Ballard House - Another one falls to the wrecking ball

Unfortunately we've lost another piece of history forever. The Ballard house was at one time a grand southern plantation. It was what started me on my journey of actively searching out old houses to restore. I found it by accident years ago when I was in a gas station getting gas.


I've always admired old homes, but seeing this one and walking through it and feeling it's history emminating from the walls gave me the restoration bug bad. I contacted the real estate agent for the property and asked him about the house. The owner had started restoring it a few years before but had given up because he had already put a lot of money into it and the area was turning commercial. The agent spoke with the owner about my desire to have the house, he said I could have it for $12,000. He also said that he had a lot of extra things like doors, windows, and trim in storage that I could have. I was really excited and began looking for land to move it to and someone to move it.

I also began researching the history of the house. It was built in 1869 by Levi Ballard. He was a Sargent in the Confederate Army. The story goes that before the war he was just a poor average farmer but that he came back from the war with lots of money. He built this plantation and hired sharecroppers to work it. He also started the first bank in town and was a Grand Master of the Free Masons.

In the end I was not able to purchase the house. It still remained in the back of my mind though. Just recently I started thinking about it alot. I figured that maybe now I would be able to find some land for it, move it there and let it sit for a while until I was able to restore it. I finally decided to drive by it yesterday and found nothing but an empty field. The attendant in the gas station said that it was just torn down recently and a shopping center was going to be built there. I am absolutely crushed by this. The house was on the National Register of Historic Places. This was a huge piece of history that is now gone forever, like so many others...

Here are some pictures of the place, these are now all that is left.

Left Side

Right Side

Front

Back

Ariel View taken before the kitchen collapsed

The kitchen fell in years before I ever found the place. When the sewer line in the foreground of the above picture was put in, the remains of it were pushed back into a pile and are still there now. Not sure why they were not taken when the house was torn down but there is still a lot of good wood in the pile.

Parlor

Dining Room?

Central Hall

Upstairs Front Porch

Front Entrance

Barn

Smokehouse

The barn burned down last year, it was set by a homeless person living in it.

The First Baptist Church across the street where the Ballard family is buried

Levi Ballards grave

New study wall and hanging the french doors

A few months back I tore down the wall between the study and foyer. This wall was built in 1955 when the house was converted to apartments. I've been puzzling over this wall for months and I believe I finally have the answer.

There was a wall in the same location when the house was originally built. Sometime in the 30's there was a major renovation on the house. The wall was removed during this time. Also during this time a larger front doorway was installed. The door always looked to me like it was from the 30's and not original. The entire doorway is 7' wide, the original hallway was 6' wide. The wall was removed, the new doorway added, and on the opposite wall a built-in bookcase was added. I'm not really sure why they removed the wall in the 30's remodel, I'm guessing they wanted a combination foyer/sitting room.

In 1955 when the house was being converted to apartments they needed to put the wall back up but because the doorway was now wider it couldn't be installed in it's original location. To make matters worse, the built-in on the opposite wall wouldn't allow for the wall to be shifted over the foot it needed to go. What they came up with was to build a slanted wall. It covered one edge of the doorway on one side, and the edge of the built-in on the other.

Here are 2 pictures of what the wall looked like when we found the house(it's on the left in the first pic, right in the second):

View from rear hall

View from front door

You can see how slanted it is and how it covers up the door frame. So last December I got tired of looking at the crooked wall and tore it down.




I then carefully removed the built-in. I will be installing it on the wall under the stairs eventually.


Over the weekend I started the project of building the new wall. First I had to cover up the space where the built-in was. I toyed with a lot of ideas for the space but eventually decided to just cover it up for now since I'm running short on time.

First I installed some studs using some of my salvaged 2x4's from other parts of the house. I'll be using my salvaged beadboard for the bottom 4' of the wall so I needed to come up with some type of sub-wall to nail it to. The lath is 3/8's thick, the plaster is another 3/8's, then there's 1/2" drywall above the plaster. The yellow pine floorboards that I have are 3/4" thick. That is the same thickness as the plaster and lath together which brings me exactly to the depth I need.


