College Hill House

Attic Bones

2010-10-13T18:58:00.000-07:00

Some time back, I headed up to the attic room to retrieve something from storage. This is what I found:

Maranda and I had already decided to replace the ceiling in the attic room a little at a time. The ceiling decided to start the process a little earlier than we'd planned. The picture above looks quite a bit better than what I found. This picture was taken after we cleaned up the collapsed ceiling and the blown insulation that was spread all over the place. You can use your imagination, but trust me that it looked very, very bad.

Here's a "during" shot, as we were putting up insulation and sheetrock:

Now that we have a couple of small sections replaced, it caused a bit of an itch* to get the rest done. I can now see how good it could look with a little more work.

*True, that itch may just be from the fiberglass insulation.

Timelapse!

2010-09-30T18:45:00.000-07:00

First, check this out:

That's approximately 6,000 pictures of me turning our spare bedroom into a playroom for the triplets.

Second: Hey, I have a house blog! Who knew? Several things have happened to the house since June of 2009, and I hope to catch up over the next few days.

- James

Backyard: Finished Product

2009-07-09T19:27:00.000-07:00

Here's what the backyard looks like now. The girls love it, of course. And I love not having to stress over the lack of grass back there.

You Load 16 Tons...

2009-06-06T18:55:00.000-07:00

Okay, it was only three tons. But three tons is a lot of pea gravel to shovel into a wheelbarrow and cart into the backyard. That's six thousand pounds of pea gravel. It sounds like a lot. And my aching back says it was a lot.

Here's the front-end loader loading one and a half tons into my dad's trailer:

Relatively impressive, right?

So why doesn't it look like much when it's in the yard?

Backsplash Progress

2009-01-18T20:20:00.000-08:00

One of the first things we did when we moved to College Hill was to get rid of the old stove. It was a mammoth 1960s stove, six feet tall with push buttons. If it had worked, we would have loved to clean it up and keep it. But it did not, and it also took up the space where we were used to having a microwave (above the range), so out it went. We bought a new stove and microwave to put in, but we had to run electric to where the new microwave plugged in. This was the result:

We had to rip out all the tiled backsplash in order to cut a groove in the wall for the new wiring. We planned to replace it with new tiles identical to the old ones. We were going to get right on that.

That was two years ago.

In December of 2007, I made a New Years resolution to finish up some projects, including that backsplash (more "before" pictures at that link, including the original stove).

That was one year ago.

But today I made progress. Check this out:

Woohoo!

Rather than replacing with the same white tiles, we've opted for tin ceiling tiles. These tiles are the same gauge and type of tin that was used for ceiling tiles around the turn of the century (the last century, not this one).

Eventually I am going to replace all the ceramic tiles with the tin ones. Also in the plan: paint the cabinets; switch the knobs out for polished silver knobs; replace the current light switches with original-style push button switches. I hope these items don't take as long as getting started on the backsplash did, but at least we don't have to be quite as embarrassed when we have friends over.

Old Pictures

2009-01-03T21:02:00.000-08:00

Back when we had the new heat pump installed, we also put more insulation in the attic. There are a few of small spaces off the attic room, where there should have been insulation but there wasn't. As I was crawling around I found a couple of interesting items. They certainly aren't the sort of thing we'd take to Antiques Roadshow, but you also won't find them in the attic space of your average modern suburban home.

What's Wrong with this Picture?

2008-11-14T17:17:00.000-08:00

Can you spot it?

Here's a closer look:

This is a melted wire nut. That's what I found after we lost power in our basement and living room the other night. None of the breakers had tripped, so I went to the back bathroom, where a fusebox-turned-junction box is. I could smell melted plastic before I even opened the door.

A guy from Tracy Electric came out and fixed it for the night, then came back the next day to beef it up more. He apologized profusely, and he showed me exactly what had happened, what he was doing to fix it, and what they would do the next day to fix it more.

Apparently the guy who actually did the work on our house in the first place hasn't worked on old houses before, so this has been a learning experience for him. Just another public service courtesy of College Hill House.

The Beast Saves the Day

2008-10-29T04:15:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was day two of the heat pump/air handler installation and electric upgrade. By the end of today, we should have our new system up and running.

The upgrade from 100 amp service to 200 amp service is complete, and the new breaker box is much better than the old system of two ancient breaker boxes and one (even more ancient) fuse box. I'll post some pictures of that later.

We had some excitement yesterday morning when the electrician got here. For some reason I had the mindset that the electrician would get here, shut off the power to the house for about an hour, then finish upgrading our service and turn the power back on. If I had really thought about all the work he was doing, I would have realized how silly that was. But I didn't think about it that much.

So I was a little surprised when I got a call from Niki around 9:00 yesterday morning, telling me that the electrician had just shut off the power and it was going to be off all day. It was 30 degrees when we found this out. Fortunately, the radiators retain their heat for quite a while after The Beast shuts off, so I knew we were okay for at least an hour or two. But with the workmen needing to go in and out of the house constantly, it was just a matter of time before thing started getting chilly.

