An Opening

Let me salute those of you who live in an apartment. Your living arrangement is much better for the planet. I’ve lost count of the amount of construction debris we’ve sent to the landfill in the 20 years we’ve owned this old house. I filled another dumpster yesterday re-opening the wall between the two front rooms and restoring the house to its original floor plan.

Should you want to attempt this yourself, Fine Homebuilding has a nice article on how to contain dust during demolition. It involves lots of plastic, an argument for not screwing up old houses in the first place. Their tips worked:

  • Wall off the area with plastic sheeting.
  • Put construction debris in plastic bags (the big orange store sells extra thick garbage bags for this purpose).
  • Vacuum like there’s no tomorrow.

Here’s what it looked like before (note the cracked drywall sheets that, I discovered, were barely attached to the studs):

During:

And after:

I don’t have a picture, but I removed the studs after confirming that the old header was adequate (it’s not a load bearing wall). The next step will be to fix the plaster (I’m hiring this out). When the plasterers are done I’ll frame the opening with molding I’ll fabricate in my woodshop to match the doorways in the rest of the house.

A tip of the hat to the folks who do this dirty and dangerous work every day.

Coppicing and Rapping

The Idler magazine has a profile of woodsman Ben Law and the house he built in Prickly Nut Wood just outside of Lodsworth, West Sussex. Modeled on a Medieval hall, Law built the house, in part, of coppiced wood. In the interview Law says, “I cut the trees down in winter they don’t die but re-grow from the stumps. This is an ancient woodland management system and as well as supplying a cyclical crop of timber poles it increases biodiversity supporting many species of butterfly and dormice.”

Law has a website, books and lots of videos. Here’s a tour of his house:

Valee: Rapper and Homesteader
A New York Times profile of rapper and DIY enthusiast Valee notes the musician’s DIY tendencies which include the skillful use of a sewing machine, building koi ponds, carpentry and electrical work. The article contains this gem:

Backstage at a private show for New York University students, Valee’s D.J. and producer Rio Mac got in on the cheerleading, too, urging his friend to hype up the college crowd. “I want you to stick your chest out,” he said. “You’re like a sex icon.”

Valee demurred. “I’m an old man,” he said. “A big weekend for me is Home Depot and a Caesar salad.”

Sounds like one of my weekends. I suspect Valee is like some of the artists I’ve worked with in the past who know that if you want to do something right you’ve can’t just buy it off the rack.

Our New Open Floor Plan

Framing the new/old closet.

Here at Root Simple we specialize in backpedalling, flip-flopping and outright hypocrisy. Within a few months of some big critique or pronouncement you can guarantee that I’ll be doing the very thing I railed against. Flipper fences? First I dismissed them then I built one. Double digging? We wrote about it in our first book then disowned the practice. No doubt, within a fortnight I’ll be back on Facebook and Instagram posting my avocado toast lunches.

How about open floor plans? In the click-baitiest blog post ever, I declared them a “death trap.” Then the good natured Will Wallus of the Weekend Homestead came on the podcast to gently defend open floor plans. Naturally, I’m spending this month making our house, gasp, more open. Let me explain.

When I installed the floor in the living room in the aughts I discovered an opening that used to exist between our living room and what we use as our bedroom. Back in 1920 this house was a one bedroom with a kind of sitting room open to the living room. I’ve also long know that the closet used to have a window in it that was covered up when a previous owner split it in two.

Here’s the existing floor plan, which was probably configured this way sometime in the 1960s:

And here’s what it will look like when put back to its original configuration as a one bedroom house:

Note the more open floor plan with the room on the left opening into the living room:

Rather than try to do all the work myself I’ve decided to do only the carpentry. I’m going to leave the drywalling, painting and electrical work to professionals.

Having tricked out the garage into a full woodshop, I can now mill my own lumber to the exact dimensions used in 1920. Over the weekend I replicated the window frame in the closet that was damaged when they covered it up. Now I’ve got to scavenge up a window.

When we’re done the house will be back, almost, to the way it was when constructed in 1920. When we first moved in back in 1998 we had to do a lot of expensive foundation work and basic repairs. This year we’ve set out to do a final restoration push. Call me reactionary, but I’ve discovered with this house that things work better when restored to their original materials and configuration. And sometimes that means opening up a wall!

Should you need remodeling/resotoration advice, I highly recommend the Fine Homebuilding website

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