Whole House Fan

We've talked about getting a whole house fan for a long time. On cool mornings I open up the house and use a few box fans in the doors to cool the house down, I can usually cool the house down enough to last most of the day without running the air. We've talked about how much quicker and easier it would be with a whole house fan. The other day we finally decided to look into it. We searched Craigslist for a used one and found on in Atlanta for $75.

It's an Emerson 5550 CFM 30" fan. The overall dimension is 42". It had been installed as an exterior gable fan and needed to be removed.

We were able to remove it in about 15 minutes, a lot easier than I thought.

I brought it home and cleaned it up. It is composed of two main pieces, the larger part with the fan and motor, and the smaller part has the louvers. These pictures are before it was cleaned. I had to use CLR on the aluminum louvers to get all the grime and corrosion off.

Next I cut out the ceiling above the stairs and framed in a box to support the fan.

First I used 2x6's to frame the opening then used 2x8's inside the 2x6 frame for the box the fan goes on.

Next I installed the louvers underneath and then the fan on top.

I still have to wire the fan up, it came with a 3-way wall mount switch. I will be installing it downstairs in the foyer. I'm also going to paint the frame that holds the louvers. It will be painted the same white trim color the ceiling will be painted.

Attic Insulation

This is one of those projects that I'm extremely glad is over. With the cold weather back for the winter I finally decided that I had to do something about the insulation. Our heating bill last year was sky high. I've already noticed some difference since I caulked the entire outside of the house but I knew we could do a lot better.

The attic was a huge mess.

It seems that over the years when the roofers would replace an old cedar shingle roof with a new one they would leave whatever dropped in the attic. There was also a ton of old coal dust. This was the worst. It has the consistency of baby power so it gets all over everything. I was completely black from head to toe for the three days it took to clean the attic out.

I started by using a large metal dust pan to scoop up piles of the debris and dumped it into a trash can. Then I would cart the trash can down stairs and outside and dump it into large contractor trash bags.

Once the large debris was removed I vacuumed up the rest with a shop-vac. When doing this it's imperative to use vacuum bags, otherwise the coal dust just clogs up the filter almost immediately.

 After three days of this hell it was finally done and I was ready for insulation. The insulation only took about an hour and a half.

I think I have close to an R-19 value right now. In a few weeks I'm going to double the amount and go to R-30.

House painting and other things...

Even though I haven't posted in over 10 days a lot has been going on here.

I finally finished laying the insulation and sub-floor for the laundry room/attic.

We also decided to hire out the scraping and primering of the house since we are running out of time before the baby is born.

It doesn't even look like the same house with some primer on it. It's about half way done now.

Last night we installed the attic stairs that go to the main attic. The main reason for this is not really storage but the huge amount of debris up there. It's full of 120 years of coal dust, bits of cedar shingles, and mortar from the chimneys. The coal dust and other debris is slowly sifting down through the beadboard ceiling and getting all over everything. The existing attic access was barely large enough for me to squeeze through, let alone a shop-vac.

Here is the opening framed out.

Here is the stairs in place.

I will clean up the ceiling and add the trim later.

This morning I painted the porch floor. It's a Valspar porch paint, the color is brownstone.

Laundry Room

I stopped working on the fence for a little bit to work on the Laundry room. I had to do this because we were quickly running out of clothes.

The first thing I did was run all the wiring in the floor that needed to be run, this includes the wiring for the overhead lights in the Dining room, kitchen, and bathroom below. With that done I laid R-30 insulation down and installed the sub-floor over it.

Here is part of the sub-floor going down:


Next I built the knee-wall where the washer/dryer will go.

I also installed the sub-panel, this will feed the upstairs rooms.


Here's a question for you Electricians out there, is this sub-panel wired correctly? The main panel is wired with a neutral ground so I added a wire between neutral and ground in this panel.

Next I hung the sheet-rock in the washer/dryer area. installed the dryer plug and vent hole after this picture.




Then I set up the washer and dryer.


This is all I'm going to do on this for now, we have a working washer and dryer and there are more pressing things to do... like maybe getting some electricity to the upstairs bedrooms. We're using flashlights to get around upstairs at night right now.

Laundry room/Attic access

Our laundry room is going to be in the attic space above the dining room and kitchen. The only access to this area was in the bathroom but the shower will be covering it up so I needed to make a new entryway into the area.

The new entryway will be from the back spare bedroom. Here is the corner of the room where the new doorway will be.

Here is the rough opening for the doorway.


Since the dining room/kitchen ceiling is a foot higher (11 feet) there will have to be a step up to get in to the laundry room. Here's the view from inside the attic.