After briefly considering a triplet exodus to Niki's house, I decided to do something I'd had in the back of my head for a while. Rex (a friend of mine from work) and I went to the house and set up what you see below.

It's a battery and an inverter spliced into the AC wires for the boiler. We had heat for the whole day -- in fact, even as I write this The Beast is still hooked up to that battery.

I would wager that there are very few houses in Wichita that could be heated for several days with a battery as the source of electricity. But The Beast is a gas boiler (originally coal, but it was converted), and the heat is circulated through the house by gravity: the steam rises in the pipes, and when it cools off in the radiators it turns to water (called condensate), which flows down the return pipes. There are no blowers or pumps. The only need for AC power is to open and close the valve when the thermostat tells it to. When we set this up at 11:00 yesterday morning, the battery had 12.05 volts. I just checked it again this morning, and it has 11.98. With a fully-charged deep-cycle battery, we could probably heat the house for a few days without power. Nice to know!

We had more excitement last night when we tried to turn on lights upstairs. I'll write more about that when I have time, but I have to say that Tracy Electric did an impressive job late last night, and they promised to replace anything that might have been damaged.

Halfway to New Heat

2008-10-27T19:21:00.000-07:00

The heating and cooling trucks pulled into the drive at 8:15 this morning and left right around 5:00 pm. And they replaced this old air conditioning compressor...

...with a shiny new heat pump.

They'll be back again, though. The air handler and thermostat still have to be installed, and that will likely take most of tomorrow.

I've received the same response from several people upon hearing that we are having a heat pump installed. It's a mixture of shock, horror, and disappointment. People are surprised that we are getting rid of The Beast. Rest assured that The Beast will still be part of our family. The new heat pump will be on a new thermostat, and The Beast will still be hooked up to the old thermostat.

I'll post more tomorrow evening after (we hope) the whole system is set up.

The Beast Lives

2008-10-23T19:53:00.000-07:00

We have a few more days before our new heating system is installed, but the weather decided not to wait. So far we've been using space heaters during the night, and the house has warmed up enough during the day that it hasn't been a problem. But today the temperature stayed in the 40s all day, and the house stayed cold despite the valiant efforts of our little electric space heaters.

And it's supposed to get colder. The forecast is for lows in the 20s and 30s this weekend, so we realized that we would have to awaken The Beast one more time. I figured I should get it on video, in all its Freddy Kruegeresque glory. I opened the lower door and set up the Mino as I turned on the gas.

I lit the pilot light at 4:45. At 5:00 I went back down to check on it, and the water was at full boil and the pipes around the boiler were warming up. A few minutes after that, I was sitting in the living room when I heard the familiar popping that accompanies the steam pipes expanding. By 5:30, the house was toasty. I had forgotten how much we enjoy radiant heat. As much as we're looking forward to manageable bills during the coldest months, I'm really going to miss the old-school heat we get from The Beast.

Electric: Upgrade

2008-10-22T18:22:00.000-07:00

We're having a heat strip installed in the new air handler. It was only a couple of hundred dollars more, and it basically converts the air handler into an electric furnace. However, the wiring that goes up to the air handler isn't stout enough for the heat strip, so we had a couple of electricians out to give us estimates. Just run some electric up to the attic. Simple, right?

In the tradition of College Hill House, it is much harder and more expensive than that. We're getting a 20KW heat strip in the air handler, and our house's electrical service just can't handle it. So we are upgrading our service from 100 amp to 200 amp. Of course, that means it will be longer before we can have the heat strip up and running, and it will cost about five times as much as we expected. But the heat pump should be installed on Monday, and it should be at least a month or so before we need the backup heat from the heat strip.

This is So Wrong

2008-10-21T04:27:00.000-07:00

In general, Internet polls are useless. You cannot get a good sample from a poll on a Web site. Take any political poll, run it on a liberal site and a conservative site, and those two results will be completely different from each other -- and different from what the majority of Americans probably think.

And yet, I still participate in Internet polls that look interesting to me. So as I was checking the weather yesterday, I clicked a weather.com poll about coffee consumption. I was shocked to find out that many people who go to weather.com are crazy:

The Decision

2008-10-17T04:19:00.000-07:00

We finally made our decision about the heating situation. It was a little easier than we planned, because of four companies we've had out, only one gave us estimates. The others wouldn't return our phone calls, and now I've heard that one of them went out of business. Glad we didn't go with them.

We are getting a heat pump. Specifically, the Trane XL14i heat pump, a 4TEE variable speed air handler, Trion Air Bear air cleaner and some sort of fancy-pants thermostat.

You may notice something missing from that list: anything to do with the boiler. That's because we simply couldn't afford to get the heat pump (or air conditioner) and replace the boiler this year. Since our a/c is on its last legs and the air handler is filled with mold, we decided to go this route.

Hopefully the heat pump will help us save money by keeping the house warm during those weeks or months when the temperature stays above 35. When it goes below 35, the heat pump isn't efficient enough to be worth running (it isn't a geothermal heat pump), and we'll have to awaken The Beast.

Sticker Shock

2008-10-01T11:15:00.000-07:00

Ouch.

Ouch ouch ouch.

