So we are closing in on the finish here at Home Crap Home. All the flooring is done, and all that needs to be done is put the quarter round down and do molding touchups. The next to last big project is installing the hood for the stove (the last being railings for the stiarways and hooking up the stove and stuff, but the plumber does that), and that will be done tomorrow. Here was something we wrapped up today.
If you remember, there was a gap on either side of the stairwell on the second floor, and it was dangerous as hell. I actually had two separate nightmares with me falling down it, so we had to put in a railing. The before picture:
Once Dean got the flooring down, we had to do something to put a cap on it so it would be smooth. He came up with an ingenious solution, which was to cut a dowel rod down the middle:
We installed the railing that we had stained and varnished a while back, and here is the final project (that’s Anita- Herb’s wife and Dean’s sister):
Plumber comes Wednesday or Thursday, bed on Saturday, appraiser/inspector on the 17th, Comcast on the 18th, and moving begins.
I had a great idea for the entryway as soon as you come into the house, too. I’m having Dean, Herb, Anita, Gerald (and his two boys who did errand stuff), and Xubi pose for a picture in the living room, and I am going to blow it up and frame it and put it right over the light switch to the right of the doorway when you enter the house.
Mobil RoonieRoo
I absolutely love your picture idea for the entryway.
Another Holocene Human
Amazing shots. That house has come a long way in a short period of time.
Corner Stone
That half step down is going to get someone killed.
Comrade Mary
A picture would be lovely because all these people have done a fabulous job and deserve recognition. My few remaining wisps of lapsed Catholicism briefly wondered about adding some little candle or an offering box, but that would just be just a liiiitle risky, and also totally too Papist.
chris
The railings and the corner beads! Perfect!
John Cole
@Corner Stone: There is no half step down. It’s just the angle of the photo.
Trust me on this. I would have ripped down the entire damned staircase if there were because I am so fall phobic.
reality-based (the original, not the troll)
oh, lovely! how did you get the stair railing stained so it perfectly matches the rest of the house woodwork!
More house pictures! Steve Pictures! ANYTHING – because my mom had on the Bernie Sanders Town Hall on CNN, he is once again sanctimoniously blaming the Democrats for being “too close to Wall Street” and “not listening to economic anxiety” – when that was all Clinton ever TALKED about, while the press was obsessing about emails –
and I am angrily screaming at the screen “Oh, shut UP , you senile old egomaniac! You are one of the main reasons we have President Trump!”
which annoys my mom.
Mai.naem.mobile
Stairs.Railing.Pretty.
Corner Stone
@John Cole: I’m kind of somewhat someway praying for you man, Prime Time style. Those stairs scare the absolute shit outta me. I can feel myself sideways scaling up and down, with both palms flat on the wall.
Corner Stone
@reality-based (the original, not the troll): Your mom?
hitchhiker
You may hate your life, but I seriously love reading about it. Thx for the pictures.
Mary G
Those railings look like they have been in your house forever, which means Dean is a master craft person. Congratulations, John
Suzanne
Good instinct on the stair railings. What you have is a feature often seen in old homes that is no longer allowed, due to, well, exactly what you fear. Those stairs look like they are already too steep (7″ high maximum, 11″ tread depth), so any improvements you can do are wise.
Knowing you as I do, may I also recommend putting in some nonskid stair nosings?
One note of concern: quarter-round? Please tell me that you are not putting quarter-round wall base over the existing wall base…..
LAO
Congratulations John. When I bought my apartment and gut renovated, I couldn’t sleep for a month. It took awhile to recover financially, but it was the best decision I’ve ever made. 14 years (and a second renovation) later walking into my home still makes me happy. Wishing you the same.
Gvg
Since you are fall phobic, have you considered a baby gate at the top of the stairs?
My grandparents old farm house had doors at the stairwell so you could not stumble down them by mistake. My cats would not approve and it would restrict air and heat flow but it has some merit.
