Jason Whong: Renaissance Man-in-Training

Because I am going to insulate the walls of my house this year, I wanted to see if I could get a copy of the blueprints, or at least find out for sure which year the house was built. I also wanted to find out if my house was a home constructed from a kit purchased from Sears, Roebuck & Co. They sold house kits from 1904 to 1939. Mine most closely resembles a Fullerton in size and layout.

So, today I did a lot of walking in circles. It was pretty fun.

I started at the County Clerk’s office. Someone helped me look up the property in the County’s records, and she said the house was built in 1900, which would not make the house a Sears home. I asked if the record was actual or approximate, and she said that I should ask the City tax office because that’s where they got the record from.

I walked a few blocks to city hall. In the city tax office, they confirmed for me that the construction date often says 1900 when assessors and property owners don’t know the date of construction at the date of the last assessment. I asked if they had any building permits on file, and they sent me to the Code Enforcement office.

At the Code Enforcement office (which I drove to, because it was on second street), I learned that they only have records going back to about the 1990s, and any records from before 1973 were lost in the flood. So there would be no official way to learn of the construction date through them.

They suggested that I go to the tax office, who suggested that i go to another tax office, which was closed from noon to 1 p.m., and I arrived at the door at noon exactly. So I went back to the County Clerk’s office, this time to ask about mortgages. I wanted to know if the builders of the house had recorded any mortgages on the property, and if so, whether Sears was the Mortgagee. I found nothing there, but I did decide to look up the original deed written for the Harpers when they took possesson of the property, after it had been subdivided from Miller’s farm, from back in 1889 in the Liber of Deeds:

Neat, huh? Unfortunately, I was still no closer to knowing when the house had been built.

So I made one more stop, this time at the Chemung Valley History Museum.

We looked at a bunch of photographs of houses belonging to people whose last names began with H. It would have been neat to see an older photograph of my house, but since my house is tiny, nobody thought to take a picture of it and give it to the historical society.

We also looked at the city directory, which was a bit like a phone book, except it was written for a time when nobody had phones. It was a hardcover book, and listed names and occupations by residence. It also listed residences in order, based on if you were traveling down the road away from the city center, so you would know what the cross streets were.

It turns out that the nomenclature of our street has been somewhat controversial over the past hundred years. When we moved in, it was Collins Street. Then the city replaced all the street signs with one that said “Collin Street”. Apparently, 90 years ago, it was also known as Collin Street. I didn’t bother to check how long it was before the street became Collins Street.

On a hunch, I found the house in the 1936 directory. The librarian suggested I go by fives until I found a time when it was not in the directory, so I went all the way back to 1916 before i found that there was no 603 Collins between Baty and South. Then I moved forward until I learned that the first time my house showed up was in the 1920 directory, which the curator said was published in Spring of 1920. Given what I can guess about lead times for publication, and how snow is not good for construction, it leads me to believe that the house was actually built in 1919.

Unfortunately, I can not vouch for the provenance of whether this is indeed a Sears home just yet, because I have not read enough about the subject. I am planning to pick up a book about it, so I can read more. For now, I have a decent idea of when the house was built, which is not that far off from what the structural inspector said. And while it was built within the time frame of the Sears Modern Homes catalog’s publication, as well as being really close to the rails needed to deliver such a kit, I have a feeling I actually live in a knockoff of a Fullerton.

Erin and I took the opportunity this weekend to catch up on some housework. We washed every dish we could find that needed it (which was most of them, sadly) and then I set about  the various energy-saving projects I swore to finish this weekend.

First I finished cutting the insulating material to place over the windows in the storage room on the second floor. It’s a cellulose board with mylar or foil on the outside of it. I don’t know enough about it but I managed to make it fit snugly with only a few gaps. I don’t know whether this will reduce our energy bill drastically. Keeping the door to the storage room shut would probably do a lot more for the temperature, but it keeps coming open.

