New electrical panel

Not much to talk about today, I spent the day under the house again. I installed junction boxes under the Parlor, living room, Foyer, Study, and Dining room. The dining room will also feed the kitchen and the foyer will also feed the hallway. I then ran circuits to each of the junction boxes.

Then I installed the panel and began installing the circuits.


That was as far as I got today. I have a pretty busy week ahead for work so it's doubtful that I'll make it back out to Woodbury until the weekend.

More electrical work

I spent most of the day today under the house tearing out old wiring. It's very cramped under there, towards the back there is about 4' of room but near the front that drops to about 2' or less. I'm having to crawl around on my stomach in the dirt, which has the consistency of baby powder so it sticks like crazy to everything.

I also took every outlet apart to see if it had old wiring or newer wiring so I would know how many new circuits I'll have to run. At least one outlet in each room was Knob & Tube, most of the others were very old metal conduit type wiring. All these were ripped out so new romex could be run. The two shots below are typical of most outlets in the house:



I'll be installing new boxes, new romex, and new outlets to replace all the old outlets. There are also a lot of outlets we want to add but that can wait until we have the power on.

There are a number of outlets I cant get to from underneath the house because of the old steam pipes, so tomorrow I'll be bringing my sawzall and extension cords. The neighbor is letting me use his power for this. I'll be cutting the steam pipes out of the way.




These dont look too safe. Luckily they are under the portion of the house that used to be a porch. This area will be torn down and a deck built in it's place.

Electrical work

We've finally gotten back to work on the house. We spent the day today in Woodbury, I've been working on the electrical wiring in the house in the hopes of getting the power turned on soon.

I'm installing a new 200 amp electrical panel. The old panel is a 100 amp fuse panel, there is also a second panel upstairs that I will be replacing. I will be relocating it to the attic and replacing it with a 100 amp sub-panel.

The room that this is in was going to be a sun room but we've decided to go ahead and make it a laundry room instead. Here is the wall with the electrical panel:


It was surface mounted to the wall and all the wiring was just run along the wall. The panel below the main panel it a 200 amp breaker panel and the one to the left is an alarm panel. All of this had to be removed:


This room was originally a porch so the wall is drywall over external siding. I should also mention that there is a bad leak in the roof in this room. There is a lot of mold and rot. I tore the drywall down since it was moldy and looked horrible:


I think it looks a lot better with the siding anyways. Next I found the studs and traced out the outline of the panel in between two of them, then cut the opening out:


I'm replacing the line from the meter to the panel as the old one was a 100 amp line. I went under the house to drill the holes for the wiring into the wall and found my first mistake. The spot directly under where the panel is has a brick pier. There's no way I can run the wires up into the wall from underneath and I've already cut the hole for the panel. Crap!!

What I've decided to do is run the lines up through the floor at the edge of the wall like it originally was but to then run the lines into the wall down at the floor level. I'll build a small cabinet or built-in bench to cover it up:


Wrestling four 2 gauge wires bundled together into 90 degree turns is hell by the way. This was as far as I got today. Tomorrow morning we'll be out there bright and early. There are about 6 circuits that I'll need to replace as they are cracked and brittle.

Once the downstairs wiring is in place I'll get the power turned on then the real work can begin!

Update

We haven't done anything at Woodbury house besides trying to keep the grounds maintained in the past few months. We finished the Airstream and then sold it. We've also gotten back to work at our main house, the Oxford-Boynton House.

We're hoping to complete the majority of that work in the next month or so then turn our attention back to Woodbury house.

Yes, we're still alive

Sorry for the complete lack of posts lately. We've been real busy on other things. We've painted our main house in Griffin, and we bought an old Airstream that we've been renovating.

We're hoping to be able to get back out to Woodbury soon and get some more work done.

Wedding invitation 104 years late

We went out to Woodbury today to try to get some work accomplished. We wanted to concentrate on the upstairs bedrooms. We picked out neutral paint colors because we dont want anything too drastic.

Today we worked on the front bedroom, you may remember this room as the hideous pink room, come tho think of it I dont think I ever posted a picture of this room because the color was so terrible:


Here are a few after pics:





Much better.

Tomorrow we will tackle the Master bedroom and the upstairs hallway if we have time.

