Our house 85 years ago!

Another quick post, because as a lot of you know, we have been extremely busy the last few weeks with a number of things! (Updates coming soon…)

But I did receive this incredible photograph today from a great-granddaughter of the Kiedaisch family, who lived in our house from 1921 to 1927. She found my house history post earlier this year and, astoundingly, dug up a photograph taken of our house sometime in the mid-1920s by her great-grandfather Walter Kiedaisch, who was a Bay Area photographer.

Our house circa mid-1920s (courtesy of the Kiedaisch family)

Even the small snapshot yields a lot of intriguing information:

The garage. We now know our garage is at least 80 years old! We’d talked to the City about this at one point since they had no record of the permits to build it; now I know why (and can conclusively prove that yes, it was definitely there when we moved in…) We’re pretty sure it isn’t original since it’s built up against the house and you can see where the doorways were modified at some point, but this means it was probably built by either the Kiedaisches themselves or by Joseph Smith, who owned the house from 1919 to 1921 after buying it from the original owners (who built it in 1915). The garage does have something of a 1920s vibe going on, too, so that would make sense. (Sadly, that look is almost gone today after the previous owner ditched the original garage doors and replaced them with a generic automatic door to get the house ready for sale. Convenient, but man, I wish she’d kept them…you can even still see them in the Google Street View photos of our block, which is just cruel!)

The adjacent rear lots. You can see the buildings on the lots behind us pretty clearly in this photo, which is interesting because both lots were redeveloped in the 1960s into apartment complexes. (The houses to either side of us, in contrast, look pretty much the same today.) I had envisioned cute little bungalows on these lots, and have often griped about how close to the lot line the 1960s developments were built. (Trying to figure out ownership of a shared fence last year, I even found a Planning Commission memo from the 1960s chiding one of the property owners for violating the property line setback rules; he was fined a relatively small amount and the building was unchanged.) As it turns out, though, even the original buildings must have been pretty close to the lot lines to be visible in this photo. (The one on the right looks like it’s practically in our next-door neighbor’s backyard—the condos there today have a bit of a buffer, at least!)

The front steps. We had wooden steps originally! (Our next-door neighbor still does and it’s pretty traditional for a California bungalow, so this isn’t totally surprising—but today the steps are concrete.) I am a little bummed, though, because when we had the foundation inspected recently in preparation for the kitchen remodel, the inspector oohed and ahhed over our concrete steps, noting that ours were in better shape than those of almost any other house its age that he’d seen. D’oh! Now I know why…

Otherwise, though, the house looks strikingly similar today, right down to the curves on the sidewalk. (Even the sidewalk itself looks like it might be the same…guess that really is due for replacement!) The front yard has since been terraced and landscaped, but we knew the previous owner had done a lot of that work, and from what our neighbor says, before then the yard looked, well, basically the same as it did in the 1920s. It’s very likely that this was the original paint job on the house, too, since it would have been barely ten years old (if that) when this photograph was taken. Hard to tell what the colors actually were, but it gives a sense of the aesthetic, at least. (The stucco on the side of the house behind the garage wall is cream, though, so that may have been the original color; in later years it appears to have been painted light green at some point.)

Anyway, just a very cool find! A huge thanks to Michelle for sharing this great piece of our home’s history!

Winter! (Or: All the things we said we’d do before the rains….)

The first snows fell in the Northern Sierras last week—and this week, winter arrived in the Bay Area with a bang, shattering the rain records as the remnants of a Pacific typhoon swept in.

This is happy news for our garden and our fruit trees, which have been gasping for water the past few weeks. (I’ve been holding off on any big watering efforts because our clay soil stays moist for a few weeks, and, well, the rains were coming!)

This is less happy news for other members of the family:

You're serious? Umm, that's okay, I'm good here, thanks.

