The Renovation of a Building into a Home Would Be Interesting

Keep it the way it was--and don't get in a hurry.

Last week I ended the story with what to do with the stair way wall.  Should we repaint the charming (scary) beach scene or what would it look like with the plaster gone and the brick exposed?

The plaster was pretty uneven and would take a lot of work to make it smooth.  It was a pretty tall wall......Take it down!

Wow!  Doesn't that look like fun?  Actually it was so much fun that it was contagious.  Not only did the plaster disappear from this wall but also from the other side of the stairs, the future bathroom wall and the back hall wall.  Did create a bit of a mess but it seemed like everything we did created a mess.  Guess that is what demolition is all about.  Notice that we did leave the lovely astro turf on the stairs to protect them as much as possible.

The interesting thing about removing the plaster was the brick underneath.  The building is constructed of three layers of brick.  The external layer, one in the middle and the inside layer to which the plaster was applied.  The inside layer of brick was made here in Wynnewood by the river.  They were sun dried instead of fired in a kiln.  When we removed the plaster we discovered the brick had fingerprints in them from where they were turned in the drying process.  They don't photograph very well but the three circles are actually the fingerprints.

After cleaning up that big mess the last of the demolition was to strip a hundred years of paint off five doors, six door frames and three windows in order to save the original woodwork.  Out came the heat guns and a month or so of work and we were back to the original wood.  The sad part about the woodwork is that all the base boards were gone although we did manage to find a two foot piece of the original.

Marshell and I went off to search for a millwright to make new baseboard and some window trim.  We just needed 1,500 feet of baseboard.  Ah - after we came back from fainting over the price to have it made - we went home to think about this.  There were other things to do so we bought lots of lottery tickets and Marshell started putting bead board on the ceiling of the stairway, the future bathroom and the back hall.  He installed shiplap on the interior stairway wall where the plaster was over the original lath.

While he was doing that I smoothed out the plaster in the back hall and the future bathroom where it was falling off the lath.  It took a hundred pounds of thin drywall mud to get it smooth and then textured.  Then I painted all the walls where he wasn't working.  The upstairs was beginning to look pretty good by Christmas of 2005.

We had some friends come from Texas to see us about this time.  They had two teenage girls and a five year old boy.  While we were talking downstairs the kids went upstairs to look around.  When we came up we discovered the five year old sitting on the edge of the stairway with his feet dangling over the twenty-five foot drop on to the stairs. Whoops, guess we didn't think it was time to create a railing around the stairwell quite this soon.  So, we could put off the baseboard a while longer.

It is very difficult to find people to do work (quality work) in small towns.  Marshell was feeling a little uncertain about building a railing and a friend popped up to help.  It needed to be very sturdy just in case children fell against it or decided to climb all over it.  It was a little difficult to explain Mission Style to him.  He really loved to build things out of rough cut cedar.  But he certainly knew how to anchor it to the floor!  Elephants could jump on it and in the end he got the design style with Marshell's help. 

After Christmas we had to make a decision about the baseboard.  No winning numbers on the lottery, no rich relatives died and the money tree we planted was not producing any hundred dollar bills.  So Superman Marshell bought a router and started experimenting. What a guy! 
He did an awesome job of re-creating the original pattern.  His reasoning was that if he messed up a board he could just throw it away (when no one was looking) and get a new piece of wood.
He does not have a lot of patience for most things but he was amazing in his quest to create the perfect ten inch baseboards.

Baseboard with corner pieces next to the original door frame

Christmas rolled around again after we got all the trim in place.  All we have left to do now is

 to figure out the layout for the new bathroom.  There was a powder room on one end of the back hall but it was too small.  Thirty feet away was the perfect room so how do we get the plumbing from one end to the other. Maybe it will come to us during the Christmas holiday.

The Christmas card for 2006 (it wasn't easy to get Marshell in the suit) said:

All I want for Christmas is our upstairs done,

having a real kitchen and a soft bed might be fun.

