Our bathroom redo is now rolling along nicely after being dormant for nearly a year. It is fitting that on the anniversary of the original demolition of the walls, we should pick up steam again and, uh, actually finish it. One of the small jobs i have been working on is finding a place that does metal plating in Chicago. There are tons of shops, but most of them are only B2B. So far i have found 2 places that will do small runs / retail sales. We haven’t used either place, so it isn’t an endorsement yet, but one of these places will be getting a Hello House seal of approval (we hope).

Al Bar Wilmette
These folks seem to specialize in restoration of antique home hardware and have many finishes to choose from. They also do powder-coating (many bike frames have this coating now) which is a less environmentally offensive alternative (ie. not chemicals) to plating. These people might be a good choice if you are not in Chicago since it sounds like they do business via the webpipetubes / real mail. They specialize in this sort of work and even specify on their site to include the mounting screws so they can give you new plated screws to match. My guess is, their attention to detail is worth paying for. I was quoted $40 for 1 knob and $35 for a backplate.

Griffin Plating
They will do retail sales but have a $75 minimum which is fair. The price is affordable: i was quoted (and keep in mind this is very rough, over the phone estimate) about $10 a doorknob or escutcheon plate. I think this may be the more economical option if you have multiple pieces you need redone.

Even with these prices, it is still 1/2 the price of buying new vintage-styled hardware from Rejuvenation. Stucco House and Petch House have both recently had quality and sticker shock, respectively, about plating.

We have been doing research on multiple rooms, and as posted before, there aren’t too many photos of “working class” rooms. Typically you see photos from magazines or advertisements that are a little fancier that Jane + Joe Steelworker could afford (Hey! Just like now-times!). I am personally obsessed with minimal, functional, and average simplicity-type fixtures, woodwork, decoration etc. but as with most average and common things of the past, they generally go undocumented.

Thanks to 1912 Bungalow, we (the House Blogs nation) have a nice little collection of period kitchens. Here is the original post: Historic Kitchens and their Flickr page with the whole series of Historic Kitchens.

One of the reasons we aren’t done planting is we lost a few astilbe and two pieris japonica to drought last year. And by drought, I mean we didn’t water them enough.

Everything’s gonna be different this year, because this week I’m installing our new Dripworks irrigation system. This is a modular, DIY system. It’s totally customizable and also amazingly inexpensive. For $85, I got more than enough supplies to keep our eight garden beds nicely watered. They even have a free design service to help you figure out what components you need (though I didn’t take them up on that).

Here’s one of the things we need most. It’s called a Shrubbler. It’s basically a mini-sprinkler with a maximum spray of 18″ or so. I’m going to put one under each of our thirsty trees and shrubs. These are adjustable, so we can make sure each plant gets just the right amount of water over its entire root structure. Pretty sweet.

So, what did $85 get us?

• 100 ft of mainline tubing (for getting from the spigots to the beds)
• 100 ft of soaker line (for watering throughout the beds)
• 100 ft of smaller tubing (for connecting the shrubblers to the main lines)
• 15 shrubblers (for keeping our shrubs and trees happy)
• 40 transfer barbs (for every place the tubing branches off)
• 30 goof plugs (for plugging unused holes and ends of tubing)
• 3 quick-connect couplers (for each place the tubing will cross a sidewalk—so we can disconnect the tubing and tuck it out of sight when we aren’t watering)
• 100 U-shaped staples (for keeping the tubing in place)
• a bunch of connectors and plugs (for connecting the tubing to the spigots and keeping the lines clean)

Seems like a great deal to me.

Pics of the installation coming soon. (Plus a review later in the season, once we know how it works.)

I have to admit, i’m not a fan of Angie’s List. I’m a fan of the concept, and the reviews, and the site looks ok, but in practice we have yet to hit upon a great contractor. We have had some pretty big jobs with very mediocre to sad results.

So it gives me the greatest joy, up there with coke floats with chocolate ice cream (oh yes i dih-id!), to say we had a great experience with a contractor: Northwest Plumbing. Fred from northwest was a top-notch professional who made beautiful art of our pipes.

There was talk at Hello House of a dishwasher (not hiring, but purchasing a machine) being installed for great energy and time savings. That of course leads to Jack falling down, breaking his crown, bringing Jill with him and the bucket, well, and hill, all needing to be replaced. So it started off simple: let’s get a dishwasher; and ended up needing a new hill: let’s replace all the plumbing. We are currently redoing the bathroom too so it isn’t a bad idea.

