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Post by Chuckie on Jul 9, 2021 15:30:13 GMT -5
Well, the harsh Kansas weather had taken a toll on our old chimney. A lot of the mortar joints had come loose, and the raccoons TRYING to take up residency was the last straw! I had FIRST contacted the bricklayer in 2017(!), and he FINALLY worked me in!! I TRIED calling several others, but nobody ELSE would TOUCH it---given the steepness of the roof and where the chimney was located. Here's a coupla "before" pix:
Note the rotted gable decoration. I'd painted a new one back in 2015(!), but that roof is too damn steep for ME too!!
They finished the job today, and I conned them into hanging the gable decor too, since the bucket truck was still there. Here's the finished product:
They did a HELLUVA job IMHO!!
Guess it SHOULD look good, for the $$ we spent!! Oh well, as Grandad used to say, those dollars are made round to roll, and they don't put no pockets in a shroud!! And we've neither chick nor child to leave it to, so...
CHEERS! Chuckie
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Post by karitx on Jul 9, 2021 18:27:41 GMT -5
Very nice work! I like your weather vane, too. I have lost my ability to both do steep roofs and to watch people on steep roofs. I would definitely have to pay someone to do all that.
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Post by pooka on Jul 10, 2021 2:39:02 GMT -5
I remember when I was there visiting for the eclipse & looked up & seeing those loose bricks hanging out. My thinking was somebody is going to get brained by raining bricks. I'm glad you finally able to get it redone. Sometimes it pays to let the professionals do the job. I'm surprised it was so tough getting anyone to do the job. Looks like they added about eight rows of brick.
On a house that old, you're always going to be playing catch up on maintenance. Especially on the exterior. At least you got a twofer by getting the bricklayer to hang the new gable gingerbread. Too bad you couldn't get them to paint the trim under the roof line too. Honestly, to be period correct, those wooden shingles on the gable should be painted too. People don't realize how colorfully houses of that era were festooned. But over time, they all ended up slathered in multiple coats of white house paint. This Old House just finished a Queen Anne Victorian. It had half a dozen different style shingles, rosettes & fanned Clapboards. They chose a more subdued paint scheme rather than the more colorful hues that were all the rage in the late 1800s.
Your house is about fifty years older than mine, & I'm in that cycle of some major maintenance issues. The roof's done, but I've got electric & plumbing woes that just can't wait any longer. I think I'm looking at having a new electric service put in. The old fuse panel from 1939, & the add-ons are at the end of their rope. My sewer line in the back yard I think has a breach, & will need digging to replace at least some of it, and there's a leak in the vent stack in my bathroom wall. The bathroom is in need of at least a minor upgrade. Then there's the kitchen floor, & on & on. I got a home equity loan for the roof & then some. So I'll have to see how far I can stretch the credit. I'm doomed to die in debt, but such is life.
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Post by Chuckie on Jul 10, 2021 12:25:45 GMT -5
At least you got a twofer by getting the bricklayer to hang the new gable gingerbread. Too bad you couldn't get them to paint the trim under the roof line too. Honestly, to be period correct, those wooden shingles on the gable should be painted too. People don't realize how colorfully houses of that era were festooned. But over time, they all ended up slathered in multiple coats of white house paint. This Old House just finished a Queen Anne Victorian. It had half a dozen different style shingles, rosettes & fanned Clapboards. They chose a more subdued paint scheme rather than the more colorful hues that were all the rage in the late 1800s. Pooka: When I FIRST put those up, the roof was cedar shake, and they looked GREAT against the shakes!!! I agree they would look better painted BUT--at the risk of repeating myself--I'm too old & fat to climb up there anymore to maintain things. If I was gonna do ANYTHING, I'd order the vinyl fishscale shingles like I had put on the end of our new carport. You can get those in numerous colours/patterns/shapes, and never have to worry about painting them. In fact, w/that roof eave over them, they'd be kinda protected from the weather, but not the Kansas sun's harsh rays though!! Here's a coupla pix of the fish scales on our new carport. I'll digress again here & state I repaired the old wren birdhouses that hung down @ my late neighbor's place. The woodpeckers destroyed the fronts, so I made new ones & painted them all bright colours. Well, I went up there 4th of July to hang the bunting, and I says to meself--I wonder if they've even TRIED to make a nest in there, maybe the HOLE is too small?, and also sometimes the female wren will make the male build MANY nests, and then she'll pick one. Well here I was up on the ladder, went to look in to see if there were any twigs inside, and about got my EYE poked out by an angry Mama Jenny Wren wondering what the HELL I was doing window peeping?!! The bunting will STAY until the babies are grown & move away!! At any rate, here's the vinyl scales: And you can even see the "wood grain" in them, they're pretty neat! And wouldn't it have been GRAND, pooka, if we'd of had that big-ass carport back when you & dwayner were up here working on the Imperial?!! Dry, on concrete, and outta the hot summer sun!! Oh well... CHEERS! Chuckie
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Post by nana on Jul 11, 2021 5:26:28 GMT -5
That chimney looks better than new! And I agree Pooka, you are never done with an old house. Usually you find yourself fixing some kind of half a$$ery that the previous owners did to buy time. And if you live in it long enough you get to start replacing the things you replaced when you first moved in. But I love my old house. New ones have their issues too, I guess!
