Another unsexy thing I recently embraced was some salvage operations in my garage. If you know old properties, you’re probably familiar with the circa 1950’s garage. Detached, built sometime after the house and not to last, long before the modern almost-as-structurally-stable as the house outbuilding. The door isn’t tall enough for a large pickup truck. The concrete floor has no… Read More »Even more unsexy renovations: Garage salvage.
Part one of my summer reno project dressed up concrete, with a bit of insulation for frills. I called it unsexy renovations, but the climax did spew paint all over the basement, leading to a modest, post-exertion haze of satisfaction. Part two of the basement remediation has a less aesthetic outcome but is more exciting because it involves tools. And… Read More »Joist Support.
There are some things a home owner has to do that are boring, dirty (not in a pleasant way) and don’t have much visual appeal. My first experience with this was roof reshingling the roof. Thousands of dollars and a lot of banging (not in a pleasant way) later, there was the new roof, same as the old roof, only… Read More »Unsexy Home Renovations.
I’ve long loved old houses. When the opportunity presented itself, in a newspaper ad looking for volunteers for my local Heritage advisory committee, I grabbed a laptop and confessed my passion to the municipal officials, hoping for a chance to be involved. And deeply involved I have become.1 So began my education about heritage preservation in Ontario, municipal politics and… Read More »A Heritage Moment.
To compliment my traditional, 1920’s era window and door trim, I am replacing the baseboards. I can see rements of the original baseboards inside the kitchen cupboards. The same style is available at my local lumber yard, aptly call ‘traditional’. I’m as excited as anyone can get about baseboards. Baseboards are hard. After watching a number of ‘how to install… Read More »Getting to the bottom of trim: Baseboards
Not content to conquer white painted trim, I’m moving on to stained wood. It’s like taking the training wheels off, or acrobatics with no net. One of the marvels of modern construction is caulking. Marvellous stuff for sealing gaps, keeping the cold and water out of where they don’t belong. And sealing gaps. Between the baseboard and the wall, if… Read More »Trim. No Caulking.
There are times when I envy the renovators who rip out the interior of a house to the studs and start afresh. Then I remind myself that I have a different agenda: aiming to keep as much of the old, and fitting in the new, in a way that respects the historical styles – of construction as well as decoration.… Read More »Trim Decisions
Like the tail-fins on a chevy or the doo-wops in a song, the trim around the doors and windows say a lot about the age and style of the home. My current DIY project, part of a grander scheme to restore my 1927-built house to something resembling an original style of the time, is to replace all the door and window casings. … Read More »Window Trim.
I like old houses. This started when I was a pre-teen, when my mother took me to see the historic estate of Parkwood. The history was interesting but mostly what I noticed was the house (picture below) and its architectural and design features. There began my fascination with older homes. How does anyone explain their passions, whether it’s for a… Read More »Why I DIY.