Finding Place for Extra Dirt

Humphrey-house has been a bit of a mud pit for the last... oh five weeks or so, as we tore out the old concrete in the backyard and are putting in reclaimed bluestone pavers. It seems like years already. There has been a lot of digging, excavating, pain killers - and then - more digging. It's all a necessary evil as we prepare for a 4-inch base of gravel and 1-2 inch of sand under the pavers.

Given the small urban lot, we quickly ran into a problem though. What do we we do with all of that dirt? We had to creative. Fortunately, some landscape design wishes and our favorite holiday came in to save the day.

Ideas for Extra Dirt:

1) Create a landscape planter!
We always thought a nice raised planter bed with wide rails in front of our rear porch would be a great landscape feature. It would make gardening a bit easier, and also provide extra sitting room outside. If only we had enough dirt to fill it though... a-ha! Problem solved! Sadly, while this turned out great (and I will post about the construction later), this ended up taking only a few loads of dirt in the wheelbarrow, so other dirt solutions were needed.


2) Raise those flower beds!
We have a "peripheral" planting area that surrounds the yard. In the past, it's been unofficially defined as the line where we can't get the few blades of grass in the yard to grow further. Now, with several wheelbarrows (20+) of roto-tilled soil, we have sleek looking berms surronding the yard. The berms give a lot of depth and texture to the small space! Bonus: concrete chunks can be reused as a nice little "rock garden".


3) Make graves!
This was honestly the most fun way to place the extra dirt. We normally have a cemetery in the front yard at Halloween. but this year it got more interesting and authentic as we created fresh graves for the tombstones. Mwah -ha -ha!


Even after these efforts, we still have a fairly hefty mound we will need to deal with. Some will be used to back-fill in dirt around the edges of the patio, but we may have to craigslist it, or build a semi-raised planter for next year's veggie garden. In the meantime, we're ready to climb out of the mud and onto a patio!

Digging Trenches

This summer we had some drainage problems with the old concrete slab we had that was pitched towards the house. Large rainfall = water cascading down the basement walk-out stairs and seeping into the house.

We knew it had to be fixed, and preferably before winter. So after a bit of scouring, I came across a Craigslist posting for some large bluestone pavers. A great look at reasonable cost. Plus, we could finally put our patio furniture on an actual patio! A week later, I heard jackhammers across the alley and found a crew tearing up a concrete sidewalk. After short conversation and some cash, they came and removed our old sidewalk.

Now we had a nice big trench going through the yard. Could be a fun slip-n-slide if only we lived on a hill. And if it was summer. But instead, i will slowly continue to dig this out for the patio.

I'm finding its quite hard to do a siginficant landscape job like this on a small urban lot. There are piles of bluestone all over the rear, and patio furniture, grill, firepit, landscaping stuff, piles of dirt, rain barrels, potting materials and other errata that all needs to be shuffled from one area to another as work progresses. It's also really hard to dig out compacted dirt! My back is getting a good workout from this, and I can only take a little at a time.

But things will need to pick up. Chicago just got our first below freezing temps (although one year ago we set records in the 80's), so there is little time left before winter to wrap this project up. Otherwise we'll be stuck shoveling snow off the "temporary" stepping stones all winter long!

Blending In the Trap Door

Last week, I posted about building a trap door. The construction part was fun, but the real magic took place after we prepped, primed, and painted the area.

The old siding we restored was a bit more damaged on the south side of the building as opposed to the north. Judging by our 100-year old siding, those UV rays are equally harmful to the "skin" of the house as they can be to people! The siding had actually weathered the most near the edges. In some places, the many layers of paint had worn away, and we discovered that the original siding of our home was not painted at all - but rather stained! And stained a nice dark shade of green. Very similar to the dark green we chose to put back on the front of the house. I wish i had a photo to post here, but they just didn't turn out very well.



Anyway, we had to prep these areas by filling the holes left behind by the 10-penny nails attaching the crappy vinyl siding to the house. There were a few other choice areas for wood filler as well, as you can see from the photos here.

After that, we used a nice primer from the Sherwin William store called Peel Bond, which is meant to help cover imperfections in exterior paint. it's actually meant to cover alligatoring paint, but I think you'd need several coats to get that done effectively. It does help encapsulate and smooth over rough patches though, giving the siding a somewhat glossy and resilient base for the final paint.

The final paint went on in a jiffy, and quickly blended in the newly exposed sides on the porch, with the rest of the front of the house (painted last year). And the trap door we installed just seemed to "melt away" into the wall.

