There’s some good information on Zillow about the value of home improvements.

It shows a lot of specifics, including multiple levels (mid-range, upscale) for certain improvements, details of the work performed, and job cost and cost recouped. The numbers match what we’ve heard locally. The kitchen renovation we’re planning fits in between their mid-range and upscale descriptions and costs; some architects and builders have told us that a two-story addition with a bedroom/bathroom will add more value than just a family room; and I’ve sense that to complete the upscale window replacement (which the previous owners did upstairs only) isn’t a particularly great investment.

Whenever I hear payback numbers I wonder where they come from. We are improving the home with the intent to live in it for a while, after all, so it’s not all about resale. Zillow’s business of making this information free is appealing, but I still don’t know what’s behind them and their numbers.

Our picture is in a Boston Globe article published today about assessed home values!

I spoke to the reporter on the phone for a while and the only quote they had from me was three words, “a good deal.” But if we go with the rule “a picture is worth a thousand words” (which doesn’t even seem like a cliche in this situation) we come out pretty good.

We had our housewarming party yesterday. Perhaps the greatest benefit was that it forced us to clean out the sunroom and dining room. The sunroom that we had written off actually seemed nice for the day. Of course we actually unpacked very little so this was just a shell game of moving boxes around.

We had way too much food. But the Weber grill did well and impressed people. I think a fully-loaded grill of food with lots of smoke and flare-ups actually makes the food come out better.

I don’t think my relatives were properly impressed by condition of the house itself. That is, we got a lot of compliments on the house, but people didn’t realize how much needs be done. This may be because as a picnic pavilion on mild day (which was the situation yesterday) the house performed phenomenally. Living in my own house isn’t supposed to feel like being under a rustic shelter at the park, however. It needs to be a place where I can put Hannah to bed without losing sleep myself, and a place where I can be safe and comfortable whatever extremes of weather or other challenges the outside world throws at us. Admittedly people have lived their whole lives with more primitive shelter (and some still do), but I live in twenty-first century North America, with a sizable mortgage, where single-family homes are expected to meet to certain standards. Eventually I showed Uncle Andrew and Aunt Diane the basement with our steam boiler and some of the electrical work, and I think they started to understand.

Speaking of the boiler, we did get the heat working. A furnace tech was able to get the flueways inside the boiler cleaned out as part of the regular annual cleaning and smoke is no longer going into the basement, the smoke alarm is not going off, and the radiators all seems to be getting hot. (I’ll wait until it’s actually cold out to try and balance them further.)

Nevertheless the house supported (literally) almost 40 people without immediate and catastrophic structural failure. I’ll take some comfort in that.

I’ve started a thread on HeatingHelp.com to get advice on what to do with our old oil-fired steam heat system.

Being a software developer I feel like in some ways I can relate to these guys; in plumbing as in coding there are a lot of little internal technical details that make a system run well and maintainable that the end user never looks at. The debates between oil and gas or steam/water/air are also something I can relate to. I’d say it goes something like this:

I could make the comparison with Macs but I think central heating is more like running a server.

The electricians have started work! They came with a huge crew of maybe 4 or 5 guys and more tools than I even own. There are already new lights working in the bathroom and the spare bedroom where there were none before, which already makes a big difference–but I need to clean the bathroom now that I can see the dirt!

They used the replacement pushbutton switch I bought from Classic Accents for the bathroom light and seemed to be impressed by it, said they had never seen it and would recommend it to other customers.

It’s a good thing I hired them to replace the lights because it turns out the existing lights were a “canopy” style that didn’t have a box in the wall behind them, which one of the guys tried to explain to me is okay if that’s the type of fixture you have, but you usually need a box for new fixtures. So, I’m glad I didn’t have to deal with this surprise on my own; and I’ll know to pick up a new box if I decide to replace any other fixture on my own.

I think what differentiates real, professional electricians though–i.e., from a handyman or do-it-yourselfer–is not in how they install the fixtures but in how they fish wires through. The real electricians seems to take pride in getting new outlets in almost anywhere so you have to scratch you head, “how did they get a wire in there?”; I guess they just have the experience to know what’s behind the walls.

Yes, really. But it’s not about me, it’s about the house. We met with a couple architects last week and the main take-away is that what we thought was a lot of money, is only a fraction of what we’ll need to do what we want.

The main issue seems to be that our sunroom is on footings. Even though this space is insulated and seems sturdy, we really need to tear it down and build a proper foundation if we want to use that space as our new kitchen. My gut feeling agrees with this; footings are OK but we’ll have a much more valuable home if we do a real addition.

The good news, however, is that once we build such a foundation it’s only marginally more expensive to build it two stories up and include a master bath. I’ve thought that the lack of a master bath is the #1 reason I’d want to move someday, so this is exciting.

What this leaves open is the question of whether we try to make some small alterations, like a patio door off the living room and/or squeezing a half bath out of a corner of the kitchen, or just wait until we can do the “whole enchilada.” It’s going to be a frustrating few years if we don’t do these things in the meantime; on the other hand, why go broke making changes I’m never really going to be happy with?

(Doing some quick calculations at ELoan, borrowing the amount we need will cost about the same per month as Hannah’s daycare – so there is hope we can do what we want when we have school-age kids and still have years to enjoy it, but when the only toilet in the house is clogged who can think that long-term?)

The other take-away from our meetings is that we might as well get started on certain improvements, such as HVAC improvements, separately. This is all well and good but I was really hoping that we’d be able to turn things over to a builder for a few months, and basically just bear with the dust knowing that we’d have a nice house when it was done. Instead it seems like there is no end in sight to the cycle of missing work to make calls, get estimates, let people in and generally play part-time project manager. And I think it’s this that’s going to keep with awake with anxiety at night for at least the next few years.

