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Oct 12

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Pretty ordinary #001

To prove how much of a gardener I am, I didn’t know that camellias were trees, or that they thrived around these parts.  In my mind, they’ve always been the large bushes that live in cemeteries in the deep south and bloom in the dead of winter.  Nevertheless, I’m happy to find that we’re the owners of several impressive camellia trees, most of them spread across the front porch of the house.  There’s one in particular, at our front steps that probably hasn’t been pruned in twenty years.  It’s shaggy and overgrown, but it’s blooming and the results are impressive:

  

Oct 7

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Before tour: the library

It’s time to tour the ordinary.  Stop one is the library, probably my favorite room in the house.  Here’s how it looks from the outside:

Library’s on the left.

This room is rumored to have been a separate building that was tacked on to the main structure sometime in the early 1800’s.  There are competing theories about what the structure might have been.  The one that seems most likely is that it was a lawyer’s office, particularly since its dimensions and shape closely resemble those of others close-by.  We’re only a few hundred yards from the courthouse, so it’s not a stretch to think that an underused office might have been repurposed as a house addition by a former owner.

Another theory is that the structure was once part of a Female Academy based in Hillsborough.  A trustee of the school, Stephen Moore bought the house in 1834 and may have attached a school building onto the house when the academy failed to thrive.

Or, the addition might have simply been built in place.  The roof pitch and width of the structure match the main house exactly, and a pair of windows in the attic mimic the the attic vents of the main house.  The chimney is a mini-me of the larger versions on the main house.  Though less intriguing, the site-built scenario seems most likely.

The interior is well-proportioned and bright, with light entering on three sides.

Highlights of the space are a fireplace, built-in bookshelves, a large rear door with an original rim lock, a faux-painted closet door and stairs up to an attic and down to the basement.

Accessibility concerns were clearly not paramount in the early 19th century; the library is a full four steps below the level of the main house.

We envision this room ultimately becoming our den and primary hang-out space.  It’ll be an informal living space with a place for the TV out of the more formal room upstairs.  We’d like to put in a woodstove and add more bookshelves.    The library is first on our list for interior renovations, but since we have to pull out the baseboard radiators to work on the walls, we’ll have to wait on central A/C before we get to it…yay, old hou$e$!

Oct 2

Color me impressed

This blog is ostensibly about a house, and yet that house hasn’t been featured very prominently yet.  That’s all about to change because we signed a contract to have the place painted last night.  We’re spending a small fortune to have it done, for a number of reasons.  The paint’s in bad shape, for starters.  We’ve got the full spectrum of paint problems: peeling, cracking and alligatoring are all well represented.  In some places, the layers of paint are too thick and they’ll eventually have to come off altogether.  And, of course, there’s lead.  If we assume the house has been painted every 10 or 15 years on average, there are somewhere between 15 and 25 layers of paint on the siding.  All but the last 3-5 are likely to have lead in them.  Our painter will be taking the requisite precautions to deal with this: spreading plastic around the perimeter of the house, wet scraping, sanding with HEPA vacuums and requiring the workers to be in suits and respirators.

Once the house is prepped and washed, we’ll be using the Cadillac of primers: XIM Peel Bond, a product I used on my last house.  It’s like painting with Elmer’s glue, but creates a super-pliable, breathable base for the paint layers that follow.  It also builds heavily, helping to smooth the wall surface and bond the remaining paint to the wall.  It worked wonders on my last house, but this job will be a true test of its effectiveness. The two top coats will be Sherwin Williams SuperPaint.  I used the SW Duration line previously, but our contractor warned us that it has a tendency to aggressively shrink as it dries, pulling old paint right off the walls.

But, I bore you with technicalities.  What you really want are color selections, right?  Well, without further delay, here are the three final selections for the siding:

This turned out to be an advertisement for why you should ALWAYS get real live samples on the walls for this kind of paint job.  The camo-green on the right was supposed to be a whole lot browner and the supposed “slate” blue in the middle went a lot lavender on us.  Fortunately, Weezie and I both love the third color on the left which is called “Link Gray“.  It’s a dark greeny-gray chameleon color that changes throughout the day based on the light hitting it.

I’ve told several people that I’m bored of non-committal architect colors.  The houses that make you stop and say, “Holy cannoli, look at the paint job on that house!” are not painted timid tan.

