It’s been a couple weeks since we last posted and a lot of work has been done on the house.
I will start where we left off with going through the house. This time has been spent mostly working on the home’s systems. We like to think of this period as boring but essential.
After we showed Bill and Jeff around (and remembering that grueling home inspection), we quickly realized here were a number of things that we knew we needed to take care of now so we wouldn’t have to think about them again for many years. We would need to attack some structural work, do a good amount of electrical work, plumbing, heating and through all of these systems, we would find ways to make the house more efficient.
Structural:
Jeff went upstairs and had us stay in the living room to listen to the shaking floor as he walked in one of the bedrooms. The upstairs floors were sagging which meant that we would have to add support in the ceiling of both the living room and the library.
They started on the ceilings and while they were up in the living room ceiling we realized that for some reason there was no support beam under the bathtub in the upstairs hallway bathroom… scary. While we were tearing out the ceilings we decided it was best to repair one of the living room walls that appeared to have some water damage and guess what we discovered? No insulation. No wonder we were burning through oil at such a fast rate.
It’s not really structural, but we did discover that one side of the roof above the kitchen and dining room was well rotted and would need to be replaced. We were pleasantly surprised when the roof came off and a new one was up the next week. Funny that things we always thought seemed so difficult could actually be less expensive and easier.
Electric:
Kyle from Ginnochio Electrical came to the house to take a look at the house’s electrical system. It was clear that we would need to upgrade the power coming into the house from 100 amps to 200 amps, rewire the whole circuit panel and straighten everything out for safety and efficiency. 
We upgraded a lot of ungrounded outlets and checked all the wiring in the walls. A lot of cloth covered wire was replaced and now we can sleep easily knowing that we have a much safer home. We also added dimmers and switches where we wanted them. It was a lot of work and there’s still more to do, but now we know what’s involved in rewiring a whole house. Miles and miles of wire.
This pictures shows just the wiring for our new kitchen set up.
Heating:
Its really nice that in a house this old there is a forced air system, it means that we can add central air someday and a humidification system if we want. However, we noticed in our first few nights that the master bedroom was getting very little heat while in the rest of the house and especially upstairs the heat was pumping.
Old heating duct
After meeting with several HVAC (Heating Ventilation Air Conditioning) contractors who tried to convince us to entirely upgrade the heating system, we finally found someone who listened when we said we just didn’t have the budget to tackle it right now.
New Ductwork
Paul Skidmore of Skidmore Heating explained we could really make the current oil furnace system far more efficient if we added zones to the house so that we could send heat where it was needed and not overheat less used parts of the house. We would also need to repair duct work and make some changes to the placement of registers and returns. All the ducts needed a serious cleaning and after seeing the animal hair build up in some of it, plus the leaky seams and rot, we ended up pretty much replacing everything.
Plumbing:
What started out as just wanting to put in a kitchen, a new bathtub and new toilets led to replacing quite a bit of the plumbing work in the house as with most of our other systems. Supply lines had to be upgraded, old lead pipes replaced and we discovered some bigger problems too. When the ductwork was coming out in the basement, we discovered that the main waste line was tucked behind one of the ducts and had probably not been seen for many years. The whole top of the drain pipe was rotted out so that the pipe was actually open on top. Our plumber (Chris from Watertight Plumbing in Red Hook) is great, he made smart decisions and suggested efficient ways of doing things. A new hot water heater is also being installed to replace the old one that had rotted and also to handle the 4 bathrooms and kitchen.
Now that we’ve got the guts being worked on, we can go shopping for fixtures, tile, paint colors, and other goodies for the house.
We hope we didn’t bore you too much with this installment, but everyone knows there’s a very unglamorous side to renovations.
Chris & Sage
