Point of No Return

Here we are.  I knew, as an intellectual exercise, that some kind of mechanical entity was going to come this week to take apart the house I've lived in for the past almost-nine years.  Knowing that and looking at this are two entirely different things, boy-howdy.

I went to yoga this morning, and decided to drive by the house on my way back to the apartment, just to see what's up.  I see this as I walk up the driveway:

What a curious pile of debris!

And then round the corner to take in the full view:

Oh, right.  That's my house.

So in the time between sunrise this morning and about 10:15, I had time to get the kids ready for school, take them to school, and go to one yoga class.  In that time, one dude with a bobcat dismantled the back of my house completely.

Hi, Bobcat.

You've been busy, Bobcat.

And after that, I had a shower, picked up one child from school, and we had lunch with friends.  And in that time period, the bobcat dismantled the little green garage there, became king of the mountain, and started loading bits of my house into a dumpster.

I think I should have mixed feelings about this, and I think there's a wee small pinging in my heart that is keening for the room that I brought my babies home to, but mostly I'm finding all of this massive destruction really cool and exhilarating.  

Look, for instance, at this:

So, yesterday, they sawed my house in half.  Look!  It's amazing! Someone took a regular old Skilsaw and just drew a line on my house--they cut through interior walls, exterior walls, roof, beams, everything.  Cut it neatly in half.  And then today they brought a giant thing to scrape off the half that we don't want.  It's crazy--like cutting your waffle very neatly into perfect squares, then eating it by burying your face in your plate and gnarfing up all of the perfect bits.

Precision slicing

Gnarf, gnarf.

Are you tired of extra-large pictures of destruction yet?  I am not.  I'll attempt to moderate myself and leave you with these until I'm able to think something more coherent than RAWR!!  Maybe they'll let me drive the bobcat.

Let's Split Up, Gang

Evidently, I think I'm George RR Martin, because I'm going to break one house event into two posts.  It just makes more sense this way, you guys!  And I promise I won't make you wait five years before the next one.

One thing that we really like to do when thinking about our house is guess at the changes that have been made in renovations over the years.  Some things, like the windows (which really aren't that great, so we're replacing them), are pretty obvious, and some things, like the siding in the wall in the back bedroom, we had ideas about that we can finally confirm.

Remember this guy?  Proof.

Having all of the drywall removed from the original part of the house answers some of the questions we had and also raises new questions we're going to have to ponder (gladly!).  Come investigate with me!

So, this is the architectural plan of our house as it is now.

We always figured that "Bedroom 2," the back "Hall" and "Bath 1" were added later.  They had that stuck-on feel as well as slanting floors and strangely thick walls, and they just didn't go with the rest of the house.  That's part of why I'm not terribly bothered that we're getting rid of them.  

We always wondered, though, and could never quite decide, what the deal was with the entryway and master closet.  We knew that there was no way a closet like that was in a house this old, but we wondered which bits of it might have been stolen from the house and which from the porch.  Now that we have all the original walls revealed, we're pretty sure we know.

 This is the inside of the closet, and now we can see the siding from the outside of the house as well as beadboard on the ceiling and upper walls that matches the porch, so we know this part of the closet was borrowed from the porch.  That gap in the siding on the right looks like there used to be a window from the bedroom looking out onto the porch, and I'm glad that we already planned to put that guy back in.

I spotted this in between two studs in a another part of the closet, and that profile is pretty clearly again, the siding that used to be the outside of the house.  So we think the other half of the closet used to be part of the entry, which makes sense because the light fixture in that little room is way off to one side (which may or may not drive me a little crazy).  So we think the house used to look like this:

That cute little L-shaped porch just makes me happy.

 Hello, random wonky boards in the master bedroom.  Most of the shiplap is so nicely honed and well-fitted that there's clearly something going on when there are giant gaps or crooked boards.  That one in the center has matching wonkiness on the other side of the wall, so there pretty clearly used to be a door there into the dining room.  That makes sense, because the current doorway from the bedroom into the little hall by the bathroom isn't original, say the wonky boards, and the door to the bathroom used to just to its left.  So you used to enter the bedroom from the dining room, which sounds weird to us, but was pretty standard back in the day, and only access the bathroom from the bedroom, which was just how they used to do it.

