Bye-bye, Boiler

Since 1915, our house has been heated in the winter by a boiler in the basement that connects to the radiators throughout the house by a maze of pipes of various sizes. The system has worked amazingly well, but man, it was expensive to run. Last January when it was cold, cold, cold for weeks on end, our gas bill was almost $400. Ouch!

This week, dear reader, we bid adieu to Mr. Boiler and his network of pipes. With sawzall (i.e., a reciprocating saw, for any English majors in the audience) in hand, I cut my way through 800 lbs. of pipe. And I mean 800 lbs. literally. The scrap yard gave me $52 for it, which luckily more than covers the cost of all those sawzall blades I burned through. In fact, part of my 800 lbs. of scrap included more than a few deceased sawzall blades.

I spoke blessings about my Dad this week. He was the one that taught me about cheater pipes. If I hadn't learned about them from him, I'm not sure I would have ever figured it out on my own. If you're new to the nifty invention known as a cheater pipe, it is a section of pipe that slips over the handle of a pipe wrench, thereby effectively lengthening the handle to provide lots more leverage. I would have thought that the only way to get more leverage would be to buy a bigger wrench, if left to my own logic. But good ol' Dad -- he taught me the handy (and cheap!) way to get more torque out of these skinny little arms of mine. Thanks, Dad!

The basement pipes are out of the way now (to make room for the 21st century ducts that are about to be installed), but I still have some pipes in place on the first floor that are hanging from the radiators on the second floor. I'll get to those pipes a little later, probably when we're making a mess on the first floor for other exciting remodeling reasons.

The next step is to get our new geothermal split-system HVAC installed. There will be more to write about as the system is installed. There will soon be a well-digging rig sitting in our front yard making a mess of things, but the end result will be a wonderfully air-conditioned house. We can't wait to walk into a house that isn't 86 degrees inside!

Historic Windows

There's nothing that says "old house" like the beefy, true divided-lite windows of a, well, an old house. I mean, that's part of what makes an old house really cool. The sad thing is that lots of old house owners don't realize that they can keep their old windows AND make them energy efficient. And because they don't realize their old windows can be made energy efficient, they have them ripped out and replaced with vinyl windows. Major sadness.

Last year, even before we had closed on the sale of our house, I began looking online for a place to buy some wood storm windows to replace the aluminum ones on our windows. Much to my delight, I found a hands-on three-day class in nearby Hannibal, Missouri that teaches students how to make their own wood storm windows. Hurray!

The class was offered at the Belvedere School For Historic Preservation, a historic trades school run by Bob Yapp. Bob has decades of historic preservation experience, and he hosted a PBS show in the 90's called "About Your House with Bob Yapp". The class was a lot of fun, very educational, and it whetted my appetite for another one of Bob's classes, his "Window Restoration College".

The restoration class teaches students how to take an existing double-hung window, restore it, re-glaze it, and make it weather-tight. The restored window, when coupled with a wood storm window that has been weather-sealed, is as energy efficient as a modern insulated-glass unit. PLUS, you end up getting to keep your cool old window AND spend less money than if you'd replaced it.

Part of our house renovations will include restoring all of our windows. We even plan on re-using some of our existing windows in the kitchen and bedroom additions we're planning. And to make sure we keep the same old house charm in our additions, we've even been dumpster-diving to find some extra old windows that we'll need for the additions.

The first set of windows we found were from a house being remodeled just around the corner from us. They are an almost perfect match to the existing windows in our house. And the best part is that they were FREE! If you've ever built a house or an addition, you know that windows can be a significant part of the overall budget. Sure, these old windows will need some work to restore them to like-new condition, but hey, they're cool old windows! These are only the sashes, so I'll need to build the jambs for them to make them a complete unit again.

The second set of windows we found are from a house a few blocks away. I drove by last week and noticed some workers replacing all the windows in a really neat English-cottage type house from the 1930's. All of these windows are casement type (which means that they swing open on side hinges rather than by sliding up and down). They also have some great old latches that are the finishing touch -- something you wouldn't find even in a restoration hardware catalog.

