Beebe -- our 1935 Bungalow on Baker Street.

[CS in Low Hud]

That's great! And very nice house! How lucky you are that your wood work was never painted... and that the kitchen is intact is downright amazing! We have a 1925 Dutch Colonial with interior craftsman-style trim and finishes (you could order all these bits from catalogues at the time), very similar to yours - BUT we didn't luck-out with the kitchen and unpainted woodwork (it took ten years to strip and restore).

Where is Gardner NJ? There's, a Gardner township out in the direction of Easton. Is that where you are? I'm located just across the Tappan Zee bridge from NJ.

Chris

[Lily left the valley]

So when I was grabbing some bits for dinner out of our cooler, I opened the upper stairwell door that leads to the lawn so I could see better. When I turned around, sure enough in a patch just above the doorway...original wood siding on the house itself. I am thrilled! Now I'm curious if that section was left untouched because it's inside the stairwell, or maybe there might be more on the house itself under the AC/Maso siding. Only 348 more days until I'm allowed to do anything that could lead to major work. I'll try to take some pictures of inside that stairwell later this week.

That's great! And very nice house! How lucky you are that your wood work was never painted... and that the kitchen is intact is downright amazing! We have a 1925 Dutch Colonial with interior craftsman-style trim and finishes (you could order all these bits from catalogues at the time), very similar to yours - BUT we didn't luck-out with the kitchen and unpainted woodwork (it took ten years to strip and restore).

Where is Gardner NJ? There's, a Gardner township out in the direction of Easton. Is that where you are? I'm located just across the Tappan Zee bridge from NJ.

Chris

Thankies. We really love the house, and do feel really fortunate that so much wasn't remuddled. Ten years on your woodwork is dedication. You must be thrilled to have that behind you. Our kitchen is... , to be certain.

We're not in NJ anymore. We moved to Gardner, MA last spring--so almost a year here now. We have lived in NJ in various places over the years, though. The last place we lived before we moved here was Newton, NJ--way out in the NNW corner. I've mentioned Newton a lot in my posts which might have been cause for confusion because I always specify that it's the one in NJ since we have a Newton in MA as well. One town in NJ we lived in for a while that's closer to you was Dumont (Bergen County).

[Lily left the valley]

Still moving stuff, unpacking in spurts.

Sean was thrilled with the good news. I finally figured out why I had April burned into my mind when I checked my calendar and saw a penciled note about "first mortgage payment, April 4th", and then I remembered the phone call it stemmed from with mortgage guy. No surprise, really. None at all.

The kitchen is slowly starting to take shape, but contact paper in/on the metal cabinet under the sink is giving me pause. It's filthy, and does not want to be removed. I don't want to damage the enamel paint underneath if I can help it. The silverware drawer is the biggest threat to my sanity. I'm thinking, because the cabinetry is metal, that maybe I can use a small steamer to help encourage it off. Not all the drawers have it. Some have more scraps of the snazzy lino. Thrifty folks, our predecessors. I just wish the tenants had been as kind as the owners obviously were for all those years before.

I have official permission from my Floor Manager to yank the fake wood vinyl strips in the kitchen only. He wants me to wait on the bath for now. No idea when there will be time, but it's going as soon as I can manage some.

I forgot to mention before that whenever they added the plastic tile sheeting in the full bath, they put the bottom of the window trim on upside down. It's funny and making me itch to fix it all at the same time.

Sean is off today, we're debating whether to finish cleaning out the bedrooms or tackle the rest of the comics.

Everything must goooooooo
to Beebe.

[Lily left the valley]

Today was filled with little discoveries, like the dark staples still sticking out of the baseboard in the dining room. Glad I saw them thanks to a dust bunny being caught on one rather than with my fingers.

Beebe is already proving to be full of signs of change and some poor caretakers in the past. On one hand, it's easy to blame the errant tenants that had to be evicted for a lot I'm finding, but I also feel bad to jump to that conclusion. I've now noticed a few doorjambs that have the wood blown out so the door cannot close properly (since the metal plate that would normally be there is gone.) The cellar door from the hall is cracked badly, also blown out at the catch. It looks like someone kicked it in from the cellar side, which may explain why the latch hook lock is half missing as well. From a quick look today, if I can get the jamb off without too much trouble, I should be able to glue the two bits back together since it seems to only be one long crack up. Speaking of the cellar, I spotted an old handsaw just hanging out in the rafters today when I was grabbing cheese for our snack from the cooler.

The good news is that some of what I thought was plaster/mud in the tub was just gobs of paint. The actual plaster/mud, though...it taking some time to remove. The tub surface is softer than I want it to be, but I don't know what I can do about that beyond what I'm already doing--which is slow going. Unlike the latex paint which peels up pretty easy once you get it started, the plaster/mud seeped into all the scratches and needs more elbow grease.

