Beadboard, Tudor Timbering, and Just One or Two Disasters Strike
Rebuilding a Beautiful, Vacant Historic Detroit Home (Episode 64)
It’s been a minute, and I have been slacking when it comes to consistent updates. This is a big information dump, so lets get started! First up:
The Garage
Beadboard
With the skylight installed last week and our sunroom sealed form the elements, the team flipped back to the garage. Alec got to work on staining our beadboard and made quick work in about 2–3 days of carefully applying our Danish Oil stain to every surface of the garage besides the floor.
The difference in the room was remarkable! It looks much like our original 1920s garage interior now, which is exactly what we were going for.
Garage Electrical
Our favorite electrician Brian of Electricmax arrived in short order after staining to finish install of the garage lighting, our EV chargers, and a few other things around the property. Our salvaged ship lights from Big Ship Salvage were installed along with modern LED track work lights so that we can work or play depending on the lighting we turn on. They look amazing on the dark stained ceiling and we can’t wait to use this space for projects and potentially for entertaining.
Our DIY Elevator
With the walls and ceiling complete on our garage interior, we can finally start the installation of our moped elevator. Motor City Metal Fab did an incredible job replicating our structural drawings and made us the two components we needed to make our elevator dreams happen! They look clean with the black powdercoating and Christian will be building a wood platform onto the elevator platform piece once we get it installed and ready to start moving bikes! The platform will have a beadboard bottom so that it is more concealed once lifted up to the attic.
Outside of the incredible weight of this structure (each piece weights several hundred pounds), Christian, Cal, and Alec made quick work of getting it into place in the attic, attaching the platform to our C-Channel and rigging up our electric hoist so we could test it out. It works incredibly easily and even has a wireless remote to control it with from above or below! It will make storing all kinds of things from mopeds to lawn equipment and outdoor furniture in our garage attic space a total breeze!
The Fence!
The time to start using up our massive pile of Ipe fence boards arrived, and Cal and Christian took a weekend to test a few panels and come up with proper assembly strategy. They they handed off the work to Dave and helper Alec to finish the job. It was about 1.5 weeks of work, but the fence install went smoothly and the results look awesome! The wood fence is completely symmetrical on both sides and is assembled with stainless steel screws, so hopefully we won’t have to worry about it for many more years to come! Alec and Dave already installed our iron fence in the front yard and once both were complete, they tied them together where the front of our home meets the front yard.
We now have a fully enclosed yard for the first time in maybe the home’s entire history. Once install was complete on the fence, we called in a painting crew to oil the wood and really bring out it’s natural red color, and protect it from UV sun load. We will likely need to reapply oil every 2 years to maintain the red color of the wood consistently.
The Timbering!
After the fence was complete, Christian and Alec recently got to work on all of our exterior garage trim. We have lots of timbering details we wanted to capture from the design by our architects at END Studio. Christian purchased sapele wood for our trim which should be an incredibly long-lasting material for the garage timbering. The sunburst details took some time and calculating work to get it right, but once Christian and Alec got cutting and screwing, the garage exterior really started to finally take shape! The only real things remaining now on the garage will be the stucco and paint.
The Firepit!
With the fence complete, and the patio and pergola done, we were surprised with the delivery of our gas firepit from Montana Firepits. Our plumbers, Nowicki’s Plumbing arrived to help with the installation. They made quick work of the install and the results are flaming hot! The new firepit puts out more BTUs than our home boiler and so we have been using it ALL. THE. TIME. Even with the yard being essentially a mud pit, we have been enjoying it in any reasonably comfortable weather. We have even already had our first shoot on the patio with Motor City Barrels asking to use it to showcase some of their new outdoor rocking chairs.
Basement Well Windows
With the driveway moving to the other side of the home, our once hidden basement well windows are now very exposed. They were already in very rough shape when we bought the home 6 years ago. With all of the work going into the exterior, we knew that we’d need to find replacement windows. We received replica casement windows from Graham Architectural Products several months back, and Christian finally had the time to tackle this project.