With that out of the way I could begin rebuilding the main wall. The first step was to cut back the outer layer of drywall about a foot all the way around. In the picture below you can see where the original wall was and the foot of drywall I cut back:


Next I laid out my new wall on the floor with chalk-line. the new wall will have a double door opening in the center of it for my salvaged french doors.


I then framed out the rest of the wall, I used most of the same studs that were in the wall I took down. With the wall up I built the door jambs and hung the french doors. I had to use new wood for most of the jambs as I didnt have any salvaged pieces tall enough. These doors are really tall, almost 90".

View from back hall

View from Parlor

View from inside the Study

Once the wall is finished I'll strip and stain the doors and trim.

Here's the door hardware I'll be using for the door:

Once the door is refinished I'll polish it up. I'm hoping to complete the wall within the next few days.

Paint on insulation

I found this product browsing through a home improvement magazine today. It's from a company called Industrial Nanotech and it's called Nansulate. Here is their website:

http://www.industrial-nanotech.com/nansulate_home_protect.htm

The product started out as an insulative coating for pipes but it has moved into the home market. It goes on just like paint and comes in either white or translucent. you can also paint right over it and it's water based. The website says that with 3 coats it will provide a 60 degree temperature difference for the Homeprotect Clear Coat brand and 30 degrees for the Homeprotect Interior brand. It protects against all three kinds of heat transfer, conduction, convection, and radiation. Standard insulation only protects against conduction. It's also mold resistant.

It sounds really great but it's $65 a gallon and one gallon only covers 150 square feet(with the required 3 coats). To do all the exterior walls in our house would cost roughly $1200 to $1600, that doesn't include the floors or ceilings. That's not too bad a price but we've used up all the money in our construction loan so unfortunately we wont be buying it any time soon.

Guest Bathroom floor finished

I finally got around to finishing the floor in the guest bathroom. It got put on the back burner because of my salvage operation at the Anderson House and because of the trees that needed to be planted.


Getting the toilet drain perfect was very important. As I mentioned earlier these old toilets have a larger drain than modern ones, they wont fit in a 3" flange so I had to rip out the plumbers work and use a 4" flange. It was very close but I managed to get everything to fit perfectly.


I went by the Anderson house on Saturday, most of the debris has been hauled away but there were still plenty of bricks laying around everywhere. I managed to collect another couple hundred. I now have a grand total of 1011 bricks.


I also managed to get our porch swing hung yesterday.

Next I hope to get the kitchen ceiling hung then it's back to the guest bathroom to rip out the walls and ceiling.

Sinks, landscaping, and more bricks

We got lucky and had another day to haul off bricks from the Anderson house. In our first load the other day we got 349 bricks. On our second load the night before last we got 396.

This is the first load of bricks

This is the second load

Along with the bricks we got a few stair treads (we have 2 broken ones on our stairs), the downstairs newel post, 3 window weights, and some random trim. They started loading everything up and hauling it away yesterday. We didn't have time to go back last night because we were busy planting the trees we got on our trip to Alabama over the weekend. Hopefully the crew wont work today because of the holiday and I'll be able to get some more bricks this afternoon.

As I mentioned we went to Alabama over the weekend and picked up a lot of trees. We got dogwoods (pink, white, and red), flowering crabapples (pink and white), and Crape Myrtles(white, pink, purple, and red). Some of them we picked up at a fleamarket for very good prices( the dogwoods are 6' and we got them for $8 each, the Crape Myrtles are 4' and they were $3 each), the rest we got from my girlfriends grandparents farm. We went out in the woods and found a lot of white dogwoods and pink and white crabapples. These needed to be planted ASAP since their roots were just sitting in water. we also got a lot of flowering bushes but those wont be planted until after this cold front passes.

These are the 2 dogwoods we planted in the front yard. The back right one is a white, the front left one is a pink.



