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.

We first laid eyes on this house (well, the for sale sign outside of this house) on Nov 1, late at night. Since then we’ve visited it on a weekly, if not daily, basis, and this morning was the first time we’ve seen sunshine inside it. The east-facing living room windows get a faceful of morning sunshine that pours through the living room, into the dining room and down the hall. It’s just that the sun hasn’t really BEEN out since Nov 1. Everything about this house has been grey – grey stone façade, grey bricks, grey plaster dust everywhere, dirty grey peeling walls, grey brick buildings next door, grey sky outside the windows, piles of dirty grey snow outside. The house is tucked between two taller buildings, so I was concerned about how much natural light it gets. So even though it’s more customary to make the 1st floor the owners unit (opportunities to duplex down into the basement eventually), I wanted to live on the 2nd floor because natural light is everything to me. Seeing the sunlight pour in this morning helped reaffirm that decision. I’m trying to imagine what it will look like once we’ve added color to the walls and the floor is refinished to a nice shiny blond oak. The sunlight will bounce around and fill up every room, I hope. That is, until we can afford to install remote skylights (living in the future will be so awesome).

The rest of this week’s update is mostly pictures:

The 1st floor kitchen ceiling continued to deteriorate in the hunt for leaky pipes:

Mostly it deteriorated onto the floor:

Ben fixed some stuff with a hammer:

I won the door battle with our contractor:

We got to see (more of) the house’s bones:

They removed the wall between middle and rear bedrooms to make the new master bedroom:

And finally, they installed a rat slide! (The hole for the dryer vent was one of the places that rats have been using to get into the house. Now that there’s a dryer vent, it’s sort of like a water slide for the rats. Won’t the rats be surprised when one day they end up in a dryer! I guess we need some kind of mesh screen).

one of the things i love about my husband, and our marriage, is that we’re really good at doing projects together. which is to say that we have complementary, rather than identical, skill sets. i manage things. ben designs things. i keep track of stuff in spreadsheets, ben can mat and frame pictures and then hang them straight. i’m good cop, ben is bad cop. sometimes he throws me under the bus (ben: “it’s my wife, you know, she’s insisting on sourcing these vintage these solid core wood doors.” foreman: “oh, yeah, man, wives. i get it.”), sometimes i throw him under a bus (“listen, i really want to go with the premium windows but my husband thinks it’s a waste of money. is there any way you can come down on the price just a teensy bit more?”). we strategize. we support each other. i see the big picture. he has the patience to do the little things right just when i get exasperated and want to rush through them. when one of us gets overwhelmed, the other one somehow finds a reserve of calm, confidence, and reason. we have a lot of conversations that go like this:

b: “where are you?”
me: “at home depot looking at moulding profiles. i’m suddenly feeling overwhelmed at the prospect of installing our own crown moulding. we can do this, right?”
b: “of course. it’s just the painting of it i’m worried about.”
me: “painting is the easy part. we buy primed moulding, slap two coats of paint on it before we install it, and touch up after it’s done. i’m intimidated by learning to mitre corners.”
b: “mitring corners is the easy part. i can do that.”
me: “we can totally do this.”

it turns out that making a play is nothing more than a set of russian nesting projects. we both majored in projects. projects are in our career DNA. planning a labor-intensive DYI wedding (simultaneous with a cross-country move through a trick of unfortunate timing) taught us that the skills we’ve honed in our theatre careers are applicable just about everywhere else. our wedding vows included the phrase “i will support your dreams, your projects and your harebrained schemes.” which, as it turns out, is a pretty good description of what buying and renovating a vacant building in the middle of the worst winter chicago has seen since 1978* is really like.

what happened this week? well, it appears that the plumber is still chasing down leaks, judging from the rapidly deteriorating condition of the 1st floor kitchen ceiling. there are a number of expensive projects on hold (refinishing floors, replacing windows) because we’re waiting to find out of there’s some very expensive disaster related to the plumbing that we have to deal with first.

