New York Renovator

I (finally) read through my stack of handy home improvement magazines over the weekend. There were some really great tips by readers that I enjoyed very much. But I stopped when I saw some small print at the bottom of the article. It said that the magazine will pay $100 to 200 for tips from readers! You could see a light bulb pop over my head. $100 for a tip! You can guess what I’ll be mulling over for the next few days!

…but the fire is so delightful. Remember that old Christmas song? Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow! Problem is, I don’t have a fireplace!

Well, we finally got some snow out of this Nor’Easter, after a very shaky and sleety start. I was very disappointed to see the sleet, but we did eventually get 6 inches of snow! It was very cozy at home, for the most part– I made stew, baked bread, and baked an apple pie for dinner. I tried to keep the oven going because the house was freezing. With the storm came some very chilly winds, and the winds just seemed to slice through the house.

As much as I appreciate our new furnace, I just wish we had an alternative heat source. I’ve always liked woodstoves, but they are dangerous, messy, and take a lot of effort to feed and maintain. We had a wood-burning furnace when I was a kid, and it seemed that all we did all winter was stock that thing. (Not to mention all the chopping, cutting, and stacking of wood we did all summer and autumn).

I am determined to install a wall heater in the house sometime. The new vent free heaters are a breeze to install, and they keep the house toasty warm. I’ve been doing some research on them for several months. I think we will plan on getting two for the house: one for the downstairs Living Room area and another for the upstairs. This way, we can have zoned heating areas. I hate having to run the furnace for the entire house. We don’t use the upstairs during the day, so all that heat is wasted. I’ve got my eye on a very nice natural gas vent-free model that would be perfect for the Living Room/Kitchen area.

Also on my mind is we really should have another heat source should the power go out around here. This was a concern when I heard of the sleet storm this weekend; thank God power remained on.

I think the natural gas wall heaters are the most efficient, from what I have learned. They are clean, take up almost no space, very efficient with fuel consumption, and easy to care for. I have been pleasantly surprised at how the prices have dropped for these models!

When we get one, I’ll be sure to offer our usual play-by-play description of the process, and offer a few tips as well. Stay tuned!

Well, with winter here in full force (expected 6 inches today, a Nor’Easter Sunday), the house is freezing. Even with the insulated Living Room walls, it is mighy chilly and I feel drafts from time to time.

It is not terribly surprising, since we still have the windows from 1910 installed. I got very busy in September and never bothered to do much with the windows, except put up insulated curtains. But during the day I need the curtains open because I need full daylight to see. So it is very cold.

I did a little searching on plastic-insulated windows. Years ago, when we lived in an apartment, I’d gotten a terrific window insulation kit. It had large plastic sheets that you cut to the size of your windows. You taped a strip of plastic all along the trim of the window (it was rubbery, flat on one side, and had a u-shaped channel on the other), held up the plastic sheet, and zipped on another long strip of rubbery plastic trim to fit in the channel. You essentially zipped up your windows with plastic. It was an ingenious invention, and it worked! Alas, when we moved to our house, I had to leave the kit installed on the windows (to rip off the kit would have removed the paint from the trim and the landlord wouldn’t go for that).

I’ve been searching everywhere for a similar kit and have yet to find it. I did, however, find another alternative that looks very good: “Building An ‘Interior Storm Window.’” It’s a DIY project, and it looks very well thought-out. My only problem is that I don’t have much time for another DIY project. I need a window fix now.

So that’s a great project for the future. As for the present time, I’ll keep searching and let you know if I’ve found anything!

Ice dams are nasty, ugly, destructive things. Here in the Northeast, where the temperature can be below zero one day and 40 degrees the next, ice dams are a loathesome reality. We recently took a trip out to Hamilton College, and I saw with some dismay that large icicles loomed off the roofs of those beautiful stone buildings.

I’ve read many things about ice dams over the years. Thank God we’ve never had a very bad time with them at our present house (although previous owners did, judging by the scars in the plaster). An apartment we lived in a few years ago suffered an ice dam “attack.” The damage was done to our upstairs bedroom. Everything– the carpet, anything on the carpet (the bed, the dressers, the boxes) were completely soaked. Not pretty.