We got an estimate on our boiler/air conditioner situation yesterday.

I say again, ouch.

Here's what we had hoped to do: replace our 40% efficient steam boiler with a 90%+ efficient hot water system. Not only would this save us money, but it would be safer as well (those steam pipes hit temps over 200 degrees F). We were also going to replace the 25-year-old A/C unit with a heat pump, which would allow us to cool the house all summer and warm the house on those high-30s and 40s days without firing up the boiler (or hot water unit).

So that's what we heard about yesterday. I don't want to give the exact number, but for those of you reading this post in the distant future (and I assume you are, since I don't think anyone reads this blog in the present), I will provide some handy 2008 equivalents.

For the price of installing a hot-water heating system and a heat pump, in the year 2008 a person could do one of the following:

Catch the matinee of Tropic Thunder at the Warren Theatre 2,714 times (that's the original 2008 version of Tropic Thunder, not the crappy remake from 2043).
Renew your Flickr Pro Account for 761 years.
Buy 5,937.5 gallons of gas (roughly enough to drive a Hummer from Wichita to Kansas City).

Obviously, we are looking into other possibilities.

Pics of the Hood

2008-09-30T18:15:00.000-07:00

Chandra has some cool photos of College Hill over at her blog, To Explain How I Got Here. Nice work, Chandra.

A Visitor and a Major Decision

2008-09-27T18:48:00.000-07:00

We've had a couple of developments with the house lately, which made me realize, "Hey, I used to have a house blog! I wonder whatever happened with that." It was a little like waking up in college and realizing you have a final in a class you'd forgotten you were taking. I haven't updated this blog since April. For five months there hasn't been anything interesting enough to post to this blog. Hopefully that will change, but as always, I will play the triplet card for now.

The Visitor

A woman who grew up in our house stopped by today. Judy, our neighbor from across the street, stopped by this morning to tell us that this woman was in town for her high school reunion and she might want to take a look at the main floor of our house.

Honestly, at first we were a little creeped out by this. I mean, I can imagine driving by the house I grew up in to see what it looks like now, but I would never knock on the door and ask to take a look inside. I would never do that with any of the houses I've lived in, and neither would Maranda.

But then we realized that it wasn't creepy; it was actually pretty cool. This woman's family lived here from 1957 to 1985. Judy lived across the street during that time too, so they were able to talk about the old neighbors and the ones who were still around. College Hill has more of a sense of community than many neighborhoods; certainly more than you find in most suburbs.

It's also about the house. It's cliche, but old houses have character. I really think you feel more of a connection with an old house than with a newer one. At least, we certainly do. We lived in our house on Robin Circle for five years, yet we really didn't feel any sense of loss when we left it. After living in our College Hill house for not even two years, we would already feel tremendous loss if we had to leave. This woman wanted to come inside because it wasn't enough simply to drive by and see the outside of the house. She still felt like this was home. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

We also found out that this woman's family bought our house from the Warrens, who were the original owners. In 1985, her family sold it to the Muths, and then in 2007 we bought it from the Muths. That means we are the fourth owners of this 93-year-old house. Pretty cool. Our house on Robin had had at least four owners, and it was built in 1992!

The Major Decision

After two winters, lots of work to make our house more efficient, and concerns about a 25-year-old air conditioner, we are considering a major HVAC makeover.

Last winter we insulated the basement pipes, installed storm windows, weatherstripped the doors, and lowered the thermostat. All of that had a measurable effect on our gas usage when compared to periods of the same temperature the year before, but it just wasn't enough. We still paid several hundred dollars more per month than we should have during the coldest months.

So we started having companies come out to give us estimates. At this point we've decided that we're willing to part with our beloved steam heat if it means we can have manageable gas bills, so we're even open to replacing the boiler with a furnace.

Fortunately, I've read Dan Holohan's book We Got Steam Heat, and that helped make a couple of decisions easier. The first two guys who came out to give us estimates for a new steam boiler completely ignored the radiators. They went downstairs, took some numbers off The Beast (the original steam boiler that still heats our house), and basically said that was all they needed.

Guess what? It wasn't. Due to many reasons outlined in Holohan's book, these old steam boilers were sometimes extremely oversized. Although some of Holohan's information may be apocryphal, the fact is that the only way to accurately determine the size of boiler a house needs is to measure every single radiator in the house.

Our third guy restored my faith. He immediately acknowledged that the size of the current boiler was irrelevant, and started measuring the radiators. He is also able to work with furnaces, steam boilers, and hot water units. We discussed the pros and cons of each, and he is going to give us estimates for each: for replacing the whole system with a furnace (or furnaces), replacing the steam boiler with a modern steam boiler, and replacing the steam boiler with a hot water unit if that is possible.

Our preference, if it's possible, is to convert the steam system to hot water. There are several advantages with this approach: we would keep that radiant heating that we love so much, for one. And we wouldn't have to worry so much about one of the girls grabbing a pipe and burning her hand. Plus, with hot water you can use cheap, easy-to-use plastic pipe and simple baseboards. So we could pretty easily run heating to the back room and the main floor bathroom, which currently aren't heated. This all depends on whether our pipes and radiators will work with the conversion, though.

