The Accidental Tourist

It appears we're "magnificent."

Every year, our town's local historical society puts on a walking tour of historic houses and public buildings. It's a fundraiser for the society and a pleasant day out for architecture buffs or snoopy neighbors. Our house was on the tour a few years ago, and we got plenty of visitors. Then we took a few years off because the organizers like to keep things fresh by mixing up the inventory of houses every year.

It looked like we weren't going to be on this year's tour, either. But then the tour posters started appearing around town and they looked... familiar.

"Hey, honey! Are we on the Heritage Home Tour this year? Because it sure looks like they're advertising our house."

We called the number at the bottom of the poster and introduced ourselves. "Hi, we're from the house in all of your advertisements. Would you like to, uh, include it on your tour?"

The short answer was 'yes.' I'm not sure why they didn't invite us to participate in the first place, but once we offered they were happy to add us to the agenda. The only trouble was, they'd already started printing handouts, tickets, and the tour map. Could we please send them a few photos and a quick history right now, while they tried to stop the presses? Uh, sure.

Within a few days, we noticed that the ads had changed slightly to say there were now 14 houses on the tour, up from the 13 listed previously. The picture stayed the same, but now the accompanying text described the "magnificent Hart Mansion" as one of the attractions.

It's funny to think what might have happened if we hadn't been included at the last minute. Would ticket buyers have come up to our door, assuming that we're on the tour? After all, it's the only house shown on the poster. It's hard to miss. Why would you advertise a home tour with an image of a house that's not on the tour?

The other complication was the potential sale of the house. It's listed for sale and there's a big For Sale sign in the front yard. Is that okay? And what happens if the house actually sells before the day of the home tour? Neither turned out to be a problem, so everything is going ahead as planned.

Kathy and I are happy to be included in the tour one last time. We don't know who will eventually buy this house or if they'll want to share it. This may be the last time it's open to the public for a while.

One Door Closes, Another Opens

It's time for us to sell the house.

That's not a bad thing, and we're certainly not doing it for bad reasons. Nobody lost a job; we didn't run out of money; someone wasn't suddenly taken ill. There was no disaster or mishap that triggered our decision to leave, it just felt like good timing. We'd like to be closer to the rest of our family, and, coincidentally, we feel like we've completed 95% of the restoration work that we set out to do. This just seems like the right time.

The house is now for sale through Sotheby's International Realty (it has its own spiffy listing site at www.TheHartMansion.com), and we've already had a number of interested people come through for showings. From the looks of it, we should be moved out before Christmas.

Our real-estate agents arranged for a photographer, a videographer, and a drone pilot to take all sorts of photos and video over several days. They even created a "Matterport" virtual walk-through, which is pretty cool. You can pretend to walk though the house and see every room on all three floors. I imagine it's especially fun with a VR headset, but you can see it with a normal web browser, too.

Now Kathy and I have to keep the house clean all the time in case someone wants to take a tour. That's not a big problem, and it gives us an excuse to go outside and play tourist in our own town. It's also proved to be good business for the new pub down the street.

If These Walls Could Talk

As part of our kitchen re-do, we replaced the stainless steel backsplash with copper tiles. It's just as sanitary, but a lot nicer to look at. Once the sinks, counters, and cabinets were removed it was easy to pull off the big sheet of stainless and hand it over to a guy with a truck who does recycling.

That exposed the moisture-resistant drywall, and the original bead board behind it. I removed the drywall and carefully pried loose a couple of pieces of the bead board where I needed to get behind them. I numbered each board with a piece of tape so they'd go back into place.

The bead boards are pretty beat-up, and many have round or square holes cut in them for no apparent reason. My guess is that the plumbing has moved around a lot, and the old holes are evidence of old pipes long removed. They're also painted two different colors, and I can't see a lot of logic to where the color changes.

We didn't need to make any substantial plumbing changes, but I did take the opportunity to clean up some old pipe that was in the way.

This shows a section of old galvanized pipe behind the kitchen wall that isn't being used anymore. Presumably, it was the drain from the original kitchen from waaay back. It hasn't been used in decades; it certainly wasn't connected to anything when we bought the house, and it's not wet inside.

It's hard to tell from this photo, but the pipe is wider at the bottom than at the top. From the drain plug down, it's 2" galvanized pipe, but from the drain upwards it's 1-1/2" pipe.

That means it's a "dry vent," a pipe that only carried water downwards, not from anything above it on the upper floors. And since there's no fixture connected to it now, the entire run is empty and abandoned. I'd considered removing it completely... but why? It doesn't hurt anything and it's a nice reminder of how the house used to be plumbed.

What we did do is cut a small section out of the pipe to remove the protruding drain plug. The missing section now has a short run of ABS, with a coupler at one end to adjust for the differing diameters.

And here's some of the new copper backsplash.

Kitchen v1.1

Around the end of February we decided to tweak the downstairs kitchen a bit. Nothing major, but we found that the arrangement of the sinks, cabinets, and worktop weren't optimal. So we took a few weeks off of work and made it all better.