A modern thing I have seen is night lights with motion detectors so when you get close to the stairs, small lights come on ahead of you. Sort of like light up front door paths. Low light so you don’t wake up everyone in the house, but never go down stairs in dark light.
The house is amazing. Pets will love it.
Suzanne
@Corner Stone: If possible, he should have some handrails put in. It’s not a big add, and could literally be a lifesaver.
reality-based (the original, not the troll)
@Corner Stone:
I’m the caregiver for my mom, who is 93 – I usually let her control the TV remote – but since the election, I find myself screaming at the screen a lot! which annoys her, when she is trying to listen to those cute anchors on CNN! (She has a serious crush on Anderson Cooper.
chris
@reality-based (the original, not the troll): Meet the Comittee for Second Breakfast. Got my second coffee this morning and turned around to this.
NotMax
Might consider a crosspiece. Can see doggy heads getting stuck between the vertical elements.
NotMax
Steve: “Thanks for the nifty new scratching posts!”
;)
CaseyL
I didn’t notice those pilasters on either side of the stairwell doorway before; they’re lovely! And the banister rails echo them perfectly.
The whole house seems like such a labor of love, down to the finest detail. It’s like everyone you know in town has worked on it. I’d say you were a lucky, lucky man – but you’ve earned every bit of luck. Sometimes karma can be a nice lady :)
Can’t wait for you to move in.
I bet you can’t wait, either!
Corner Stone
@Suzanne: I think it has been said before that handrails will be going in. But those stairs still scare the shit outta me.
JPL
It’s beautiful and the railings look like they have been there forever. I used to doing a lot of the work myself, so I’m a little jealous.
Corner Stone
@reality-based (the original, not the troll): I feel you. My mom is over quite a bit and she always has Gilmore Girls reruns on or episodes of Longmire.
My mind boggles how either and/or both of those fit in her wheelhouse.
Yarrow
@Suzanne:
Pretty sure he’s putting in railings. From top:
John, it looks great. Love the railings at the top. Definitely a safety issue. It all looks great.
rikyrah
Thanks for sharing your home journey ???
Ohio Mom
@Gvg: That’s what I was going to say, the top of the steps needs a baby-gate. Or maybe it would have been better if the new posts and rails came out more. And I like Suzanne’s suggestion of adding non-skid materials. Count me among those who are made nervous by those steps.
reality-based (the original, not the troll)
@chris: oh, that’s perfect! And perfectly captioned! With those 3 pairs of eyes boring into you – how could you NOT be a Second Breakfast provider
Keith P.
Question for folks here – on the sheetrock on my house, it has this light texture, like waves on the ocean is the best way to describe it. It’s definitely not a Home Depot paint texture, but it’s not just paint, as whenever I’ve stripped wallpaper (house was mixed), I can never get that texture…it looks like I painted over stripped wallpaper.
My best guess is that there’s some mud in the primer, and I’m seeing roller texture augmented by the mud. Whatever it is, it’s super-common, as I’ve seen it on sheetrock/drywall in almost every house I’ve been in, but I’d really like to know for sure in case I ever regain my motivation to work on my house.
Mnemosyne
@Gvg:
The problem with those doors was that it was not uncommon for people unfamiliar with the house to think it was a door into a room and fall down the stairs. IIRC, the most famous case was when David Niven’s first wife died that way.
Suzanne
@Yarrow: I wasn’t sure if that referred to the guardrails that got put on, or new handrails down the whole length of the stair.
@Corner Stone: Stairs are kinda awful in every house. Just before Christmas last year, I slipped on mine and crashed on the small of my back. Didn’t break anything, but was limping for a week or so. Fortunately, mine is a U-shaped stair with two separate runs, so no long falls.
I took my stitches out earlier. They were irritating me.
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne:
Nail scissors and tweezers?
Suzanne
@Keith P.: It’s just a mudded texture. It’s not from the paint. Those are common in production houses when the builder doesn’t want to pay for nice smooth wall finish.