And even less happy news for:

• Our rain barrels. Yeah, they’re still in the garage. We just need to build them a platform, but unfortunately neither of us knows how to build a platform. Bleh.
• Our rafters. Umm. A few of them have been Bondo’ed where the knob-and-tube electrical wiring used to be attached….but the rest still need to be patched and painted. Maybe this weekend, if things dry out enough before then (and we finally find a ladder that’s tall enough!) We lose major points on this one since it’s actually a leftover project from last summer….augh! (We replaced the wiring right after we moved in to placate our insurance company.)
• Our bedroom windows. We still have not replaced these because I haven’t had time to go debate the whole permit issue with the City. (I did finally talk to people there, but got two completely contradictory, mutually exclusive answers from the two departments that are ostensibly supposed to approve our window replacement permit. Ugh. I hate bureaucracy!)
• Our baseboard gravity registers. I took these apart three months ago to try to strip the paint off of them. Then I discovered that they’re actually broken (from being forced open and shut, I think). Then I discovered that when the heat was installed, someone creatively stacked a bunch of wood together to “frame” the register, and when I took the register off, the wood moulding fell apart. Then I ordered new registers only to discover that the size is off by half an inch. Argh. Somehow this needs to get fixed before we have to turn the heat on…

So I guess a busy work weekend lies ahead!

Lead!

No, that’s not a directive to Mayor Dellums (though if he’d like to take it as one, I have no issue with that!) It’s that other kind of lead.

After a great tip from a reader (thanks, Len!) I recently called up the Alameda County Lead Poisoning Prevention Program (ACLPPP) to see what they could tell me about lead testing and lead safety, especially in soil. First, I have to say—these guys are rock stars! They called back promptly and had all sorts of information to share. A couple of days later, I received a complete lead test kit in the mail, with detailed instructions on how to test my soil, paint, and dust.

I picked out nine areas—five sections of the backyard, two painted areas, and two dusty windowsills—and sent off the samples to be tested. (For FREE!) Just a few days later, along came the results in an emailed PDF.

The results…
First, the bad news: the paint on the woodwork and the dust in the window sills have a whole lotta lead. We pretty much assumed as much—in a hundred-year-old house, it would be unusual for glossy trim paint not to have lead in it—but now that we know for sure, I’m having to rethink my strip-the-woodwork project. Lead, like asbestos and other icky airborne things, is not especially dangerous if it’s adhering properly to the painted surface (and you’re not licking it), but if it starts to flake off or chip and create paint flakes or dust that can be inhaled or eaten by small children or pets, it’s a bad scene. And you’re not supposed to remove high lead paint with a silent paint stripper (which was my plan), and I really don’t want to mess with the toxic chemical agents that can remove it safely.

But happily, there was good news too. Specifically, the paint and plaster in our kitchen do not have lead in them to speak of—and that’s very good news, since someday soon we’re hoping to tackle the kitchen renovation, and it will be infinitely easier to attack the woodwork and wall demolition if we aren’t simultaneously worrying about lead abatement and controlling lead dust.

And, perhaps even more importantly, our soil—all of it!—passed with flying colors, with everything testing on the very low end of the “lead safe” category (150-500 ppm). (In fact, the lead levels were barely higher in the soil from the ground than in the potting soil from the nursery that I threw in as a control. That may say more about the nursery soil than about our soil, but there ya go….) This is especially good news because it means we can begin to plant veggies in other areas of the yard, and we also don’t have to worry about trying to make the yard lead-safe (which would be a frustratingly painful process, since you basically have to dig everything out and replace the soil). So that was very welcome news.

…and what to do about it!
Based on this news, I’ll be repainting the woodwork in the dining room with a safe high-gloss paint to seal all that badness inside—and, of course, leaving a note for future owners that stripping the woodwork is probably not the bestest project to take on! (This is probably not the end of the world, since I’ve recently discovered that past owners of our house were—how shall I put it—”creative” (and resourceful!) in cutting out the woodwork when heat was installed, and consequently there’s not much to restore near the heating vents. And when my woodworker uncle came to visit a few months back and checked out our front door—nicely stripped—he noted that it had clearly been intended to be natural wood on the outside, which is apparently a quarter-sawn oak veneer, but not on the inside, which is plain old Doug fir. Ah well.) Luckily, we also own a HEPA vacuum, which is the best way to clear a home of dust and paint chips.