Initially, we'd located all the major kitchen appliances -- sinks, hood vent, refrigerator, etc. - exactly where they'd been before when there was a restaurant here. We figured (a) that a professional restaurateur would know the best place to put everything, so we'd just follow their lead, and (b) that health codes and/or city ordinances might limit our options. Those both turned out to be untrue. The arrangement was awkward, as we discovered over a few years working in that kitchen. Not terrible or anything, but not ideal, either.

Before...

Turns out, we can swap the locations of a few items and make a big difference without costing a lot of money, changing the plumbing, or needing a permit. In actual fact, the changes we made were small, but they paid off in increased efficiency. We're really happy with the result.

Our downstairs kitchen is basically divided into two rooms, one larger than the other. The small room used to have the main work surface and a small sink, while the large room had the big sink. Swapping the two sinks was pretty straightforward: just reverse the sinks and leave the plumbing in place. Same drains, same hot/cold supplies. Just swap the hardware. Simple!

...and after.

Same goes for the under-counter cabinets. Instead of a small L-shaped work space in the small room, we now have a much larger, straight counter in the large room. Much better! And again, no structural modifications required. Just unbolt the cabinets and move them a few feet to the right.

The photo above shows the old L-shaped counter top and cabinets. The problem we had with this arrangement was that the sink cut the work surface in two, so there was never a large place to roll out dough or to place a full-size sheet pan. After the change, this space became the triple-basin sink.

In the bigger room, the space that was occupied by the big sink is now one long butcher block counter. All the cabinets that came out of the small room are now lined up under the new work surface. Same cabinets, just arranged differently.

The one tricky cabinet was the L-shaped lazy Susan that used to be in the corner. I disassembled it and made it into one straight cabinet using all the same pieces. Corner cabinets have funny hinges, however, so we had to source new hardware for the cabinet doors, but that wasn't a huge deal.

Here's a look at the new work surface, where the big sink used to go. It's a hard maple Boos Block, made to commercial NSF-certified quality. (There's even an NSF logo "tattooed" into the side of the wood.) Strangely, it's about the same total size as the old L-shaped maple counter, but it's far more useful because it's not broken up into smaller pieces. I love it.

Under the Big Top

"I see bug people."

The B&B next door to us got tented the other day, which affected us in a small way. The exterminators needed to get into our backyard to assemble the tenting, and they needed to partially disassemble the fence between the two properties. During all of this, the B&B was vacant, of course, so we had no neighbors for a few days apart from the fearless guys climbing all over the roof of the buildings next door.

The big, brightly colored tent lent a festive atmosphere to the neighborhood. It's made out of square pieces clamped together with oversize clothespins. First, the installers put padded scraps of carpeting on the chimneys, roof corners, and other sharp projections. Then they draped the tent over the roof and down the sides, finally weighting it down at the bottom with big sandbags. Because there's no easement between our property and theirs, they needed to get into our backyard to stretch the tent across the back side of the B&B. That's no big deal, and the installers were very nice about not disrupting anything or trampling any plants.

There are two places where our community fence abuts their building, however, and the installers had to cut this away to make room for the tent. (Otherwise, the tent would have draped over the fence, which isn't airtight.) They'd warned us about this a few weeks ahead of time and, frankly, we were thrilled. We've never really liked that fence very much and we were kind of looking forward to replacing it anyway. The opportunity to tear it down and split the cost of rebuilding it suits us just fine.

The whole process took three days, which seems pretty normal. There's one day of tent assembly, one day of gassing the interior, and one day to disassemble it all again.

Their building is only two stories tall in most places, but it's almost as high as our three-story house because it's slightly uphill from us and it's built on a slightly taller foundation. We can look across to their roof, or slightly down onto their second-floor guest rooms. Even so, it's pretty high up and I'm impressed that the installers can scamper about on that roof with no trouble. It's a long way down. but maybe the big padded tent material would make a good cushion.

All Quiet on the Eastern Front

The first thing we noticed was the parked cars. There weren't any.

We live next door to a bed-and-breakfast inn that's been there for 120+ years, so we're accustomed to neighbors who come and go every few days. The B&B itself has no parking lot, so the guests generally park on the side streets around the building, often near us. It's not a problem -- we can always find a place to park our own cars -- but it does lead to an ever-changing array of cars nearby.

Then, suddenly, they were all gone. Hey, where'd the cars go?

Oh, yeah -- that's right. The owners of the B&B had warned us that exterminators would be tenting their building for a few days. We'd have to leave our backyard gates open so they could get access, and we'd want to trim back any bushes or flowers that were growing directly against the structure. We did all of that, but we missed the obvious side-effect: there would be no guests staying in the B&B while the tenting was gong on. No guests, no parked cars. 

The springtime weather has been bright and sunny, and it's nice to sit outside in the morning with a cup of coffee, a peek of the ocean, and no breeze. Normally, we'd observe folks at the B&B doing the same, but not today. It's all quiet on our eastern neighbor's side.