Restoring Siding and Building a Trap Door

The front of our house looked so good after removing the crappy white vinyl siding last September, that Jen and I have been talking ever since about restoring the original siding back a little bit further. We considered going "all the way" down the sides, but that idea was quickly eliminated, as it would require (a) lots of work to repair the original wood siding, and (b) lots of paint (and $).

So, a happy compromise was to take the siding off just along the front porch part of the home and restoring that original wood siding. This allows us to stay within a reasonable budget (1 gal of paint) and we also don't lose the (marginal) value of the foam board insulation under the vinyl that covers the heated living area. Best of all, the house looks good from the street instead of having the wood siding in front oddly transition to white vinyl at the corner, as shown below.


The timing to do this project is now, after the blower door test revealed that our access door connecting the basement to the front porch crawlspace was a major source of air leakage. Really not too surprising, considering how cold that part of the basement can get in winter. We decided to seal off this door permanently, and realized we could still access this storage space from the outside if we built a new door into the siding. This would actually make the front porch crawl space more usable and be a great space to store gardening pots, landscape supplies, etc.

As with many of the finer carpentry projects at Humphrey House, Kenny came up for a weekend to help with this project. Removing the siding went quite quickly, and we even found someone on Craigslist to take it away for free. During siding removal, we found the wood underneath was in really good shape,especially on the North wall. The south wall was a bit worse, but was still quite salvageable.

We then cut an access hole for a new door to the crawl space on the south wall. The bottom piece of lumber (touching the ground) was quite dry rotted, which is really no suprise given that it was original pine, untreated and left in contact with the soil. We had to replace this board, and also "sister" brace the studs as some of them had rotted at the bottom few inches. To avoid future damage, I also dug out a trench and filled it with two layers of old 16 x 8 concrete pavers and sand before we replaced the bottom board with a pressure-treated 2x8.

It was interesting to see the porch framing was really a "skirt" in which the studs came down from above, but were tied with a cross-beam to the main part of the house, and a support column at the corner. Of course, we had to reinforce this when we cut out the crossbeam for an access door. We put in a LVL header (leftover from the LVLs we sistered to the second floor floor joists), and beefed up the framing with supporting studs underneath this header.

Anyway, we debated how this new door should open, to the left or the right? To avoid future landscaping damage and any threshold issues, we decided that it would be best to try and get this new access door to swing UP, and we could attach it with a chain / hook to an eyelet in the wall.

We also wanted to make this look unobtrusive, so we used low profile 1x4's as the trim edges, and reused the siding cut out as the finish of the door, working to line up the lines so they would match the existing siding. This was more difficult than it sounds because there were some really bad pieces of wood in this particular part of the wall. With a few pieces of old kitchen wall lathe (we don't toss anything!) as a bit of a standoff, we ended up mounting the siding on a piece of plywood and the lines matched up pretty well. A few hinges completed the job, and we now have a nice little trap door to the front porch!

Once the wood siding is repaired with some wood filler and then primed, we will paint the door the same Roycraft Bronze Green as the surrounding wall so it all blends together. Then it will be a like a secret trap door to a hidden passageway! Where one can behold bags of potting soil! Exciting, right? Well, we'll see once it's all painted.

Interested in Solar Energy? Mark 10/3 on your Calendar

The national American Solar Energy Society (ASES) is holding their annual solar tour on the first Saturday in October. On this day, homeowners and businesses with solar energy systems will open their doors allowing the general public to come in and take an up-close look at how these systems power their home, heat their water, and climate-control their buildings. It's a great chance to ask questions and hear first-hand from a homeowner how their systems have worked for them. If you already have plans that day, you can always learn about solar online.

The solar tours are often coordinated by local chapters of ASES, such as the IL Solar Energy Association. Here in Oak Park, there are several homes participating on the tour. I'll actually be volunteering for the day at my friend Jim's house, who has helped us out a lot here at HH. His home is a "super site" on the tour where you also can learn about worm composting, and his Jetta converted to run on waste veggie oil (a grease car), among other things. Jim is also an energy auditor and instructor for the ISEA and Wilbur Wright College, so you're bound to learn something if you show up! There's no cost, and the tour will be going on from 10 am - 3 pm.

I was proud to see the OP well-represented with four houses on the solar tour. While you're out, visitors to the area interested in historic preservation as well as green energy can also check out the Pleasant Home bungalow tour, where you can view the variety, craftsmanship and interior design of the best examples of bungalow architectural style, also on Oct 3. It should be a fun day!