He and Alec took the old windows out, which was no small feat, as they were welded shut in several places (likely for security years back). With the windows removed, Christian built himself a tent and he and Alec got moving on installation. The windows look great in the space, they are so much nicer than the completely busted old ones. They are also fully functional and dual paned, which is an awesome plus for that basement space now. eventually we will figure out what we wanna do with our basement room and be ready to tackle that project, but for now at least the room has safe windows again.
Solarium Tile
Back to the solarium. Not much has happened out here since the skylight got installed. The room is fully insulated, but we are waiting on wood work to arrive from a mill in Ohio before the room can really get going again. We may move forward with the tile first, so after hunting around we were able to find enough tile that we wanted in-stock from places willing to ship to us. We have found a lovely tile subcontractor we are excited to work with. He will be giving us the “area rug” checker design we are looking for and placing brass Schluter in between to create some gold border details that will carry around the entire room. We also purchased a Nuheat flooring system that will allow us to heat the solarium floor as a secondary heat source.
The Roof
This is probably my last piece to update and the most current. We intended to have concrete for our garage be poured in mid-May, but with our roof also on the schedule, we learned that our roofers wished to bring on-site a large SkyTrak to be able to lift elements up to the roof which as you all know is incredibly steep and over 5 stories tall at the peak. These things are incredibly heavy, so in order to ensure we wouldn’t damage our brand new driveway, we opted for our roofers and our concrete subcontractor Dennis to switch places.
The roofing material arrived shortly after the decision was made, and as I type this all I can hear is the sounds of banging, saws, and loud yelling coming from the roof. We’ve got the vast majority of the old roof removed, and the crew is replacing any damaged or missing wood as they discover it. A typical asphalt roof would only take a couple days to install, but our roofer is planning on 1.5 weeks to install our metal roof. Waterproofing is essential in these circumstances, so as the old roof is removed, a large thing layer of blue waterproofing barrier is attached, and the standing steam steel roof will be applied to that.
Once the roof is complete, it means we will also be ready for solar panels to be installed! Our panel company The Green Panel is ready to rock when we are, so we are trying to find the proper balancing of timing to get those panels up. It may take several months to activate the solar system with DTE once it’s installed, so we would love to get that process moving sooner rather than later.
Our old dining door finds a new home
One project Brandon and I tackled was our old back door. We originally had a door to our dining room that was a match to our front leaded vestibule door. When we removed that doorway years back, we placed this leaded door in our basement and hoped to find another use for it someday down the road… well that time has come!
After measuring, the door is a perfect match for our old back door, which no longer needs to be an exterior grade door as the mudroom has closed it in. Roman took a day to refit the dining room door in its place for us, and Brandon and I spent the following weekend stripping, sanding, cleaning, staining, and finally Shellacking the door to match our other 1st floor doors. The door looks awesome in place of the old crummy back door and really will help bring some more light into the kitchen and tie better into our leaded exterior windows.
A couple small disasters
We have run into a couple issues that we will need to sort out soon. Our water storage system we installed may be causing us some unforeseen issues. Christian noticed in a heavy rain that our downspout pipes we have running into the ground and to the AquaBlox storage system were full and overflowing with water, even with only one of the 4 downspouts attached. We don’t suspect that the underground tank is full, so we believe there is a clog somewhere in our pipe system. We will need to figure that out and come up with a long-term solution for keeping it clear of debris in the future (if that is in fact the problem)
The combination of the AquaBlox issue and the removal of all of our gutters to make way for the new roof introduced a new problem… water in our basement! We woke up this morning to 2–3 inches of standing water in our basement utility room. Thankfully, a small clog in our basement drain was cleared with a drain snake and we got things drained out quickly, but the water intrusion means we will need to keep a careful eye on the weather until we can get the new gutters installed. Thankfully we had the vast majority of things in the room elevated on shelving, so nothing major was lost… but not a fun project to wake up to at 5am!
What’s Next?
Christian and Alec are working to get exterior trim material on the sunroom and out of the sunroom interior where it is currently stored so that our tile subcontractor Mario can begin ASAP. He will be tiling the sunroom as well as our mudroom. We should have the roof complete by sometime next week and Concrete is scheduled to begin the following Monday!
Once concrete is in place that’s when things will really take off around here. Our landscapers at B&D Garden Design are itching to start, and we have updated plant plans for the while backyard to really take shape!
Our journey isn’t over
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