Our Bungalow

The windows have added lots of light to the basement and made it seem less basement-like. We are very happy with how they look on the inside:

Before

After

They also look great on the outside:

Before

After

More photos of the process:

A Window in the Hole

A View from the Inside

One Old Window, One New Window

The window wells are made of timbers. We had some bad experiences with timber window wells in our last house and swore we’d never use them again. Wood rots, don’t you know. But we didn’t feel like stone fit this house, and we were convinced that, if installed correctly, timbers could be very durable. These timbers are protected from moisture in the ground by dimpled plastic sheets, gravel, and plastic. They should last a long time.

Plastic Lining and Timbers

We decided to install four new windows in the basement in order to let in more light and make it feel less like a basement. It is (hopefully) the most expensive single thing we’ll do in our basement, but we think it’s well worth it. We had two casement windows and two double-hung windows installed, but they are styled such that they all look like double-hungs and match the mission style of the other main windows in the house. Installing the new windows required digging large window wells and cutting into the foundation. Here we go:

Double Window Well

This next part made me a bit uneasy:

Here’s another sketching, this time of some plans for the basement. We sat down again with David Wagner from SALA Architecture and, once again, he did a nice job of working out some details for us (click for enlarged image).

Basement Plans

Again, I’m not sure how useful this is to most people, even if you’ve seen our basement. But here it is, all the same.

We are adding a bedroom, not necessarily because we need one (although I think Matthew is assuming it will be his), but because it will add value to the home. Also, it would be nice to have a place for guests to sleep, so people will visit us once in a while. These plans include the following exciting features:

- a 3/4 bath with a shower,

- a laundry room,

- a storage/furnace room,

- a family room, and

- a “library” space.

We tried, but there just wasn’t room for a horse stall.

So, the next steps include replacing the windows, and having a plumber replace some pipes (some of which are held together with electrical tape!). More to come…

A few photos from the big day (click on image to see larger version):

Today we demolished the walls in our basement. We’ve been wanting to do this for some time, but our weekends have been pretty busy. We rented a dumpster and had it put in the street. The walls were mostly plaster and lathe, except for one wall of sheetrock. The boys must have made a gazillion trips up the stairs with loads of debris to throw in the dumpster. See below for a few before and after shots (it’s hard to tell, but each pair is from the same perspective). More photos to come…

Now it’s just one big empty room; a palette on which to paint our new basement.

Before #1

After #1

Before #2

After #2

Before #3

After #3

Actually, I’m not sure what the mice are planning, but they always seem to be up to something in this house.

The men and women, however, have a plan. And here it is (click for enlarged image):

Main Level Plan

This isn’t going to be very useful to those of you who haven’t been in our house, and it might not even be useful to those who have.

It’s a drawing of a remodeled back three rooms of our house: Dining room, kitchen, and family room on the main level. “But I thought you were refinishing your basement!” you say? Yes, we are, but we realized that we wouldn’t even be able to get lumber or sheet rock into the basement, because the entrance to the stairway going down is to cramped with turns. So, we need to blow a hole in the family room wall to get a straight shot down the stairs (Stacy’s been wanting to do that since we moved in).

So, we thought we should decide what that hole in the wall could eventually be part of. We spent less than two hours with an architect, David Wagner, from SALA Architecture. It was time well spent. He pulled all of our ideas together and solved some problems that we couldn’t figure out. He sketched the plans you see here.

I think the mice will be happy.

Dining Room Corner Cabinet

You might have caught a glimpse in a previous post of some built-in corner cabinets in our dining room. We had to pull one out to get the radon pipe up the wall.

They’re nice cabinets, but we didn’t like them from the start because they didn’t fit into the style of the house. The rest of the house is mission style heavy quarter sawn oak, and these cabinets are more closely aligned with a colonial style (my sister has a colonial home with similar cabinets. They look great there!).

They are in what was originally the kitchen when the house was built. However, we believe that around 1940, the current kitchen was added on and the old kitchen was turned into a dining room. By 1940, the bungalow style had somewhat lost favor, so it’s understandable that these “more 1940’s stylish” cabinets would be installed (along with a faux tin ceiling).

Cabinet Removed

But it was time for them to go. We posted them on Craigslist, and they sold almost immediately to a gentleman from St. Paul (a cabinet maker, in fact). It’s fun to sell things that you don’t want, and know they’re going to someone who really wants them.

So, I removed the second cabinet from the wall, loaded them into his truck, and away they went! So, now we have two bare spots in our dining room that we’ll need to live with until we figure out what we’re going to do to remodel that space.

The money we made from selling these pretty much pays for the oak bookcases we purchased last week. Sweet! Thanks again, Craigslist!

Now You See It...

...Now You Don't

The "Tree Fort"

The trees in our yard our young and small. The largest was a maple big enough to climb, and the previous owners had nailed boards on the trunk to serve as steps up to a one-board fort. We enjoyed the small amount of shade it provided.

But this tree had problems. Lots of problems. The neighbors had a large pine tree that grew next to it for many years and crowded it out (according to them), thus it’s gangly, one-sided structure. It had a huge split in it, half the tree looked dead (and more was dying), and fungus was starting to grow on at least one of the branches (which means it’s already rotting). It was so stressed that it produced a massive number of seeds this year.

As Jack Handey once said “If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down?  We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.” This tree was screaming all the time.

A Screaming Tree

We’ll need to get someone in to grind the stump down so we can use the space where the stump is, hopefully to plant another tree.

We’ll need to figure out what to plant in its place. Another maple (fast growing, but if this tree was diseased, probably not a good idea to replace it with another maple), an oak (sloooow to grow), or Justin’s suggestion: A Ginkgo (there are many in the neighborhood. Cool, ancient trees, but not really a shade tree), or …?

The yard somehow looks much larger with the tree down, even though it took up very little space.

Goodbye, tree.

Coming Down

Down

While our yard is small, there is room for a garden. We didn’t have time to put one in last spring, so we only grew some tomatoes on four large pots on our patio this summer. A perfect place to feed the squirrels and chipmunks. Stupid squirrels.

Before

But today, Justin and I built a raised bed garden. We started by cutting the sod out (I had to sharpen my shovel for it to be of any use cutting sod. The grinding wheel comes in handy again!). And we reused the sod in our front yard along the street where there was no grass (long story involving the City of St. Paul and rotting tree roots). I’d never cut sod before and it went much better than I expected.

Justin at Work

We then arranged and leveled two layers of 4×6 posts centered against the back of the garage. We connected them where necessary and drove spikes through them into the ground so they wouldn’t move.

The finished garden is about 16 feet long and only about 20 inches wide. Stacy insisted that she didn’t want a garden that overwhelmed our relatively small yard. We’ll need to think about what we can grow vertically along the back of the garage. And how we can keep the multitude of rabbits, chipmunks, and squirrels out of it. Stupid squirrels.

We filled the garden with dirt from the hole that was dug for the fish pond. It fit perfectly. Stacy even saved some “sludge” that she dredged up from the bottom of the old pond and mixed it into the soil. Yum.

After

What would a bungalow be without a garden? Now we’ll be ready for spring!