They haven't taken all the drywall down in the second bedroom and kitchen, but I don't see a door from the kitchen into that bedroom so far.  I wonder if you could only access the second bedroom by walking from the first through the bathroom?  I wonder if I'm wrong that the little hall in front of the bathroom didn't used to be there?

 I'm also wondering pretty hard about this patch.  It seems newer than the door patches, which is interesting, it doesn't go all the way to the floor, and it's too narrow to be a door, but it is in that wall between the master and the dining room and has a patch on both sides.  I've seen ironing board cabinets in old houses that are about that size and shape (no, I'm not totally obsessed with laundry, really), but it seems too low and in a weird place to be that.  I guess it could be something as practical as where they had to cut into the wall to fix some wiring at some point, but maybe it is also a good spot for a little curio cubby?  Maybe there's treasure hidden there?  I should go rip that patch off the wall myself and see what's in there, right?

And this here is totally throwing a kink into my certainty about what's going on with the porch/closet/entryway.  This is in the wall of the master bedroom to the entryway, and it's clearly a door-shaped patch.  It is not any kind of centered, so I reject it as original on the basis of my own prejudice against wonky things.  Who cut that door there, then?  Why is it right against the wall?  Who wants to go straight into a bedroom from the front door?  It could have been the lady who lived there before us, who I think is responsible for the closet, and who made a lot of art that she may have kept in the living room/dining room.  Would she have used our "Master Bedroom" as a dining room, separate from her "gallery," and that's why it had a chair rail and a light fixture like you find over a pool table in a pizza parlor (no pictures, sorry, we traded it in years ago)?  That patch seems older than her very involved paint job in that room, though.  Was this a second living room in a time when two families shared the house and therefore needed a second entry?  That could explain the awesome blue wallpaper.  That's definitely parlor wallpaper.

I like finding the answers to some questions, but I also like continuing to wonder about others (not that you shouldn't tell me if you can offer some insight into these things!).  Even more, it's comforting to me to see the evidence that other people, maybe even the original owners, have changed the house to make it their own.  I'm excited about improving the house to meet my family's needs, but my love of old things leaves me with some guilt about messing with the "original" house.  These patches tell me that the original house is gone, and has been gone for a while, so that guilt is misplaced.  I can worry that our design is ugly (it's not), or too big (probably not), but I needed this reminder that a house is a place that evolves, happily, to meet the needs of the people who live there and their time. 

Auld Lang Syne

I like old stuff.  I've liked old stuff for as long as I can remember.  My Grandma had a flatiron as a knick-knack (along with other cool antique stuff), and I can remember marveling as a little kid that women used to heat it up over a fire and use it to press their clothes, all of the clothes that they had just washed in pots and dried on the line.  Yes, I used to play laundry, of all things, in my Grandma's living room.

I think liking old things might just be a thing that bookish girls of an age end up doing; when you start out your childhood pal-ing around with Laura Ingalls, then frolic with Anne Shirley on your way to meet Jo March and Elizabeth Bennet, I think it's pretty likely that the past and its trappings will always hold some magic for you.  Old places and old things fascinate me.  The daily objects of past generations have a patina that reflects the lives of strangers who seem familiar to me, and places that have been around for a long time tell the story I avidly want to hear.

I know that my house isn't THAT old.  In New England, I gather from This Old House (of which I've been a fan for decades, clearly), 100 years is beans compared to the Revolutionary-era structures you're just tripping over up there.  In Houston, though, the city where we can't even save the Eighth Wonder of the World, my house is about as old as it gets, and that's part of why I wanted it.  I was disappointed that the windows weren't original to the house (energy efficient windows that actually open and close? Bah!), and the house had been pretty thoroughly remodeled before we got to it, which was also part of why I wanted it, because I lack the skills or the perseverance to do my own renovations or repairs.  The house did feel old, and it had the bungalow look that set it in a distinct time period.  It certainly has that old house smell, which I love but probably brings my guests to tears, but other than that and the general size and appearance of the house, I could only blindly believe that my house is old because I wanted it to be.  Until now.

