Happy 8th Anniversary Little House!

Can you believe it has been eight years!?! Goodness. Eight years. So much life lived.... Especially this year with all that has happened, it has reminded me how very important Home and Family is. I have always been so very very grateful for this little house. It has truly been our haven and safe sanctuary.

"We shape our buildings; therefore they shape us." ~Winston Churchill

This little house has also shaped me, in so many ways. How could it not! An intense year long renovation, a thousand and one decisions (for a person who hates making decisions this was really hard!) time and resources stretched to the limit and family who was always there to push and prop me up. It has taught me so much; so many house skills, how to manage time and money better, how much I am really capable of when I put my mind to it and opened up un-dreamed of avenues!

Eight years ago I wasn't really dreaming of being a landlord of multiple properties. I had a possible plan that this little house might be a rental if things didn't work out as I hoped, but I sure wasn't thinking as far ahead as having a house and two rental properties! That would have been very over whelming! 

Do you see the house to the left of my Little House? That is Sister House. She is almost identical in floorplan as my house and joined the family in August!

I wasn't really planning on buying another house this year, but the neighbor who owned it was ready to sell and I couldn't say no! I have had a dream of owning Sister House almost as soon as I got settled in my house! Sister House has been a rental for the last twelve and came with renters, so no remodeling yet. I have been trying to content myself with sprucing up the yard and tiding up the back yard. I can't wait to tackle a few more outside projects next spring!

Now on to this year's Have-Done-List!

If you are new here, every year I list out projects I have completed. I started this tradition the first year as a way to show myself that progress was indeed being made!

Most of last year was taken up with installing a boiler and radiators and dealing with projects it created. It started last October with pulling out all the old ductwork, 

By the end of January we had the boiler and radiators installed.

Early Spring the old cold air return holes in the floors were patched.

In April I also patched the entry ceiling. To run the upstairs radiator we had to cut a pretty large hole in the entry ceiling.

Then it was on to adding another layer of Shellac to the floors in June. 

And then we finally found a new rug to go with our refreshed shiny floors!

Not the longest of lists, but the boiler was a major project! I still haven't patched the heat vents and trim. I am saving that for a long winter project!

"He who loves an old house never loves in vain.

How can an old house used to sun and rain,

To lilac and larkspur and an elm above,

Ever fail to answer the heart that gives it love?"

Isabel Fiske Conant

Living Room Updates 2020

I thought it would be a good time to share more pictures of the living room, especially since we just got a new rug! Now, that sounds simple but of course there is a long Rug Story!

It has taken us about a year to find one we like! I know! We are particular. It had to be soft, plushy, but not to thick, not too dark, busy or too light colored. Nothing that would clash with the curtains, which was the biggest problem! We looked at so many! But I think we only tried five.... Still that seemed like a lot! 

Before I forget to mention, we finally decided on the Mohawk Marrakesh Damask. Mom loves the Mohawk brand and it is made in the USA! (We still had to air it out on the front porch for a week before bringing it inside. Not sure why rugs have to stink so much!)

We actually start looking for a new rug last summer as our old one didn't recover from a washing. But we were ready for a new one and it was starting to look sad and worn. In the fall, right before we started the radiator project we tried out a couple of rugs and didn't like any. Then we decided to post-pone a new rug as it was a bit of a construction zone! (I think Kerri Dog missed having a rug!)

We did learn things from our first batch of rug trials. The curtains kind of clash with any pattern, navy blue was too dark on the dark floors, and rug shopping is hard work! Lol!

This rug comes in a couple of different colors and I hadn't realized at first that last fall we tried the navy blue one (which is the only color our local Lowes carried.) So glad I took another look online and found this one! 

This wall is still rather blank... but I am thinking on it! 

Renewing Floors- 2020 Edition

Guess what we did this weekend?!? 

Yes, we shellacked the floors again! The last time was back in.... 2014! I just checked and if you are interested HERE is the link to the post about it. Goodness! All things considering the floors have held up great for six years. 

Other floors posts can be found here and here.

