Upstairs porch reveal: sleeping porch to guest room, fall 2013 to fall 2014

Back in the day, we had this porch:

It's always been a funny room at the back of the house on the upper storey, way at the end of a long hall we never went down.

Plaster walls crumbling, uninsulated and unheated, lead paint flaking from (single pane) windows and walls - it was a combination storage and get-away room, but very rarely used over the 15 years we've been in the house.

We'd finally reached the end of a lot of other projects, and decided it was time to (literally?) tackle this one...  fall of 2013:

Jeff got the walls down and new ceiling rafters put in before our long hard winter started.

Then there was a long winter wait:

Finally, spring.  We decided to take out the window in the wall, that went to a small storage room off the hallway.  We didn't want to take it out, but neither of us could figure out a reason why we shouldn't.  There were lots of reasons why we should, starting with not having to refinish a whole window.

After Jeff rebuilds the walls and adds insulation, the window guys come:

and the drywall guy comes (if you need a drywall guy in the Mpls area, we can tell you who not to call - but he did get the job done):

Painting is always exciting:

And the last bits always seem to take the longest (especially when we can't find the trim we want off the rack, so Jeff makes his own and I prime and paint it).  Summer is moving along, I'm buying things here and there that we'll need to finish the space.

We get bogged down in the details...  I have an idea what I'd like for new sheets, but have trouble matching the ones I choose (lovely nice ones on clearance, so no returns) to anything else, like duvet covers or curtains or flannel sheets.  The things you work out in your head are sometimes so hard to convert to a real space!

Being an area people need to comfortably sleep, and facing directly east, the porch needed good curtains.  This turned out to be a huge hassle of time and energy and money, but we did eventually figure out a cozy and dark plan that should keep out the 5 am summer sun, and maybe even help keep out the 4:30 pm winter sun-set cold, all the while making the space feel private and secure.

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Finally, end of the summer, "finished":

The girls give their own high praise:  "it's like a hotel!" they exclaim.  To me, that means finishing touches are still needed, like pictures and little things that make it a home.  These will come along the way, I'm in no hurry to fill the space with things just to fill it.  There will be adjustments that need to be made, too;  so far the new windows and insulation has kept the fall cold out, but we'll see how the heater can compete with the -20's winter. 

Now we walk down the hall just to stand in the room and enjoy the space.  We hope our houseguests will enjoy it, too!

upstairs porch - the (slow) start

Home projects around here are slow, but they do get finished (and, need I add, all paid up along the way).  I took some "before" pictures of our little upstairs porch back in May, when we started thinking about what we'd finally do with the space.

Five months later we started on demolition, and now it sits, patiently waiting!

This room, with no insulation and its crumbly walls, most always has been used for various storage.  More than likely it was a sleeping porch when built, and when the windows are open here and at the front of the house, we get a lovely breeze east/west;  we certainly appreciate how well these old houses are set up, making do without air conditioning.

We don't let the kids much play here, due to the flaking paint (and cold, six months out of the year), but every once in a while I'd come back here to read or knit.

Finally we decided that the best use of this space would be a small guest room, just big enough for the double bed (a well-made futon) we currently use in the library/tv room, plus a little chair and table or small dresser, and maybe even a bookcase (of course!).  I am also excited to someday have a new couch for movie watching, reading, and game playing where we currently use the futon in its bed form.

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Demolition was Jeff and a crowbar, pretty much entirely.  I don't mind helping, but we knew the work was going to be filthy and would take all day, never mind that there really is not room for two people to work (one of them swinging a crowbar) in this small space.  So I stayed clean, worked around the house, and brought Kaatje to her basketball game.

We did some final clean-up work a couple weeks ago:  pulling the nails left from the lathe, pulling down more tar paper, getting the plaster out of the crack where the floor meets the walls.

There's always surprises!

Jeff was wondering if he'd find what we found above, and he was right. 

This porch is attached to the back of the house, above our downstairs back porch (not to be confused with the downstairs front porch.. yeah, I know).  We don't know exactly when the porches were added, but this used to be the east exterior wall, and above is proof of the matching symmetrical window to the one still there (which goes into a tiny-but-larger-than-a-closet storage room).

None of the porches were insulated, all had single-pane double hung windows without any weatherproofing, none had heat.

I'm kind of sorry (but also relieved) to say were now considering removing this remaining window.  Like I said, it goes into a storage area, is useless, would be hard to refinish and match to the new drywall, etc, etc.  It's also more than likely lead paint (over beautiful thick oak, of course).  And really, aren't there enough windows on this porch?!  I will be happy to have those two little sections of wall to utilize.

The ceiling here is under eight feet, just by a bit.  Kaatje took one look above the rafters and immediately requested a tiny play loft, but we measured, and the peak would be under four feet, with a drastic slope down from there (not to mention the freezing cold and boiling hot it would experience under the roof).

