This Odd House

A rendering of the kitchen by the Ikea kitchen design tool. There are some artifacts: the countertop is not shown (it is from a different supplier) and a dishwasher will replace the ghost shelves on the far wall.

The last time I designed a kitchen it was for a dream home, and the cabinets were provided by a vendor who took pride in making an exact configuration to fit the space and meet the needs and desires of the homeowner.  It was a positive experience, especially when, at first installation the drawers were not the sizes I had specified in the original design sketches.  The cabinetmaker, to his enduring credit told me “if it isn’t right, we will make it right”.

That was another time and space, where the project started from a clean sheet of paper and had an expansive budget.  The design was via pencil on that clean sheet, and I laboriously transcribed it into primitive computer tools that could make crude 3D renderings to get a sense of what it might look like.  In 1992, computers could, with lengthy computation times, make simple shaded views of rectangular blocks configured as if they were walls with doors and windows.  Today, there are many tools available for both professionals and amateurs including online tools that can generate near photo-realistic views of a designed interior space.

In the planning to replace the black and white chessboard kitchen that came with This Odd House, I investigated various kitchen cabinet sources.  I paid Home Depot for a cabinet design session, including professional measurements, but found their proposal to be breathtakingly more expensive than expected.

My previous experience with Ikea was as a source of inexpensive bookshelves and swivel chairs:  furniture that disclaimed itself with “some assembly required”.  Yet the efficiency of their designs, constrained by the modularity in their manufacturing, yielded a sparse but clean and very contemporary look and feel, something I have come to appreciate and desire.  Even though my house is from another century, the interior space I live in can still offer the light and pure clean look of a modern home.

The Ikea website offered a universe even beyond their Olympic-sized retail store.  An entire kitchen space can be designed, cabinets and appliances selected and arranged, completely from within a web page-based internet application.  There were a few idiosyncrasies, and patience was needed in some of the spatial manipulations, but in the end, we could envision the kitchen, print out a bill of materials, and make dimensional construction drawings, all from the online app.  The computer graphics world has advanced dramatically in the last twenty years!

There are limitations of course.  Ikea offers what Ikea offers, and if you want something almost but not quite the same, you are out of luck.  However for projects as large as a kitchen, there are some options, and Ikea realizes that every kitchen is a custom kitchen to some degree—wall and floor dimensions can be just about anything, and one needs to have ways of making the parts all fit!

We also had the luxury of having a master carpenter on the job.  If it wasn’t square, he could make it square.  If it wasn’t level, he would make it level.  If it didn’t fit the space available, a few critical cuts and adjustments would make it fit.  Ramiz was a Jedi master at woodworking.

The Ikea kitchen was inexpensive.  There are tradeoffs of course, and we will probably learn more of them over the next years, but for now the cabinets look great and provide a kitchen where two cooks can perambulate, wielding kitchen tools, and offering tastings and libations to our welcome guests at This Odd House.

I recently received an anonymous letter from one of the former owners of This Odd House  (I was the anonymous addressee).  Somehow, word had gotten back that his former house had again changed hands and that there was remodeling and construction activity going on.  He didn’t know me, but of course he knew my address.

It was a revealing letter describing how his parents had acquired the store, he had grown up in the house, it had been converted to a duplex, and then he had taken ownership and carried the remodeling on.

Among the interesting tidbits was that he was the visionary to put the time capsules into the walls.   And it was his father to credit/blame for the exterior style of the house.  Over the protests of the son, the mansard roof was installed.   His father had also been the one to lower the ceilings from their original ten-foot store height.

I think I would have made different choices over which ceilings to drop, and I know that not everyone finds mansard roofs attractive:  love them or hate them, they are distinctive in our particular community.

The final treasure in the letter was a copy of the MLS listing for the store when his parents bought it in 1969.  It includes a small black and white picture of the store, truly the “before” picture of this continuing transformation.

I’m excited to establish this contact.  I hope to learn much more about the colorful history of This Odd House!

The MLS listing for This Odd House in its 1969 incarnation.

Who would have guessed that I would have multiple lengthy conversations about toilets after simply observing that there are many to choose from?  I had no idea there was such pent-up interest in how toilets work.  I certainly never expected that I would be so strongly urged to file a report on my toilet performance.

Ok, well, here it is.  Those of you who have more important things to do, click to some other, more interesting blog entry.

