New York Renovator

Now that the heating season has officially begun, my thoughts turn to home safety and security. I’m a “be prepared” kind of gal; my family suffered a devastating house fire over 20 years ago. It was a scary thing. THANK GOD no one was home at the time, but the house was a total loss. I had just moved out to my own apartment, but I lost a lot of books and art work and other things. I am a stickler for security measures. So when winter rolls around every year, after the outdoor and renovation activities have ceased, I turn my attentions to “battening down the hatches” for another Upstate New York winter. And this is a great time to get deals for security items for the home. Here are some ideas that you can consider:

Smoke Detector
I know, this is a no-brainer, right? Everyone seems to realize that every room needs a smoke detector, but how many homes actually have a working smoke detector in every room? Since the renovation, I still haven’t gotten around to installing detectors in every room. Some local codes require that you have a detector in every room, or at least on every floor of the house (including the basement).

You can get very inexpensive smoke detectors anywhere, but I usually stick with the name-brands for stuff like this. First Alert is a good brand. I will be buying more of these.

Carbon Monoxide Detector
If you use combustible fuel sources to heat your home or your hot water, you need a carbon monoxide detector. You should install one of these on every floor of the house, and/or near the furnace or gas outlet equipment. Carbon monoxide is an odorless, highly toxic gas. A furnace or heater emits this gas when the fuel is not properly combusted. Local codes regulate the placement of these devices, so your codes may be more stringent.

Gas Alert
This is a new device that I found while shopping at Buy.com. I’m going to get one. This device senses and alerts you of gas leaks in the house. Natural and propane gas is odorless, but utility companies add a sulfuric compound to the gas, to make it smell like rotten eggs. This helps you know if there is a leak. But sometimes leaks are small, or your nose does not smell (or becomes accustomed to) the smell of gas. This device alerts you of a gas leak.

It may seem that if you get all these detectors, your entire ceiling and wall will be covered with these things! Some companies combine the detectors– I have seen combination smoke and carbon monoxide, and combination carbon monoxide and gas leak detectors.

Be sure to have batteries on hand, and replace them at least once a year!

A Safe Box
Also called a fire box or sentry box, this insulated, heavy-duty box will store your most important items in the event of flood or fire. Buy.com has a bunch of them in all shapes and sizes, from $25 to $500. Some are very sophisticated. I own the Sentry 1100 SentrySafe Fire-Safe Chest, and it suits our needs well.

Most boxes are locked with keys, although the expensive brands sport electronic keypads. These things weigh a ton, and the outside is a lot bigger than the inside, so get as big a unit as you can afford. Oh, and DON’T LOSE THE KEY. Yeah.

External Hard Drive or Data Storage
If you are like me, a good portion of your most important documents and photos are digital, on your computer. Should your computer hard drive die, or should your computer become damaged by some freak of nature or accident, you could lose everything. Set aside all your important digital data on a dedicated external hard drive. Place it in the safe box for safe keeping. Update it from time to time.

External hard drives can be pricey, but you can get very good deals if you keep your eyes on Buy.com for a good sale. I spotted this enormous Fantom G-Force 1 Terabyte External drive for $50! That’s a steal.

If you don’t want to get an external hard drive, you can also create a DVD with the digital data, and store it in a safe place like a safe box or in a shed or something. Additionally, if you have webmail or some online storage space, you can upload that data to keep it on someone else’s server. I wouldn’t place sensitive documents there, though, because a hacker could possibly gain entry to your data. But you can store your photos on Flickr or Photobucket, or on a web server.

So home safety and security just requires a few steps and some investment. You can decrease the cost by shopping around for deals, too. Be safe!

If you have a woodstove, gas- or oil-fueled furnace, please remember to have smoke and carbon monoxide detectors for your home. These devices are not expensive and in some locations, they are mandatory. Usually, you can find a good sale on these devices this time of year.

There are two types of smoke detectors:

The ionization type of smoke detector detects flaming fires that start up quickly, such as flash fires, paper burning, or grease fires. Most house fires are these kinds of fires, so the ionization-type detectors are usually advised for residences.

The photoelectric types of smoke detectors perceive smouldering fires that produce a lot smoke and heat, such as cigarrette-started fires or fires that begin in couches or other soft furniture. Less than 30% of house fires are these kinds of fires.

It is advised that smoke detectors be installed on every level of the home– basement, first floor, second floor, etc. Detectors should be placed on ceilings outside of sleeping areas.

