Dumpster Diving -- Ideas for Old Windows

I drive Ted crazy with my obsessive dumpster diving, I admit that. But sometime I find really cool treasures. I've picked up antique mirrors, oak wood kitchen chairs, cast iron candlestick holders, and vintage bar glasses.

I've picked up some clunkers, too, including several dressers I meant to refinish, changed my mind about (i.e., never really got around to it), and quietly snuck back out to the alley with a "curb alert" notice on Craig's List. But at least they don't end up in a landfill.

A few months back, I saw a listing for old windows that someone removed during a remodeling project. I was in the middle of a stained glass art class, and with visions of all that wonderful, wavy old Chicago glass, I drove across the city and in the pouring rain loaded up the car with a dozen very large windows. Okay, I know it's more glass than I'll ever need for stained glass projects, but I couldn't bear them going into a landfill, either. Since then, I've been trying to figure out what to do with them.

While surfing CL today, I spotted a "free" listing for some more (don't worry, Ted, I have no plans of getting them). Accompanying the ad was this picture of how the seller has reused similar ones. He simply added a shelf for some geraniums and hung it on an exterior wall. I think I could do a similar effect for our garage, which has no side windows.

What do y'all think?

What Happens When You Don't Use the Right Mortar

It's a real problem in Chicago. Very few contractors who do masonry work on old buildings use the right kind of mortar for the job. Whenever you need to repoint or replace the mortar on your historic brick building, you should have a sample of the original mortar analyzed so that you can create a mortar with the same components. If you don't, all sorts of horrors can happen.

When we tore down the gypsum ceiling boards in our basement last summer, we exposed about 85 years of efflorescence on the interior wall. When moisture travels through the brick, it carries water soluble salts along with it, which end up evaporating on the surface. Ours wasn't too bad, a bit thicker in some spots than others, but overall probably acceptable for such a length of time. I used a shop vac to clean up most of it, and our basement walls looked like this:

Well, after a long winter and an even longer, damp spring, there seems to be a fair amount of efflorescence collecting in a single spot above one of the front windows.

That's a lot to collect in less than a year. Most of our basement after 85 years didn't have this much. So we went around to the front of the house to take a look at what was going on. What you're looking at here is some really cheap patch work done on the exact opposite side of this wall; we found tubes of Quikrete in the basement, and we think this is what the previous owner used when they said The Box House had been recently tuckpointed.

Whatever they used, the result is that the building is not breathing properly in this spot. The bricks are not able to expand and contract as they're supposed to against the rigid mortar, and moisture is somehow being forced through the brick.

There are earlier repairs to the brick as well; we're not sure when these were done--our guess is maybe 40 years ago when the last owner bought the place--but it looks like a better attempt was made to mach the mortar to the original at that time. At any rate, there are no problems to the brick where these earlier repairs were made. However, it is beginning to crack in certain spots--nowhere near as much as the most recent mortar repairs are cracking--but enough that we'll have to address it soon.

But here's the real problem, and thank goodness it's on the garage and not the main house.

On this entire corner, the PO used Quikrete or some kind of rigid cement to patch the mortar. The mortar does not move at all. So as the bricks here are expanding and contracting, they are literally crumbling against the mortar. If we let it go long enough, we'll have this web of mortar and no bricks. We're going to attempt, very soon, to repair and remortar this ourselves as a way to practice for the bigger task of repointing the house.

Most masonry contractors, when they tell you they can match the mortar, mean they'll match the color. Period. By not using the proper materials, or trying to work with a buildings original materials, such contractors are literally destroying the face of the city. Ever since we learned about the importance of the right mortar at a recent masonry workshop, we've noticed building after building across Chicago crumbling away. It's very sad.

Do you know what's also sad? The fact that the dang squirrels cannot wait until September for our neighbors apples to ripen; instead, they've been leaving half-eaten apples all around our yard. They usually take a bite or two, toss it over their shoulders, and grab another one.

Messy little buggers.