I called my friend Bob Yapp today to see if he would offer a class on building window jambs at his Belvedere School. (A jamb is the frame that goes around window sashes to hold them in place and allow them to slide up and down). I think I may have stirred his creative juices. He said it was an interesting idea, and that he'd think on it for a couple of weeks to see how he might advertise the class. I'm hopeful he's taken the bait.

Maybe I'll be heading to Hannibal again sometime in the near future for another window class.....

(For a follow-up to this post, see my later Building Windows write-up.)

Goodbye To The Deck

A couple of months ago (maybe longer?), I started taking apart the deck on the back side of the house. It was old and the support beams were not in the best of shape due to our friends, the carpenter ants. Most of the cedar planks are still in decent shape though, so I plan on re-using them in some capacity during the remodeling. At the very least, I can plane them back down to fresh wood and use them to build storage shelving in the basement. This was quite a deck in its day, let me tell ya. The cedar planks on the deck were 2 x 12s that were anywhere from 17 to 21 feet long, so it wasn't a cheap deck to construct. If I remember the story correctly, the previous owners had the deck built when one of their daughters got married years ago. I think it was the site of the wedding reception. Those days are long gone though, so it was time for the deck to come down. Besides, the deck was located right where our kitchen addition will go, so it would have had to be removed anyway.

"Solid" is an understatement when it comes to describing the construction of this deck. There were 27 steel support posts anchored in concrete. Removing those posts was the project for this weekend. Knowing that it was more work than I could do with pure grunt work and a shovel, I asked my friend, Terry, for some help.

Terry is a great guy. He's got a great assortment of equipment, and he is always looking for an opportunity to help someone with it. Terry had helped me pull out some old fence posts a few years ago with his Kubota tractor, so I thought I'd see if I could recruit his help again. When I asked if he could help me with the deck, he was his typical eager self.

Terry showed up with his tractor -- complete with backhoe attachment -- at about 9:00 on Saturday. He did some masterful backhoe work! For the posts that were right next to the house, I (along with my buddy, Phil) did some digging with a shovel to loosen things up. By 11:30, we were finished. It's amazing what some well-operated hydraulics (and a little sweat) can accomplish.

I now have an impressive pile of steel posts and concrete piled at the edge of the woods south of the house. The next step will be to rent or borrow a cutting torch to cut the steel posts off of the concrete chunks -- after all, they will make a nice addtion to the next load of metal that I haul off to the scrap yard for $$$. The concrete "chunks", on the other hand, won't be quite so easy to dispose of. I suppose I'll wait until the next time I rent a roll-off container from the city, and dispose of them then. Anyone need an unwieldy boat anchor?

Now that the deck is completely gone, we've got a fairly clean slate to start the kitchen addition. We meet with our architect on Tuesday, so we're excited to see the ideas she's drawn up. Hey, we're actually making some progress!

The next demolition project? THE BOILER. (To be continued....)

"The Tree" Comes Home

A few weeks ago I got a call from Mike Anderson, the guy that milled our oak tree into boards (see my 6/10/2010 post entitled The Tree). He called to say that the wood was ready to come out of the kiln, and he asked if I was interested in having him plane and square up the edges of the boards. His price to do the extra work was very reasonable, so I asked him to give me a call when it was ready.

Last Saturday morning, Mike called to say the wood was ready for delivery. His delivery charge would have been $90 (basically an hour and a half of labor), so I told him I would come pick it up myself. I got directions to his place, then headed out that afternoon.

To say that Mike lives in "the boonies" is an understatement. He doesn't live that many miles outside of town, but man, his place is remote. I took my wife's cell phone in case I got lost, and sure enough, I had to make a phone call halfway there to see if I was still on the right track. Somehow I went past the entrance to his driveway (which was a mile-long dirt road through dense woods) and ended up at his neighbor's place. I rang the neighbor's doorbell -- which I can only imagine hadn't had anyone ring it in a decade or two -- and asked if the gentleman would be kind enough to give me directions to Mike's house. Back up the road I went, this time turning into Mike's driveway which was demarcated by a mailbox in the shape of a gigantic fishing lure. How could have I have missed that the first time?

