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The Faller HO Swiss Lake House is a Masterpiece of Mid-Century Modernism

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Posted by SeeYou190 on Thursday, December 31, 2020 10:23 AM

ATLANTIC CENTRAL
the caulk colors never match

I bought three very expensive tubes of "color matched" caulk, from the same manufacturer, that was supposed to match the tile grout in my bathroom.

It did not match. It was also not easy to work with.

I scraped it out and just used white Alex Plus.

-Kevin

Living the dream.

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Posted by ATLANTIC CENTRAL on Thursday, December 31, 2020 6:28 AM

Ed, if you buy HardiePlank prepainted, your warranty on the paint finish ends the first time you repaint it. That's obvious.

If you buy any of the primed products, you need to paint it to have a warranty, within 90 days of installation if I recall.

The prepainted product is not the best way to buy/install the product. The lapped siding gets caulked like wood siding, the caulk colors never match, no matter how careful you are it is hard to not scuff the prepainted finish during the install. Then what do you do? Have ugly touch up spots?

Hardie offers it prepainted because some people want it that way, not because it is the best way to install the product.

I've put this stuff on a lot of houses over the last 25 years. In fact painting it is one of Hardies advertising points, that you can change the color if you change your mind, unlike vinyl which is "final" when it comes to color. 

Sheldon

    

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Posted by gmpullman on Thursday, December 31, 2020 1:50 AM

Lastspikemike
Hardie plank is just fibre reinforced cement board. It has very little structural strength.

I had a greenhouse built adjoining the house. I wanted a good, solid and moisture-proof surface on what was formerly an outside wall. I knew the greenhouse was going to be damp and hot most of the time.

I chose Hardiboard textured sheet. When I bought it they offered a 4' x 10' panel, I don't know if they still carry that? It is dead-flat. I painted it. Indifferent Didn't know I voided the "warranty" by doing that!

In eleven years it hasn't shown one bit of wear, fade, buckle, cracking or mold.

Lastspikemike
Construction litigation is something I do. 

Why does that not surprise me Whistling

Warmest Regards, Ed

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Posted by BATMAN on Wednesday, December 30, 2020 11:59 PM

SeeYou190
I don't have a fireplace so I don't have a horse in this race, but I can't stand to see a big screen TV over a fireplace.

The big TV in the living room is a perfect height for serious TV watching and I agree, TVs over the fireplace are horrible. That being said the TV in the family room which is part of the kitchen has the TV over the fireplace, however, that is where all the dogs are and it is a gong show as far as trying to watch anything so it doesn't matter to me as I rarely watch anything in there. We also have a big screen in the master BR and another in the guest room if I really need to escape.Laugh The mega sound system is in the LR though.

Brent

"All of the world's problems are the result of the difference between how we think and how the world works."

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Posted by ATLANTIC CENTRAL on Wednesday, December 30, 2020 10:09 PM

Lastspikemike

Hardie plank is just fibre reinforced cement board. It has very little structural strength.

Basically, it's the stucco version of drywall.

Wavy substrate will get you wavy Hardie plank.

Paint it and you void the warranty.

Construction litigation is something I do.

What are you talking about? HardiePlank comes primed for field painting or painted.

No smart person buys it prepainted.

I have been installing HardiePlank since before they even offered it primed or prepainted.

The pictures of my house, that is the 1997 paint job with Sherwin Williams Superpaint. Those pictures were taken just a little more than a year ago.

https://app.photobucket.com/u/carrollhome/a/bfdbd701-abf4-4d5f-bb20-786bbc5599c9

How many houses have you installed HardiePlank on?

Sheldon

    

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Posted by SeeYou190 on Wednesday, December 30, 2020 10:03 PM

BATMAN
My mother-in-law is a very vain person that is horrified the formal living room has a big screen TV in it

I don't have a fireplace so I don't have a horse in this race, but I can't stand to see a big screen TV over a fireplace.

This seems to be very common practice on house remodels up north.

-Kevin

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Posted by ATLANTIC CENTRAL on Wednesday, December 30, 2020 9:57 PM

So if any of you old house lovers want the whole tour:

https://app.photobucket.com/u/carrollhome/a/bfdbd701-abf4-4d5f-bb20-786bbc5599c9

And, the Maryland and Pennsylvania Railroad ran right behind this house. The house is less than a block from the Ma & Pa Station which still stands in Forest Hill, MD.

