thesimpleHOUSE

Well, I’ve been hinting at the final results of all the sanding, scraping and sealing of the house. I’m not sure how many sanding pads we went through, how many nails and staples we pulled out of the walls, but you can now see the results of all that work.

As I mentioned previously, the house has, throughout, fir shiplap paneling. It wasn’t clear, vertical grain fir that people might want to select today, but we feel the variation in the grain and variety of color tone adds so much to the character of this house.

The left picture is our son sanding one of the walls. My wife and I also spent many hours on step stools and ladders sanding and touching virtually every surface in this house.

The picture on the right shows the results of those efforts. We sealed the walls with an Olympic brand clear sealer in a satin finish. This will allow easier cleaning and it also brought out the richness of the fir.

This is a great example of the “reuse” portion of the reduce, recycle, reuse part of environmental stewardship. This 1907 home still retains about 95% of the original materials. 

When I asked our son (who has done the bulk of the work) if he knew then what he knows now, would he do it again? 

Without hesitation, he said “YES!” He is loving living in the house.

Old houses, actually even many new houses, have air leaks. When we removed the wallpaper and exposed the shiplap, there were areas where you could see daylight through the walls. They didn’t insulate houses in 1907 and they also didn’t have any real concern about air sealing.

“Air Sealing” is a term that is used to plug all (or at least most) of the air leaks in a house. A huge amount of the energy inefficiency of a house is simply the heated air leaking out through cracks in the wall, floor, ceilings.

This became very clear to me a number of years ago while attending a conference in Portland, Oregon. A Portland architect was called to help a client who had purchase a vintage old house. They did the requisite replace the windows and blow insulation into the empty wall cavities. And they found no change in their utility bills.

No Change.

They did a blower door test (which measures the air leakage on a building) and found gaps everywhere. The air leaking out of these gaps rendered the windows and insulation virtually ineffective. At that time, they were foaming and caulking throughout the house. Time consuming and arduous.

Fast forward to today. We came upon a system called “Aero Barrier”. They were very reasonably priced, came out to the Onion House and it was all done in a day. Their system pressurizes the house, sprays an environmentally-friendly sealer that finds and seals the gaps. Check out their website with the link above. It’s fascinating process.

And effective.

As you can see from the photo, we went from 3,530 cubic feet per minute of leakage (about the volume of a two-car garage; every minute) to 138 cubic feet per minute, resulting in a reduction of 96%.

We did insulate and replace windows, but this one item was, in my opinion, the single most effective thing we did on the house. Our son’s utility bills are now very reasonable and we feel the savings will repay the cost to seal in maybe two years, if not less.

In many homes, and especially in the moist Pacific Northwest, dry rot is a concern. And add to that the fact that this home was 113 years old, had layers upon layers of finishes and no real rhyme or reason to a lot of what was done and you’ll almost guarantee there will be some dry rot.

We actually were fortunate. The front porch was almost completely dry rotted out. No ventilation, no pressure treating (a process which didn’t even begin until 1900) and porch deck boards that were laid tight to each other led to dry rot and dangerous conditions on most of the front porch. It’s also on the north side of the house, which further adds to the problem.

The second area of the house that had dry rot was the bathroom/utility room. No real surprise here, either. Most anywhere there is moisture and little to no ventilation is a perfect place for dry rot to develop.

Plus, the bathroom sink leaked (the water was turned off at the street, if you need a hint) and the bathroom floor was springy/spongy, to say the least.

At the front porch, we started feeling that we would have to replace the decking as well as the joists. Since it wasn’t ventilated, we decided to replace it all with pressure treated joists and Trex decking, which allows for ventilation between the boards. We ended up not being able to save the original wood columns, but found some new ones at a local building supply store.

At the bathroom, we originally thought we would just pull up the flooring and replace the floor deck. However, after removing that, we found the entire floor deck had dry rot and most of the supporting joists also had problems. So we ended up replacing the entire floor structure, decking and floor. We also added more supports under the new joists.

This was probably the most extensive part of the remodel changes and we took the opportunity to rearrange the access and arrangement of the rooms.

Next: how do you increase energy efficiency in a very very old house?

In my last blog, I mentioned the wallpaper. Layers and layers and layers. In order to remove the wallpaper layers, we had to scrape scrape and scrape. And sand and sand and sand. Hours and days and weeks.

When we bought the house, we knew there was at least relatively nice shiplap under the wallpaper in the living room. Some of the other rooms seemed like they might have nice shiplap.