Boom!

My house is so old, y'all!  Look at that shiplap!  It's everywhere! My house is nekkid and it's clearly so, so old!

I went by after the workers left last night so I could get a peek at what they'd been up to, and I was so surprised and excited to see all this that I had to wait until today to calm down enough to write about it.  I've been to houses on historic tours (yep. That, too.) where someone did a remodel and left the shiplap exposed because they thought it was so pretty or rustic, and I admit I thought that was a bad design plan.  This, though, is just so beautiful, I can see where the impulse comes from.

Look at how the boards fit together!  You could spend hours at Home Depot (or whatever your favorite building supply store is) and not see boards this pretty and well made, even with drywall dust and who knows what else on them.  I guessed that either shiplap or plaster lay under our walls, but it's just so neat to see the house like this--it's like I'm getting a quick peek at what the house was like when it was built, which is pretty much the best thing ever, for me.  And then there's this:

WALLPAPER!  If you told me you were going to put some wallpaper in your bathroom that that had hot pink flamingos and water lilies on a neutral background with silver splotches, I would think you are unwell.  But because this is clearly OLD, I'm super excited about it and want to have it replicated in my own bathroom.  I spent quite a bit of time last night Googling "history of wallpaper" to see if I could figure out how old this paper might be.  I really did.  And seriously, I know nothing about wallpaper, so if you know whether having linen-like stuff on the back makes the paper a certain age, I would really like for you to tell me all about it.  There's a wallpaper museum in England, and I might have to go.

This is in the dining room.  I love it so much. Help!

In more practical news, it looks like everything that should be is well on its way to being totally demolished some time next week, which is almost as exciting as it is scary.  We're keeping the floorboards, interior doors, some siding, and some of the plumbing fixtures, and the guys are taking good care of those things.

Neatly stacked

Stuff that's not being saved is just being piled up in the rooms that aren't staying,

And windows are already gone from the North side of the house.

I spent roughly 43 hours (ok, only 3) on hold with utility companies this week trying to get power turned on to our "T-Pole" which will hold our meter until we have the part of the building to attach the new meter.  

T-Pole. Pretty awesome.

I'm not going to pretend I really know about this, but it felt good to be doing stuff to help until I saw how much the crew was accomplishing at the house.  I'm absolutely flabbergasted.  I'm going to have to make them some cinnamon rolls.  Using an old recipe, of course.

De-Construction

Our contractor gave us a funny little chart when we started working with him, to educate us a little about the emotional highs and lows of a home renovation.  He's probably had some experience with folks like me before, and just wanted to give us some advance warning that I'm going to want to invest in some anti-depressants or a little talk therapy when we get to drywall sanding, because that stuff is boring and takes forever.  Duly noted.  But now at the beginning, as the chart indicated, is a time for joy, because STUFF IS FINALLY HAPPENING!

Construction Fence! Woo!

Destruction of nuisance trees! Yay!

And if you're like me and feel a little sad about the destruction of any tree, please set your mind at ease.  This tree was a cherry laurel, and when I took that picture of the stump, my eyes were watering from the fumes coming off of the cut wood because that sucker is so poisonous.  I've hesitated to get rid of it for years, because it gives our yard some privacy from the house/apartment across the alley from us (and because I didn't know it was so bad, I swear).

Backyard before.  Giant tree shading yard, providing privacy, dropping toxic "cherries" into sandbox.

Backyard after.  No privacy, no death by cyanide.