Sheldon

    

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Posted by Doughless on Wednesday, December 30, 2020 8:57 PM

ATLANTIC CENTRAL

Wavy HardiePlank? they don't know what they are doing, or they are installing it over some kind of sheathing other than wood (plywood or OSB).

HardiePlank is rated to be nailed at studs and can go over various types of foamboard/composite sheathing, but building a house out of that stuff is crap no matter what kind of siding you put on it.

Vinyl side will "last" longer than 20 years - but, by then it looks like crap, it is brittle, it wil not come clean, it generally cannot be repaired if something happens to it, etc. Some people have taken to painting it and the paint industry is laughing all the way to the bank.

I see lots of people living with it for a long time, and I see lots of others around here having it redone.

I now live is a brick veneer rancher built in 1964, sold as a rock. Not just brick veneer on the front, brick all the way around, with wood clapboard gables and wood sofit trim, all still in good shape.

When the trim needs painting again, I might replace the wood with Hardieplank and Azek then it would be trouble free for my lifetime and then some.

Just to be clear, when me and my people do Azek and/or HardiePlank, we paint everything after installation, even if Azek trim is staying white, it gets painted with Sherwin Williams Emerald paint, for a consistant look and UV protection.

Sheldon 

 

Yep.  I've seen it look wavy.  Don't know why, waves in the sheathing, twisted warped 2xs causing the waves carried all the way to the hardiplank?  I think its great stuff, but sometimes the final product just doesn't look like I expected.  

I've seen 40 year old houses with press board siding that look better.

Yeah, the vinyl siding will fade, and it can't be matched with new.  Patch work looks terrible and some folks live with that for a few years.  I know better than to hire a house painter to try to remedy that.  They have companies that do some sort of plastic coating spray, which makes sense, just not sure if it really works.

Full brick is less maintainence for sure.  We have stucco.  Real stucco, but it still needs to be painted frequently if just to fill in the hairline cracks that develop, and could get bigger if left unattended.

Homeownership can be a labor of love.  My love has waned a bit after these past few years.  

 

- Douglas

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Posted by ATLANTIC CENTRAL on Wednesday, December 30, 2020 7:56 PM

Wavy HardiePlank? they don't know what they are doing, or they are installing it over some kind of sheathing other than wood (plywood or OSB).

HardiePlank is rated to be nailed at studs and can go over various types of foamboard/composite sheathing, but building a house out of that stuff is crap no matter what kind of siding you put on it.

Vinyl side will "last" longer than 20 years - but, by then it looks like crap, it is brittle, it wil not come clean, it generally cannot be repaired if something happens to it, etc. Some people have taken to painting it and the paint industry is laughing all the way to the bank.

I see lots of people living with it for a long time, and I see lots of others around here having it redone.

I now live is a brick veneer rancher built in 1964, sold as a rock. Not just brick veneer on the front, brick all the way around, with wood clapboard gables and wood sofit trim, all still in good shape.

When the trim needs painting again, I might replace the wood with Hardieplank and Azek then it would be trouble free for my lifetime and then some.

Just to be clear, when me and my people do Azek and/or HardiePlank, we paint everything after installation, even if Azek trim is staying white, it gets painted with Sherwin Williams Emerald paint, for a consistant look and UV protection.

Sheldon 

    

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Posted by Doughless on Wednesday, December 30, 2020 6:01 PM

ATLANTIC CENTRAL

 

 
Doughless

The hand built custom house built here in Georgia in 1994 has been horrible.  And anything made of wood rots in this humidity after about 10 years. 

 

 

The humdity has nothing to do with it. The wood available today is farm grown, very quickly, and is not rot resistant. Nobody with any real knowledge of construction is using wood outdoors anymore.

120 years ago houses were built from "old growth" lumber which had plenty of natural rot resistance. I'm not writing a book here, so look it up if your interested.

BUT, that does not mean you need to settle for cheap vinyl siding and crappy vinyl windows, cardboard doors, and lick and stick stone......

PVC trim lumber and moldings, commonly known by the brand name AZEK, cement board siding, commonly known as HardiePlank, and a host of other products look and feel like traditional materials and will last way longer than vinyl siding.

That big blue house I posted a picture of, it still has lots of original wood trim with no rot. But the clapboard siding is cement board - fire proof, rot proof, and holds paint so well the paint job lasted over 20 years.

