History
We’ve been able to piece together the history of this house from public records, neighbors, and stuff we found during our renovations. The house was built in 1954 as a post-war subdivision, most likely by the Dale Family as they built most of post-war Woodbridge. The home was built as a solid masonry “” style house, one of the styles popular in the 1950s subdivision developments. It was built with a partial basement/crawl space with dirt floors and outside concrete walk-up stairs for access, and a pull-down ladder in the main floor hallway to access the attic space.
The partial basement contained the oil-burning heat system and hot water heater. Original heating was oil-fired hot air pushed through ducts in the walls and floors, with only the main floor heated. The original construction was three bedrooms, one bath, the kitchen, and an open dining room – living room area. There was a brick wood burning fireplace in the living room. The house had modest-sized windows in every room, including the bath, which afforded plenty of natural light. The living room was furnished with what in the 1950s was referred to as a ““.
In fact, with exception of the fireplace, the house was very much like the 1950- houses I grew up in and lived around back on Long Island, New York.
The 1970s
At some point the owners had added an uncovered deck to the back of the house, extending from both sides of the back kitchen door. Judging by the condition of the wood decking I’d estimate this was added in the late 1960s – early 1970s.
In the mid-1970s the owners converted from forced hot air to hot water baseboard heating. This would have been a major project as it involved adding a couple of hundred feet of copper piping all around the perimeter of the main floor and removing air ducts.
The 1980s
In the early-1980s the owners dug out the partial basement area and created a full basement, which included pouring new concrete along the outer walls, below the existing masonry, to extend the foundation. The basement was finished with carpet over the new concrete flooring. The heating system was extended into the basement using cast iron radiators. The finished basement was configured for two more bedrooms, a second bath, and a common area. The owners also added a clothes washer and dryer. For access befitting a finished basement the owners installed a circular staircase to the main floor, opening into the living room.
Around the same time, the owners also added central air conditioning with an outside heat exchanger and the air handler in the attic space. The air was ducted through ceiling vents into the main floor, with the ducts running across the attic flooring. When we bought the house there was a large duct pushed down through a hall closet into the basement for a single vent outlet, but I don’t know whether this was done in the 1980s or more recently. I suspect it was fairly recent, based on the poor quality of work.
The 2000s
The house changed hands in 2005. The new owner (“The Former Guy”) converted the house into a “workman’s rental” by subdividing the common area of the basement into two more rooms and converting one wing of the outside deck into a sort-of room/enclosed porch on back of the house. These extra rooms became rental living space for migrant workers.
Mali told us that for a couple of years there were as many as twenty unrelated adults living in the house at any one time. Which probably explained the thick layer of grease covering everything in the kitchen.
This owner also removed the circular staircase and installed the straight staircase using space from the one bedroom. Then he added the large bay window by taking out the picture window and enlarging the wall opening. He also cut a doorway between the two main floor bedrooms, through the one closet, apparently to make a two room suite. I’m guessing the green, blue, red, and pink color scheme was also the inspired work of this wanna-be interior designer. As a final touch, The Former Guy extended a roof over the remaining deck space, creating a covered porch of dubious construction quality.
At some point the basement walls started leaking groundwater. Judging by the mold, it must have started only a couple of years before the house went up for sale. I could never determine why the walls suddenly started leaking, but the basement was unusable when we bought the house due to water penetration.
Our Renovations Begin
The day after we closed, Winnie and I started hauling over tools and supplies to start renovations. I had already found a plumber to replace the stolen copper piping. Fortunately, between empty pipe mounts on the ceiling joists and memory, I was able to reconstruct how the piping had been routed.
I also used the opportunity to frame out openings in the walls behind several cast iron radiators, and recessed them inside the wall. This gave a few more inches of needed floor space, which was particularly helpful in the bath. Within a week we had running water back in the house, a big step forward.
We decided that, although we intended to make this house a rental, we might also want to live here ourselves someday. So, we renovated the house to be a place we would be proud to live in. We also thought that renting out a nice home would encourage the tenants to treat it well.
This showed just how much naivety we had in being landlords.
Starting Upstairs
We decided to focus on renovating the main level first. The wall colors needed to go, so we picked out a light shade of yellowish-white paint (“Sailcloth”) and Winnie started repainting. Meanwhile, I stripped out all the glue-down carpet squares in the living room, which proved to be a mistake. The glue residue remained on the oak flooring, making walking a sticky mess. I ended up covering the flooring with a heavy tarp and left it there until I was ready to refinish it. When I pulled up the carpet squares, I discovered a roughly four-square foot hole in the floor where the spiral staircase used to be. The hole had been plugged with , one-eighth inch thinner than the surrounding oak flooring which left a slight depression.
The dining area was covered with vinyl flooring. When I pulled up the living room carpet I discovered the dining room vinyl was almost one-half inch higher than the living room oak flooring. I discovered there were five layers of vinyl, with one layer of thin plywood, covering the oak flooring. The top layer of vinyl was carried over into the kitchen.
Winnie and I tore off the vinyl flooring, one layer at a time. The plywood was the base for the third-lower level of vinyl. It had been fastened down with closely-spaced wire staples and an occasional nail. As we stripped off one layer, the patterns of the next clearly revealed the era the vinyl had been laid down. I felt like an archeologist. The pattern of the lowest layer looked exactly like the vinyl flooring I remembered from my childhood of the late 1960s.
The glued-on lowest-most vinyl layer was pretty tight, no doubt compressed by the many flooring layers above it. I got busy with a scraper peeling it all off. We were left with seemingly hundreds of wire staples sticking out of the wood.
I hunted around and discovered that a radiator hose removal tool, backed up by a pair of pliers, was ideal for staple removal. Winnie had the patience to spend several days of quality time pulling out the staples one-by-one.
