Up On A Roof or Down In The Basement

Steve was Up On A Roof (I hear James Taylor singing in my head). He went up to do some tuck pointing around a few bricks, and fill in a gap where one was missing.  Since we had the chimney height reduced last year,  he has been wanting to get up there and fix that last gap.  The chimney is blocked off and not used for anything, so it's just basically for decoration. Someday, if we ever were to redo the roof with metal,  we would probably take it down completely.

The chimney is pretty ugly. Originally, I had been thinking that since the bricks don't match in color, it would be nice to just paint over each brick surface with my red paint on a roller and make everything match. But once he got up there he said the lower darker red bricks are much rougher and will be harder to paint, compared to the lighter bricks above. 

So instead, he is going to parge over the entire surface with masonry cement and paint the whole chimney solid red. It's going to warm up later this afternoon so he will work on it then. For now, he took care of wire brushing down any loose spots and dirt. He gave it a light scrubbing with a degreaser and he will let that dry.

While he was up on a roof, I was down in the basement. Well, almost. I gave a fresh coat of paint to the bulkhead doors that lead to the basement in the newer half of the house. They had gotten slobbered up when Steve was painting some of the white trim and siding up above, especially the soffits--- he got some drips that landed down on the bulkhead. So it needed a new fresh coat of my red paint anyhow.

I never wanted the bulkhead in the first place. 

That's the whole reason why I got the bedroom window!

See, we made a deal. Last year Steve wanted to rip down the regular shed type entrance to the basement that had an upright door and a roof, etc  I thought it was fine the way it was.  

Here is the blog post about that process:  and-walls-came-tumbling-down   I didn't like the idea of the bulkhead cuz you have to lean over, open up the slanted doors and walk down into it like going into a bomb shelter! LOL. So if he wanted to put on these bulkhead doors, the deal was then the space left over on the wall I could have the big window in the bedroom. So he got what he wanted and I got what I wanted --- and it's finally done! 

Well, almost.

This morning, right before we were making breakfast together, he took out his ladder and the two red shutters that I had already painted for the bedroom window.

While I was watching him, I was standing on the patio looking at the surface and texture of the new siding we had put up. This isn't plain old vinyl siding. It's called LP Smart Siding and it has a beautiful texture embossed into the wood strips. It's put on a strip at a time just like regular old wood siding but it lasts a lot longer. I like it so much better than vinyl siding. I like looking at the natural texture of it where it looks like it could be real wood.

Anyhow, back to Steve. 

Zip Zip Zip in no time flat he had both of the shutters mounted on each side of the bedroom window.

Now we just need one more set for the bathroom window. They will be 74 inches tall and not as common as the shorter ones. I have been watching the ReStore shutter bin for a number of months, and haven't seen any that tall. 

Here is the East side and back yard that we did this year. New siding, new windows all around and the screen door, along with the patio stones and rain chain. We fixed and painted the foundation surface too. The bulkhead doors are the same color as the shutters and picnic table, just the angle and light make them appear brighter.

We didn't find any shutters on our last stop at the ReStore in Marinette. But he is going to Green Bay today with the neighbor to do some other shopping. He will stop and look at the ReStore in Green Bay. But if they don't have them he might just bite the bullet and pick up a full price set at Home Depot! Can you imagine that? Paying full price? At the ReStore we usually find them for $5 each. At Home Depot it'll cost about $60 or $70!

Okay, back down into the basement for me. I had a few more bunches of my coleus that I had dug up in the yard and some that I had rooting in glass jars in the window in the kitchen. Time to get them planted for the winters retreat in the safety of the basement. I keep enough plants growing all winter in the south-facing windows. In the Spring, when the danger of frost has passed, I am able to transplant them outside again

This year, Steve made it easier for me to water the flowers in the basement. I used to have to carry buckets of water down from the kitchen each and every week, all winter long. Hauling buckets of water from the kitchen, through the She Shed, through the side door, outside through the snow, then lean over and lift up and go down through his dang bulkhead doors, down the steps and into the basement. Now, it's so much easier because he added a laundry sink to the basement. Not only is it good for watering my plants, but it's right there for washing out paint brushes and roller pans and even to bathe the dog.

