I Don't Like Spiders and Snakes, a Basement Adventure

I don't like spiders and snakes
and that ain't what it takes to love me
you fool, you fool.
I don't like spiders and snakes
and that ain't what it takes to love me
like I want to be loved by you...

I've had this song, Spiders and Snakes, going through my head all day. It's from Jim Stafford's self-titled album, one of my all-time favorite cassettes growing up--yes, I'm old enough to remember cassettes. Actually, it was my mom's tape, and I swiped it from her when I left for college. It was great roadtripping music between Chicago and Iowa City, where I attended university.

I don't really mind snakes or spiders. Spider egg sacs, however, I can do without. Particularly when they're in my house. Lest you think we've been slacking this week while the contractors sand and refinish the floors, rest assured we've been hard at work clearing out the basement of junk, sweeping, and sorting through the items left by the previous owners. We've put in two full work days so far. (The highlight of this week's Basement Finds: A box of underwear, including boxers, granny pants, long johns, etc. Ted threw it away before I could take a photo. But really, who out there wants to see a box of old underwear? I don't have to chronicle everything.)

So. Spiders. While I only spotted one live spider and a half-dead moth, there where hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of egg sacs surrounding each window and piled in the corners. I don't know if these are all from this year, just waiting for spring to inundate us, but I took no chances. With our handy dandy (actually, it's a bit of a junker) shop vac, I vacuumed the bulk of them up, returning with a broom and rainbow-colored dust grabber to get the rest. Eeew. Our basement has two boiler rooms (one for each flat), three separate storage/bedroom/office rooms (not sure what we'll use them for yet), a laundry room, an under-the-stairs storage area, and a main, general-purpose room. All but the under-the-stairs room have windows. That's a lot of spider eggs. I feel like I wiped out an entire civilization from our basement, a spider armageddon.

Lucky for us, today was trash day, and we were able to clear several bags of assorted basement junk all the way out of The Box House, to the curb, and away. However, not everything can be dealt with immediately. There are old glass table tops, half-used paint cans, nearly-empty-but-not-quite cans of twenty-year-old spray starch, and a host of other things that I need to contact the city about for the means of proper disposal. All in all, we can only get one car in the garage at present because the other half is being used as a staging area for this stuff. I'd like to recycle, donate, or reuse as much of the stuff as possible and keep it from the landfill, but it's not going to be easy.

So yes, we've been busy dejunkifying.

I was going to bore you all with more pictures of how the floors have been coming along, but unfortunately we've been locked out of our own house for the evening. We ran a few errands this afternoon, and came back to find that the contractors had used the chains to lock all the porch doors. We didn't plan on sleeping at The Box House because of all the fumes from the stain and the still-lingering dust clouds, but I did want to stand in the kitchens, which are accessible from the back porches, and survey the overall progress. We can't go up the front stairs tonight because the stairs themselves have been stained today. I was told in no uncertain terms "no walk floor" by one of the work crew, about the extent of our communication. (Only the project manager, who wasn't there today, is easy to talk with.) It's no big deal, really, but it is slighty funny in a frustrating way to be locked out.

Floor pictures will have to wait.

Ripping Out the Ugly, Toxic Carpet

We tackled our first real project at the Box House yesterday: removing the carpet in all of the Floor 2 bedrooms. (There was no carpeting on floor one, thank goodness.) We narrowed down our search for floor finishing experts and have a team coming out later in the week to completely sand and refinish the floors upstairs and down, with the exception of the kitchens and bathrooms. To save money we decided to tear out the carpet ourselves.

We had visions of the entire project taking only a few hours for the three rooms. I had picked up The Black and Decker Complete Photo Guide to Home Improvement and it looked straightforward enough. Step 1) Rip up carpet and padding, Step 2) Throw said carpet and padding away.

Uh-uh. It was a lot tougher than those photos made it look. Our carpets were glued down in some rooms and in others we had to remove literally hundreds of staples because some previous contractor had gone staple happy.

Here's what we started with. (Click to view larger images.)

Bedroom one is off the living room. The quarter round piece of trim that you see was an unfinished piece just sitting in the gaping crack where settlement had pulled the wall out slightly. We'll have to fill that in later...with something...when we redo that trim.

Bedroom two is off entryway and next to the bathroom.

Bedroom three, the smallest of the bedrooms, is off the kitchen. It's so small that I had to stand in the kitchen to take a picture.

My job was to pull up the carpet, cutting it into thin strips that we could then roll up and stuff into construction garbage bags. I used a carpet cutter for the task. We both wore face masks rated for dust and mold, as there was clouds of nasty stuff coming out of the carpets as we moved them. Underneath each one, there were piles and piles of dirt and grit. Whoever invented wall-to-wall carpeting was evil. I don't think your standard household vacuum cleaner can ever get them clean enough and when people have carpets installed, they tend to stay there for decades. Unless you never use a room, carpets tend to look shabby within a few years, in my opinion. Give me hardwood floors and easy-to-swap-out oriental rugs any day.

