So, a few months ago, our involvement with the Sheridan House project ended. Through lots of talks with Janie about our vision, we all discovered that we had different wants and needs, and despite a lot of effort, couldn't find a way to compromise. We parted ways amicably.

Now, three months later, we've come to find out that someone who has been reading our blog was concerned about the way we laid the sewer pipe down. Instead of contacting us and letting us know their concerns about how we should have done it better, they went behind our backs and sent an email to the requisite authorities. When that didn't elicit an eventual response they pursued the matter by sending an email up one level in the bureaucracy to the original contact's boss.

Now we are in a bit of trouble with the building and permits department, and have to completely dig up and redo the sewer connection under supervision. We want to make it clear that we had no intention of skirting the correct procedures or cutting corners. We knew we were going to have to get the house inspected when we were done renovating it, and we just weren't aware that we had to get an individual permit for this specific project. What can we say? We're inexperienced.

So, what we really want to say is: Shame on you! Shame on you, secret snitcher! You are a terrible coward who obviously cares more about bringing trouble and expense onto your neighbors than dealing honestly to address legitimate concerns. We implore you to just speak to your neighbor face-to-face in the future before bringing down unexpected consequences from afar.

A note to any prospective Clifton residents:
Be extremely cautious and inform yourself well, especially about historic guidelines, before attempting any home improvements on that to-do list; there are people here who won't hesitate to bring this kind of trouble down on you as their version of a warm welcome to the neighborhood.

Here's some progress we've made inside the house, knocking off plaster, and popping off lathe. In the beginning Seamus and Matt went in so excited to finally be doing some work, that they ended up taking out an interior wall that we probably could have kept in tact. After a few other moments where we asked a little too late if we had needed to do something, we took a step back and realized that we needed a more concrete plan for how we're going to insulate before we go forward with knocking out walls. In the end we decided that no matter what, we'll still take the plaster and lathe off all the exterior walls because most of it is in bad shape anyways.



Here's Me, Marlena, Matt, and Seamus all digging a trench to find the blocked sewer pipe in the front yard. We had to dig about three feet down to find it, which would have been a pain in such a narrow space to begin with, but I'll tell ya, there were some thick old tree roots down there to make it interesting. Seamus ended up breaking out a chainsaw to go through one of them, and still didn't get all the way through it. I think he eventually hacked through it with a maddock a few days later. One thing we had to be careful of, was that the pipe is clay, so easily breakable. We needed to make sure that it stayed in tact up by the sidewalk so that we could have something to hook the new pipe into when we lay it down. I think everything went okay in that regard, but it did take some finesse at the time.

Ol' Russel

Here are two funny stories that Janie just told me about Mr. Sheridan.

Mr. Sheridan is notoriously tight with his money. He gets a veteran's pension and a pension from his lifetime of work at L&N railroad, and he's never spent a dime on it. Obviously we can see that in how bad the house looks like now. Janie also notices that when she goes out to the store and gets him something, if she spent $8.96 on something, he'll get out four pennies instead of just giving her the $9. Sometimes he accuses her of cheating him on his money over a dollar or two.

It's true, he lived through the depression, and so he learned the hard way with the rest of the country, but even in his family he was famous for his meticulous habits. At age 11, Russell got a newspaper route, and started making a few dollars a week. Every night he would sit in his bedroom counting his money. Someone saw him through the window at some point, and broke into his room and stole all the money he'd saved over months of work while everyone was out of the house one day.

Russell reported the theft to the cops, and was actually able to give them a list of every serial number of every dollar that he had stashed in his moneybox. With that info the cops were able to get back every single dollar bill except for one. A week later his sister saw a stray dollar bill lying in the street and when she took it home he matched it against his list of serial numbers and it was the missing dollar.

Seriously.

Another good Mr. Sheridan story is more recent. After the tree root grew through his sewer line, and the water stopped running to his house, rather than spending the money to fix it, he just started peeing into two liter soda bottles and stacking them in the bathtub. A couple of years of that habit, and eventually someone noticed the smell and called Adult Protective Services to come make sure he was doing all right. That's how everyone decided it would be best if he moved into Janie's apartment, and his house was declared unfit to live in.

Well, anyways, Janie called ServePro to clean out the bathroom, and when Mr. Sheridan found out they were coming he decided to help out. Janie walked outside to find him dumping a two-liter bottle full of piss down the sewer in the street outside her house. She said, "Hey! you can't do that!" and he said, "Well Lady, it's done now." That was the last bottle out of around one hundred bottles. Janie said it rained pretty soon after that, and the whole street smelled for a week like five year old urine.

Reality Checks

So, previously I outlined our basic design for the house. It included making the house livable by repairing the water damage, and bringing the electricity and the plumbing up to code, adding windows for light and solar gain, and painting it in bright, happy colors. Another major piece was that our design would expand the size of the house just a bit to make it more livable for a small community instead of a single family. Community living is a life goal for me, Matt, and Seamus, so it was a priority to make more sleeping space than just the two bedrooms that are already there. We designed a plan that added 8 feet onto the back of the house, and raised the steep pitch of the roof with a shed dormer, so
we could have more space in the attic for bedrooms.

So here's Matt working really hard to make a drawing to submit to Landmarks so they can approve our plans. Looks good huh? Lots of good windows, lots of good room for living comfortably. He even colored it in real pretty for them.

We never did submit that drawing. Instead we met with a green building group in town called Green Go - three guys who specialize in building and renovating energy-efficient homes with strawbale and salvaged materials. We thought they could give us an idea for a budget for the project -- something we didn't have any idea about yet. All between us we have about $20,000 liquid, which we had a vague idea wouldn't be enough, but didn't know by how much. Well, they let us know. They estimated that just the basic work of bringing the house up to code would be somewhere to the tune of $100 grand - although they were strongly recommending that we contract out the work instead of doing it ourselves because they didn't think it would be worth the time we would spend making mistakes and learning the hard way. My head is still spinning from the talking to they gave us about our naievety, but I'm not sure they even thought we could handle hearing how much extra the strawbale addition would cost so they didn't even give it to us. Take away message: you're in over your heads, kids. Call us in a few years when you know what you're talking about. I don't mean to sound like they were rude or mean to us. They just handed us a reality check based on their own experiences. Still, it was pretty disheartening.

So, that's okay. We knew better than to just assume that our first design would work without having to mess with it at all. We went through a lot of different ideas to modify our plan and make it more affordable, and after about a month we came up with this: Scratch the addition to the back. We would have to dig and pour foundation, and it would block some of Janie's sun anyways. We're still going to push for the dormer, so we can add bedrooms in the attic though. We think that with the money we save from the addition, we can afford to do it while we're on the roof anyways. And after a lot of time weighing our options, we've decided that screw it - we're doing it ourselves anyways - as much as we can legally. Obviously electricity and plumbing require some oversight by licensed pros. So that's where we're at with that.

So, going back and discussing our plans, we decided that we could still afford to do a dormer, but we are going to strike the addition to the back of the house. This will simplify a lot of different aspects to our project, and with the extra space we're gaining in the attic, we can live with a slightly smaller downstairs. Matt went back and drew up some new plans, and we're going to Landmarks with them pretty soon.

Since then we've had some more encouraging talks with other home renovators, like our friend David Coyt, and we've been reinvigorated with the idea that we can do a lot of this work on our own without calling in professionals. He's also taken us under his wing a bit, and shown us how to salvage good lumber and other useful materials, and we've already gotten a good amount of stuff to use for the house. I will never stop being amazed at how much perfectly good material people will just throw out. The richer the neighborhoods, the more the people will just get rid of whatever looks like clutter to them at the moment too. I should be used to it by now.

Big Work Day

Saturday, January 11:
We started work on the house today, by cleaning out the basement. If you scroll down to the previous post you can see what a mess it was - full of scrap wood, gallon jugs of motor oil, and little treasures. It only really took us a few hours, but it felt like a huge job. We had good help from some people we've met around town in various places. Our neighbor Carol stopped by the Thursday before to give us a hand starting everything off. On Saturday our favorite friend Ray brought us a saws-all, a computer, and a bunch of face masks to keep all the mystery dust out. And Marlena, a friend excited about living in community came to see if she wanted to get more deeply involved with the renovation project. We also had good help from Melissa, a lady we met when giving a talk at an Earth-Save potluck about the work we're doing. Earthsave is a local group that meets once a month, cooks vegetarian meals, and advocates vegetarianism as a key part of repairing the environment.
Here are some awesome things we found:
A metal tin completely full of neatly cut off pencil points - just the points, nothing to hold on to. Right when he saw what was in that tin, Matt got a little teary eyed and said, "this is a beautiful man."
A pint jar of motor oil labeled "motor oil, 1960"
A bugle made out of a bull horn - completely covered in black dust, which was no obstacle to Matt, who spends 3/4 of his day making trumpet noises with his mouth anyways. He was tooting on that thing before he even realized he had it in his hand.
An old scooter helmet. We decided that whoever facilitates our house meetings from now on has to wear that helmet with the rabbit ear antennae that we found attached to the top so they can get tuned in to the vibes - you know, the vibes.
We found some cool cobbler tools, like old metal shoe forms. We also found a sausage grinder to match the one already upstairs.
Mr. Sheridan and his father kept everything. Everything. seriously. motor oil in jar labeled 1960. Why? And I'm sure he would have rebelled if he'd come over and found us disposing of anything. Someone might could use that some day!

We also had to shovel out a random pile of large gravelly rocks, clean up a large oil spill in the back corner, sort through box after box of rusty nails and screws, and organize and filter through that huge pile of wood. We now have a good pile of scrap we'll probably be able to use in the construction process at some point, as well as a pile of things we can hopefully make some money off of - like the shoe forms, a miniature ironing board from the 1950's, an old radio, and an old tourism book on lovely, bucolic Bardstown "My Old Kentucky Home."

Anyways, the cleaning project was a good way to get things moving with the house. We've got a whole room completely clear now. We filled up three big trash cans, and two of them were so heavy that Edgar had to sweet talk the trash men into taking them by promising to never do it again. Our next step will be to clean out the rest of the rooms completely, and then start demolishing the plaster off of walls.

the house as we found it

Here are some pictures Janie and I took of the house a few weeks ago. As of yet only minimal work has been done to it. Betty and some of her family members came and cleaned out a lot of the old furniture from the rooms. Janie hired ServePro to clean out the bathtub which was full of two-liter bottles of urine, and the toilet which was just full. Mr. Sheridan helped the process by dumping some of the bottles out in the street. Other than that, the house really hasn't had much done to it in the past hundred years or so.


This is the front entrance way. The door leads to the unfinished basement area,which is actually on level with the entrance floor, but the house is built into a hill. There's one room on the left, and the stairs lead up to the main living area. The picture on the right shows the main furnace for the house, connected to a chimney on the south wall.

These are pictures of the basement, which is still full of old building materials, tools, and junk. We've found some cool stuff digging around in here, like an old cast iron stove -- it was probably for coal. We've also found old cobbler's tools, like a big shoe horn, and a hanging bag full of pristine suits and coats probably from the 1950's or 1960's.


We have dreams of turning the basement into a workshop, tool lending library, and apothecary.

The downstairs room -- it's a dungeon with one small west-facing window that doesn't allow much sun in. The black walls don't help. Janie and I ripped a bunch of cardboard off to reveal this fireplace, which has been bricked shut.

Moving upstairs, this is the main common room. It has a back door which leads to the yard through the stoop that Janie and Edgar built to replace Mr. Sheridan's rotting back porch. We would like to extend the length of this room eight to twelve feet into the back yard, and plan to use strawbale the addition. There's only one window on the south wall in this room, so we'll need to add three more to gather enough sun to heat the house in the winter.

That's the smaller furnace, piped into the chimney on the east wall. We think that we could keep the chimney where it is when we build the addition, and make it into a cob oven. The bricks will make good thermal mass for storing and releasing heat in the winter.

We would also like to knock down this wall between the living room and the kitchen to open the space up. We spend a lot of time in the kitchen fermenting, baking, sprouting, cooking, and making medicine. We want to have lots of room in there.
This is the kitchen. It's also got a backdoor, but right now it leads to a bit of a drop. It's a really narrow room, and there's nothing in it right now save for a this amazing 1940's era "douching kit" with a pamphlet that describes the delicate subject of feminine hygiene, in sensitive terms that our irrational brains can understand.

That's the bathroom, which the kitchen leads in to. Believe me, it's seen worse days. The tub is an old clawfoot, and I don't think it would take much to make it really nice again. A neighbor donated a newer toilet to us, so we're just going to retire the old trooper in this picture.

This is the bedroom on the south wall.
This room is in the best shape in the house. It gets a lot of sun, it's a nice size for a bedroom, and it doesn't seem to have any major damages we'd have to repair. We want to add more windows to the south wall for passive solar heating, and we'll probably need to do some maintenance work on all these old wooden window frames. There's also linoleum stuck to the floor which should just come up.

This is the bedroom on the north wall. It has the north wall chimney, where a lot of water leakage has caused the ceiling to rot. You can see the rot over the window on the right. Again, there's work to do on the windows and getting rid of the linoleum floor.

As for other projects: we're hoping to build stairs into the attic, raise the roof angle with a shed dormer, and create two more bedrooms up there. We also need to fix the blocked sewer line that's still filled with that tree root, and bring the electricity in the house up to code. The house was built in 1910, and the wiring is probably original, so it's going to be a big job. Right now there's no power in the house, so we'll have to at least do the wiring for the outside walls in order to run power tools and heaters as we work through the winter.

Starting Off

this is what we want to do to the outside of the house:

fix the roof: This is the first thing to happen, because the roof is full of holes and rotten wood. Any work we want to do inside the house has to wait until we can keep it dry.

See that whitish border at the bottom of the chimney? That's the flashing that hasn't been replaced in years, which is where all the water is getting in. There are three chimneys on the roof, all in the same state. The consensus seems to be that there is so much rot under the eaves and inside the attic space, that we'll have to tear off all the shingles, replace everything inside, then put a whole new roof on.

At this point we plan to do all the work ourselves except for laying on the top layer of roof covering. Within historic preservation guidelines we'll have to either use shingles or metal for the roof. We're hoping we can hustle ourselves into a really cheap metal roof somehow.

add a shed dormer on the roof and a back addition of 8-12 more feet:
If Landmarks lets us add a dormer, we'll need to do this at the same time that we tear the roof up. That means we have to wait for complete approval from Landmarks before we can do any work on the house.

The dormer will help create two bedrooms in the attic, doubling our bedroom space and allowing more people to live here. We think living in groups is more efficient environmentally, and more fun.

The back addition, in turn, will allow us more kitchen and common space, as well as more windows on the south wall for passive solar heating. We plan to build it out of strawbale with the help of some guys at a group in Louisville called GreenGo who have already built one complete strawbale house in Crescent Hill (the next neighborhood over from us).

add more windows on the south wall:

The picture above also shows the south wall in a wider context. We have a lot of uncluttered space for the sun to hit our house, even on cold days, but that also means it's easy to see our "unhistorical" changes. Landmarks is pretty strict about windows, and this could be a battle for us.

These are all the windows we have on the sunniest wall right now. One goes into a bedroom, leaving only one for the common room. If we want to heat this house through the winter with stored sunlight we need to add a lot more windows, and put in a masonry floor to catch and slowly release the heat throughout the day.

fix the porch: the porch is old, wooden, and rotting. One of Landmarks requirements for Janie even buying the house was to fix the porch, so we need to address it soon. We also need to get some fresh paint on the front side of the house. We're not allowed to remove the historical rusted cans of paint though.

Edgar's pushing for a concrete porch. It will have a longer lifespan, and will probably be cheaper than finding the right wood to refloor with. At first we didn't think Landmarks would let us, but Edgar has this charming way with people, and now they see his side of it.

We also need to replace the porch roof, which has to be metal according to historic guidelines, even if the main house roof isn't.