I have some painting of the trim to do to finish out the inside of the bedroom window. Also the big wide old original mop boards can be put back into place.  We are recreating the top crown and egg and dart trim for the top of the new window, as well as the top of the new closet trim.  Then it will match the other window and both doorways. 

So that's it for our home improvements today. Like I said, Steve is off to Green Bay with the neighbor for a couple hours. I will finish up this blog and get my own stuff done.  I might get in a couple hours of quilting or weaving.

This evening we're babysitting three of the grandkids so I have a list made up of fun stuff to do after we pick them up from school.

Let There Be Light! Lots and Lots of Light

My friend Merikay reminded me to put some time-capsule type notations in the wall to the people of the future. We had done this in previous homes we had lived in every time we did some remodeling or construction. I'm glad she reminded me to do it.

Here's our portraits 

and the date

Then I added a little descriptive notation along the side of the window framing.  Maybe someone in the far ahead future will see it and look around further? 

In one of the wall cavities between the studs, underneath the window, I decided to do even better than that. I wrote down a quick history of the home owners as far back as I knew.  I took the wonderful hundred-year-old construction figures paper we found the other day, and put it into a plastic sleeve protector. I also typed up a message to the people of the future, folded that and attached it inside the sleeve as well. I tacked it right to the wall.

I wrote:

To the people of the future:

     We found this calculation sheet in the wall in 2021 when installing this new window. There was never a window before in this section of the wall. The sheet must have been from the late eighteen hundreds or early nineteen-hundreds when this section of the house was built.

     We love this home and have been restoring and updating it since we purchased it in April of 2019. We are Steve and Karen Pfundtner.

We bought it from Warren and Peggy Burton. They purchased it in 2015 and did a lot of updating. 

     Previous to 2015, for many years it was a rental home owned by Melva Heise, Widow of Lloyd Heise. They lived here in the 1950s and started raising their family. That is when the structure to the south was joined to the original structure on the north. We never found out the location of where the structure was moved from. Lloyd built the newer foundation and the fireplace, as he was a practicing Mason.  As their family grew, they moved to a new farm out on Highway 22 near Little River. That is when they converted this home to a rental unit. It had a rough life and was quite beat up until 2015 when Warren and Peggy Burton bought it. .

     Prior to that it was owned by a Donald and Grace Allen, and they had a son named Douglas. That was in the 1940s.

     Prior to that, the first owner I can find on record was a Mary Bateman, a widow, 77 years old in the 1930 census. We were told she had a big chicken shed out on the back foundation and raised chickens to support herself. We were told she died after a small fire in the kitchen area, where there was a wood stove at one time. We found the burned wood remnants underneath the flooring when we did work on the laundry room.

     That is all I know about the home, because the records are incomplete prior to that. The home and property were part of the township and not the city of Oconto. No records got transferred at the time of annexation. 

Steve and Karen Pfundtner -

Sept 15, 2021

I hope whoever finds it in the future will be pleased with gaining some insight and knowledge about the home. I know I would be excited to find something like that in the wall.

~~~~~~~~~

Now onto the construction itself. The next step we needed to do was to make a temporary wall to hold up the ceiling joists while he cuts away the studs on the side wall. Once the header is in place, the temporary wall gets removed.

Here is this happy man with his temporary wall built up into place. Please read his shirt. That will make you smile too.

Usually,  I am right by his side during all phases of construction. We are doing this project together. But I happened to be taking care of canning up some more tomatoes in the kitchen, while he started to build his temporary wall.  I could hear him hammering away and he buzzed back and forth to the saw in the garage.

I casually asked Steve: "what did you pad the floor with to protect our hardwood flooring?"

ACK!!!

it was one of my good oriental runner rugs!!!

"Don't worry, I didn't put any holes in it", he said.  Ugh! 

He soon took down the temporary wall,  and vacced the carpet until it was as good as new.  

Here is the completed construction: 

• -the header across the top to help support the joists, 
• -and then the King studs and Jack studs on each side 
• -and the cross framing and lower wall for underneath the window.

That was enough work for one day. We left it this way overnight and we still slept in the bedroom. It only got down in the fifties, so it wasn't too bad without insulation or a wall in our bedroom.