Almost all the comics are moved over now. Our last trip of the day yesterday was lots of awkward things that don't "tetris" nicely, so a light one, but good things to be moved.

Kitchen still needs cleaning too. It really is...gross, but it's cleaning up nicely--just slow going. One very interesting thing I have found is it appears that the wall o' cabinets was not always there. I found a recess on the outside wall before, and had pondered what it was since it was smallish. Yesterday, I realized that if you look up in the right side cabinet, there is still dark smokeyness on the painted walls--evidence that the stove used to be there. So the recess may have been the exhaust fan hole.

The snow is melting at a fairly steadily clip now--temperature hit the low 50s here today. We're due for a dip down again starting tonight, but we have an oil delivery set for Friday morning, so we just need to hold out with our little 5 gallon can runs until then. I've been watching the cellar for signs of wetness, nothing new so far. we did find a decent door mat on the front porch that had been buried under the snow. Whatever was painted on it once is undiscernable, but it's still in ok shape. There's also still some odds and ends the PO never got rid of, cardboard, laundry hamper, et al. Now I pick up one thing when I go to get the mail. Another few days and the porch will be clear.

We did stop by the local used appliance shop yesterday. Looks like we can get a decent "unmatched" set for under $200 there, and delivered for only $25. Hopefully that set is still there this weekend. He had a matching set too, but for $350 as far as his lower cost stuff. I just need stuff that works. Don't care if it matches.

We still have not heard back about the fridge, so I have no idea if it's sold, or the seller is just waiting to see if anyone else shows up to pick it up before responding.

MiL sent an e-mail letting us know a parcel is coming. "A little something for the house," she said. I'm hoping it's the rake I asked for.

We were going to do another run of stuff tonight, but we decided we have to get the comics shelves together, as well as the media rack. There's so many boxes stacked 2-4 high taking up floor space. We need to keep putting things away so we can recycle the boxes and free up room for the last of the stuff that needs to come over. If the kitchen wasn't so bad, that'd give us some breathing room. *shrug* It is what it is. At this point, we're guessing at worst 6 trips with the PT plus the truck for the big stuff. Almost everything still at the apartment is already packed up, so it's just a question of moving the boxes save some hanger stuff in closets.

[Lily left the valley]

Since we got home from a quick errand, I thought one time I saw a dark shadow zoom by on my left, but figured I was just tired.

Welp, not long after, there it was to my left again just as Sean got startled. (I'll just pretend that's a bat emoji zooming right at Sean just before he got the side door open...) By that point, we weren't watching a show, so the flutter sound of its flying was noticeable.

Short story, we think it came in with us when we got back from our errand as it seemed more than happy to go right back out the side door when Sean opened it. (He ducked, so we're not 100% positive it's out because I was coming down the hall myself after trying to exit the office and having to slam the door shut because it tried to get back in, then me popping out after the door had been opened.) We can't find it anywhere and we've been looking for over an hour.

Other tidbits, and thoughts: We're glad we have a few see through umbrellas; fortunately Kira didn't get all riled by it before I tossed my lap blanket over her head; and.....

...one really good thing that came out of this was we made a very enlightening discovery. The drop panel made out of wallboard to close the hole to the attic was missing in the ceiling of the linen closet. Apparently someone did go up there after final walk through #1 (I didn't check the linen closet during #2) and managed to break it, leaving the pieces right next to the hole.

So one cardboard box for stiffness inside a constructor garbage bag and really cheap and lousy duct tape later, the hole is now not open.

Even if that linen closet door does seal well for an interior door, now we find another reason we may have been losing heat unnecessarily. The linen closet is at the top of the stairs, so the rising heat could easily have been sliding right under that door, getting pulled up in the "chimney" effect of the narrow closet into the unheated attic. Well, better finding this now than later, even if it could have saved us even more funds on oil than just closing storms and locking sashes did.

How could they not use even a piece of cardboard to cover the hole once they'd broken the former wall board piece? Or even simply say, "Well, we're really sorry, but..."? I did notice, with a quick sweep of the torch while I was up there that except for our superior insulating quilts, the other bits I had noticed on the far end of the attic, but never ID'd what they were are all gone now.

Once again, POs...you've really earned the alternate words for p-o-s.

[Lily left the valley]

We're still slogging along with the moving in phase. We're at a point where it feels like not much has been done, yet the pieces are coming together.

I haven't posted much because the pieces feel small and scattered, and most of them are just average move in stuff. We're very frustrated with the POs still, and I don't like talking about all the reasons why because it feels like I'm complaining which undercuts how much we love Beebe. We're also frustrated because we just keep finding Drunken Weasel level of recent work. The good news is that most of it appears fairly easy to disable, but the worrisome unknown is what is hiding beneath that they were so frantic to cover so shoddily.