The Renovation Of A Building Into A House Would Be Interesting

Everything takes longer than you think - that's our motto and we work hard staying true to it.

Moving into the building in December we did not make much progress beyond getting settled.  There were numerous trips to Dallas and Oklahoma City to deliver and install all the drapes, redone furniture and bedding to my customers. Daily trips to the eight storage units to find all those things we thought we wouldn't need but did. By the end of the month we managed to have Christmas, get youngest son, Wally, married off and the shower in.

January of 2004 began the serious work of demolition of the upstairs.  There was no real plan for the building except that the bedroom and bathroom would be upstairs.  In thirty-five years of designing and moving, I have discovered that the building would tell us what needed to be where.  Too often I have designed places for customers before they moved in only to have them decide two or three years later the plan doesn't work.  All we started out with was that we wanted the floor plan to be as close to original as possible.  If you are going to do a "loft style" living space then forget about walls.  The drawing below shows the layout of the upstairs.  Goodbye to the tanning booths, the "stage" and the wall around the stairway.

First thing we did was to remove the lovely "astro turf" carpet that was glued to the floor with good old yellow contact cement. Much to our dismay under the carpet were various layers of old linoleum, tar paper and lots of glue.  We were not too happy as we wanted the original pine floors but that was just one of those minor setbacks. Looks like patience plus will be needed.

Demolition of the tanning booths and the stage created a huge pile of lumber and drywall.  The drywall was easy to get down stairs - we just opened the door at the bottom and let it slide down.  A neighbor with a dump truck parked it out front and whisked it away. I did not ask where he took it - just gone was all I cared about. Also discovered that anything we did not want if we just laid it out by the street it would disappear in thirty minutes.  No trips to the dump yard for us!

Once all the construction was demolished and the piles of stuff gone the fun started.  Marshell tried removing the contact cement and layers of who-knows-what with chemicals, a heat gun and sanding. None of these methods worked. Sandpaper gummed up and the heat gun and chemicals made a gooey mess that hardened again in three seconds.  Guess what worked?  A two inch wide putty knife and scraping.  Cool!  At least something took it off.  I have to admit that I was not good at this.  After all I had other work to do, had to cook, had to walk the dog etc. etc.  I have said before what a guy Marshell is.  Roughly fifteen hundred square feet of crawling on his little knees with his little scraper and the hundred year old floor appeared. Actually he kept from going crazy or giving up by working in the morning and then taking Gene, the dog, and I for a ride thru the back roads of Oklahoma.

So, floor cleared of mess and time to get the sander out.  An initial sand showed what boards needed to be replaced.  At some point in time the roof had leaked and there was quite a bit of damage.  Once again the skilled little Marshell replaced all the bad flooring so that no one can really tell what is new.

By Christmas the floor was looking great.

Every Christmas I do a picture card and if I am not crazy busy I sometimes can think up a rhyme.

This particular year we used the outside of the building for the picture and on the inside I wrote:

                        Christmas lights and decorations get done faster than historic restorations.

                        

                        More serious sanding, hammering and scraping

                                   should have occurred this year

                        But back road adventures, festivals and friends

                                    kept completion from being near.

If I remember right this was when we had visitors who wanted to see what we were doing to the building.  I remember people from the bank across the street coming in and saying it would look really nice when we got the walls up and some drapes. Ahh...we just took some walls down and now it looked huge and cool.  Cover up the awesome windows...ahhh...no. Remember how the cobblers children had no shoes.  Well, the designers house was to have no drapes.  As Marshell says - anyone who wants to watch an old man walk around in his underwear - have at it.

Funny story.  It was around this time that the woman who cleaned the bank very early every morning told some of the bank employees that the man in the building across the street stood in an upstairs window and stared at her every morning.  Gosh! She thought I was married to Matt Dillon!  I would have been flattered if Matt Dillon in real life stared at me every day - especially in the morning with no makeup and bed head.