We should start getting estimates back this week. I'll keep you posted on what direction we take.

Back to Work

2008-04-30T19:43:00.000-07:00

There just haven't been many blogworthy house happenings lately, but hopefully that will change pretty soon. I have a four-day weekend for Memorial Day, which is a perfect time for choosing one of those we'll-get-around-to-it-someday projects. Our tentative plan is to (at long last) put up the kitchen backsplash. That's the same kitchen backsplash I mentioned in my New Year's Resolutions post.

Back in December.

Five months ago.

But on with the future. We're leaning towards the tin ceiling tile look, like the ones on this page. They may not completely match our kitchen's current look, but we plan to replace a lot in our kitchen over the years, so we'll just head in that direction slowly.

In other news, we are seeing a big change in the backyard. For a long time it has been nothing but dirt (more often, mud). A few weeks ago I tried seeding the area. I had no expectation of anything coming of it, but I've always loved the myth of Sisyphus. Surprisingly, this is what I saw seven days later:

That is grass!. Real, live leaves of grass. Walt Whitman would be proud.

More Storm Window Progress

2008-04-01T18:12:00.000-07:00

We have storm windows!

I know, not too exciting really. But it is exciting for us. This is just the south side of the house -- the main floor is almost finished now, except one window on the porch. (That remaining window could have been installed already if I didn't have to replace the bottom pane.)

I am especially impressed with the far window in the picture (the one on the right). That was the only storm window on the main level that was missing, so my father made the frame for me. It's a darn good match if you ask me, and it fits better than the originals.

Here is the new storm window when it was half finished.

And here it is beside one of the originals (which was obviously also in progress).

Kitchen Faucet

2008-03-26T20:25:00.001-07:00

Wow! I am really slacking on the blogging the last couple of months. There really hasn't been much to blog about with the house, but that's just an excuse. There's always something to blog (complain, gripe, etc.) about when you live in an older house!

We did get lots of storm windows finished and installed. At some point I need to do a comparison of our natural gas consumption from last year to this year, and see how much money it might be saving us (assuming that I can find months with comparable temperatures).

The main thing we've done to the house lately was installing a new faucet in the kitchen. We've resigned ourselves to the old "one piece at a time" kitchen remodeling program, where we replace things as they break. It was the faucet's turn a few weeks ago:

It's hard to tell in the picture, but a nice, steady stream of water is shooting out of the faucet and onto the wall behind the sink.

I've replaced faucets before; in our (newer) house on the west side of town, it took me about half an hour to replace the kitchen faucet. Using that as a gauge, I figured I should set aside an entire day to replace the College Hill House faucet. And I was right.

There were no shut-off valves under the sink, and once I traced the lines back far enough, it ended up being easier to shut off the water for the entire house. Then, of course, all of the fittings under the sink were corroded and nearly impossible to break loose.

But with a minimal of swearing and only a few trips to the hardware store, I succeeded in installing some quarter-turn shut-off valves and our shiny new faucet:

I'll try to get some pictures of the storm windows posted over the weekend.

Senseless Destruction

2008-03-01T18:51:00.000-08:00

We've been pretty busy here at College Hill House, but not working on the house. The triplets all had their first ear infections and their first birthday (the former was much less pleasant than the latter, as you might guess). So between comforting crying babies and planning the small-but-exciting first birthday party, I haven't had much time for house blogging.

I don't think I've mentioned this on the blog before, but I have a 1963 Ford Galaxie 500XL out in the garage (and I'm using a very generous definition of "garage" here). Back when we started working on the storm windows, I pulled the Galaxie about halfway out of the garage so that we'd have room behind it to work. Yesterday I tried to back the Galaxie into the garage. It wouldn't run. I'm pretty sure it's just a clogged fuel filter, but in the meantime my dad and I decided to push the Galaxie back into the garage.

This is a heavy car, mind you. And of course the drive slopes down from the garage, so we were pushing it uphill. And one of the tires probably could have used some more air. Basically, it was a rough job. We both had to brace ourselves against my Sportage to get the Galaxie rolling. Once it had moved about a foot or so, things got easier.

And then they got worse.

Here's a picture of the car where it sits now. Can you spot the problem?

It's hard to see there. The garage is dark in the very back. But if you were to walk into the garage, you'd see this when you got to the passenger's door:

My, those windows look awfully close to the back of the car, don't they? Someone must have slipped those behind the car after it was backed in. Surely...

Nope. We were so concerned about whether we would be able to get the behemoth rolling, that we forgot to see if there was anything breakable behind the behemoth. The right-hand exhaust pipe went straight through three panes of glass.

So if someone asks you what it takes to stop a rolling car, you can answer that it takes at least four panes of glass. Probably more.

We're Famous(ish)

2008-02-09T13:05:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago Barry Owens from the College Hill Commoner interviewed me about our house blog. The interview is up on their Web site now, and I think it turned out pretty good. At least I don't think I come across as a complete idiot.

Rereading it, I'm only disappointed that I missed the opportunity to plug Houseblogs.net. Well, if you are reading this blog because you followed the link from the Commoner, here's the plug. Check out Houseblogs.net.