I’ve done some research and have come up with a handy-dandy list of 5 ways to prevent ice dams. Of course, if an ice dam is bound and determined to attack your home, there isn’t a whole lot you can do. (In other words, you’re still at the whim of the weather extremes and severities). But this can help. All these tips are really wrapped up in four simple words:

Ice dams form on the roof when there is a cycle of warm/cold/warm/cold. The snow on the roof melts and refreezes. The ice builds and creeps up into the shingles or underneath gutter supports, If allowed to continue, the ice will build up into the interior wall, where it will melt. This was what happened to our soggy apartment that one year. There’s a good diagram of the mess here.

1. Insulate your attic floor. But do not insulate the soffits! You must have cold air flowing up along the underside of your roof. Continuous soffit vents (and a ridge vent at the exterior top peak of your roof) keep cold air circulating. Insulating the attic floor will keep the heat down in the living spaces of your home and out of your attic. The big thing is ventilation. A cold attic and a cold roof doesn’t produce enough heat to melt that snow on your roof; thus, no ice, and no ice dam.

2. Seal any and all gaps, holes, and cracks. You want to keep heat from escaping your living spaces. You don’t want heat leaking into the insides of your walls, up your eaves, or into your attic.

3. Remove gutters. (or, remove them just for the winter) This is a touchy issue. My house has no gutters and I hate it. The land around the house is pretty soggy. I now know why all those old houses had big, wrap-around porches. Not only did it make a cozy place for Grandma to shell peas, but it protected the foundation from water from the roof.

Gutters trap water, and water in the winter freezes. If the ice in the gutters builds up, the ice will eventually make it way up the roof and under the shingles. We have a small section of gutter across our front porch. Every year it fills with ice, every year the ice builds up, and every year we have a huge ice dam. When the gutter fell down this spring, we have never bothered to put it back up.

4. Install flashing around your chimney, and install a boot around any vent pipes coming through the roof. If the flashing or boot is old and corrupted, replace the whole thing. Patches don’t last very long, and you don’t want to be up on the roof constantly fixing patches, do you?

5. Add a turbine to your roof. This is no quick fix, obviously. My neighbor has a few turbines on his roof and they work wonderfully. He hardly has any icicles on his eaves. The turbine acts as a vacuum by spinning with the air flow and sucking air out of your attic to the outdoors. It is an excellent, passive way of keeping the air in your attic circulated.

Those are just five quickie tips. I didn’t add the popular heat cables to my list. I’m not too fond of them, actually, especially when there are better, more energy-efficient means.

Do you have an ice dam and need an emergency fix? Here’s a few tips I’ve come across: turn on a fan in your attic and point it at the suffering area. Cooling the air in the attic will stop the leaking very quickly.

Also, I’d read that a pantyhose leg stuffed with calcium chloride and tossed onto your roof will melt the ice. The hose will create a channel for melting water to follow. Interesting! I’ll have to keep that in mind should we ever get afflicted. I’ll also have to buy some pantyhose to have on hand…

I love this time of year. As much as I love gardening and being outside in the summer, winter is so nice because it is so cozy. This is the time of year when I can give some attention to the interior of the house. I still haven’t done any decorating or anything to the Living Room. I haven’t even hung my wreaths on the doors, either. I have been so busy with other things, but I do plan to get to it!I’ll have to hop to it soon, because this is the best time of the year to find really good deals on all sorts of stuff, especially home decorating stuff. I found another great site that has some excellent discounts and coupons: GoGoShopper.com.

The site is very organized– a major advantage to me– and I found a multitude of store coupons! There’s JCPenney coupons, Home Depot coupons, and even WalMart coupons which are hard to find. Walmart is having some great discounts on housewares right now, so coupons on top of that would be a terrific savings.

My husband was just at the store to buy some parts and a sump pump, so we missed out on coupon savings. We go to Home Depot pretty regularly, and the items really add up. But looking at GoGoShopper, I think I’m going to try out their online store, because deals are better with the Net than the store-bought stuff. It’s a good site to boommark and check everytime you order online. I just love finding bargains!

Grr. I don’t know what it is about winter. Our basement has been flooding again!

