Victorian Farmhouse - Electrical (Day 7)

Before I get into the meat of this post, I have two random "old hardware photos", and a few photos of the foundation work on the exterior.

Here is that other Victorian handle I had seen. It's on the basement door, and it's a different pattern than the other one. This one has a cranked (or offset) handle. You might wonder why there's a rectangular notch in the bottom, and that's because it was cast as both a "right and left" handle. Just flip it over and it's identical for fixing to a different door.



I also re-photographed the lovely handle from the "under stairs closet".



Here's the foundation on the side of the house where the deck was. If you'll recall from one of the last 2 posts, it had been dug out, and all the stones had been cleaned up and prepared for the lime mortar. 95% of this area will eventually be hidden under the deck once it's replaced.





While I was at it, I thought I'd show some of the tree stumps from this small front porch landing.



This VINE grew between two boards to a pretty amazing size. I'd say it was at least an inch and a half trunk by this point.



All the framing under the side door was rotted. I was also surprised to see that the addition is partially on a stone foundation, rather than cement. I'm fairly sure that parts of it are cement, but this section here is stone. The small section of cement on the right was apparently still in good shape (over the stone) so it was left as-is.



I mentioned a while back that there was a HUGE pile of vines, and this is some of it. It looks like just a pile of sticks, but it's actually about a 4 foot high pile of tangled vines.



Most of the work on the farmhouse on days 7 and 8 (April 9th and 10th) was spent on electrical work. As mentioned previously, when this house was first built, it had no electrical, and no plumbing. The house was basically just a stone basement, 2 rooms on the main floor, and 2 bedrooms above. We found no traces of gas lighting, wall brackets, or hanging fixtures (such as hanging kerosene lamps).

The house was first wired for electricity in around 1969 or 1970. The current panel uses fuses (see days 2 & 3 for photos), and the existing wiring is still fine. It's copper with a ground wire, but it has the more brittle cloth type wire coating. While the existing wiring is still good (and a bunch of it will stay) there are many rooms with barely any electrical (one plug per room, no overhead lights, etc).

I'm helping my friends with the installation of the new wiring. When it's done, it will be inspected, and we're putting in an updated panel with circuit breakers. We were hoping to be able to move the electrical panel, or raise it from 100amp to a 200amp service, but costs were going to be much too high, so we're opting to have a more compact panel, and inset it into the wall.

I had started a bit of electrical work on day 6, but we had the wrong electrical boxes (octagonal ceiling boxes) and I had also forgotten that we needed some 3-wire for the 2-way switch in the hallway. With the materials in hand, I got to work early, and passed most of the hallway lighting wires (a separate add-on light fixture in the lower front hallway on a 2-way switch). I also passed the wiring for the office ceiling light, which you can see here. The bare bulb fitting is temporary.



Office's light switch (in progress). Note the use of plaster buttons to help stabilize the lath boards where needed (especially near outlet boxes).



Front hall light fixture partway done.



Front hall switch 1 of 2 (near living room side).



This switch gave us some problems but in the end we got everything working correctly.

Next to the front door were 2 light switches (one for the porch, and one for the staircase light above). Now there are three switches and the third controls the light in the main hall on the first floor (at the base of the stairs just outside the office).



Here's that ridiculous outlet box in the master bedroom.



We discovered the reason why the box didn't fit within the wall. This wall (next to the staircase) is only 1 inch thick. It is barn board tongue-and-groove and it had just wallpaper over it originally (and it now has an added layer of drywall in the bedroom). This box is the second 2-way switch for the staircase light, and we're moving it to the exterior wall next to the window.



Pierre was up in the attic to pull wires. We also followed the old wires to see which ones went where, and how they passed them. Most of the upstairs is all on one breaker (fuse), including the staircase light, master bedroom, and spare room. The only separate circuit upstairs is the bathroom.



The attic is in similar shape to mine. Lots of signs of old water damage, and old hornet nests. Behind Pierre are the remains of the original chimney, which would have come from a wood stove in the living room, up through the ceiling into the spare room, and then up into an elbow and into the chimney. The top of it was removed a while back, and you can see the roofing tin in the top corner (they didn't patch the hole with wood).



The attic of the main house is largely just a big triangular area, but there's a bit of a peak where the gable is (which I didn't photograph). This shows the area over the master bedroom.



Our last little adventure of the way was to take a peek behind the paneling in the kitchen addition. All three of us were THRILLED to find that under ALL the thin plywood, wallpaper, and mac-tac are solid wood tongue-and-groove walls on all four walls!



Hopefully all the mac-tac will come off as easily as this section did (like a big giant piece of masking tape). They still make a nearly identical tongue-and-groove if we need to patch anywhere, but this will look awesome!