Carbon monoxide detectors sense the invisible carbon monoxide gas. They are a little more complex than the smoke detectors, coming in three types of sensors: metal oxide, biomimetic and electrochemical. There are slight performance differences between the types, but all detectors are supposed to be tested and officially approved for their effectiveness. Carbon monoxide detectors are usually installed within 15 feet of each bedroom. Be sure to follow the manufacturer’s instructions for each device.

Individually, detectors are not terribly expensive, usually at $10 to $15 apiece. But if you have a big house as I do, the cost certainly adds up! If you are looking for some good deals on smoke and carbon detectors, check out Buy.com. They have a good selection with many name-brand models, and much of their inventory offers free shipping and frequent sales. The First Alert series of smoke and carbon monoxide detectors are very affordable. I saw some detectors priced as low as $4 for the basic smoke detector. Very nice! Be sure to change the batteries in these things regularly, too. A safety detector is only as good as its battery. (Some you can hard wire into the electrical system, too!).

I do not trust kerosene heaters. They are a terrible burn and fire hazard. I had a few bad experiences as a young lady (turned it on only for the flames to go POOF; another time, I burned holes in a shirt that I had been drying over the heater). And if you have young children or rambunctious pets, kerosene heaters are in danger of being tipped or pushed over. Plus, the kerosene creates a lousy soot that coats everything, YUK! I’d much rather pay a little more in electricity for “clean” heat. I bought an electric heater a few years ago for our living room, and now I’m looking into getting one for my daughters’ room upstairs, that gets terribly cold in the winter. Now that I rewired their bedroom, we can safely run a heater up there! yay!

I tend to stick with “name brand” products when I purchase important appliances like electric heaters. There’s a sweet Honeywell Mini Tower Surround Heater currently on sale for a good price at Buy.com: under $40! There is no free shipping with the model, but the shipping is still quite inexpensive. Buy.com has a very good selection of name-brand heaters right now, just in time, too! We’re trying to run the big furnace a little less frequently, and stay huddled around space heaters where possible.

What to look for in an electric heater? Well, efficiency– my other heater generates 1500 watts on high power; the Honeywell model is nice because it has a fan that circulates air all around the heater and not just in the front of it. I also look for protection from tips and overheating– a good electric heater will shut off if the unit tips over or if the unit gets too hot. And the name-brand is just a little added protection (warranty, a United States-based company to contact if necessary, etc).

So while I would never heat my home 24/7 with an expensive electric heater, they do have their uses for small, cold areas. Buy.com has some good prices, get your space heaters before they sell out by mid-winter.

One of my favorite blogs is Electrician’s Notes, and blogger Sparky has had some really good posts lately. He’s been showcasing some of the nightmares discovered in homes concerning their electrical wiring. I am closely associating with the posts (and photos), because my home is a nightmare, too!

My house was built in 1855, and has remained largely unrenovated since then. But there have been a few additions throughout the decades, one being electrical wiring installed in the 1930s. Believe it or not, until two years ago, 98% of my electrical system was running through those 80-year old, knob-and-tube wires. I had no idea how horrible the system was until 2006, when I completely gutted the living room. This is an example of one of the ugly blackheads I discovered when I pulled down the ceiling.

Apparently, the previous owners had ripped up the floorboards on the second floor above, installed the wiring for most of the house in between those floor joists, and closed up the floor again with the old floor boards. (See how close some of the nails are to the wiring between the joists). The owners in the 1960s slathered the second floor flooring with glue and installed this disgusting-looking yellow lineoleum in the bedrooms, making it impossible to see the damage done.

So last year, when I pulled down the ceiling in the living room below, I found this massive wiring disaster: open wires, spliced wires connected ONLY with black electrical tape. A disaster. A lot of the “improvements” are disasters. The previous owners had insulated the attic floor in the 1980s, where more of this black-cloth knob-and-tube wiring was located (it’s against codes to insulate on top of this kind of wiring).

Actually, most of this house is completely against codes– not just the electric. The plumbing had no vent system, no u-traps or vent for the washing machine… no cold air return vents for the furnace…. fiberglass batting is stuffed in the kitchen cabinets to plug the gaping holes in the walls…. a true DISASTER. You can read some of my past posts about my venture into DIY electrical– what a harrowing ordeal! I have details here and here and here and here is my successful Inspection Day! I passed!