@Mnemosyne: Current building code doesn’t allow doors or gates or anything right at the top or bottom of stairs anymore for exactly that reason. It’s also easy for someone opening the door to smack someone on the stairs with the door from the other side and knock them down.
schrodingers_cat
@Corner Stone: What did your mom think about the Netflix season of GG? Who is her favorite GG?
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus: Yeah.
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne: As you can guess, it is my go to method.
stinger
Really looks great, John. I’m sure you can’t wait to move in (even though that’s a pain, too).
Corner Stone
@schrodingers_cat: We don’t speak of it. I come home, retreat to my bedroom to change clothes and re-center myself. Sometimes do a few google searches for images of Salma Hayek or Aishwarya Rai, you know, the yoosh.
Then give her a hug and a smooch good bye until next time.
Mnemosyne
@Suzanne:
It’s the premise of one of my favorite ghost stories: “Smee.”
Don’t be fooled by the “scary for kids” label. That just means there’s no gore or sex.
Suzanne
@Mnemosyne: No gore or sex? What’s the point?
Seriously, though, I see Queen Anne houses and I can TOTALLY see why people thought they were haunted. No one ever thinks Brutalist buildings are haunted. It’s all that fucking gingerbreading. Casts creepy shadows at night.
Mnemosyne
@Suzanne:
Just saying, sometimes adults think anything is suitable for kids as long as there’s no gore or sex.
That story gives me chills every time I read it. I think modern-set ghost stories scare me more than ones set in the past.
Omnes Omnibus
@efgoldman: I had forgotten how ugly that building is.
Suzanne
@efgoldman: They are wrong. It is awesome.
I love Brutalist architecture. It’s so…..brutal.
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus: It is fabulous. Great rhythm and texture, beautiful massing and light.
LeMessurier, the structural engineer, went on to make a notorious fuckup that fortunately was discovered prior to anyone dying.
Another Scott
@Suzanne: You’ve seen Jonathan Meades show on the BBC, I trust?
It’s quite a show. I think the buildings are hideous, but his discussion and videography was pretty amazing.
“Wow. Did he really just say that?!!”
Cheers,
Scott.
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne: And Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.
Suzanne
@Another Scott: I believe I have seen that, yes.
The buildings are entirely about material and form. They are honest and full of integrity and tectonic brilliance. Love.
Modern times should have modern buildings. Forward.
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus: Boston City Hall is incredibly well-regarded by architects and critics. I know it isn’t pretty, per se, but perhaps it has some other treats to offer?
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne: I will defer to your educated eye. I know more about other areas of art and know that some art appreciation depends upon knowing that “why” and “in reaction to what” are important questions.
Suzanne
@efgoldman: That’s like complaining that the restaurant sucks because you don’t like the flatware pattern they selected. Nearly every building of that era, and all the ones before, is a drafty-ass mess. It is about form and drama and material composition, and expressing a new passion for social utopia, a truly democratic way of living.
Sorry the corridors suck.
Comrade Mary
@Suzanne: Really? My Toronto house, about 10 years old, has a door right at the top of the basement steps and I’m glad it’s there. The stairs and the hall closet are opposite sides of a little alcove. I do not feel comfortable stepping back from the closet when the basement stairs door is open, so I’m glad local code allowed this.
Another Scott
@Suzanne: Dunno.
On the University of Cincinnati campus is/was Crosley Tower which I was told was “the tallest continuously-poured concrete building in the world” at the time (1960s) when I was in Cincy in the late ’80s. It didn’t have any other obviously appealing aspects to me (maybe cost – maybe). 8 windows per floor?!?
Brutalism does serve as a contrast to other architectural schools, so maybe its useful as a “don’t do that!” marker. ;-)
Robie House is more my style, but I think Wright let form overpower function in things like the interior furniture (e.g. the ramrod-straight dining room chairs). I love the way he thought about how people would walk up to the front door from the street, how the architecture very gradually builds up and slowly surrounds you, rather than instantly looming over you.