This time, I’m going bold and I have a feeling it’s going to turn out to be a great decision.

Sep 27

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DOT saves the day

Do you ever say or write something and wonder if it’s the first time in the history of the world that it’s been said or written?  The title of this post is one of those phrases.  In my last post I wondered if we’d ever encounter success having the tree that fell near our yard cleaned up.  After too much time on the phone with various government agencies, the North Carolina DOT finally relented and showed early this morning to remove the tree:

Yes, I took the photo out of my upstairs window because, yes, NC uses old-fashioned inmate labor to keep our roads clear.  8 dudes, 1 backhoe, 1 dump truck and a chainsaw made quick work of it.  Many thanks to the secretary at the local DOT yard who graciously received all of my annoying phone calls.

Sep 25

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Arboreal angst

During last weeks test-run for monsoon season, a tree fell near the corner of our property.  That near is important.  I found the following upon arrival at the scene:

See that bundle of pink tape in the foreground of the photo?  That’s our property corner.  The tree in question, running horizontally across the top of the photo, never has been and never will be on our property.  Everything beyond the corner marker is in the street right-of-way.  Unfortunately, our street is maintained by the state, meaning we’re dealing with DOT to try to arrange removal.  They have no particular incentive to remove the tree quickly since it’s not impeding traffic.  We, however, are trying to preserve neighborly harmony, despite the fact that this really isn’t our problem.  Yes, the tree happens to fall on our side of the line, but the line hangs a hard left and heads east before getting to that tree.  Summary: it ain’t ours!

Nevertheless, I have a sneaking suspicion that due to stereotypical government-style bureaucracy, we’re going to end up cleaning up a tree that’s not on our property that fell into a yard that’s not ours either.

Sep 17

A Sunday well spent

Some people wake up on Sunday morning, say “screw it, it’s Sunday”, roll over and go back to sleep.  Others get dressed to the nines and amble off to church.  I eat my Lucky Charms, down a tall cup of black coffee and decide that it would be a great idea to tackle this:

“This” being the low brick planter built smack against the house, a big no-no for lots of reasons.  The planter created a trough that collected all manner of evil things against the foundation and siding: water, dirt, leaves and bugs among them.

So, shovel and sledge in hand, I set to work demolishing the ugly masonry edifice. Fortunately, it wasn’t the stoutest brick wall on the block, so aside from being heavy, the work wasn’t too bad.

Here’s where most folks call it quits, take a shower and sit down for an afternoon marathon of Mad Men Season 5.  I decide to install the mother of all drainage systems:

Worried about the water coming from the east side of the house, I devised this system to divert it around the foundation and into an existing terra cotta drain I found below the brick patio.  I prefer to use rigid PVC drain pipe in these scenarios since it’s less likely to develop low spots when you backfill and it’s less susceptible to intrusion by tree roots.  But, to pick up the downspout in the foreground and jog around the stair foundation, I had to transition to the more common black corrugated pipe.  Everything works great: the first hard rain sent water gushing from the outlet at the bottom of the patio.

A Sunday well spent, the old house way.

Sep 9

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Goodbye, buddy.

Last Wednesday, I had to say goodbye to a dear friend.  Jacques, my French Bulldog, began having seizures three weeks ago.  By 3:00 a.m. on that morning, he’d had four fits in a single day and hadn’t recovered between them.  We’ll never know for certain, but his breed, age and symptoms all point towards a brain tumor.  It was one of the hardest decisions of my life.  I got Jacques when he was one from a family that couldn’t (or wouldn’t) keep him.  He was chubby, enthusiastic and fun.  He saw me through the highest and lowest moments of my 20s, acting as a constant companion through a turbulent decade.  For plenty of people, a dog is “just a dog”.  I can’t understand that; Jacques enriched my life beyond measure and there are no words that can convey how much I miss him.

Jacques loved life.