While I was doing that, Ted pulled up the tackless strip--a stupid name, considering there are thousands of pin-sharp tacks along its length. I guess it's tackless because you're not supposed to need additional carpet tacks to keep your carpet in place. Each tackless strip was nailed down to the floor about every two inches or so with way more nails than needed to keep it in place. He used a molding pry bar to pull it up, but the wood strips were old and weak and kept splitting, making for a rather grueling task.

As Ted was finishing up with the tackless strips, doubling back to pull out all the nails, I began cutting and rolling the carpet pads. This was the worst part of the entire project. In bedroom one, it looked like it had sort of melted to the floor or was glued on in patches. It did not want to come up, and rather than rolling it up in neat strips, I had to tug it up in patches. It was stapled to the floor along the seams, so when I got to those parts I needed to get a hammer and use the nail puller end to pull out each staple, which was held in place with gummy, semi-decayed padding. Ted helped after he finished with the tackless strip. "This is as close to someone else's old carpeting as I think I ever want to be," he said. I agree. We had to work on our hands and knees, peering at the floor from mere inches away as we searched for rogue staples. Thankfully, we had our masks. And the padding in the other two bedrooms came up pretty easily.

Here are a few more intermediary stage picture:

Bedroom One

Wallpaper sample found behind a radiator.

Ted in bedroom two.

Clean-up took a long time as we bagged trash (nine bags in all) and swept out the rooms. Bedroom one with the glued down padding took the longest. I didn't have a floor scraper, as recommended in the Black and Decker book for removing gummy stuff, so I used a putty knife/paint scraper instead, gently running it along each floorboard to pull up as much gunk as possible.

What we ended up with were floorboards of three different colors. I think the original color of the stain was medium-dark, as seen in the next photo. The floors in bedroom two were sanded and not restained before putting the carpet down. Why would they sand first? I have no idea.

Bedroom one--cleaned of all the goo.

Bedroom three--looking good!

Bedroom two--all ready for a light sanding!

By the time we were through -- six hours later -- we were exhausted and starving. With nothing in the refrigerator and unwilling to cook anyway, we headed out in search of fast food. Thank goodness we're only a few blocks from the border with Chicago and all the late night and late late night restaurants that can be found on Clark Street. Although it was two in the morning, we founds a 24-hour place serving burritos as big as our heads. Really, I know we shouldn't be eating this stuff, but it was soooooooooooooooooo good. Heck, I think we earned it.


I can't wait for the sanding guys to get here this week!

Please don't feed the dust bunnies.
—Author Unkown

Basement Blues

"Toss? Save? Who Decides?" Apparently, I do.

One of our top-of-the-list tasks is to clear out the basement, which we started to do last night. The previous owner of the Box House, a 94-year-old woman, had passed away last year, and we purchased it from her four children. Despite promises to have everything removed before we closed, they left us with an assortment of odds and ends to deal with—some of it pretty freakin' heavy, too. It will probably take a dumpster to get it all out. Here are some highlights:

Half a dozen boxes of Letters, Christmas Cards, Birthday Cards, Birth Announcements, Easter Cards, Graduation Programs, Wedding Invitations, etc., all of it spanning back 60 years, four generations of a family's milestones. I thought briefly of keeping it all, but it seemed too voyeuristic, too personal. Almost like reading someone's diary.

Instead, I flipped quickly through the boxes to see if there was anything specifically house-related, and then bundled up the rest for recycling. It made me kind of sad that the woman's family didn't want any of this stuff. It made me kind of cranky that I have to make angst-filled decisions regarding another person's ephemera collection.

A badly peeling cedar chest. The veneer on the top is all lifted. Is it worth restoring? I don't know. The interior smells good.

A dresser. After being told everyone in the family wanted to keep this piece for themselves, it turns out that nobody wanted it badly enough to actually remove it from the basement. Like the cedar chest, it's in very rough shape, with a fair amount of veneer loss. Still, maybe we'll keep it in the tool room or something for extra storage. I don't quite have the heart to throw it away. (However, the half bag of cat litter next to the dresser may come in handy when we go kitten-hunting in the next month or so.)

A trashcan filled with gosh-knows-what. It looks like bits and pieces of some kind of ceramic. Does it contain asbestos? Probably. Ted said it somehow reminded him of his mother's kiln from her pottery days.


A seventies-style jumpsuit? Cold War era protection gear? It was one of the only things left in the dresser, besides a ratty-looking stuffed dog and silver-plated salt-and-pepper shakers, souvenirs from someone's vacation to Arizona.

All in all, there is a fair amount of stuff to either haul away, sneak into someone else's dumpster, or set aside for future restoration—all of which must be decided upon before we get the rest of our stuff out of storage and into the Box House.

The Contenders

The Bird House

We looked at A LOT of houses before finally deciding on one. The task was tougher than we anticipated, as our requirements were very specific. The building had to have two apartments or it had to be a large single family home that could be easily divided into two separate dwelling spaces. It needed a garage, and it needed a yard big enough for my mom's dog, a one-year-old Beagle/German Shepherd mix named Maggie. It couldn't be more than a 15 or 20 minute walk to the train and, of course, it had to fall within our price range. This left a very short list of suitable properties.