But not only was our giant cherry laurel going to block construction vehicles, and not only has its unnatural multi-trunkness leaned precariously on our fence for years, and not only has it dropped irritating little fake cherries all over our yard and sandbox and drawn scary-huge flocks of birds to feast on the cherries and poop purple goo-poop all over everything, it also turns out that every part of the plant is rich in hydrogen cyanide.  You know, otherwise known as Zyklon-B.  So much so that the cyanide seeps into the soil around the tree from the roots and kills other plants growing nearby.  Which I'm going to believe explains why I've not been able to grow anything successfully in that corner (It has nothing to do with my black thumb.  Not a thing.).  So no feeling bad about that tree, ok?

This other tree wasn't poisonous, and it wasn't technically our tree either, being kind of on our neighbor's property line with the alley.  But our neighbor gave us his permission to get rid of it, the city doesn't care, it was hanging a giant dead limb over our garage, and it also dropped another dead limb onto the power lines in the alley last summer and started an electrical fire on another garage.  It was time.

We also did a little deconstruction of our own last weekend.  I told you before that we're pretty sure that the back bedroom used to be a porch because of the pitch of the floor (and the rooflines), but we always wondered what was going on in the walls.  We'd hang something on the wall, from a picture to a big cubby system, and whether we were hammering or drilling, we'd be fine going through the drywall, and then run into what felt like iron.  Something in the walls, throughout the walls, not just at studs, was the thickness and hardness of iron beams.  But when you're just living in a house, if you destruct it, you have to fix it when you're done, so my curiosity went only so far.  

Now, someone else is going to destruct and rebuild my house for me, so what the heck:

I may or may not have had a little too much fun ripping up the wall.

So now we know what's in our wall!  This wood siding, that matches the outside of our house, is behind the drywall/plasterboard in the guest room,

Second bathroom, and back porch (no picture, sorry.  My arm was too tired from whacking the other walls to make a good hole.).

So now we know for sure that the back bathroom and bedroom are additions to the house.  This doesn't affect what we're doing with the house or how we feel about it, but I like knowing things about the story of our house.  I like to know that our renovation and expansion are just another set of changes in the lifetime of our house, another way it's becoming home for our family the way it's become home for other families.  I like to speculate on whether that iron-hard siding is oak, as many from-a-kit bungalows were shipped out of Chicago and had Illinois and Wisconsin oak bits, or if it just might be cypress, as many houses built in Texas and Louisiana swamps used the native wood because of its strength, density, and resistance to rot (until we used it all up).  I like to think that maybe the house might like to be yellow again (IS that yellow paint?), or if it the couple who built it whitewashed it themselves (because that might be white).  And I'd like to find out who might have decided to build on a third bedroom and second bath and when.  It's part biography and part mystery and I like it all.

This all that's happening so far, so clearly, I'm using all caps and exclamation points for no reason, but stuff is happening (again, STUFF IS HAPPENING!).  We went by today and there's a crew unhooking light fixtures and taking knobs off of cabinets.  There's good plywood down to protect the floors that aren't coming up.  Little things falling into place.  It's like this season of The Walking Dead--plots aren't really moving, and everything is clearly setting up for next season and whatever horrors/wonders await everyone in Terminus, but the preparation provides a tension of its own.  We were clear that I'm a dork, right?  Good.  Coming soon--The Excavator!

As is

Welcome to our home!  Here's a pre-reno tour, warts and all, so you have a good before shot to compare when everything changes.

Step up to the front porch.  We think this porch used to be a different shape but was made smaller at some point to enclose a walk-in closet (which retains the completely un-insulated climate of the front porch) for the master bedroom.  We're going to make this sucker bigger and properly quadrilateral, the better to swing on without whacking something, my dear.  I think we're adding about six feet to it in depth and moving the front door to the North wall of the porch (next to that existing window).

Here's our wee entryway.  It's going away entirely to become part of the new front porch (or East Porch, as our architectural plans grandly dub it).  I THINK it will work well to have the front porch function as the entryway, and I trust our architect when he tells me it will, but there's the rule-following part of my soul that wonders how you can possibly have an entryway that's not behind a door.