Another reason for going to Alabama was to go to a place called Dixie Salvage. They carry builders overstock. I bought a wall cabinet for the kitchen (42"x30" oak face, solid plywood sides for $80). We also found 3 sinks there for our bathroom vanities, 2 for the double vanity in the master bathroom, and the 3rd for the main downstairs bathroom. The sinks are handpainted in Mexico. I wasn't sure about the design of them first but now I kind of like them.


The faucet is one we got from vintage tub, the handles have small extensions to raise them up by about 2" but I didn't have them installed for the picture. Everything is test fitted into place, I still have to refinish the vanity before I can permanently install everything.

We also found a faucet for our kitchen sink, it's brushed copper made by Kingston Brass, it was $50!


Hopefully when I get home this afternoon I can make another trip to the Anderson House for more bricks, if there's anything left that is.

Final update on the Anderson House

See the posts here and here for the first 2 parts of this story.

I was out of town for the weekend. I came back yesterday to find that the demolition of the Anderson House had begun. They were removing the windows and other asbestos containing materials from the house. The windows were wrapped in heavy gray plastic and thrown unceremoniously into a dumpster on the site. Most of the glass shattered from them being thrown. Even so, I had to restrain myself from raiding the dumpster last night. Everyone knows how badly I wanted the windows, the asbestos cops would have been at my house in no time.


I went by there today to see about getting some other things from the house, turns out they were about to start the actual demolition of the house right when I arrived.

It took just over 2 minutes to tear all the additions down.

Then he started in on the main part of the house:




All in all the entire demolition took about 15 minutes... the house stood for 101 years.

I went back this evening to salvage some bricks. I found 3 columns that were salvageable and a door. It's the white one pictured above with half the house torn down. It has an Eastlake rosette and keyhole cover.




That's close to 400 bricks in the picture above. There are still thousands left but unfortunately it got dark on me. Most everything will be gone by the time I get off work today. What really sucks is that this whole time, for the last 4 months, I could have been salvaging all of the other things in the house.I just didn't realize, I thought I had to have something concrete, in writing. Now I see that as long as it wasn't asbestos, it didn't matter.

I learned a pretty hard lesson today, in situations like this it's better to just take then try and ask for something. Every single person I talked to in my long fight for the windows didn't care if I took them, they just didn't want to be responsible. So they passed the buck on to someone else. I spoke with everyone from bank presidents to attorneys, architects to contractors. Everyone passed the buck. If I would have just taken them months ago no one would have missed them, no one would have cared. Now another piece of history is gone.

More work on the kitchen cabinets

I've been working on the kitchen cabinets for the past few days. I spent yesterday building the doors for the cabinets that are already installed.



I also installed the cabinet and counter top next to the fridge. This is temporary as I hate the cabinet and will be building a new one in it's place.


Today I tackled the dishwasher cabinet, The first picture below shows the frame as I was beginning. Unfortunately I didn't get any pictures of it as I was building it. The second picture shows it once I finished it.


Here is a shot of the south wall of the kitchen, I have the upper cabinet over the dishwasher and the upper cabinet next to the fridge left to do still and all the drawers, then once those are done I still have to install the crown on top of all the uppers.

Kitchen cabinets and butcherblock counters

I worked on the cabinet doors and counter tops yesterday. Yes I actually went to Ikea to get the counter tops. I really hate that place but the oak butcher block counters are awesome.

First I cut it to size, then I rounded the edges with my sander, then gave the entire surface a light sanding with 220 grit.



The first picture is after the sanding, the second is with one coat of oil that Ikea recommends. It's basically a blend of tung oil and linseed oil. I used two coats on the counter tops but I may add a few more.


In the above picture you can see what they look like after two coats. you can also see the cabinet doors that I finally finished building. The doors are built out of select pine slats of varying width. The drawer faces will be built the same way. We're still trying to decide if we should paint them white like the cabinets or rub them down with the tung/linseed oil to match the counter tops(or perhaps shellac them). The white of the cabinets in the pictures is primer. The final color will be an off-white, the same ones we used for the trim upstairs. Feel free to comment on which way you think would look better.