Old Newspaper Dates Gas Light Retrofit

The Crickets performed "That'll Be the Day" and "Peggy Sue" and Sam Cooke sings "You Send Me" and "For Sentimental Reasons." The Ed Sullivan Show on December 1.

Newspaper: a renovator's best friend...The newspaper was wedged in to plug the plaster hole during the wall repair post-retrofit. 

Anyone remember Gimbels Department Stores?

So the house presumably had gas light up until just before 1958. 

This is the electrical wiring which was commonly installed onto the existing gas light fixture plate (here from the ceiling), and the wiring run along the same wall chases as the gas pipes. Made sense.  But totally not-to-code today. 

First Floor Bathroom Interior Brick--Evaluation

DiMola and crew demoed the bathroom this week.  I had a good look at it last night.  Like all the other interior walls in the house, this one will require repair as well.  There was some sort of settling happening on this side of the house, in the bathroom area, which is basically the back-center of the structure.  There was a very similar shift-crack in the wall to the right of the window as was seen on the second floor.  But curiously, you do not see the same pattern of stress cracking in the basement in this area.

Second floor stress cracking.

First floor stress cracking

Close-up first floor.

You can see evidence of some mortar patch repair done at some point in the bathroom's history.  What I am hoping we can do is tuck-point and replace the bad bricks w/o having to have a lintel placed in to secure the brick arch.

Note the attempt to shim the floor joist also at some point in the bathroom's history.  In the next post, I speculate on the date of the renovations. 

Before demo image:  I don't believe we want to replace the window at this point--it functions well.  It is the oldest window in the house, a single pane, double-hung wood window with the sash weights.  Maybe it is a remove, re-glue the joints, and reinstall job.  Not particularly difficult, but a little time consuming.

Demolition on first floor bathroom to take place today

We've been concentrating on moving all upstairs over the past several weeks.   We still have several minor touch-ups with the painting, including finishing the front of the peninsula. However, we must now focus on the first floor, as we want to rent it asap!

We are bringing back Nick DiMola for the demolition.  As we have mentioned before, his company DiMola Bros.did the initial demo of the second floor.  Below are the before pictures.  We'll post the after pictures tonight.

The toilet was not bolted down, instead, what appears to be drywall compound was pressed into the cam, and then the cap was inserted over the bolt...

Some sort of wallboard was glued to the aging plaster...

The toilet was set upon drywall compound, and as you can see, the wax gasket is completely worn away.  And why someone put in a rubber gasket is unknown--busted flange maybe?  We did not investigate further.

Sink removed.

Bad ceiling tile.

As we started to pull the ceiling and wall-board, we realized there was more demo than we wanted to handle.