Fred was one of the few contractors we talked to that didn’t scoff at our desire to “olden-up” our kitchen or try to make suggestions about what we should do instead. His estimate was also reasonable and he followed through with phone calls and mailed things when he said he would. Fred did amazing work in about a day and a half … by himself! He replumbed our whole house (1 floor of a Chicago bungalow) and even fixed a few things that we weren’t expecting. Northwest Plumbing is basically him and his brother and they do all the work themselves.

Don’t hesitate to call them, and be persistent if they don’t get back to you, they are probably making coppper art in someone’s house!

Northwest Plumbing - Fred
4375 N Elston Ave
Chicago, IL 60641-2147
Phone: (773) 283-7414

Mysteries in my life bother me. A lot. They don’t bother me in the way that an unresolved movie intrigues me, or how you might see a single shoe on the side of the road. I know that they will live happily ever after (once the snake digests them) and that raccoons typically just get full after the first leg.

What i am talking about here is two-fold: why on earth people do they things they do the places they live and “how was this originally.” This obsessive mindset is incompatible with sane restoration.

When we moved in, we had a few small clues that there was once a fireplace in our house. The most obvious ones were that most bungalows have them, and the fireplace-shaped mark on the wall, hiding behind the covering paper:

Dramatic pics after the jump!

The trail ran cold beyond that. We knew there was one, but had no idea how it looked. For the last 2 years we have had fits of research that have revealed very little. We bought books (which are worthless because apparently all the photogenic bungalows, like people, are in California), we went to the Historical Society (also worthless because old time people didn’t want to waste expensive film on taking pictures of fireplaces), we posted on messageboards, and we quizzed our neighbor, Lil, whose house is identical to ours and had lived in the house 80+ years. She said she still had the bookcases that flanked the fireplace, but her dad took the bricks out ages ago. We weren’t allowed into her house, so the answer was 20 feet in front of us, behind a closed door.

Sadly Lil passed away a few weeks ago when her kitchen caught fire. It was a sad and confusing time for us. The light in the situation is that we got to meet her lovely family (again, photogenic Californians, who probably live in a bungalow!) and we have tried to help with the house situtation as much as possible.

Last Friday, while seeing the progress on clearing out 80 years of stuff, we noticed some shelves in a corner. It was like a spotlight had shone down. The fireplace shelves! There they were! We had finally found the key to a mystery that was vexing us from day 1:

This discovery solved nearly all of our fireplace problems. It fixes the question of what to do where the wall dips between the window and stained glass (the left shelf is shallower), how tall they should be, what they looked like, how they were constructed, how integrated they were, and on and on. Luckily they should be very simple to recreate. So, as you might have seen previously, we revealed the stained glass, now all we have to do is some woodwork and masonry. Simple!

Here is a terrible mock-up of what the room may look like w/ the new fireplace:

If you have advice or pictures of your own, we would love to see them. Thanks.

After we had the exterior limestone accents stripped last year, we couldn’t resist adding urns to the front stoop. Who knows if the house had them originally? Not us, and we don’t care either. We just love them.

(These urns came from Bungalow Avenue, which I hear is going out of business. So sad!)

We decided to replace it with a solid cypress, Craftsman-style door made by Vintage Woodworks. It’s got a screen insert and a glass insert. Even better, there’s molding that covers the insert so it looks like a permanent part of the door. (No crappy little metal clips showing.)

Jef stained, sealed, and installed the door.

Ahhh, that’s better.

These babies have drop-in screens and window panes, so we never have to take the storms themselves off. They’re pretty nice and actually do their job; the house was noticeably warmer this winter.

The prep and installation in pictures:

We were pretty lucky to find healthy, intact wood under the vinyl. The paint is Sherwin-Williams’ “Contented.”

That’s about as far as I can get without removing the woodwork or lighting the wallpaper on fire. When I do take it apart, I’ll need to strip off the rest of the paint, clean the wood with denatured alcohol, stain it, shellac it, and reinstall it.

Pretty amazing difference, huh?

So this week, I’m staining, shellacking, cutting, and installing the cap and shoe for our living-room and dining-room baseboards.

For over a year we’ve had just the base up, and it looks very decent. (Much better than the bare plaster peeking out below the wallpaper!)

Here’s the new cap after being stained and shellacked:

It’s poplar, with walnut stain and lemon-yellow shellac, which gives it a warmer tone.

Still to do:

• Stain and shellac the shoe (3/4″ pine quarter-round)
• Remeasure the living room, dining room, entry, and hallway walls
• Cut it all
• Install it all

Easy-peasy, right? Just a nice, relaxing vacation.