Floored

I know I'm a little strange but I love the look of exposed lath.

If this were my summer cottage by the sea, I would keep it like this.

Just hang a few paintings on the wall.

Anyway, the demo is done.  Well, I think the demo is done.

Here's why I'm not sure.

Darryl Carter

I was toying around with leaving a few of the old beams exposed

like in this Darryl Carter kitchen (which is one my favorites)

but until everything was gutted, there was just no way to know whether or not

anything would be pretty enough to leave exposed.

So I was looking forward to getting home and walking around the space

to make an assessment.  I unlocked the back door to step in and found...

No floor at all!

I guess the subfloor was just so crazy and at all different levels, it

just didn't make sense to save it.

There's nothing left but the floor joists.  Rosemary left me a comment

on the last post that the house looks so vulnerable in this state.  I think that's a great word.

 

We also discovered a second foundation, in about three feet from the outer one

just was I had suspected.  Why?  We'll get back to that.

The joists under the old bathroom don't seem too bad.  New 2x6s have been

sistered alongside the old 4x5 joists and additional pairs of 2x6s were also

added in between.

In other places joists were spaced about two feet apart.

Sixteen inches is normal and probably code.

 

 

And between the two foundations, the spacing is over 30 inches!  Many of the

joists are at different levels and the entire floor is just way out of level.

I could certainly beef up the structure with new joists and pad some of the

joists that are too low, but it just might make more sense to rip it out and

start from scratch.  There's certainly no better time to fix it properly.

From a purist point of view, I would love to leave anything original intact because

it's an historical document; on the other hand, the perfectionist in me would like

it all to be new.  I have a little bit of a stomach ache about it but I'm  not going

to shed any tears or lose any sleep over it.  Just gotta figure it out.

It is what it is, as they say.

But let's talk about the two foundations.  As I said, there are two foundations

about three feet apart but notice the center floor beam goes all the way

across to the outer foundation.  There appear to no bones, no treasure,

no stash of Paul Revere's silver although it would be fun to poke around with

a metal detector.  The inner foundation seems a little better built and made

of gray fieldstone...

...just like the foundation on the rest of the house. 

The outer foundation has a few wooden piers that have been filled in with brick.

It's much more makeshift than the inner foundation.

 The ceiling joists (and the second floor) go all the way across but notice on the back wall,

the sheathing is different on those three feet between the two foundations.

But why?

     1856 drawing                                                      2013 diagram

If you look at a few key measurements between the 1856 drawing and its current dimension,

you'll see that the house has gone from 61 feet to 42 feet on the right side and from

37 feet to 18 feet where the porches are.  Nineteen feet is missing!

I suspect there was a barn attached to the back of the house.  A place where horses and

firewood might have been.  But the double foundation?

Photo:  Our Little Big House

My guess is there was an inverted porch on that side of the house.  Perhaps just wide enough

to provide cover from the rain or snow to get firewood.   I think that explains the more

solid inner foundation of the house and a porch foundation that was most likely entirely on piers.

If I didn't lose three feet of my kitchen, I would love to recreate that.  I think it would be

really nice detail on that side of the house.

 

 

 

Up next is dealing with the plumbing and heating.

 

This plumbing stack serves the upstairs bathroom.  It would probably

make sense to renovate this bathroom at the same time but I have my limits.

Cast iron is famous for splitting open.  This is most like over 100 years old

so it's time to replace it with PVC.

 

 

The plumbing stack was boxed in just beside the old kitchen sink.  In the new plan the kitchen

sink will be placed right in front of the window.  The challenge will now be to move the plumbing stack back into the outside wall as far as possible so I can get a nice expanse of countertop.

 

Having plumbing in an outside wall can be a little troublesome in the wintertime

but I'm being told if the pipes are wrapped in foam and then foam insulation

is blown in around them, there shouldn't be any issue with freezing. 

 

Can I get a witness?

If This House Could Talk

 

Cambridgeport History Day was this past weekend and part of that event is a week long walking tour called "If This House Could Talk."  The event encourages residents to research the history of their homes and write a sign sharing something about their house for others to read.  This is a fun way to get everyone involved and raise awareness of the rich history of our neighborhood.