We went on YouTube to find out how to remove wallpaper in the easiest, fastest way. And, as often happens in our YouTube searches, the answer came back: vinegar. I’m amazed at what vinegar can be used for. Cleaning drains, cleaning countertops, disinfecting, etc. And… removing wallpaper.

Armed with scrapers, pliers and chisels to remove the tiny nails and staples (zillions of them; I’m not exaggerating), we set to work.

As we dove deeper into the rip and tear part of the renovation, we discovered that not only was there nice shiplap under the wallpaper, this shiplap as 113-year old old growth, fir. And while the original workmanship was marginal in places, the more wallpaper we removed, the more shiplap we found.

And virtually all of it was in amazing condition. At least after removing the layers of wallpaper and sanding until our shoulders were sore.

You can see the amount of work it took in the pictures above. I can honesty say this was the hardest, most grueling part of the project. In the living room picture above, we have removed the wallpaper, but haven’t started sanding yet. 

But as you will see in later pictures, it was completely worth the effort. And not unexpected, we encountered some areas within the house that had dry rot. I’ll chat about that in the next post.

Those three words kind of epitomize the environmental movement. I’m going to take a short journey down this road that’s a little different than prior blogs. This time, we are going to focus on the “reuse” portion of environmental stewardship.

In May 2019, we helped our son purchase a 1907 shotgun style house in the historic Washburne District of Springfield, Oregon. As you can see from the above pictures, it was a major fixer-upper. However, the “bones” of this house were good.  The foundation seemed pretty solid (at least there WAS a foundation!) and most of the work seemed largely cosmetic.

Often, people will tear down old houses and simply build new. It’s often just easier. But it also comes with a much higher environmental cost: new lumber, new materials, plus the disposal of the existing materials has an impact on our world.

Aptly dubbed “The Onion House” by our son, we started by removing the wallpaper. Layers and layers and layers of wall paper. Up to SEVEN layers in many parts of the house. But the reward was the very first “layer,” which was beautiful, fir shiplap. Throughout the entire house, except for the bathroom and utility room (which were added some time after 1907).

The bulk of the time spent by our son (and my wife and me) in this initial phase was taking down the wallpaper. We literally touched every square inch of the house. And in many places, we touched over and over. Untold numbers of small brad nails, staples and glue were removed.

The results were incredible and I’ll show those in future blogs. But I wanted to go through our process of the “reuse” of such a character-filled house. While it is not on the historic register, it does have historic significance. And it was certainly worth saving and not just razing for a new home.

So sit back and enjoy a little bit of our journey in the renovation and Reuse of The Onion House.

Fifty years ago today, I was finishing my eighth grade year at Madison Junior High in Eugene, Oregon. My social studies and language arts teachers, Gary Folkker and Tony Mohr had our class participate in this event called “Earth Day.” We walked around the neighborhood on Wilkes Drive, where our school was located, and picked up litter. 

That’s pretty much all I remember about that day, but it had a profound impact on my 13 year old life. I did a simple thing: I committed to never litter again. But that pivotal event changed the direction of my life and how I would respond to and live in this Earth we call Home.

There were many other moments and directional shifts in the following years. Enough, I think, to write a book. Maybe someday, but I want to focus on today and moving forward.

Today marks the 50th anniversary of that very first Earth Day. I’m now 63 years old, and I still haven’t littered. And, for those of you who know me, you know simply not littering was just scratching the surface of who I would become. Those of you who don’t know me, read some of my past blog posts here at thesimpleHOUSE.

What I want to briefly talk about today is the opportunity we have during this pandemic that has shut most of the world down. Industry, vehicle travel, air travel, and many other segments of our economy have ground mostly to a halt.

And in that, people in India can see the Himalayas for the first time in 30 years because the air is cleaner.

The water in the canals in Venice are becoming clearer because of less pollution from the gas-powered boats. (The dolphin story circulating is actually false, by the way).

Largely due to the reduction in travel via internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles, the air in Los Angeles is much clearer, as well.

We have an opportunity during this crisis to adjust our way of thinking. Will we have the fortitude to actually do that, or will we, when the pandemic has passed, simply return to “life as normal?”

We don’t have to; and we shouldn’t return to normal. We have an opportunity here to truly and significantly shift to electric cars, renewable energy, reusable over disposable and many other choices we can (and should) make.

We need to be much better stewards of this planet we have been entrusted to care for. Again, those of you who know me, know my environmental focus is also a spiritual focus. And those of you who don’t know me, again, read some of my past blog posts here at thesimpleHOUSE.

Today marks 50 years of focus on caring for this planet on which we live. We have an opportunity at this turning point in global history. Let’s seize it.