~~~~The next day~~~~

Our next step is to actually cut away all of the exterior wall boards from the outside and open up the hole to place the window in. To prevent the house getting filled with sawdust, we covered the inside surface with a couple wide strips of rolled plastic floor protector. This is used on carpeting at open houses to eliminate soil from foot traffic. We used it when we changed the window in the motorhome, and still had some left on the roll.

With careful measuring, and drilled pilot holes, we were able to open up the wall!

OH MY GOSH!

LET THERE BE LIGHT!!

All of the messy sawdust stayed contained in the opening and held back with the plastic protective runner material. What a great idea and it kept all the mess out of the bedroom. It also kept the circling wasps and hornets were looking for a way in this fall to find a warm cozy home for the winter.

This was mid-day. Now we had to wait wait wait until our son-in-law would be home from work in the evening to help Steve lift the window up into place. 

But----- I think we all know Steve, don't we? 

He figured out that by removing the four smaller panes on each side of the window configuration, it would reduce the weight enough that he and I could manage to lift the window ourselves. Smart thinking!  We may be getting old, but we are still pretty strong. 

We loaded it up on a little furniture dolly in the garage to wheel it across the floor to the back opening where it would be closer to the back of the house.

Then we transferred it to a hand truck cart and very carefully hauled it across the backyard and around to the location where it was going to be installed. I was very nervous about this step. But Steve handled it with ease.

Working carefully, the two of us together were able to lift the window up onto the scaffolding and get it balanced on end, ready to lift it into place. I had the chance to take one quick picture before I had to set my phone down and help lift the window up into the opening.

Once we got it into the opening, Steve held it into place while I rushed around to the inside and helped level it. We shimmed it up here and there and got it correctly installed, and Steve was able to attach the outside flange all the way around the open frame. Yay! The window is in!

We slid the four smaller window panels into place right away, trying to keep out as many bees and wasps and hornets as we could. One managed to sneak in, but we shoo'd him right back out. 

Oh my, this made such a huge difference in the master bedroom. To have all that light coming in where before it was dark and plain. This is a "wide angle" shot to show the room. Previously there had only been the one window on the side wall by the bed. Binney is sure enjoying the view as well! 

This was a lot of work to get this far.

But it is worth it. 

This is why we did this, because the view out the back is just amazing. Our backyard is 2 and 1/2 acres deep. Then behind us is the Northeast Wisconsin Land Trust Sanctuary land and beyond that is the protected state wildlife marsh. It's such a beautiful backyard and we spend a lot of time looking out the windows in the she shed. Now we will have just as beautiful of a view from our bedroom.

That was enough for yesterday, but we did put up the Venetian blinds that we had ordered. We can leave them open at night if we wish to look out and watch those sassy deer that come to hang out in our backyard. Or we can close it down for privacy.

First thing this morning before it was light out, I opened up the blinds. It was delightful to watch the sunrise and have the golden light come streaming in across the bed

Now that the window is in place, Steve started working on the trim around the edges from the outside. About halfway through, the dang air nail gun malfunctioned. He tore it apart and found out it's a little teeny pressure trigger switch. He ordered a new piece, but it won't be here for a couple days. The rest of the siding will just have to wait.  I don't think we are up to hand nailing it all.  

Our local building inspector approved our construction so far and allowed us to progress the rest of the way to close it in. We had to send him detailed photos via email because of Steve and I both having covid and being under quarantine. Because this is new construction of a window and not just a replacement, he needs to be sure that it's correctly framed in. Steve is well-versed on what to do per code and he got the approval of the inspector. Actually, Steve had worked on some construction jobs with the very same guy years ago when he was at UWGB. So he knows how detail oriented and precise Steve is when it comes to building things. 

