Week 3: Slow & Steady
Hello! We’re now 3 weeks in, and we’re still making progress, slow and steady at this point. Before I get to this week, I’d like to add something else about last week! Remember when I said it was a bit of a blur? Well, it was so much so that I entirely forgot to mention I spent an entire day creating a floor plan map! I even did it to scale, thanks to Mike’s architect ruler. ⅛”= 1 foot was the right size to get it to fit onto a regular 8.5 X 11 piece of paper.
I will admit, I think I kinda lost the scale by the third floor. My brain was really starting to hurt trying to figure out that tricky layout up there! It’s tricky because while the main floors were built in tandem in the late 1850s, the 3rd floor is laid out entirely different. It was added in the early 1900s, sometime between 1904 and 1908. I know this thanks to the wonderful resource known as Sanborn maps. They are maps that were regularly made in towns all across America for fire insurance purposes. Quick tutorial: the red means brick, the yellow means wood, S= Store, D= Dwelling. The dotted line on the inside is the mansard roof.
If you’ve never seen the ones for your town, I highly recommend them! I just did an internet search for “East Mauch Chunk Sanborn Maps” and found them that way. Using the maps from different years, I was able to determine property changes. For instance, the 1895 and 1904 maps look basically the same, and say that the house has 2 stories and is made of brick with a wooden 2 story outbuilding and wooden porches. But on the 1908 map, the 3rd story and mansard roof are listed. My guess is the mansard roof was added to create a boarding house on the 3rd floor. I’ve heard it was for railroad workers, but I’ve yet to find definitive proof of that. I hope to have time to do more investigative work soon.
Back to this past week! Most of the work was done on the outside of the building on the roofs and dormers. Unfortunately, all 13 dormers are in terrible shape, and need to be torn off and rebuilt. I am sad to say that due to time and money constraints, we are unable to save the original curved dormer roofs and keystone trim, and instead had to change the design to a steeper pitched gable with a pointed front. While I wanted to keep the original design as much as possible, in this case I’m ok with the final product, because it is still a design already on the house. The three dormers along the back of the house all have this shape already, as do almost all of the other dormers in town. Once they are shingled and painted, I’m hoping they make little difference in the overall look of the place. I may even still try to determine an affordable decorative trim to add to their fronts.
You may wonder why they are getting boarded up entirely at the moment. It’s because we still have to find and purchase 13 windows! We plan to look around at discount stores and auctions, so we wanted to keep the size dimensions as flexible as possible while still keeping the elements out. Once we have the windows, they’ll be installed and we’ll be able to add the final details.
Poor Troy keeps discovering one issue after another while he’s up there on the lift trying to do this roof job. For instance, the side bay of the house is only 2 stories tall, and apparently the roof that covers that part was almost completely rotted, so they had to tear and repair far more than they originally anticipated.
During this process, the final pigeon hangout was removed, including two fledglings who weren’t quite old enough to fly yet. Once they were discovered, we worked as a team and managed to get them safely boxed up and taken to the Environmental Center. I named them Neil and Chris after the Pet Shop Boys, because they were “East Side Boys”. They were feisty little buggers that were tricky to get -- I have no doubt they’ll do just fine in the world.
Despite the extra roof setbacks, they managed to replace every dormer on the East Side, with a goal of getting every dormer on the North/Front side this week. Fun Fact: once the rot was torn away, yet another broken chimney was discovered! Now that we know what we are looking for, we can see where the bricks have the most external damage and look for wall shape clues inside and find more. Kevin and I went on a hunt and found every other former chimney lurking in this place: all 6! We are hoping that there is a potential that one or two of them might be saved; two of them are inside the building and not along an external wall, so we’re hoping they fared better over time. The external ones are all going to have to be taken down from within. The theory is that they have all slowly been failing ever since the original coal heat stopped using them and they’ve sat vacant, cold, and damp, and that this has exacerbated the roof deterioration as well. All I know is that we’re about to have a whole lot of reclaimed brick, and I’m already mentally planning garden walls and patios and various hardscaping projects in my brain.
Well, my dream of someone coming to take all the furniture away failed miserably. Doh! So now I’m going through with a bucket of murphy’s oil soap and my trusty Norwex cloth and I’m cleaning each piece, matching up sets, and putting them on Facebook Marketplace to sell. So far this is also not going so well; mostly I just get scammers trying to get my phone number. Apparently this is a big problem on Marketplace now; my fellow sellers beware! Several people have written to me saying they will buy it and requesting my phone number, which is entirely unnecessary for the transaction to happen. I found an article about it. Apparently once they have your phone number, they set up fake google phone numbers using the stolen number? I don’t quite understand, but it’s shady as heck and really frustrating to think I’ve sold the stuff, and then it turns out all the interested parties are shysters. I considered donating it all to the Salvation Army or someone like that, but none of the charity organizations seem to send out trucks any longer thanks to Covid. I honestly did not think THIS was going to be the most impossible job of the bunch so far!
Back to the world of actual progress: Along with the roof, the other remaining entry points are being sealed up! The front floor to ceiling windows have been scraped, primed, painted, and finally re-glazed. Not the easiest feat! It took two full containers of glaze and several hours for the glazing alone. The broken glass transom above one of the back doors has finally been replaced too! This gave me an opportunity to play with potential color choices. I’m considering painting all the transoms black along with the original windows, so while the transom was inside, I primed and painted it as a sample. It’s amazing how the black makes the wood trim disappear, right? After all this window glazing, I’m pleased to say I’m getting pretty decent at it! Let’s just hope it all cures properly over the winter. Below 40 is not ideal for glazing, but holes in windows are even less ideal!
Between Guy and Dom, the two rotted, sad old plywood pieces covering basement windows on the west side have also been rebuilt and sealed up nicely. Once Spring comes around and I can paint the foundation, they will practically disappear, and it will make a HUGE difference in the overall appearance of the place. I can’t wait!
Well that’s it for this week’s report, I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving this week!