Near the end...

It's been a busy month, evident in my lack of postings.  We've fast-forwarded through the construction process and ended up with a Victorian house.  My contractor and spiritual advisor, Bill Zeller, pulled us through six weeks without missing a single detail.  I know he has a punch-list longer than it probably needs to be, but he doesn't let anything through his inspection until it is just right.

There are too many photos to post at once, so I'll just shoot them out little by little.

Here is a teaser for the upcoming pictures--and mind you, I have a lot of work to do on the porch still with the rails, balusters, bracket/fretwork, running trim, etc., but we love the front facade.  The new storm windows are painted and in place with the hardware (I'll show you later).  The porch floor is done as well I'll send a photo of that (I actually got the idea off of a Victorian homeowner online.

Joe

Details...

The front porch of the house, from what we can tell, is the original one.  It looks like the upright posts, floor and rails with balusters were switched out at some time, but the roof line appears to be the original.  The roof type is called a shed style roof.  Not incredibly decorative, it is basically a wedge that slopes away from the house, with no gable in the center. 
We were excited to see that the original gingerbread (that was pulled from the main gables at some point in time) was still on the sides of the porch when the aluminum was removed.

Another big surprise today was the discovery of more rafter tails at the front of the porch.

Now this doesn't look like much now, but these will be visible from street view.  The soffet itself will be painted the cream color we are using for trim and the rafter tails will be cleanly sanded and painted the rich chocolate brown we are using for architectural details.  Unfortunately, as you can see, the rafter tails were squared off on the ends, at some point in time, to accommodate a gutter board and k-style gutters--these would have been rounded at the ends.  The porch posts will be painted the cream color, as well.  As far as the detail on the porch is concerned, I am making my own brackets, rails, running trim, fretwork and balusters.  The balusters are the most time consuming part of the porch project for me.
The original balusters and porch details are long gone--and in the 70's, the previous owners did their best to put something together that looked Victorian, which for the time was exceptional--there really was very little regard for preservationist thinking at that time.  This is what they came up with.

  These are what is known as a sawn baluster.  Their profile should have an intricate design that plays with the eye--allowing you to see two or three patterns mixing and merging.  The pattern I came up with to replace them are these.

The three on the left are completed.  I have about twenty completed at this point, but I will need 45 to finish the porch.  I have the day off today and I hope to get another 20 completed.  When installed, they are placed against one-another like shown above.  They will be painted the cream color.  You can see a couple of patterns as you look at it.  I hope it is worth the incredible effort.  They aren't perfect like a professionally made item, but isn't that the point?  These are hand-sawn balusters.

Week 2 Construction

Cassie and I had a week of vacation last week.  With the reconstruction of the house starting, I was glad that we were around all week.  Our contractor, Bill Zeller, has been great.  On a hundred occasions, we have called an audible--and he never seems to mind at all. 
Money was a little tighter than we expected because of some additional work that we decided to get done while we have the workers here--but all-in-all, you would be surprised with how reasonable this whole project is going to be.  If anyone is considering taking a leap and doing this scope of work, just let me know, I am happy to share my quotes and final bill, if it may just help push you into wood restoration.

Let me go down the list of what is being done...
-Removal of all aluminum (siding, trim, porch ceiling and storm windows) Finished
-Removal of rotted wood (cedar plank, soffits, window surrounds, etc)
-Scraping and removal of lead-based paint.
-Replacement of the crown molding and sills on windows (that were hacked off during siding install)
-Replacement of margin boards, drip sill, and baseboards.
-Replication of missing and damaged decorative rafter tails.
-Replication of missing wooden eight light storm windows (taken out and replaced by the aluminum)
-Replacement of corner bead trim.
-Removal of K-style gutters and replacement with half-round gutters, downspouts and hardware.
-Priming and painting 4-color victorian paint scheme.
-Digging underground drainage pipes for gutter flow.

With all of this work, we are currently on pace.  Bill has stated that it is mapped as a four week project.

I have had prep guys here for the past week, and the carpenter shows up tomorrow. 

This is a picture of the house with some of the primer on, after scraping is done on one side.  They put primer on before major wood repair because it helps identify cracks and pits that may need filled with epoxy.  Note the missing margin boards below the attic window and above the first floor window.  Also note that the crown molding above the second floor window has been hacked off as has the sides of the window sill.  This picture still has the gutter on it, but you can see peeking out a little, the hand-carved rafter tails that were covered in aluminum.