A New Record for Junk Collectors

Sometimes, the most satisfying projects aren't the ones you can photograph. Today was like that. Ted and I were standing in the garage, contemplating what to do with a ginormous pile of scrap metal left by the previous owners. Most of it was extra garage door parts--springs and tracks and the like--that we've been hanging onto "just in case." But we recently decided that if the garage door ever does need to be replaced, we'll convert it back to a two-door style and won't need this stuff, anyway.

"Let's just haul it all to the curb," I said. "It's garbage night, and I'm sick of looking at it."

"Okay," Ted agreed. "We'll leave it for the tinkers."

Almost every day, we can spot an overloaded pickup truck slowly driving down our street in search of scrap metal. There are so many of them, in fact, that the city considers them a nuisance and wants to start regulating them. Evanston, which charges a $25 fee for special pickups, claims it lost nearly $90,000 in revenue last year to junk trucks that beat them out. I say "whatever," we already pay a lot in taxes and fees 'round here, and if a junk collectors does take something, at least we know for sure it's actually being recycled.

"Let's just lean them against the bins, then," I said. And just as I was dragging out the first piece, what did I see rumbling down our alley? Yup, a junk truck. So instead of trying to figure out how to carefully balance everything without it spilling into the alleyway, we just waved the driver down instead, and he loaded up his truck directly. A new record for the removal of unwanted junk!

Eager to clear out more space, we decided to put a curb notice for an old refrigerator on Craigslist.com. Since last summer, I've been meaning to list it for fifty bucks or so, but never seemed to get around to it. The ad said it was on the driveway, come and get it if you want it. We rolled it out to the curb and...fifteen minutes later two big, burly guys drove up in an SUV to take it off our hands. Woo-hoo! A Craigslist record, too! I'm sure it will find a second life as a beer fridge in someone's garage.

So, while we didn't get much done on our place this weekend (although we did help my cousin hang up drywall at his), it felt like a satisfactory day just clearing out that stuff.

What do the rest of you think? Should junk trucks be regulated?

Alley Garden Progress

When we first moved to The Box House, the alley side of the garage was a bit of a mess.

It was a dumping ground for sand, refuse, broken glass, and dead leaves. A tree was growing from the foundation.

Here it is today:

Last year, I had whacked the weed tree down and soaked it in root kill. I have yet to decide how I'm going to remove the root ball. You can still see a bit of the stump at the far end of the picture. The hostas are all hand-me-downs, transplanted from the gardens of friends and family. The brick edging is primarily made from bricks I've found or dug up in the yard. The bushy things at the far left are two forsythia saplings I got for free last year. When they've had another year or so of growth on them and can fend for themselves, I'll plant them elsewhere in the yard. For now, the garage blocks the roughest of winter winds. There are some lilies of the valley here, too, transplanted from the back of the house, where we found hundreds of them growing.

Not bad for a free garden, eh?

Deconstructing Our Workbench and a Bit o' Cream of Wheat

One of the things we inherited with The Box House was a monstrously huge, very heavy workbench.
It was in the room we call Uncle Jimmy's tool room, now my office, which is located at the far, far end of the basement. We hauled this puppy the full length of the basement, up the stairs, and into the garage. I'm stronger than I look, but even so, it was not an easy task.

We decided we already had enough workbenches, in the garage and in the house, and didn't really need or want this one. It looked like it was cobbled together from miscellaneous scraps of this and that. It's not the kind of thing that we thought would go on Craig's List, either. So we decided to take it apart and salvage what wood we could. But something made me wipe down one of the boards, thick with coal dust and decades worth of grit, and look! It's from an old Cream-of-Wheat shipping crate!

Now, I love a good bowl of cream o' wheat. It's one of the two foods my mother could get me to eat when I was sick (the other being creamed eggs on toast, which she'll still make for me when I have the flu). When I was in college, and poorer than I am now, a box of quick-cooking Cream of Wheat could last me for weeks. I'd have it every day for breakfast, with a pinch of salt and a dollop of butter. So you can imagine how excited I was to find this. The script on this board is rather old-fashioned, and I tried a Google search to see if I can date it based on the logo, but no luck. I assume it belonged to the previous previous owner.