After we finished the bedroom I was exploring around the house. The top of the mantle in the living room is missing and the PO stuck a 1x12 on some shelf brackets to rig up a top mantle piece. I removed it because it was so ugly and started thinking of what might be behind the mantle. It was loose and hanging from the wall so I got a flashlight and started looking behind it. At first I found nothing, I was about to give up when a small envelope wedged way down caught my eye.

It turned out to be a wedding invitation to the second owners of the house dated 1904! and it was still sealed! Here are some pictures of it:




The first pic is of the outer envelope, notice the Ben Franklin 1 cent stamp, the second pic is of the inner envelope, and the third pic is the invitation. It had a very fine piece of tissue paper inside it.

I also found this:


I wonder what store this was from and how old it is...

Antique Toilet for sale

I've decided to sell my antique toilet I bought a few years ago. It's a really nice embossed Victorian style toilet made in 1902 by T. R. & Co. The tank is oak and finished in amber shellac. All the internals are original except for the flush valve.

I hate to sell it but with the medical issues I've been having lately I could use the cash.

I've put it up on E-bay for those of you that may be interested.

Status update

I haven't been able to go out to Woodbury for a while now. I've had a few health problems that have stopped me from doing any work on either house.

I should be able to get back to work soon. When I do I'm thinking of concentrating on the Oxford-Boynton house for a little while. This doesn't necessarily mean that I wont get any work done on Woodbury house, but it just wont be as much.

Yet again more yard work

I'm beginning to think I'll never get this yard done. Here are a few more before and afters:

First the barn area. I'm still nowhere near done:

The entire area to the left of the barn has yet to be done. You can also see the huge yard debris pile that I've built up. The thinned out stuff to the right is in the meadow:

Next is the meadow:

There is still a lot to do in this area also but it's already looking a lot better:

Another angle:


I found this unusual bottle in the yard while working yesterday:


I know the bottle is newer than the mid 1800's because the seam goes all the way up the bottle and through the neck and lip.

If you look very closely at the lip of the bottle you can see that it has a notch in it, possibly for holding the cap on... maybe? The letters on the bottle are very strange, on the front it has what looks like a number "3" but with an extra part on top of it, followed by what appear to be two lower case "i"s. I cant make out the writing on the bottom of the bottle at all.

We probably wont be back out there today. I'm actually thinking of doing some work on the Oxford-Boynton House.

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.

A cool discovery and floor plans

We decided to go back out to Woodbury yesterday afternoon. I really wanted to get that Master Bedroom done. I started by removing the drywall from the ceiling, this was quite a dirty job as years of soot from the chimneys had sifted down through the beadboard ceiling and was laying on top of the drywall.


Here are a few shots of the room with all the drywall removed.




I've been using one of the other bedrooms to hold all the garbage I've ripped out of the master bedroom and main hall. Here is a pic of our garbage pile:


Once the drywall was down I took the old carpet up. As is usual for an old house there was another layer underneath, more linoleum.


This one came up very easy compared with the stuff in the hall. I just pulled up a corner and rolled the entire thing back. that was when I made my first cool discovery in this house.


A bunch of old newspapers from 1950 & 1951! They are all in almost perfect condition. All the newspapers I've found in the Oxford-Boynton house were brittle and fell apart the second you touched them, these are like they were the day they were made.

I havent had time to look through all of them yet but I did find a really cool article on an upcoming tour of old homes in Madison, Ga. Madison is loaded with old homes, most of them are beautiful Greek Revival plantations (my dream house).


The article mentions Boxwood, which is a very well known home. The gardens are beautiful, filled with boxwoods and camelias. The article talks about the woman that lived there at the time, Miss Kitty Newton. It says that every 8 or 10 years she trims the boxwoods and the entire town would come out to get clippings. Unfortunately as you can see from the picture above the bottom edge of the page is damaged so I couldn't read part of one paragraph but I was able to read the rest of the article.


I've drawn up a basic floor plan of the house. I'm using this to get a better idea of what we are going to do.



The first floor is where the changes will occur. The large area at the back of the house that is listed as the deck is currently an addition that appears to have been built in the 50's. I believe it was once a porch that was closed in. It's in really sorry shape and needs to be torn down.

At the front of the house is the current sun room. I'm pretty sure this is not original but it is very old. I believe that early on they closed in the wrap around part of the porch to make the room. If that is the case I will be opening it back up and using the windows for the new sun room at the back of the house next to the deck.

Here is a picture of the double doors for the sun room, the windows look the same:


Were hoping to get back out there in the next few days and take the trash pile to the dump and decide what to work on next.