Three new toilets were delivered to my house.  The plumber, Mark (yes we are on a first-name basis), arranged for installing them, and for a moment there was a “pile of toilets” in the main room.  He proceeded to de-install the old stools, offering to leave them in the yard as planters, and then assemble and install the new ones.  Installing toilets is one of the easier tasks that plumbers are asked to do.  There is some lugging of heavy ceramic pieces, but the actual plumbing hookups and connections are straightforward.

Toilet delivery

There were a few hindrances offered by This Odd House, as one would by now expect.  And the first toilet had a defect, a crack, in its structure and finish.  We had ordered three, but only two could be installed immediately, so the extra unit was substituted (the third will be installed at a later date).

The immediate benefit from the new toilets was apparent at first sitting:  they are two inches taller than the standard height.  But according to Mark, the vast majority of toilets he installs are these taller, ADA-qualified stools.  Only bathrooms for children get the standard-height fixtures these days, so what should now be called “standard”?

The next thing that was obvious was the flush time.  Having grown accustomed to protracted swirling and siphoning motions, followed by lengthy tank refill periods, I was amazed at the flushing action of the Gerber Avalanche.  Twenty seconds was all that was needed between flush and refilled, the tank ready for the next cycle.

Inside the tank. This shows the completely filled state. A line on the back of the tank marks it.

The water use is dramatically less than the 5-gallon monsters that were replaced.  In fact, the tank is oversized for its function, probably just for appearance, or maybe for compatibility (so the top is at a standard height to put stuff on?).  At any rate, the water refills only to the halfway mark on the inside of the tank.  I don’t know if I will see a change in my water bill, but it is nice knowing that this aspect of daily life is now considerably more efficient.

I don’t have enough data yet on “solids transport”, so you will have to contact me later on these details.  Meanwhile I will be continuing my field tests.

I have mentioned my encounters with time capsules in This Odd House as features and walls have been exposed and/or removed.  I have an email connection to the immediately prior owner, to whom I have posed various questions about the state of the house I acquired from him.  I have also met neighbors whose memories include times when this house metamorphosed in stages toward its current form.

Among them was a member of the neighborhood forum who responded to my self-introduction on first moving in.  She had actually lived in one of the upstairs bedrooms when it was a duplex; roommates with the then-owner and his partner.  She recounted some of the design, construction, and party activities that occurred at that time, but the conversion to a single family home happened after she moved on (although she has now returned to the neighborhood).

I also was able to gather clues from government documents that record the various permits (building and others) that have been issued over the years.  The oldest in the online history is from 1982:

NOV 1982 RMDL BLDG FOR DX PER SPC 58838 * HO 

This would seem to be the date at which the building was converted from a store with upper living area into a duplex rental unit.

There do not appear to be subsequent building permits, but there was a “street use” permit issued a decade later, in 1993.  This may be to hold demolition debris for a subsequent remodeling, but at the very least, the flat roof was replaced at that time:

JAN 1993 DUMPSTER VALID FROM 1/29/93 THOUGH 2/5/93 

JAN 1993 REROOF W/TEAROFF FLAT ROOF 2-UNIT DWLG 

1993 appears to be the last year that the building was operated as a duplex.  All landlords pay a fee to the city for the privilege of owning  (and to cover the city costs associated with) rental properties.  There was a rental license fee recorded in the years prior, but the last one paid was in September 1993.

SEP 1993 RLIC – RENTAL LICENSING

The only other permits are for exemptions from paying the rental license fees from landlords.  Yes, if you own rental property but do not rent it out, you must pay a fee for not paying the full rental license.  An exemption fee was paid in 1998, and then later renewed by the next owner:

JUL 1998 RE-FEE       RENTAL EXEMPTION FEE

JUN 2005 REXM         RENTAL EXEMPTION FEE

The final permit issued before I acquired the property was to run some power to the garage seven years prior:

2005 INSTALL 1- OUTLET FOR GARAGE DOOR OPENER.

This is not quite enough to reconstruct the full history of This Odd House, but it provides a strong outline.  The details are still frustratingly out of reach, but with the time capsule contents and other clues I can imagine the timeline:

1910 – 1983    Corner store with residence above
1983                 Mansard roof feature added, store converted to duplex
1983-1993       Building operated as a duplex
1993                 Duplex converted to single-family home.
2005                Prior owner (my seller) acquires property, maintains it as-is

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 6,800 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 11 years to get that many views.

Click here to see the complete report.