The problem with modern tract home construction is not how it performs when new, it is the fact that in 25 years when it does start to wear out, the only solution is peel off all that crap, put it in a land fill, and put more on. Not very "earth" friendly.

That 120 year old house I just sold has NEVER put a roof in a land fill, and olny put wood siding in a landfill once. Most of what we did put in a landfill while restoring it was safe and biodegradable.

The cement board siding I put on it will last at least 60-70 years, maybe longer, and will only need painting every 20-25 years, mainly for appearance.

The things people should know before they buy or build a house......

Sheldon

 

 

I didn't mean the ambient humidity per se, but the morning dew being so heavy it runs down the pane and onto the wood sill every morning and into the wood if not kept caulked.  Cheap 25 year old wood windows with bad E rating creates more dew in our heavily AC'd homes here in GA.  And the trim that creates little pretty coves and such tends to trap the rains.  It can rain almost every afternoon in the summer just because of the humidity rising like convection.

Nice 2 x 10 joists laid every 12 inches for a sturdy floor.  Except the nails come loose after about 10 years and the nice floor is ruined by squeaks.  Gluing and SCREWING the floor to the joists will be a demand of mine with any house build going forward.

Around here, I can't even get a repair guy to screw it.  We've had bathroom subfloors redone because of bad plumbing (when "custom" built) and they always whip out the nail gun.  Tsk Tsk.

In the burbs of Indy in the 1990s to about crisis time in 2008, towns grew from 15 thousnd to 50 or even 80 thousand.  Most new growth was a sea of vinyl siding, with several large regional builders and the long time family owned builders building the same product. 

I have not seen a sea of dumpsters holding stripped off vinyl siding that failed.  Replacement come from the occasional hail storm, or sometimes an owner wants to have the only "real" sided house on the block.  Vinyl looks cheap, but my experience being around thousands of houses for 20 years is that it holds up just fine.

Before 1990, a lot of those tract homes were built with T-111 siding...textured plywood.  And that stuff did fail after so many years.  But, just go to the lumber yard and get a $50 4 x8 piece, prime it and paint it, and it was good for another 15 to 20 years.

Most new builds in these areas now use the hardiplank siding.  Installers still seem to get those waves in it though, just like what contributed to vinyl siding looking bad.

But anyway, even if it fails, I'm not sure why they would take that stuff to the gneral landfill.  Part of the efficiency of petroleum based buidling products like vinyl siding , windows, shutters, and asphalt shingles is their renewable recycleabilty.  Just melt them down and stamp new ones from the same material, provided its properly collected in the first place.

But these houses are definitely architecturally and beauty challenged if not thought out.

In hopefully the 20 good years I have left, me spending my time on labor, or money paying for others labor, on maintaining and replacing house stuff is going to be minimal.  That's for folks in a different stage of life, IMO.

More time and money for trains.

- Douglas

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Posted by BATMAN on Wednesday, December 30, 2020 4:45 PM

York1
To me (but not to everyone) a formal living room and a formal dining room are just not useful to me in modern home living.

My mother-in-law is a very vain person that is horrified the formal living room has a big screen TV in it and is decorated with Vancouver Canucks everything and is hockey central. The very nice dining room table has a 5' x 10' sheet of plywood on it to accommodate all our friends that show up for hockey night. Having the perfect wife means the train room stays which means the formal living/dining areas are the centre of the action. My MIL has a formal living room that I have been in twice in 25 years, it is most uninviting, not a Canucks beer mug to be seen anywhere.Laugh

Edit; Oh ya the family room is for the dogs/puppies. The house works for everyone.Laugh

Brent

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Posted by ATLANTIC CENTRAL on Wednesday, December 30, 2020 4:39 PM

York1

Kevin, I'll buck the prevailing trend and I'll agree with your daughter.  I would like the outside look of the older home, but I would like the modern interiors with open spaces and more usable space.

To me (but not to everyone) a formal living room and a formal dining room are just not useful to me in modern home living.

 

John, I would respectfully submit that the typical 1900 Queen Anne floor plan is nothing but open spaces usually connected by very large doorways (often with pocket doors for when you don't want open spaces), and these houses are easily modified to modern lifestyles without gutting them and loosing all the original features.

You want to see open spaces, I will send you a private message.

