Let’s Get Creative!
Rebuilding a Beautiful, Vacant Historic Detroit Home (Episode 7)
“You can’t save Detroit. You gotta be Detroit.” –Antonio “Shades” Agee
We hope you all had a good holiday season! Things slowed down a little these past two weeks, but we still made some commendable progress!
Calvin Gets An Idea
So after seeing a neighbor who had used creative methods to support their curved ceiling while removing a structural wall, we decided to try something similar to open our doorway between the dining room and breakfast nook. We were concerned about damaging the plaster work in our dining room, which was in pristine condition for being 90 years old. Calvin said he would think about it for a few days and eventually came back to us with a creative solution.
Spray Foam!
So Calvin suggested that rather than using a board to directly press on the ceiling, we could offset the board from the curve slightly and fill the space with a spray foam used for insulating windows. His idea was that the spray would better distribute the weight of the ceiling across the entire surface and evenly push on the delicate and intricate carvings to hopefully protect them from harm. If the plaster still developed cracks and damage, we’d have to pay money to have them repaired, but we decided the risk was worth the possible reward and gave Calvin and his son the go-ahead.
After the doorway was opened, some warping in sub-floor was revealed and so we had to remove some of it and the hardwood flooring in order to figure out the problem. A combination of weight shifting and water damage was the likely culprit, so after fixing some of the joists and replacing sub floor, we’ve gained back a fairly smooth surface again. We also replaced a bunch of damaged sub-floor in the Kitchen, including our hole where you could fall through.
Another Discovery
Before we pulled out the wall between the nook and dining room, we had to remove some of the carpeting and we made an interesting discovery. Underneath the carpet in the middle of the dining room we found a strange brass object wired into the floor. After some thought, Brandon remembered that the previous owner had talked about ringing the maid’s bell as a kid while sitting at the dining room table. This was the foot-activated call-bell for the maid that you could reach underneath the dining table! A pretty awesome find! It’d be interesting to get it working again somehow, but it may need to be relocated.
More Water Problems
As if this house hadn’t had enough problems with water in the past, I discovered a disaster waiting to happen one morning in the house. I was in the basement and noticed standing water by the boiler and when I looked up, I quickly realized that we had a major problem.
We didn’t know what it was at the time but quickly learned we had a faulty steam trap. The steam was escaping out the sides and billowing up underneath the floor joists and sub-floor above, filling the air like a sauna. After paying closer attention I could see sap oozing out of the sub floor to the point that hot sap was dripping down onto the top of the boiler from the heat and moisture! We quickly had our HVAC subcontractor order us a new part and that was installed this week.
Had it gone on much longer, we could have had some serious damage done to the floor of the Living Room! Since it has been replaced, we noticed that 2 boilers that were previously not working in the house have started functioning again! We feel fortunate that the house didn’t sit empty longer, as this problem would have caused much more damage for the previous owner.
1.21 Gigawatts!
Finally, the next big step that happened over our winter break was electricity has begun to be installed! In order to be able to charge 2 electric cars in the future, we decided to upgrade our home to a 200A system. So we dug a trench to our garage from the house for service to be installed and began to put in a new breaker box in the basement! Our electrician has now begun to re-wire our kitchen, nook, and bedroom above where the walls are exposed.
Full Steam Ahead
With the holidays over, we can finally get back on track with working full-time on this bad boy. It was nice to get a break from work, but we’re also anxious to get a move on and start seeing quick progress again! HVAC, Electrical, and Plumbing are going to begin this week!
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!