I’m still undecided on the living room, where the paint is stripping pretty cleanly, the wood is in better shape (and was nicer to begin with—beautiful elm and quarter-sawn oak) and there might be some merit to finishing the project. It’s just that it’s a very, very BIG project—and we already have a lot of other big projects to contend with right now. On the other hand, I don’t want to repaint if we might really strip it all at some point, because that just creates more unnecessary work. We’ll see.

This has some implications for our window project, too. The dust from our window troughs also tested high (not as high as the paint itself—but still high enough above the “safe” level to be of concern). Again, not terribly surprising, but something to think about nonetheless. One big source of lead dust in old houses is windows and doors opening and closing—and one good way to get rid of this problem is to replace the windows. So as we work through our window rehabbing and replacement work, we may decide to replace all of the bedroom windows instead of just the two with dry rot to ensure that none of the bedrooms have lead problems. If I can find a good place that will strip the windows, I may go that route as well. We may also re-prioritize to do these in order of use rather than in order of condition. A few of the windows have also had strips of unpainted wood set into the side jambs, which I think was intended to facilitate movement (or replace rotting wood perhaps), but has the added benefit of eliminating one of the two pieces of lead-coated wood that meet each time the windows open.

How much lead is too much?
The most confusing part of the lead testing, at least for me, was figuring out how much lead was too much lead. The kit we got came with baselines for safety, but I found some of them a bit high. ACLPPP uses 1,000 ppm as the “safe” threshold for soil, for instance, and 250 ppm for child-safe soil; in contrast, the state of Minnesota uses 100 ppm as their threshold for bare soil (although they don’t require soil above that level to be removed unless there are visible paint chips). The EPA claims you can plant in soil under 1,500 ppm, except for root vegetables, which you should grow in soil under 1,000 ppm.  Other sources say you can garden under 500 ppm; others say no, only garden if the soil tests under 100 ppm. (Notably, even our nursery soil came in at 140 ppm!)

So what’s really safe? With the information we have, I feel comfortable using our general soil (which tested in the low 200s) for everything except for leafy vegetables and herbs. (Fruiting plants and other plants where the edible components don’t grow directly in the ground don’t absorb as much of the lead and other soil contaminants as leafy vegetables and herbs; with root vegetables, the contamination is largely from surface contact, so you can mitigate this by simply peeling and cleaning these vegetables.) We’ll continue to grow those higher-risk plants in our raised beds with nursery soil (even though this will screw up the crop rotations—argh!)

It’s a little more straightforward on the paint front: this summer the “lead-free” standard for new paint dropped to 90 ppm (down from 600 ppm up until this year), and the feds define anything above 5,000 ppm as being “high lead.” Since our kitchen and trim paints came in at 150 ppm and 7,500 ppm respectively, there wasn’t much fuzziness there! (What to do about the high lead paint is another question altogether—and there are just as many schools of thought on that as there are on the gardening!)

Want to get your own lead test kit?
If you live in Alameda County, you can check out the ACLPPP site for more information on ordering test kits or having someone come out to your home to do a free inspection. (These resources are geared towards homeowners, but there are programs for renters and landlords as well.) The cities of Oakland, Berkeley, Alameda, and Emeryville also have a variety of programs to pay for lead remediation and other work; information on those is also on the ACLPPP site.

Window woes

So we’ve finally decided to bite the bullet and replace some windows. We’ve been holding off on this in part because we had so many other big (and expensive!) projects hanging over us and in part because the first bid we got was pretty daunting, but now that the last of the costly “necessary” projects is done, it seems like a smart time to do the windows while there’s still a 30 percent tax credit available.

We’re lucky in that our wood windows are all original, a pretty unusual feature around here, where a lot of bungalows were “updated” in the 1960s with aluminum windows or more recently with vinyl. Because of that, we’re not touching most of them—the windows that are in decent shape (which, fortunately, is the vast majority of them) are just going to get rehabbed and weatherproofed in the hopefully not-too-distant future when I actually learn how to do this. (For now, I’m cozying up with Working Windows, a really good how-to book on repairing wooden windows.)