Since I am telling stories.  The previous owners told us that there was a ghost in the building.  The ghost would turn lights on and off.  Guess they were warning us or trying to scare us.  As Marshell worked all those long tedious hours scraping the floor he started telling me that he thought someone was watching him. I smiled and said "yes, dear" figuring he was sniffing glue fumes from the floor.Then I began to notice when I got up early in the morning to work or play on the computer I would feel this chill sort of move up my arm - sort of like a breeze but there wasn't one. About this time our oldest son and his wife came to visit with their two labs.  They brought a blow-up bed and slept up stairs.  The next morning son, Wes, announced that we had a ghost.  Now you have to know Wes to know this was totally not something he would dream up. He said they had awaken in the middle of the night and the two labs were at the other end of the room and were playing with someone but of course, there was no one there.

I happened to know the gentleman who knew Everything that went on in Wynnewood since the 1920's.  When I asked him he told me that a doctor who had an office upstairs was in the habit of taking sleeping powders after lunch for a short nap.  One day he didn't wake up from his nap. So now our ghost had a name.  We don't "feel" him very often anymore.  Actually we think he did not like the previous owners but has decided we are okay.  Oh - maybe he likes to watch me walk around in my underwear.

Marshell and I had a few discussions about the "beach scene" painted on the stair way wall.  Actually it was scarier than the ghost.  I could paint it.....or.....the plaster could just be removed.  I will save the answer to that one for next week.  We are a year into this project and we still have re-wiring, baseboards, paint to strip off all the door frames and doors, plumbing to do and a bathroom to create and a back deck that wouldn't hold the weight of a cat to rebuild.  At least we are holding true to our motto of making everything take longer than it should.

Are you ready yet to take on a project like this?

The Renovation Of A Building Into A House Would Be Interesting

Moving is never fun as I have learned from eighteen moves to twelve different cities in my life.  The good thing is that when you are done, it didn't seem so terrible.

After a Thanksgiving consisting of several trips back and forth between Irving, Texas and Wynnewood, Oklahoma all of our belongs were in their new location.  Most in the eight storage units and the rest that we needed to get by on from day to day in our new abode. Marshell was retired, I wasn't.  December is always a busy month in decorating as everyone wants to totally re-do their homes for Christmas.  Getting settled quickly was at the top of the list.

This is where the fun begins.  From the first tour through the building our thoughts were that this would be an easy remodel. There was no real plan of action since we had a roof, electricity and plumbing. Upon moving in the realization came to us that there was a lot more to do than we thought.....or wanted to think about in our speed to move in.  Let's see, no kitchen and no shower. 

Below is a drawing of the downstairs layout and a picture of the structure we referred to as the "hut".  Everything drawn in red was not original to the building, Black lines are original walls and the yellow are the windows.  The windows measure twelve feet long by ten feet high and the ceiling is nineteen feet with the original tin ceiling. Since the hut had a sink we decided it would work as a kitchen for now.

The most pressing issue was putting in a shower. The little powder room tucked behind the kitchen/hut only had  toilet and a sink with no room to spare.  Off to the hardware store to find a small inexpensive shower.  Managed to get one that seemed to be made out of cardboard for very little money.  Marshell removed the sink in the powder room and the shower just barely fit.  Not pretty but it did solve the problem.  In the process of hooking up the shower he discovered that the sink the previous owners installed in the hut drained straight down into the basement.  Nice - guess it worked for them.. So Marshell got lots of plumbing practice hooking up the shower and the sink. Was great to have a shower until we discovered that there was no hot water.  Another trip to the hardware store for a small hot water heater.  More plumbing practice.

The building had separate HVAC systems for the upstairs and the downstairs.  The one downstairs was definitely old enough to vote and may have been close to Social Security.
There were many trips by so called heat and air repair people over the course of the next few years until we found a neat guy who actually knew something. One who came out to fix it actually agreed that cleaning the coil might help but we should buy a new one since he needed the money. Another had a new fan motor hooked up backwards. Never a dull moment!

