Our Bungalow

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.

Thank you Craigslist!

Original Pond

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!

Beautiful Ponds

There’s an interesting ad in the 1940′s comics that is worth a look. It is done in cartoon style (hard to tell apart from the actual comics).

I searched for more on our hero, Cecil Yates, but all I could find were other ads like this, and a short bio.

Imagine if this were in the papers today (click on images to enlarge):

Complete Ad

Bong?

My hero!

Wow, what a guy

Is there anything he can't do?!

The Lance Armstrong of his age

He's my he....WHAT?

Wait, was he smoking in that last frame?!

He rides to...

...EMPHYSEMA!

Wait, I thought FAST was good...

The End

The crawl spaces had some junk in them. Earlier this year, I pulled an old maple syrup bottle out of the space beneath the family room. I searched for Griggs, Cooper (manufacturer/distributor/whatever) and found the following:

Griggs Cooper & Co. was founded in 1882 as a distributor of grocery products to stores in Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota, Montana and other states in the upper midwest. The Company was not only a distributor of grocery products but also a manufacturer of its own brands of crackers, cookies, candy, coffee, spices and jams and jellies under the ” Home Brand” and “Sanitary Products” labels.

And a court case.

Unfortunately, that still doesn’t exactly tell us how old it is.

Syrup Bottle

Syrup Label

Also, Val found an old newspaper in one of the crawl spaces. It is a complete comics section from the Sunday, February 25, 1940 edition of the St. Paul Pioneer Press. It’s in pretty good shape, although it has some holes in it. It’s amazing that it survived in a seemingly damp, floorless crawlspace for nearly 70 years.

So, where were you on February 25, 1940?

The comics include:

• Li’l Abner
• Terry and the Pirates
• Smitty
• Our Boarding House
• Out Our Way
• Skippy
• Katzenjammer Kids
• Joe Palooka
• Freckles and His Friends
• Mickey Finn
• Off the Record
• Jane Arden
• Joe Jinks
• Little Mary Mixup
• Polly and Her Pals
• Abbie an’ Slats
• Tarzan
• Chief Wahoo
• Fritzi Ritz
• Ella Cinders
• Bringing Up Father

Each comic takes up between a half and a whole page. For example, see the photo of Li’l Abner. The section is 14 pages long.

1940's Comics

Li'l Abner

We highly recommend the services of Val Riedman (Croix Valley Radon Mitigation). He and his son finished the job on Thursday. They were thorough and thoughtful. Thanks Val!

Radon Pipes

This is a shot looking into one of our crawl spaces (under our kitchen). The pipe on the right is the main venting pipe that comes up from the drain tile and vents to the roof. The other two pipes are pulling air from beneath plastic sheeting in each crawl space. You can see where one of them goes down into the plastic on the floor of this crawl space. The pipe going off to the left ends up in the other crawl space (beneath the family room).

So, it’s done. In a few weeks we will do another radon test. Val thinks it will be down below 1 pCi/L (which is good).

The radon mitigation system taps into our existing drain tile, which runs around the inside perimeter of the foundation. The continually running fan draws the air up from the drain tile. To access the drain tile, a hole needs to be drilled into the basement floor. A pipe is run up through the house and out through the roof.

Drain Tile Access Hole

Radon Vent Pipe

One of our faithful readers asked how we know if the radon mitigation fan is working. The pipe in the basement has a guage on it that shows the pressure (relative to the room). See how the left side is higher than the right? That means there is a lower pressure in the pipe. The fan is working. (Aside: It reminds me of a big mercury barometer I used to have in my classroom. If the administration knew it was there it would have been removed, since it required a large vat of mercury.)

Pressure Guage

We have two crawl spaces in our basement. These are spaces underneath the kitchen and back family room which were both added on sometime after the house was built, and thus they are outside the foundation. So there are two openings in the foundation (see photo) to access these spaces. Some of our radon problem could be because of the dirt ground in these spaces, which allows radon to seep in. The crawl space under the family room actually has an old cistern underneath. The cistern is half filled with construction waste (see close up photo), including pieces of plaster and concrete block.