That still leaves three problem windows, though. The double-hung windows in our bedroom and bathroom all face southeast and consequently seem to get the weather in its extremes—sun in the summer, rain in the winter. As a result, the windows and the jambs are all warped and have a great deal of dry rot, so rehabbing these windows is a gigantic project. In the meantime, they let in drafts and rain in the winter months. Add to this that the bedroom windows are the only windows in the house where we have noise problems (they’re a short distance from the building next door with only the garage in between, so there are no trees to buffer the noise) so they seem like great candidates for replacement with double-paned windows that will block the noise and fix the rot.

Getting the bid
So we started down the estimate path. I’m getting pretty good at this now that we’ve undertaken several major projects with contractors, and we’d already decided to try to stick to Oakland-based businesses if we could. Luckily, there are two very well-regarded window places just a mile from our house, so that was a good place to start.

Window Place #1 came out and gave us a very thorough estimate after requesting a series of photographs of the windows from all angles. Their plan was to completely rebuild the windows so that they would be indistinguishable from the originals, but would have the benefits of modern windows. This sounded great, but was unfortunately way beyond our budget. If I had a lot of money to spend, though, I wouldn’t hesitate to use them—they seemed very competent and very invested in the historic preservation of the house. Since these windows happen to be the only ones in the house that are visible to exactly no one but us and our next-door neighbors, though, I was comfortable with not having a 100 percent match. (Plus, I’m planning to put the old windows in the basement in case some future owner comes along and wants to rehab them for real, so I don’t feel too bad.)

Enter Window Place #2, which gave us  a much more reasonable estimate to rebuild the sashes from Doug fir so that they match the style of the original windows, although they won’t be exactly identical. They make the windows locally in their Oakland shop, so we really liked the sound of that. They would replace just the inner workings of our windows, leaving the moulding intact inside and out—another key concern. Best of all, while their windows aren’t cheap, they’re definitely in the realm of possibility budget-wise.

Too good to be true?
Sounds great, right? Except for one thing: because their windows aren’t officially rated for energy efficiency by NFRC, they don’t qualify for the tax credit, even though the glass is the same. The only windows they sell that do qualify are clad window inserts (basically, windows inside a frame, which means knocking out the frame that’s there now) from a national company, which wasn’t quite what we were going for. So we’re in the odd position of choosing between more expensive, not-locally-made windows that may end up costing less with the credit, and locally-built windows that we actually like better that aren’t mass-produced and thus don’t qualify. (Apparently there’s a somewhat intensive NFRC certification process that, I guess, isn’t worth the cost for the little guys.)

I find this whole thing puzzling, given that the whole point of the tax credit is to green the country. Seems like windows that are energy efficient and don’t need to be shipped across the country should be worth extra! Not to mention that they create local jobs, and don’t we have a whole separate stimulus package just for that?? Argh.

Borrowing more trouble….
And then there’s the other big bump we hit. Two of the windows are in our bedroom, and the existing double-hung windows don’t meet modern bedroom egress requirements (ironic given that I climb in and out of them regularly to water the plants on the garage roof!) To do the project with permits, we need to put in casement windows or a bay window, which turns the whole thing into a much more elaborate renovation than we have the desire (or money) to do—and it completely disrupts the architectural integrity of the house. (Even then, we might not meet code, because apparently it specifies that the window needs to open directly onto a street or yard, and ours open onto our garage roof—c’est la vie!) California does have an Historical Building Code which has more flexible requirements for egress (we either just make it or just miss it depending on how you measure), but to qualify we have to be designated a historic structure first. Augh.

The rules around replacing just the window sashes are very vague—basically, the chances that the inspector will allow us to replace the windows as-is are about equal with the chances that they’ll shoot down our project and require us to put in casement windows, and it just depends on which inspector shows up. We don’t really object to casement windows on principle, but it just seems wrong, somehow, to completely ignore the history of the house. (D. is a lot less picky about this than I am, and just doesn’t want the cost of the window project to spiral out of control.) Not to mention that there are two exits from our bedroom, one of which leads into the sleeping porch where there are not one, not two, but THREE huge casement windows that are easily climb-out-able if there ever were an emergency.

