LET THERE BE LIGHT!
Rebuilding a Beautiful, Vacant Historic Detroit Home (Episode 16)
Spring Has Sprung!
This past week has been the Vernal Equinox and you know what that means? FLOWERS! We’re finally starting to see our first flowering plants in the yard, in this case some gorgeous little crocuses started blooming!
Preparing for Rough Inspections
So this week, the majority of our work centered around getting all plumbing and wiring in place for our coming rough inspections. Before we can install sub-floor back into the master bathroom and insulate the walls, all electrical, plumbing, and AC needs finalizing. Our subcontractors worked hard this week getting our home closer to inspection day.
Brandon decided on having our home lighting be controlled by Insteon Smart Switches, which is what he currently uses in his home in Cincinnati and has for many years. We worked with the electrician to come up with a game plan for wiring that would allow us to have keypads and smart controls in the locations we wanted. Our electricians have been great with working with us to come up with the perfect wiring plan.
Plumbing!
Our plumbing rough was also completed this week so that we could get a quick inspection of our floors and this will allow us to re-install our sub-floor in the master bathroom so that work can be done more easily without having to carefully balance on joists. We’ve had to be very careful not to put any weight or drop anything on the floor since you’ll be effectively putting pressure and weight on our beautiful plaster ceilings below. With our inspection complete this week, Christian has begun cutting pieces to prepare to install new sub-flooring.
Kitchen Planning
I also spent some time this week sketching out an elevated view of one of our kitchen walls in order to get a feel for what we can expect it to look like. I took some of our tile ideas and placed them in context as well. We’ll use these sketches to finalize our plans with the Amish and make decisions about how we’d like the kitchen to look.
Other Discoveries
Our electrician also did us a solid today and found us another matching chandelier! We already have purchased one chandelier, but were still needing an additional one to replace the gaudy 70s brass one in our study. Brian found us a gorgeous replacement that is only missing a few crystals, which we have found a local source for replacements. Thanks Brian!
A new mini project also developed for us. We pulled our driveway light from the house to take a look at its condition. It’s an amazing original cast housing shaped like a lion and the marbled glass shades around it are broken. It’ll need a little bit of an overhaul to get it looking and working right, but I think the energy will be well worth saving this gem!
After doing some cleaning on the 3rd floor and wallpaper removal, I decided to tackle a record player I had found in the attic and see if I could fix a broken foot and turn it on. We also found a bunch of near new condition 45rpm records with accompanying “read-along” golden children’s books from the 1960s and 70s. I fixed the leg, plugged the player in, dropped on a “Wizard of Oz” 45, and turned to page one. The record player works wonderfully, even a light-up toggle turned on brightly!
Finally, we also wanted to share how pleased we are to have been welcomed into our University District Detroit community by being asked to write a short article in our neighborhood’s community newsletter! Thanks for including and supporting us on our journey. We’re proud to call U.D. home.
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!