I'm excited to see what's under the ceiling panels, but it's possible that the ceiling is also tongue-and-groove. If that's the case, we'll do the walls a different colour to break-up all the stripey effect. The floor is apparently also nice solid wood (under linoleum and plywood).

Lastly, we finally decided that the old grate in the living room ceiling was going to be removed and patched.

Before:



After removing the ring and patch:

A Very Busy Weekend

I had a pretty busy weekend these past few days.

On Friday we celebrated a friend's birthday and had a nice social evening at her parents' place.

On Saturday, I helped my friend Devin install a patio door in his back room. This job consisted of sawing a hole into the exterior wall where there was currently a window. When the previous owners had built it, it was supposed to have a patio door there, but they never installed it, and instead it had an awkward window. The window opening was the right size, and around the right height for the new patio door, so it was FAIRLY simple to install the new door. It still took most of the day, though. I took one or two "before" photos, but no "after" photo. I'll probably post one later on.

Here's the "before" with the window removed and part of the wall sawn. On the left is Devin, and on the right is another friends' father. Devin's dad also showed up a bit later and helped us out.



After the patio door was in, we got showered and changed, and left for another friend's birthday celebration, which consisted of a lovely meal at a nearby local restaurant, and then an evening at a bar for drinks/karaoke.

On Sunday, I returned to Dev's place to finish installing the mouldings around the patio door, and patch all the wall panelling, which took most of the afternoon. After we got done, I was invited over for supper with his parents. When I got back home, I was in a productive mood, so I installed all the crown mouldings in the Office, and caulked and puttied them.



Note: I had to redo this entire corner seam, since the paper seam was literally peeling off the wall because it was so poorly installed.





I'm incredibly happy with how the replacement crown turned out. It blends in seamlessly with the original.



Today (Monday), I went outside to do a bit of yard cleanup. I started with just picking up a few fallen branches, and then I somehow ended up 15 feet up a ladder sawing a rotten limb on the maple tree.





I thought this was going to be EASY, since it was a mostly dead branch, but as it turns out, it still had a live portion growing on the very end (see blue arrow), and most of the bottom of the branch was still VERY sturdy. It took me probably 10-20 minutes to saw that (I was using a hand saw).

Note, this photo and the next one were taken from my bedroom window, with the camera about 5 feet off the floor, to give you an idea of how high these branches were.



The bad stump that I really wanted to get rid of, however, was on the other trunk, and can be seen below:



This is the remnant from that branch that had fallen down a few years ago:



I wasn't able to bring myself to get that high on the ladder. It's about 20 feet off the ground, and the ladder I've got is an old, busted-up piece of crap. That, and I would have needed a hatchet or a chain saw for this one (I have neither). I'm not too worried about the tree's health, but I'd definitely like to have that rotted stump removed. It's infested with bugs/holes and I'm sure it's not doing the tree any good.

I also got some help from the landlady* next door, who was there to do some cleaning-up and checking on the building. She was there with another man, and they cleaned out a lot of the junk in between the garage and my other neighbours.

* She also informed me that my chimney has been shedding bricks apparently, which isn't surprising, considering the atrocious shape it's in. She was concerned that I'd need to fix it, but I told her I'd be removing it completely.

The branches I trimmed, plus the ones in between the houses left me with 2 full trash cans.



Another quick repair was FINALLY getting around to patching this extra hole in the foundation. It looks like a hole for a PVC pipe (same as the other 2 next to it), and it does go all the way through the foundation, but for some reason they didn't use it, and it was patched only on the inside (a few inches deep) with just a bunch of wadded-up plastic bags in the hole on the exterior.

Rather than fill the ENTIRE cavity with cement (which would have been hard, since the foundation wall is something like 8-10" thick), I removed the old bags, and re-stuffed the middle cavity with insulation. I patched the last 2 inches with hydraulic cement. If I ever need that hole again, it should be fairly easy to drill it back out.



I also removed this ugly/useless metal bracket on the side of the house (same wall as above). I have NO IDEA what it was for, or why they left it there, but I wanted it GONE. It was just a strap with 2 L shaped hooks on each end pointing upwards. You can see it in the "fallen limb" photo a few pics back. It was held in place with 2 large square head bolts (top one was loose). The top "hook" was in the way when they did the siding, which is why there's a notch in it now. I managed to carefully undo the bottom bolt, and I patched the hole with cement, since I had a bit left.



A few hours later, I made a trip to Home Depot for wood/mouldings so that I can recreate the missing piece to go under the built-in (the bottom casing) in the Office. I'll also need one for the Kitchen built-in (which isn't even made yet, or 100% decided) but I got enough wood for 2 pcs.

Oh, and I also did another coat of drywall on the last Living Room drywall corner (so that I can get it done, install the crown, and then paint all the trim (since it will need shellac primer, and I only want to do that ONCE).

So yeah. Busy weekend.