Nursery: Done!

2008-01-27T16:17:00.000-08:00

At last, I feel comfortable nudging that Project Tracker up to 100% for the nursery. We got the border up, and we are happy with it.

We don't have any real "before" pictures of this room, but the walls were blue and the carpet was green. We thought that was a strange color scheme until my sister Laura pointed out that the walls were the sky and the carpet was the grass. It was a nice enough looking room, but of course we wanted to personalize it for the girls.

The only thing we really didn't like was the color of the carpet. Which is why everyone thought it was rather funny when we painted the walls (with help from my Uncle Gary and Aunt Becky):

Yes, somehow we chose a shade of green for the walls that was very similar to the carpet we didn't like. So maybe that carpet wasn't so bad after all...

But we still think the hardwood floor that were under the carpet looked better:

Here is the room now. We're rather limited in terms of arranging the furniture: three cribs take up most of the wall space. But we love it.

New Year's Resolutions

2008-01-21T09:40:00.000-08:00

I heard on NPR today that this is the most depressing day of the year. Or maybe the most depressing day is coming up -- I was in the shower and couldn't quite hear the radio, and when I googled "most depressing day year" I found conflicting news stories saying that January 22nd, 23rd, 24th and 25th are each the most depressing day of the year. Nothing on January 21st.

But that's beside the point. They say this period is most depressing because it's when you a) get the bills from Christmas shopping and b) realize you have completely failed at keeping your New Year's Resolutions.

That must be why I'm so chipper. I haven't looked at the mail yet, and I'm actually doing fairly well on my resolution. Our nursery is 99.983% finished now, and I managed to paint the little access door in the basement. I made some more progress on the storm windows over the weekend, so things are really taking shape around here.

Now as long as I can avoid seeing those bills...

Cool Bathroom Stuff

2008-01-10T20:02:00.000-08:00

A post on the Old House Web forums led me to a site I've never seen before, Mac the Antique Plumber. Someday we plan to completely renovate the kitchen and bathroom on the main floor -- most of the main floor has the original woodwork, the push-button switches, the original glass knobs on the closet door, etc., but the kitchen was redone in the 60s. It was probably a good idea at the time, but blech. Boring woodwork and cabinets, and a bathroom that opens directly into the kitchen (perhaps we're prudes, but that just feels wrong). Someday, that bathroom door will be around the other side, where at least the person washing dishes won't be the first to mention you have toilet paper on your shoe. Mac the Antique Plumber could get us into trouble when renovation time comes. Of course, this is after the triplets are out of college we're talking about, so who knows what will be around by then.

The site has some very cool stuff. Some of it I don't think I'd actually want it in my house, though. For example, the Pillbox Toilet would be quite a conversation piece, but I rarely have conversations in the bathroom. But for the tub, you can't beat a thermostatic leg tub faucet. Very cool.

It's a Small Blogosphere After All

2008-01-07T16:08:00.000-08:00

My mother knits, and since she's a Net-savvy knitting grandma, she reads the immensely popular blog written by the Yarn Harlot (Stephanie Pearl-McPhee). The other day, Mom sent me an IM (see? told you she was Net-savvy) telling me that I might like a house blog she had read about on this post by the Yarn Harlot. The blog she was referring to was Stucco House, which is a blog that I read anyway after I discovered it on HouseBlogs.net. Pearl-McPhee's octopus furnace had gone out, and she linked to Stucco House's post about theirs. Just thought it a funny coincidence.

Another house blog I read is Delano Bungalow. It's another house blog from Wichita, except they are far, far better at updating it. A couple of weeks ago, I was surprised to see that they had noticed our blog too! And had very nice things to say about us.

Why I Never Throw Anything Away

2008-01-02T19:18:00.000-08:00

We make a gallon of formula every day, so a few months ago we bought a Pur water filter. The pediatrician said that plain tap water was fine, so maybe it's a waste, but we like the piece of mind. Tonight, as I was washing bottles, the faucet started spraying water everywhere when I turned it on.

I fiddled with the tap a little, and found the problem. The aerator that came with the Pur filter is a little cheap black plastic thing, and the plastic had actually split. No idea how that happened -- I wasn't washing bottles that enthusiastically. But, since I am a packrat, I still had the original aerator for our faucet and all the little adapters that came with the filter. And I even knew where they were!

After a couple of minutes of trying to stick adapters together like a monkey assembling a carburetor (a really smart monkey, mind you), I got everything hooked up and working smoothly. Just think what would have happened if I threw things out!

As I was organizing the boiler room over the weekend I found, at the bottom of a pile on the workbench, the old broken hinges for the saloon doors in the kitchen. My first thought was, Wow, there is no reason I could ever possibly need these again. We don't have more swinging doors, and these are broken.

My second thought was, Where should I put these?

Don't worry. I found just the right place.

Project Progress

2008-01-01T20:51:00.000-08:00

We may actually finish the nursery before the triplets turn one! I bumped the "Nursery" entry on the Project Tracker up to 99%. I really thought I would be able to move it to 100% yesterday, but we had a problem with the border, so we need to make some small adjustments for it to be complete.

