Working on the House

Just in case you were wondering what I've been doing with my time here these last few weeks, here's an update!

First, when we moved into our house, one thing that was immediately apparent was that our Master Bedroom was about 10 or 15 degrees colder than the rest of the house at night. This made sleeping, and especially getting into bed rather uncomfortable.

As I've mentioned, the Master Bedroom was an addition that the original builder built for his mother in law, so it is the only room in the house that does not have basement underneath. The problem was, I had no idea where the access to the crawlspace was. Then, one day, I was in the bathroom down stairs, doing what you do in a bathroom, and I noticed a funny looking panel on the wall that just didn't seem quite right for where it was. I then saw heavily painted over screws. EUREKA! The access to the crawl space!


Upon inspection, here is what I found. Basically nothing. Not one shred of insulation, no insulation on the heating ducts, zip. Well, all other house projects (I had just started scraping wallpaper in the parlor) ground to a halt as I decided that this project needed precedence.

Yeah, we basically had carpet insulating our floor. No wonder it was so bleeding cold!

All in all, the project took about a week (I had to take several days off because Steph was working, and as she works at night, and sleeps during the day, working right beneath her probably wasn't going to work...I just kept scraping wallpaper).

There were a few problems, namely that the floor joists aren't spaced at regular intervals. The ones furthest from the house are about 25 inches wide, and then the ones right next to the house are about 18. This made buying insulation problematic.

Also, being 6'5 and trying to maneuver down there is not easy. There were places, particularly under the heating ducts where I would have to lay flat on my back and wiggle underneath, and with my back flat on the dirt floor, my chest would still be hitting the duct. It was very uncomfortable...and all the dust...and cobwebs...and spiders that built the cobwebs...and bones of animals as small as mice, and as large as dogs....

But here you have it...before

...and after



I insulated the floor, the walls, the heating ducts...everything. There is still a slight difference in temperature between the Master Bedroom and the rest of the house, but considering it has three exposed walls, I think we're doing pretty good.

On to the next project! The parlor! This has been incredibly time consuming and tedious.

The walls in the parlor are as follows: Wallpaper, two layers of paint, wallpaper.
So the steps to remove it are:
Step 1 - score (puncture small holes into the wallpaper so the steam penetrates and loosens the glue), steam, scrap the top layer of wallpaper off with a putty knife.
Step 2 - Re-score/steam/scrap wallpaper with paint on it.
Step 3 - Go over the area a third time with the steamer/putty knife to get bits and pieces of glue/paper that didn't soften under the paint (The nasty brown stuff on the left in the picture).

Here you can see all three steps clearly demonstrated:

The section on the right between the wall corner and the window took a little less than four hours.

As you can imagine, if the walls are such a pain, the ceiling is infuriating. It has an extra layer of paint, which makes it much more difficult to score, which makes it much more difficult to scrape. That little 2x2 square took about an hour and a half.

But today, as I once again tackled the evil ceiling, I came across something of great curiosity. It was a boxy shape that you could just see through the wallpaper. Then, when I got to it, for whatever reason, the wallpaper on top came off a little easier, revealing this wallpaper underneath. I'm not positive, but I think that this was the original wallpaper for this room. The colors started to fade very quickly, and right now you can barely make out the yellow on the flowers (3 hours later).

Once the surrounding wallpaper was removed, there was a small sheet of metal nailed into the ceiling. I was hoping that it would be a secret stash of Depression era currency...but that was not the case. :(

And here's what it is. What it is I have no idea, but I'm going to post pictures of it on a forum of old house owners I've been reading up on, and hopefully someone there can tell me.


So that's about it. Hopefully the scraping will be done in the next week or two, and then we shall move on from there (to what I shan't tell you yet!).