All summer long, the sump pump hardly went off, due to our severe shortage of rainfall. I have to say, I was so thankful for the dry summer. My basement was dry!

Now all of a sudden, ever since the first snowfall a few weeks ago, we’re dealing with water in the basement again. I woke up to find 6 inches of water this morning. My poor cat was stranded on top of a box until we rescued him.

We found out that one of our pumps had died. My husband waded in ankle-deep, freezing cold water to pull out the dead pump. Off he went to Home Depot to get a new pump.

I don’t know what it is, or why it is. I’m thinking it has more to do with run-off water than a high water table, because the precipitation hasn’t been heavy enough to warrant a a lot of underground water.

At any rate, my discouragement at seeing water in the basement again was back to an all-time high. I really don’t like living in a house that floods regularly, like this.

It’s a sleety, snowy, stormy mix of precipitation for the next few days. It is not pleasant to go outside when it’s raining and 32 degrees out. And it’s too gloomy to finish framing my French door. So, we’re inside, waiting for the snow to come. The kids are hitting the books and I am hitting the blogs and thinking about the art and business of blogging.

I’m come to discover that blogging is more than just plunking down thoughts and words. Half of blogging is writing (and writing well) and designing your page, and the other half is social networking (like Facebook, etc). I’ve put some effort into joining some neat social networks, and have met some really interesting people from all around the world. I’m surprised at the variety of visitors this blog gets from all around the world. (And thanks for coming!)

This has helped my blogging and it’s helped my broadening variety of topics to blog. For example, I do a lot of blogging about our home improvements, but I also want to start blogging about my thoughts and ideas in the business of home building, construction, tools and their functions, techniques, and etc. Blogging has become an excellent discipline for me as a writer. And one of the perks is meeting people!

Another new thing I’ve learned is that I can even “market” my blog in the “real” world, and not just online. A few years ago, I had some business cards printed up for my website. Cards can be very helpful breaking the ice, or as an offering to others who are interested in social networks or blogs or the specific topic of my blog. They were good for me, because I am always promoting or discussing New York issues and home improvement, so my cards had a local interest, as well.

Business card printers, like Ooprint, are getting into the act, I see. They are promoting some of the best social networking cards I’ve seen. The graphics are vivid and aren’t your usual “Windows 3.1″ type of graphic.

Classy! The great thing is that they are offering 100 free ooprint biz cards right now. I have yet to order some for New York Renovator and New York Traveler, but it is on my list of things to do. The cards can be custom-made and they are very nice.

I think business cards for my blogs would be a great idea– because I had hand a chunk of them to my relatives and ask them to pass the word on!

I’ve watched, from a distance of course, the rise of popularity for radiant floor heating. It’s a terrific invention, I think. I have lived all my life with central heating, and I’ve come to have some strong opinions about it!

Most of the homes I’ve lived in had forced air heating systems. I dislike them greatly. They create drafts and the house never seems warm. There is a ton of dust. And if you have an odor in one end of the house, within one minute of that furnace kicking on, it’s permeated the house. I dislike forced-air systems very much.

I’ve lived in a few places with radiator heating. All places were very old apartments with very old radiators. I didn’t care for the radiator system, either. If you were within five or six feet of the radiator, you’d be warm. But radiators didn’t radiate very much.

I’ve lived in a house with a wood furnace (far to much work) and electric baseboard heating (far too expensive and noisy).

I’ve watched with interest the introduction of radiant heating to this country. Radiant heating is not “new.” It’s been established in Europe for a long time.

In the 70′s here in this country, radiant heating was added to ranch houses with concrete slab foundations. It was not very well thought through when it was introduced in modern homes. Radiant tubing of copper pipes was placed in the subfloor, and a fresh coat of concrete poured over it all. Hot water from a boiler flowed through the pipes and warmed the floors. It was a lovely idea. But you cam’t stop physics. The exchange of hot and cool temperatures causwed the pipes to shift a little. Concrete doesn’t like shifting. Pipe seals broke, leaked into cracked concrete, and before you know it, it’s a disaster. Not only have you lost your heating system, but you’ve lost your floor.