But it would be hard to extend that type of form to a skyscraper. ;-)
Great architecture is great – I agree that buildings need to help define their times rather than just continuing to do variations on what people know and like. But, Brutalism, hey I just can’t get into that.
Cheers,
Scott.
Aleta
Even this doesn’t lift my gloom. I don’t think I’ve ever felt worse, excluding personal grief. Today feels the lowest yet.
Omnes Omnibus
@Another Scott: Wright’s houses were not particularly livable from a modern standard. My parents almost bought one in the late ’70s. No closets. Few outlets. Etc.
Mnemosyne
@Comrade Mary:
I think basement doors are different. It’s staircases between floors that have traffic that are a potential danger.
Another Scott
@Omnes Omnibus: Yup. Lots of issues – Robie House is over 100 years old, I think. Neat that your folks had a chance to get one though!
Cheers,
Scott.
Mnemosyne
@Omnes Omnibus:
Wright houses also tend to have strange leaks and other odd problems. He was a great architect, but a lousy builder.
Suzanne
@Comrade Mary: I’m not familiar with the nuances of Canadian building code, but what I’m talking about is a little bit different than what you’re describing. It used to be common in houses for there to be a door literally at the nosing edge of the top stair in a staircase. Then the door could swing into the staircase, and the door would be overhanging the stairs while it was open. That’s not allowed anymore. Now, there is a bigger clearance space required at the top and bottom of stair runs. (And in commercial buildings, it’s even larger.) With that clearance, the door swing is over a level area. This makes it safer to open and prevents falls. What (I think) you are describing is still allowed.
Another Scott
@Aleta: That’s rough.
Do you want something to take your mind off things a bit? Did you see this yesterday?
:-)
Hang in there. Get some help if you need it – don’t suffer alone.
Cheers,
Scott.
Omnes Omnibus
@Another Scott: My dad, the romantic, also wanted a massive Victorian fixer-up. He could have done it, but my mother refused to spend 10 years in sawdust. They bought a practical place.
Suzanne
@efgoldman: Look, architecture of that type is an art. It has aspirations to meaning and greatness. Buildings like that are trying to express the spirit of an age and to embody ideals of their creator and their city and their sociocultural context. Often, buildings like that suffer in some functional aspects. But ease of utility and operations does not a great building make. There are plenty of buildings with sensible room numbering that have no aesthetic or social value whatsoever. I get that much of the non-architecturally-educated people in the world are not that into Brutalism. But maybe, just maybe, there’s something in it? I mean, if the best architects in the world did it for a while, and some of the greatest critics in architecture think something is worthwhile, maybe youre missing something?
Suzanne
@Another Scott: Wright designed some skyscrapers. He famously did renderings for a mile-high skyscraper.
@Mnemosyne: Wright was inventing things as he went a lot of the time. The houses he did where he had contractors are usually very well-constructed. He dreamed up a kind of prototypical version of base isolation for the Imperial Hotel, which helped it survive a significant earthquake better than almost all of the adjacent buildings. Fallingwater was just restored after experiencing some significant steel fatigue, but it still lasted much longer than many other similarly-constructed buildings of their time, and was a relatively early use of reinforced concrete. I’m not saying any of these guys are perfect, by any stretch, but they were undoubtedly visionary, and people are still copying them today. That’s what makes them brilliant. The fact that the chairs in the Robie House don’t look comfortable for someone to sit in is not really the point. A chair can be more than an asscatcher, and a building is more than a glorified storage locker for people and stuff.
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne: I would argue that a public building should be functional.
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne:
This is where your art form differs from others. A chair’s purpose is to be sat upon and a house’s purpose is to be lived in. The JAMC don’t mess up a family (aside from sleeping patterns if played loudly at night) the way an architect can.
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus: Sure. I’m not saying that it’s okay to build something completely unusable. But I do think measuring the greatness of a major work of public architecture by how easily a first-time visitor can find the restroom just may be missing the forest for the trees.