Case in point..the full bath. The fake Corcoran board was only tacked onto the plaster wall. When I tried to take a peek at the piece behind the toilet, almost the entire thing popped immediately and I had to put my hand to the wall to stop it from simply falling off. Where they tacked it, the plaster is gouged. Not impossible to fix, just messy. (I'm kinda tired of messy lately. Don't even ask about the kitchen. We'll just leave it at that, and later when you see before and afters, you'll understand. )

We also had a bit of a rude surprise today. Sean's check was short. It was a computing error, and they've fixed it to a degree, but he can't recoup all the missing funds immediately. They will be rolled into his next check. (His PM did sincerely apologize and gave him the highest percentage she could per policy as a 'cash advance'. Silly system, but she did what she could and we really appreciated it.) It did curtail appliances purchases, though. Just short on what we needed for the fridge. (All the CL fridge ads have not even responded to my e-mails, so we've been looking at sales.)

One happy discovery, at least, is that I have confirmed there is wood siding under the AC/Maso on three of the four exterior walls so far. I have not yet managed to check the west wall, but at this point, I do not have any reason to doubt it has it as well. Given how many layers are between the wood and the latest exterior layer, my hope is that the rest of the wood is in at least as good of shape as that I saw in the cellar stairwell. Time will tell on that! Given what I found on the front porch section as to depth between layers where it appears someone slammed an area with something heavy so I could better see through a badly damaged AC piece, there is a tiny chance that the original trim is also buried beneath the 1/4" foam insulation that was placed between the wood and the AC.

Two not so great discoveries:
- the garage is in worse shape than just the initial crack we saw on the back wall. There are more, though not all are as big. I haven't repaired cement block ever, so that will require research when the time comes.

- I have already noticed dead but not easy to yank out climbers both on the back southeast section of the house, as well as from what appeared to be a garden of some sort right next to the garage, so the climbers invaded there as well. This shouldn't be as bad as the garage cracks issue, but it looks to at least be time consuming to make sure all the tendrils are indeed dead as a doornail.

The weather hasn't quite been co-operating, but there's not much left to deal with. I just hope the snow & rain stops in time to get the truck for the big stuff next week so we can be out on time.

[Gothichome]

Well lily, bats. Welcome to the world of old homes,for both them and us. Hopefully it was a stray as you suspect.

[Lily left the valley]

Well lily, bats. Welcome to the world of old homes,for both them and us. Hopefully it was a stray as you suspect.

I actually like bats although I understand the rabies concern. When I was at college, our radio station was inside a mini castle at the time (was later moved to the new monstrosity of a student center.) At night if you opened the doorway to the hallway leading to small offices, the bats would happily zoom up and down the full length of the building when they dropped down from their roosts in the tower's eaves.

Here's what it looked like before they renovated it and repurposed it.


The one time we truly were unhappy with bats was really the landlord at the time's fault. We never directly had issue with them as they stayed in the full length attic. However, he knew when he rented to us that there was a very large bat community living in the attic which had been there for quite a long time. Yet he never bothered to mention the fact that within the first month of us living there, workers would be in our apartment at all hours for a long time doing extermination and health and safety remediation. First, to remove the ceiling in every single room on the second floor, because the guano was that bad. We suddenly went to living in plastic bubble rooms on the second story of the apartment, with a blower set up running 24/7 so there was never a moment's peace. When that happened, we asked to live rent free until the work was done since we had not been told prior to renting. He refused that and also refused to lower the rent for the duration of the work as well.

When we were told it could take months for them to finish the remediation, that's when I had a sit down with the landlord and the words "break our lease legally or we sue, and we expect our full deposit back as well" apparently made him realize the horrible choice he had made. (That was the stone home in Little Falls, NJ I had linked to in the discussion about "quiet neighbors".) We really did love that apartment, but what a mess!

[Lily left the valley]

The weekend sort of flew by, and we got done what we could. We're almost to the point where we're ready to pull the last bits out of all the rooms and pile it into the 3 season for easier loading. We're watching the weather this week to figure when might be the best day for the truck rental for the few big pieces.

I have a growing short list of "worn out" electrics that will need seeing to eventually. Little things like the 3 way miswire, and switches that don't quite turn the light on the first try. I have to swap some outlets out if possible in the office if they have the grounds I am hoping they do. I am also going to have to do some work on pull chains--both with some of the bath sconces and cellar lights as well.

Sean got a late call yesterday to sub at another PO, and since he left late, he got home late. All the plans we had for the apartment went right out the door. The weather was poor for most of the day, and he was exhausted. So we had a very simple dinner, watched a show and not much more. After he went to bed, I'm continuing my reading up on steam boilers, and..oh...prolly at least four other topics I seem to flit between as well when I get overwhelmed with the boiler stuff. The vocabulary when I read the pro forums is tough. I spend a lot of time looking things up.

Yet, since he was away for the day, I decided that meant it was time to tackle the kitchen, especially since we've been steadily clearing out the one at the apartment. I think we only had three boxes of kitchen stuff left to be moved after our last run. I did take more pictures of the kitchen, and a few other bits and bobs here at Beebe, but I'm already past my bedtime, so maybe later I'll add those to the Beebe gallery here.

I have made some headway with the silverware drawer with the sticky shelf paper. What amused me greatly was that under the shelf paper was...more lino! Wheee!

I did realize one side under the sink also had a scrap of the red I've been seeing through cracks and such. It looks like both had it at some point, but for some reason (I'm guessing from the rust on the right side that was related) there's only a very small scrap of the red left on the right and it's stuck fast, unlike all the others that you can easily lift out. I am finding some rust spots in certain drawers and corners of the metal under sink cabinet as I dig through the grime. Nothing seems too horrid to fix so far.

One obvious craft skill difference between at least one PO and the Drunken Weasels was when I started taking out the shelf sized lino from the wood cabinets (as mentioned, not glued down). Since the front edge wasn't quite as nice as the back due to wear, I thought I'd simply flip it when I put it back in...nope. They cut them to fit exactly, and the cabinets aren't perfectly square inside, though very, very close.

I still haven't found a small enough sample of most of the linos save the red to try to send off for testing if we don't get said bits back, as I'd like to keep using them as intended if we can. I may find them over time and I'll worry about it later when I can look at exactly what a testing place needs. So far, the pieces I've been able to remove all seem to have black backings--again, no adhesive, just the backing.

One curious bit is that the top shelf in the upper left cabinet has moulding for a plate rail in the rear. It's also nailed or screwed through the lino, and I'm not sure if I'm going to let it remain, or remove it for easier cleaning of the lino and not put it back. It's so high up that I'm not sure if it was done specifically because something flat might get visually lost, or perhaps it's more for lids like a stewpot or Corningware you don't use as often so you wouldn't have them falling off the piece when taking them down from that height. I'm really not sure. I did test the shelves to see if they were not secured (like the lower right because of the bath plumbing nook), but they are firmly in place. However, if my theory is right and those cabinets were put along that wall later, maybe the plate rail shelf was in a different spot before.

I also took more pictures of the cellar stairwell heading outside to get a better sense of the siding and other bits like the Frankendoor. I did notice for the first time water gathering near the door. There is a spot in the stairwell near to the west side of the jamb that either collapsed or I don't know what, but the water seems to be coming from there where the hole was poorly covered with a board. The good news is even though it was more water was gathering than I realized, the sump pump works! We heard a gurgle just before he went off to bed, and when I went around trying to figure out what it was, I thought of the water and the pump, and sure enough, the well and bucket within are no longer dry. So I think that's what we heard, and I have not heard anything further since. You can see various spots on the dirt portions of the floor where the water "channeled" or was channeled towards the sump. The Frankendoor has once such channel, so not even minor flooding, just evidence of wet, and now water in the well/bucket.

Oh...one thing that leads to another. I also started to go through a lot of mail and office paperwork that's been grabbed in bits and pieces during the move to start sorting and organizing it. That led to our little inside bin for recycling getting full, so I took it outside and...

We also had a visit from the "not-Og" cat. (Remember my crazy cat story? Yes. That one.) When I went out to get mail and put recyclables in the bin, it was sitting on the shorter rail of our porchlet. It definitely looked like it wanted to come inside, and I sort of kept the door mostly shut as I spoke to it because I had no idea what to expect if it did come in, and our cat crate was already tucked away in storage. I was right in one remembrance--no collar. The good news is it looked much healthier than the last time. Definitely about the same size as Og, but a bit more brown tinges in the back body and leg area than Og had.

We had a seemingly friendly one sided chat, it almost let me pet it longer than a second as it tried to scent me with headrubs before meandering off, and if my past experience with cats is worth anything, it will be back. Hopefully I'll have remembered to bring the crate or at least a camera by the door by then. I told Sean about the visit, and he said he was sorry he missed it. Since there's no collar, the plan is to crate it and contact the shelter first in case it has been reported missing. If not, then check up time and hopefully they'll get along. I realized I have no idea what we might call it. Between the two of us, we do call it Og, even though we know better. So maybe the name will carry. We'll see if it comes back first, worry about the name later.

[Powermuffin]

Lily, please check with your city's water board to see if in fact your house is dated from 1935. A lot of your house looks like ours, our bath and kitchen cupboards were added in the 1920s, so until we went to the water board, we thought the house was much newer. The water was turned on in March of 1908. (Happy anniversary to us.) We also went to the library and found old address books, which clearly showed us that our house was not built by 1906.

I am curious to see what you find, since your house looks more like it was built <1930.
Diane