Walls can talk

We have all heard the expression "If walls could talk", well they do in an old house. The older the house, the more the walls have to say. But in order to hear them, you may have to open them up. It is fascinating what you can learn. In our case, it has helped piece together the history of the house, complementing stories we had heard. In other cases, it negated some stories. But one thing is for sure, walls don't lie.

According to information available online, it took 7 years to build our house. They started in 1905 and finished in 1912. The house was built for Nannette Hodgson and Hugh Gordon. The Hodgson family had their residence next door at the corner of Prince Avenue and Chase Street on the land that GA Power occupies as their local office today. Unfortunately, the Hodgson mansion was demolished in the 1970's to make room for this 2 story office building. Our house however still stands up proud. Nannette was the oldest daughter of the Hodgson family. Another sister had her house built next to ours and was known locally for years as the pink house. Luckily today the pink house is blue. It is a beautiful Victorian home even bigger than ours. One of the Hodgson brothers built a house behind the parents' house. If you ever wondered why the little stretch of Chase street between Prince Avenue and Cobb Street is named Prince Place, well it is because the Hodgson son's house is on that block and the parents didn't want their son to live on Chase Street, which was considered at the time as a poor people street.

Back to our walls. As you know we are working on building a kitchen by combining the original butler's pantry with the back room. I am being careful not to call the back room the kitchen, although it was the kitchen when we bought the house. It appears our house may not have had a full kitchen when it was built. That theory is supported by the fact that the main family residence next door had a fully staffed kitchen. The butler's pantry however had this beautiful 8 foot long cabinet / hutch combination built on site. We know it was built on site now because the back of it is made of vertical tongue and groove boards taller than the doors leading to the room. It is such a beautiful piece with mullion glass doors on top (not visible on this picture) that we have decided to restore and showcase in the dining room. But in order to get it there, we had to saw the hutch off from the base cabinets and that's how we know it couldn't have been built before it was installed. Removing this magnificent wood piece confirmed that the oak wood floors are original to the house, since they ran under the tall cabinet.



Another interesting discovery, made after taking down the kitchen cabinets built and installed in the 1980's, was the reveal of these 2 pipes in the wall. The wall is bumped out like a chimney and lines up with the chimney stack above. We had assumed that there used to be a fireplace there, especially since we found a mantel in the attic. But it turns out there never was a fireplace there after all. First, the bump out is too shallow to have housed a fireplace, even for the narrower coal fireplaces encountered throughout the house. Second, the Hanks, who owned the house for 24 years, said they bought that mantel somewhere else. So it appears as if this wall was in fact the location of a wood burning stove or perhaps two wood burning stoves since there are 2 exhaust pipes in the wall. This stove or these stoves were not the main source of heat for the house. There was an oil furnace in the basement with ductwork to every room in the house. So these stoves were probably used for reheating food and perhaps for cooking too. We also found cold and hot water pipes hidden in the wall right next to the butler's pantry, suggesting a sink used to sit right next to it.


You can also see from the picture above that the ceiling was dropped down by about 18 inches when the kitchen was redone in the 1980's. Apparently the plaster ceiling had been damaged and a modern sheetrock ceiling was built a bit lower to conceal the plaster that was falling apart. Once we took down the lower ceiling we discovered a burgundy wall paper that appears very old, however we cannot confirm if it is original to the house or not. In the space that was the 1980's kitchen used to be a big closet or perhaps a food pantry. We can tell by the different hardwood floor in that corner. They are heart of pine which are consistently installed in all closets of the house. We also found remnants of the original framing for the food pantry. So everything suggests, that if there was a kitchen, it was very small with a wood stove, while the sink was in the butler's pantry.

The wall between the butler's pantry and the kitchen is a load bearing wall. We noticed a pronounced sag right above it in the jack and jill bathroom floor. We had assumed the weight of the claw foot tub filled with water over time was to blame for the sag. Now we know it is not the case. First, the bathroom floor was poured with 7 inches of concrete under the tile making the floor very heavy. But most importantly, the support below was compromised when they cut several of the 2X4 studs right beneath it. Some do not even touch the floor. Others were built with 2 pieces on top of each other and the beam and brick column in the basement that are supposed to support the wall does not even line up with the wall. These are pretty serious framing and structural issues that we discovered because we are in the process of taking down that load bearing wall. We are making one big kitchen by combining the old kitchen with the butler's pantry, which had been subdivided to make a breakfast nook and a laundry room.

Combining these 3 rooms to make one bigger kitchen

Now that we are aware of these issues, we are addressing them by adding a steel beam to support the second story with steel columns all the way down to the basement using proper concrete footings. I will tell you more about the beam and the new big open kitchen in another post once it is all in place.

But before wrapping up this post, I wanted to share perhaps the most interesting piece of framing I have seen so far: the doorway frame above the door in the load bearing wall. In today's framing techniques, all studs are vertical and the header above the door would be much thicker instead of these 2X4s sitting flat. Nonetheless, the oblique studs are quite curious and very interesting. Unfortunately, we have not found any old newspaper, notes, or money inside this wall. Hopefully we will discover something of historical value in the future.

We've become caterpillars

There is a book called "Renovating Old Houses - Bringing New Life to Vintage Homes" by George Nash that appears to have been written just for us. Every chapter and every page illustrate typical problems encountered in old american homes and we seem to have won the lottery. This book is a wealth of information about old construction techniques, but more importantly teaches you how to properly restore your house with materials available today.

