Windows & Doors

Hello.  First a couple of business items for those following along.  I've uploaded the photos that appear as thumbnails in the blog in full resolution from my 7 megapixel camera.  If you would like to see something in more detail click on the thumbnail photo in the blog and it will come up as the full file.   The second item is that if you subscribe to the blog then you can get email notices when I post something new.   If some prefer I can send a personal email.  Let me know if that's the case and I'll make a list and let you know when I've posted by email though it would be nice to use the system.  
    Sometime soon we'll get to the interior of the house and may touch on it a bit here but I'd like to go around the outside of the house and look at a few things more closely.   First I would like to shed a little light on the matter of how I came to be in the position of renovating a decrepit old house in Eugene OR after having happily lived and worked in Southern California for fifteen years.  If you told me a year ago I'd be doing what I'm doing now I would have had a hearty laugh.
     As stated I'd been living in SoCal for fifteen years doing background (BG) or extra work in film and television.  I nearly always felt privileged to work in the 'biz' and was blessed with enough union work to keep body and soul together.   Admittedly I had stars in my eyes when I first starting working in the industry.  But working on the set as much as I did opened my eyes to how political it can be.  Even so I spent a number of years attempting to crack the nut of union principal work with nearly no results.  After five or so years in the business I became aware that there were benefits - specifically health care and a pension - for doing union work.  Those benefits became an important part of my work goals.  Over the years I consistently achieved health care and pension credits for my work - a wonderful thing.  Understanding the pension as important put me more into the mind set of being able to take advantage of it when the time came - as early as when I reached 55 years of age but I figured probably later rather than sooner with work hopping like it was.  Things began to change in the industry one of the results being that fewer people would be in a position to make a living doing BG work as I had been.  I became old enough to collect my pension.  I had emotional experiences that presented me with the idea that I might not be doing the best for myself by continuing in LA.  I had always entertained the idea of living near sister Kate as we have been close through the years.  When I visited Kate in June and saw the house a door in my mind began to open.   I had visited OR enough because of Kate's presence here to know the nature of the climate so when I saw this house which sits high and dry on it's foundation - much higher than many area homes - and has an excellent southern exposure open to the south and west because of the streets and park limning it I began to think this might be a window of opportunity for me to own a home on the limited income I would experience as a pensioner.   When there is sun this little house gets it.   So a number of things came in to play that motivated me to 'take the leap'.
    Windows:   We're up on the front porch looking at the front window in the opening photo.  It was made to open but had been painted shut for years.  This summer the cat stench was so great in the house I went around and took all the double hung windows out of their openings every time I visited the house.  Wanting as much air as possible I attempted to open this large front window.  I succeeded in opening it but broke the glass and mangled the frame in the process.   I boarded it over with some of the pressboard wainscoting I took out of the bathroom.  I now am looking for a piece of glass for it and will have to repair the frame once I find the glass.  I don't want to replace any window units yet because the new ones might get damaged when I jack the house up to repair rotten floor joists and cracked foundation.

Off the porch and around to the west side of the house just at the corner where house and porch meet is this sizable stump that has to be removed as it's been impacting the foundation.  It's quite a monster and will be my spare time project for a while to come.  I worked on it a bit today during a blustery snow shower we had this afternoon, got hot and sweaty, and broke my new (to me) ax.  I'll have to fashion a handle for it now.  

Yes it does snow in Eugene.  A lot of folk here were pretty excited to see the white stuff in town.  The view from my garage apartment of MLK Park this morning.  The little trail in the snow is a meander I dug from the garage's downspout directing water to the garden and away from the garage.  It was raining when I did that a day or two ago and it reminded me of being five years old and playing at damming snow melt in the street.  Maybe I'm growing pin feathers!  Now for some down.....
      Many of the windows have overspray on them from when the house was painted without masking them off.   Garage the same.  I successfully scraped the garage windows clean with a razor blade but broke two panes in the kitchen doing so.  Thick paint, brittle glass.  Kate suggested using paint remover 'cause it worked for her and I did so on the remaining windows in the living area and it worked great.  The other windows in the house aren't so bad and I am working on cleaning them up, replacing glass and hardware where necessary.  While old they'll be fine while I'm working on the house.  Nice to be able to see views of my neighborhood from the house now.
      Nearly the first thing I did in the garage was rehang the side walking entry door so it would work. It didn't open because the building has settled somewhat.  I nailed the big garage car door shut and took it's opening hardware out to facilitate fixing up the garage - don't think there'll be a car in that garage any time soon.  I rehung the back porch door so it would open and close properly.  Too I put a screw eye in the door and one in the frame that line up so I can padlock that door shut.   I put longer screws in the top hinge of the front door so I don't have to kick it open every time I go in.  The small things raise my spirits.
      Further north along the west side of the house we come to the new 200 amp electric service I installed (two half scraped broken kitchen window panes just left of it).

The left side of the panel holds the meter and the incoming hot wires from the electric company through the mast.   The right side is the 200 amp circuit panel.   Below is the single duplex outlet I originally hung from the box.  Eventually a large conduit containing all the wires powering the house will drop from the box and go through the sill into the crawl space.  Here you can clearly see the yellow 2/12 - I learned they are now coding romex for size by color - (20 amp) romex cable I've run through the back of the outlet into the kitchen and onto the back porch to power the garage.  Not at all code but not a hazard as long as I'm careful with it.  It gives me the ability to live here and work on the place.  I'll make the setup meet code before I'm done. We go around back and see the fine faux wood grain linoleum and tar paper roof on the garage.  You can see the carriage lantern I put on the side of the garage to make it more inviting and easier to see one's way at night.