Sheldon

    

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Posted by York1 on Wednesday, December 30, 2020 4:32 PM

Kevin, I'll buck the prevailing trend and I'll agree with your daughter.  I would like the outside look of the older home, but I would like the modern interiors with open spaces and more usable space.

To me (but not to everyone) a formal living room and a formal dining room are just not useful to me in modern home living.

York1 John       

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Posted by BATMAN on Wednesday, December 30, 2020 4:32 PM

I bought this house with MRR in mind. I was single and had no plans to get married.

The one thing I do not like are the fake wood chimneys and gas fireplaces, but that was something I was willing to put up with and in the end, a gas fireplace in the trainroom is a better choice. The roof is almost 6000 sqft and I did put a steel roof on as those big trees can drop massive branches and a steel roof made it bomb proof.

We have upgraded it over the years, putting much better everything in it. The siding is real cedar and considered high end by the realtors that visit. The windows were/are crap and will be replaced soon.

I bought the place on how useful it is/was to a single guy that wanted a trainroom on acreage. In the end, however it measures up on the hoity-toity scale doesn't matter as it has been ridden hard for the last 25 years and held up well.  The bulldozers are coming this way and it will be gone in a few years and replaced by something three times the size.

Brent

"All of the world's problems are the result of the difference between how we think and how the world works."

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Posted by ATLANTIC CENTRAL on Wednesday, December 30, 2020 4:26 PM

Doughless

The hand built custom house built here in Georgia in 1994 has been horrible.  And anything made of wood rots in this humidity after about 10 years. 

The humdity has nothing to do with it. The wood available today is farm grown, very quickly, and is not rot resistant. Nobody with any real knowledge of construction is using wood outdoors anymore.

120 years ago houses were built from "old growth" lumber which had plenty of natural rot resistance. I'm not writing a book here, so look it up if your interested.

BUT, that does not mean you need to settle for cheap vinyl siding and crappy vinyl windows, cardboard doors, and lick and stick stone......

PVC trim lumber and moldings, commonly known by the brand name AZEK, cement board siding, commonly known as HardiePlank, and a host of other products look and feel like traditional materials and will last way longer than vinyl siding.

That big blue house I posted a picture of, it still has lots of original wood trim with no rot. But the clapboard siding is cement board - fire proof, rot proof, and holds paint so well the paint job lasted over 20 years.

The problem with modern tract home construction is not how it performs when new, it is the fact that in 25 years when it does start to wear out, the only solution is peel off all that crap, put it in a land fill, and put more on. Not very "earth" friendly.

That 120 year old house I just sold has NEVER put a roof in a land fill, and only put wood siding in a landfill once. Most of what we did put in a landfill while restoring it was safe and biodegradable.

The cement board siding I put on it will last at least 60-70 years, maybe longer, and will only need painting every 20-25 years, mainly for appearance.

The things people should know before they buy or build a house......

Sheldon

 

    

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Posted by Doughless on Wednesday, December 30, 2020 4:00 PM

BATMAN
You mean like this? Sorry, it's all I could afford with my high school education. Real brick on a wood frame house and the crawlspace still has the extruded foam on the walls. I'm still a dead man. Have you checked out Vancouver real estate prices?  My picky wife was happy enough with it though, she still married me after she moved in. Fake house.

Before our mods tell us to move along.....

For 20 years I lived in a fake house in Indiana.  The suburb I lived in grew in the 1990s and early 2000.  Nothing but tract builders building simple homes, some some with a few choice options allowing them to be called "semi custom" homes.

Poored concrete basements...a partial basement was free if you built in January when the ground was frozen and the market slows.  Silent floor engineered joists.  OSB flooring GLUED and SCREWED to the joists (no nail squeaks).  Basic vinyl windows.  Basic vinyl siding with a choice of about 6 colors, 3 of them a variation of tan.  Full brick front in front of wood frame (ya don't have to paint brick....so its good for something).  Vinyl shutters that probably cost 30 bucks a piece at Home Depot.  Trim boards made of rough sawn (read...no time spent sanding) cedar.  Standard 25-35 three dimensional shingles.

It was a cookie cutter.....architecturally challenged...... house. 

In 20 years, we spent no money on maintenance or repair.  Zero.  Nothing fell apart.  Nothing rotted...nothing to rot.  Paid somebody $200 dollars to paint the shutters on the fancy brick front after 18 years of the plastic fading.   Replaced the sump pump, the HVAC, and of course the carpeting, as those things wear out after a while.