What first caught my attention about this book is what the author calls "The Caterpillar Approach". This refers to people, like us, who chose to live in the house while renovating it. As George Nash says, there are serious drawbacks to that approach in terms of time, money, and maintaining a "simulacrum of domesticity", which means trying to organize your living quarters in ways that won't interfere with entire sections of the house that are out of commission. And that is precisely what we are having to do. It is like a giant puzzle that keeps moving. At first we could use the toilet and sink downstairs, but we quickly had to demo that bathroom to address a severe foundation issue right below it. So then we moved to the largest bathroom upstairs, which ironically was the only one that didn't leak below.

Coming from a relatively recent house in Marietta with plenty of cabinets in the bathroom and going to a house with only a pedestal sink and a medicine cabinet makes us hurt for storage. Where do you put toiletries, towels, even a bar of soap or a bottle of shampoo doesn't have any place to rest. So we repurposed a china cabinet that we had when we lived in a loft in midtown Atlanta. Despite its contemporary look with dark wood and silver metal door, it actually works well in this old style bathroom. It is a good example of how mixing old and new can complement each other.

But perhaps my favorite "cocooning" arrangement (since we are caterpillars) is our temporary kitchen / laundry / mudroom.  While we are restoring what was the current kitchen, laundry and breakfast room, we temporarily relocated the laundry and kitchen to the back sunroom. To make that work, we ran new pipes for the washer and added a free standing sink. Then with some more open metal shelves and a restaurant preparation table (which we already had) we have a working kitchen complete with a toaster oven, microwave, hot plate (2 burners) and even a dehydrater.

This sunroom has quickly become the center of the house where you can do laundry, cook and wash dishes while listening to a conference call for work all without moving at all. There is something to be said about the simplicity of the temporary kitchen. Everything is close by, you don't need a ton of dishes, you wash everything by hand in 2 seconds, you see everything you own, nothing disappears in cabinets forever, and cooking is quick since everything is close by and you don't have to open doors or drawers. I am actually enjoying this basic kitchen. These are the memories you create while renovating a house. I still have fund memories of our camping nights in the den at the old house before we could use the master bedroom. At the end you're very happy with the final results, but the temporary living arrangements is what you reflect upon later in life that give you the warm and fuzzy feelings about the past.

It is true that living in renovations can be stressful and overwhelming, but we would not do it any other way. Taking the time to live in the house and getting to know every inch of the house is the best way to figure out how to improve it. If we had unlimited budget and could just hire people to do all the work in 3 months and then move in, we would not enjoy the process. I think that's why our old house was so well done in the end. We took the time to think through the smallest details and do it just right. So I hope we can do it again this time on a bigger scale.

Oh, and I wouldn't do it without this handsome man. He is a genius when it comes to this stuff!

Getting Back in the Closet

If you saw our closet in Marietta, you already know we have too many clothes. Wearing the same size is truly an advantage for Kevin and I as we essentially doubled our wardrobe when we met. But with so many clothes, we needed a closet big enough to contain it all in the new house. The solution: the front sleeping porch on the second floor with approximately 150 SF (roughly 10' X 15'). So we first moved all the wardrobe boxes there, which wasn't bad for a temporary solution since you could hang and see everything.

That's what we thought until we tried to hang clothes back in the boxes after washing them. Think again! Inserting a single shirt in a cramped box without getting it wrinkled was nearly impossible. So we had to rethink our temporary solution. However, temporary in this case could mean 2 years and maybe more.

Since the walls are technically exterior stucco walls, we were hesitant to nail or screw anything to them. Therefore the solution had to be free standing and economical. I was hoping we could find metal racks from department stores. But where can you find those things at a reasonable price? So all I could think of was a metal pole with some legs. Then it came to me: plumbing pipes!!! They come in 1/2", 3/4", 1" in diameter, in all lengths, in cast iron, in galvanized steel, etc. And with so many fittings available, I am sure we could build something custom.

Off to Home Depot we go and sure enough it seems like it will work. They were a bit low on pipe supplies though. I wanted 2', 3', 4', and 8' sections. It turns out a 10' section is about the same price as a 3' or 4' section and they can cut it to length and rethread it. So I got many sections cut out of a single 10' pipe. I drew a plan, figured out the pieces I needed, and Mike from Home Depot cut it and threaded it all for me without any problems. If you intend to build a closet like this using the 1/2" diameter like we did, make sure to limit the span to 4'. After that the bar starts to sag when you hang clothes. But if you really want sections longer than 4', then just go with the 1" diameter pipes, but be aware that it is a lot more expensive than the 1/2" diameter.

I used 90 degree elbows and T connectors to build a single hanging section as well as two double hanging sections with shirts on top and pants below with still enough clearance on the floor for shoes. I also used caps for making feet to protect the hardwood floors from being scratched.

Then for replacing drawers and shelves, we simply used open metal shelves from Costco that we had in our garage and added some baskets. This way we can stack folded T-shirts, gym clothes, etc., while socks and underwear found a home in baskets sitting on the same open shelves.

And voila our inexpensive, custom, free standing closet organization system. And when we get to doing the permanent system in a couple of years, we can always repurpose the pipes for plumbing as they were intended.

Brilliant! (OK, sorry I got carried away with this closet)