Once I traversed the woods back to Mike's barn, we loaded up the wood. It filled my pickup bed to the very top. My pickup was squatting just a bit under the load.

Mike was kind enough to give me a brief tour of his place. He showed me his solar kiln, which was impressive. It has a steeply sloping roof covered in clear fiberglass panels. On top of the kiln are two small solar panels that power a small circulation fan inside the kiln. Mike has even constructed a really cool rail platform that can be loaded with fresh wood outside the kiln, then easily rolled into the kiln.

When Mike offered to give me a tour of his house, I was quick to accept. First let me give you a little background. Mike's house is a log cabin -- actually more of a grand lodge. He and his wife began building it eight years ago, and they are close to being done. Mike's place is completely "off the grid", i.e. he generates his own electrical power via solar panels and a wind turbine.

The whole reason Mike bought the portable mill that he used to mill our tree into lumber was because he wanted to build his own log house. Every piece of wood in Mike's house was cut and milled right there on his property. The logs in his walls are ten inches square. His floors and cathedral ceiling are oak. (Mike: "We used the good stuff on the floor and used the lesser quality stuff for the ceiling.") He built his own kitchen cabinets from walnut that he felled and milled himself. He built a spiral staircase from walnut. His garage doors are walnut (single-slab doors). The main post in his living room (two stories) is a single red oak tree, stripped of bark, then coated in polyurethane. It is probably 36 inches in diameter.

The fireplace is massive. It is built of stone and rises, floor-to-ceiling, two stories (and twelve feet beyond the roof). Mike built it himself, and it provides all of the heat for their home. Right now, Mike is working on installing "air conditioning". It is a coil through which cool water circulates, and which has a fan that blows across the coil. The chilled (55 degree) water will be pumped from the bottom of Mike's pond, circulate through the unit, then be returned to the far side of the pond.

Needless to say, Mike's place (and his initiative) is really, really impressive. It made me think that our house remodeling project is "small beans" in comparison. Regardless, the oak tree in our front yard has returned home to be used in the remodeling project. It is nicely stacked in the basement for the meantime, filling the downstairs with the scent of freshly milled oak. If you take a deep breath, you can probably smell it, too.

Going "Green" To Save Some Green ($$)

I've never considered myself a "conservationist", but the more I dive into the whole renovation process, I'm realizing what a fun challenge it is. The idea here is to re-use as much as possible. And what I can't re-use, I'm making efforts to recycle. While I am glad that all of this is beneficial to the environment, I have to admit that the biggest motivation for me is saving money.

Re-use
One of the most obvious ways to save money on what will be a substantial project is to re-use as many things as I can throughout the remodeling process. In other words, why go out and buy something if I already own one of those somethings? Sure, if something is worn out beyond usefulness, or if it is plain ol' ugly, I'll get rid of it (although there is a better option than just tossing it in the dumpster -- more on that in a minute). But why throw away an existing window if I can restore and re-use it? Not only will I have a cool old historic window that matches the rest of those in the house, I will also have saved myself several hundred dollars to boot.

For example, there are three large windows in our dining room that will be taken out to open up an entry into the future kitchen addition. There is also a smaller window that will be removed to make a passage from the kitchen into the future butler's pantry (i.e., the current kitchen). If I were to throw away these windows and buy something of comparable quality (which would be tough to find), I would have to spend somewhere in the $3000 - $3600 range. High-quality windows are expensive, let me tell ya.

What we will do instead is re-use these windows. Our architect has already mentioned that she plans on using the three dining room windows in the future master bedroom addition. And the smaller window will replace an awkward circa 1959 window that, for reasons unknown, replaced an original window when the kitchen was remodeled many years ago by the previous owners. Reusing the windows (plus some others that I'll write about in a future blog) will save a LOT of green ($$).

There is another way to re-use items, even if I don't re-use them myself. Habitat For Humanity has something called the Habitat Re-store. It is a store where people can donate virtually any sort of building material or appliance that is in good enough shape to re-use -- doors, shutters, vanities, cabinets, light fixtures, appliances, windows, plumbing fixtures - you name it. Not only does it keep perfectly usable (albeit outdated) items out of the landfill, donors also can deduct the value of the item on their taxes as a charitable donation. These items are a great buy for people who own rental properties, or others who perhaps can't afford brand new items for their own home. And once in a while, you can come across a real treasure at the Habitat Restore. Several years ago, my wife bought a pair of large leaded-glass cabinet doors (probably from the 1920's) for only $12!! We've been storing them for years and now plan to use them when we build in a china hutch as part of our remodel.