We cut ourselves some slack when dealing with the nursery -- after all, we thought we'd have at least another month, maybe two, hopefully three, before the girls arrived. And since then it's been difficult to work on the nursery, because the best time to do house projects is, of course, during nap time.

I did finish insulating the steam pipes, though. It's definitely making a difference. The basement is probably ten degrees cooler than before they were insulated, which means all that heat is getting up to the living area now. I hope it makes a big difference in our gas bill, too.

Here's a side view of the 1.5" insulation:

I had wondered what sort of tape I needed to join the pieces. Fortunately, the big shipment included strips of tape:

It was a pretty simple project, and not even too expensive.

Pegboard: It Will Come Back To You*

2007-12-30T19:42:00.000-08:00

I finally have my pegboard back! For more than a year, it's been sitting out in the garage. As part of my New Year's resolution to start finishing projects, I decided to get the boiler room -- which serves as my shop room -- in order. I got only one of the boards up today, but it's certainly a start.

And yes, I do know that this seems counterproductive for my resolution, if one considers that I spent all day organizing the boiler room rather than working on the projects that I resolved to finish. However, not only will this help speed my work flow, thus making it easier to finish projects, but this isn't the new year yet. I figure I'm still in the grace period before the resolution goes into effect.

* Yes, it is bad pun week here at College Hill House.

Wave and Smile

2007-12-29T20:18:00.000-08:00

We love this view. Most of the windows in our house have the original "wavy" glass, which is a feature that we were completely clueless about until after we moved in. During the open houses and walk-throughs, we were too worried about the windows being painted shut, the (we thought) highly dangerous boiler system, the mini-golf carpet in the living room, the (yes, I'll mention it again) cat-pee smell, and multitudinous other things. We knew the windows were old, but we didn't really notice the glass.

We also didn't really know much about old houses in general. We knew that we loved what we had seen of old houses, and that we hated living in our cul-de-sac suburban hell where every house looked the same. And of course we knew that College Hill had the best Halloween in town. But otherwise, we were old-house newbies.

The first day when we moved in, we noticed the glass. And we went crazy. Or at least, I did. We didn't know why the glass was so wavy, but we knew it was one of the coolest things we'd ever seen, and it was something we had never seen in any of the cookie-cutter houses we'd been in all our lives.

A week or so after we moved in, people started telling us how smart it would be to replace those old wooden windows with brand-new high-efficiency double-paned windows. We replied that we liked the old windows with the wavy glass. Most people said "Oh, well, okay."

But some didn't.

Some kept pressing, telling us that we didn't understand how nice these new windows would look. We replied that we didn't care how the new windows would look, because they wouldn't look more original than the original windows look. That seemed rather self-evident to us.

But they kept going. And I'm not talking about one or two people here. I'm talking about several individuals on different occasions. We had to get brand-new replacement windows, or we were idiots. We maintained our position that we really liked the wavy glass and the old windows, and for the most part I ended up ranting that if we were going to replace the windows we might as well replace the lathe-and-plaster with sheetrock, and replace the original wooden doors with new hollow-core doors, and replace the steam heating system with a furnace, and eventually we would have completely replaced our old house that we loved with a new house that was just like the one we moved out of because we wanted to live in an old house!

Unfortunately, most people seemed to think my sarcastic rant was basic common sense. Of course you should replace everything, they seemed to think. No one actually said that during the uncomfortable silence that usually followed my rants, but they probably were thinking it...

Of course, after reading more house blogs and forums, we realized just how lucky we are that none of the previous owners have replaced the windows. The wavy glass is coveted by many.

Now, we are restoring and installing the storm windows, slowly, and it seems to be helping the insulation considerably. The back of the house, which was freezing last January even after adding the plastic window insulation, is now completely tolerable. We've been impressed by how much the old wooden storms from the garage have helped, and now we know why: it turns out that many people think that the old windows with wood storms have a better R-value than new replacement windows.

Ha! We knew that. Of course we knew that.

Okay, we didn't know that and it completely surprised us. The fact is that we would keep the old wavy-glass windows no matter what. We are prepared to pay a little extra for the historical value. But it sounds plausible, and it is great ammo against those new-window-nazis.

Christmas 2007

2007-12-27T20:08:00.000-08:00

Happy Holidays! My side of the family had Christmas in College Hill this year, and it was great fun. Hope you and yours have a safe and happy holiday season.

I hope to get out and take some pictures of the College Hill Christmas lights before they start coming down, but we'll see how that works out. Here's a picture of our living room in full holiday mode (complete with the three new stockings, of course):

A New Year

2007-12-27T18:45:00.000-08:00

It's that time of year: the end of it. Or the beginning, if you're one of those glass-half-full types. Either way, it's the time when people decide to claim they are going to do things better in the upcoming year. I've never been into the whole New Year's Resolution thing, basically because people never keep them and I doubt I'll be any different. However, after living in this house for a year, I need to take desperate measures, so I'll give it a shot.

For 2008, I resolve to finish projects.