Next I started cleaning out in between the joists, there's over 100 years of dust, coal soot, knob & tube wiring, and old bits of cedar roofing shingles everywhere.


I stopped at this point for a few reasons, first I had stepped on a 3" long nail earlier in the day and my foot was starting to swell up pretty bad, but mainly because I need to get a few things before I can lay the rest of the sub floor down. I need to get some R-30 insulation, and I need to get the sub-panel and install it first.

The sub-panel will be installed here in the laundry room and control the entire upstairs and a few of the overhead lights downstairs. I also have to wire up the overhead lights before the sub-floor can go down.

Sunroom Windows

I worked on the sunroom windows yesterday afternoon and only got 2 more done. It's very slow going, First I have to build the casing for each window, every trim piece either has a miter or a bevel cut plus I'm having to cut about 3/4" off each side of each window. Once all the windows are installed I'll go back and remove them one by one to restore them properly.



I had to stop doing that and go upstairs into the attic above the kitchen and dining room to install a knee wall. The plumbers need the wall in place so they can install the water heater. Half of this attic space will become our laundry room.


The water heater will sit where the plumbing is in front of the new wall (A new door will be opened up to the left out of the picture). I only built this small portion of the wall because at the end of it the wall will break right about 3 feet before turning back. The knee wall at that point will only be about 3' high. This will give us more room in this space.

Kitchen electrical almost done

I was out at the house again on Saturday for more electrical work but I haven't had a chance to post since then. I'm almost done with the electrical in the kitchen. Most of what's left will have to wait until the cabinets are in for me to finish.


Above is a picture of the back door that leads into the kitchen. The room beyond is the one that will be demo'd soon and then replaced with a deck.

I know it looks like the light switches are on the wrong side but I'm going to be reversing the swing on this door. There is some heavy damage where the cheap door knob is now, it appears that someone kicked it in at one point. I will be filling this in and installing a door knob and lock on the right side of the door so it swings the other way. I wired up the two 3-way light switches on Saturday, the right one will control the recessed lighting and the left one will control the chandelier. The empty spot on the far left is for the porch light I will be installing outside the door once the other room is torn down.


The above picture shows the other two 3-way switches, this is at the entrance to the kitchen from the dining room.


These are the junction boxes in the attic, I still have more wiring to do here.


As you can see, I finally got a light installed in the attic space above the dining room and kitchen. I will be opening up a door into this space from one of the bedrooms and putting down a sub floor in at least half this area for storage.

Well, that's about it for now. I cant wait until this part is over so I can finally post some less boring pictures!

More electrical work

We didn't get to spend a lot of time out at the house today but I did get some things accomplished. I worked on installing the second circuit to the kitchen. The second circuit will run the fridge, dish washer, garbage disposal, and attic light. There will also be a third circuit run, it will control the chandelier, the recessed lighting, and the under counter lights.

I ran the circuits down from the attic space above the kitchen. Why I didn't think to do this for the first circuit I don't know. It would have saved me a lot of crawling around in the dirt under the house...

I'm running the wiring through the holes that the knob & tube wiring ran through.




The last picture above is the wiring for the attic light.

I found an old Bulldog friction tape box in the attic, it was used to tape up the knob & tube wiring.



We hope to get back out there some time this weekend to finish up the wiring.

More yard work and interesting barn finds

We had a few extra hours yesterday so we went back out to Woodbury. I started clearing out the area in front of the barn. Below is a before shot of the barn area:

And here it is as of now:

I still have a long way to go back here but it's start. I started exploring inside the barn and found a few interesting things.

I'm not sure what this first thing is, I'm guessing it's part of an old tractor or some other type of farming implement. The patent date on it is June 22, 1909. Today there is a Stahl company that makes truck bodies and Stahl Headers company but they've only been around since 1946 and 1963 respectively. Anyone know for sure what it is?


And what the heck is this thing?:


I found this plinth block in the barn:

The only other ones it matches is in the main downstairs bathroom. All the rest of them throughout the house look like the one below:


It has nails in it so it was removed from somewhere. The only area that I see it could have come from is in the dining room, a doorway was closed off and turned into a built-in. There was also a few pieces of original trim in the barn but I didn't get any pictures of it.

Next I explored the inside of the house. There is an access panel in the upstairs bathroom that leads to the attic area above the Dining room and Kitchen. I took the panel apart so I could check it out.

We're thinking of eventually expanding the upstairs bathroom into part of this area because right now it's maybe 5'x8' at best. I found this ruler in the attic area, the calender on it is from Nov 1951 to Feb 1953.

I took a few pictures of the house and barn in sepia, I think they turned out pretty good.