As you can see, there was worn patches and scratches. And I probably should have done this last year, but I had just finished up the Brick House floors and wasn't really ready to tackle more floors. That turned out to be okay as moving the radiators around put a few more scrapes and scratches in the floors. Not to mention the patching of the cold air returns.

There is something refreshing about moving all the furniture out and cleaning the floors and baseboards really well. (Actually, the dining room table, bookshelf and the sofa stayed. Everything else we managed to cram on the front porch and in the bedrooms!)

Part of this project was also redoing the little hallway floor. I never liked how it turned out, but since it was a small portion of the floor we just lived with it. Above  is the "after" with finish on it. It was quite the process to get there!

This is what I started with. I hadn't realized how scratch up it was. And obviously I needed to blend the patch with the rest of the floor.

The first step was to remove the current finish which was shellac I had put on it 2013. I tried not to use a sander as the dust gets everywhere. Instead I tried scraping it by hand with a vintage Stanley 82 scraper. It worked fairly well, but was very slow on taking off the finish. So I eventually got out a small belt sander.

Because this is maple which I tried to stain, the belt sander wasn't evening it out very well and I ended up doing a final sanding by hand with 50 grit sand paper, then hand scraping it thoroughly to smooth it. This method worked very well and I felt like it was a reasonably good place to be. I wasn't ready to spend another week sanding to try and get down below all the stain.

 The first coat was a light amber button shellac similar to what I used at the Brick House (a detailed post here). I used the same button type shellac from www.Shellac.net , just in a different shade. Yes, shellac comes in different shades! It just depends on how dark you want your orange. Lol! There isn't too much difference between the shades, but it is nice to have options.

And this is with the next coat of shellac which I put Brown Mahogany dye in. (Also from Shellac.net). I love how the dye worked! It is still a bit blotchy from the previous stain job and old sanding marks. I am not sure if it that much different from how it started, but at lest the cold air patch is blended a bit more! And the tone matches better.

  At the same time as putting the first coat on the hallway, we put a coat on the dining room. You can see the line in the picture above of "coated" and "uncoated". The button shellac is so different from the pre-mixed shellac you buy in the store. I know it is hard to tell in this picture, but the buttons are a lot less shiny, it also dries faster and harder. And for some reason not as glossy smooth. Still trying to figure that one out....

I love the afternoon sun coming in the piano window! Just waiting for everything to dry!

 We have been enjoying a clean and uncluttered look!

Now we are working on finding a new rug we like and wall art. This long wall has kinda been a stumper!

Patching Floors

Hello Friends! We are all well. I haven't been motivated this winter to blog. And everything going on in the world didn't help motivate me either. But the sun is shining, we are getting back to normal and things are looking up! I hope all of you are well.

Today, I am here to talk about patching floors. And in this case, patching old cold air returns. True to 1920's science at the time, the cold air returns were huge! 

First, I will briefly mention the cold air return in the picture above. My brother did this one so I can't take credit. But I did watch carefully and that gave me courage to tackle the other two! This cold air return was also a lot smaller as it was a later edition. I suspect it must of been cut in the late 40's/50's when the heating system was updated.

Not so large at all!

Before the sub-floor was patched, but after the floor boards are cut back.

 This is the dining room cold air return. Inconveniently placed just behind the dining room table. (And yes, we had a couple of incidents of chairs legs getting stuck in the grate and people suddenly falling off their chairs.) We were glad to see this one go!

Mandy and I added a couple of new blocks on the edges to make sure the subfloor would be stable. In the photo above you can also see that part of this area has a decided tip. It is a small window bump out. And given that it is a few years shy of 100 years old, a bit saggy. Which made it a little tricky getting the new plywood sub floor mostly level!

 We finally got approximately level. Then the next step was cutting back the old floor boards to "feather" in new. As you can see, the "new" boards match almost perfectly! I raided my older brother's stash of old flooring and after a good clean, the boards blend right in! That is one advantage of using the same shellac finish as old flooring! 

And after a bit of hammering, screwing and cutting, the new boards are in! On this patch we were lucky as the tongues were facing toward the wall. Which means we started laying the boards from the front edge of the hole to the back. And the last board is held in place with a couple of face nails or nails through the top of the board. 