Again, this whole thing is just puzzling, given that ostensibly everyone involved (the City, the state, the feds) wants us to be making our house more energy efficient. And theoretically the City even wants us to be preserving the historic features of our house, according to the General Plan. *sigh* Gotta love bureaucracy.

What would you do?
So I’m a little torn on all of this. We can pick the local window guys and just pass up the tax credit. (This might be okay if we end up taking on another project that would qualify, which is a possibility—but by the end of 2010? Hard to say.) Or we can get the windows we don’t especially want because they’ll be cheaper at the end of the day.

Or we can decide not to bother with this project at all and just add the money to the kitchen fund instead, which I have to admit is looking more and more tempting….

2009 House Resolutions Check-in: June

We’re just about halfway through 2009, so I figured it was a good time for a resolutions check-in.

Here’s the original list: My New Year’s House Resolutions

…and here’s where we are today:

1. BETTER WINDOW INSULATION.
I have the bronze weatherstripping, but have yet to install it, so….partly done? Also got a great book, Working Windows, from our local bookstore after reading a stellar recommendation of it—it pretty much covers the weatherstripping (and everything else about wooden windows) from start to finish, so assuming I can master the art of removing and replacing the stops, I should be good.

2. DROUGHT-TOLERANT LANDSCAPING.
Yard is (mostly) de-grassed and ready for paths, woohoo! Everything else is mulched in for the year, ten cubic yards of wood chips later….so let’s call it sixty percent done.

3. PRODUCTIVE VEGETABLE BED.
Lookin’ good so far! Summer veggies are all in as of last month. Leaf lettuce and arugula coming out our ears, and (knock on wood) even the tomatoes and squash look happy so far….

4. NEW POWER STRIPS.
Done!

5. CLOTHES LINE.
Picked out—I think we’re getting this one since D. wants one that spins—but not yet actually ordered, since I keep balking on the price (but also had issues with the crappiness of the $50 version that Ace sells….) Does that count?

6. NO MORE LEAKY TUB.
So, so close….tiled and everything! Just waiting on the fix we need to install the new fixtures, which will complete the picture (and actually fix the leak, which in the end turned out to be in the tub spout).

7. RAIN BARREL.
Have the barrels, but haven’t set them up yet. Halfway there?

8. RETAINING WALL & FENCE.
Supposedly this will be done tomorrow! (Currently we have no fence at all, although oddly, and fortunately, the Labradane seems to be oblivious to this.) Probably the most exciting development on the list so far. We’ll see if it’s still exciting once the new fence is actually up… (In the end, the company who manages the building we share this fence with chose the contractor. Somewhat against my better judgment, I didn’t pursue getting photos of their work or anything, as I was too exhausted by the year+ it took to work this whole thing out, and figured some fence was better than no fence. But for the insane amount of money it’s costing, I hope we like it….) We did not, sadly, get to use reclaimed wood on this. Luckily the fences on the other two sides of the yard don’t involve retaining walls or significant demolition work, so we should be able to tackle those ourselves when we finally get around to doing them—should be a lot easier to manage.

9. DISHWASHER.
Umm. Yeah, not so much….but hey, there are still six months to go!

Porch planning

One of the things we’ve been pretty lazy about over the past couple of years is actually doing anything about our front porch. We sit out there occasionally, but it desperately needs a bench or some chairs or something going on out there. (I got a tiny bit organized earlier this spring and put a few plants out, but now it looks even barer than it did before!) Some new neighbors recently moved in across the street, and the first thing they did was put out porch chairs, which got me motivated to finally push this project a bit.

So: porch furniture. D.’s preference is for a bench, and for the past year or so I’ve been watching Craigslist and eBay and the local salvage yards for a suitable bench that isn’t too long (four feet long and a couple feet deep seems to be the perfect size, since the entire porch is a little over six feet long, and there’s just under two feet between the back wall and the door jamb) and ideally doesn’t block too much of the window, but still has a back. Finding all this in one bench has proven to be a bit tricky (okay, that’s an understatement!) so this weekend I finally started looking at buying something new.