Crawl Space

Cistern

For radon mitigation, the floor of the crawl spaces need to be sealed with plastic and a pipe connected to it to draw out the radon that accumulates underneath. The cistern is problematic, because the plastic sheet would not be supported underneath. Solution? We decided to “temporarily store” some of our demolition waste (sheet rock, plaster, lathe) in the cistern until it was full. Now the plastic sheet can be laid on top. Problem solved.

Radon mitigation involves pumping radon gas from under the foundation up and out through the roof. This is accomplished with a PVC pipe and a fan unit connected to the pipe. There are two ways to do this: The hidden way, or the ugly way.

The hidden way: The pipe from the basement comes up through the house, hidden in the back of a closet or in a wall. The fan unit sits in the attic out of sight and pumps the radon up through the roof.

The ugly way: The pipe runs out the basement, up the side of the house, around anything that gets in the way, and up onto the roof. Here‘s an example. We REALLY want to avoid this.

All of the radon mitigation contractors we talked with said that we would have to use the ugly way. Our house does not appear to have a clear, hidden path from the basement up through the roof. But finally we found someone who said he could figure out a way to hide the pipe in the house, and he did.

He’s running the pipe up the inside of a wall that used to be the outside of the house (before the kitchen was added on), so it’s a thick wall with room for a pipe. To do so, he had to remove one of the corner cabinets in our dining room (which we were planning to take out someday anyway). The fan will sit in an attic space (that was closed off) above the kitchen.

Behind the cabinet was a rough coat of plaster (but no second, finish coat) on the lathe. He cut that away and installed the pipe. Inside the wall was some very interesting insulation (see photo). We’re guessing that it’s just a little flammable…

Cabinet Removed

Insulation

Nathan Inspects the Wall

Vent Pipe Installed

Plastic Covered Walls

Now that the foundation is exposed, we are ready for the plastic sheeting to cover the walls. We hired a waterproofing company to do this. They worked fast (a little too fast, in fact). They covered the walls in plastic, sealed the tops and seams in the plastic sheets with a gooey acoustic caulk (who knew there was such a thing?), simply because it had the right consistency for sealing the plastic to the wall (not because it would help make a quiet basement).

Tape

Then they tucked the plastic behind the dimpled plastic sheet and sealed it with wide tape (see photo).

So, in theory (and hopefully in practice), the plastic should now encapsulate the walls. When a radon mitigation system is connected to the drain tile (where the dimpled plastic sheets are coming from), it should suck the plastic against the walls.

We have a radon mitigation guy coming tomorrow, so we’ll see. I’m skeptical.

The basement project has begun! We are starting with the essential radon mitigation.

Partial Wall Removal

If you click on the image, you’ll see an enlarged version of it. If you look at the base of the wall, you’ll see a dimpled plastic sheet coming out from the floor. This is what it is, and this is why it’s there. It provides a gap between the wall and the floor that allows moisture to run down into the drain tile. The problem is, it also lets radon gas up into the basement. So, how do you allow it to serve it’s function while also sealing it up to keep the radon out? Good question! The answer is, to line the walls with plastic, and seal the plastic down onto the dimpled plastic sheet. The plastic on the walls is sealed at the top, so it is air tight.

So, we hired someone to come in and seal the foundation with plastic. But, to prepare, I needed to give them access to the entire foundation. So I borrowed our friend’s reciprocating saw (thanks Wendell!) and cut the plaster and lathe walls back about 18 inches wherever a wall butted up against the foundation (see photo). Fun!

Also, there was a finished “office” in the basement that the previous owners built. For some reason. So, the sheetrock and trim in that room had to be ripped out. It took very little time to cut the plaster and lathe walls, but the sheetrock in the office took much of the day for me, Matthew, and Nathan to rip out (Justin is on a canoe trip).

The "Office" Before

The "Office" After

Matthew Removing Sheetrock