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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
We’re Craigslist junkies, but for good reason. We moved from a house that had twice the square footage of our current house, so we have lots of extra furniture and furniture that just doesn’t work in this old house. We’ve sold hundreds of dollars worth of things on Craigslist, and currently have several items listed. We’re taking the money we make from these sales to purchase furniture that DOES work in the house. Since we can’t afford all new furniture, and since old furniture looks better in this house anyway, Craigslist is a great resource for buying, too.
Round Mission Oak Table
Stacy found a dining room table. It’s oak, round, and a perfect fit for our home. And it cost very little. Stacy fell in love with the base, which is big, solid, and can be split down the middle to accommodate adding leaves. The table came with five solid oak leaves, so now we can have a party!
Speaking of oak, we’re very excited about one other Craigslist find:
Mission Bookcases
These bookcases were salvaged from a 1920’s home. They’re solid oak and beautiful. They are meant to be installed as shown in the photo: as half-wall type room dividers. I’ll be honest: we bought them without knowing exactly where we’re going to install them. But we’ve been trying to figure out how to make the basement feel like it fits into the rest of the house, and the only way we’re going to do it is with quarter-sawn oak. And, again, that’s more than we can afford new. It would cost thousands for us to have someone build bookcases like this. And it feels good to reuse instead of buying new. So we purchased these off Craigslist when we saw them (for a small fraction of what they would cost new). It will be fun to design around them.
This house has a fish pond in the back yard. It’s a little pond; big enough for some gold fish and a fountain in the middle. Stacy liked the pond, especially the sound of the water with the fountain on. But, she decided early on that she really wanted to add another pond, with a waterfall connecting the two.
Last week, she did it, with the help of some strong teenage backs and arms. Matthew and Nathan dug a large hole (Justin was still in the Boundary Waters), large enough to fit a ~200 gallon horse watering tank that we brought from our old farm, plus additional room.
Digging
After a week of digging two hours/day, they finished the three foot deep hole. They moved some of the dirt around the house to spots that needed it in the lawn, but also built up the slope away from the foundation along the side of the house. They worked hard!
Once the hole was in place, Stacy got to work. She and Justin back-filled around the horse tank and finished getting the ground around the pond to the appropriate height. The tank and dirt were then covered with a plastic liner, and the site was now ready for rocks. Stacy used the edge of the tank as a ledge to put rocks around the new pond, and built an upper waterfall that drained down into the upper pond. Also, she created a gap where the upper pond flows into the lower pond.
Stacy Building the Upper Pond
Stacy started to fill the pool with water, and also hooked up the pump and filter system to the upper water fall that runs into the new pool. She spent lots of time arranging the rocks so that they are stable, functional, and attractive. At the upper falls, she used a large piece of slate that Stacy’s parents had brought from their home in Vermont. A beautiful piece to use as the center of the falls!
Stacy spent much of the day arranging rocks that she pulled out of the bottom of the old pond. Luckily, there were lots of them! Unfortunately, there were also several inches of muck on the bottom of the old pond from years of decayed tree debris and fish poop. So, she drained most of the water from the lower pool and moved the fish to the upper pool. She scooped all of the muck out and fed it to the plants in the yard. Yum! Smelly, but good for them.
Muck in Old Pond
Both Ponds
Stacy took a short video of the nearly-completed upper falls in action.
To finish it off, Stacy purchased a few rocks. As the centerpiece of the lower falls, she used Bighorn flag stone with beautiful colors from Montana. She also found some rocks with lots of moss and lichen to make the ponds look a little more natural and aged.
Lower Falls
Lichen and Moss Covered Rocks
So, it’s just about complete. Stacy got close, but ran out of rocks. It’s time to go visit our 14 acres of fields in Wisconsin. There are LOTS of rocks there. Here’s a shot of the nearly finished project. Beautiful!