Comrade Mary
@Suzanne: Ah! Yes, my door opens into the little alcove area on the main floor, not over the steps themselves. What you describe does sound genuinely dangerous (and terrifying.)
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne: Reiterating.
NotMax
@Suzanne
One kind of wonders what Wright would have thought about adapting some of his canceled projects (mostly a house designed for Marilyn Monroe), as done here on Maui. Another view.
Another Scott
@Suzanne: Yup. But his mile high skyscraper didn’t look like Robie House. :-)
I was kinda disappointed that the Burj Kalifa (sp?) didn’t look more different from Sears Tower – it’s easy to see that it’s a SOM building. A lot of that is due to the need for the building to function (so many elevators), I’m sure. Topology and the need to fit humans does impose lots of constraints, and it’s interesting to see how architects try to do new things.
But there has to be a balance to respect the needs of humans inside, too. :-) I believe you’ve commented here about the various energy efficiency standards. It would be a terrible shame if in 100 years all new buildings were underground to ensure stable temperatures, protect from UV, and all the rest…
Cheers,
Scott.
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus: If a chair’s purpose was just to be sat on, then we could all go get some POS from Ikea and call it a day. It is also meant to provide beauty and to give a feeling of ceremony to rituals of the day, to convey status and position, to establish semiotic relationships to home and work. A house is not just a shell to be lived in, it is literally a physical and spatial embodiment of human meaning and relationships and lineage and relationship to environment.
This is why we have artists and designers, BTW. Not just to engineer stuff that works. To literally give form to meaning. To express human truth.
Saying that a Wright chair is a poor design because it doesn’t look comfortable is like saying that Bach sucks because he never wrote anything as catchy as the Kit-Kat jingle.
Suzanne
@Another Scott: Those buildings look somewhat alike mostly because of the bundled tubes structural system they used. But there are some contextual elements on Burj Khalifa that give it some interest. Burj Khalifa is mostly notable for its scale, it’s not really considered one of the greats.
@NotMax: We have a Wright project here in town that was originally designed to go in KSA, I believe. I don’t think Wright would have liked it being built here. It is a lovely building…..just completely, obviously, out of context. (And they’re having to do a big reno on it to put in more bathrooms and elevators, blah blah blah, because nothing they built is functional enough for us today.) Wright was very much about physical, environmental, and cultural context.
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne:
What if it isn’t actually comfortable? That is my point. If you don’t like the VU, don’t listen anymore. If your house is beautiful but uncomfortable, it is a different thing. You also know that Wright rather demanded that people adapt their lives to his style. Regardless of comfort.
Edited.
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus: He’s not trying to make it comfortable. He’s trying to make people sit up straight in those damn chairs so they look lovely and presentable. It’s the chair equivalent of a tuxedo or a jeweled ball gown and Spanx.
I’m just saying that there is more to design than comfort. And that it is really limited to insinuate that a design is poor because it’s not comfortable. That’s just one criterion. I’m not saying that anyone who doesn’t want to live that way should be forced to do so. Just that design is a big, expansive endeavor, and maybe some further investigation is merited prior to proffering judgment.
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne: Anyway, it seems that you missed or ignored my comment above.
Another Scott
@Suzanne: Just to be clear, since I brought up the chairs – they were beautiful and you could tell he put a lot of thought into the aesthetics of the design. I just wouldn’t want to have to sit in them.
That said, I’d probably prefer them to a Brutalism chair! ;-)
‘night all.
Cheers,
Scott.
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus: No, I got it. Thanks.
@Another Scott: Well, most of the Wright homes won’t let you sit in the chairs anyway. He did some at Taliesin West that are super-comfortable. I’m just saying that comfort and ease of usability are just a small, small corner of what designers do. The tip of the proverbial iceberg. Designers are usually looking to elicit specific responses in order to almost choreograph the way they want life to unfold in their building. Every building and every movement needs to be judged on those terms, that’s what makes something great, something that truly means something to people.