There were other boards for Quaker Oats.

The boards all cleaned up fairly well, and I'll be putting hooks on them to hang up in the garage and/or my office. The rest of the wood made it to a scrap pile in the corner. Not sure what we'll do with it, yet, but we'll figure out something.

Patching the Garage Gutter, A Mystery Solved, A Hidden Danger, And More Kitten Pictures!

Way back in March we began our plan to redo the gutter on the back of the garage because it is pretty much a disaster. In sum, the previous owners never cleaned it, it was solidly packed with mud, there were holes along the length, and most of the roofing material that anchored it was simply gone. Water was cascading down the front exterior, and also getting into the structure so that there were solid sheets of ice covering much of the interior back wall. In spring and early summer, we fought off a carpenter ant invasion that was no doubt attracted to the damp roof beams. That was fun (not). It took forever to get them all.

The photo below is from March. The shiny surface on the brick is ice. The ice on the ground formed from water pouring out a big hole in the gutter.

We originally planned to make the gutter repair (more likely replacement) a priority project. But you house bloggers out there know how it is. Other projects creep up unexpectedly, and you suddenly find yourselves diverting time, effort, and, most importantly, money to things like leaky roofs and rotting windows. Where did the warm weather go?

With temperatures plummeting into the thirties, something had to be done. The brick is in bad enough shape on the back wall; we definitely don't want the garage fending off another onslaught of ice this year. So today, on what may be the last dry, sunny (but chilly) day for a while, I patched the gutter. This is the before:

I don't know if you can even count this as a "patch" job. I had cleaned the area as best I could, using various garden tools to dig out and sweep away the inches of compacted dirt and trees (yes, trees) that were growing out of it. Then I used an entire can of black roof cement to rebuild the lip of the roof, where it meets the gutter. I used the cement and reinforcing fabric to build up the areas; hopefully, this will keep the water flowing along the gutter and down the drain. For the holes along the length of the gutter, I used silver aluminum gutter tape, the same stuff we used on the roof of The Box House.


And this is how it looks now:

Voila! Cross your fingers we'll get the garage through the winter!

Getting a job done, even a temporary fix, is satisfying. But this one was satisfying and solved a mystery that had been bugging us. When I was regrading along the side of the garage, I kept coming up with shovels worth of strange glass rocks.

The previous owner's granddaughter had never seen them before, and we finally decided it must be some kind of glass landscaping mulch, which is available in a rainbow of colors. But no! When I was cleaning out the gutter, some of what I was removing was old roofing tar that had slid down the front and solidified into this hard, brittle, glass-like material. I pulled back some of the roof membrane for a better look, and yes, there was more of it, hard and glassy. When I climbed down and told my mom about it, she had a sudden flash image back to her childhood in Chicago, when using pitch or tar as a water sealant was the norm. The tar would solidify, and you'd find just such stones as these in the alleyways. They made good toys.

Sometimes working on an eighty-five-year-old house feels like treading an alien landscape. The Box House is so different from the homes I grew up in.

After cleaning up, I sat down at the computer and Googled all sorts of things about tar and pitch and roof fixes. Researching roof and gutter repair (after the fact) made me aware of something I hadn't thought of before I began. Because the roof on the garage is way more than thirty years old, the tar I was breaking off along the edge and chucking into a garbage can might very well contain asbestos. I wasn't wearing a dust mask for this job, as I wasn't creating much dust. But let this be a lesson to you out there on the hidden possibilities of asbestos. Don't do what I did!

Oh, well. At least I was wearing gloves.

And now for something completely different--it's only two more weeks until we get our Maine Coon kitties! The breeder has been keeping me up to date with what's happening; they just had their neuter/spay surgery and were microchipped over the weekend. She had some new pics, too, so here they are:

Boy kitty.

Girl kitty (left) with one of her other siblings.

Girl Kitty.

Ted won't settle on names yet. Phooey. So until they arrive, they are just Boy Kitty and Girl Kitty. I have to think of them that way, otherwise the names the breeder gave them will stick.