I love pretty houses. 

But I'll never OWN another house unlike the national-builder tract house we had in the low cost Indiana suburbs. 

The hand built custom house built here in Georgia in 1994 has been horrible.  And anything made of wood rots in this humidity after about 10 years.

- Douglas

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Posted by BATMAN on Wednesday, December 30, 2020 3:27 PM

Lastspikemike
Brick or stone facing is a particular bugbear of mine. Wood frame requires no brick or stone. Hanging a real full depth brick wall on an angle iron sitting on the concrete foundation wall is just so pointlessly out of place. By all means build a brick house but don't build a fake house.

You mean like this? Sorry, it's all I could afford with my high school education.Laugh Real brick on a wood frame house and the crawlspace still has the extruded foam on the walls. I'm still a dead man.

Have you checked out Vancouver real estate prices?  My picky wife was happy enough with it though, she still married me after she moved in.Laugh

Fake house.Surprise

 

Brent

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Posted by Doughless on Wednesday, December 30, 2020 3:16 PM

-E-C-Mills
No doubt, tough to build.  However, it may be possible with careful thought to orientation and function, one could incorporate passive heating and cooling into an arrangement of the boxes, insulation a must.  But yeah, a very industrial look. Personally I prefer the craftsman /  prarie type of look to a custom home but with a contemporary twist.  Natural materials and selective masonry, a site built home that works with its surroundings rejecting the summer sun and collecting the winter sun.  Features that will allow warm air to naturally rise, exhaust, and self cool in the summer.  Something like this, with passive solar features. http://www.deepgreenarchitecture.com/images/passivesolar/passive-solar-model-big.jpg  

When I was a teenager and wanted to be an architect, I did my senior English paper on passive solar houses, researching the stuff you speak of.  That was about 1980.

Are people building that stuff for real, and does it actually work? 

I mean, you know, without incurring similar heating and cooling bills as if the house was a simple well insulated box.

- Douglas

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Posted by Doughless on Wednesday, December 30, 2020 2:49 PM

Shock Control

 

Not sure how drunk the handrail installer was, but code probably would say those posts need to be verticle and not at 90 degrees from the sloping railing.

Looks like they may have been installed by Alf and Ralph Monroe from Hooterville.

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Posted by SeeYou190 on Wednesday, December 30, 2020 12:35 PM

Shock Control
Erected stooopid looking Greco-Roman columns on either side of the front porch.  Talk about kitsch.  

My family bought a brand new ranch house in Gainesville, Florida suburb up-scale neighborhood in 1971. It was a 2,500 SF brick ranch house on a 3/4 acre lot, and the porch had four of these columns on it.

Yuck.

-Kevin

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Posted by Shock Control on Wednesday, December 30, 2020 12:24 PM

I am a strong proponent of interior and exterior remodels that are stylistically consistent.  Things can be upgraded in a way that still reflects the period and aesthetics.

I live in a mid-century modern neighborhood, and since the pandemic, I've had lots of time for long walks and explorations.  It is so sad to see what various owners over the years have done to these houses, lots of bad 70s and 80s remodeling choices. 

Our own home had both good and bad upgrades over the years.  The terrazzo was all covered with ugly tile.  We restored the terrazzo in the bedroom suite when we moved in, and recently restored the terazzo in the kitchen/living room/dining room. We still have to bedrooms to go.

There was a house on our block that was untouched by time:  terrazzo floors, original bathrooms and kitchen.  It was like a time capsule.  The owner could have sold it as-is, and would have made more than his asking price.  There would have been a bidding war.

Instead, he gutted the place and remodeled everything with generic stuff from Home Depot.  I talked to the workers.  They said it made them sick to destroy something in such perfect shape, but they were paid to do a job, so they did it.  

Another thing that cracks me up is mid-century ranches on which an owner, in the post-Dallas and -Dyntasty era, erected stooopid looking Greco-Roman columns on either side of the front porch.  Talk about kitsch.  

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Posted by ATLANTIC CENTRAL on Wednesday, December 30, 2020 12:13 PM

SeeYou190

 

 
Shock Control
Do her interior renovations reflect the exterior period/style of the house?

 

No, the interior of the house will be 100% modern and contemporary.