I had a uniquely OR welcoming a few nights back.  I was tossing and turning in my sleep as many of us do and reached for a pillow to put between my legs.  I touched a cold wet spot and  immediately thought 'damn I have a leak in the roof' (it was raining).  Got up turned on the lights and went to investigate my bed and above and there on the pillow was a big slug.  Must've peed his pants when I disturbed him.  He didn't stay inside very long.  I'm so pleased with and proud of that roof.  :)
      Next: up into the porch and there see the old two wire 60 amp service.

The circular thing toward the top is the old banjo style meter socket with the old mast next to it - too small to even carry one of the wires that now power the house and there are three of them.  The main box is below the meter socket.  Below that is a small box/breaker for the dryer outlet which is below it - the washer and dryer used to be on the back porch.   The bigger box to the right of that was for the hot water heater and the box to the right and above that was for powering the house.  The 2/12 romex that comes in from the garage is visible crossing the top of the picture just below the meter socket and above the main circuit box.  When I found it it came in just as it does now hanging in mid air then went into the small box to the far left for power. 

All of the lights and outlets in the house are powered through these two 14 gauge (15 amp) wires that emerge out of the kitchen wall onto the back porch through ceramic sleeves.  They are the old cloth covered  wire fortunately not too brittle and also fortunately like much of the house not reworked by anyone in the past.  The house's more original condition makes it easier to work on because everything is much easier to understand and hasn't been mangled like it would have had four or five or however many handymen mucked with it through the years.   In this photo you can see the ceramic sleeves that protected the wires as they passed into the circuit box - glad I don't have to do that kind of wiring!

And finally we see where I've hooked the new yellow 2/12 romex wire that comes in from the right after passing through the kitchen on it's way from the new circuit box to the romex wire from the garage and the two 14 gauge wires powering the house.  There will be more circuits when I'm done but this will do to get me going. Now both garage and house have electricity.

       I took the bike Kate gave me out in front of the garage for a photo op.  When it came to me the back wheel was well bent.  I took the bike into Kate and Eugene's shop, took the  rear wheel off, eyeballed it up good, put it on two pieces of firewood, and jumped on it a time or two.  Put it back on the bike, spun it a few times, then tightened and loosened the spokes where necessary to get the final kinks out of the wheel and now it's good as new.   Replaced one of the pedals as it was down to the spindle, a rear brake cable part, and raised the seat.  Good to go.  I want to find a rear parcel carrier of some sort for it.  Good old rugged Schwinn mountain bike.  Not little blue but it gets me around - and no gas expense.
      There was a toilet in the house when I bought it but it was not hooked up.  Too I mentioned I had to clean it of human excrement left by homeless who frequented the vacant house.   I went to install the old thing only to realize it was missing parts and then in manipulating it broke the brittle tank.  I decided to quickly borrow Kate's Subaru to go to nearby Restore resale house and get a used toilet.   Found one and found a nice chunk of light blue carpet just the right size for my apartment for less than their usual price and loaded it all up.  It was raining and once I got back to my place it was all I could do to get that big roll of carpet in the door and into the small apartment.  Then after a wiff or two I started moving the furniture and carpet around to try to find the best fit.  After a couple of hours moving furniture, belongings, and carpet around I got it all in place and settled as you've seen in previous photos.  So much for a quick trip with the car though.  Took the car back to Kate's place.  She was pissed 'cause I'd taken the car without letting her know where I was and she wanted to use it after riding her bike home from work - after all it is HER car.   I won't let that happen again!
      The next day after seeing both carpet and toilet for free on Craigslist - go figure -  I went to put the toilet in and succeeded only to find that the bolts holding the tank to the stool were leaking due to brittleness from being dry so long.  I procured some gasket sealer, applied it to the bolts inside the bottom of the  tank, and let set over night.  Finally on project day three I managed to get the toilet working well.  The floor of the bathroom was replaced at one time but is already rotten again so I had to put some strips of plywood under the edges of the toilet so it would stay level and work properly.  It works but you definitely don't want to be drunk using it.   It's kind of a balancing act cleansing oneself after doing one's duty - don't want the whole rig to go over.  Definitely quite camp.  The throne complete with padded seat that came with the house:

      Another thing that has taken me by surprise is my ambition for gardening.  I hauled in a load of horse manure with Kate's old truck and spread it in a patch about 10'x60' on the west side of the house.  The city manages fall leaves partially by collecting and delivering to homeowners who want them for gardening.  I ordered one load.  One nice morning I woke to find a city truck ready to dump leaves.  This shows 7 cubic yards of leaves by the house with the south Eugene hills in the distance.

A couple of hours later - and not a few huffs and puffs - a well mulched garden plot as seen from the back of the property.
      Since I've been here I've seen a number of beautiful vibrant rainbows - on account of the climate - that always seem to end somewhere near my place.  Guess I can't complain about that.

Next time we should be able to get inside the house and take a look around.  'Til then.  Peace       d