The kitchen/hut actually worked out pretty well once the sink did not drain into the basement and we had hot water. Although we had the stove we got with the building and one in storage it did not seem logical to hook one up since we were uncertain as to what the plan was for the downstairs. So I became a pretty good cook with a hot plate, a toaster oven, a microwave and a vintage Westinghouse roaster.The toaster oven was pretty good at baking six Christmas cookies at a time.

With all of the comforts home, I went to work on all of my customers needs and Marshell got to work on the demolition of the upstairs. As we lived in the building, now with plumbing what could happen but the sewer lines stopped up?  One plumber in town to call and he was working a some other project at the time.  Nice.  No toilet and no shower.  Our neighbor in the office next door came to our rescue.  She had an apartment behind her building that was empty and gave us a key so we could use it while we waited for the plumber.  It was a really good little walk - or run - depending on your need around the corner and down the alley in the dead of winter. But at least we had that! The plumber showed up a week later and replaced all the lines from the building to the alley.

In walking around in the kitchen you could feel movement in the floor.  That did not seem to happen in the rest of the downstairs so we called a foundation person.  A very nice young man came out and announced that the entire back of the building had no support.  Guess it disappeared sometime in the course of a hundred years.  So on a snowy Saturday morning he arrived with a crew and placed 240 halite blocks and six twenty foot beams under the floor to support the building. The back part of the building came up three inches when he leveled it.  Guess we were lucky it did not just collapse.

The rest of the downstairs was filled with our television, my worktable, our extensive vinyl record collection that could not go into storage and the great futon that was our sofa/bed for the length of time it would take to complete the upstairs. For the moment we had all the little minor inconveniences repaired and we were could start noticing other things we missed before.

Everyone has a different skill level, a different idea of what quality of workmanship and materials are and it was a commercial building.  It is not nice to complain about other people's work but......let's just say the previous owners were not craftsmen.  Looking closely at the downstairs there was very cheap bead board paneling for the wainscoting, 1 x 4's for the baseboards, 1 x 4's around the arched windows that were barely attached and the floor looked like they applied polyurethane in places with a rag mop.  Maybe a our time estimate on completing the building may be a little longer than we thought.

Next week is a look into the demolition of the upstairs.  Please leave any comments or questions you might have.

The Renovation Of A Building Into A House Would Be Interesting

All I can say is that my husband, Marshell, and I must be the eternal optimists. After renovating a 1920's gas station into our home you would think we would remember all of the Murphy's Laws that came true.

In this story over the course of the next few weeks I will try to let you know all the perils, pitfalls, work and love that goes into the renovation/restoration of a historic building into a home. Along the way you will learn a little bit about re-purposing an old structure, a few decorating tips and come to the realization that you could do this too. The National Trust for Historic Preservation is currently running a campaign called This Place Matters. All the historic building, homes, and other sites matter because they are the history of our country.  They all played an important part in people's lives and deserve to be saved. Good thing I am a firm believer in this or I would have given up years ago.

Marshell and I have both been "Big City" for all of our adult lives. He lived in places like Ventura, Ca,, New Orleans and the Dallas-Ft. Worth area  I managed to live in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Detroit and Norman, Oklahoma.  When he decided to retire in 2003 we got the brilliant idea that we did not need to live in the big city anymore. I had an interior design business in Oklahoma City and Dallas so it would be nice to live somewhere in between.  So off we went for the perfect building in rural Oklahoma.

Driving on the back roads between Dallas and Oklahoma City we hoped to find a building that was not in too bad of shape and fit closely to what we thought we needed.  There were not a lot of requirements, just the ability to camp out in it while we worked since we were not going to commute back to Texas.  Too many of the really neat old buildings had no wiring, no usable bathroom facilities or worse - no roofs. Others were too small or in really poor locations.  Then we happened to drive into Wynnewood, Oklahoma.