We saw some very scary properties: multi-units that had long been student rental properties, stripped of all vintage detail, or houses with extremely narrow stairs leading to dank basements with 6 1/2-foot ceilings--no way I wanted to navigate down there to do laundry. And then there was the Mouse House and the Bird House.

On paper, they had everything going for them: two units, full basements, backyards, vintage built-ins, and, best of all, they were just steps away from shopping and the train. They were even next door to each other, making them easy to visit with our agent.

The Mouse House was just that--completely infested. The evidence was plain: each room had two or more mousetraps or bait traps with poison scattered along the baseboards for good measure. I have no idea how the basement fared, as we didn't get to see it. The couple showing it to us--parents of the owner--were shocked that we even wanted to see it. Scratch that one off the list.

The Bird House was no better. Right away we knew we'd have to rip off the front and back porches, an expense we didn't want to take on immediately. There was no seller's agent to meet us, so our agent knocked on the door and then got the keys from the lock box. We must have been in the downstairs unit for a full five minutes before walking into one of the bedrooms to see a kid sprawled across the bed, sound asleep. He didn't budge the entire time we were there! As we made our way to the basement, we could hear birds chirping. "Is there a window open?" I asked our agent, thinking that maybe some birds had flown in. As we opened the door, the chirping stopped, and we fumbled around for the light switch as it was pitch black down there. What I had mistaken for wild birds were parakeets. Hundreds of them. There were--and I'm not kidding--20 or so very large cages, each filled with up to two dozen birds. Smaller cages, covered with dark cloth, held pairs of birds, which I assumed were being used for breeding. The entire place was dark, grim, and smelled strongly of bird droppings. I can't imagine this was a legal breeding operation.

That was the day we started naming houses to help us keep them straight in our heads. There was the Sherman House, a beautiful old home we actually put an offer on--less than a week before it went to a foreclosure auction, much to our surprise. (After that, the bank that held the title rejected our offer, although now, four months later, they have relisted the house for less than our offer was for. Grrrr.)

There was the Chocolate House, a cute brown stucco 3-flat that we had an offer accepted on, but which failed to go through after our inspector revealed some very disturbing faults with the property. What do you mean the garage doesn't have a roof? Before you think we're complete idiots, I have to tell you that when we visited the property, we couldn't see the top of the roof from the outside. It was only after we climbed the ladder with our inspector that we could see it was nothing but a nailed-down black tarp over the wood. That, combined with the fact that it had a fairly new Sentricon system hidden in the garden and lawn to combat termites, that the third unit in the basement would never pass code (although it was currently being rented out), that the covered portion of the porch was covered in asbestos tiles, and that the uncovered part of the porch would have to be torn down and rebuilt to make it safer for my mom and her dog, it was pretty clear that the inspection was a train wreck.

That's also when we decided we had to let our buyer's agent go. When he said things like "you probably won't use the back porch for egress anyway" before leaving partway through the inspection, we began to have our doubts about him. But when he called back later to tell us he didn't think he could work with us again if we used the same inspector on the next property, we knew it was time to part ways. I mean, seriously, whose side was the guy on? (Luckily, the next agent turned out to be great, and with his background in both construction and law, he was a real asset.)

So it went on like that, with our less-than-inspired naming process: The Log Cabin House (a.k.a. The Washington House), The Twin Houses, The Green House, The Coach House House. And finally, the one that was destined to be ours: The Box House, named for its, um, boxy shape.

It wasn't love at first site. In fact, we had seen it in the MLS months before, but eliminated it from our search because of its boxy nature and that it was further from the center of town than we hoped to be. But when we realized that some of our favorite houses on our short list were that far out and farther, we decided to take a look anyway.

The woman who owned it had passed away the previous year, and she had lived there for forty years. Her granddaughter, acting as seller's agent for the heirs, believes she was only the second owner since 1928, when the two-flat was built. It had a lot of what we were looking for: two separate units, each with three bedrooms, a decent-sized yard, and a brick garage big enough for two cars. It also had features we weren't looking for, but considered a bonus, including a partially finished basement, stained glass piano windows in both units, original deco light fixtures in the stairwell, and its location on a corner lot. Lots of sun.

Still, it was a bit rough. The kitchens and bathrooms were severely outdated and the electrical system would need some major updates (luckily, my brother is an electrician). But there was something about the property that spoke to us. It felt like it could be home--more so than the ones we had previously made offers on.

Just to be sure, we looked at several more two-flats, but even though some were better situated or would need less work, there was just something about The Box House that felt right. And so we put our offer in, and after a ton of negotiating, settled on a fair price. Our inspector couldn't find anything seriously wrong; he more or less made a list of things to keep an eye on in the future, but he said it had "good bones" and that it was a quality construction that didn't get messed up by past renovations. All in all, a good property that with a lot of elbow grease would yield something beautiful.

I'll have to keep reminding myself of that as we dig in, because there is a lot of work ahead of us.

The Washington House. We really, really liked this one but couldn't quite make the configuration work as two separate units without some major work.

Nothing like house hunting during the worst freakin' weather in the Chicago area. This tree blew over in an August storm about 50 feet from where we were sitting in our agent's car. The rain and wind were so loud that we never even heard it fall.