So I’ve watched and waited. I’ve seen the introduction of PEX tubing to the idea. I like PEX tubing, but I have my doubts if it would really work here in Upstate New York. It gets cold, bone cold here for long periods of time. And I’m not too keen on anything being “set in stone” or, in this case, concrete.

But radiant heating is extremely appealing. Heating with water has got to be the best means of heating anything, and water is doubly efficient because the same water you use to heat your rooms can be the same water you use to wash your dishes or take your bath. Radiant heating heats the floors, which in turn heats objects. No drafts, no exchange of one kind of air for another. You can also install hardwood flooring– usually a chilly option for homes in the North– and still stay warm. As a matter of fact, hardwood floors are recommended with radiant heating, because the wood doesn’t insulate the heat from the room, as a carpet would. It’s very appealing indeed.

You can even install radiant heating with PEX and aluminum flashing to existing homes. Although, I wouldn’t in my house. Older homes have a plethora of problems and situations unique to newer homes. The way my sill sits on my foundation, for example, and how my home’s framework is built (balloon frame). There are a lot of drafts within the foundation and between the sill-plate and wall-framing that I cannot access. The wood is old, it has shrunk, my basement is very drafty. I also have a century’s worth of pipes, drains, and wires protruding every-which-way. I couldn’t even begin to imagine where I’ve have the space to install radiant heating to the floor. Unless I ripped everything out to the house’s barebones and started from scratch. But then again, why do that? Just build new. So I really think that to install radiant heating right, you’d have to build new, with proper preparation and installation.

It’s an interesting system and one I intend to monitor for a little while longer. If I ever build a new house, I think I would choose radiant heating above all else. So far, I think it’s the best system out there. But even that makes me sad. That’s the best we have? We’ve been to the moon, sent a robot to Mars, and we still have a heating system that’s only one step advanced from the stone age?

I just finished flipping through my New Old House magazine. I got it a few weeks ago (it’s the winter 2008 edition) but hadn’t gotten to it until now. An excellent article by Russell Versaci, Pennywise, got me very excited. It’s a topic that’s been on my mind for over fifteen years, ever since I became interested in homes and home-building.

It sounds so… so…. simple, doesn’t it? But over the course of my time spent reading books and magazines on home building and improvements, and flipping through countless architectural books and designs, the McMansion– that banal behemoth of excess home-building and wasteful sprawl–was very alive and well, and growing.

I’d read an unusual book (for the time) many years ago, The Not So Big House: A Blueprint for the Way We Really Live by Sarah Susanka. In it, she laments the bloated blueprints of modern housing, and prescribes building smaller, more efficient homes. Her book, published in 2000, is called “groundbreaking” by the publishers. That gives you an idea of when the push for efficient modern housing began– at least among designers and builders. Actually, I don’t think builders have even caught on yet.

Back to the Versaci article, I was impressed with some of his ideas about the “new” little house (not that they were new to me, but perhaps for some of his readers).

Home builders toting bulging portfolios of generic bloated McMansions have little to offer new arrivals who want smaller, more authentic homes. The five-bedroom, five-bath, 5,000 square foot behemoth is a relic of another idea. [yeah, Louis IV of old France!]

Living in Upstate New York watching the rich get richer and the poor get much poorer, I’ve noticed the change. Older houses (like mine) are crumbling, farmers are selling their land, and huge castle-sized homes built on the hilltops are gobbling up resources and crowding everyone else out. It sends the environment, the tax base, and the sense of community all awry. It is also interesting to note that rarely do these opulent five-bedroom homes house large families. Large families tend to be poorer, and have poorer and smaller houses. How ironic. And wasteful. And disrespectful of the rest of the community.

Now, old houses can be very inefficient and wasteful, too. Most of the houses in New York State– built before 1970, built even before 1900– were constructed in a era where “energy” meant wood fires for cooking and heating. Old houses waste resources, too. So don’t think I am holding the poor old homes at a nobler standard. However, modern home-building cannot claim any excuse for their excessive wastefulness except greed.

Well, Versaci continues and I nearly bowled over when I read the next few paragraphs:

Construction costs are out of control because builders are still using a delivery system that hasn’t changed much since the Middle Ages. We still gather up sticks and stones, bring them to the job site, trudge through mud and snow, go up and down ladders, cut and hammer in the blazing sun or driving rain, and generally build like medieval house wrights. Stick bulding houses is expensive and outmoded. With the home-building industry in shambles, there must be a better way.

