My New Hobby: House Restoration
From James Donahue’s Diary
My friendship with South Haven’s Police Chief Otto Buelow led me into a new interest that would affect our lives for many years. One night Doris and I were invited to Otto’s house to visit. It was a large older house and once inside, we could see that a lot of interesting restoration of that grand old structure was in progress.
That turned out to be Chief Buelow’s hobby. He bought that house in a run-down condition and was busy restoring it to its original grand state. He took me on a tour of the house, showing me all the work that he had completed and what was yet to be done. By then I had been actively involved in restoration and playing with the problems of our house in Wilson Street. After the evening at Otto’s house, I was hooked.
I suppose it was inevitable that I would fall into building restoration. I watched my parents restore that old farmhouse near Port Hope, and even got involved in a lot of the work that went on there. And I always harbored an interest in historical buildings, cars, and objects. I started thinking about restoring an old house. The house we were in needed a little work, but it was basically a finished home and not something that needed restoration.
I don’t know whatever possessed me to even want to take on another project. At the time I was working full time as a bureau reporter for a daily newspaper. After painting Dorothea Logan’s house I suddenly had a business of painting houses all over town. I would give people a price on the labor, let them buy the paint, and then when off work and when the weather allowed, spent my spare hours painting houses. I had so much business I took on a partner to help me keep up with the demand. I bought a used Dodge pickup and long extension ladders. In addition to all of this, I was a volunteer fire fighter and did extra photo work for insurance companies after major structure fires. Yet, as busy as I was in those days, I soon fell into home restoration as yet another “hobby.”
It happened unexpectedly when I was at the police station getting my news one morning. One of the city patrolmen and I got to talking. His mother had just died and there had just been a funeral. He told me that he had a problem because he had to dispose of her house, a small two-bedroom place a few blocks from Lake Michigan. He said the house had been let go for so many years it was going to need a lot of work. He said he would like to sell it cheap just to get it off his hands. I asked his price. He thought for a while and said he would sell it to me for $5,000.
I met him later in the day to look at the house. It was a two-story place with a long porch on the side that opened into a large kitchen. It had a bathroom in the back, right off the kitchen. There was a small dining room and living room. Stairs led to two bedrooms on the second floor. There was a full basement. The house wiring was shot. Thin wires had been pushed through old copper gas lines that once provided gas lighting. Lights with pull chains hang from these wires in the middle of the rooms. Some had extension cords leading down along the walls that had been used to run household appliances.
There was a large garage in the rear yard, at the end of a long driveway.
I saw that this house was going to need a lot of work that included a complete rewiring, plumbing work, a complete renovation of the kitchen and renovation of every room. It was a big task, but at that price I was tempted. In the end I bought the house and made plans to start working on it right away. I think Doris thought I had lost my marbles but for some reason, she let me plunge into this new endeavor.
The first thing I knew I had to tackle was the wiring. The city electrical inspector accompanied me to the house that first week. As we stood on the porch looking at the electric meter box, we noticed that it was turning. Since there were no electrical things operating in the house, the inspector said this meant that there was a short in the wiring. He was surprised that the house had not burned. He turned off the power to the house until I got a new electric panel installed and all of the old wiring disconnected from the existing panel.
Suddenly I was in a new training mode. I knew nothing about wiring a house. I was lucky, however. One of the volunteer fire fighters I worked with owned and operated a wholesale electrical supply store and he agreed to sell me everything I needed at a wholesale price. Also, one of the men who went to church with us was a licensed industrial electrician employed at one of the local factories. He agreed to help me learn the ropes. The city electrical inspector also agreed to guide me through the process. I bought a book on basic wiring, drafted a plan for rewiring the house, and went to work.
I discovered that I really liked wiring. Once the main panel was installed and the power was restored, I created a temporary plug outlet and used a long extension cord to provide power to lights and power tools. Then I began stringing wire throughout the house, running the first lines into the basement to service the furnace and overhead lights. Then wires were run upward through the walls into the upstairs bedroom. I even got power into a crawl space over the kitchen where I laid a plywood floor and installed insulation between the roof rafters. It turned out to be a great storage room.
Running wiring through the walls in that house was a bigger job than I had expected. Instead of open spaces between the two-by-fours, I ran into fire blocks, or two-by-fours nailed between the wall frames. That meant cutting open the walls every where I wanted to run wires and install plug outlets. By the time I had that house wired, every wall in the place was cut full of holes.
Rather than deal with learning how to work with drywall, I chose instead to panel the walls. In some rooms I paneled halfway up the wall to cover the holes, then hung wallpaper or painted the upper walls and ceilings.
