Spring Cleaning, Inside and Out

Rebuilding a Beautiful, Vacant Historic Detroit Home (Episode 45)

Published in

Between 6 and 7

6 min readMay 21, 2018

“[Detroit is a]classical tragedy in lots of ways. In this case, the character is the city. You see the seeds of the character’s destruction. You see those tragic flaws early on, and it’s completely undone, and now we are at the third act, and we will see what happens.” — Mark Binelli, Author

Spring Has Finally Sprung!

With Winter finally behind us, as well as major interior construction, these past couple of weeks have been all about Spring cleaning! We’ve been getting to work, room by room on recovering from the last 6 years or so of vacancy and 1.5 years of construction grime from the house.

Working top to bottom, and then room by room, Brandon and I have been scrubbing windows, wiping down walls and sills, vacuuming, sweeping, scrubbing, and mopping. Our windows have been by far the hardest to work on. With so many years of grime, dust, and sawdust, Windex is essentially useless. It was suggested to us by our leaded window expert Ann Baxter to use ultra fine steel wool and that has been working wonders on our windows! The biggest downside to our beautiful lead windows is the amount of time it takes to clean them however. Every individual pane needs attention, so by the time you clean each pane of 20 or so on both sides, and then the inside and outside of the storm window, you’ve spent a solid 1/2 hour on each one.

We’ve cleaned all of the windows on our 1st floor, and are now about to start moving up to the second for a deep cleaning. Hopefully in a week or two we’ll be able to say that we’ve got the rest of the windows shiny and clean!

Still have to get to our 2nd story windows…. but we’re starting to show some progress on the 2nd floor with some minor decorating and organizing

Scrubbing the windows by hand has really allowed us to take stock of the condition of each window. In many cases, the glazing between the panes that holds them all together is failing and falling out. While it’s not a complete disaster yet, it’s still a sign that there’s work to be done to make our windows more efficient, stable, and structurally restored.

Timelapse of IKEA closet building

Building Our IKEA Dream Closet

Next up on our list of to-dos was building out our walk-in closet. We used IKEA’s PAX Closet Planner to build out what we needed and get all of our necessary dimensions. On one side of our closet, we knew we’d be cutting it close with about 1/16in too narrow a space for the IKEA pieces according to their planner, but we crossed our fingers and hoped that it would just work out once the parts were here.

It took us a solid weekend of building non-stop but eventually we got everything done and in! Our measurements were correct, and we were just 1/16in or so too narrow for one side of the closet, so Brandon bought a Multi-Tool from Home Depot and went to town on our baseboard. The multi-tool seemed to be one of the most useful tools we saw Calvin and Christian using regularly, and sure enough, it was the perfect tool to trim away our baseboard just enough to make the cabinets fit perfectly. At this point if you walked in you’d assume we had these suckers custom made, because the fit is clean and tight to both walls.

(Left) brandon cleverly cuts away the bottom of our baseboard with our new multi-tool for the last 1/16" we needed

Brandon was pretty excited to get this project done. It looks great, functions even better, and it means we can get some of our moving boxes out of the house finally now that we have a place to put our clothes that’s clean and organized!

Getting Busy Outside

Lastly, with Winter coming to a close, it was clear that one thing had to happen right away… we had to get our big maple tree out of the yard. We had a ice storm and a couple windy days the past few weeks of Winter into Spring, and man were we getting scared for our tree. Dropped limbs and swaying branches, not to mention the creaky noises coming from the trunk of the tree made tree removal 1st priority.

A Plus Tree Service out of Dryden, MI did a fantastic and professional job removing our big maple tree and about 4 others that were dead or dying. It was a really sad day for me, as the old maple tree is such a significant piece of our side lot/garden, but given its condition, we really had no choice unfortunately. With these trees gone however it now opens up some new possibilities for the yard in the future.

Driving through the yard with equipment and cutting of the last maple branch

Our maple and cherry tree had started to produce rot inside their main trunks

We were left with a TON of wood logs in our yard. After days and days of rain, Brandon and I finally found a spot of overcast days to rent a log splitter from Home Depot and go to town. We didn’t quite get to every last log, but after 12 solid hours of hard labor, we’ve probably split around 90% of the logs left in our yard. We still need to buy a new wheel barrel now and move these split logs to the back yard to dry out, but hopefully by winter we’ll have at least some of this wood dry enough to use for a fire!

(Right) Our split logs after 8 hours with the splitter (This photo doesn’t do the pile justice)

Finally, with the trees gone, we have begun working with a landscaping designer to come up with a home plan for our yard long term. With a new driveway also a priority for us at the moment, we really wanted to make sure we have a plan in place and a “North Star” to follow as we start to tackle the garden. We had a concrete contractor coming to our home on Saturday, so we’re excited and anxious to see how a big concrete pour like this is going to work and if we can even afford it!