And there is! It’s something that was under the noses of rich city-slickers for decades, those Fifth Avenue architects who snubbed their noses at what was happening with the “little” people– the people who had to be efficient, who had to work smartly:

GASP! No! Say it isn’t so!

It’s the new wave of the future! Well, it is now that the Fifth Avenue architects have “discovered” it.

Here are my suggestions… look at systems of home delivery that offer a better alternative to stick building. I’m putting my money on factory prefabrication. One hundred years ago Sears, Roebuck & Company conceived the idea of a house in a box…. still prized by ther owners and coveted by home buyers.

…The fact is that America has a huge industry equipped for prefabrication. After touring a dozen plants, I am convinced that their standards meet or exceed those of stick building.

Yes, manufactured (or, “prefabricated”) housing is much more efficient. It isn’t terribly new, either. It was invented in the early 1900s by a company catering to middle-class families looking for comfortable middle-class homes in middle-class neighborhoods. But the building boom after World War II blew the home kit away. “Planned communities” began in cities like Levittown, and the plague spread to the rest of the country.

I believe that a lot of our traffic, stormwater, and property tax problems today stem from such “planned communities.” It is an idea whose funeral is deserved, in my opinion.

With the mortgage problems in this country (due to exponentially high consumer debt), the energy crunch, globalization policies like NAFTA and SPP that are killing our labor force and industry infrastructure, it is time– yea, past time– to end excessive waste and the glut of consumerism that infects our culture. From home-building to neighborhood planning to individual lifestyles, change is required. This is a critical time for our country. Can we really scale back and tighten the belt before more collapses?

I’ve had the laminate floors installed for a few months now. I’d wondered when I installed them how they would perform in the Living Room. We still have not gotten an area rug, so we’ve been fully treading on laminate all this time. I’m sure the eager questioners are begging: How have they held up?

Well. OK. I’ll break things down into a list: Pro and Con.

PRO:

1. It still looks beautiful. There’s nothing like the look of wood floors.. except wood floors themselves.
2. I’ve had to mop it only twice.
3. I see no indentations from the heavy furniture’s legs. I have a desk that is probably 300 pounds. I put flat casters under each leg, and the flooring has endured the weight extremely well.

CON:

1. There are a lot of small scratches everywhere. It wasn’t as durable as I’d hoped. We did buy the less expensive stuff (cheaper), but I had hoped it wouldn’t show scratches so soon. Our first time vacuuming, a little piece of grit got caught on the vacuum wheel, and made a large scratch. So we only sweep in here now. But the scratches are a major “con.” I am disappointed.
2. The floor boards have warped a little. Some are raised at the corners. Now, my house is so old, and we have drafts everywhere, so there are some major temperature extremes here. But I am surprised at how much the boards have expanded. A lot.
3. The floor bounces. The instructions for the flooring said to make sure your floor is “reasonably level.” I know that this is an impossible goal for a house as old as mine. But for laminate to look really good, your floor has to be far more than “reasonably” level. The slightest bump, it seems, shows up eventually as the boards contract and expand with the seasons. When we first installed the flooring, we had some bumps (I had nailed the old pine flooring down to secure it), but the laminate didn’t “rock.” Now, when we step in certain areas, the laminate rocks and gives a little. This also is probably due to the expansion and contraction of the boards.
4. Laminate flooring, while warmer than plain hardwood flooring, is much colder than carpeting. The floor is cold. No wonder they install radiant heating underneath. Brr!

So am I pleased with the flooring after these months? So far, yes. The scratches are minor (so far) and even so, we can still cover the floor with an area rug to protect the higher traffic areas. The bounce of the floor is irritating, and the raised edges are very irritating. But the floor is easy to care for and still looks pretty good. With more use (the Living Room is our most-used room of the house), I suspect that the raised edges will begin to chip or wear. This concerns me.

If we could have afforded carpeting and installation, I would have preferred that. We installed laminate because the materials were on sale and we could do it ourselves. Eventually, we will have carpeting in here, and perhaps use these boards for another room (if they are still useable).