Skin and Bones

Site Plan

It's common to talk about the "bones" of a house.  If it has good bones (structurally sound) then the choice to remodel can often be a good one.  Our examination of the house revealed good bones and bad skin.

The house is triple adobe brick that has very few cracks in the exterior wall.  The foundation is rock and sandstone 3 to 4 feet in depth and 18 to 24 inches in width.  The ground under the house is at the same level as the surrounding ground except for where we dug a trench for ease of movement under part of the kitchen and bathroom. All the floor joists are 2 by 12's inserted into the walls. With the exception of the wall between the front room and dining room and the wall immediately above it all of the other interior walls are also triple brick with a rock foundation supporting them.  A close look at the photos will reveal their thickness.  The house is approximately 2,400 square feet with a foyer, front room, den, dining room, pantry and kitchen as part of the original design.  The second floor has a central hallway, three bedrooms and a bathroom.  Many years ago the pantry off the kitchen was turned into a small bathroom and about twenty years ago an elongated room approximately 7 by 22 feet was added onto the back of the house.  This addition became the modern kitchen and the original kitchen was turned into a large utility room.  The main floor ceilings are 11 feet in height but have been lowered to 10 feet everywhere but the den and foyer by previous owners.  This was done to allow for running copper pipes for the heating system and additional electrical lines.  The ceilings on the second floor are 10.5 feet.

All of  the interior woodwork and flooring are soft woods, either cedar or pine and have always been painted so stripping and staining was never an option.  The stair railing is oak though and original.  We also have an ornate oak fireplace mantle in the front room and what appears to be a cherry or mahogany mantle in the den.  We assume heat was originally provided by a kitchen stove, two fireplaces on the main floor and possibly two fireplaces on the second floor.  There is a clear outline of one fireplace still visible upstairs.  Over the years forced air was added then a hot water system.  Unfortunately this was poorly done with some copper pipes left exposed while others were awkwardly boxed in with sheetrock.  The electrical also was a hodgepodge of wiring combining knob and tube, old and new romex and a few creative unknowns.  In the front room they actually just put wire in a channel and covered it with carpet!  Most of the interior had also been sheetrocked over the plaster on brick.

At one time the house had been painted but at some point before our purchase the paint was sandblasted off leaving the original brick exposed.

Note sandstone foundation

The interior walls are 12 inches thick

Note bare copper pipe along window and floor

Wiring we discovered under carpet!

Water damage from ruptured copper pipes after home abandoned

Removing boxes built to hide copper pipes

Because our house has "good bones" the work we've done has all been worthwhile.  We know it will stand the test of time because the foundation is solid.

The Roberts Family

The Thomas Roberts family built our home in 1892.  A local book on the history of our community has a number of photos of the family and property and relates that it encompassed fifty acres and was known as the best farm in West Bountiful.  During much of the twentieth century our community was considered the poor step-child of Bountiful, our much larger neighbor to the east of the highway and the train tracks.  But in the later nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century this was the rich part of town because this was (and is) where the best farm land is located.  Consequently we have many more "mini-mansions" as they are called than our neighboring city to the east that is built on the poor, rocky soil of the bench (our local foothills).

Home and Family - early 1900's?

The Roberts family raised eleven children in our home and like most homes of the time there was one bedroom for the boys and one for the girls and one for Ma and Pa.  If we can find a current family member that has the original family photo posted here we would like to copy and frame it for display in our foyer.  In later photos we'll show how we modified the porch from the original which had been removed before we bought the house.  Due to the size of the bushes we assume these photos are from the early 1900's.

Baby Boomer Upgrade

When we first looked at the house we realized that access to the upstairs would be difficult for me due to post-polio syndrome.  That meant looking into the possibility of an elevator as a stair glide would not work on the stairs. We also had to decide if there was a convenient place to locate one.

As it turned out the company that was the largest residential elevator installer in the country was located only a few miles away so it was easy to get the necessary information and bids.  It's too bad that those things were the only easy part of dealing with this company.  We ordered the elevator the first week of August and were told it would take about 8 weeks for installation.  At the end of 11 weeks I visited their office and was told by the company's semi-retired owner that they had dropped the ball and couldn't find any of my paperwork (plans, material orders, inspections, etc).  In fact he even opened a manila folder with our name on it to show me it was empty.  But he did give me a restaurant gift certificate and then offered me a 10% discount that amounted to $1500.  After seventeen weeks they finally got the mechanical parts installed but we waited another week for the cab to be installed.  They delivered the cab on a Friday but all the wood had been stained and sealed that day so the fresh fumes filled our home and made my wife ill.  We finally got a crew to come and move the parts to the garage for the weekend.  The horror stories continue but I won't relate all of them. However I will say we received another 10% discount and the company eventually went out of business.

Looking from living room into bedroom

Furnace will be located in closet behind elevator shaft

Looking down from the bedroom

8" cement pad / heat ducting for downstairs

Framing the walls of the elevator shaft

Chris on high

950 lbs. of counterweights

220v motor and battery backup

Finally... installation proceeds

The fancy interior

Elevator door on left and furnace door on right

For those who are interested we ordered a mechanical, counterweight rather than hydraulic elevator because they are much more reliable, need very little service and don't require as much space.  They make a little more noise but it's minimal.  The elevator is located in a corner of the front room and goes into the master bedroom upstairs.  In both cases it simply looks like a closet.