You might notice that in my Project Tracker (on the right side of the blog), Nursery is currently set to 95%. The nursery has been almost finished for a few months now. In fact, there are several projects that I could put on the project tracker that would require similar percentages. For example...

This is the stove that came with the house:

The whole kitchen was remodeled around 1960, and this was surely the latest and greatest high-tech food prep wizardry available at the time. It even had push-button heating levels for the stove coils. Unfortunately, only one of those coils worked, and the whole top unit was broken. We took it out and bought a new stove and microwave to replace it. Since there wasn't an electric outlet to plug in the microwave, we had to tear off a lot of the tile to run the wiring:

It all worked out rather well, and the microwave was simple to install. Looks pretty good, doesn't it?

But perhaps you've noticed the problem. I still haven't replaced the tile. Almost a year later. The cost wouldn't be exorbitant, and it wouldn't take much time. I just haven't quite gotten around to it. There are always more pressing projects to see to.

There was the floor in the bathroom on the main level. It had awful stained carpet, so we ripped out the carpet and padding, mopped and sealed the floor underneath, and put down new vinyl flooring. All it needs is caulking around the tub. That was at the beginning of February. (In case you're too horrified, we never use that tub.)

The upstairs bathroom? Ripped up the carpet there, put in new flooring, taped off everything and painted the walls, replaced the towel hooks, recaulked the tub and sink, fixed the valve on the tub, replaced the shower head, and installed one of those fancy curved shower rods. That was about half a year ago, and just any day now I'll put the baseboards up.

The steps in the front room -- we spent days tearing the horrid green carpet off of these beautiful wooden steps, then pulling out the billions of staples and filling the holes. Just need a few trim pieces to put a big "Done" stamp on that project.

There's an access door in the basement that leads under the front porch. If I were to paint it the same color we painted the rest of the basement, that room would be pretty much finished.

See a pattern here? I'm sure there's some name for this pathology. Something official sounding, like Project Completion Aversion Syndrome, perhaps. It's very annoying. Mainly when someone comes to our house for the first time, and as we're taking them on "the tour" I feel like I need to justify every 95% finished project.

So I'm going to do it. I'm going to finish all the projects from 2007 -- it can't take that long. One solid weekend of work should be plenty to finish up everything. And in 2008 I will finish each project before moving on to another.

That can't be too hard, can it?

Dining Room Retrospective

2007-12-22T19:17:00.000-08:00

As I've mentioned before, a lot of work was done to this house in a short amount of time after we moved in -- thanks in large part to our wonderful friends and family. The dining room was the first area to take considerably longer than we expected, because there were a couple of surprises waiting for us.

Here is the dining room right after we moved in. Nothing horrible about this room. It was just a little plain for our taste:

We decided to paint the walls red and replace the chair rail with a more substantial one. Simple, right? Except that when we took the old chair rail off, it was stuck to wallpaper. Lots and lots of wallpaper. There were perhaps five layers of wallpaper from the chair rail down to the floor.

We tried to remove the wallpaper, and we were able to get through a couple of layers. We tried all sorts of techniques, but it was going to take forever.

Here is the dining room during the process, with one coat of paint on the top and layers of wallpaper still on the bottom.

Finally someone (I can't remember who, but it was one of us that had been soaking and scraping wallpaper for a few hours) came up with the solution: wainscoting. We just covered up the wallpaper (as so many generations before us had, but this time with something other than more wallpaper).

Here it is after we put it up and filled all the cracks and holes:

And the final product:

One of the main reasons I'm keeping this blog is so that someday we can look back and see what we've accomplished. We're pretty proud of the dining room.

Guess I need a bigger stocking

2007-12-14T09:35:00.001-08:00

The pipe insulation for the basement arrived a couple of days ago. I didn't expect it so soon -- looks like I have another item for my weekend to do list. Here's hoping this helps cut down the gas bill a bit.

Here's the sample piece I ordered a few weeks ago:

This is good stuff. The pipe is around 200 degrees, but you can barely feel warmth on the outside of the insulation. I'm slightly concerned that the basement will be a little chilly once we've covered all the pipes, but we rarely go down there anyway except to do laundry. Perhaps in the future we'll look into getting the basement fireplace operational again.

Sometimes the small stuff is worth sweating

2007-12-13T09:30:00.000-08:00

Within the first couple of weeks after we moved in, we replaced the carpet in the kitchen and main-floor bathroom with new flooring, painted several rooms, replaced the stove, put in the electric for the new microwave, installed the microwave, went through an epic process of cat-pee de-scenting that I still have to write about someday, and completed several other fairly major projects (all with the help of friends and family, of course).

The fact that the doorway from the kitchen to the dining room had only one saloon-style door wasn't high on our list of situations to rectify. We found the other door in the basement, but didn't bother with it. We had more pressing issues.

This week, I finally got around to it. It turned out that the little plastic thing on the bottom hinge (for the DIY purists out there, I believe the technical term is "coggy-type whatsit") was broken. I acquired a new hinge, and after only an hour of measuring (because the new hinge was, of course, completely different from the old one) and cursing (because apparently I can't measure all that well), I was successful:

It's not a huge accomplishment: the doors stay open all the time anyway, and personally I'm not even all that fond of them. They don't match the style of the dining room or the kitchen. But they are rather quirky, and we don't want to get rid of them. Most importantly, it's one more thing that looks finished.