Before they sold their roofing business near Orlando a couple of years ago, they lived in a brand new luxury community and really loved the interior fo their house, but hated the neighborhood and architecture.

They moved to a small town in Illinois and bought the biggest house in town that was in poor shape with the plan to do exactly this.

The exterior will be beautifully restored as a Queen Anne should look, but the interior will reflect their lifestyle and preferences.

Right now the basement is being excavated a few feet deeper so the finished basement rooms can have eight foot ceilings.

She has asked me not to share the in-process pictures with anyone, but she has only sent me two, so I guess she is not sharing with me either.

They also bought the house behind them and tore it down to have a huge back yard. They plan to buy every house on the block as they become available and eventually rebuild the entire street. They live within driving distance of an affluent community if Wisconsin, and hope they can sell to people that work there.

When finished, the house will be a four bedroom five bathroom home with an attached two car garage and a carport on the side. It already has the carport, I guess it was for carriages when the house was built.

From the sidewalk no one should be able to detect any of the changes.

-Kevin

 

The sad thing is you can make old house function well for today's life styles without gutting them and loosing all the history and details.

I have done it to a long list of properties, not just my house.

Sheldon

    

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Posted by SeeYou190 on Wednesday, December 30, 2020 12:02 PM

Shock Control
Do her interior renovations reflect the exterior period/style of the house?

No, the interior of the house will be 100% modern and contemporary.

Before they sold their roofing business near Orlando a couple of years ago, they lived in a brand new luxury community and really loved the interior fo their house, but hated the neighborhood and architecture.

They moved to a small town in Illinois and bought the biggest house in town that was in poor shape with the plan to do exactly this.

The exterior will be beautifully restored as a Queen Anne should look, but the interior will reflect their lifestyle and preferences.

Right now the basement is being excavated a few feet deeper so the finished basement rooms can have eight foot ceilings.

She has asked me not to share the in-process pictures with anyone, but she has only sent me two, so I guess she is not sharing with me either.

They also bought the house behind them and tore it down to have a huge back yard. They plan to buy every house on the block as they become available and eventually rebuild the entire street. They live within driving distance of an affluent community if Wisconsin, and hope they can sell to people that work there.

When finished, the house will be a four bedroom five bathroom home with an attached two car garage and a carport on the side. It already has the carport, I guess it was for carriages when the house was built.

From the sidewalk no one should be able to detect any of the changes.

-Kevin

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Posted by BATMAN on Wednesday, December 30, 2020 11:43 AM

hon30critter

 

 
Lastspikemike
House "restoration" reminds me of classic car restoration.  Nice idea but not at all rational.

 

Thank goodness that not everyone is entirely rational!

Dave

 

Yes

I wonder if restoring old locomotives is not rational? Or old people for that matter.Laugh

Brent

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Posted by tstage on Wednesday, December 30, 2020 11:18 AM

hon30critter
Lastspikemike
House "restoration" reminds me of classic car restoration.  Nice idea but not at all rational.

Thank goodness that not everyone is entirely rational!

Dave

Amen to that, Dave!  And not all modern construction can hold a candle to the craftsmanship found in some older homes.

https://tstage9.wixsite.com/nyc-modeling

Time...It marches on...without ever turning around to see if anyone is even keeping in step.

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Posted by Overmod on Wednesday, December 30, 2020 11:02 AM

Lastspikemike
You cannot restore a wood frame house, only slow the deterioration.

But the same thing could be said of anything else 'restored' -- particularly railroad equipment built of certain types of steel: MP54s and GG1s coming particularly painfully to mind.

My experience with Hudson River Heritage and rebuilding Soldier's Fortune alone indicates that you can, in fact, cost-effectively 'restore' wood historic fabric.  (The original roof framing in the 1756 part of the latter house is partially framed in tree branches... and remains so behind the 'improved' plastering and new physical systems we installed in the late '80s.)

I successfully saved a number of wet-rotted panels by carefully removing the worst of the internal sections, carefully jigging for straightness, and baking dry, disinfecting, and soaking in "wood hardening" material -- the result is still accurately dimensional, and more than technically "historic fabric" in the sense that any painted wood is, but will never, ever suffer rot issues again.  Cost was not particularly excessive considering what would have been needed to replace 'in kind' with new material and fabrication.