Here’s the space:

Porch steps

The Labradane, lounging on the porch

...and the space we have to work with

What seems like the best thing to do with this space? I’ve toyed with both the bench D. wants and with the concept of two small chairs that could go at either edge of the window with a low table in between to avoid blocking the window itself; either way it’s not symmetrical because, well, the window isn’t centered over the porch to start with. There’s also a little side ledge that’s visible at the edge of the photos that’s quite nice for sitting and reading—but when you’re sitting there, you’re completely invisible from the street, and I also like the idea of being able to sit on the front porch and engage with (and be able to see!) the neighborhood, too.

So, I’m stuck. If I could get a clear vision of what belongs in this space, I’d be up for getting something custom made—doing that with our planters out back turned out to be an extremely good decision spacewise (and wasn’t much costlier in the end, either). But to do that, I need to be able to picture this hypothetical porch furniture….augh!

Ideas, anyone?

Hey, look—grout! (And tiles!)

Took way too long, but we finally have tiles that pretty much match, and grout and caulking to seal the deal. We spent about six weeks looking for tiles that were indistinguishable from the existing tiles—finally found them at Lowe’s after one of the local tile stores guessed that our chunk of sample tile might be a Dal-Tile color. As it turns out, it’s American Olean, which seems to be pretty exclusively available at the big box stores, but that’s made by Dal-Tile, so not a bad guess. Unfortunately the nearest Lowe’s is in Union City, so it took a while to finally make it out there….luckily they had eight tiles left of this color and size buried on the back of a shelf. We bought all the ones that weren’t chipped, just in case we have to do anything else on this in the future. (The new tiles are the four touching the valve; everything else is old.)

When I finished grouting, I also used a whitener that our hardware store recommended on the old grout to try to get a close match. It still needs to be sealed, but it’s looking pretty good overall. The only big issue has been that our original tiling was done pretty terribly, so lots of tiles aren’t lined up or flush. The funny part is that I never noticed this before, but once we started working with the tile, it became pretty evident, and now I see it every time I look at it. Argh. (D.’s decided that he wants to rip this all out—that would be at some future date after we win the lottery—and retile it with a clawfoot bathtub to fix the look. We’ll see. On the upside? or downside? that means I’m not doing the floor anytime soon, since it’s silly to do it for aesthetic reasons if we might realistically replace the tub at some point.)

New valve and tile

….and speaking of doing something else on this in the future, it turns out that the nice round plastic piece is supposed to be behind the tile, not in front of it. I’m not sure if this is a problem with our plumber or the depth of our wall and valve, but the end result is that the valve trim that finally came in the mail last week doesn’t fit on the valve. Augh. There’s about a half-inch gap between the escutcheon and the wall. So now we have to figure out a solution to this that hopefully doesn’t involve knocking out the tile and reinstalling the valve.

*sigh*

Fixtures for bungalow bathrooms

So, we now have a new shower valve (though still no new tile!) As it turns out, though, we also need a new tub faucet (or at least parts for a faucet, but I’m just going to suck it up and buy a new one so that the fixtures match, because even old chrome and new chrome look awful right now!) That pesky leak wasn’t fixed by $400 worth of plumbing parts and labor, sadly, and now seems to be the fault of a bad faucet diverter.

That brings me to….trim decision making. We got a cheap-o valve trim from the plumbing place over the weekend so we’d be able to use the shower in the interim, but now that I need to go faucet hunting, I’m revisiting the trim choice. Might as well make it all match. (Incidentally, the cheap trim was under $30, which I’ve discovered was a mighty fine deal, even up against eBay—props to the independent retailers!)

Here’s what I’d ideally like, leaving aside for the moment the fact that we missed a golden opportunity to replace our shower valve with something other than the generic single handle valve—ah, well. What’s done is done. (Though it reminds me of a friend’s recommendation—do a little research on all of the pieces of your house even if you have no plans to replace them, so that if you have to replace something unexpectedly, you know roughly what it is you want and don’t buy the easiest thing that lands in your hand!)

