Spring Forward

It's spring in Akron and things at the Akron almost-mansion are (mostly) moving forward.

In my last update on this project I alluded to the fact that we're spending every weekend at the house attending to the business of patching, prepping, priming, and painting.

Well, we're still doing that, one room at a time, and actually starting to see some progress.

Three rooms are pictured through two doorways. One doorway is arched and the next is rectangular. The closest room is painted yellow. The next room is tangerine. The last room is a kitchen with blue-grey floors.

My wife has determined that this house is going to cheerful, bright, and full of whimsy. I support that initiative and will point out that those efforts begin with paint selection. While I wouldn't go so far as to say we're selecting colors based on name alone, it's nice when the moniker fits the theme. Here you can see we chose Optimistic Yellow (Sherwin Williams) for the dining room, and Cheerful Tangerine (Behr) for the breakfast room. Whimsy indeed!

[A note on floors. Currently, the breakfast room has floor protection paper taped down. That paper is in place so that we don't track the chemically unknowable adhesive fused to the original hardwood floor all over the rest of the house. We found this mystery compound when we pulled up the old carpet in that room. It's likely we'll have to carpet this room again as we have identified no clean, efficient, easy, or inexpensive way to reclaim the floor. In the r/centuryhomes subreddit there are many references to the floor lottery. This phrase refers to whether or not the homeowner will be a "winner" or "loser" when pulling up existing floor coverings (carpet, vinyl, linoleum, and the like). Winners will find pristine tiles, elaborate mosaics, and hardwood floors laid out with picture frame borders under current flooring. Losers find water damage, sloppy hardwood floor patches, and apocalypse-proof petroleum-based adhesives. We have held three floor lotteries at this house, and have lost all three. We still have one more room of carpet to pull up, but I'm not holding out hope. It appears that in this house every time a covering was put over an original floor, it was with good reason.]

A room in the process of being painted is pictured. There are French windows on two of the walls. Two ladders can be seen in the room. There are tarps covering the floor.

As we finish one room, we move on to the next. I joke that if we were working on our current home, we'd be done by now; such is the number of rooms we're up against in this house. Along the way, we're learning that some rooms go more quickly than others. Rooms with lots of walls, few cracks, few windows, and few doors go the fastest. Rooms with two walls of ancient French windows go the slowest.

We call this room "The Treehouse Room" as it faces the back of the house and ravine and really does create the sense of being nestled in a forest canopy. It's striking, but also a lot of work to paint. It's not an exaggeration to say that there was a time when I wasn't sure we'd ever be done in here. I know too now why people buy replacement windows.

A bedroom with a bed that faces French windows is pictured. There is a rug on the floor, a bed in the foreground, and a door leading to an en suite bathroom in the background.

But finish we did, and it's as lovely and chill a room as you can imagine.

[A note on radiators. You might be saying to yourself, "Jeff, that doesn't look like a one-hundred year old radiator under those French windows. What gives?". Reader, you are both observant and correct. It's not a hundred year old radiator. This room is the room that had the cracked radiator that needed to be replaced. We couldn't find a good vintage match and so went with a contemporary unit instead. It does the same work as the original, but takes up less space. That cracked radiator also made this room one of our floor lottery losers. The water damage is quite severe and it's likely we'll see carpeting in here at some point too.]

A dumpster is pictured at the end of a driveway in front of a backyard full of trees. The dumpster is a 10-yard model, blue, and almost full. 

It wouldn't be spring without  a good spring cleaning, and for that we rented a 10 yard dumpster to haul away the leftovers of a year's worth of construction debris, building materials, and packaging, as well as the last bits left by the previous owner. Most of that waste had been staged in our garage, and with all that out of the way, we were able to do a proper clear-out there. The results offered a huge psychic boost as we now have a garage that can be used for its intended purpose (as opposed to a refuse collection site).  

A semi-attached garage is pictured. It is a two car garage with both door open. It has been cleared out recently. A shop vac is pictured in the foreground.

I'll admit I'm a garage person. I've spent plenty of time in garages and have a special affinity for the place they hold in our homes and lives. They're like kitchens in a way, but for frustrating and dangerous mechanical things that don't always work right. They support our outdoor lives and pursuits the way a kitchen supports life inside the house.

From that perspective, I feel like the garage at the almost-mansion could merit a post all its own. Saving that for another day, I'll simply share that when this garage was born it was very fancy indeed. Evidence suggests that like all the rooms inside the house, the garage had a finished plaster ceiling. 

A large, cast iron wall mounted radiator is pictured in a garage featuring ceramic tiles on the walls.

It also had beautiful finished structural tiles running halfway up the walls, a poured concrete floor (with a sewer drain) and RADIANT HEAT!!! Yes Reader, this was a heated garage! In 1925! The decadence! The audacity! The waste! Honestly, for all my assertions of its mansioniness, this house isn't really all that fancy, but this right here, this is some Gatsby ass shit!!!

You can see the radiator is currently not connected and so doesn't provide heat now, but don't surprised if this bubbles up as a potential project in Phase Two or Three (or maybe Phase Four). 

Related, I'm looking at those plaster walls above the tiles and thinking that could be the perfect support for a series of antifascist murals I might like to paint. Obviously I've never created a mural (antifascist or otherwise), but I feel like the time is right. I've always had a soft spot for visionary environments and the quirky things people do with their home, so why not? Plus, if we're doing all this in part to provide our granddaughter with a childhood full of old house charms and familial eccentricities, I need to get on the eccentricity part.

A tree is pictured having fallen at the top of a ravine. The tree was a large wild cherry tree that broke off at about 8 feet up the trunk.

Further afield, we lost a tree. Early on, when we were preparing to meet an arborist to triage the trees on our property, I counted 38 specimens on site. That is, 38 trees that were of the size and shape and maturity that they could count as trees. Those included oaks, maples, hemlocks, Japanese maples, and other assorted types. We had 6 near the house removed (tall hemlocks and yews as I recall) and that left 32. A couple of weeks ago saw that number drop to 31 when the wild cherry tree on the edge of the ravine split and toppled.

Oddly, given all the severe weather we've had this spring, this was NOT weather related. The trunk had become so damaged by insects that eventually it couldn't support its own weight. I'm sad as this was the only cherry tree we had here. I'm also sad that it didn't just topple into the ravine. Instead it fell into our neighbor's yard. Nothing was damaged thankfully, but we will need get a crew out to clean it up.

An orange sunrise is pictured over the Cuyahoga Valley. In valley below you can see the Cuyahoga River.

While we're looking outside, I'll offer a quick recap of the geography of this house. It faces east on the street side, while the backyard faces west and provides a view above the Cuyahoga Valley and across Cascade Valley Metro Park. That puts the house in close proximity to the Cuyahoga River, the City of Cuyahoga Falls and the High Level Bridge (also known as the N. Main Street Bridge) that connects Akron to Cuyahoga Falls.

This bridge is notable not just for its height, but also for it's spectacular views across the valley. It's not uncommon to see people walking across the bridge around dusk to take in the evening's sunset. On a recent weekend, I managed to get up early for a run and was able to capture the sun coming up across the valley in what turned out to be a beautiful day. The trees had begun to leaf out and it was hard just then not to believe in all the promises of spring.

[A note on the High Level Bridge. Apparently it's going to be replaced in the coming years. I'll need to look over those plans to see what's in store. I'd love to see something that's bike and pedestrian friendly, and maybe even include an observation area.]