And of course, that's not a ghost in the mirror, just a tastefully blurred photographer.  This house shows no signs of being haunted, and I would know, since I've lived in a haunted house and if I'm not exactly psychically sensitive, I am for sure a giant scaredy-cat.  I'll tell you my ghosty house story sometime.

From the entry, you walk into the living room and dining room through that doorway on your right.  The party table, of course, isn't usually there, but this is a good picture (read, not a disaster as it is two minutes after the kids wake up).  These rooms are going to stay the same, though there are marks on the floor that show there used to be a wall, maybe with pocket doors, between the two, and we did consider rebuilding those walls.  Though we're going to continue to use these rooms in the same way, it will be nice to have the room be big and open as it is now, and we nixed the dividing wall for now.

And here's where the changes start.  I love this kitchen, and in another shot I'm standing at my mixer next to the stove, barefoot, frumptastic, and happy as a pig, making yummy messes in my laboratory, which is how I probably spend a whole lot of my time.  Add in the kids running laps around that little kitchen island, a giant mess somewhere, some carpooling, and that's my life that I wouldn't trade for anyone else's. I hope, above all, that the new house still has a heart like this shiny, busy little room that I love.  We're going to add a hallway here, and a big, well-lit pantry, and then the new kitchen will extend to about where that back door is, and to your left it will open into a new family room, so big changes are on the way.

The house has a style like a lot of houses of its era with two bedrooms and a bathroom in between on one side of the house.

Bedroom:

This one is going to stay, get a pair of windows on that East (left) wall that will look out to the porch, and be a guest room/study.

Bathroom:

This will stay but get a little bigger, and we'll add a real shower.  Because we've been showering in one of those clawfoot-with-the-curtain deals for eight years, and that's just not a good way to make people feel welcome.

And Bedroom:

This sunshiny little room is going to be opened up to the kitchen and made into a family room.

And the rest of the house is going to make the acquaintance of the backhoe in a few days:

The back porch/hallway/laundry room/mudroom/pantry off of the kitchen.

The guest room/Lego room/storage room that clearly used to be a back porch (we know because of the precipitous grade of the floor) and was enclosed to rent out sometime in the 30's.

And the second bathroom.

Then you pop out of the back door of our cozy little house into a cozy little backyard, and your tour is done!  The new house is adding a big garage and an upstairs, with three bedrooms, so "little" may no longer apply when we're through, though I hope "cozy" still will.

By the way, if you like the color of the house, thanks!  I picked it myself.  If you don't, keep in mind that I was 8 months pregnant (in July, in South Texas) at the time.  Not to be held responsible for decisions made when ankles are the size of monster truck tires.  I go back and forth about the color even now, myself, but I see it popping up on new houses every day, so I can't have been all wrong.

A New Old House

For some reason, having a sign makes it official.

  

I'm not sure how to describe what we're doing--we're renovating, expanding, re-doing our house.  I think the way my little boy puts it really makes the most sense:  we're going to have a new old house.

Our house as it is right now IS old, that's for sure.  The city dates it to 1940 (does the City of Houston ever have the best info?  I think not.), but census records date it to before 1920, which goes along with what the previous owner told us when we bought it.  She set our house's birthdate to 1915, and I have no reason to believe that's incorrect.  The siding on the house is old wood and hard as rock, there's (still functioning!) knob-and-tube wiring in the attic, plaster walls, cast iron water pipes, and hardwood pine floors through whose cracks you can see the dirt floor of the crawlspace on a cold sunny day.

We've lived in and loved this house for eight years, which, by three years ago, was the longest I've ever lived in one place in my life.  We knew when we bought it that we'd want to update it and perhaps expand it one day, but we also want, above all, to keep the house essentially itself.  Shortly after we moved in, the previous owner came by to pick up her mail and told me, looking fondly around the room, "This house has great karma."  And it does.  This is our home, and despite the problems that living in an old house has, we love it and don't want to change what it essentially is, if that makes sense.  We're hoping that we can make our old house new so that it can continue to be our home until I'm an old, old lady and beyond.

Valentines the kids made for the house because they love it and didn't want it to feel lonely when we moved out. AW!