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Post by pooka on Jul 12, 2021 2:14:54 GMT -5
Those plastic shakes on the carport look pretty good & are a great detail. Around here, a lot of old houses with ornamentation got covered up with aluminum siding ages ago, because you never have to paint it again. The down side is you lose all the decorative impact. Even my simple little house has a starburst on the gable above the front door, & there several rosettes right above the door & reeded pilaster on either side. There's a couple of serpentine brackets that brace the overhang too, but it's all covered now, so a plain little house looks even plainer. Now the siding is rather weather worn, but at least it won't rot like the wood underneath. The one good thing about my house is except for the first three years of it's life, it's always been owned by my relatives, so any half a$$ery would have been done by great grandpa, grandpa or uncle Orville, so it's all in the family.
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Post by nana on Jul 12, 2021 5:47:32 GMT -5
I don’t hold the half a$$ery against anyone…I’m guilty of my own share of it!
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Post by Chuckie on Jul 12, 2021 15:54:56 GMT -5
I don’t hold the half a$$ery against anyone…I’m guilty of my own share of it! And I snapped this photo today, that shows the gable end decoration on the FRONT of the house also--which I did INDEED install in 2015!! The colours are STILL nice & bright. Thank goodness I wrote the date/our name on the BACK, as I COMPLETELY forgotten when I did them!! 'Course I put like 7 or 8 coats of paint on them, I certainly HOPE they'd hold up alright!!! And the snow shovel is sitting there as I scraped some MORE of the oak tree acorn/sprout garbage outta the roof valleys, and I used THAT to scoop them up--works like a charm!!
CHEERS! Chuckie
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Post by pooka on Jul 13, 2021 2:04:34 GMT -5
Chuckie, the thing with your house is it's not a textbook restoration of a Victorian home. You've had fun with it adding & subtracting elements of that time period rather than being a stickler for historically accurate. I love the splash of color of the gingerbread at the top of the house against the weathered shingles.
A purist would have fits at what you've done, but hey, it's your house. Life it too short not to do as you like. A house should not be a museum frozen in time, although it can be. Some people can live that way to a point. Most of us are accumulators. Our homes & our things are a collection of what we've picked up along the way that was either functional or something about it was appealing. My things span a century or more. I'm not stuck on any one style or look, but I do favor some eras. Sometimes a comfortable chair is just that, whether it's a Victorian Morris chair or a 30s club chair, or even a 50s modern design. The style becomes secondary to comfort.
We all have our own sense of style & what pushes our buttons. You just have to be bold enough to indulge here & there. Throw caution to the wind. You can do it in small or large ways.