 

In the past, I've focused my signs around how and where I got information that helped me restore the exterior of my house to its original condition.  This year, I decided to write about one the house's longest residents Jennie T. Ray.

 

For those of you that have been around from the beginning of my blog, I wrote a post on how I used old maps and Ancestry.com to learn about the people that lived in my house before me.  You can find that post here.  And since the 1940 census was recently released, there's a lot of new information available.

 

 

I do have an update to that story though.  In my old post, I wasn't sure if Jennie's daughter Frances survived.  In the 1880 census, Jennie had one daughter Frances and in the next census, Jennie indicated that she had had two children but one had died. 

 

When I searched for Jennie recently on Ancestry.com, I found her attached to someone's family tree.  I contacted that person and found Jennie's great great great granddaughter Sheena.  Frances married, had eight children of her own, and lived just a few blocks away.

 

Despite Jennie's many hardships, it was some nice closure.

On History and Blog Pirates

Please excuse my absence; I've been really busy.

If you've been following for the past year, you may remember I participated in a local event called "If This House Could Talk."  Anyone who wants to participate writes a sign with an historical tidbit about their house and it creates a self-guided tour over the course of a weekend through our historical neighborhood.

This is what my house looked like back then.  It weird to see it this way.

I've done quite a bit of research using old maps, public records and Ancestry.com to find out who the former owners such as Jennie T. Ray and residents of my home were.  As I researched these data, particularly the census records, I came across all the other residents of the street at various points in time.

When this year's event came around I suggested to the organizers that I wanted to do "A Snapshot in Time" and post signs in front of each house on my block with the 1880 census records showing the names, ages and occupations of the residents.  The idea of the event is to get each home's residents to do their own research but they later came back and told me they loved the idea.

  I wold still like to get everyone on the street to participate so I'm in the process of putting out flyers on every house asking they'll participate but if they "don't have time" could I have permission to place a sign in front of their home.  It's kind of big job but I'd love to see my street be "the" destination for the tour.

Actually I thought I would sell lemonade, hot chocolate and cookies and really clean up.  Maybe I could rent dealer booths in the garden.  I'm always thinking.  Gotta raise funds for a new kitchen.

At the same time, Nita from Mod Vintage Life sent me an e-mail early Sunday morning saying that she found a blog that had pirated ALL of our blog posts, as well as those of three other bloggers, and is using our material to generate traffic to make money on ads.  You can read her post here.

This is really unfuriating.  I spend a lot of time doing research, taking photos and crafting the story on each post.  Sometimes they don't work but, let's be real, many of them are genius!  And this lazy-ass person just steals the material to make money.

Getting them taken down isn't easy.  You have to file a complaint for every single post giving the URL for your post and the offending URL, the nature of the copyright infringement.  For me it's about 160 posts, for Nita it's about 400 posts and one of the other poor bloggers, the pirated posts go back to 2008!  I've responded to some of Blogger's boilerplate e-mails asking what we need to do to take this blog down.  I got a curt e-mailed saying "As we stated you must file the URL for the original and offending post...."

If anyone knows a better way to stop this, we'd be appreciative of your experience.

ADDENDUM 3:20 p.m. on 9/15/11: I'm happy to report the pirate blog has been taken down as of about five minutes ago. It took several days and probably well over 50 complaints between Nita and I alone, but it's gone....hopefully for good.

  

Guest Bath Demo

Here are a few shots of the kitchen before the demo started.  This door went to the little kitchen closet.  When I ripped out the closets looking for the hidden window, I no longer needed to use this door so the fridge was placed up against it with my portable dishwasher in between to act as my only countertop.  I still have to wonder how housewives managed with no counters.

Don't you love my exhaust fan?  It actually works extremely well.  The new bathroom wall should hit just to the right of the fan.

I moved the fridge over to the other side of the room where it will stay until I can renovate the kitchen.  Just for reference, the doorway on the left goes to the dining room.  The open door on the other side of the fridge goes to the back porch.

The plaster is flying as demo starts.  You can see the hidden window on the right at the top of the basement stairs.  I call that the gnome door because it's about 5', 6" high.  You should see the dents in my head.

