Christopher P Day
cpday@cpday.com
cpday@cpday.com
The house came with two wood-burning fireplaces. Both had been used heavily by previous residents. After getting the chimneys cleaned in 2010, I was not eager to dirty them up again and honestly, I had gotten the desire to burn wood out of my system several houses ago.
Jayne has long been enamored with gas fireplaces seen in commercial establishments and in magazines. After some reading I realized that she was on to something. They are nice on a chilly evening, incredibly convenient to light and there is no cleaning up after use.
Even before we purchased the house we had identified the family room fireplace as a likely place to install a gas-burning unit. That decided, there was an important choice: Would we install a gas log set in the fireplace and just let everything go up the chimney flue (easy) or install a sealed direct-vent heating unit (complicated)? Naturally we took the more difficult route.
What finally sold me on the more elaborate gas insert was the fact that it could provide heat to the home during an extended power outage, as Connecticut seems to have all too often. The idea that I could keep my pipes from freezing without any electricity won me over. I settled on a gas insert from a Norwegian manufacturer called Jotul.
This photo gallery shows the steps in getting this installed and running.
The original exterior masonry at the Greenwich house included a patio, some small retaining walls, makeshift stone pads for the air conditioning units, a crumbling driveway centerpiece and one dangerous set of stairs to the back yard. None of this was done well. All of it is being replaced.
In addition to the things that needed outright replacement, we also needed to add stairs from the driveway down to the basement walk-out door so that I have access to my shop. A flagstone patio at the bottom of the stairs will provide a solid outdoor platform for my table saw, etc.
Fortunately we maintained contact with Harold the mason. At the South Salem house we had hired Harold in 2006 to build a retaining wall, stairs and a walkway. His approach is hands-on, high quality and well thought out.
Just as fortunately, our son, Austin, is training to be a mason and needs both the experience and the work. No, we didn't plan it this way, but it works out well.
In this photo gallery the progress on this masonry work is followed.
The Greenwich house has two interesting stone chimneys that serve the gas furnace and the two wood fireplaces. There were no records of them ever being cleaned. There were also no caps on the chimneys, meaning that rain fell directly into the fireplaces and the gas exhaust flue. Not a good situation.
Jayne has also been planning for a gas firebox in the family room. I certainly don't want that getting wet.
I fortunately had some good experience at the South Salem house with a reliable chimney service company. Using them I was able to get copper caps for the three flues, which should pretty permanently solve the rain problem.
Climbing onto the roof is something that I occasionally do, but not because I enjoy it. I was happy to let Anthony and Eric demonstrate their skills on the chimneys.
The copper caps are quite attractive. They will lose their shine pretty quickly, but will last a long time.
The Greenwich property was dominated by a very large Ash tree. The very large Ash tree was also very dead since sometime in 2009.
Theories abounded for the cause of the great tree's death. Some thought that it was the work of a foreign bark borer that had recently invaded New England. An arborist that I called in reported that a lot of ash trees were dying in the area, but that no one really knew the reason. A neighbor opined that the tree had been struck by lightning some years back and the damage had been fatal.
It didn't matter whatever the reason. The fact was that tree was going to come down either under some controlled conditions or in the next large Nor'easter. Due to it's size and location, an uncontrolled fall treatened up to three houses, incuding ours, with major structural damage.
The tree's location precluded getting a crane in to do the takedown. I needed a tree climber with a chain saw, a lot of skill and a lot of courage. I found one. Even though I wasn't the one up in the tree it was still a nail-biting experience.
There are things that can be fixed and then there are things that, practically speaking, can't be fixed. For me, property problems involving Himalayan-like topography, high water tables, aircraft takeoff and landing patterns, and major highways all lead candidate properties to the reject pile. This part of the country offers lots of properties for that pile. I won't touch them. On the other hand, bad plumbing, dumb floor plans, neglected landscaping, crumbling masonry and rotted windows can all be opportunities for us to fix things.
We spent three years looking for properties in Connecticut, including a demolition-only waterfront home and several promising houses that just presented insurmountable problems. We finally settled on this house in Greenwich. Make no mistake: The house has plenty of serious problems, but none of them require moving the house to a new location, petitioning the FAA for aircraft route changes or waiting for sea level to go down. The problems with this house all seem to be, well, surmountable.
The Greenwich house is our first one in years that is close to a real downtown area. It is located within walking distance of the train station, Town Hall, supermarkets and many stores and retaurants.
We now have all of those surmountable house problems. This is a house full of opportunities and these photos introduce some of them.