As the work on this house progressed, the decision was made to sell our home on Wilson Street and move into the smaller place. That was probably not the smartest thing I ever did. Our house sold quickly, and we were forced to move into a house that still had holes in the walls, lumber stacked in the middle of the floors and an old kitchen that was yet to be worked on. We were in a holy mess, Doris was very unhappy with the arrangement, our beautiful cat refused to move with us so we lost him, and life suddenly got very complicated.
We began working on that kitchen, installing ready-made cabinets, a new sink and garbage disposal, a dishwasher, a new range with overhead blower, a new refrigerator, and other things that slowly took shape. I closed off doorways and windows and installed a new entrance door from the porch that was more convenient, and built a small broom closet in one corner. I found myself working almost around the clock, trying to maintain my regular job, answer fire calls, keep up on the house painting work as long as the warm weather lasted, and get that house as finished as possible and as soon as possible.
We moved Ayn and Susie into one of the upstairs bedrooms and put Aaron in the other one. Doris and I made the living room at the front of the house our bedroom and my office. My roll top desk just fit on one wall and left room to walk between the desk and the bed so one could get to the stairs.
It was getting late in the fall and we still hadn’t tackled the problem of storm windows before winter set in. I tore off a dilapidated wooden front porch, built a frame, and had concrete poured to make a replacement porch and step. Then we replaced two old front windows with a new double-pane Anderson all-weather crank-out window at the front of the house. That was about the time my body rebelled.
I began getting very sick, was aching all over, and was feeling too tired to even get out of bed. Whatever was wrong hit me like a ton of bricks. Doris drew some blood, ran some tests in the hospital lab, and diagnosed me with mononucleosis. We drove to Doctor Cooper’s office. I remember I was so sick I couldn’t sit up in the waiting room. A nurse took me into a waiting room where I could lie down until the doctor could see me. He prescribed some medicine and sent me home with an order for total bed rest for at least another month.
We were in a serious dilemma. I had to call my father for help. He drove to South Haven and spent several days putting plastic coverings over the windows to serve as temporary storm windows that first winter. He did a few other things to button down the house for winter. I spent that month in bed, reading books and watching television. When, at last, the fourth week was over and I was starting to feel my old self again, I went back to work. I worked all one Monday covering news and attended a city council meeting that night. By the time I got home I was in relapse. Another visit with Doctor Cooper and I was ordered back to bed for another month of rest. He warned that a relapse with this disease sometimes has a harder effect. I remember that I was quite ill.
Thus it was that I spent almost an entire winter on my back. I paid a heavy price for burning the candle at both ends. But I was not about to slow down just yet.
From James Donahue’s Diary
My friendship with South Haven’s Police Chief Otto Buelow led me into a new interest that would affect our lives for many years. One night Doris and I were invited to Otto’s house to visit. It was a large older house and once inside, we could see that a lot of interesting restoration of that grand old structure was in progress.
That turned out to be Chief Buelow’s hobby. He bought that house in a run-down condition and was busy restoring it to its original grand state. He took me on a tour of the house, showing me all the work that he had completed and what was yet to be done. By then I had been actively involved in restoration and playing with the problems of our house in Wilson Street. After the evening at Otto’s house, I was hooked.
I suppose it was inevitable that I would fall into building restoration. I watched my parents restore that old farmhouse near Port Hope, and even got involved in a lot of the work that went on there. And I always harbored an interest in historical buildings, cars, and objects. I started thinking about restoring an old house. The house we were in needed a little work, but it was basically a finished home and not something that needed restoration.
I don’t know whatever possessed me to even want to take on another project. At the time I was working full time as a bureau reporter for a daily newspaper. After painting Dorothea Logan’s house I suddenly had a business of painting houses all over town. I would give people a price on the labor, let them buy the paint, and then when off work and when the weather allowed, spent my spare hours painting houses. I had so much business I took on a partner to help me keep up with the demand. I bought a used Dodge pickup and long extension ladders. In addition to all of this, I was a volunteer fire fighter and did extra photo work for insurance companies after major structure fires. Yet, as busy as I was in those days, I soon fell into home restoration as yet another “hobby.”
It happened unexpectedly when I was at the police station getting my news one morning. One of the city patrolmen and I got to talking. His mother had just died and there had just been a funeral. He told me that he had a problem because he had to dispose of her house, a small two-bedroom place a few blocks from Lake Michigan. He said the house had been let go for so many years it was going to need a lot of work. He said he would like to sell it cheap just to get it off his hands. I asked his price. He thought for a while and said he would sell it to me for $5,000.
I met him later in the day to look at the house. It was a two-story place with a long porch on the side that opened into a large kitchen. It had a bathroom in the back, right off the kitchen. There was a small dining room and living room. Stairs led to two bedrooms on the second floor. There was a full basement. The house wiring was shot. Thin wires had been pushed through old copper gas lines that once provided gas lighting. Lights with pull chains hang from these wires in the middle of the rooms. Some had extension cords leading down along the walls that had been used to run household appliances.