While Steve was working on the window trim, I started painting the siding anyhow. Each piece of Smart Siding needs three coats of paint. So that was my project today. My little supervisor kept me on task and told me to do a good job.

Steve helped spread out the saw horses and lay out 12 more strips of the Smart Siding. It's easier with 2 people handling those 16 feet long pieces of siding.

It was very pleasant painting in the sun dappled shade of the trees. I enjoy painting so much, Steve not so much. So this is one of the tasks I do that he doesn't.  I have music cranked, my coffee cup at my side, and my dog at my feet. 

Since he is that kind of a standstill now with regards to the non-functioning nailer gun, he finished up the inside insulation on the lower wall underneath the window. Now the little messages to the people of the future are encapsulated behind the insulation.

So really there's just a little bit more of siding to finish, and then we will attach some pretty red shutters to match the rest of the house.  It will be good to have it closed in before the cold weather starts. 

I don't have the shutters yet because, like I said, we're still under quarantine. I usually keep an eye out at the Habitat for Humanity ReStore for shutters of the right size that I can paint to match. Maybe later next week I can pop in and see what they have.

~~~~~~~~

That is enough for tonight. I am cooking some ribs in the pressure cooker, baked taters in the oven, and crispy garden salads to finish it off.   Tomorrow we will have some socially distanced front porch visitors....    Merikay and Craig are here in town at the local RV park.  They WERE supposed to be camping in our driveway and visiting with us these last three days.  But again, the danged covid put the kabash on those plans.  They had boxes pre-shipped to our house for them to get during the visit.  We will sit far apart on the front porch and avoid any contact.  My quarantine officially ends today, but Steve's is until the 22nd. 

Again, we are soooo glad we had the vaccine, so this breakthrough covid was mild and we handled it well.  Please get your vaccine and help stop the spread of this awful pandemic!  Be safe. Be well.

Trying To Keep Busy

As we try to deal with the loss of our mother, our aching hearts are feeling so helpless.  The funeral and cremation were all planned. Mom had planned ahead and took care of things with policies taken out years ago. Never wanting to be a burden on any of us, she took care of things.  There really isn't anything else we can do. The funeral will not be until Saturday at Windsor Baptist Church of Gainesville Florida. It will be live streamed on their YouTube channel.  I tried to include a link on my last blog post, but You Tube didn't like the link.  Sooo for my family members, or anyone else if they wish, just go to You Tube. In the search box, put in "Windsor Baptist Church Gainesville" and it will lead you to the service. If you miss it live at 11 am eastern, 10 central, they will leave up the link for a while to watch it afterwards.

~~~~~~~

Steve decided he needed to find me something to do to keep our hands busy. He came up with a multiple day project, that we could work on a bit at a time.  It was time to tear off some yucky vinyl siding on the East side of the house and replace the rest of the windows. 

Last fall we had picked up a wonderful bargain of 2 large thermopane window combinations for the East side of the house.  He found them on a great deal on Facebook Marketplace, of course. They are the same brand we put in all around in the other 10 windows last fall.  Originally these window combination units were over $600 each. They had been mistakenly ordered in the wrong size for a gentleman's cabin. Their conttractor used them temporarily in place for about 6 weeks, until the correct windows could arrive. Steve got them both for $225.00 total. Score! 

We also ordered a single smaller picture window to go along with the others for the east end of the kitchen nook. They've been sitting in the garage all winter, just waiting for some nice weather. 

If you look back in my past blogs, we had already replaced 10 of the windows in the house. These were the last 3 to get done.  So we planned on replacing two in our kitchen nook, and the third will be a new installation into our master bedroom wall facing East. We will tackle that later on.

We gathered materials and had most things on hand to do the project.

Steve's older brother Mark, and his wife Ann generously brought us over a large load of more LP Smart Siding. We had used this same type of siding on the North side and the front of the West side of the She Shed. We wanted to continue using it all of the way around the house. It's rather expensive, so we were just buying one wall's worth at a time as we completed each phase.

