Knock Knock

Here's a flip book look at the progress on the inside of the house.

It started with tearing everything out and taking the walls...

and floors down to the studs.  A plywood sub floor was put in and 2 x 6's (maybe) were lined up to make sure the 2nd floor stayed upstairs where it should be.

  

Framing of the new walls started.  Downstairs there will be a small powder room on the left and a wall next to the stairs that runs from the basement to the 2nd floor.  A temporary staircase was built so we can run up and down inspecting progress.

And, yipee!!, insulation.  Up til now it's been absolutely freezing inside.  It helped when the doors and windows were installed, but only slightly.  Ridiculously cold.  Once the insulation was in it actually held in the heat that was pumping out of the furnace in the basement.  So toasty.  Finally, drywall.  It's sad to see all that exposed brick and wood go away. Drywall is for squares. But exposed insulation isn't really a great look and freezing to death without insulation is for the birds. So drywall.  Next up is priming the drywall for paint. My car was in the shop and in the waiting room there was a xeroxed copy of "Angie's List's Top Picks" from 2008.  My mechanic was one of the top picks, another was a local painter.  So I have an appointment with the painter this week to get a quote on priming and painting the interior of the house.  He sounds normal so I'm hoping for the best.  Actually his company does a lot of work on the north shore so really I'm hoping he's not crazy expensive.  

You should check out my demo

When the demolition started it looked like a bomb had gone off inside Huron.  Messy messy messy. Getting inside was a challenge but for the sake of history I picked my way through the wreckage and took some photos.

They got rid of everything down to the studs which meant there was a lot of debris to haul out of the house.  

This toilet was not always right inside the front door.  I swear they moved it there from somewhere else.

Here you're facing the front door and you can see the backside of the stairs.  They left that ceiling fan in as long as they could because that was the only working light in the building.

This is the living room area looking into what used to be the kitchen.  What. A. Dump.

They sorted everything and took out the various materials in stages.  They hauled off a lot of the lumber already, this round was scrap metal and garbage.

                          

The demo took about twice as long as originally planned.  I've stripped wallpaper before, only to find 3 or 4 more layers underneath.  These guys were pulling off drywall and finding extra layers of walls underneath.  For a small house it was a deceptively big job.

So how did they do it?  With wheelbarrows and elbow grease. Then,once they took out the windows, they were able to pull a dump truck up over the sidewalk, straight to the front of the house and load out directly through the hole in the wall.

Then they would re-board up the window holes at the end of the day.  Better safe than sorry, you never know who'd want to sneak into a vacant house at night and steal chunks of plaster.  

Let's Make a Deal

On the second floor you can choose door number 1, door number 2 or door number 3.  And you know what, it won't matter because behind any door you'd find the same dumpy looking carpet laid in a teeny tiny room.  At least that's how it was before the demo.

But I don't want to spoil it for you before you have a chance to look around.  Starting in the back of the house on the second floor there was a makeshift linen closet right next to the back stairs.  From there you walk into the upstairs master bedroom then down the hall and on into 3 smaller bedrooms.  

There's just not much to say about the upstairs.  The rooms were small and they all looked the same.  And now they're gone.

The First Story

Here's a tour of the first floor before the demo started.  All of the downstairs windows were boarded up to keep people out while the house was empty so the pictures are a little dark.  But ignore that if you can and come on in.

There used to be a little entry hall right inside the front door.  Behind the door to the left were the stairs that lead to the 2nd floor.  The stairs were really steep and covered in bulky carpeting which explains the silver handrail. You'd hold onto it for leverage and pray you didn't bite it while going in either direction.  Those were very short, scary treads.

Now you're in the main room.  It's easy to picture the layout of the first floor, it's a rectangle shape that runs about 40 feet deep by 20 feet wide.  In the picture above you're looking back toward the front door and you can see, inside that little closet, the slanted underbelly of those treacherous stairs. Stand near that boarded up window by the front door, turn around...

and you're in the living room,  That bright light is a cutout in the wall that looks into the kitchen.

Here's the kitchen, small and efficient.  And right next to the kitchen was this bathroom.

The kitchen and bathroom used to be at the back of the house.  They were just beyond the open doorway in the picture on the left and that edge of white brick wall next to the open doorway used to be on the outside of the building.  But then someone built a set of back stairs and then enclosed them.  Then the addition was added, right off of the back enclosed stairwell, and it became the master bedroom.  The picture on the left is looking out of the master bedroom into the stairwell and beyond into the dark dark bathroom. The picture on the right is the looking into the master bedroom. The addition and the stairwell were removed in the demo and replaced by the cedar porch. 