The Original Garage Doors

This is the room that Ted is slowly morphing into his office, circa last fall, just before we closed. Um, so far all we've done is take down the groovy bit of fabric hanging over the window and the crappy insulation from the pipes and clean out a garbage bag's worth of dust and all the junk left behind by the POs. But I did promise Ted I would post a before photo so we could chronicle all the progress, as we'll be taking on some more serious work next week when we remove the ceiling boards.

And that pale green stage or platform or whatever it is in the center of the room? Turns out those are our original garage doors, or at least part of them, constructed of tongue-and-groove boards. Very cool.

There aren't very many of these obscenely heavy wooden garage doors left in Evanston. Our inspector said he only came across two or three similar ones in the last twenty years of home inspection. Er, one of those was for a house he inspected for us, an inspection that turned out to be a train wreck because--among other disasters--the garage didn't have a proper roof! That tarp is sitting on bare boards; we have no idea why it didn't have a real covering--and no, you really, really couldn't tell from the ground it didn't have a real roof, only when we got up there did we know for sure. (But it did still have the original chimney, which was somehow used to heat the old Model T Fords in winter, so that's something.) This is the house we fired our first agent over. Here are the pics of that garage, inside and out (the doors slid from side to side, rather than up):

We tried out the forearm forklifts to carry our doors out of Ted's office and back to the garage, but they are so unbelievably heavy, that when we got to the stairs I couldn't lift them high enough. They're sitting in the laundry room, waiting for my much-taller cousins to help Ted get them out of the basement.

The boards are in great shape, and we will probably disassemble the doors to salvage the boards for repair projects. Here's the unpainted side of one of them...


All right, I know that doesn't show them off very well. If I think about it, I'll try to get a replacement picture.

Garage Inspiration

Now that the weather is finally, finally, finally warming up, I will need to order the gutter parts to repair the mess on the back of our garage. We've decided to go with the gargoyle theme. After that, I want to tackle the front of the garage, which is blah, boring:

Ted and I went on a B.A.D.C.* run a few days ago, varying the route somewhat to get a longer walk in. We spotted this garage, which I think is fabulous:

We had talked about just painting the garage door a non-white color, something earthy and muted. But why not use it as a canvas for some great art? Shine a coupla lights on it so folks driving by after dark can see it, too. Now, I have absolutely no talent for murals, but I live in a college town--surely there must be someone here who would like the chance to paint our garage.

Or do you think the neighbors would hate us?

*Big Ass Diet Coke

Winter of Our Discontent

A client sent me this macabre snow scene a while back--it nicely sums up my general irritation that winter has returned. It's bad enough to try to move and settle into a new place in the dead of winter; worse still is noticing some outdoor maintenance projects I'd like to get to sooner rather than later and can't because of the weather.

Last week it actually reached the low sixties in the Chicago area. The snow that had accumulated on the garage roof melted quickly, but we noticed that the brick at the back of the garage, below the gutter, was pretty damp--meaning the gutters were clogged and one of us would have to climb up and unclog them. Based on the visible brick wear and (mostly cosmetic) damage, I think this has been going on for a while.

So a few days ago, shortly before sunset, Ted and I dragged a ladder to the back of the garage and climbed up on the roof. I had it in my head that I'd be able to just scoop out the leaves and debris that had accumulated in the gutter and be done with it. That wasn't going to happen. It has been so long since the gutter had been cleaned that it was now firmly packed with mud, frozen mud. There were a few dead leaves embedded in the surface, but otherwise it was solid, unyielding, rock-hard mud. No wonder there was water backing up into the walls!

Because it was quickly getting dark, we decided to tackle it later in the week. I should have paid better attention to the weather report, because the temperatures have rapidly plummeted; it's like 2 degrees outside right now, and no relief in sight for the next 10 days. It's way too cold to work on the roof, and the job will probably take a while because I'll have to dig out all the compacted mud with a spade. So far, the gutter itself looks to be in decent shape, thank goodness.