The main part of the house was assembled by (we presume) carpenters who worked for the owner's shipping line in the 1850s -- it is all carefully adzed and joined with dowels instead of metal fasteners.  Even in areas where the siding had failed over the years (yes, some of it had been carefully caulked and recaulked to 'close the gaps between the boards'!! Surprise)  this was solid after ~130 years, and this on little more than a dirt foundation with brick footings.  

A more difficult restoration comes with longer neglect.  The Richardson house on Lily Pond Lane in Easthampton had a kitchen set on 4x4 cedar posts ... many of which had in fact rotted and sagged, so the kitchen had a particular drunken tilt.  This was fixed by fitting temporary supports, cutting and facing the posts to be 'jackable', and then very carefully and progressively doing small coordinated lifts over a few years until the structure came back level.  Elsewhere in the house, there was settlement not as easily fixed -- one notable thing was that the lintel between two of the main rooms, a solid piece probably impossible to replicate today, had cold-flowed into a visible warp.  I wouldn't be sanguine about where pulling that string would lead you structurally if you chose to 'gut' in rebuilding, although the last I heard, some of the warp had in fact relieved itself with continued proper jacking. 

Please note that generally speaking commercial structures are not renovated unless some nutter decides they have cultural value.

Well, sometimes it does.  Take the cast-iron facades in downtown New York, for example, or some of the tin ceilings in the South.  Some commercial buildings are no less worthy of preservation than residences ... provided they are subsidized, or still serve the necessary commercial purpose when 'historically preserved'.

Part of the problem is that, like certain PRR steam locomotives, commercial building was often done to a price, with what might be significant corners 'cut' to ecomomize on construction or maintenance.  That can cause the most interesting problems to develop at times -- we had several "historic buildings" actually collapse in downtown Memphis, mercifully none so far when inhabited.  YouTube is full of videos that show reconstructions or restorations that 'go bad' -- sometimes, I think, pushed a bit to get around the letter of historic-preservation do-goodery.  

But there was one example of a colonial house in the Princeton area, which was slated for demolition as part of a campus expansion unrelated to education (ISTR it was for one of the convention complexes built out toward Forrestal) -- the house was sold to someone from east Tennessee, who had to wreck out the plaster (agonizing at that decision was!) but carefully took down the framing, numbering the boards, and has the whole house in safe, climate-controlled storage pending reerection.  It will be just as good, and I expect will have at least as much 'life' in it, when rebuilt as the past 250-odd years. 

Modern construction, even of wood frame, is far superior to original stick built in-place wood frame. Engineered joists and multi lam beams are far superior to 2x10 solid wood. Insulation, weatherproofing, you none it and it's all far better than it used to be.

It is ... but so, too, are the manifold corners to be cut with both the parts you can see and the invisible structural detailing.  B&S was the only builder in our areas who bothered to bend the little tabs in the door strikes so there was no rattling play with the door closed.  And my wife's cleaning company was the only entity that did that, even in "luxury" custom home construction, in the Memphis tristate area...

 

I am perhaps a little bitter about "modern construction" since a college friend of mine built his dream 'architect-designed' wood-framed house in Canada a few years ago, incorporating a number of the mod cons described above.  He had a small fire develop, which caused the main portion of the house to collapse totally within 10 minutes, wiping out the entire family at a stroke.  That simply didn't happen with correct older construction.

I also remember a great moment in expedient construction when we got a new (and attractive) secretary who was studying for her real-estate license, and I took her over to the first spec townhome we were building in Green Acres Place phase II, the result of careful and extended conference between the client and a couple of B&S staff (including one of the owner's daughters).  I was astounded to see what looked like a 30' manufactured truss attached with the mother of all nailplates to another, roughly 15' truss, with no intervening support.  I said "I had no idea you could do that sort of thing and get away with it -- must be really good modern materials".  Then I mentioned this casually to the construction superintendent, who went over and came back screaming: the client had objected to a little column in the floor plan between the living and dinette areas, and the helpful daughter had simply red-penciled it out ... without remembering that houses have more than two dimensions...

House "restoration" reminds me of classic car restoration.  Nice idea but not at all rational.

Did anyone ever say either was rational?