The town of Wynnewood lies about 80 miles south of Oklahoma City and 135 miles north of Dallas.  Great location and just a mile or so off the Interstate. Most small towns don't have any industry or are too far to commute so they slowly die.  Wynnewood has a refinery (stable income), two banks, a tree lined boulevard and a three block downtown with some neat buildings.  The population of 2500 residents are mostly families that have lived here all their lives. Sitting on the corner, one block from THE stoplight,  was a building for sale.

Well, it does not take long in a small town for people to notice strangers looking in the windows of an empty building. A woman from the business next door came out almost immediately and asked if we were going to be her new neighbors.  A few minutes later the real estate agent was on hand to show us the building. She even let us have a key so we could come back the next weekend and look on our own since it was getting late. Ah - how often would that happen in the big city?

We liked the building and the price. Here is where I will stick in a little history that we learned later.
It was built in 1896 as the First National Bank of Wynnewood. Since Oklahoma did not become a state until 1907, it was chartered as a bank in Indian Territory.  The bank was on the first floor and upstairs were a couple of doctors offices, a lawyer and a printing company. When the Masonic Lodge down the street burned in the 1920's the bank President gave the upstairs to the Masons and all the offices were turned into one large room for their activities.

It remained a bank downstairs until 1969 when the bank moved across the street.  The Masons took the whole building over as their Lodge.  At this time all the windows were removed and filled in with halite blocks.  They stayed until until 1996 when some people  from Oklahoma City bought the building.  They did replace the windows, put on a new roof and supposedly did plumbing and wiring They opened a Beanie Baby/Antique/Flower shop downstairs and a tanning salon upstairs. Guess none of the ventures worked out very well. The building had sat vacant for several years when we happened into town.

 The pictures above are of the upstairs with the tanning booths and the lovely beach scene on the wall.

This is the downstairs when we looked at the building. reminders of the flower/antique store. Doesn't look too bad until you get the stars out of your eyes and realize you just bought the place.

There were several weekend trips to Wynnewood to look over the building and check out the town. It did not have some things we needed.  Here is where the optimism kicked in.  It had one powder room, that is a toilet and a sink.  No shower or bathtub.  It did not have a garage which we needed for a couple of classic cars we own.  It did not have a kitchen. It needed quite a bit of work and there was no place to work but in the building. No Problem.  We bought the building for the asking price with a stove thrown into the contract.

We spent the next month moving stuff every weekend. When we brought a truck filled with framed pictures and paintings the rumor around town was that we were opening an art gallery. We knew we were known as the crazy people from Dallas when we stopped to eat in a small town just inside the Oklahoma state line.  That particular trip we had driven our 1957 pink Cadillac up since it could hold almost as much stuff as the pickup.  When we came out of the restaurant a gentleman in a cowboy hat, vest and jeans tucked into his red boots was admiring the car.  In the course of the conversation he found out that we were going to Wynnewood.  His reply was something to the effect that had he had hea,rd about the crazy people from Dallas that were going to live in an old building - like those people in New York City. Don't think we admitted that we knew them.

Marshell's last day at work was the day before Thanksgiving and by the end of the weekend we were in Oklahoma with all of our possessions. It had been six weeks since we first looked at the building that was now our home. The building plus eight storage units.

Check back in next weekend to learn more about the fun of creating our home - against the odds.

End of the Tesla Road Trip

May 1, 2015

I think that the Tesla Road Trip to Ocean City, Maryland ended for most of the participants on the 19th of April.  Our road trip ended last night when we finally rolled into Wynnewood.  I don't think Marshell or I really wanted it to be over as we had a great time on the road, met so many people and learned a lot of history of this country we live in.  The whole purpose of the trip was to see how travelling in a total electric car over long distances worked out and to go explore some interesting places.