He loved running in the snow:

He loved sprawling out when he was hot:

He loved beer:

And he especially liked being curled up and comfy:

He didn’t like playing Santa Claus:I wanted Jacques to be close to us in death, as he preferred.  Just outside the door to the kitchen used to be a green thing, half wisteria, half rotten tree.  It was ugly and had to go:This thing was brutal to get rid of.  It took two solid days of digging, cutting, hacking, chopping and cursing before it was gone.  But in its place lives Jacques’ tree, a crape myrtle that’s red like he was:

We sprinkled his ashes around the root ball as we planted it.  It was a cool, sunny Carolina day, the kind Jacques loved.  He never got to take full advantage of this amazing yard, but it gives me comfort that he’ll rest here eternally.

Life doesn’t feel right without him.  I hope that we’re shouldering the suffering he might have been subjected to if we had kept him going.  I hope that he somehow knows that I did what I did because I loved him.

Goodbye, buddy.

Sep 3

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#1 problem

One night two weeks ago, I shuffled to the master bathroom for a midnight tinkle.  I finished my business, flushed, and noticed that the toilet also went tinkle.  It turns out that the gasket that sealed the tank to the bowl was completely dry-rotted and only had a few flushes worth of life left by the time we moved in.

I wasn’t too distressed since I already had the house’s toilets in my replacement bullseye.  If there’s one piece of your home that should NOT be ye olde, it’s the toilets.  The crapper in question was “vintage” (code for filthy, discolored and barely functional) and had a big ol’ badonkadonk:

Almost every plumber’s preferred toilet brand is Toto.  Their toilets are purported to be extremely reliable, and the Drake model is a mainstay in plumbing circles.  You might think that toilet technology would have been perfected by now, but leave it to Japanese engineers to develop a toilet that seems like it could flush a horse with only 1.28 gallons of water.  Witness the Drake 2:

I prefer it to the normal Drake for its svelte tank profile and miserly water usage.  It’s not a budget option at $350 with the soft-close seat, but I’m reasonably confident that I’ll never have to replace it.

Installing a toilet isn’t nearly as shitty (literally or figuratively) a job as you might expect; I finished in a couple hours.  The black shims are necessary due to our old-house slanty floors.  I’ve also got to cut down the bolts and install the cover caps, but otherwise the master toilet is officially back in action.

Aug 22

Weed whacking

Last Tuesday evening, I felt the urge to do something, anything to start to make this house ours.  Often, short and sweet projects are the most satisfying, so I concentrated my energies on a tiny patch of “garden” next to one of the back porches.  It looked like this:

After an hour of chopping, pruning and digging, I managed to tame the vegetative orgy, and the remaining plants were reduced to two: a scraggly rose bush and one lone daylily.  I’m not sure that either of these are right for the spot, but they’ll do for now.  Check out the dead-sexy rubble stone foundation that was hiding behind all those weeds:

I finished up by pushing the dirt around a bit to make sure that there’s positive drainage away from the house.  It won’t make the cover of Country Gardens anytime soon, but baby steps, right?

Aug 19

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Week one, done.

We made it.  After all the dreaming and scheming, planning, packing and moving, we live in Hillsborough.  Just to make sure our first week here was interesting, Meg, the world’s laziest dog, pushed the limits of irony by tearing her ACL.  To ratchet the tension up another notch, Jacques (dog two), convulsed himself awake with a seizure on Thursday morning.  Everyone is doing fine, except perhaps for the people.  Oy.

Between unpacking and cleaning, I’ve done a few things that qualify as home-improvement this week.  Waking up on this rainy Sunday morning, I was curious why all the storm windows seemed to be leaking at the meeting rail.  Water, as you know, is a building’s worst enemy.  It’s an insidious foe, flowing relentlessly downward until: a) it gets to an ocean, or b) something else stops it.  If that something else happens to be your home, sooner or later you’ll have problems.

After a quick examination, it turned out that EVERY storm window in the entire house had the outermost storm panel set at the bottom of the window.  Which means that all the rain that hit the top panel flowed behind the lower panel.  Which resulted in pools of water on the window sills whenever it rained hard.  Fortunately, there are about 278 layers of paint on those sills, so they don’t seem to have rotted at all, but they were filthy.  Really filthy:

So today, I wandered around with the vacuum and some Lysol wipes and paper towels, reversed the storm window panels so that they actually shed water, and scrubbed all the window sills clean.  It wasn’t glamorous work, but it was fundamental and easy and I’ll rest better knowing that my window sills aren’t collecting puddles of water every time it rains.  And they look better, too:

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