He had over 70 pieces of 16' long LP Smart Siding left over from another project. Whew! What a generous gift, and we will be putting it to good use on the East Side of the home.  It is a golden color, so I will be painting it to match in all white. 

Time to get busy and get our minds off our sorrows.  With prayers of Mom in our hearts, she would want us to work on something and not wallow around bawling and crying about her.  

It was such a beautiful morning with clear weather ahead for days on end.  Steve helped me set up my saw horses. I went right to work with my little paint bucket and roller. Each piece needs 3 good coats, and it's an exterior primer/paint combination.  It's so much easier to paint it while it's on the saw horses on the ground, as opposed to trying to paint at once it's nailed up on the house! 

 

While I was doing that... Steve's first step was to pull off the ugly vinyl siding that someone many years ago had put on to cover the damaged original wood siding. We weren't quite sure what to expect as we pulled it off, But we knew it probably wouldn't be good. The rest of the house has really nice original wood siding. With just this one side having vinyl slapped over it, we knew it had to be hiding something.

Yep, was pretty much what we expected. We figured that there would be some water damage because there had never been a rain gutter or down spout on that portion of the kitchen nook roof. Basically, all of the water from the back half of that section of the house was coming down and dumping in the one spot. When we bought the house, we immediately put a rain gutter up there to help divert the water away, and subsequently into my rain barrel. The damage underneath the vinyl siding was from many, many years of not having proper gutters in place.

Ewwwwww, just as we suspected. 

Steve stripped it all back to the studs, which were still good. He reinforced the exterior wall with double sheets of good new plywood. Boy oh boy, has plywood ever gotten expensive! Close to $70 a sheet right now!!

Now it was fixed right.

That was enough work for the day. Just needed to cover it up with house wrap. We said it was time to take a break, put away our materials, and rest a bit. We also had to take a run up to the Menard's store to pick up some more supplies, so it was a good time to stop for the day, before moving on to the next part of the project.

The next morning he jumped right back at it.  Now  it was time to remove the siding from around the little kitchen nook. We can see there was a spot that had been patched in, also many years ago. We knew this wasn't going to be good either.

He started pulling off a few pieces to see what was what. It was a beautiful sunshiny morning with temps in the sixties, and later reaching up into the low seventies. Perfect time to be working on a house.

Yep, this nook was pretty rough and rugged too. Now this portion of the home was built well before 1900. And being located in a historic lumbering sawmill town, all of the homes were built pretty much the same way. The insulation between the inner and outer walls is sawdust!

Yep, sawdust!

The wall cavities are very deep, made with rough sawn lumber. They are between 6 1/2" and 7" deep.  All filled up with sawdust in most of the sections as we uncovered the siding.  Sawdust spilling out now, that was over 100 years old. 

Steve decided to remove one complete strip of the wall sheathing underneath the nook windows. That way he could remove all of the sawdust and access each chamber cavity to put in new fiberglass batt insulation. Some of the cavities were empty.  Explains the frost on the inside walls of the nook when the temps went below zero.  LOL 

Just look at the size of these boards. That is 1 complete board on that bottom level about 14" wide. In a lumbering town like ours, big wide boards like that were not uncommon for basic construction sheathing in walls. We saw the same thing in our daughter's house when they were doing some work which is located about 15 blocks away.

Look at all that 100+ year old sawdust on the ground....

While Steve was playing with the insulation, I was painting another batch of the siding. After triple coats of paint, they look wonderful crisp and clean. The more I can get painted now, the less I have to do later. Even though we aren't ready to do the siding yet, it's good to keep going back-and-forth to roll another coat on the boards.  12 down, 60 more to go???

I helped Steve finish up tacking around the house wrap layers to protect the wood. It's so funny, we have 3 different brands of partial rolls that we are using on the house. Can you tell we shop at Habitat for Humanity Restore?  We find partially used rolls that we grab when we have the chance, knowing this project was coming up.