One of the questions that we are asked most often is about charging the car.  There is not a good vacation history for me except for a camping trip a year and a half ago.  That is another whole long story for some other blog.  But I have a feeling that most people tend to pick a destination for a trip and drive at break neck speed to get there - some of my previous experience.  The old idea that the interstate highways and the exits filled with gas stations are the only way to travel and to get someplace fast is not a fun way to travel.  Then you tend to rush thru the vacation and rush home.  Electric car travel is a little bit different.

Yes, the Tesla Superchargers tend to be on the interstate highways and the car will travel at 120-140 miles per hour. But you are forced to stop and charge every 280 miles or so.  To get a full charge it will take 30 or 45 minutes of down time.  The chargers tend to be located off the corners of the interstate so you usually end up at a shopping center, an eating establishment or even a hotel.  We travel with a dog so there is time to walk the dog, you see some of the city driving to the charger and there is time for a bathroom stop or get a bite to eat. It may be a mental thing with us but we enjoyed being forced to spend a few minutes in a town we might not have stopped at and one that you might find very interesting. We enjoyed it so much there were days that we only managed to log 150 or so miles. Relaxing is the best way to put it.

The most asked questions Tesla owners get is "What kind of a car is that/", "Who makes it/" etc. etc.
I find this a really fun part of owning one.  Most of the electric cars are small, shall I say a little on the ugly side and don't have the capability of going 280 miles. So people are surprised when you go into all the details.  It does not matter to me whether I can judge whether they could afford one or not.  My response is that you can't afford not to own one due to the warranty, the fact that they are for the most part "service" free and they are the future. Marshell and I love the teenagers who actually know more about them than their parents and are excited to see one and even get to sit in it.  The small children are mesmerized by the door handles that move in and out on their own. It was very enjoyable meeting so many people over the course of our trip of all different backgrounds and age groups.  Maybe I should be a sales person for Tesla.

When we left the Philadelphia area there were two routes home we could have taken and stayed on the Supercharger path.  Back the way we came through Kansas, Indiana, Ohio, and West Virginia or the southern route down I-95 to the gulf coast.  At the current time we would have to have been creative to come back thru Tennessee and Mississippi.  We had packed camping gear since you can charge at RV parks, but there was severe weather all across the South.  We choose the southern route and hoped for the best.  Boy, did we luck out!  It seemed like severe storms preceded us into most of the towns.  At one point the navigation system in the car - better known as Gertrude - actually rerouted us away from a storm in Georgia. It was as close to perfect weather for the whole trip that you can get.

Things I learned on the trip or remembered from past experience of living in different parts of the country:
I am actually a downtown person.  Forget the quiet country life.  There is as much crime per capita in the small towns as the big cities. The positive aspects of big cities is that there are so many different cultures, languages and things to see and do. I have lived in five major metropolitan cities before moving to rural Oklahoma and the first thing I would do when I moved to a new place was to go "downtown". I love the architecture, the ethnic parts of a city and the bursting life of a big downtown
.
People in the North and the East are extremely friendly.  Marshell and I found for the most part that the only unfriendly people we found were in the South Of course, I have to exclude my friend Lu Beth in Greensboro, North Carolina.  She showed us a great time and more hospitality than anyone could ask for.

Motels and Hotels have gotten wonderful about accepting "fur" kids as guests. No more Motel 6 and getting placed in the worst rooms in the motel because you have a pet. We stayed at Hampton Inn a few nights but the majority were La Quinta's.  We even racked up a free room with their point system.

I really feel sorry for people who do not take the time to venture out and see this country. I live in a town 40 miles from Norman, Oklahoma and I know there are many people here who have never ventured that far. Marshell says they never leave the shadow of the water tower.  It is okay to stay in one place due to job or family or whatever but to miss learning and seeing other places is really rather sad.

So - we are home. I should have known I would have a great time but I really learned a lot on this trip. We already have two more planned in the next year so I can survive in rural Oklahoma with more adventures to look forward to.

My blog is going to continue with a new title in a few days.  I think it will be "I Should Have Known It Would Take A Long Time To Turn A Bank Into Our House" - or something along those lines.