I know it's probably been like this for years and a few more weeks won't matter much, but things like this drive me crazy, especially when I see a newly formed sheet of ice on the inside of the back garage wall. Why was it never cleared out? Why? Why?

Thoughts of Spring, or Our Humble Garage

The "Shine in the Shade" collection by White Flower Farm,
an early contender for the garden around the garage.

As more and more flower, seed, and bulb catalogs arrive at our door (I sent business reply cards for, I'm not kidding, nearly 30 of them), I'm starting to look at the Box House yard as a blank canvas. Sure, it's only January, but with this freakin' weird fifty-degree weather we've been having in the Chicago area, it's hard not to think of spring.

I'm not sure what I want to plant; for the last five years, all Ted and I had was a small deck off the master bedroom of our condo. We had the top-floor unit and few things were able to survive the ever-present sun, which tended to bake everything. What Mother Nature didn't kill, our cat Pascal tried to finish off--she was forever balancing herself in the flowerpots to use as a summertime litter box, precariously hanging halfway off the deck in the process. In such harsh conditions and circumstances, we were limited to growing the most sun hardy, cat-repelling (and overused) flowers--geraniums, marigolds, and the like. Boring. Boring. Boring. I have no intention of ever planting an impatien or its kin in my garden again.

As for Mom, she has long kept a garden, and she's both looking forward to a smaller yard and new terrain. The Box House also gets much more sun than her previous house, so she'll get to experiment with new plants. Between the two of us, we should come up with something good. We've already had long, dreamy discussions of naturalizing crocus, snow drops, and daffodils in the lawn and planting wisteria trees and red horse chestnuts. But our budget is going to nip many of those ideas in the "bud" (Heh-heh).

So, yesterday I started taking pictures of the yard to share with family and friends and get ideas for what should be planted. Originally, I planned on scanning them into this computer program called 3D Home Architect: Landscape, but honestly, it looked like too much of an effort and I'm far, far too lazy. I'm good enough at visualizing things (I hope), and many garden supply centers sell pre-matched plants to take out some of the guesswork.

To begin, you see our saggy garage. It's a lot more solid than it looks. Really. I do trust putting our cars in it. Honestly. It's probably as old as the house--1928. The inspector seemed to think it had sagged as much as it was going to, but there were a few things we could do to strengthen it. But that's not what this post is about. Can you see how barren it is? It will definitely need some life, some color around it, next spring.


Here's the side adjacent to the alley. I think, once the sun passes its zenith, it will be fairly shady. So perhaps a morning-sun tolerant shade garden. Something bright yet simple to care for, as our neighbor across the alley will be looking at this more than we will. (Click to enlarge these pictures. I'm loading them as small pics to save on download time.)

But what the heck is up with all this sand? We'll have to dig it out and reprep the yard before planting.
There are also several weed trees which should be removed, but I'm not certain if we can do that ourselves or if we have to coordinate with Com-Ed; they come close to the electric wires (and block the back gate). Also check out the damp spot on the wall. I don't think the gutter was in the habit of being cleaned, the water backed up into the walls with snow melt. This would explain the efflorescence inside and the solid layer of mortar at the corner. Again, I'll save that for another post.

There's a small strip of grass and dirt alongside the driveway; it's practically begging to be landscaped.The side facing the house has two cast iron planters they left us, and a sidewalk that will only accommodate pots, unless we rip it out. Definitely ain't happening anytime soon. The bulk of the tiny back yard is comprised of bark chips where there was once a swing set. I think I'll be able to reuse those beams elsewhere as edging.

And finally, the back of the garage. Those doors have been sealed off for decades, allowing whole trees to come up through the sidewalk cracks. We don't anticipate using those doors anytime soon, but will clear the area of rubbish plants to at least make the place habitable, and extend the yard for our dog Maggie.

So, if anyone has suggestions for how we can "spruce" (heh heh) up this area, let me know. We have a ton of terra cotta and ceramic pots, a couple of trellises, and some assorted garden statues to get us started.