There was a large garage in the rear yard, at the end of a long driveway.
I saw that this house was going to need a lot of work that included a complete rewiring, plumbing work, a complete renovation of the kitchen and renovation of every room. It was a big task, but at that price I was tempted. In the end I bought the house and made plans to start working on it right away. I think Doris thought I had lost my marbles but for some reason, she let me plunge into this new endeavor.
The first thing I knew I had to tackle was the wiring. The city electrical inspector accompanied me to the house that first week. As we stood on the porch looking at the electric meter box, we noticed that it was turning. Since there were no electrical things operating in the house, the inspector said this meant that there was a short in the wiring. He was surprised that the house had not burned. He turned off the power to the house until I got a new electric panel installed and all of the old wiring disconnected from the existing panel.
Suddenly I was in a new training mode. I knew nothing about wiring a house. I was lucky, however. One of the volunteer fire fighters I worked with owned and operated a wholesale electrical supply store and he agreed to sell me everything I needed at a wholesale price. Also, one of the men who went to church with us was a licensed industrial electrician employed at one of the local factories. He agreed to help me learn the ropes. The city electrical inspector also agreed to guide me through the process. I bought a book on basic wiring, drafted a plan for rewiring the house, and went to work.
I discovered that I really liked wiring. Once the main panel was installed and the power was restored, I created a temporary plug outlet and used a long extension cord to provide power to lights and power tools. Then I began stringing wire throughout the house, running the first lines into the basement to service the furnace and overhead lights. Then wires were run upward through the walls into the upstairs bedroom. I even got power into a crawl space over the kitchen where I laid a plywood floor and installed insulation between the roof rafters. It turned out to be a great storage room.
Running wiring through the walls in that house was a bigger job than I had expected. Instead of open spaces between the two-by-fours, I ran into fire blocks, or two-by-fours nailed between the wall frames. That meant cutting open the walls every where I wanted to run wires and install plug outlets. By the time I had that house wired, every wall in the place was cut full of holes.
Rather than deal with learning how to work with drywall, I chose instead to panel the walls. In some rooms I paneled halfway up the wall to cover the holes, then hung wallpaper or painted the upper walls and ceilings.
As the work on this house progressed, the decision was made to sell our home on Wilson Street and move into the smaller place. That was probably not the smartest thing I ever did. Our house sold quickly, and we were forced to move into a house that still had holes in the walls, lumber stacked in the middle of the floors and an old kitchen that was yet to be worked on. We were in a holy mess, Doris was very unhappy with the arrangement, our beautiful cat refused to move with us so we lost him, and life suddenly got very complicated.
We began working on that kitchen, installing ready-made cabinets, a new sink and garbage disposal, a dishwasher, a new range with overhead blower, a new refrigerator, and other things that slowly took shape. I closed off doorways and windows and installed a new entrance door from the porch that was more convenient, and built a small broom closet in one corner. I found myself working almost around the clock, trying to maintain my regular job, answer fire calls, keep up on the house painting work as long as the warm weather lasted, and get that house as finished as possible and as soon as possible.
We moved Ayn and Susie into one of the upstairs bedrooms and put Aaron in the other one. Doris and I made the living room at the front of the house our bedroom and my office. My roll top desk just fit on one wall and left room to walk between the desk and the bed so one could get to the stairs.
It was getting late in the fall and we still hadn’t tackled the problem of storm windows before winter set in. I tore off a dilapidated wooden front porch, built a frame, and had concrete poured to make a replacement porch and step. Then we replaced two old front windows with a new double-pane Anderson all-weather crank-out window at the front of the house. That was about the time my body rebelled.
I began getting very sick, was aching all over, and was feeling too tired to even get out of bed. Whatever was wrong hit me like a ton of bricks. Doris drew some blood, ran some tests in the hospital lab, and diagnosed me with mononucleosis. We drove to Doctor Cooper’s office. I remember I was so sick I couldn’t sit up in the waiting room. A nurse took me into a waiting room where I could lie down until the doctor could see me. He prescribed some medicine and sent me home with an order for total bed rest for at least another month.
We were in a serious dilemma. I had to call my father for help. He drove to South Haven and spent several days putting plastic coverings over the windows to serve as temporary storm windows that first winter. He did a few other things to button down the house for winter. I spent that month in bed, reading books and watching television. When, at last, the fourth week was over and I was starting to feel my old self again, I went back to work. I worked all one Monday covering news and attended a city council meeting that night. By the time I got home I was in relapse. Another visit with Doctor Cooper and I was ordered back to bed for another month of rest. He warned that a relapse with this disease sometimes has a harder effect. I remember that I was quite ill.
Thus it was that I spent almost an entire winter on my back. I paid a heavy price for burning the candle at both ends. But I was not about to slow down just yet.