Part of the renovation effort for This Odd House involves remodeling the second floor bathroom.  Access to it required a traverse to the back of the kitchen and through a door into a long windowless room.  Yes, it had vaulted ceilings with speakers, a phone jack, and light bulbs arranged as the Pleides star cluster, but still, despite the plumbing efficiency, it just seemed awkward to me that the bathroom door was in the kitchen.

The plan is to condense the oversized bathroom into a slightly smaller space, and provide hallway access from the rest of the second floor without interrupting the cooks in the kitchen.  As usual, this is easy to describe, but hard to implement.

Any rearrangement of plumbing fixtures will arouse the interests of the city, which takes a responsibility for preventing unsafe living conditions.  There are plenty of ways to screw up while building a house, resulting in hazards not just to the occupants, but also to neighbors and entire communities.   As a result, rules have been put in place that are intended to prevent sewer backups, water supply contamination, gas leaks, electrical fires, and building collapse.

It is hard to make simple rules that apply universally, but the building and construction codes are an attempt to do so, and even though we are sometimes annoyed at our obligations to the other people we share the land with, and especially the city government that we have authorized to have authority over us in this activity, I endorse the goals and objectives that the covenants and codes try to support.

In the case of bathroom remodeling, there are limits to how far the water supply and drain lines can be from the fixtures.  And if a toilet is being installed, it must meet the modern requirements for water usage.  Flush toilet technology has advanced considerably from its first widespread promotion , and our concern for water conservation has increased as well.  New toilets in Minneapolis (and the entire U.S. for that matter) must be rated better (less than) 1.6 gpf (gallons per flush).  The toilets in This Odd House were 5 gallon monsters.

Well, I’m ok with replacing the old toilet.  In fact, I’d like to replace all of them in TOH.  Having been spoiled by modern toilets in suburbia for the last twenty years, I had found the stools in TOH to be rather low and compact, and, how can I say this delicately?,  less than optimal, even inadequate, for my specific Nordic anatomy.

So I thought it would be a simple matter to tell the plumber to install new modern 1.6 gpf (with elongated bowl) toilets.  I should have known better.  In an age where Malcom Gladwell can explain why there are dozens of different spaghetti sauce offerings  from the same vendor, and a hundred square feet of shelf space can be devoted to toothpaste variants, it was only reasonable that specifying a toilet would require more than my simple description.

I did some research.  Consumer reports actually conducted tests on toilets , and I discovered that they could be rated on many measures.  I need to select from “pressure assisted” to “gravity feed” (I think this is the classic design), and assess their tests for “Solid waste removal:  The ability to move simulated waste through the bowl and trap”, noise, water consumption, and “bowl cleaning”.  And cost, of course.

I settled on one recommended by CU, the Gerber Avalanche 21-818.   With a name like this I would not expect it to be quiet, but it was rated well on this scale.  I read reviews of other toilets that warned of quiet flushing followed by loud desperate gurgles at the end of the discharge.   I hope this is not the case for this model.  Unfortunately, I don’t get to try before I buy on this item.

Toilets are ordered and will be installed soon.  I will provide a review only by popular, insistent demand.

Sheet rock panels and materials are delivered to TOH by the first in a series of specialized teams. This is the beginning of a difficult but necessary step in the renovation.

When my house was built, walls were constructed with “lathe and plaster”, thin rough strips of wood nailed to the studs and coated with coarse plaster, which oozed between the strips and clung to the structure.   The result was a wall that conformed to the irregularly cut framing, warping as needed.  A final top coat of fine-grained plaster made the wall smooth but not flat.

Modern walls are assembled from “sheet rock”, large panels of gypsum encased in paper.  They are part of an automated house-building system, uniform standard sizes that fit stud dimensions, butting up perfectly against each other, with their edges shaped in such a way that one layer of tape is exactly the right thickness to make the resulting surface smooth and flat.

For the greatest efficiency in the construction of sheet rock walls, specialists have evolved.  There are teams trained to deliver the raw material, pairs of drywall sheets, just at the limit of convenient lifting and moving to their staging place at the job site.  Other teams specialize in the attachment of the sheets to the wall studs and ceiling joists:  standard wall sheetrock is 1/2”, ceiling sheetrock is 5/8”  (the better to stand prone against the forces of gravity).  Armed with battery-powered drivers, the panels are rapidly hung by the installers using screws specially designed for the purpose.  There is a flurry of rapid motions, cutting and fitting edges, locating outlets and routing exact openings for them.

As impressive as this activity is, it is not a precision process.  The rock hangers know that gaps and errors will be covered and corrected by the next specialized team: the tapers.