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Post by Chuckie on Jul 13, 2021 7:20:57 GMT -5
Chuckie, the thing with your house is it's not a textbook restoration of a Victorian home. You've had fun with it adding & subtracting elements of that time period rather than being a stickler for historically accurate. I love the splash of color of the gingerbread at the top of the house against the weathered shingles. A purist would have fits at what you've done, but hey, it's your house. Life it too short not to do as you like. A house should not be a museum frozen in time, although it can be. Some people can live that way to a point. Most of us are accumulators. Our homes & our things are a collection of what we've picked up along the way that was either functional or something about it was appealing. My things span a century or more. I'm not stuck on any one style or look, but I do favor some eras. Sometimes a comfortable chair is just that, whether it's a Victorian Morris chair or a 30s club chair, or even a 50s modern design. The style becomes secondary to comfort. We all have our own sense of style & what pushes our buttons. You just have to be bold enough to indulge here & there. Throw caution to the wind. You can do it in small or large ways. Our neighbor, Phillip, who lived next door to us until his death in 1993, always told me "that was a HELLUVA HOUSE, until my BROTHER bought it, and screwed it all up!" He took out the pocket doors, but @ LEAST used them for flooring in the attic. Phil said it had 10' ceilings (bro put in drop tile ceilings @ 8'), "all kinds of stained glass & fancy woodwork, TWO walk-in fireplaces--one in the living room, one in the dining room that had the swinging arm on it for hanging pots to cook over the fire". It also had a "wrap around front porch, with all the gingerbread on it". THAT is my goal--after hitting the lottery--tear off the stone porch his brother put on in the late '20's or early '30's, and put the gingerbread porch back on it. I WOULD reuse the stone in his porch SOMEWHERE in the new porch construction. I WOULDN'T go ahead and "wrap" it around towards the deck, but it WOULD run the length of the front of the house, and be about 4' wider than the current porch--I'd bring it out to the living room eave. S-O-O-O-O-O-O-O, ya'll need to go light a few penny candles in Church (as IF they MAKE those anymore!) so I can hit the lottery. Perhaps THEN I can afford to remodel the kitchen too, to accommodate a DOUBLE thermowell Imperial!! LOL, watch for pigs to FLY!! CHEERS! Optimistic Chuckie
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Post by mach12 on Jul 13, 2021 9:10:26 GMT -5
I'm looking at all of those tomato vines and feeling a bit guilty about them being empty from all of those great tomatoes Dwayner hauled out here from your yard. Had my wife telling all kinds of stories and she's right, there's nothing like a Midwest tomato. Man do we appreciate it!
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Post by nana on Jul 13, 2021 11:57:55 GMT -5
So often with old houses, they’ve been around long enough for their features to go “out of fashion”, then for someone to modernize it, and then for their original features to come back into fashion. Our neighbor across the street has one of those Sears Roebuck houses that you could order from the catalog that came complete down to the nails and carpet tacks. It had all kinds of exterior stuff, like a sunburst at the peak and fish scale shingle siding on the upper levels and fancy trim around all the windows and doors. I nearly cried when they decided to get it vinyl sided. I suppose it’s low maintenance now, and probably warmer in winter, but it looks blah and characterless now. I’ve never had the nerve to ask if he regretted doing it…
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Post by Chuckie on Jul 13, 2021 14:51:10 GMT -5
I'm looking at all of those tomato vines and feeling a bit guilty about them being empty from all of those great tomatoes Dwayner hauled out here from your yard. Had my wife telling all kinds of stories and she's right, there's nothing like a Midwest tomato. Man do we appreciate it! Uhhhhhhhhhh, I can NOT take credit for growing those tomatoes--Dwayner bought them @ our local farmer's market. I WAS the one, however, that suggested he do just that--as I recalled just how much MRS. mach12 enjoyed Kansas tomatoes. And he DID pay a pretty penny for them, so there's some consolation there!! LOL
So glad you got to enjoy, we had our doubts they'd make it that fer...
CHEERS! Chuckie
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Post by pooka on Jul 13, 2021 15:37:20 GMT -5
That's one of the downsides of a house that requires painting. You've got to repaint every few year depending on the quality of the paint you use. It gets old real fast. If you don't, not only does it look shabby, but once rot creeps into every nook & cranny & chasing it becomes a never ending chore. Grandma use to do the painting on my house till she got up in years & we feared having her climbing up those ladders. My cousin got a job putting up aluminum siding, so they went ahead & did this house.
It's a load off your mind getting off the painting treadmill, but on something like an old Victorian, you lose all that decorative appeal, & they end up just big funny shaped boxes. I think that's why the vinyl siding makers are coming up with stuff like the vinyl fish scale Chuckie put on his carport. They also sell PVC boards that can be cut like lumber for exterior trim-work that will never rot. They also reproduce all kinds of vinyl & urethane & PVC millwork, so you can build a Victorian style home with all plastic exterior for for that no maintenance feature, but you can still go to town with elaborate details.