On the other hand it can be nice when at least a 'sop' to historic preservation is made.  Edwards Hall at Princeton was completely gutted and a new cast-concrete dorm structure erected inside the shell -- but it still looks historic from the outside, unlike some of the recent witch-hat or Brutalist buildings elsewhere.  We had a lovely Gothic church on Union Avenue that was to be demolished for a Chick-Fil-A: part of the facade was preserved and the parking lot/drivethroughs arranged around it.  On the other hand, it's surprising what little regard commercial ventures have for preserving really well-constructed historic mansions in good shape that couldn't be effectively replicated today at any reasonable price... and then we could get into the landmark-law action surrounding the years between the Penn Station demolition and the save-Grand-Central actions in the late '70s.

Cars are right up to the minute. Residential building trails far, far behind. Why? You cannot import a house.[/quote]But you can, and do, import many of the critical framing and detail systems, and the software to do CAD/CAM to set it up.  AVG and ArchiCAD being two particularly good large-scale examples, and "any particular" frameless cabinet door hardware in small.

It is also possible to print reinforcement structure or make panels for Shotcrete-consolidated panels for house construction -- the latter letting you effectively frame a 7900' house in the dry in less than a week's time, to a full custom plan, with modular utilities 'framed in' correctly.  (Habitat for Humanity built a few examples using that construction in the mid-Nineties, and they were the only structures for blocks around that survived Hurricane Andrew when it came.)

It does have to be said, though, that just as with cars some of the 'innovations' and developments in house construction are Not Always Progress.  One great example was the version of 'plastic' premise water piping that was designed along the model of house wiring -- little individual 1/8" lines run from a manifold to individual plumbing 'devices', letting you work on something like a leaky faucet by simply 'closing the breaker valve' at the labeled box.  This was the niftiest thing since sliced bread ... until you installed it in typical toothpick-and-cardboard house framing, or worse, in a building with light steel framing, and actually turned the water on...

  • Member since
    November 2009
  • From: Farmington, NM
  • 383 posts
Posted by -E-C-Mills on Wednesday, December 30, 2020 10:32 AM

Overmod
 
-E-C-Mills
Now, here's one that maybe a clever modeller could bash together

https://www.dezeen.com/2017/09/26/splayed-shipping-containers-joshua-tree-residence-james-whitaker/?fbclid=IwAR0rDMVLH4ANcJ1DXDYDFw6xqYSaJVw0IPPTrzDuKVz0tVHbKNNRYhER3Vo

Not sure I would want to live in it but it sure does look cool.

 

Anusingly this is sited like Fallingwater, three-quarters of a century more 'postmodern'...

 

Here's the original concept, and a reference to another 'container-based' home by Patrick Bradley:

https://www.dezeen.com/2015/03/26/james-whitaker-affordable-workplace-concept-cluster-shipping-containers-visualisations/

The first thing that came to mind is how much this reminds me of Miesian design language: 'industrial' tropes as metaphor.  What was that house on the Fox River where grinding the welds in the girders 'perfect' cost as much as the erection?  It's not about containers but the "vocabulary" ISO standardization and widespread shipping familiarity evoke.  That the actual structure likely has to be ridiculously overbuilt with fancy structure and seals as with most Gehry buildings, and likely as ridiculous to heat, cool, or indeed live in as the Incinerated House, is pretty much beside the point...

 

No doubt, tough to build.  However, it may be possible with careful thought to orientation and function, one could incorporate passive heating and cooling into an arrangement of the boxes, insulation a must.  But yeah, a very industrial look.

Personally I prefer the craftsman /  prarie type of look to a custom home but with a contemporary twist.  Natural materials and selective masonry, a site built home that works with its surroundings rejecting the summer sun and collecting the winter sun.  Features that will allow warm air to naturally rise, exhaust, and self cool in the summer.  Something like this, with passive solar features.

http://www.deepgreenarchitecture.com/images/passivesolar/passive-solar-model-big.jpg

 

 

 

  • Member since
    December 2016
  • 554 posts
Posted by Shock Control on Wednesday, December 30, 2020 10:02 AM

SeeYou190
 My daughter has her 1905 Queen Anne completely gutted, all four stories worth!

Do her interior renovations reflect the exterior period/style of the house?

  • Member since
    December 2016
  • 554 posts
Posted by Shock Control on Wednesday, December 30, 2020 9:54 AM

Lastspikemike
House "restoration" reminds me of classic car restoration.  Nice idea but not at all rational.

If you have a one-of-its-kind classic, it is worth restoring.  We have a few Frank DePasquale homes in our mid-century neighborhood, and if someone were to buy one as a tear-down, people would freak.  

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