We found this little children's plate inside the wall.  It's a metal of some kind and has the alphabet around the rim.  I'm hoping it will clean up a little.

Here's the area opened up.  The door on the left is the basement door.  In the middle is the hallway to the front door and the door on the right is to the living room.  I put up the old closet door and barracaded the hallway just to help isolate the cats from the mess.  They'd be sitting in the middle of it all to see what was going on with their house.

Here's the bracing where that second staircase was attached.  It's still a bit of a mystery.  I don't think the family that lived here would have been wealthy enough to have a maid but the 1880 census gives us a clue.



Click to enlarge



Three lines from the top shows the family that lived in my house in 1880.  This is 17 years before Jennie Ray lived here.  If you missed that story, you can find it here.

You can see Caleb S. Buckman, his wife Sarah, and three children, Maude, Charles and Herbert.  Also living in the house was George W. Hale, a 19-year-old boarder who worked at a stationery store.  I believe the house was built with a rental unit to help defray costs.  The second staircase provided separation of the living quarters.  In my former condo in an 1837 Greek Revival, we had the original contract for the house that included a two-room tenement above the kitchen at the back of the house.  I think this was a similar situation.  Imagine, six people lived in this 1200-square-foot house.  And they probably only had one outhouse!

Interesting to this side story, I found Caleb Buckman on Ancestry.com in someone's family tree.  I e-mailed the owner of the tree who turned out to be Herbert Buckman's great great grandson who lives in a suburb of Boston.  He told me that Caleb and Sarah soon divorced and he ran off leaving her with the kids and was  never heard from again.  (I like to think that Sarah was a cougar and took up with the strapping young boarder.)  I was hoping he would have photos of my house and he was hoping I had information about his deadbeat great, great grandfather.

Anyway, back to this photo.  The vertical boards aren't studs; they were added as a base to attach the lathe to.  The area between those boards is plaster.  This was done as a way of insulating.  After the sheathing was placed on the outside of the house, lathe was nailed to the back of the sheathing and the inside of the cavaties were plastered to provide insulation.  

Remember when I did the exterior of the house...

...and it was all opened up?  That was necessary to remove all that lathe and plaster so that insulation could be blown in.  I'll eventually have to take all this out so it can be insulated properly.

Back to the mess.  Note the strip of floor between the masonite on the left and closet floor to the right.  That's the original finished floor.  It doesn't seem to be finished or painted unless the paint was more like stain.  It's gray but you can also see the path worn into the floor where people walked in and out of the kitchen.  I'm very attracted to that area.  If I could only touch it to soak up their stories.

This wall that's being opened up is the gable end of the main house.  We were going to put a reinforcing beam under the original beam to redistribute weight to new posts below.

Here is that beam.  A huge hunk was cut out of it somewhere along the line.

This shows the piece that's missing.  On the left, the beam is sitting on the door frame from the kitchen to the dining room.  On the right, the leftover stump was left dangling off the post (at the arrow) on the outside wall.

That's it for today.  I may post more Sunday but I hope everyone has a great weekend and Happy Easter.

If This House Could Talk

It rained all week -- very little got done on the house -- so the sun was a welcome visitor today which is Cambridgeport History Day.  There are a great number of history related events throughout the weekend...

...but my favorite is the "If This House Could Talk" tour.

The tour is created by the residents of the neighborhood who volunteer to write just a few simple interesting sentences about their house.

It could be anything about the house or its residents, past or present.

It's also a great opportunity to get out and enjoy the last of the fall flowers...

...and maybe "see" a few things you might not notice when you're walking on your way to work.

I love these old plaques in the sidewalk above some of the storm drains.

How can you not love this?

It might seem like a odd time for me to put my house on a tour of homes but when a neighbor invited me to participate, I thought it would be a good opportunity to highlight my restoration.

The tour revolves around Dana Park which is centered in the middle of the neighborhood.  A map of the 105 participating homes is available as well a variety of historical maps so residents can find their home, and former owners' names, on the old maps.

This particular map from 1830 is just as the neighborhood was being developed.  All of the darkened areas were tidal swamps along the Charles River.   These were prolific oyster beds at the time. 

All of the tidal swamps were filled, new streets were laid out and homes were built.

