The Scary Garage

We have a roof!  I don't have any pictures yet.  We are heading out there today to check it out.  In the meantime, here's some details about the scary garage.

Buying a really old house is partly an exercise in archaeology.  You exhume little snippets from another person's life.  We found many such snippets in the scary garage.

One of my favorite passages from Daphne DeMaurier's Rebecca, sums it up perfectly:

Packing up.  The nagging worry of departure.  Lost keys, unwritten labels, tissue paper lying on the floor.  I hate it all.  Even now, when I have done so much of it, when I live, as the saying goes, in my boxes.  Even to-day, when shutting drawers and flinging wide a hotel wardrobe, or the impersonal shelves of a furnished villa, is a methodical matter of routine, I am aware of sadness, of a sense of loss.  Here I say, we have lived, we have been happy.  This has been ours, however brief the time.  Though two nights only have been spent beneath a roof, yet we leave something of ourselves behind. Nothing material, not a hair-pin on a dressing-table, not an empty bottle of Aspirin tablets, not a handkerchief beneath a pillow, but something indefinable, a moment of our lives, a though, a mood.  This house sheltered us, we spoke, we loved within those walls.  That was yesterday.  To-day we pass on, we see it no more, and we are different, changed in some infintesimal way.  We can never be quite the same again.

OK. This is perhaps a bit of a romanticized view of the mess left in the scary garage.

I didn't really go in here.  Larry and Mom poked around, but because the dirt was also strewn with oats, I figured there had to be some little creatures in there.  And at a minimum, I figured it was safer to wait until I had my tetanus booster.  To the right of the screen, you'll see a fishing net.  The pile of bags in the center are bags of concrete that got wet at some point and turned into solid blocks. 

The back corner was full of miscellaneous rusty tools, as well as an old wagon or cart of some sort. Some of the things we found are pretty cool, actually. We're going to figure out how to work them into the house as decoration or something later.

And here's what happens when a termite infestation goes untreated for over a decade.
We called in some assistance getting some of the junk out, and finished some more recently.  We pulled the garage doors down for safety purposes.

Mom raked through the dirt floor to get additional scraps of metal to give to the guy who was collecting it for scrap.  Once we removed all the garbage we figured out the wagon-looking thing is probably a forge.  It is so heavy we aren't exactly sure how we are going to move it.

We tried to demo the shelves at the back wall, but realized the 2x4's holding up the back wall are rotted out at the bottom.  We didn't know if they could handle the stress of demolishing the shelves.

We found some nifty rusty stuff out there including a lawn mower blade, a bit for a horse, more blacksmith tools, and a gigantic wrench.

Shout out to Bob Schaefer and his son Matt for helping us out with our rusty stuff.  They have been grinding some of our old tools to make them shiny and new again.  Last week Matt discovered one of our wrenches was marked.

 This serial number indicates that this wrench was included in a tool kit sold with a Model T Ford!

But to me, this padlock is by far the coolest thing we found in the scary garage.  Mom did some research and found out that this could be a fire brigade padlock from London.  Why a fire brigade padlock from London would be in the scary garage is anyone's guess.

That's all from Wisteria Bend Cottage for now.

Christy

Meet Stephen

Meet Stephen.

We found Stephen in an antique booth off the square in Fayetteville during antiques festival last fall. I found him the first weekend, but the dealer was asking an awful lot for this poor beat-up little table, so we didn't buy it.  But I thought about him all week and the next weekend the dealer was ready to negotiate.

Since the kitchen is so large and there isn't much functional counter space for food prep, we were initially thinking about an island with some barstools. But the rebirth of farmhouse style has also led to a rebirth of the farmhouse table instead of built-in islands.  I explained to the dealer my hesitation and he made me a deal: if I bought the table and fixed it up, but decided to go with the island instead, he would allow me to sell it out of his booth in the spring.  That sealed the deal for me, and much to Larry's chagrin, we drove back to WBC with this 9-foot table hanging out the back of our SUV and me in the front seat holding on to the legs for dear life so it didn't fall out on the road.  

Stephen had clearly been someone's garage work table.  There were paint spatters, oil stains, and nicks where someone cut just a little too deep with their saw blade.

So we set to work sanding down the old nasty finish to bring it back to life.

 After working our way from 80 grit sand paper up to 120, Stephen was looking pretty good.

Lo and behold, Stephen is also made of long-leaf pine, just like much of the rest of the house.

The next weekend we did a couple more layers with finer grit paper.

It was such a pretty day it was hard to go back to town. But by the end of the afternoon, we knew Stephen was ready for paint and stain.



Since there is already so much wood (and because it is really hard to get a good finish on turned legs), we decided to paint the bottom of the table to match the kitchen counters.  To make that process easier, we taped up the top with plastic so we could prime the base and legs with spray primer.

Over the past 4 weekends or so, I've been bathing the top in Waterlox.  It's supposed to soak into the wood and form a water-resistant coating.  And even though it isn't a stain per se, it also substantially deepened the color.

After about 4 layers of Waterlox, the top is ready for use as a kitchen island. As soon as we finish the inside cabinetry, we will probably do a coat of paint on the base and legs so the table ties in to the cabinets.

Here's the before and after side-by-side:

I love him!

Why Stephen, you ask?  Because it has worm holes!

That's all from Wisteria Bend for now.

Christy

Porch Progress

Last week the guys made a lot of progress, despite 3 days of rain.  They got the columns mostly rebuilt.

But they were still working on the remainder of the front porch facade.

The columns look a little gray because they tinted the mortar gray to match the original brickwork.  You can see the original brick work underneath the bedroom on the left of the picture below.  The contractor told me that after the brick guys were done, they'd power wash the new work with a solution of muradic acid and the extra mortar and tint would come right off, leaving the new work a perfect match to the old work.