The tapers are responsible for the final smooth wall.  They apply tape and “mud” to fill in over the mounting screws, seams, and corners.  The mud is a plaster mix that is applied liberally over any and all areas that have need for it.  The workers that do this work are on a tight schedule and so the mud is troweled rapidly, with splashes, drips and blobs flying in all directions, the philosophy being that it will be sanded back flat after it dries.  The result is that tapers (“mudders” as Portia calls them), leave a trail of plaster slime behind them and on everything they touch or even just walk past.  It is a messy process, made worse by another when the walls are sanded and fine plaster dust fills the air and settles on everything.

This is the state of the art in making walls for the homes we live in.  The process is messy, yes, but the result is that the walls are smooth and flat with knife-edge perfect corners.  Life is filled with tradeoffs, and spattered, splattered, and dusty as it is, This Odd House now displays a truer line to its visitors and occupants.

The kitchen walls now cover the wiring and plumbing behind a veneer of drywall, taped, mudded, and sanded to smooth, flat, vertical, and level.

“Love me, love my stuff”. Portia behind boxes and furniture to be assimilated by This Odd House.

I enthusiastically welcome a new occupant to This Odd House!  My design consultant, collaborator in this project, and longtime renewed friend Portia, has had her house on the market for the last year and it recently sold.  The buyers insisted on closing immediately, and Portia now needs new digs.

She could have selected a comfortable and zero-maintenance condominium anywhere in a moderate climate as her next home, but her normally sound judgment failed.   Evidently the prospect of joining me in this quixotic venture appealed to her and she has now moved in to this work in progress.

She will encounter an improvised life style, cooking with a hotplate, washing when the water has not been turned off by plumbers, and constantly rearranging boxed possessions to accommodate the requirements of renovation and remodeling.  It will now be even more challenging, as we combine two households of furnishings to fit into only half of a house.

Yet she sees and shares the vision of what it might be, of living smaller, in an unconventional style, of being a part of this neighborhood, and making a home here and making a life with me.  I am deeply appreciative of her support and look forward to a long and beautiful partnership.

The basement storage area “before”

The basement storage area “after”

Carpenters, ventilation workers, electricians, all at work. Not pictured: plumber, plumbing inspector, laborer, general contractor.

Today (Monday) was perhaps the busiest day This Odd House will have over its reconstruction.  A representative from just about every construction trade showed up this morning at 8:00 (a courtesy to the owner, who doesn’t like the 6:30am start times that most construction workers prefer).  Plumbers, carpenters, laborers, electricians, apprentices, “tincutters” (HVAC professionals), city inspectors, and the general contractor all converged on TOH to apply their skills to its transformation.

The morning was a flurry of details and descriptions, with lots of verbal instructions and requests to and between the tradesmen.  I was there to make a dozen design decisions in even fewer minutes.  As an engineer in a different discipline, trained to carefully weigh interacting constraints and requirements and find the optimal solution, this was very difficult and made me quite uneasy.  I witnessed the electrician asking the plumber to re-route pipes so his outlets could be placed to “meet code”.  This struck me as an awful re-work cycle, but the plumber took it in stride and authorized the pipes be cut as needed.  Amazing.  Somehow the system works.

The day progressed with much noise and activity.  With that many independent tasks all progressing simultaneously, it is a marvel to behold.

One of the inspirations for me is my friend Dave who has taken on a project to build a house with a workshop in anticipation of all the free time he will have when he someday retires.  Taking on the most important piece first, naturally he designed and is now building the workshop, a modest structure detached from the future  house.  He is rightly proud of his project, although like me, he sometimes finds it to be larger than expected.  He sent me a photo of the shop space after the walls and roof were up, and ready for the interior finishing. It is a picture of construction—studs and joists and trusses everywhere.  I guess I can see where he might find it a large project.

An interior view of Dave’s workshop.

Suffering from stud envy, I decided to do my best to make a panoramic view of my kitchen remodeling at its current stage.  I’m afraid it doesn’t compare.

The interior of my gutted kitchen. The re-wiring has started, the ceiling leveled.  The building permit can be seen nailed to the wall at left, next to an abandoned vent from a wood stove.

Update:  Here is the last view of the opened walls before it gets insulated and vapor barriered tomorrow (the ceiling is already sealed).  The cavernous view is an artifact of the 180-degree panorama using a very wide angle lens.  The future kitchen will be large, but not the ballroom shown here.

The gutted kitchen, re-plumbed, re-wired, and ready for insulation and sheet-rock.