Because of the budget, we were going to leave the aluminum wrap on the porch ceiling.  Bill told us that if it was taken off and showed damage, it could cost into the thousands to get it right.  We decided to make it a later date project, but on a whim of sheer courage of stupidity, Cassie and I decided to yank the aluminum down on Saturday, while the construction team was off.  To our joy, the ceiling was flawless!  You can see some peeling paint, but there is no rot, whatsoever.  Bill emailed me and told me that I get the 'Grande Cajones' award for even trying it.

We plan on painting the ceiling light blue (which was a common Victorian practice).   They were under the impression that this helped with insects.

Demolition

     A reflection on this process is that someone with a borderline obsessive-compulsive personality disorder should avoid the endless detail and fuss of Victorian architecture. Not actually a style of architecture, but a period of time that, for the first time in human history, common people had access to beautiful things.  Because of the creative genius of millers and metal-smiths, industrialists and investors, small factories popped up all over the US, producing turned spindlework with water powered lathes and impossibly complicated fretwork by the boxcar load ready for painting in any of a thousand manufactured colors. The beautiful, shiny tidbits that make up a Victorian parlor:  six types of wallpaper, floor, inlay, hearth, mantle, base shoe, baseboard, wainscoting, char rail, picture rail, crown molding, ceiling medallion, ceiling frieze, an electrified gas-light fixture, pocket doors, curtains and rods, ties...  Somewhere between enthusiasm and dysfunction lies 352 Lesley Avenue.
    
     My first project was flooring.  In a prior home, an arts and crafts bungalow, my wife and I rented a drum sander and finished the floors in a couple of days.  When the moldy and stained carpet was removed from our new house, it didn’t seem fitting that the floors should be done with a machine, as in 1896, when the house was built, the method of finishing wood would have been more primitive.  Over the next couple of weeks, I proceeded to sand the second-story floors by hand.  Now finished, they have retained the imperfect by shiny glory that the original Victorian homeowner would have appreciated.  Halfway through this project, my shoulders were swollen and stiff, my back and knees were agonizing reminders of the work.  Prescription anti-inflammatory medicine to control the damage I was doing to my body helped,  but the work was taking a physical toll;  I was just as committed to the process as when I started and wouldn’t have done it in any other way.

     While this project was going on, I tackled the ceiling in the Library, a 16X16 room in the center of the house, on the first floor.  After installing crown molding, I proceeded to large project of painting a frieze on the ceiling, adding wainscoting, chair rail, crown molding, yada, yada, yada.  Over the next eight weeks, I came home from work, grabbed my artist’s paint brushes and ladder, plaster and trowel, and got to work, sometimes painting, plastering or cutting wood until two or three in the morning.  There were normally three to four major projects going on at any given time.

 The good news is that after two years of this, we are roughly 3% done with the house!

The newest project is the exterior.  When we bought the house, it was covered in aluminum.  I'm sure there was a salesman in Irvington in the early 70's that made a mint convincing people that this is what houses are going to look like in the future.  What this salesman forgot to tell everyone was...

1.  The Victorian guy that designed your house knew what he was doing.  

The eves, roof brackets, yankee gutters, window trim, corbels, drip rails and window crowns that were all hacked off with a hatchet when they installed the siding, served a purpose.  They were beautiful, yes, but they kept water out, while allowing the occasional moisture to evaporate.  The only thing that aluminum or vinyl siding does better than keeping water out, is keeping it in.  If you have a historic home with siding on it, you have rotted wood under it.  Did you wonder how mice were getting in, or how we are always seeing gnats in the house?

And 2.  Aluminum and vinyl siding looks bad.   

The irony in the removal of my siding was that the wood underneath was painted EXACTLY the same color red as the aluminum the prior owners later chose.  You can see that with chippy, rotten wood, the cedar plank siding shows more shadow and depth that the almost 2 dimensional aluminum. 

 So here we are in demolition.  Construction starts next week.  We have chosen WC Zeller as the contractor--they did the beautiful arts and crafts house on Hawthorne.  

I will always love this house, but I have misgivings that it could ever look as beautiful as I'm sure it did in 1896, when a carpenter and his wife named William and Phoebe Mann finished the construction and moved the family from a farm somewhere near Plainfield, Indiana.