The trim must be:

• Compatible with Kohler’s Rite-Temp single-handle shower valve
• Somewhat vaguely period appropriate for a 1915 bathroom (flexible, given that we don’t have the clawfoot tub or anything)
• Either polished nickel (ideal) or polished chrome (second best)

Here are a few options I’ve found so far:

Margaux

Antique

Memoirs

Finial

Bancroft

Pinstripe

Any of these can be had in a variety of finishes; some are way too expensive—the “Antique” one would eat up the entire project budget at list price!—but for right now I’m just trying to settle on a few that would be workable. Who knows what deals may lie in the depths of EBay, after all. I’ve also decided not to stress about matching the style of the pedestal sink faucet in any way, though for what it’s worth, I plan to use a traditional faucet with cross handles, either with porcelain handles or just porcelain buttons.

Sadly, I’m just not in love with any of these—and am really hoping it wasn’t a mistake to go with the Kohler valve. If we’d had a little more time to plan, it would have been great to put in the three-handled Sign of the Crab shower valve, for instance. (The only other option at our local store was Grohe, though, which was even more expensive.)

What would you put in a bungalow bathroom?

Bathroom beautification

Okay, so the last thing I really need to be doing right now is spending money on a facelift for our bathroom, given that it’s mostly operational and I have a bazillion other projects running right now.

But. Then I found out that Rejuvenation Hardware is discontinuing the bathroom set I’ve been eyeing! And it’s on clearance! And perhaps most astoundingly, my favorite piece from it, the toothbrush and cup holder they discontinued a couple of years back, has miraculously reappeared on the website! And to top it all off, Van Dyke’s, where I’d planned to get the medicine cabinet (since I can’t quite swing shelling out $500 for the beautiful one Rejuvenation sells) is also having a sale!

And then I got a call from D. while I was out and about yesterday afternoon. “Good news!” he exclaimed. “You know that ugly shower faucet you wanted to replace? Well, you can pick out whichever one you want now. Because the one we have is sort of, umm, broken.” Broken? But not like last time—we still have running water, right? “Umm, that depends on how you define ‘running’….”

Yeah. So, we’re renovating the bathroom—or at least doing a little mini-renovation (and relying on the front garden hose until the plumber gets here!) Our bathroom’s actually in pretty decent shape, aside from the now-broken shower valve and the very 80’s decor. So there’s thankfully not all that much to do with it.

Cup and toothbrush holder---already headed our way!

The plan is:

• Replace shower faucet and valve
• Replace tile that has to be removed to replace shower faucet and valve
• Remove existing mildewy caulking and re-caulk the tub
• Replace missing moulding on wall
• Install recessed medicine cabinet
• Install hooks, toothbrush and cup holder, toilet paper holder, shelves, and soap dish
• Replace pulls on built-in
• Rewire and replace wall sconces
• Replace sink faucet
• Replace cover plates, since they don’t match right now
• Install curtain rod and remove blinds
• Insulate window

…and try to do it all for under $1,000. Update, Day 2: With the $400 bill in for the new shower valve, it’s abundantly clear that this project isn’t possible on the original budget. We’ll up it to $1,500 and see how that pans out. The worst part about the new shower valve? The faucet still leaks!! On the upside, since we’ve replaced virtually everything at this point, it’s pretty clear that the problem is a faulty faucet diverter. So I guess we’re getting a new one of those, too (or at least a new washer, if that solves the problem). Also on the upside, the tub is now plumbed all in copper, so we’re making progress (very good progress, actually, if you consider that we only have water running to the tub, the bathroom sink, and the kitchen sink!) on getting everything onto copper pipes.

That will leave the only two major projects there, re-tiling the floor (and replacing the MDF moulding and adding beadboard between the moulding strips)—please let us be lucky and still have hex tile under the current raised layer of tile!—and replacing the toilet. We’ll save those for another year, since what’s there is functional.

Bathroom view from the hall---doesn't look too bad from here!

Bathroom fixtures---these all have to go. (I didn't think to snap the shower pre-disaster, sadly.)