In the cases where we can't re-use something, recycling is also a good option.

Recycle
I'll be the first to say that I am by no means a tree-hugger. However, I am discovering that recycling not only makes good use of resources, but it can also be a way to make back some of the money that we are spending on the remodeling. Anything that is metal is worth cash -- aluminum, steel, brass, copper, lead, etc.

You wouldn't think there's much steel in a traditional construction home, but it is amazing how many pounds of steel you can come up with when you start pulling nails. Honestly, we've just started scratching the surface of this remodeling project, but you wouldn't believe the number of nails and deck screws I've pulled/removed. Instead of throwing them away, I just started throwing them into a five-gallon pail. So far, I have filled two buckets, each of which weighed about eighty pounds. Then there were the bolts and brackets that held the deck joists to the posts -- probably another thirty pounds. Old pipes, old chains, old curtain rods, old shower pan, etc. To date, I've hauled 1000 pounds (literally) to the scrap yard.

The really good stuff, though, is copper and brass. Remember when I wrote about having the new electric service panel installed? I told the electrican to just leave the old wire and conduit. Just from the few feet of copper wire that carried power from the weatherhead above the electric meter to the old service panel, I got $24.50 from the scrap yard.

All together, my metal salvaging has earned me $100.25 so far (and we really have just barely started the remodeling). There will be several thousand pounds more steel when we remove the boiler, piping, and radiators.  And then there will be the old copper wire and plumbing that has yet to be replaced. Then there will be a few hundred pounds of aluminum when I get around to replacing the old storm windows with nice wooden ones.

The money I've made so far isn't such a big deal, but my choice is to either recoup a little on what I scrap, or pay the city to haul it off. It doesn't make much sense to me to pay someone to haul away something that has actual cash value.

Anyone have some old metal laying around that you'd like me to haul off for you? Anyone?

The Summer Of 1915

Having only a window unit air conditioner in our house, we are developing an appreciation of what the summer of 1915 might have felt like in this house. I don't know what the actual temperatures were in 1915, but there was another summer not too many years later that must have been similar to the hot weather we're having now. It was 1921.

Since most of our evenings are spent either indoors (sticky) or outside working on removing the old deck (downright sweaty), we are getting a little dose of early 20th-century Americana, particularly the decades of hot summers that were spent in this house. My curiosity got the best of me, so I started looking for weather archives online. The only records I could find for 1915 were accompanied by a request for a hefty $34.95 access fee to the information. NoThankYouVeryMuch.

I did find, however, some old newspapers on the Library of Congress website. One of the newspapers from the 1920's was The Columbia Evening Missourian. The front page of each edition reported the weather for the day. The print dates available varied, but I was able to find an edition that came right from the steamy summer of 1921. July 12th, to be exact. Warren G. Harding was president.

The high on July 12, 1921 was 94 degrees. The forecast for today was 95 degrees, although I'm not sure what the actual high ended up being. Regardless, it was hot.

One of the things that must have made the summers more bearable years ago were the first and second-floor sleeping porches. The first-floor porch had windows added (along with lots of rough cedar paneling) sometime in the 1970's, but the upstairs sleeping porch is still pretty much intact. There are a few casement windows, and each one is flanked by a pair of shutters. Behind each shutter is a screen that can be opened up to ventilate the room.

Quaint as the sleeping porch is, in this heat, I'll take our window-unit-air-conditioned bedroom anytime. Speaking of which, it's about time to get ready for bed. I'd better start up the air conditioner so the bedroom will be bearable once I hit the sack....

Some Follow-ups: Basement, Bugs, and HVAC

Here are a few follow-ups on some topics mentioned in previous blogs.

