It’s been too long people, so I’m popping in to say “hello,” congratulate the winner of our latest Narrative Conflict Prompt, and give you photographic evidence of my excellent excuse for ignoring Steemit over the past few weeks.
There, now that’s out of the way, let me congratulate 
Unlike some people folks were once fans of, @jayna will not disappoint
Now to my excuses. Some of you may know that in an epic fit of insanity and moral indignation, I once convinced my longsuffering (and super-hot) husband to buy a historic house in East Bumblefuck, Pennsylvania, as a restoration project. Some of you don’t. Here’s how it went down.
I mean I love old shit. Black and white movies, classic novels, estate sales, flea market crap, wizened and shrunken people with fluffy white hair... basically anything the smells musty or looks dusty will catch my eye. I grew up in an old Victorian house with an alcoholic carpenter for a dad who rarely repaired or restored anything. I dreamed of owning a similarly old home one day with the important difference that I would actually restore mine to its original splendor. Having spent hours in my (surprisingly good when he actually did anything) carpenter dad’s company (drunk and sober… him, not me), and adding in YouTube videos, I felt confident this would present little to no trouble.
When I see an old home falling to ruin, it pains my heart. I become literally nauseated. But since I am an anarchist and believe taxation is theft, I can’t very well support tax money going to save these old places. That means no grant applications, and all the money has to come out of my own thin pockets. Over the years, hubby and I have looked at several historic homes to purchase, but they were all way overpriced for places with floors that left you feeling like a drunken sailor on a trampoline.
“Yes, I’m sure you’re right, a couple of shims will level these floors right out”
Then we discovered the Madera Mansion. It sounds grand, and it was for the time it was built in 1872 at a price of just $8,000 to a local lumber mill and brickyard owner, James Hegarty. Add in the local rumor that eight of nine children who lived here died in childhood of consumption and now haunt the place, that it was abandoned for sixty years, and basically the place is 
Did I mention I also love a good ghost story?
The place is in rough shape. Really rough shape, but the floors are solid and level, the beams are twelve inch cedar, and most of the woodwork is in beautiful condition for a place that was left without climate control for six decades. When we found it could be had for less than the price of a new compact Kia, even my darling and ever-so gorgeous husband (who frankly hates old shit) was sold.
The first year was perfect. We were living in Morgantown, WV for work at our employer’s expense. I would drive up on weekends and demo, tearing away the layers of ‘remuddling’ like the one wall in the kitchen that was literally just a two-by-four frame with faux paneling glued to it. I was determined to get to the original structure, and I did! It was satisfying as hell tossing out load after load of tacked-on tackiness like the drop ceilings that had been put in to hide wiring in the fifties. There were disappointments of course. All of the plaster ceilings had been torn out or so damaged they may as well have been, at which point the previous DIYers decided, “Fuck it! It’s too hard to run wiring in the joists, let’s just punch holes in the tops of the walls and then cover this mess up with asbestos tiles!” But for the most part, we began making incredible progress.
We rewired the place ourselves, carefully fishing behind the plaster walls and notching minimally where necessary. We got the old heating system running with the cast iron radiators and the 1950s-era shaker coal furnace. We had help from a local Jack-of-all-trades who took down some trees and replaced the main house roof. I learned to plaster and redid the walls in the bedrooms. Hubby drywalled new ceilings. When the word came that we were being transferred to Boise, ID for who-knew-how-long, we were at the point where the house was livable but needed plenty of cosmetics. The thought of leaving it without heat after all the plaster work… of leaving it unoccupied after all we’d done and with thousands of dollars in tools on the premises…
Then the perfect solution: The local Jack we’d been working with for nearly a year was hating his apartment and looking for a new one. What if he stayed at the house, where we had not just heat and electricity, but cable and high speed internet as well? He would live free, keep the furnace stoked, and we could work out prices for projects to get the house to 100% while we were away. Everyone was happy!
That is until I started receiving invoices charging me thousands of dollars for work we had not agreed would be done and for which I received no evidence. The first couple I paid. Then I made it clear we could not afford to do any more large projects, and by the way, when was he going to send us those pictures of the work we’d already paid for? Spoiler alert: Nothing had been done to take pictures of! I know. Virtually Shyamalanian twist.
To make a long story slightly less long, much horrible drama ensued and the bastard gutted our house. After two years away we came home to find he stole half of our cast iron radiators. He stole easily $10,000 in tools. He cut trenches and knocked holes into our plaster to rip out every last piece of wiring he could. He stripped our heating system of all the copper piping. He smoked in the house and ground his butts out on our floors. There was literally a hardened mound of ash in front of the toilet where he apparently sat on the commode smoking and ashing right onto our floor. The house was in worse condition than when we bought it three years earlier, having at the time been abandoned for sixty years.
We were devastated. And we had nowhere else to go.
With three kids in tow, we moved in, redid all of the electrical (again) reconstructed the heating system and plumbed the bathroom back in. Things like painting rooms have had to take a waaaaaay back burner to things like trying to heat this place with half of the radiators gone.
This perfectly exemplifies both how my house looked and how I felt when I saw it
In the two years we’ve been back, we’ve managed to get a kitchen in (for the first year we had camp tables, an oven, a microwave, and a laundry sink). We managed to get a bathroom redone. And finally, in time for Thanksgiving, we decided we would push ourselves to get the dining room functional. There’s still finish work to be done: The ceiling needs mudding and paint, there are wires in the corner we are going to conceal inside PVC painted to look like the other radiator pipes, and of course refinishing the floors will wait until last, but considering the time we had and what the before looks like, we feel we did a damn fine job:
Here you can see where the original rear wall of the house was extended into a servants' quarters added when the owner married. Lath was nailed up over the arched window above the door and it was plastered over to compensate for lower ceilings in the SQ.
Removing the lath and broken glass revealed the old frame still mostly intact. We'll be replacing the glass and finishing out the inside here to make a curio cabinet rather than concealing the old window space.
The plaster here was so torn up we decided to cut out a 5X4 area and replace it with drywall.
With areas of as much as a quarter inch difference between the depth of the plaster and the drywall, I had to build up layers of skim coat to blend them together. Since plaster is more rough and wavy than drywall, it also helps to coat all the way across drywall patches so they don't stick out as a big, smooth spot surrounded by texture.
My best girl was all about entertaining me as she waited for the caulk to dry so she could actually paint.
And here she is celebrating in the finished product!
It was a lot of work, but sitting down to eat Thanksgiving dinner was significantly more pleasant this year than last
I was blessed to have mom here to help, as well as my dad of half my lifetime (the new and improved, not the alcoholic) and brother, and of course my lovely children and smokin' hot hubster. As you can see, the rest of the house has a looong way to go!
So please, dearest readers, extend the same patience you showed in reading this ridiculously long post filled with photos no one really cares about but me, and be patient as I work on this house until at least January. I'll be scarce both on Steemit and on The Writers' Block, but I'll be back, and I'll miss you all while I'm gone.
In the meantime, check out my fiction or nonfiction over at SteemShelves!