We talked her out of it, but did decide to raise the ceiling just a bit.  There might even be room for a ceiling fan!  ...but then I won't get the chandelier I was hoping for!

I won't get in to the structural problems we discovered (there's always bad surprises, too, in a 100-year old house), but we expected as much after doing the porch below this one.  We're honestly not sure what the people who built this were thinking sometimes (all the time), but Jeff will have to do a chunk of work before we can think about moving on with wiring, insulation, windows, and everything else that makes a room a room.  How about that light hanging job above, where they drilled through a joist to push the wires through?!  Don't mind that it's the center of a structural beam!  Please don't ask about any of the framing.

Remember this was the outside wall?  Here's the original roof line with the original stucco.  I get a kick out of that little decorative wood piece under the eaves.

And check out that wiring job!  The knob and tube wiring cracks me up:  they had to run that precious wire the shortest distance possible, often taut to the light.

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So here's to the start of a new project, which is tied to more projects as usual.  We'll probably change our plans multiple times along the way, both little things and big, but it's fun to see where we start.

upstairs remodel 2: demo(lition)

The demo started with carefully removing all the doors in the project.  We're still not 100% sure what we're going to be doing with this area "after," but we tend to be hoarders when it comes to the usefulness of previously used house parts, (at least until that rollaway dumpster shows up), so in the basement the doors will go.

Jeff and the girls worked on this part while I was gone in the morning.  Give those girls a screwdriver and they know what do to!

So the doors go, then there's a big huge pause while we go about much of our early afternoon before getting back into it.  Pull out the little pry-bar and the hammer!  (and the trash cans and the shop-vac)

First we pry off the door frame, carefully removing the transom window.  Then it's on to the horrid material they used to box in the cabinet: some sort of thick cardboard/extremely thin wall board stuff.  They didn't even use 2x4's to build it, Jeff says it looks like they ripped 2x4's. 

Doesn't take long to get that down, thought the shelves take a bit to carefully remove.  The shelves are each a single solid plank of pine, without knots.  That's a big tree!

Then, the last of the framing comes down.  And the space is open!

 

I scrub with an old sock and vinegar & water, and we find the fun mysteries of "what used to be there"...

The landing railing probably was some really neat oak, going by the rest of the trim in the main floor.

This art deco wallpaper trim we've seen in other places in the house.  We think it's the original, what they would have had when they finished the house originally.  I'm not sure about that floral stuff.  Maybe another era, but it doesn't seem to be the same vintage as the art deco stuff.  The weird brown covering the wall is wallpaper, but very degraded.  The blue to the left is about 3 layers of wallpaper, or more, painted over.  That'll be fun to remove!  (ahem.)

So, here's before and after (well, "during" I guess):

So much more open.  So much more vertigo inducing!

Maybe it's the influenza, but every time I'm standing up there to go down, I sort of feel like I'm falling a little.  There is a handrail, but because of the doors, it's short and doesn't go up far enough.  We still really like it though.

Hopefully soon I'll be healthy enough to start in with the wallpaper; I do love a good weekend of wallpaper removal.  We'll keep you up to date.

$25 holes - day 17

Yay, holes!

The heat on the back porch will be from the radiator that was once (before we owned the house - probably 60+ years ago) in the kitchen. The radiator pipes in the basement are even less than a couple feet from where they need to go to it!

Unfortunately that 2 feet is directly through the foundation of the house.


Wish I had better pictures of the holes, before sealing up, but hey, they're holes - doesn't take much imagination. You can see the pipe sticking out there that will feed the radiator out on the porch... this is the view from near the ceiling of the downstairs pantry. There's another hole just like this one to the left, about 4'.

These holes in the foundation brought to us by: 2+ trips to various hardware stores, radiator testing where the only leak discovered was in the garden hose, hammer-drill and giant (but not giant enough) bit, a trip in the afternoon for all the girls out of the house (thx Cary!!), and not as much mess as expected - always nice.


Jeff said he was glad he needed 2 holes. If he just needed one, it woulda been a a $50 hole!

we don't need no stinkin' floor - east porch day 4

Monday, after a lovely day of rest Sunday, Jeff and I tore out the floor... having learned how to do it on the front porch, Jeff knew how to do it efficiently. Figuring out what to do next, however, was a different step; but by the end of the day, he had a plan.

This day brought to us by: a trip to Lowes, day-after-4th-of-July barbeque in the rain, grass-fed meat from farmer John, family coming and not minding the mess, help with dishes (thx melanie!), happy children, pasta salad from Grassroots, a trip to Menards, lemonade popsicles.


And now we get to walk a plank, many times a day!

(but for how long.....?!?)