The Basement
A few weeks ago, I noted that the goal of doing my own jackhammering in the basement was to save money. At the time that I blogged about the hoped-for savings, I hadn't yet received the bill from the city for the rental/dumping charges on the roll-off container. The savings quoted by the company that installed the sump system was $1700 if I were to do my own jackhammering. Offsetting that savings was a cost of around $210 for a week's rental of a jackhammer. I just received the bill from the city for the roll-off service, which came to $270. Then there were also a couple of tools that I bought (a pick axe and a shovel with a straight forward edge, which made it easier to shovel the debris from the concrete floor). I'm including the cost of these tools, even though I will have them for the long term, because I wouldn't have purchased them had it not been for the basement project itself. They came to around $38. So bottom line, the savings ended up to be something like $1700 - $210 - $270 - $38 = $1182.

My wife asked me if I would have done the jackhammering myself if I had to do it all over again. I think the answer would still be "yes". The savings weren't as much as I had originally hoped, but money saved always amounts to more than just the obvious amount that wasn't spent. For example, let's say I'm in the 20% tax bracket. (Note: I have no idea what the actual IRS tax brackets are, or which one I fall into. I just plug the numbers into TurboTax every year and let it handle the rest.) If I were going to spend $1700, that means I would have to have earned more than $1700 in wages to bring home the $1700 to be paid to a contractor. I would have had to earn $2125 in order to have $1700 in take-home pay with which to pay the contractor. ($2125 - 20% income tax = $1700 take-home). Rather than paying that out to someone else though, I still have managed to keep $1182 in after-tax savings that I can now spend on something else that I need to do to the house. And since I like doing things myself, that $1182 will go a lot farther than it otherwise would.

But probably one of the best advantages to the whole thing is that I got to enrich my "life-experience" (and the experience of a few of my friends) by running a jackhammer! This is nuts, I realize, but hey....

The Bugs
We had the exterminator come about a week and a half ago. Our primary inspiration for inviting the exterminator was to get rid of the carpenter ants that, despite the lovely Midwest weather, wanted to come indoors to see us.

With the spraying complete, bugs are dying in droves. The basement seems to be their preferred place to expire. The ones that are the most dramatic about dying are the crickets. These guys do it up big time, which I will describe shortly.

I'm not sure what kind of crickets we have. They are utterly repulsive. They aren't like the black chirping crickets that I remember from growing up in Texas. These crickets are a light-tan-almost-albino variety. They don't even have a charming chirp. Their bodies are somewhat bulbous, and the don't crunch when you step on them -- they pop. Did I mention that they are absolutely repulsive? I'll take a roach over these things anytime. My wife still thinks roaches are worse. Well, at least she did think that. Thursday evening, we were working on getting the house cleaned up for a visit from my sister. My wife was tending to some laundry down in the basement. As she ascended the basement stairs, our conversation went something like this:

She: Augh! Augh! Disgusting!
Me: What?
She: The crickets! Augh! Disgusting!
Me: Are there a lot of them?
She: Not that many, but they are disgusting when they die!
Me: What do they do?

(Here comes the cricket drama I referred to earlier...)

She: Augh! Their legs fall off, and they lie there writhing and oozing liquid! Augh! Disgusting! Absolutely disgusting!

Seriously folks, leaking crickets are not something you want in your basement. I mean, we're glad they're dying, but the whole death process is as dramatic as something from a Shakespeare tragedy.

HVAC Update
We've heard back from one of the HVAC contractors with a bid for a dual (upstairs/downstairs) geothermal system. I'm meeting with one of the other contractors tomorrow to talk over his company's proposal. It seems odd to me that I haven't heard a peep from the other two contractors that are supposed to be bidding the job. Maybe with the hot weather we've been having, they're up to their eyeballs in requests from other people who want their system replaced now.

In the meantime, we're actually muddling through the hot weather pretty well. We have a window A/C in our bedroom which makes for pretty good sleeping, and there are lots of fans scattered throughout the house. Needless to say, shorts, T-shirts, and flip-flops are our standard uniforms here at home when we're not suited up to do demolition of one kind or another.

Well, now that the basement is cleaned up from all the jackhammering and plaster smashing, I think I'll go down and start putting my workshop back in order.....