europe.

We might have freaked out a little bit on Monday night. Combine this news with sheer exhaustion from all the recent road trips, upcoming travel, trying to jam 40-hour work weeks into 3 and 4 days between all the travel, and a super hellish few days at work. I started to actually wonder if we’d made a horrible horrible financially ruinous mistake. This house had been under contract and then back on the market 4 times before we bought it. We were just too naive to see what all the other potential buyers saw. Calling it the Money Pit stopped being even a little bit funny or clever.

Besides the cost, we are on a timeline now – our current apartment has been re-rented and as of May 1 we don’t have anywhere to live. Yes, we can put our stuff in storage, and couch surf, but I’m in tech for all of May so that would really be hell. Plus no one wants couch-surfers with two elderly, querulous cats in tow.

Our contractor said he’d get it sorted out “with a politician friend.” Well, that politician friend was out of town for the week. We called our HUD 203k FHA inspector. He said it was out of his realm – if the city inspector says you gotta do it, you gotta do it.

So Ben got in touch with our Alderman. Who happens to be a big fan and supporter of the theatre company of which Ben is a long-time company member. Dropped a few names. Told him our sad story. Chicago business as usual. Asked if there’s anyway we could request a second inspection. Our contractor would be happy to pull down any particular piece of drywall for spot checks, to prove what was underneath is plaster and that the drywall is cosmetic, not a cover-up job. A very kind staffer from the Alderman’s office got back to us at 10:30pm that same night. Said he’d make some calls to the city Building Office and to call him the next day.

Meanwhile we met the contractor at the house on Tuesday morning to talk through the problem, and to walk through a few other things. The weather finally got up above freezing so they’d started the roof replacement. Which actually means chopping the old roof into a little bits and throwing it in to a nasty sooty heap in the back yard. (Good thing we hadn’t started landscaping). And they’d pulled the front steps off the porch, only to discover that the rest of the porch was rotten too and were in the process of disassembling the entire thing.

Our contractor had said he “didn’t really need a permit” just to swap out the porch stairs. But now that he was rebuilding the whole porch structure, he conceded that we probably needed a building permit. Or rather, now that we’d invited the Alderman to pay attention to our little project, a building permit might not be a bad idea. So he yelled at his guys to stop work. They piled all the lumber in the living room.

The Alderman’s office called and they managed to arrange for the same inspector to come back out. Appointment to be scheduled at his whim and with very little advance notice sometime in the next few days.

We met at the house again on Wednesday morning (jobs? what jobs? of course we can just swing by the house any day, any time. **Moment of gratitude for our flexible employers**) to sign permit application for the porch. Oh, and a dummy contract that I had to throw together because the building permit required a contract covering the porch even though it’s getting rolled in with the rest of the bigger project.

Ben was called back to the house Wednesday afternoon to look at some mortar work that was needed. The first row bricks under the parapet tiles on the roof were loose and needed to be re, um, whatever you do to bricks to glue them down to other bricks. (When they don’t come with lego bumps, that is). Another $650. Whoosh! The sound of money zipping out of our savings account.

We both left town on Thursday morning – me to a conference in Texas, Ben to visit his sister for her birthday in Washington. All week we waffled on whether to change or cancel our trips. I really wanted to be present when the electrical inspector came back. But there was no way I could back out of this panel presentation I was on in Texas Thursday afternoon. So we left the re-inspection in our contractor’s hands. Which ended up taking place early Thursday morning, JUST as we were boarding our planes.

The end result is that we still have to do about half of what was originally spec’d. Another $8k in electrical work. We no longer have to replace all the conduit or tear out the drywall, but he got nitpicky about a whole lot of little things. Number and location of outlets. Technical details of the grounding. Some old fabric wiring that was lurking in a few places means they’ll pulling new wire. A 3rd “common area” electrical panel in the basement. Some of it, like the 3rd panel, is frustrating because it’s meeting an arbitrary code rather than addressing our particular situation or safety. And some of it is necessary. I don’t want old frayed fabric wiring in our house any more than the electrical inspector wants fire hazards in old homes. And it’s frustrating that we’re re-doing some work, and it’s costing more and taking longer because we did things in the wrong order.

We can point fingers and ask why two different housing inspectors didn’t find the fabric-covered wiring. Or why the electricians working on it didn’t point it out sooner. Or why we didn’t just open up a few light switches and look behind them ourselves. The electrical inspector said we were idiots for not having cut open walls before buying to determine the extent of the electrical work needed, but when you’re buying a house as-is from the bank, you don’t get that option. In the end it won’t really do any good to assign blame, so we just have to write the check and keep moving forward, and frankly, be glad that we will be poor but safe in our new home when all of this is done. And keep our fingers crossed that this house will appraise sky-high when we’re done with everything.

