Lipstick on a Pig

Let me get one thing straight here: yes, I am a girl and I like girlie things. I value a sense of style, like beautiful things, appreciate quality and believe a home can tell you a lot about the people who live in it. But I also believe that a home is like a family member. As in all relationships, it has to WORK for the consideration of its inhabitants. It has to be reliable, comfortable, secure, bring joy and be a respite from the outside world. When nurturing a home into becoming a family member, it is like nurturing any other relationship: you get back what you put in.

I feel the need to say all of this based on some meetings I had today with 2 HVAC contractors and an exteriors contractor. The HVAC contractors seemed to pussy-foot around the "bad" news, e.g. (and these are nutshell-versions that describe the upshot of the danced-around points):

• "The return for the basement furnace is grossly undersized. We'll have to cut into the dining room floor to create a properly-sized return...maybe we can help you find some decorative iron covers that will be in keeping with the style of the house."
• "Adding supply vents for the attic to the existing ducts that service the 2nd floor will result in over-venting of that single run of ducts. Would you be OK with new, exposed ductwork running along the ceiling of the finished attic?"
• "We're gonna have to cut away some of the drywall in these soffits to terminate the ductwork if you plan to install radiant heat flooring in the basement so the furnace can work more efficiently on the 1st floor. Are you OK with us cutting into the drywall?"
• Meeting with the exteriors guy: "If you want to get the house back to the original style you should keep this stone around the bottom, do a siding exterior with a scale finish at the peaks. Me: "We do want to try to get the exterior back to it's original style, but we need to find sustainable materials that can be installed as seamlessly as possible to increase energy efficiency. The look of the house is important, but the MOST important thing to us making the house as energy-efficient as possible. We're willing to sacrifice the former for the latter." He gives me a quizzical look.

I had to work really hard today to convince all these guys that I REALLY AM much more concerned with how the house WORKS than how it looks. When I start worrying SOLELY about how the house looks I may be enlisting the services of an interior designer, but not them. I'm not gonna worry about furniture placement in the dining room at the expense of a properly-placed and functioning air return.

Which brings me to something funny we found today. As Steve and Caton were taking down drywall I joked with them "find any dead bodies yet?" They did find several beer bottles, some other ill-placed detritus and this:





Next to the piece of conduit (sitting on the sill of the electrical panel cabinet), at first I wasn't sure exactly what it was. Upon further examination I realized it was a lipstick tube. Empty.

Clearly, the previous builders must have used it all up on this big pig of a house.

The kludgy stuff

This house was advertised as "recently rehabbed". Let's just say that the term "rehab" should be used loosely. Admittedly, the "rehab" that was done on the house really did help us to envision the spaces and their potential use probably better than if they had been left unfinished. The problem is, when they "rehabbed" these spaces, they did it REALLY half-assed. Fundamental things like roof repair, basement sealing, proper plumbing, etc. were blown-off in the interest of making the house LOOK nice. Unfortunately a whole lot of those "nice looking" finishes will have to be UNDONE to make sure everything behind it gets done properly. There is added cost to this.

Off the top of my head, here is the initial list of what needs to be done in the house to make it "right":

• Roof repair - The roof is largely serviceable, but several areas of flashing were improperly done so will have to be redone. There are signs of leakage in many of the "rehabbed" areas of the house.
• Chimney repair - There are at least 2 chimneys (for the 2 furnaces...don't know yet if there are more for the 4 fireplaces, 3 of which we will be reversibly sealing) and none of them are properly lined or capped. This allows moisture seepage into the mortar which causes "bubbling" in the plaster around them. We will have to have this done (we did it in our last house...not cheap).
• Basement sealing - The "finished" basement showed signs of seepage on 3 of the 4 foundation walls. There was mold in a lot of the drywall at time of inspection despite the fact that mold remediation had already been performed over the 9 months the house was listed. All of the new carpet will need to be pulled up (which is fine 'cause it is off-gassing some seriously toxic stuff), much of the drywall ripped out, areas of seepage analyzed to determine the source of water, any remaining mold remediated, etc. We'll probably leave the drywall cut away for several months to get a good sense of where the water is coming from. There is indication that, in several areas, it may actually be coming from interior plumbing leaks, which leads to...
• Plumbing repair - This was fun: we turned on the water to the house at the main for the sake of the inspection (the listing agent actually had to pay the city to have it turned back on after all the back-bills were paid). A wastewater line that had been run in a wall right next to the electrical panels was leaking (pictured right). In the short time before inspection of this area, water from the line had pooled-up in the wall insulation just below the electrical panels. Our contractor, who was there for the inspection, wouldn't get ANYWHERE near it to even look at it. This, among other tell-tale signs, led us to believe that the plumbing work that had been done during this "rehab" was highly suspect. We were right:

It looks like some inexperienced choad started to weld the copper pipe together (pictured left), singed a 2 X 4, got freaked-out and decided to "seal" all the joinery with some sort of teflon-based mastic. YUM! The water main closet (pictured middle) not only was not properly sealed (the pipe just comes right out of the dirt) but is coupled with 3 different diameters of pipe within a 2 foot run. Not so good for water pressure. PLUS, the pipe was leaking which caused mold in the dirt on the floor of the closet and on the surrounding drywall.

• Exterior Fascia and siding repair - Not only is it BUTT UGLY, it wasn't even installed right. There are gaps EVERYWHERE letting in air, water, bugs (yech!), etc. We really want to re-do the whole exterior to take it back to its original style, but we don't know if we can afford this right now. Either way, it NEEDS to at least be sealed-up to keep water out for the time-being.
• Insulation - This house is what energy-raters like to call a "leaker". It is SO drafty it has about 4 air exchanges per hour...about 4 times more than it should. Not very energy efficient. There are MANY areas of no or poorly attempted insulation so Steve (our contractor) will be remedying this and establishing a heat envelope for the house. Drywall will be ripped out on almost all floors in an attempt to seal up all rim joists, superfluous doors sealed, window & door seams properly sealed, etc. According to our energy rating report, all this work should result in the cost of heating/cooling this house to be less than our last house, which was 1/3 the size.
• Venting - There are NO exterior vents in the kitchen, laundry room or any of the bathrooms.

That's all I can think of at the moment. There's more kludgy stuff, but it's mostly cosmetic and can be dealt with over time. You'll hear about it here later...promise.

So we bought this house...

...and MAN is it UGLY! Well, it's ugly on the outside. The inside is pretty amazing, though certainly not anything we expected to end up with when embarking on this odyssey 2+ years ago.
The thing is, it is also a freakin' BARN...I mean it is HUGE...which is definitely not anything we expected (or had any desire to) end up with. But it seems like everything we saw was either smaller than our last house or...well...like this. EVERY medium-sized house we saw we really did try in earnest to get (that would be 5 tries, in 9 months, before this one). Who knew it would be so hard to buy? In THIS market???

So this is what we ended up with, and we really did get a pretty great deal. It's on a "busy" street (not what we wanted), it sits amongst nothing but apartment buildings (not what we wanted), it has VERY little yard (not what we wanted), but we get this:


... and this doesn't suck.

What also doesn't suck is this house's proximity to the best of Oak Park. Walkability to neighborhood amenities was a VERY important consideration to us in our next home. We hope to be here for at least 15 years. This is where we will raise our son. Plus the elementary school district it's in has the diversity we were looking for for him.

This house hasn't been lived in for at least a couple of years. In fact, word is it was converted to a 3 flat at one point. And then some poor soul bought it at the height of the market, mortgaged it to the hilt at the height of the market, then got foreclosed on. Considering the quality of the work done on the house, however, it's highly likely that whoever did it 1) didn't spend all the money that was leveraged out of the house ON the house and 2) had NO clue what they were doing. There are signs of this EVERYWHERE. So, we will be undoing a LOT of the kludgy work that was done, a la Mike Holmes. Sadly, none of it is sexy stuff, but will ensure we can live here for years to come without new (or continued) major problems.

This blog is an attempt to document this journey of renovation, greening, attempts at interior design (and exterior re-design), landscaping...creating a home.