the foreman plowed ahead and framed out and installed cheap steel doors, apparently because the contractor never told him we wanted to find our own vintage doors. then he tried to tell Ben that we couldn’t keep changing things on him, which is when Ben threw me under the bus. he and the foreman had a good manly moment acknowledging the demands of their wives, and we all moved on. so this beautiful wood door that we found at a salvage yard will be the front door of the first floor apartment, but our apartment will have the cheap steel door and tacky stock frame with contemporary moulding that is nothing like the moulding profile of the rest of the house. le sigh. first world problems.

i made the first mortgage payment. i pitched a fit about doors. i might have shed a tear or two over our contractor’s inability to return a phone call. the internets taught me a lot about door hardware, and faucet plumbing. it snowed. again. i looked at a bazilion images of front porch railings on pinterest. i made appointments with three painters and two floor refinishers to bid on work that we’re not yet sure we can afford. a window salesman came and gave us his pitch. it snowed some more. i learned that a surprisingly large number of wood restoration companies throughout the country are named ‘the strip joint’. ben finished drafting the plan whereby we turn two tiny bedrooms into a master bedroom, a pantry, a walk-in closet and a linen closet. closets! we will have both vintage charm AND closets!

given the distinct lack of communication between our contractor and his foreman, we have our doubts about whether they will actually move the walls around to the right places. the dimensions are all right there on the drawing, but it’s not clear that anyone who is doing the work is looking at the drawing. so, returning to our theatre roots, this morning we went by the house and taped out the positions of all the new walls and doors:

my video game-playing career really peaked in early middle school*, which means that nearly all of my video game reference points are Super-NES-era games**. there was a summer that my brothers and i played metroid like it was our job. for those of you who were cool in junior high not familiar with the game, it follows the adventures of a sort of futuristic spaceman-bounty hunter who has to explore alien tunnels and caves. there’s a tremendous amount of territory to cover, but you can only see it displayed on the screen one room at a time and there’s no master map to reference. it became necessary to start mapping the tunnels ourselves to avoid falling into the jaws of the same monster over and over again. we’d draw the turns – right, left, up, down, elevator here, bottomless pit there, on an 8×11 sheet of paper, and when the map ran off the edge of the paper we’d just tape another sheet on to the side, so that the map grew in a sort of organic fashion.

over the course of the past two weeks, we’ve been taking measurements of the house as needed in order to hunt for vintage doors, to think about adding windows or moving walls around, or try to figure out where the furniture will go. usually i take and call out the measurements to ben who sketches it into his notebook, and then later drafts it to scale on the computer.

eventually we’ll draft the whole house (there’s no such thing as as-built drawings for this place, it was purchased strictly as-is and full of surprises), but without time to do the whole thing we keep popping in and grabbing a measurement here or there. the end result is that ben’s notebook reminds me of the metroid maps of my childhood. while we don’t have any elevators, or monsters***, we do have that weird random air shaft. (there will be more pictures of the air shaft as soon as it’s safe for us to get up on the roof, which is currently buried in some of the 66 inches of snow that have fallen in chicago this winter).

yesterday Ben was able to join the various pieces together to complete the map of the interior of our apartment:

and if reading groundplans isn’t your thing, here is the narrated video tour teresa requested last week.

in terms of progress this week: the electrical work is nearly complete. our contractor says that means that the “spaghetti bowl” that was our breaker panel has been all sorted out. there was a moment of panic mid-week when they opened up a kitchen wall and found some electrical wiring that had been run sans conduit. for a moment we thought the whole house might be like that, which would mean about $10k in extra work. but a few spot checks in other rooms determined that it’s only in the kitchen, where the recent, spectacularly shoddy, rehab work had been done, that had unsheathed wires running behind the sheetrock. everything else has nice, 1950’s era BX conduit. which means it’s still not up to code, but also not unsafe.

the plumbing was hooked up and turned on, only to discover that there is a leak between 1st and second floors (there’s now a hole in the 1st floor kitchen ceiling where they went in after the leak). the house was winterized, meaning that the pipes were blown out so that they couldn’t freeze, in 2012, but neighbors tell us that the place has been vacant for 3-4 years. which means there’s a distinct chance that the pipes froze in the winters of 2010 or 2011. so there’s no telling just how many leaks they’ll have to chase down. finding leaks seems to be an inexact science (ie, turn on the water and wait to see what drips), which means i can only hope we find all of them BEFORE we take possession of the house.