 

While I was cleaning up all of the sawdust I found a few treasures! This 1st one is a safety pin! It's only a little over an inch long so I think that it's meant for pinning together clothing. When I posted it on Facebook, some people had mentioned things like pins for hunting licences, horse blankets, or skirt pins. But it's much too small for that.  It's just an early primitive pre 1900 safety pin. But not too safe! 

The other treasures that I found were a scrap of wintage wallpaper, some interesting old square headed hand forged nails and an old rusted up nail set. A nail set is used to push the heads of the nails deeper into the wood for finishing work so you don't get big "elephant feet" circles from whacking at so hard with the head of a hammer. We didn't find any buried treasures, no bags of gold, no hidden family silver or piles of money. 

Now we were ready to start removing the old windows. A trick we had used when we had to remove a window on the motorhome was to cover the opening with this wide roll of sticky plastic. It's easily released later, kind of like a post it note adhesive. It's used to cover flooring, especially carpeting, to protect it from foot traffic during open houses. We had seen it as a hint on the internet, where somebody used when having a window replaced on their motorhome.  Luckily, we had a large portion leftover on the roll from that job.

We put up a layer on the 1st window facing to the East in our kitchen nook. This would prevent dust construction debris from coming inside, as well as stray wasps or hornets or houseflies while we worked on the window.

It didn't take us long and we had the new window into place. Steve lifted it from the outside as I shimmed it from the inside and leveled it. Then he was ready to screw it into place.

Next, he surrounded it with spray foam insulation. After that, sticky rubbery tar window flashing tape. Soon, it was air tight and snugly into place. That was enough for one day. Time to rest. Now that we're retired we are trying to learn to do a little bit each day, and not just go go go to get it all done at once.  I think Steve's brain says to keep going, but our aging bodies are saying to slow it down a bit. 

Although the trim isn't on it yet from the inside, it sure looked pretty this morning with the sun shining in.  So much better than those old chipped peeling single pane windows that were here before. 

Now this Sunday morning and we decided it was our turn to tackle the rest of the kitchen nook. I removed the four interior storm windows to make it lighter when we lift it down. We cranked out 2 of the windows which Steve removed those as well.  Anything to make it a little lighter to ease the entire window to the ground.  It is over 6 feet long and 4 feet high. 

Again, I covered the inside surface with more of that protective film. It will really help to keep down the mess that would be blowing into the house. The wind is coming up from the South today and there are lot of little buds falling off the trees that are blowing all over into that part of the yard.

Steve discovered that by cutting the window in half with his sawzall tool, he was able to take it out in 2 sections. Much easier to ease each piece down while standing on the ladder. I stood below and caught them and it was a lot easier for me to handle too.

In between helping Steve this morning and getting a few things done in the house, I also started painting the LP Smart Siding Trim that needs to go around the windows and on the corners of the nook when we get to putting up the siding.   I managed to get three coats on all three sides of seven pieces by noon. 

It used to be this stuff was SO expensive at $20 for a 16' section. But right now plain average 2x4 construction lumber boards are $25.99 for a 16 footer! Hard to believe that this manufactured fibered Smart Siding is cheaper than a 2x4?

By early afternoon Steve had the opening completely prepped with extra spacers to size for the window that would be going in.  I helped him carry this big window combination on the dolly cart. It was comical.  

We came out of the garage door, 

around the front of the garage, 

around the side of the motorhome, 

around my saw horses full of trim, 

around our backyard fence, 

to reach this portion of the house. 

It was a bumpy ride, but we made it with out breaking any of the window glass! 

It is parked here now against the cedar siding of the She Shed, until the neighbor and our son-in-law can come over this evening to help lift it up into place.

~~~~~~

(added later after dinner)

Our neighbor Dean came over and quick as a wink, those guys had it up and in place!

Steve nailed the flange down all around, 

then covered it with the window flashing material.

Now for a little bit of trim and we are done!

Ahhhhh  

Wonder what we will work on next? 

Probably the siding.