The Garrett Wallis House

So this is a shot of the existing staircase from the front room.  The diagonal bracing you see above the door opening is a job-built truss.  Today we would use a doubled 2x12 or a piece of engineered lumber, a beam built up out of veneer and glue.  Look at the bottom of the diagonals, how they are notched into the bottom 2x4, or plate.  It is crude and precise at the same time.  The notches were made with one saw cut and show hatchet marks where the waste was removed.  Today in the very rare event that a carpenter needed to build a truss on-site, all the connections would be made with nails.  There is an aversion to any kind of joinery among framers, since nails come out of gun and joinery takes time.  And the solid header would be stronger and faster to make, over a short span like this. But it is lovely, I think. We are still planning to replace the stairs.  Stairs are all I do at work anymore and when I look at these I get a little...

Well, we have to admit: it's been a tiny bit harder to stay up-to-date with blog posts than we thought it would be. Sorry for the radio silence... We've been busy finalizing all of our plans over the past 6 weeks or so, getting really detailed about the placement of structural columns and beams, plumbing, toilets, sinks, walls, doorways, windows, pipes, electrical outlets, etc. etc. so that we could submit our final plans to Richmond Heights (the municipality that we live in, for the non-St. Louis people) and get our permits to begin construction. Oddly enough, you don't need permits to take things apart, just to put them back together! All of these various different systems are really interconnected, so at moments, we found ourselves a bit paralyzed, stuck in a complex -- and sometimes circular -- web of decisions to be made. But, we are feeling good about where we landed (and are confident that a million other decisions-to-be-made will reveal themselves in due course). W...

We have been in planning mode for a few weeks -- we're at a juncture where the messy and satisfying manual labor of demolition is largely complete, and now we need to finalize some of our design and assembly choices that trickle down to influence some of the plumbing and foundation work that we need to do next. The result is that we've been doing a lot of thinking, sketching, researching, and getting input from different friend-experts and contractor-experts -- so we haven't benefited from the endorphins that visible progress provides... ah, well!  We'll share more updates on our process and plans later. In the meantime, we wanted to share a few more artifacts that we found during the demolition process! **** Throughout the house, newspapers had been stuffed into cracks over the years to prevent drafts. The first of the newspapers we found capture one of the most incredible historical moments that we could have imagined -- this paper from April 29, 1939 (just about 5 mo...

Harmony reigns in the Walrett household…perhaps because we are too tired for anything else? You might remember from an earlier picture that during our original demolition blitz we left in the 2 nd floor ceiling lath.   And went to some pains, really, to remove only the plaster, kind of shaving it off with a spade instead of just knocking it all down. So naturally this weekend we took it out.  I climbed up in the attic and knocked most of it down from above to avoid being showered in soot, shingle granules, and yes, the several squirrels who had made a final resting place of our home.  Not technically a code violation, but as a good-faith gesture, we addressed it.  (Sorry for the bad resolution, it was a nasty business and I didn't want to stop for pics.) I had been hoping to avoid this process because the lath was retaining the attic insulation, which no matter how filthy was still insulation, right?   And we could just insulate on top of it to reach our ...

Well, if not for the pandemic, we would have been returning from our honeymoon on Wednesday of this past week. Nathan would have spent the month of April in England at a  cabinetry school ; we would have met in London and traveled on to Vienna to visit Nathan's aunt, then to Berlin to see friends, and finally to Greece to stay in the family home of another dear friend.  While we are grieving this postponed trip -- made all the more present by the google calendar events that auto-populated on my calendar to mark our various flights (apparently these automatic calendar events don't delete themselves when a flight is cancelled...) --  it's wild to think that if we had been able to go on our trip, we would only just be beginning our work on the house. As it is, we not only got an early start, but also benefited several weeks when we were able to completely dedicate ourselves to the house project. That all being the case, we are looking forward to rescheduling our trip wh...

Well I thought I had better get an entry in early, before everyone gets too used to Danielle’s chipper style. I wanted to call our blog “7307 Lindbergh: Wrestling with an Angel” but D said no. Without an explanation. Sheesh. This is a big project. Not crazy, not unrealistic…but, big. I felt sobered when I took a look just now at the “before” pictures. They make it look like a perfectly fine house to begin with. So, uh, why did we just decide to spirit away a third of the overall mass of our dwelling as purchased? Turns out there are a lot of good reasons. Here are some of them. Removing all the plaster in one swell foop permits us to… Stop worrying, forever, about rotten ceiling keys and collapsed plaster ceilings. NOT embark on the plaster-repair learning curve. Choosing our battles. Make all the ugly dusty mess now, at once, and never again. Our proposed changes to the floorplan are evolving as we learn more about the space, and I don’t want to re-enter the dem...

After spending some time planning (and recognizing that we will have to learn and plan as we go), we started our first actual "cut" into the house. We decided to remove the radiators (the house had 4 different HVAC systems when we bought it: a gas furnace, radiators/boiler, and two heat pumps) to allow for more flexibility with the floor plan, and to use a more energy efficient heat source (though we do love the feel of radiant heat). Nathan removed all nine radiators in about 4 hours, surprising both of us with how quickly they came out. He pried the sections of the radiators apart, which allowed him to remove them from the house in small pieces -- which is good, as a whole radiator can weigh about 500lbs. Behind this radiator in the master bedroom, we found a really beautiful combination of old wallpaper, layers of paint, and water damage from over the years. And, here are some pictures of the removal process! Nathan built a ramp out of the back of the ho...