 Naturally, the cold air return across the room in the hallway was quite as easy.....

For one thing, the tongues go the other way, meaning we had to start at the wall and work out from there. But first I had a little trouble locating a couple of old maple floor boards. Our local salvage place was out, the older brother didn't have any the right width... finally I discovered my brother-in-law had a stash! Yey for family members that are also into old houses!!

 One tool I would highly recommend for a project like this is oscillating multi tool saw. Very neat tool! It is a little hard to cut super straight when cutting straight down with a vibrating tool, but a lot neater than a hammer and chisel.

Once the old boards were cut back, new boards cut to length we were ready to screw in the boards. That is when we discovered we should be working from the wall out! Opps! Just a few screws to unscrew and we were headed in the right direction. All went good until we got to the last board next to the old floor. The tongue on the old flooring was also ready cut off , so that was good. But the new board was warped and refused to go in it's place. (Even when boards aren't warped it is tricky getting the last board in place!) So we unscrewed the next to last board, wedged the warped board in place and screwed it down and then put the next to last board in. Except it was a close call..... We hammered and wedged and pushed for all we were worth and it would not go! We scraped and chiseled edges and it still would not go. Mandy and I just kept banging away and just about the time we were going to give up, it popped into place! 

I told Mandy to sit on it while I ran to get the trim nails! We did not want it to even think about coming out!

This one was a bit odd to feather in. At the one end is my bedroom door, so couldn't go that way. The other end is the bathroom door way. And since I am not 100% sure how well I am going to get the old and new to blend I didn't want to feather into the doorway. 

So I ended up only feathering an inch or inch and half. It still turned out really well! So I am happy!

The next project is to try and figure out how to blend the old and new. The old floor is maple. It was covered with 1940's linoleum when I bought the house. After pulling up the linoleum, we used a steam mop to heat the black tar/glue stuff to get it off. The heat and steam opened the pores in the wood and allowed it to take up stain. (Normally maple is notoriously hard to stain! But I didn't know that!) I am not sure I can replicate that whole scenario on the new boards.

But I will keep you posted!

Boilers and Radiators

You know how when you plan a big home renovation you know it is going to be totally worth it, but know before you get to the amazing finish there will be chaos, many decisions, hard work and furniture moving? And when you emerge, slightly frazzled and very much poorer, after the whole ordeal and say "Yes, it was worth!", but that was a LOT of hard work!! Whew! (It amazes me I always forget this! Lol!)

That is where I am right now. Recovery mode. 

We absolutely love our hot water heat!! It is heavenly! My allergies are great! The upstairs is warmer than we anticipated!(One problem we were hoping to solve.) It really is a dream for an old un-insulated house. We cannot tell what the weather is like outside anymore. (Old house dwellers, you will know what I mean. The it-feels-slightly-more-drafty-then-usual-must-be-windy-outside. Or yep-temps-are-falling-the-corners-are-colder.) We feel insulated! It is so even, no warm or cold air drifting around the house.

To get to this heavenly warm bliss took four months, quite a few late nights and several long Saturdays. And we had a blast! Thank the Lord for family. My younger brother was as intrigued by the idea of retro-fitting hot water heat as I was! 

It is hard to know where to even start! Two years ago I bought a house full of radiator, which had been waiting in the garage. We measured each radiator and figured the btu's, then spent several weeks discussing which radiator would work for which room and where to put it. We finally decided we needed two more small ones for the bedrooms, which we were able to find at a radiator salvage place in Duluth, MN.

This summer I worked on scraping and painting the radiators, which I posted about HERE and then Mandy and I removed all the old duct work, which you can read about 

HERE. So glad we don't have to do that again! Yuck!

The next week we started plumbing in the supply lines and install radiators! This is the one in my room. 

The project ended up falling into three phases: Phase #1- installing main supplies and returns, installing boiler, installing downstairs bedrooms and bathroom radiator, Phase #2- Switching dinning room radiator and moving living room radiator, Phase #3 piping in and installing upstairs radiator.

Lots of big pipes! We used 2" black iron for the supply and return lines. Then 1 1/2" and 1" pipes depending on the size of the radiator. Thankfully the brother had plenty of muscle to screw them all together! I stuck with organizing all the different sized fitting, handing tools and putting Teflon tape and pipe paste on fittings.

