so have you remodeled your house recently
i haven't done too much uh i mostly get stuck doing repairs like broken replacing a broken window the neighbor threw a rock through the window with his lawn mower
can you do that yourself or do you have it done
i did that myself and it kind of surprised me i just paid attention to how i took it out and went to the hardware store and got a new one and put it back in
and then you put putty around the edges
yeah yeah that's all there was to it
i'm i'm impressed that you did that though
well the screen still has a hole in it so don't be too impressed
we um live in our current house about three years and we've only done minor repairs like painting and we did put a new roof on but previously we had owned a eighty year old house in another city
oh wow
and that's where i got my real experience at repairs and so i've replaced many windows
i'll bet you have
but they had wooden they were wooden windows and um i don't know for some reason it the putty seemed easier or something because it blended in
uh-huh
yeah
yeah what all did you do to your eighty year old home did you totally remodel it or had
well uh we had a lot of it done i can't claim to have done much of it it had wood floors that we had refinished commercially so that they were all um even tiled what do you i forgot what you call that where you skim the top and then revarnish
uh-huh
oh yeah
and we had it had real plaster walls so we had a lot of plasterwork done
we bought when we bought the house uh most of the walls were covered in fabric and although it was sort of pretty when we went through it once that the previous owners had their furniture out it looked pretty bad so when then we took down the
i'll bet yeah
um fabric to find huge plaster cracks
oh no
not unexpected i suppose but so we repaired a lot of that and then um we didn't do any real major we moved just a couple walls
right right
and we put in new bathroom fixture not not we kept the fixtures but we put in like a new we did put in a new bathtub and then we sort of bought the antique looking
you know the brass plumbing type thing although it was new
oh the
oh yeah uh-huh
i like old houses but it is everyone talks about it it's true small bathrooms and small closets
that that's right yes i lived for a while in Ohio and i was so impressed with the old homes there that the big old homes but i know people were constantly remodeling them and fixing them up
uh-huh
and plumbing you have to know a lot about plumbing
that's right and those lovely old homes had no insulation whatsoever
that's right
you know we had we ran into an interesting complication um our house it had fifty six windows
so we decided in order with an exorbitant heat bill we decided one way we would attack that we put storm windows on and then we put insulation in the attic a a lot of it because we didn't have very much the problem and we never anticipated it was in the summertime
uh-huh
the humidity it it would rise and in the stairwell at the top of the stairwell it literally would um the humidity would condense on the walls so that the walls would sort of sweat and
when we had an engineer come out and talk he just said that we had over insulated our house so it quote couldn't breath
and so the humidity when it would you know that the the highest point would go up there and then and then would condense and it was it was really a problem
i'll bet it was did it damage the walls
well not you could i don't know i'm sure over the long term it would and it would kind of cause sort of streaky pattern in the in the paint
um we put in the first thing we tried we just put in a fan in that area so that we could circulate the air and hope that that would help um
um-hum
we actually took a screen uh door window off one of windows to try and allow a little ventilation in that area and then the truth is it then became
uh-huh
cooler weather and then we sold our house and i never i always hope that the owners didn't have the same problem next year it's all those things that you don't necessarily want to tell them i don't know i mean we weren't trying to be dishonest or anything you just
well you gave it your best shot
we gave it our best shot but it was kind of ironic that we thought we were being so energy conscious and you know it's
yeah
and overdid it
perhaps we overdid it
i'll bet that eighty year old house had a lot of pretty moldings
its prettiest features it had beautiful wood molding high ceilings and it had beautiful cut glass french doors
oh
and um i suppose that was it's it's prettiest features but and the and the floors were beautiful
uh-huh
but it much like the Swiss Avenue area in Dallas
uh-huh
i don't i only have friends there
i don't think i have the energy or the money for those sort of beautiful old homes now
no i've just recently helped a friend put up crown molding in the in his guest bedroom
up around the ceiling of course it was a ten foot ceiling in there and it was a rather small room to
that's