Little Chicago Bungalow

When we bought our home, we anticipated that most of our repairs would be waterproofing the basement. As it turns out the garage has become our major fix up from exterminating the family of 15+ rats, to re-pouring a new concrete floor and currently rebuilding the un-pitched roof.

Also, our garage is 6 feet short and due to that I accidentally ripped the nonfunctional spoiler off our VW Beetle. – I was having a very bad day.

I grew up from age 6 to 18 in a small town called Riverwoods which is made up of an enchanted forest – a get away from the suburbia that surrounds it.

Yesterday Adam and I went to gather boulders from my parent’s and neighbor’s (we got permission) property – to bring a little bit of my childhood back to Chicago.

More photos here.

Secretly I’ve always wanted a Beware of Dog sign and now my dream has come true.

And a few more photos here and here.

Above is a piece of art of my own that I am going to call White Sheep because it’s made from the wool of one sheep whose wool I obtained from a farmer. The raw sheered wool was so beautiful as is but smelled like barn, was too oily to work with and contained plant matter. -So I had the wool cleaned, then spun it in a organic way and pieced it back together to form a “clean” sheep.

Also, I can’t wait to see it framed in few weeks.

I love this photo by Carl Kleiner.

Above is our home in 2001. Photograph was taken by the Cook County Tax Assessor’s Office.

Two owners ago: the lush tree in front passed away from disease + the evergreen bushes have been replaced with other landscaping.

See more here.

To say it more accurately, Adam and I try to be ecologically concious members of the community but sometimes we just aren’t. I was reminded of this when Sarah from A Girl’s Guide to Greenovating a Chicago Townhouse asked about our refinished wood floors.

Although there are a lot of new low-VOC or no-VOC wood floor stains out there, there are very few homeowners or flooring contractors whom actually use these products. Green floor products are expensive + no flooring contractor will work with an unfamiliar stain. -It’s just too much of a liability for them. I actually found one contractor who has worked with a green stain, but their estimate for the job was twice as expensive as the average quote. Our options to refinish our floors ended up like this:

1. Do all the work ourselves.

• Rent a drum and edge sander from Home Depot + sand the floors ourselves = no cost factor, but a lot of labor.
• Obtain samples and test stains on floors.
• Stain the floors with the no-VOC Monocoat wood stain = no cost for labor, but an expensive stain ($100+ per gallon).

2. Do part of the work + hire a contractor.

• Hire a flooring contractor to sand and buff the floors in preparation to stain = no labor for us, but a high cost factor.
• Obtain samples and test stains on floors ourselves.
• Stain the floors with the no-VOC Monocoat wood stain = no cost for labor, but an expensive stain ($100+ per gallon).

3. Hire a contractor to do all the work.

• Due to our budget and time frame, we went this route of  hiring a contractor who stained our floors in Royal Mahagony = a fair cost factor with a harsh impact on the environment.
• Unfortunately this is a common solution for most people.

For those of you who want to explore, here is a list of low-VOC or no-VOC wood flooring finishes:

And just for jealousy’s sake: Baseco is a Swedish company that carries a gorgeous wood flooring line.

Above I am breaking up the concrete sidewalk with a jackhammer – just kidding!

Excavation and pouring of cement is a grueling laborious effort and I don’t envy the crew who is doing the work for us. Sam at Urban Construction, Inc. is handling the job for us. He doesn’t have a website so here is his contact information:

Urban Construction, Inc.
Contact: Sam
5151 Foster Avenue
Chicago, IL 60630
(773) 895-9415

One of the pre-existing conditions of our house when we bought it was the horrible condition of the garage. The previous owner used it as a storage space which resulted in a family of very happy rats to move in. Amazingly they chewed through the concrete floor and plaster walls.

Here is a list of how we are cleaning up the garage:

• Exterminate the rats from the garage, yard and alley.
• Remove the previous owners crap from the garage.
• Replace the garbage cans with new ones (did I mention that the rats chewed these up too).
• Called the City of Chicago for a request to spray for rats in the alleyway.
• Breakup existing concrete floor of the garage, haul away, build up with gravel to be above grade (did I mention that our garage was below grade = flooding from the alley), pour new concrete floor, patch plaster walls.
• Install a new garage door (old one is going to fall off any day now).
• The roof is not pitched so it has become sunken and will need replacing.

From here.

I like how it looks wrapped in kraft paper and string.

Beautiful doors of all shapes, sizes and aged with character are labeled by project locations for easy coordination.

Today in the rain Adam and I trucked down to 47th and Kedzie to visit the newly opened Rebuilding Exchange. We were pleased to meet Megan, who chose to leave Salvage One in order to devote her time with this new project. She and a handful of young modern thinkers were unloading a new shipment from a demolition salvage in which we happily scoured.

Personally I fell in love with a pair of round windows (not shown) but Adam encouraged some restraint.

Wood building materials salvaged from sustainable demoltion practices range from oak flooring, moulding and raw lumber.

Ironically I forgot to bring our door dimensions, but we scored a pair of red industrial lights for only $25.