Years ago when I was still renting my house from my uncle he offered to replace my old divided light windows & I probably should have let him for practical reasons. I just didn't like the idea of losing the one decorative detail that still shows. I knew the new window would have been plain single pane aluminum or vinyl jobs that would have performed well, but have no visual appeal.
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Post by nana on Jul 14, 2021 6:36:18 GMT -5
Divided light windows were because they didn’t know how to make the glass any bigger. Once they invented the process to make bigger sheets of glass, everyone wanted to get rid of those little windowpanes and have the status symbol of a big expanse of just glass. It showed you had the money to get the best, most modern things, I suppose. But not everything new is the best. One of my neighbors up the street had her house vinyl sided the way you describe, Pooka, keeping the nice decorative features and trim in plastic form. The house looks really nice, and you have to get pretty close to be able to tell for sure that it IS plastic. But these old houses all have dirt floor basements, and there’s a lot of moisture that comes up out of it. She said she never had a problem with it until she wrapped her house in plastic. Then she started getting mold in her closets and behind furniture against the wall—places that didn’t get enough air circulation. The house couldn’t “breathe” anymore. She had to put in all kinds of special venting to deal with it. She said if she had known, she would never have done it.
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Post by pooka on Jul 16, 2021 3:57:03 GMT -5
The problem there is integrating the newer technology of plastic sheathing for a house without taking into consideration a damp basement. It could be either ignorance on the part of the contractor, or he knew better, but didn't mention it because it might lose the job. Homes used to be pretty drafty by today's standards. That was partly a good thing with hygiene & sanitation of the time, plus burning wood & coal for cooking & heat. A drafty house kept it aired out. If you remember the energy crunch of the 70s, with the Arab oil embargo. That's when people started more heavily insulating, & sealing up their homes to cut down on power consumption. That's when we discovered indoor air pollution. Some of it came from the building materials like formaldehyde. Then we learned about radon gas, & as you mention about your neighbor, just plain moister coming up from a damp cellar promoting mold growth. A house has to be looked at as a series of interconnecting systems. Change one thing, & you have to check if it affects the rest. I'm sorry your neighbor had a bad experience. If that contractor didn't know better, he should have. I won't go as far as calling him shady, but maybe a little suspect. Houses build today have to have more complex high tech heating & air systems that bring in outside air as well as doing a better job at filtering the air. My house is stuck in the 1960s. That's when the coal furnace was put in, then later converted to gas. The air conditioning, maybe in the 70s. It quit working last year, & I haven't had it looked at yet. I think it's just the fan motor on the condenser outside. I just open all the windows a bit, & let cross ventilation do the trick. I have fans running all the time. It's not ideal, but it's tolerable. Owning a home can be a job on it's own. Especially an older one. There's always something that needs attention. And now & then, a big ticket upgrade. Once I get my electric & plumbing up to snuff, the next job is guttering on the house & garage/workshop, then heating & air. I'd like a tankless water heater too, but that's more of a like to have upgrade.
I'd like to peal off a bit of my aluminum siding off of the front of the gable above my front & back door, & expose the decorative brackets, & trim around the door. My simple little house has such little pizazz, I hate having it's most eye catching features covered up. That why I was apposed to losing the divided light windows. It would've become just another nondescript windowed box. But at least I don't have to paint. I'm afraid the best I'll do is repaint the porch, & I want to repaint the front door in an eye popping color. Something that stands out from a block away. I've got a pair of copper mailboxes that I've picked up over the years. I never could decide which one to put up, & I'm afraid some low life might steal it to sell for scrap. In my dreams I see a turquoise door & trimmed in the same. Copper gutters, & a copper roof over the back door, & a stylish railing around the porch. This is what it looked like, I think when they bought it in 43. Right now I've got three overgrown yews swallowing it from the windows down. They need to be ripped out & replanted.
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Post by nana on Jul 16, 2021 8:08:38 GMT -5
Every homeowner has “the list” and things get put on it and then have to wait their turn. Sometimes things jump the line by becoming an emergency, like a furnace conking out in the middle of winter, and sometimes things languish for decades. The trick is to not let things languish so long that they become big, difficult problems. Things like your gables and front door are good listers. Not likely to become emergencies, and not likely to get worse or harder to do as time goes by. They’ll be there, waiting until you get around to it, and when you do they’ll look great!
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