So the question of whether the house could get any uglier? The answer is yes. We’re still looking for that bottom. We’re also still looking for the control wires for the furnace that I broke.

Some photos to wrap up this week’s post:

This is why we’re spending another $8k on electrical work. In the end, I feel okay about it:

New porch (what color should we paint it? votes?)

First we were walled in by snow, now we’re walled in by roof debris. The depth is about the same:

They dug up the front yard looking for the water main shutoff valve. And still haven’t found it:

Which means that the water still isn’t on. I find it’s better not to ask questions about this:

a lot of things have to get worse before they get better. you pull all the stuff out of a messy closet, now you have an entire messy room. but then some stuff heads off to goodwill, and everything else goes back in, neater, and voila! better than when you started. (i say this like i ever actually clean out closets. i just move once every 2-3 years and purge as i’m packing. but i’ve HEARD that some people clean closets). as we dig deeper into the house renovation, we’ve begun asking each other, do you think THIS is the ugliest the house can get?

we sucked it up and decided to pay to have both apartments completely drywalled. i was sad to let the plaster walls go (covered up, actually), but we’re not really in the financial position to fix, or maintain, plaster long term. and while the house is old and charming, it’s not exactly a national registry treasure or anything. chicago is full of 110 year old greystones with sagging floors and cracked plaster walls. it was time to stop being so precious about it and figure out how to move forward.

but we did decide to be precious about the moulding. we can’t fix everything about this house right now (and what’s the point of a project house if you DID fix everything on the first round anyway?), but we’re trying not to sink money in things done cheaply that will have to be redone later. the contractor suggested that they leave all the window/door/baseboards in place and just install 1/2″ thick drywall up to the edges of the trim. but that means that the moulding wouldn’t have any depth against the new drywall surface. it would look like crap. i had imagined that we’d probably replace, or at least refinish, all the trim one room at a time over the next few years. while weighing our drywall vs. plaster decision, we dragged several friends who have renovated old houses over to consult on the issue. everyone told us the same thing: pry off the trim, drywall underneath it, then re-install the trim. sigh. we knew they were right. if we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it right.

after dragging his heels for weeks, suddenly our contractor was all about getting his drywall crews in ASAP. so this past week ben and i spent 4 hours every night after work in the house tearing off all the trim. It’s beautiful old wood. oak, I think. 100 years old and still in great condition, if you can look past the 72 layers of gloppy paint all over it. every piece had to be pried off, then every nail pulled through (pounding them back out the way they came splinters the wood). each piece was coded in sharpie on the back side and corresponds to a map i drew (so in theory we can remember where it all goes).

it was not easy. we cursed. a lot. ben put a rusty nail through his thumb that landed him in urgent care 36 hours later when the infection set in (fear not, moms, he’s up to date on tetanus and fully antibioticked now). dinner became a parade of takeout and leftovers eaten hastily between prying off and stacking the trim. my inbox overfloweth with unanswered emails. the cats grew lonely and whiny because we were out every night. laundry and dishes piled up. but it also felt good to finally get in and start working on our house ourselves, rather than just sitting around waiting for the contractor to do stuff. we removed and salvaged literally thousands of linear feet of moulding. the 1st floor alone took 36-man hours. the second floor would have taken almost that had our contractor not gotten antsy and taken it down for us. (we still have to map and mark each piece and pry out all the nails).

the trim will have to be professionally stripped and sanded because there isn’t enough time, or dust masks, in the world for us to tackle that project ourselves. we’ll probably end up repainting it ourselves once it comes back clean. the trim in the rental unit will have to go back up before we can rent it, so its good that we have a deadline to keep us honest. the trim in our own apartment will have to go back up before we can have the house reappraised and refinanced, so that means we also have a motivating deadline there.

a few months ago a friend of ours was renovating his new [old] house in Pilsen and found a gun hidden in the walls. (he turned it over to the police). we did not find anything so exciting, or sordid. just this writing on the backside of one of the pieces of trim:

after busting our asses (and thumbs) for four days to get the trim down, we left down for 3 days (quick road trip to PA for a family wedding). we got back tonight, swung by the house, and lo! all the drywall had gone up and is awaiting taping/sanding. the leprosy is gone!

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.