Suzanne
@efgoldman:
Actually, most governments at every level want to make avant-garde buildings. It is considered to be an important use of taxpayer dollars to make meaningful buildings that embody certain values and to stimulate the leading edge of cultural development. Public work is often the prize work for architects because of this. The US GSA works with the most innovative designers in the country for the high-profile buildings. The US government, and most states and cities, elected by taxpayers do not want beige boxes. That is considered to be a poor use of public funds.
To be clear, I’m not defending design flaws. Every building has them. They suck, and they should be rectified. But innovation and trying new things means that some small failures like draftiness are inevitable. That doesn’t invalidate the effort. This profession moves forward from things being tried and from seeing what works and what doesn’t. And I think that you are missing the beauty of that building, because you aren’t looking for it. You are looking for kind of a “Level One” easy experience. That’s fine, but that’s not what the architect was asked to do, nor what the client wanted.
Suzanne
@efgoldman: The point is that “catchiness” isn’t a measure of quality. Catchiness is the way someone who doesn’t know anything about music would judge music.
fuckwit
That… that is not a “crap” home.
Looks amazing.
J R in WV
I can’t wait for the final pictures Cole takes as he moves furniture into his home. My Grandfather named his house, which was built on a bench below the ridge top overlooking the town. Around the front of his house, which was creme brick, were old growth hickory trees – so he named his new (1951) house Hickory Bench.
It was surrounded by tall straight huge hickory trees, and the bench was 150 yards down from my parents house, and lower down from the top of the ridge. He found the design by the Cast Concrete Building Foundation… but used block and brick because in the early 50s concrete was a really expensive building material. But he wanted it to be fireproof, so block and brick was mostly it.
30 years later Mrs J and I spent years studying American Architecture. We liked Frank Lloyd Wright better than the German Bauhouse styles, so got some of the books with many Wright designs, and visited two houses he built in SW Pennsylvania, Falling Waters, the party house for the Kaufman family and Kentuck Knob, built for friends of the Kaufman family, owners of a large commercial Dairy.
It was much more livable than Falling Waters, needed less maintenance and strengthening, Mrs Kaufman told Mrs Hagen to tell Frank that her son was 6’6″ tall, otherwise the ceilings would be too low, and to tell Frank that the budget was half what they could really afford. These folks were all rich, unlike most of us.
Anyway, the Kentuck Knob house had one giant idiosyncracy, no 90 degree angles, except for in the shower. Everything else was 60 degrees or 120 degrees. It was like a ship on the ridge top, with a bow leading into the weather. And the current owner has added a sculpture garden.
Mrs Hagen also insisted on a kitchen she would be comfortable in – many of Frank’s houses assumed staff would be using those spaces, and he didn’t care about their enjoyment of the space – but if the owner needed that space, he had to pay attention to it. There was a skylight that needed to be shaded or blocked, it made the kitchen a solar oven. And they added a basement, where the furnace and laundry tools could be located away from the public space.
We had learned all these lessons before we started building. So we made different errors, placing the house in a cove halfway up a ridge. There’s more light than you would expect, but not as much light as a ridge top house would have. The trade off is that our house has views of loss covered rocks and a creek, and woods, and all of it is our property. You cannot see any other property from our house.
It isn’t classic, or Art Deco, or anything like that. It’s by Tom Potts, with clients JR and Mrs J, and it’s filled with books and art, rocks and minerals, and cats and dogs. And Hickory floors, in honor of my Grand-dad’s home, Hickory Bench.
Some Dude
John Cole: Have you thought about installing the bullnose led treads, (like they have in theaters) to light up the stairs? I know it’s a little late in the remodeling phase to bring it up, but I just had the idea now (timing is everything, I know). Similar idea would be to have a rope led light runners along the wall.
Jim
“I had a great idea for the entryway as soon as you come into the house, too.”
What a wonderful way to celebrate friends! And the perfect place to put the picture, too.
mzinformation
It’s going to be gorgeous and will be your forever home!