Many of the residents of the lower 'port say they still find oyster shells in the ground when they dig in their yards.

I love this event not only because it's easy for everyone to become involved but it raises awareness of the rich history of our neighborhood and makes residents aware that they're part of that history.

The event lasts through next weekend.  What a beautiful day it was to kick it off.

The Genealogy of your Old House, Maps

If you live in an old house, you've probably wondered about the families that lived in your house before you. Who they were, what they did for work, what their lives were like. These are just a few of the things I've wondered about my old house's former residents. Recently I've been researching my family's genealogy trying to prove or disprove old family tales of ancestors being on the Mayflower. The internet has some wonderful research tools so I wondered whether or not I could use these same tools to learn a little bit about the "genealogy" of the Urban Cottage.

The biggest hurdle is learning the names of the former residents. We're extremely lucky in Cambridge to have had a project undertaken by an assistant librarian at the Harvard School of Design to document every building in Cambridge. It's not complete but it does list some key data points which can be helpful.

The Harvard listing for my house shows a two-story structure was built in 1843. In 1842 a land deed transfered ownership from Catherine Watson to Barnes Putnam. It also shows a building tax paid by Barnes Putnam so it stands to reason that Mr. Putnam built the house (or had it built). In 1846 a house tax was paid by the heirs of William Watson so the property ended up back in the hands of the Watsons. The house is also documented on the 1854 Walling map of Cambridge which is the earliest map of Cambridge showing structures. And, finally, the house was sold by George Averill to Jennie T. Ray in 1892.

So let's take a look at maps from Cambridge and see what else they may tell us.

This 1854 map shows houses that existed at the time. Unfortunately there are no names of property owners. Even though I've marked it with a star, it's fairly easy to spot my house because it's right next to the long, narrow strip of land, a little alleyway. Today, it's the last remaining dirt street in the city.Since my house was built 11 years before this map was made, I thought it would be fun to see what the street looked like at the time the house was built in 1843. So using technology, I took the map back in time from 1854 to 1843 by editing out houses (using the Harvard database) that were built after 1843. So this is what my street looked like when the house was built in 1843. It's hard to imagine what all the open space would have looked like.

This 1873 map is the first map I can find that shows property owners. I put a red star next to my house and the little dirt street that borders the garden side of my lot.

These maps seem fairly available on the internet, for urban areas anyway. Try doing a google search for your town's/city's name and "antique" or "historical maps." All of the maps in this post, I found on the internet. If you can't find anything, I'm sure you could make a call to or an appointment with your local Historical Society/Commission. I have found the people at my local historical commission thrilled to help. I'm sure you can also get the information from your Registry of Deeds but that seems a little more daunting to me.

Here's another map of my house from 1894 (just above the red line) showing the house still owned by the Watson family. The Watsons are well known in my neck of the woods. I think it's doubtful the Watson family, who would have been quite wealthy, would have lived in my house. It was very much a working class neighborhood. So it's also important to remember when doing this research that the property owner may not be the same as the resident of the property.

It's interesting to note that this map contradicts the Harvard data which showed the property being sold by George Averill to Jennie T. Ray in 1892. Sometimes this process is like putting together a puzzle that someone's thrown a few extra pieces into. Sometimes you just have to collect and lay out all of the peices and see what you have before the puzzle will go together. Particularly when you start to look at census records, names can be mispelled and sometimes just incorrect.

This 1903 map shows Jennie Ray was the owner of the property. This makes sense if she bought it in 1892. It also appears that the property has been divided into two smaller lots. The previous map showed the lot was 3175 square feet and now Jennie Ray owns 2200 square feet and another owner right behind her has 1000 square feet. Did she divide the property?

In 1916, Jennie T. Ray still owns the property. This woman interests me for some reason. I even like her name.

And finally in 1930, we still see Jennie T. Ray owning the property. I know the family that I bought the house from purchased it in 1940. So it seems the home has transferred hands very few times over its 167 years.

So these maps provide a few names we can research to (try to) learn a little more about the people that lived here. Putnam Barnes, the Watsons and Jennie T. Ray. Next time we'll see what we can find about these people.

Can you find any maps that show who owned your old house?