It takes a village to renovate a house...

We have the greatest neighbors... ever.

While loading our 25 sheets of dry wall into our house some of our neighbors came by to say hello and lend their sympathies (renovation seems to be a neighborhood past time). One of our neighbors is a contractor and he mentioned he might come by and give us a hand with the drywall today. Well.. to our surprise he rounded up a crew of guys from the street to come help us hang drywall. He also brought many fun tools that made the job *alot* easier (laser level, t-square).

Being so far away from home and family we've been feeling a bit out on our own with this house thing so far. To know that there are so many people close by willing to lend a hand really helped our morale. Having a friendly contractor to bail us out when we get over our heads is also very comforting.

Let there be light...

Finally we have made some progress on a part of the house we can see. After 3 weeks of our electrician not showing up we booked someone else. We waited a long time before rebooking because the first electrician had given us a really low quote. Once we rebooked (at a higher price :\) things moved significantly faster! About a week after meeting our electrician we now have a rewired house. This is the first change we've made to the house that has a real positive impact on things we can see.

Here are some pictures of our shiny new wiring. Ok... it's not that shiny right now. We're hoping to hang some drywall this weekend so the pot lights have regular bulbs in about half of them and the other half have no bulbs. Even in this state though they make a huge difference. Our main hallway used to have no lights and adding 2 potlights to it made has helped make it look bigger and less grungy.

Dreaming of Bathroom...

This project is a long way off, but I am really anticipating having a bathroom that does not have a hole in the floor. Sometimes Bren gets on my case about dreaming about next projects when currently the main floor barely has walls. I have to argue though, that it's kind of like when people are in a situation where they don't have food for a long time and they dream about the next meal they will have. Any who... this is my dream for the bathroom...

Originally we were planning light blue/white really spa like and pristine like out old bathroom (below)



The plan hasn't changed too much. There's still gonna be lots of white. But now I'm leaning towards more yellowy off-white/white/black for a color scheme. Below are some inspiration pictures for various aspects of our room.



Floor (Our Fixer Upper)
Vanity (Rona's Odessa 2 door)
Light fixture (Home Depot)
Shower kit (E-bay)

So close... yet so far....

So after 3 weeks we might be getting electrical redone in our main floor this week (hopefully). Our electrician hurt his leg so things have been stalled out for a while.

In this waiting period we've started getting things in order so that when the electrician is done we can get our drywall up in the living and dining rooms ASAP. We've been busy figuring out jam extenders, blow in insulation, getting taping quotes. Next up, floor refinishing and window quotes!

In unrelated not so current news, we got our shower kit set up. We had splurged on a shower that had the telephone attachment on it to make cleaning our dog easier. Two doggy baths later and we can say, it was worth every penny!

Plaster vs drywall...

Deciding between plaster and drywall is a decision owners of old homes often have to make. The Internet has proven to be a valuable source of information on the subject (1, 2, etc).

The three main contenders are to:
1. save the plaster: neater/tider than gutting, more challenging when things behind the walls need modifications (e.g., electric, plumbing, insulating)
2. remove the plaster + replace with drywall: dirty and hard to live through, makes replacing mechanicals/insulation easier
3. cover plaster with drywall: cleaner than 2, allows holes for mechanical work to be covered up, makes for thicker walls

Before moving into our house we had noble intentions spurred on by way too many nights watching HGTV. We were going to gut it all and replace it all with drywall. Upon moving in we realized that the logistics of living in a house while gutting all of the living space would not quite work with one of us working from home and the other trying to do grad school. We also realized that the plaster did have some nice side effects (noise deadening!).

Saving all the plaster wasn't really a possibility though. The living room had some pretty dodgy DIY patch jobs and we need to replace the electrical which makes saving the plaster more challenging. Our current plan is to drywall over the plaster in the living/dining rooms (we'll post pictures of the electrical holes eventually), gut the kitchen and bath (eventually) and save the plaster in the bedrooms (ie. attempt to repair the plaster holes from electric ourselves).

One thing we realized when cutting the holes for the electrical that we didn't realize when looking at the whole plaster vs. drywall debate is the sheer amount of waste generated by removing plaster and lathe. Given the costs of removing waste in Toronto we realize now, how expensive our original "gut everything" approach would have been. We also realize that in our case removing the plaster isn't required to "do it right". We can put in new electrical by cutting holes and blow in insulation using a blown in insulation product. In the rooms where moisture is an issue we will be removing the plaster and in some cased replacing it with cement board/green board, but for dryer rooms (e.g., living/dining) this just doesn't make sense for us.

Well... this is the plan for now that seems to work for us. We'll see how it unfolds as things progress.

Our house has an age!

While cutting the holes for the electrical work we found some newspaper (we assume from when the house was built). It's a bit hard to see in this picture, but the date on the paper is September 17, 1920 (click for a bigger view of the picture).

More on the electrical/holes and progress later...

Stack replacement

It has been a successful week for the house. This week I installed 2 new deadbolts installed and the stack replacement happened.

The stack replacement was a pretty intense thing. When we saw that the stack needed replacing in the home inspection we figured that they could cut it and install a stretch of PVC or at worst replace more of the stack above ground.. This was not really the case. As you can see in the picture below, the corrosion was pretty close to the ground. This meant that they needed to dig up some of the floor and replace the part of the stack that was below ground.

So we called a plumber and he came by and told us the stack above was in good shape and us a very reasonable quote for replacing the section of stack, however he said the pipe downstream of the stack was also probably very old and might need replacing as well. We crossed our fingers and hoped that this was not the case because this would be a very expensive item. After replacing the bottom of the stack it looked good and we were hoping that would be all we needed but when the head plumber showed up with his fancy video scope and brought us down to look at the pipe it got a little scary... turns out at some point a section of the clay pipe had shifted and now did not completely align with the following section, this shift in turn caused sewage to be leaking into the ground and water and sediment to build up inside the pipe. So we bit the big bullet and got the whole remainder of the clay pipe replaced.

It was hard to take pictures while they were working but here are a few that I managed to take:

After the first section of the stack was replaced with PVC.


The beginnings of the massive trench that stretched across our basement.


The stack and the section of pipe that they originally removed


Pieces of pipe from phase 2 of the replacement, mmm what is that thing on the end of the pipe...


Yep that's some kind of plastic bottle embedded in concrete on the end of one of the pipes... I don't even want to know what the purpose of this was.


Above are our shiny new cleanouts. They barely poke out of the ground. I wish we had a picture of the rusty old breather for comparison... Knowing the expense/inconvenience of doing this type of repair I think we will consciously avoid houses with old stacks/breathers next time we house hunt, or ask for a credit off the price (not that we are house hunting any time soon). It's definitely a hidden cost that we didn't know about.


Above is our new stack and trench all cemented back in. The cement has dried quite a bit since this was taken.