* after that i started hanging out with boys who were more interested in hacking a circa-late-70’s UNIX mainframe than they were in completing Metroid levels, and i never really made it back to video games. possibly, it’s just that i haven’t had any free time since i was 13.

** once in college a friend and i happened upon an old Super-NES system and stayed up all night trying to save the princess (we did). I was amazed to discover that i still know where all of the extra coin blocks are located in Super Mario Bros. there is a treasure trove of useless information rattling around up here.

*** unless you count the rats, which CAN get awfully big.

there still isn’t a lot of exciting renovation progress to report. the contractor promises he’ll have his crews running at full speed starting next week. it’s understandable, given the delays we encountered in getting utilities turned on, that his crews were busy with other things and couldn’t just drop everything to start the first day that we had heat. but it’s also frustrating that we’ve now been paying to heat a drafty, poorly-sealed house up to 60 degrees around the clock for a 10 days now and still hardly any work has been done.

some demo work did start this week. as you can see, the basement “half bath” has become a quarter bath:

they also started some of the system inspections, and “discovered” that all the copper water pipes in the basement are missing. our contractor called us over to the house on Thursday to deliver the news. you’re missing some copper, he told us. yes, yes we knew that. but what we didn’t know was that the 203k inspector left it out of the repair list so the contractor didn’t include in his bid. which means we have to pony up separately for that. there’s a contingency fund for exactly these sorts of things, but we’d hoped to use it on sexier projects than plumbing.

the interesting part of this process is that i have no frame of reference for what things cost. i’ve been working in theatre long enough to know that if a director says he wants to fly an actor, that’s a minimum cost of $10k, but if a director asks if that white cotton dress can be purple by tomorrow night, that’s just a box of rit dye and an afternoon of labor. even before pricing out a project, i have SOME reference point for knowing how many 0s we are talking about. but not with house renovations. things are surprisingly expensive at times, of course, and other times surprisingly cheap. Ben asked our contractor how much it would cost to add a window in the south-facing living room wall, and it was less than $2000. But 20 feet of 1″ copper pipe in the basement? $3300. it costs less to CUT A HOLE IN A BRICK WALL than it does to attach a few pipes to the basement ceiling. but the water main isn’t really an optional repair, so we signed the change order and the next afternoon this went up in the basement:

in the mean time we’re trying to get through the stuff that we can do ourselves. i bought a washer, dryer and fridge today. our unit came with a fancy new fridge (an icemaker? i’ve never had one of those!) but we needed one for the rental unit. we deliberated but in the end decided than spending an extra $200 to get a stainless steel finish on the fridge was silly, but worth it. stainless steel finishes on kitchen appliances are so in vogue right now that i think it will make the apartment rent better than a big blocky white one. and, considering that i am the world’s worst bargainer, i’m proud to say that i at least asked for a discount and managed to talk the salesman down by about $100 from the sticker price. i’m sure someone else could have done better, but it was pretty obvious i wasn’t going to leave without buying some appliances today. there’s only so much bargaining power in that situation, and i didn’t have ben along with me to play good cop/bad cop.

how cold was our house? well, not quite as cold as this place, but a close second. (seriously, check out that link. it’s way more amazing than the rest of this post).

but no longer! the heat is on! after 22 days and 5 service calls, we have gas service and, happy surprise! the furnaces work. Ben stopped by the house last night and sent me this visual report:

there’s not much else to tell; we spent all week trying to get the gas on. the contractor cut down the remains of the drop ceiling in the basement. we shoveled a lot more snow. the snow has been drifting in strong winds and piling up against the fence, so that on one side of the yard the snow is more than 4 feet deep. i suspect we will be well into may before it all melts.

in the mean time, here are a few more “before” photos.

the living room looking into the dining room, 2nd floor unit:

some solid electrical work in the basement:

1st floor unit front door. or, what’s left of the front door:

this is what happens when you don’t heat a house for three years:

before. all the before:

fun fact: we bought the house without ever having seen inside the shed in the corner of this photo. now the snow is piled up so deep we can’t really get to it. but at some point we’ll have to saw off the padlock and see what’s inside. yikes.