We installed the main supply and returns, the piping to both bedrooms and the bathroom. This is the bathroom radiator above. In floor radiant heat 1920's style! This style of radiator was made to fit perfectly between floor joints or you could hang it on the wall. They knew how to make the most of small spaces back then! The kitchen radiator was also pipped and installed. We couldn't install the dining room radiator or the living room as we had to do a little shifting around, which I will explain later. For the radiator upstairs in Mandy's room we added tees and valves and figured out where the pipes would run, but her radiator was phase #3! So that comes later! 

Finally the day before Thanksgiving the boiler arrived! It took a few weeks before it was up and running, but as soon as we could we connected it to the kitchen, bedrooms and bathroom radiator and fired it up! At this point we had part of the house running off the boiler and the living and dining room running off the hot water heater. But not for long!

We made sure to put plenty of gauges in! I love running down and checking the pressure and temperatures. This also helps us know if the system is running correctly and efficiently. Because we used old radiators we have also ready had a couple of issues with clogs in the system. (We think a mouse was eyeing up a radiator for a winter nest! Lots of debris floating around the system. Thankfully we have a strainer before water goes back into the boiler.)

Whew! That was the end of Phase #1! Just in time for a cold snap!

On to Phase #2 which required a couple of strong guys to move the radiator currently under the living room window upstairs! We were all a little apprehensive, but guys were pros and it was up the stairs and in it's new home in seven minutes. Then they moved a slightly larger radiator from the garage into the living, but hold on... Is that a hole in the floor?!?

It just so happened that there was an old cold air return right where the legs of the radiator was going to sit! I was prepared and had some salvaged oak flooring (from the elder brother) handy to patch it up.

Can you believe that is the hole? I can't take credit for this one, the brother did most of the work. But I have two more to do, so hopefully I can post a couple of tips. It really helps to have old wood floor boards that match your floor color! I was really surprised how well they matched. I think it helps that the floors and the patched boards all have shellac on them!

Before those radiator hauling guys left, we also had them move this giant radiator from the corner of the kitchen/dining room/hallway to the other side of the kitchen doorway. We had originally put it next to the hallway because we knew it would help heat the bedrooms and because there was an old heat vent we could run the temporary pex piping down. Moving it heats the dining room more evenly and prevents the bedrooms from getting over heated now that they have their own radiators. 

The radiator placement was the most discussed. Should it be centered on the wall? Should we leave it next to the doorway? We finally decided to put it in the corner which would leave enough room for a piece of furniture next too it.

As you can see, we ended up moving almost all the furniture in the dining room and living around! I will post about that later.

That was also the finish of Phase #2.

On to Phase #3! Once the radiator was upstairs we just had to get pipes up. After the a lot of figuring and measuring we decided the best way was to run the pipes up along the corner of the entry next to the coat hooks. We would leave these pipes exposed as we knew that was not 4" thick, it was only 2". (Once I paint the pipes, they will look like they have been there a hundred years!) 

But the only way to get across the room was to run the pipes inside the floor, so we had to cut a hole in the entry ceiling. Nothing I can't fix, but it is always sad (and messy!) cutting into plaster! This was the last phase of the project and we were so ready to get it done! Maybe this project has more than three phases? Phase #4 is cleaning up. Can't wait for spring to give the basement a good clean out! It is disastrous! In the mean time, I can work on plaster and floor patching and trim patching....

In case you are curious, here is a break down in costs. It is such a different project, we didn't really have a good idea what it was all going to cost.

1100 sq. ft house with 8 radiators

9 radiators from Craig's list - $400

2 radiators from Northland Radiator in Duluth, MN - $300

boiler - $3000

pipes, fititngs, valves - $3000

Total - $6700

I love these radiators! And I am so grateful my brother was willing to tackle this project with me! At times it was a family project as occasionally the only way he could find available time was to bring the kids along. It made for a fun family circus! And I hope we have instilled a little renovation love into the next generation!

Let me know if you have any questions friends, I would love to talk more about my hot water heat!