Until you close them, that is. The doors aren't the same height. Did I mention my measuring skills? Maybe next year...

Insulating the Steam Pipes

2007-12-07T20:08:00.000-08:00

A couple of days ago, we got the first length of 1.5-inch-thick insulation for the steam pipes. It was only a three-foot length -- I wasn't about to order 25 lengths at ten bucks a pop, based solely on the assumption that I had measured the pipes correctly, remembered pi correctly, completed the math correctly, and then guessed blindly at the correct size of insulation.

Surprisingly, the insulation fit perfectly. And it was simple to install, as well; these are preformed fiberglass lengths with a vapor barrier glued to the outside. They open up like a hinge, and then you just close them around the pipe. The wrap has an adhesive strip, so you peel off the paper and seal the deal. Simple.

We ordered the other 24 lengths yesterday. We got them from Express Insulation, because of their shipping price. The other places we checked were going to charge around $150 for shipping; Express Insulation charged $30. It was a pretty simple decision.

College Hill in the News

2007-12-06T09:51:00.001-08:00

There's an article an KSN's Web site today about Kirstie Alley's new "Santa Land" that is on display. (If you drive down east Douglas, you can't miss it. It's between Kirstie's house and the Scientology Center, and it's the thing that looks like a giant Santa Land.)

Apparently it's the actual Santa Land that was made for the movie Look Who's Talking Too, but I won't hold that against it.

They don't specifically name College Hill, but that's what they are referring to:

Wichita's resident movie star, Kirstie Alley is at it again, getting into the holiday spirit with a display that people say will be "over the top."
Santa Land is taking shape at 3725 E. Douglas in Wichita. Her friends say it's her way of fitting into the neighborhood that's long been big on holiday decorations.

The Beast

2007-11-28T09:37:00.000-08:00

Last year when we first started looking for a bigger house to accommodate our quickly-growing family, we knew that our dream house was something old in the College Hill area. There was an open house just two blocks from our friends' place, and it was in our price range, so we thought that was an obvious place to start.

There were several problems with this house (just one example: we referred to it as "the Cat Pee House" during the rest of our house search), but we found the big deal-breaker in the basement:

The Beast

This thing scared the crap out of us. I didn't know anything about boilers or radiators or steam heat; all I saw was this ancient monstrosity that was sure to break down, or worse, blow up at any minute. The previous owner said that it was the original boiler, installed when the house was built. But we suspected that it was, in fact, older than the house. It was probably sitting there since the beginning of time in a largish hole that would eventually become a basement, and some clever developer in the early 1900s walked by and said, "Hey, let's build a house around that thing!"

In the end, through reading posts on the Old House Web forums and talking to people who have had steam heat, we realized that maybe the old boiler wasn't such a bad thing. Eventually, the steam heat went from a major drawback to one of our favorite features.

As far as I can tell from a little research, the size designation below means that it's a 28" round boiler, which (I think) means it puts out around 225,000 BTUs. I've been told that our house probably requires around 150,000 BTUs. We do love overkill.

Storm Windows Part II

2007-11-28T09:22:00.001-08:00

Here's how I spent part of Thanksgiving break:

A craft-store embossing gun worked well for softening the rock-hard glazing compound. It heats to 650 degrees (F), so I had to be careful not to crack the glass.

With the new glazing compound in place:

First coat of paint on:

Storm Windows

2007-11-26T09:53:00.000-08:00

We have been considering getting aluminum storm windows ever since we moved into this house; it has the original windows with the wavy glass, which we love. But it also has the original windows, with drafts so strong they'll muss your hair, which we don't love so much. the storms obviously would help our outrageous heating bills, but the thought of covering those old windows with modern aluminum monstrosities didn't appeal to us any more than the $3500 estimate did.

I knew there were wooden storm windows out in the garage (two things tipped me off: the previous owner told me so, and the huge stack of storm windows out in the garage), but I had never looked at them. They were taken off the house last year when the previous owner had the trim of the house painted (I assume they paid extra for the security provided by painted-shut windows). He told us that the people who had painted the trim had told him that the windows were all rotten, so there was no sense putting them back up.

A few weeks ago, I went out and looked at the storm windows. They were fine. They needed new glazing compound and new paint, but the wood and glass were fine. My dad came over and we started working on them, but unfortunately the cold weather moved in faster than we'd expected. Now I'm working on them one at a time in the basement.

Because I work with some of the greatest people in the world, my coworker Terrell volunteered to help me out with the storm windows. He loaded eight of them into his truck (a truck that he bought from my dad, who bought it from me, who bought it from my dad in the first place) and took them home for Thanksgiving vacation. Doesn't that sound like fun? Sweating over a bunch of windows that won't even go on your own house? During Thanksgiving? He is a saint.

Here are few pictures of the windows at Terrell's place:

Getting the glazing compound:

Slight power-washer-related mishap:

Painted and almost ready to keep us warm: