Chim-Chiminey, Chim-Chiminey, Chim-Chim-Cheree

One of the very first projects we anticipated when we bought the farmhouse was taking down the extra chimney. From what we could tell, it maybe wasn't in great shape, and more importantly, it served absolutely no purpose.

The chimney on the left is purely decorative

At one point, the chimney may have served a cookstove in the kitchen, and we know that it once served the wood burner that's still in the house. But prior to our ownership, the wood burner got moved to the dining room and got a new chimney (which featured in its own blog post last fall). To keep the chimney from collapsing into the house, the previous owner decided to just put in a small closet, which is clearly to code.

We almost did this project last summer, but the threat of rain coupled with some indecision about exactly HOW we were going to get up there and remove the chimney when the roof is fairly steep and also you can't step on it because you'll crack the tiles. That meant that by THIS summer, we'd had a full year to prepare our game plan and gather supplies.

And it turns out... that actually paid off.

First, we got ladder hooks, which are pretty much what they sound like -- they attach to the ladder and allow it to slide up the roof and hook over the ridge, distributing the weight of the ladder. Like so.

Testing the ladder hooks

Then my father brought up ladder jacks, which look like they should be used as bear traps or something, but actually attach to the ladder and allow you to set boards across the two ladders to make a flat, stable platform. For added safety, we had harnesses tied off to the bucket van. So from there, dad and I were able to spend a morning up on the roof, trying to gently take out the chimney without dropping bricks or loose mortar onto the roof tiles. Chris took the hard job of trudging up and down ladders all day to haul down the bricks and mortar we removed.

The actual taking down of the chimney was not significantly harder than playing Jenga. A fairly light tap with a hammer was enough to loosen up most of the chimney, and bricks came out with basically no effort.

By the time we were reaching through the roof into the attic, however, the whole chimney was swaying significantly every time you touched it. That didn't seem great, since we didn't really want to knock down ten feet of chimney into the attic. When we regrouped inside for further demo, Chris and Dad rigged up a couple boards to brace the chimney a bit... and then the rest of the chimney was also super loose and in about the same amount of time it took to measure, find boards, and screw in the braces, they'd taken down the chimney past the point where the braces were helpful.

Good-bye, chimney.

Soon enough, we were finding the tools that had been dropped down the chimney earlier, shockingly well-preserved bird skeletons, and a lot of years of soot and dust and dirt and general nastiness that had to get scooped out. But eventually, we reached the kitchen!

Yes, this is the "closet" that was supporting the chimney.

I'm standing in the kitchen, looking up to the hole in my roof.

So then the chimney was gone, and we were left with a hole in the roof, which is the downside to removing a chimney. Fortunately, this was easily remedied.

No more skylight!

This was the point where we decided to be smart and let this be a two-day project. The next day, we were sore, but back at it. After a little aerial YouTubing, we figured out how to use a slate ripper, which is a tool that looks like it's not going to do anything, but somehow manages to slip up between roof tiles and rip out the nails so you can remove a tile without having to remove every single tile that overlaps it. Then we set about taking out the partial tiles, installing new tiles... and fixing the tiles we accidentally broke with the ladder. Oops.

New tiles!

Finally, it was time to splice in some new metal over the ridge, re-attach the lightening rod assembly, and ta-da! -- a totally fixed up roof!

Roof, now with less chimney!

From up close, it's pretty obvious which tiles are the new ones, but from the ground, it's like the whole chimney never even happened.

No chimney!

All in all, this was one of the more rewarding projects. Once we took the chimney down in the attic, for instance, we were able to get in and finish up the insulation project from the last post. Having the chimney out is also going to let us (hopefully yet this fall/winter??) move ahead with putting a wall back in between the kitchen and dining room. So I guess the "reward" here is more projects, but it still felt really good to get this big one done.

In Which We Very Nearly Finish Something

Good news for anyone who wants to come help work on the farm: we now have a guest room, so we can hold you hostage and ensure you don't leave until the work is complete. You won't have a door on the bedroom, but you won't care because you'll have the whole upstairs to yourself. And you'll have to walk through the construction staging area that's the upstairs hallway in order to get to the bathroom at night, but that's just part of the experience.

Or you could just look at these pictures.

So, a long time ago, we had done the baseline work for the back bedroom: painting the walls and the floor.

Not featured: the floor paint

Well, now we've finally made real progress in this space. For one, you can see in the picture above that the baseboards in this room were incomplete. They were also unpainted 2x4s. All the rest of the upstairs has the wide baseboards you can just barely see behind the paint cans in the hallway. So during our Fourth of July week at the farm, we broke out some wide boards and finished the baseboards for that room.

Cutting mitered angles is the worst.

 We went with the process of "measure twice, overthink about whether or not you're cutting the right end of the board, measure a few more times, cut once, dry fit, measure again, trim down."

Oooh! Wide!

That little bumped out bit was a little tricky because (of course) it isn't smooth, which is probably why the previous folks never bothered finish the baseboards. Once we got the boards in place, it was time to paint and caulk the trim. I have to say that one thing I've definitely learned from our farm projects is that nothing makes a job look quite as complete as some well-placed caulk.

Houston, we have baseboards.

At this stage, we had a complication. The goal was to put a queen-sized bed in this room. We did the measuring, and it would be a bit tight, but doable. So we got a bed... and then realized that taking a queen-sized boxsprings up the steep staircase with a low header was so tight as to not be doable at all. My dad suggested taking first few stair treads off, but when we tried that, it quickly became apparent that we'd actually have to take off about half the staircase worth of treads.

Seriously, this van is the best.

So, we took out the window, put rope around the boxspring, and used the bucket van to take it in through the window. Ridiculous? Maybe. Effective? Absolutely. Since we had the window out, we went ahead and repaired the sashes, reglazed the glass, etc. Now we have something that's looking like an actual bedroom for actual people to stay in!

Never fear -- we have since added pillows.

You can't quite see it in this photo, but we still need to get the light fixture in place (but we have one) and then the aforementioned door needs to be painted and hung, but this room is awfully close to finished! It's actually more finished than the master in some ways... maybe we need to start sleeping up here while we paint downstairs.

Things I've Painted So Far

Since these rooms aren't really done, I figured a quick process update would be enough. I painted some things.

First, I painted the upstairs back bedroom. It was in the best shape of all the bedrooms, and a fresh coat of paint cheered it right up.

Before

After

Soon the floors and trim will be painted, the light fixture will be installed, the window will be reglazed, we'll find a door for this room... and then it's all decor from there out!

The other painting project was the conclusion of the earlier project of revealing and sanding the floors in the master bedroom.

Scraped and sanded

Painting!

Painted floors

The floors weren't in good enough shape to refinish -- the wood was soft and pretty roughed up in a number of places -- and we figured that painting would have been a more durable and convenient coating "back in the day" than having to routinely wax and/or oil the floors in the private family quarters.

So, two painting projects down!

What's Under That? Flooring Edition

We're finding that one of the joys of buying an old house is the ongoing game I call "What's Under That?" The rules of the game are simple: one person identifies an aspect of the house and says "I wonder what's under that," and then all players start removing layers in order to answer the question. Depending on the surface, this game can have multiple rounds on the same surface.

We started this playing this game literally about fifteen minutes after closing on the house (and that's only because we had to drive back across town to get to the farm).

Originally, all the upstairs bedrooms were carpeted. The carpeting in the green room was fairly normal, but the other two rooms had something with a more woven texture that I'd be more likely to call a "rug." I'm not really sure why I feel like there's a distinction between "rug" and "carpet" in a situation where it covers a room's floor entirely, but you'll see what I mean (I hope).

This is a "rug..."

But this is "carpet."

Fortunately, neither rugs nor carpet was actually installed with any skill; basically, they were all just cut to size and laid on the floor; in the green and paneled rooms, the carpet was stapled or nailed down right by the doorway in order to keep the door from snagging on it. Other than that, carpet removal was easy -- I just rolled it up.

In the back bedroom, that was all there was to it. I rolled up the rug, swept up the layer of dust, and found the wood floor. You can see in the picture below that the floors are partially painted; apparently, that's not uncommon; why waste perfectly good paint (and labor) when you're just going to put a decorative rug in middle of the room?

Back bedroom without carpet

In the front bedrooms, though, the game continued: What's under the carpet? Linoleum.

Some of that nastiness is dust. Some of it really is the pattern of the flooring.

Yes, the thing on the floor in the above photo is the rug. See? You couldn't ball up a room full of carpet like that.

This linoleum was at least a little better looking.

Fortunately, the linoleum wasn't installed any better than the carpet had been -- once again, this was just a roll-and-remove job in both rooms. And what's under the linoleum? Ah, there's the wood floor we've been looking for!

This room looks a lot MORE paneled now that everything is wood.

This one, however, looks a lot less green. Much better!

The best part of this project was discovering that the upstairs floors are in excellent shape. They have a mix of wide and narrow floorboards that's apparently pretty common in old homes -- you kept the good materials downstairs, and in the more private spaces upstairs, people might just use what they had left over. The floors have all seen paint in their lifespans, and the plan is just to scrub them up really well and paint them again so the whole upstairs is uniform in floor color.

In fact, the upstairs floors went so well that I went downstairs to the master bedroom and decided to play again. Certainly the tiles that had been laid in the master weren't original to the house, so what was under those?

You don't have to be an expert on 1880s decor to know this isn't original.

 Sadly, these tiles had been installed using actual technique and materials, so this round of the game involved a lot of scraping. Chris took over this portion of the project because his (literal) strengths were more suited to the intensity of the scraping involved. As of right now, almost all of the tile is gone.

Much better.

We think that both the age of the tile and the cold (it's winter in Michigan, and the farmhouse is unheated this winter since "new furnace" is on the to-do lost) worked in our favor because both tile and whatever is adhering it to the floor are fairly brittle. It's a lot of work, but it comes up in surprisingly big chunks. This floor will need more love -- thanks, adhesive! -- but still should mostly be a matter of sanding it down to smooth things out and then staining or painting.

I'm hoping to play this game again in the parlor, where the floors are almost certainly a match to what's in the master bedroom, just without the layer of tile (we think -- we did have a peek under the carpet, and it looks like a straight shot to the wood). Chris likes carpet, but it's just so worn out and threadbare in all the main traffic areas that I'm still hoping to see it go even if it cleans up ok.

We'll also have to play this again in the kitchen and dining rooms once the chimney comes out and we're able to take out the weird pieces of wall/closet that currently divide the spaces. The floors don't match, and there's currently a bit of a threshold between them, so that will have to get matched up eventually. For now, we've still got that little bit of master bedroom to uncover, and then a lot of finishing to do before this project is complete.