Cutting Into Brickwork

Rebuilding a Beautiful, Vacant Historic Detroit Home (Episode 10)

One of our beautifully repaired stained glass windows! This window had at least 2 cracks and damaged lead that were perfectly repaired for us!

“We may be lifelong residents, newcomers, or former Detroiters, but a common undercurrent alights our work: We are a city moving through the fire of transformation.”
― Anna Clark, A Detroit Anthology

Window Repair Begins

This week we had a packed house full of subcontractors! We started the week with the removal of several windows around the house. While, we plan on keeping our original leaded glass windows, there were many that are in need of small repairs: several cracked panes, some damaged lead, and our back door having been broken into through the leaded glass prior to our purchase of the home. A woman who specializes in repairs of lead windows came by and picked up the first of several batches of windows form the house in need of repair. It only took a few days for her to repair and return them, and now she is working on our second batch of windows.

(Right) The mason finishes a wonderful job opening up our window!

(Left) The mason used the removed extra bricks from our window to fill in space on our house where an old kitchen vent used to be. You can barely see where he worked even though the mortar is still wet.

We also removed our kitchen window and a mason came by to help us expand the footprint of the window. He spent about two days cutting up and re-pointing the brickwork around our window and then used those extra bricks to fill up where an unused vent was on the side of our house. Now it’s just pretty brick throughout!

Timelapse of our mason chopping through our brick to expand the kitchen window!

(Left) So many tubes through some of our closets! Luckily this is a linen closets that was deep already. (Right) Tubes running through our nursery that’ll need to be walled in.

Rough AC Complete

We are now finally ready for our rough AC inspection. There are tubes everywhere. They tentacle around our attic like a giant octopus and then dive down through the floor and appear throughout the house. Most of the mini-ducts are run through closets, which means we have a slight loss of closet space, but thankfully we have pretty ample storage in the home so it shouldn’t cause us too much of an issue.

Christian and Chad have roughed in framing around all of the mini ducts so that once we have our inspection they can all be boxed in with drywall and disappear.

Christian cuts and preps the hole for our return and the final result looking up at the ceiling on the 3rd floor.

Our attic is being taken over by tubes! Christian was able to hide the tubes going to our condenser outside by running them along our chimney on the inside of the house (right)

Overall it’s been a productive week, and now rough plumbing can come in to run new pipes! We also plan on having some rough electrical inspections before we have 200 amp service run to the house and garage. We are trying to come up with a plan for our pink bathroom to be converted into having a working shower as well as selecting new toilets and a sink for our awful black 1/2 bath on the 1st floor.

(Left) Awesome “notepad” we found of Christian’s calculations of the proper dimensions for one of our archways! Who said that this kind of math wouldn’t be useful to know when you’re older?! (Right) Christian also did a great job of converting our maid’s staircase into a useful closet/storage area!

Our Journey isn’t over! We’ve been working hard since we purchased the home in November 2016 and are writing updates on our progress roughly every week. Make sure to check out our latest updates on our homepage!

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