What blows my mind is that all this work was done without any inspection at all, obviously. I know the house is old, but… I’m stunned that all of this stuff was done without the homeowners consulting the codes and building inspectors.

I have had to disconnect a good deal of my electrical system– half the house– because after I saw the condition of the wiring and the way it was installed, I was absolutely terrified. So we are without electricity until I can gut the remainder of the rooms to wire them.

My plea to you homeowners is this: PLEASE get your work inspected. PLEASE resist the urge to slop something together just to “get it done,” and then seal up the walls. Do it the CORRECT way and the SAFE way– for your own sake, but also for the lives of the people who will live in the house after you.

My house is a balloon-frame house. Balloon-frame houses became all the rage after the World’s Fair in Chicago, when visitors saw Augustine Taylor’s new building design in 1833.

Photo courtesy of Old House Web.

Balloon-framing was the alternative method of post-and-beam framing. PandB framing requires massive timbers with strong, skilled workers. The labor for this is extensive and demanding. The invention of balloon-framing sought to curb this expense and make home-building less tasking. Wikipedia sums this up nicely:

Although lumber was plentiful in 19th century America, skilled labor was not. The advent of cheap machine-made nails, along with water-powered sawmills, in the early 19th century made balloon framing highly attractive, because it did not require highly-skilled carpenters, as did the dovetail joints, mortises and tenons required by post-and-beam construction. For the first time, any farmer could build his own buildings without a time-consuming learning curve.

Balloon-frame houses are not being made anymore (not in quantities, anyway). American home-building shifted to the platform-frame (stick-frame), and is now coming full-circle back to post-and-beam framing. (I won’t delve into another new and exciting form of house-building– the modular home).

I am not too keen on balloon-frame. Let me tell you why.

• Greater risk of fire. Since studs are like long toothpicks which go all the way up from foundation sill to roof rafters, there is a tremendous risk for fire. If a fire starts in a wall, the flames will race up the long studs. The air flow from sill to rafter feeds the fire, until the house is essentially consumed from top to bottom. Fire stops (blocks of wood nailed between the studs at intervals) were added later to reduce this risk. Many old houses do not have fire stops. Mine does, though (at least, what few walls I have seen inside).

• Drafts, dust, vermin. My house is very, very drafty and dusty. I dust the house a lot, and still we cough and cough (the family has developed what I call “Morning House Syndrome”). The staggering amount of dust in this house is amazing. If I do not dust for a day or two, a thick powdery coat of gray dust settles on everything. The plus side of this is that there is plenty of air circulation here. The bad side is the air is dirty and we hack and cough all day. Smells are a problem, too. Odors from the moist basement and smells from bats in the attic circulate in the framing and come right into the house. The house stinks. Also, smells are not the only things that race up and down the studs! Mice love balloon-frame houses. So do bats. Because our exterior siding and eaves still have so many holes and pocks, we have a problem with bats. They are well able to scurry down the studs from their attic nests. I have to say that I hate bats. I am not afraid of mice (besides their uncleanness), but I cannot tolerate bats in my house. When I redid my front Entry Hall, I had left the top of the door framing open, to continue it later. Oops. So, any wall-removal that we do must be replaced very quickly, or the room must be completely sealed off and then scoured for lurking bats.

• Sagging and twisting. This isn’t as much a problem for me. What old house is not sagging or twisting? But, because the long studs support the entire load of the house, we must take great care that studs do not twist or bend. It has not helped that previous owners have carelessly hacked and chipped at the studs in order to install an electric receptacle box here or furnace vent there (some fools even cut out large chunks of the foundation sill to install ducts). When we finally do open up the walls, I do wonder how much of the structural support of the studs has been compromised. In every area that I have opened up so far, I have found transgressions of this sort. Therefore, we must have a stash of “emergency” studs to sister to any compromised framing. Anything can happen once we remove three tons of lathe and plaster and flooring!

So…. balloon-framing, for all its hype at the time, has turned out to be problematic. It seems to be plagued with more problems than stick-framing, and is less-sturdy than post-and-beam. I hear that balloon-framing is the structure of choice for metal-stud homes, and that sounds like it works better than with wood.

I think it’s important to know what kind of structure your house is before you start tearing away at it. For one, I want my efforts to be long-lasting and sturdy. Two, I would have appreciated it if previous homeowners had been more careful, caring, and fore-sighted about the work they had done. After all, I am living with their successes and their errors. So, I am trying to keep future homeowners in mind as we do this.