I bought a Black and Decker 18 inch electric lawnmower at Sears this past weekend. There was also a 19 inch Craftsman model, which looked so similar I suspect it’s a private label model from the same manufacturer. The main difference was that the Craftsman model had a grass catcher bag included.

I was a little harder to put together than it should I have been. It’s interesting how Black and Decker has had such success at consistently being, let’s say, “average”—they walk a fine line in selling tools that do, in fact, get the job done, but no one could ever accuse of being heavy-duty or professional-grade like so much that is sold to homeowners seems to be these days.

Net result is that I have no ambition of creating a golf course, but it’s better than it was. I’ll need to experiment with how to deal with the extension cord, but I figure that’s a transferable skill; whereas maintaining a gasoline for such a small yard will be more of a hassle (not to mention more polluting). Next yard project is going to be getting some of the hedges under control, like the one that scrapes the car every time we come and go.

While I was at Sears I also picked up a Craftsman self-leveling laser level with tripod. Of course self-leveling because otherwise what’s the point? I almost passed it over because its accuracy was labels at only +/- 1/4 inch in 30 feet – but really, if the whole house is not level or something, am I really going to consider that a do-it-yourself project? It’ll be great for handing things on the wall.

All the laser levels advertise that they can make cross-hairs for laying floor tile but I can’t figure out how you’d set that up. It’s not really leveling anything, you’d have to mount the level sideways (and not on the floors since you’ll be putting tile there). Curious.

Ok, haven’t posted in a while due to weekends away, but here’s the latest on the house:

We planted grass. Just in the one corner of the yard that (from being watered by the sump pump) had turned into a blue-ribbon dandelion patch. And after about a week, it’s sprouting. Plan for next weekend: buy a lawnmower.

New flowers are also coming up in the back, which is a pleasant surprise. Still lots to trim and weed but I think it’s gradually going to come under control.

The sunroom was built over what had been the basement bulkhead, which had been sealed up from the basement side. When we moved in I pulled up the dusty carpet in the sun room and noticed that there was an intentionally loose piece of subfloor. I pulled that up and there is basically just a big hole, which I guess you could put a ladder in (or hoist up an old boiler, maybe). I’ve taken to calling it our Underground Railroad stop (although of course the house is not that old, but there are a lot of older houses nearby so it probably happened in the neighborhood).

I also realized that the sealed-up door in the basement has an octagon crystal doorknob – such extravagance for the basement! Must have been a spare at the time, but I’ll have to keep it in mind as a spare for upstairs.

I also attempted some electrical work. The outlets in our house are interesting, in that, in an old-fashioned style, they’re installed in the baseboards, horizontally. The electrical box is actually installed flush with the wall, requiring extra-long screws (not the ones that come with the outlet) to hold the outlet in the right place.

Cheryl had been having a frustrating time drying her hair because of issues with the outlet, so I upgraded it, but one of the existing extra-long screws was missing. So, it’s better than before but not finished. I also installed the dimmer switch in our room, but because of some sort of old-fashioned wiring splice in the box the, couldn’t make the dimmer flush with the wall. I think it’s time to hire an electrician—he’ll have the parts in his truck and just get it done. Moreover, I figured out that all the outlets and lighting upstairs (except the bathroom) are run on one circuit. So we’ve had some hot days outside and there’s no place to plug in the air conditioners.

Finding contractors is the hardest part of this whole enterprise, largely because it takes work hours when my time is at a premium, and because it involves larger decisions. I decided calling an electrician was worth it because we won’t make any other good decisions this summer if we’re grumpy about it being too hot. In general, though, I am trying to defer things to get started on the The Big Project, which I think will involve hiring an architect and coming up with a master plan for all the changes.

What I like most about the house is having a back yard, something I grew up with. Hannah likes to call it “the garden” and I like that term as well. Sure, it sounds a little pretentious (or maybe just British!) but I think there’s a specific architectural meaning to “garden.” The idea is to have a space outdoors for eating, playing, or just hanging out on a nice day and that’s an important feature of a house; it’s something, for example, that Moshe Safie included in the homes of Habitat ‘67 or that is talked about in A Pattern Language. Moreover we certainly don’t have a big, mowed space where you could throw a football which would really qualify as a yard!

What is new about having a garden is that there are things that grow. These purple and while wildflowers sprouted up over the past couple of days:

I think these are related to the spade-shaped ground cover that also seems to have sprouted up througout the yard; I don’t know what it’s called but I remember them (without the flowers) as being all around the house I lived in in elementary school. There is also some clover, and a lot of unmowed grass and weeds. I suppose if someone was actually mowing the grass the flowers wouldn’t have grown in.

In the category of new toys, I also got a new Weber Genesis Silver A gas grill. I bought it from Harvey’s Ace Hardware in Needham, where it came delivered, delivered, assembled, with a tank of gas, by a technician with the patter of an experienced tour guide who spent about 20 minutes explaining how to maintain it. Not the sort of experience I’d expect from the big stores. It also came with stainless steel, not the standard porcelain or cast iron, cooking grids and “flavorizer” bars. For all this it was about $100 more than you could get the same model elsewhere, but the tank of gas alone makes up a big part of the difference and having it delivered was just convenient. When we were at Yale Appliance a couple weeks ago I saw that they were also selling a Silver model with stainless steel cooking grates; I guess it’s something the independent dealers do to differentiate from the big stores.

We closed on our condo yesterday. Now I will finally have time do all those other things I’ve wanted to get to, like start a blog.