After that, I reglazed the last remaining storm window that had yet to go up. We inherited it broken with the house, and it was in the shed; I didn’t realize what it was until well into the last heating season. So I reglazed the window with a new pane, and hung it on the front of the house. It faces our enclosed porch, which is pretty cold, so I think it was a good idea to finally get it up.

We now have storm windows on every window except for the ones in the back, which are all on a part of the house that looks like it was an uninsulated expansion anyway.

All that’s left is blowing in some insulation, and I will have done everything possible short of replacing the furnace.

The other day, Erin asked me to clean the carpet in the dining room. Our dog, Kelsey, has been “laying claim” to that area, probably because other animals from previous house owners also did the same thing. It smelled bad.

I decided that since previous cleanings of the carpet never got the dog to stop peeing there, and because it was so ugly anyway, I was going to rip it up from the dining room. I knew from previous exploration that there was a hardwood floor underneath, and Erin and I had been planning to rip out the carpet at some point. So I got started.

Underneath it all, I was able to find sections of carpet folded underneath that had a rich green color to them instead of the dulled-green yukkiness. So perhaps the carpet looked good when it was installed. But now it just looked and smelled bad.

The floor underneath is in better condition than I thought it would be. It’s not perfect; there are a few spots that I can get out if Erin and I decide to refinish it. It’s totally changed the flavor of the first floor. Eventually, we’re going to expose the hardwood in the living room, too.

Disposal of the carpet is tricky: in Chemung County, you can’t just leave stuff on the curb and call the county to pick it up. Instead you have to take it to a waste transfer station, weigh it, and pay for the disposal. So I loaded the bad-smelling carpet into Erin’s SUV.

I drove to the waste transfer station and saw that it had closed at noon. So now the smelly carpet is still in Erin’s SUV. We will discard it tomorrow.

Now, onto the second part of the post: babies. No, Erin and I are not expecting. However, Annie Miga (formerly Annie Becker) came back to her hometown of Endicott, N.Y. for her 10-year reunion. She and Erin go way back through some church events. Anyway, she brought her husband, Brian, and her new daughter, Sophia. A friend of hers also brought her baby. I didn’t get the spelling of this baby’s name, but it could be Thalia. Anyway, here’s a photo for your enjoyment:

We decided it was time to make our house look like it’s ours instead of just one we moved into. So, We repainted the living room to a green off-white, and did the bedroom in a light blue with a deep yellow horizontal accent stripe.

It was my first time painting plaster/drywall. I learned a few things:

• It really does pay to use masking tape to keep paint off of things next to the surface you’re painting. The adhesive can get irritating, though.
• Painting a flat (non-shiny) paint onto a shiny paint can be a challenge, because the paint won’t stick well to the shiny paint. The answer is to use more paint the first time around, or paint again.
• A gallon of paint should cover about 400 square feet of painted surface.
• If you run out of paint, scrape the bottom of the can. Don’t scrape the lid unless you’re using white paint. The lid often has the part that is least mixed because it’s right on top, and the up-and-down agitation often contains a bit of the pigments or the unmixed white paint. I have one spot that’s noticeably lighter because of the white, and noticeably darker because of the pigments.
• The more you spend on painting tools, the easier it will be to apply and the better your paint will look on the wall.
• Be prepared to fix your mistakes.

I’m sure Erin will be posting photos of our painting adventure soon. It was fun.

Almost all of my storm windows are hung onto the house for the winter. Unfortunately, there are two windows that are not yet hung, because they are broken and wouldn’t do much good. Here’s one of them.

There are two ways I can get this fixed. I can pay someone to do it, or I can fix it myself, and save a bunch of money. The total project cost for this fix was under $25, including the tools that I get to keep for next time. I didn’t check to see the price of fixing one window pane in a removable storm window, but I bet I saved some money.

I figured that I might as well document the procedure for my blog, in case anyone else wanted to reglaze a window. “Reglaze” could mean to replace glass, but it could also mean to reapply glazier’s putty or caulk. I am not really sure. It doesn’t mean to drip molten glass (as the word suggested to me, anyway).

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