We’re already hitting some obstacles:

• So Moran Supply on 40th Street hooked us up with a new valve in short order, but they only stock the basic fixtures and need a couple weeks’ lead time on anything else, so I couldn’t take the opportunity to upgrade our shower fixtures to something a little more period appropriate. Probably not the end of the world given that the basic set is only $30 and every other option is much, MUCH more than that—but it would have been nice! We did spring for the Kohler valve, though, which in theory should give us a nice selection of fixtures in the future if we do upgrade.
• Also, the kind of valve D. really wanted—one that would control both volume and temperature—is apparently not to code in California. (“You must be from out East, huh,” the plumber laughed when I asked. “We don’t deal with that nonsense here!”) Bleh. We can apparently add a second handle to control volume (or get a way-too-expensive combination handle with a lever)  and maybe we will someday—but that’s too much plumbing work to worry about right now.
• Apparently it is all but impossible to match white tile perfectly, even tile that isn’t all that old. (I think ours was installed about twelve years ago.) Everybody makes a 6″ x 6″ matte white tile….but everybody makes it slightly differently. Augh. So far, no luck at the local tile makers and distributors, one of whom suggested designing an interesting pattern to fill the space instead. We’ll see.
• There’s no way to know what’s behind the wall over the sink, where I want to put the recessed medicine cabinet, until we knock it out. Hopefully no one’s tried to route anything back there in the years since the original cabinet came out. Luckily, we can at least see the vague outline of it where they patched the plaster, so I’m hopeful.
• And last but not least, D. and I are still debating whether the toothbrush holder must absolutely hang over the sink to allow the brushes to drip, which limits the available space since the electrical outlet is there too (and, after $100+ to rewire it last year, it isn’t moving!) And I’d like the towel ring and the toothbrush holder to be somewhat symmetrical, which complicates it further.

But at least it’s a start, and we can tackle these step by step (once the water’s back on, that is!) And when we finish, we’ll have an Arts and Crafts bathroom, more or less! Yay.

The doors of a bungalow

The discussion of our front door in the previous post prompted me to take a quick photo series of doors in our house this morning, since we have a *lot* of them—in 1250 square feet, there were originally fourteen doors! (This was probably due in large part to the fact that our house was almost certainly not heated when it was built, so the sea of doors and south-facing windows helped maximize and contain natural heat.) Today we have ten in active use and an eleventh in storage. Most, if not all, are original to the house—the back door and its screen are the big question marks. They’re certainly old, but possibly not 94 years old. 

Here’s a taste:

The swinging door into the kitchen. Sadly this one has been gouged out by a previous owner to try (unsuccessfully) to get it to clear the tile. When we finally replace the kitchen floor, I may try to find a salvage door to replace it.

The back door: Original? Who knows. Forgive the awful ORB hardware, which the locksmith unfortunately talked me into. It’s flaking off now, just like the other hardware the previous owner had installed in the kitchen that the locksmith thought it should match. Ah well.

The screen door….also unclear. This one is warped beyond salvation, though, so it will be replaced one of these days.

The back door, from outside. It desperately needs refinishing!

This used to be a door, but was turned into an opening in a 1939 kitchen remodel.

Detail on the front door. We think this one’s original.

The lock and handle. (The crappily-matched lock cylinder is courtesy our locksmith, who guessed wrong on the finish.)

The front door. Simple, but definitely an Arts and Crafts look and a perfect match for the door next door, so it’s probably original.

Another once (and future?) doorway. There were originally french doors here separating the dining room; the spot where they latched into the floor has since been filled.

The hallway o’ doors. There were originally four, leading to the bath, bedrooms, and dining room.

The fourth hallway door, into the second bedroom.

There are a few more doors in the two bedrooms and the sleeping porch, but they’re all identical to the doors above. All except the bathroom door have matching vintage hardware, too, though I’m not sure if it’s original or if someone went through and replaced it at some point—it’s clearly been cared for and, for the most part, isn’t painted over anywhere, which is unusual in a house this age. Then, of course, there are the garage and basement doors, which didn’t make this photo shoot. Nothing exciting there: the basement door is your typical shed door, and the garage door was actually added the summer before we bought the house, so it’s a brand-new garden variety Lowe’s door.