And this is what the back stair area looked like. There was a closet that's out of frame and I gotta say that, for an old house, they had a lot of closets.  I think they had more storage space than I'll have with the new build.

Down the stairs was a door leading to the backyard and if you took a right at that landing at the bottom you'd need to duck really quickly or you'd bump your head on the way into the basement.

The stairs and the addition were slanted and rickety and not very well built.  It was nice to see all of that go away.

Front Of House

Back in 1888, when the embers from the Great Chicago Fire were still burning hot in people's memories, someone decided to build a row of pitched-roof brick cottages along Huron street.  In the 1960's some of the home owners got so tired of banging their heads on their sloping attic ceilings that they scraped their pitched roofs, built up their side walls a couple of feet and created a whole second floor of livable, inhabitable space.  My house and the one next door went through their remodels around the same time and while my neighbors opted to use wood for their build-up my owners used brick in the front and back and wood with siding on the sides of the house.  The picture below shows my house on the left, my neighbor's remodeled home and on the right a house with long-suffering owners who don't mind squat-walking through their attic as they pull out and put away boxes of Christmas decorations every year.

Now, lest you think my neighbors have left their halloween decorations out through New Years Day, this is an old picture taken before work was started on the house.  I love these decorations and hope they put them out again next year.

Addition Subtraction

The backyard has undergone quite a transformation since work started in November.  This is how it looked when I bought the house.  The little brown building on the right was an addition off the first floor which was identified in the listing as the master bedroom.  That was the first to go.

Next up was the enclosed back stairwell.  Gone are the days when you could head up to the 2nd floor, pause at the landing and survey the backyard from that little window on the left. Or reach out of the window on the right and adjust the reception on the dish tv.  Oh, and this is also when the gigantic mess took root in the backyard and refused (get it? No?) to leave.

 Now, boom, yellow siding is gone.  It was beautiful out that day.  Look at the sky.

The back stairs (and surrounding walls) have joined the trash heap on the ground.  The stairs from the basement to the first floor are still there but as you can see the stairs going to the second floor are gone, leaving a ghostly shadow etched into the brick.  Hey, be careful walking out of the back door on the top floor.  That first step is a doozie.

That lower set of stairs on the right are gonzo and there's finally a clear view of what was the original back wall of the building.  The doorway at the bottom on the left leads to the basement.  You can't really tell but you actually jump down about 3 feet to be on an even level with the basement floor.  That door and a window hole to the right will be closed up and there'll be a two story deck built off the back wall.  But why explain it when you can just look at the pictures below.

Some of the garbage has been hauled away and the little orange things that look like pumpkins are concrete footings for the back porch. Also, the electric company came by and put a meter on the wall.  The cables back there are such an eyesore but I will want electricity in the house so I guess it's one of those things you put up with.

The difference this day is a little bit of a mystery but if you look up you'll see a blue tarp hanging off both sides of the house.  It's because the roof is gone (yikes) and except for the tarp the top of the house is open to the elements.  You can see it better in pictures from the font of the house.  I'll put those up soon.

Still tons of garbage in the backyard.  I mean, that's just what you get I guess.  But...look what else!  The porch is taking shape.

What's different?  Sure, the porch is framed and wrapped in Tyvek but look at the back wall. It's gone!  Well, a bunch of the bricks have been removed to make room for the new back doors. Before they took the bricks out I asked Bill, the architect, how they could do that without the whole building falling down.  He kind of laughed and didn't seem worried about it so I didn't sweat it too much either.

Doors are in and the porch is almost finished.  It's clad in cedar and smells really good.  I don't know how long that fragrance will last, it's certainly not as strong now as it was at first, but I love love love the porch.  When you come over you can press your nose up against the wall and enjoy it for yourself.

More progress has been made. You can't really see it in this picture but the ceiling on the 2nd floor is done and this project is almost complete.  This particular day was unseasonably warm and rainy and all the snow melted and washed away.  Which was good because someone stole my snow shovel.

So just to recap...

          

It went from this                                                                             to this.

At some point there'll be railing added, like in the drawing below...   

which is good because when you're inhaling all that glorious cedar aroma you'll need something to hang onto.