Also we found a gently used matching stove and microwave on Craigslist for $250.  Couldn't pass up that deal!  Especially since the fridge and dishwasher are going to be pricey given that we're trying to retrofit them into a very old kitchen.

 This week they've been continuing to get the front porch back together.

Dad sent me these photos Thursday.  Mom said it took six guys to get the concrete tops back on the top of the columns.  

 The wood part of the columns is heavy too.  Those are made of solid pieces of 1" thick cypress.

And as you can see the wisteria are blooming too!

Today the antiques festival starts so we're going to go see what we can find.

That's all from Wisteria Bend for now.

Christy

The restoration has begun!

Finally! After 8 months the restoration has begun.  Though we did a LOT to clean up the house and the remainder of the property (and I still have some posts to publish on the work we did), we couldn't actually do the restoration work.  We had to wait on pros for that.  But last week, the restoration work began with demo of the bricks under the front porch so that they could be rebuilt after the house was leveled.  

I stopped by the house on the way back from a deposition in San Antonio, and was shocked to find the railings had been removed from the porch and that the demo of the brick columns had already begun.

And the guys had begun removing the front row of bricks from the porch.  I frankly had no idea that there was a second row of bricks behind there--that's because I'm WAY too much of a chicken to crawl under the house.

We totally lucked out because the bricks supporting the front porch and that make up the columns were solid and did not have holes in them, which meant a) the guys could de-construct them relatively quickly; and b) they could chip off the old mortar without damaging the bricks.  SCORE!

When I came back on Sunday with Larry, the guys were not only continuing to demo the brick, but also bracing the roof so they could re-build the columns.

 They had also already pulled down the rotted pergola.  It will be rebuilt, but we decided to demo the planter box too.  That brick work was completely different.  The bricks that made up the planter box DID have holes and the guys spent hours trying to get those out.  If I had known how much of a pain it was going to be, I would have told them to just leave it.

 While the guys were doing their thing, we took advantage of a fabulous opportunity.  The school next door did some construction and ordered one of those huge commercial dumpsters.  The mayor stopped by and told us that it was only half full so if we wanted to get rid of anything in the dumpster we were welcome to.  We JUMPED at the chance!

  We got rid of at least 5 garbage bags of junk from the cistern house, about 40 or 50 granite rocks that we found scattered EVERYWHERE and didn't know what to do with, at least 7 or 8 wheelbarrows full of other items from the scary garage (I will do a separate post on the scary garage soon it has been a long process to clean that out.)

And this is partly why I call it the scary garage.  I'm not sure what died here, but it's never comforting to find remains of any sort.  Even worse than finding remains is finding something ALIVE.  Larry climbed a ladder and came eyeball-to-eyeball with a mouse in the rafters of the scary garage.  I'm not sure who was more surprised.  But I'm glad it wasn't me because I probably would have fallen off the ladder.  

By the end of the day, the porch roof was fully braced, and most of the columns demolished.

The house leveler came out on Monday or Tuesday and boy can you tell a difference.  All the doors now open and shut with ease.  And the floor feels really solid and not as creaky.

I took a peek under the front porch and this is what's there.  I have to be honest: I don't know what this is.  I'm pretty sure that the pyramid looking things are the old system, which is probably why everything was kinda wonky because they don't seem tall enough to have provided any support.

I am pretty sure I know what this is...termite damage on one of the joists under the porch.  Lovely.  I'm pretty sure there's still some work to do there...

But now that the house is level, the guys are already rebuilding the brick columns.  Two other notable developments this week:

We have a building permit.  Yay!  And...

We have a functional electric meter box and electricity!  Double Yay!  I did ask the contractor if that was safe given the sad state of the previous wiring.  To avoid burning the house down, he disconnected everything and installed a temporary plug so that they guys can at least run their tools (and the microwave they brought to the jobsite for their lunch) without the generator.  

That's all from Wisteria Bend for now.

~Christy

Before and not-so-before Part 6

In case you missed Larry's FB spoiler the other day, the big news is that we FINALLY have a contractor and his guys started working on Saturday!  There is now lots of activity at WBC.  But before I get to that, I wanted to highlight some of the other stuff that we did over the last 8 months while we were waiting for the real show to begin.  So here's the Before and not-so-before for the bathroom.  If it's true that kitchens and bathrooms sell houses, it should be no surprise that it took months for this house to sell.  It takes a very special/crazy group of people to see beyond the disaster that is the only bathroom at WBC.

Clearly, it's not entirely unredeemable.  That tub is pretty cool; I found a reproduction available for only $3,400.00, so I think we're going to keep it.  We are going to try and keep the sink too.  The toilet...not so much.  I have no sentimentality about the toilet.

The shower was added at some point much later, and apparently done badly because the outside of the house shows some resulting water damage and mold.

For the most part the paneling was like that in the kitchen and sleeping room.  It was cardboard like with wooden strips between the sheets.  So we first removed the strips and then pulled the cardboard off.

The shower surround was solid plastic and it came off in very large sections.  I was working by myself that day and getting the large sheets out the door was tricky to do alone.  To my disappointment, though, the glue residue on the wall is pretty bad.  We plan to tile that wall anyway, but unlike some of the other rooms, pulling off the wall board in the bathroom was not a major improvement.

The medicine cabinet came out in one piece so we are going to try and restore it too.

Check out how large that linen closet is.  Our thought is to relocate a tankless hot water heater here to give us more space in the mudroom.

And of course after we pulled off the wall board, we still had to pull all the old nails that held it up.

"WE" again in the general sense.  I don't think I was very helpful at the nail pulling.

That's all from Wisteria Bend for now.

Christy