Keep Your Eyes Open

Our upstairs had all matching doors except the one in the bathroom was missing.  All of the doors on our main floor were gone so we didn't know where we would find a matching door for the bathroom.  We looked in salvage and antique stores in Utah and Denver but couldn't find a match.  Our neighbors who are also restoring a Victorian built the same year as our's had matching doors but didn't have any to spare.  So for several years a sheet served as the door to our bathroom.

Many holes and latch area almost gone

Even worse on the other side

Filled the holes and reversed the door

7 layers of paint

Hours and hours of stripping and sanding

After weeks finally looking good

No more hanging sheets for privacy

Thanks to Ebay and Lowe's

However one day as my wife was driving past an antique store she thought she saw a door similar to what we needed leaning against the wall of the store.  She pulled a u-turn and after examining the door decided it was a match.  I agreed and bought it the next day after getting the price down to $30 which I felt was a good deal as in our area antique doors often sell for $100 of more.  As the pictures show it required some extensive rebuilding and refinishing.  I reversed the hinges so the rotted hole from the knob would be out-of-play and I would have solid wood for the new (old) knob.  We purchased matching antique glass knobs and faceplates on ebay for all the upstairs doors and Lowe's sells replicas of the old style mortise locksets.

One of the delights of old homes is seeing something of your's somewhere else.  One evening we were watching an old Henry Fonda western "My Darling Clementine" and we noticed the hotel where much of the movie took place had doors that are the exact match of the ones in our home.  So if you want to see our doors rent the movie.

The First Room

There will probably be random philosophical and experiential postings interspersed throughout this blog but most of it will focus on actual remodeling efforts.  The first room we finished was the bathroom on the second floor.  It was one of the failed "modernization" attempts made by previous owners that I mentioned in an earlier post.  The door had opaque glass panels and the walls and ceiling were either shingled in cedar or covered in tongue and groove flooring as the photos will illustrate.  The sink was a modern pedestal backed by heavy contemporary tile.  The ceiling had been lowered from 10.5 feet to about 9 and the whole look was intended to be "I don't know what."

At least the glass was opaque!

Splinters, cobwebs... who came up with this?

Behind the glass door

Lots of patching and sanding

Hammer and chisel to remove that tile,
cement and chicken wire

Our renovated cabinet with bargain sink and faucet

New trim and paint

Built-in cabinet to replace the hanging one

Patched and painted ceiling and added crown molding

The first task was to strip the walls which meant scraping glue, pulling nails and screws, chiseling off tile, chicken wire and the underlying cement and then patching all the sheetrock which had been put over the original lath and plaster walls.  After that we painted, added crown molding, constructed a built-in cabinet and added new casing around the door and window.  Several years later we found a door at a second hand store that stylistically matched our other doors though of slightly different dimensions.  During the interim we hung a sheet on an expansion rod for what can be termed limited privacy.  Our sink came from an antique cabinet (more art deco than Victorian) that I adapted.  I should mention at this point that almost all of our plumbing and several of our lighting fixtures came from ebay or clearance sales.  We literally saved thousands of dollars  shopping on ebay and only had one slightly bad experience in dozens of purchases.  In the next blog I'll show the efforts made to restore the bathroom door.

Initial Trials and Tribulations

One of the difficult lessons of remodeling is that there is no foolproof way to get the job done on time the way you desire.  The "hidden bummer factor" is always present when you do the work yourself.  If you've done any remodeling or repairs you know you always run into glitches that end up requiring four or five trips to the hardware store.  If you work with friends you always end up subject to their schedule and hesitate to push them too hard because you don't want to hurt their feelings.  And contractors...  well you need to understand their language; a two-week job really means ten days of work scattered over several months.

August 2 - our 2nd day in our new home

October - the foundation is finally poured

Much of the junk we pulled out of the house
decorating the front yard

Our home did not have a garage but our general contractor assured us we could have one up and ready to use by the end of September, two months after we moved in and well before winter.  This was very important to us as our new home had no storage to speak of, most of our furniture was in a storage unit and the rest of our stuff was stored in the back yard under plastic sheeting.  Naturally this ended up one of the wettest falls on record and the delays lasted until December.  The tree guy actually showed up when he said he would and removed the tree that was located where our garage would be built.  However the neighbor that was supposed to remove the stump in trade for my old motorcycle wouldn't return my calls for weeks.  He did finally get the job done but then we couldn't get the cement contractor to pour the footings.  When we finally accomplished that the framers weren't ready and so it went.  So these are photos of those earliest days.

To be fair over the past 6 1/2 years we have had several contractors out of more than a dozen show up when they said they would and come everyday until the job was completed.  They include:
Steve Hanson of Steve's Trees
Aire Serv HVAC in Davis County
Lone Pine Cabinet in West Jordan
Legacy Granite in Centerville
Rodney Eggett, cement contractor

Moving In

At the time we moved in on August 1, 2004 we lived in just a few rooms of the house. We used the den on the main floor as our bedroom, the dining room as our living area, a bathroom and part of the kitchen. The first evening we moved in my son-in-law and I had to install a water heater as the old boiler system no longer worked. But first we had to tear out the closet that had been built in the original kitchen that currently served as a utility room.

The ultra-modern kitchen on moving day

The dining room that became our living area for three months

The main floor bathroom

The den that became our bedroom for three months

Installing a water heater late at night our first day

Utility room closet with unusable hot water heating system 

Those first few weeks felt very much like camping out.  In fact if I'm honest the first few years felt like camping out!