I Bought An Abandoned Victorian Mansion - 1 YEAR UPDATE

[Music] hello everyone my name is caleb and this is my house the charles s brown house built in 1889 by you guessed it charles s brown who is a woodworking manufacturer here in st louis uh his company was the hall in brown woodworking machine company so this house in itself was was built for a man who was obsessed by making the best machines to make the best woodwork so lots of really amazing woodwork lots of really amazing stories and history i've been with dug up on the place and i've been working on restoring this house not renovating for the last year trying to learn the old techniques of plaster and and tearing out all the really old nasty carpets and bad drywall and trying to retain the plaster and learning the techniques of plaster and it's been an absolute blast so i wanted to share with you guys what i've been through in this past year what i've learned what i've failed on what i've succeeded with and generally what has happened in the past year here without further ado let's get into the tour and i'll show you guys my beautiful house that uh charles s brown built so starting here with the outside of my home you can see a lot of the walls i stripped this fall before it got too cold to do so i think that's coming up will be the cornice here uh that should be happening sometime in the spring and one of the hardest things we had to do was get a new water line dug up so you can see the the hole here and the new sidewalk which had to be uh cut through so that was really fun but the original pipe was lead so that was one of the major things we had to do up front to just to get water in the house at all coming down the side here you can see some of the the older windows and things like that and as we come around to the back you can start seeing some of the new ones one of the very largest things that i did and each of them took about a week was uh restoring the windows up here all the sashes are new built in an old way on old machines they're mahogany as opposed to pine what they used to be but uh all the pediments and all the trim around the outside all the sills themselves everything was taken off cleaned up repainted and put back out and uh it's made a huge difference as you can see between the difference in this window and these ones here they look spectacular and it's one of the more exciting things now another note out here one of the first things you did but even before i started the youtube channel was uh this wall here was threatening to fail on me so we had to rebuild that wall because it was collapsing out and actually this wall here because there's a little weird dip right there that's actually because this is existing and this didn't exist at all from about here up this never even or didn't exist and so to completely rebuild that uh all of the walls on these two sides have been completely pointed um not with you know the most matching materials or anything they're just trying to stop the bleeding and then you can see up there that was bubbled out and threatened to fail as well so if you have an old house like mine with a flat roof fix your gutters because that's what's cause or caused all the damage here and you can see a lot of that damage on the inside as well which we'll go get to back inside now we're up here on the third floor i figured we'll start from the top and work our way to the bottom one of my favorite little features in this area just to prove that i'm up on the third floor is a look down the stairs you can see all the way to the first floor um i actually use this quite often to call my girlfriend kim that you guys know um and say you know if you need something or if she's up here doing something you can easily call up it's really nice this is the only room in the house i actually had a drop ceiling um why did i drop sailing not quite sure but it had one and when i got past the drop ceiling there was of course a drywall sailing behind that and that's when i found my good buddy over here on the chair chippy [Music] chippy is uh our mummified squirrel and uh somewhat the mascot of the house i believe or at least i assume anyways um but he's gonna stay with the house i know the victorians had a quite the fascination with mummies so why not keep our little mummy buddy i think it makes perfect sense especially since we're staying period correct i think chippy's a perfect little piece uh for the house and uh i mean you know he was here when he got it so he's lived here longer than we have so we gotta keep him now under this next room here this will eventually be me and kim's bedrooms but we had to rip a lot of the plaster out here and you might be able to see why right there uh this is actually in the mansard roof you can see where the brick ends and the wood begins well that's where the mansion is so basically everything under that wood would be the cornice and then the stone front but i need to know how bad this was how bad was the condition of it turns out it's not actually that terrible most of the roof is really dry it's a good testament to slate to know that it had never really been messed with and it's still shedding water beautifully uh the same cannot be said for the dormers here you can see that light right there yeah that's straight sky oddly enough though doesn't leak terribly unless the wind really really comes in at that angle for the most part it does still shed water okay however it is something that in the next six months has to be repaired um because uh yeah i don't want to run the risk of that being open for uh much longer than it has to be anymore so something something coming soon for sure we did get a new tpo roof is it perfect is it brilliant no we'll have to be replaced probably in the near future yes however right now it is most of the water we haven't had too many issues with it recently so you know figures cross knock on wood that we don't have any problems in the future um but this is one of the very very first things we did after tuck pointing was getting a new roof on it because keeping this thing dry is you know priority number one you gotta stop the water coming in because you start trying to repair stuff with water coming in you're gonna have a bad time so we got the roof on and uh yeah it's been working mostly well so coming down here to the second floor one of the large items i've gotten done is a pretty appearance pretty quickly that light right there is about the most beautiful thing on the planet when we got this place the electricity was extremely scary i had one outlet in the basement that would work now i have like eight outlets and four lights so that right there is a thing of beauty it's actually wired to the one that's on the first floor as well so you can turn them all off in unison you can see some of the wiring here on the floor um the option was either to rip up the floor or rip out the ceilings with the beautiful plaster that i'll show you guys in just a moment downstairs on the first floor and of course i had to choose the floor because this is just pine and i believe these would have been carpeted floors you can see some of the ornate plaster here that is a very very big deal it helps a whole lot when walking and moving around the house and as you can see when we throw the switch beautiful this switch will be changed out to the push button ones i have them i just didn't have them when i put that in but uh still that is the most amazing thing ever this is the main master bedroom a lot of cleaning up has been done here although i have to say it is still a little bit dirty because we have been using it for storage and things like that and obviously running electrical which creates weird little hazards on the floor we have the bathtub that we're going to be putting into the main bathroom on this floor in the original tub which was here this one i can't find a date on that one is 1896 and so should be almost perfect for the house it also has our halloween decoration in there which is pretty creepy i have to say i think my dad did that nice joke dad one of the larger things i started experimenting with in this room is cleaning the plaster because almost all of the plaster and the medallions and everything in this house have so many coats of paint on them you can no longer recognize the shapes and so i started with this one and so you can see a lot of the details here these little buttons here and things that you couldn't see when i first started so you can see i've got this part of this pretty cleared out but you see how everything's a bit muddier can't see any of those points up here that's because they're super duper full of paint so you know slowly getting back off there so i can make this house look like the date was built so uh yeah lots of work i have to do like that especially the medallions which are going to take a very very long time but are quite fun to clean if i do say so myself so here we can follow this electrical tract into the next room these are for the two parlors that are downstairs as you guys will see in a second uh the two grandest rooms in the house those two this would have been the second master bedroom uh we believe it would have been the man of the house bedroom because uh this window here is the jefferson window it opens all the way up from the floor so you can see it runs all the way down there so there's actually a balcony back out there which we'll end up having to put back at some point because i'm going to tear it down to the top pointing because that's that's still probable and the real big thing about this room is all of the gross really gross carpet i had to remove at the very beginning and just kind of getting it together and cleaned up most all of these rooms are here the second floor were so full of junk that you couldn't operate in them whatsoever so it was a full two months of cleaning before i even started the youtube channel and then a few months of cleaning afterwards just to get going in each individual room that's just kind of getting to the back of the house on the second floor where i've done oh probably most of the work including this wall here which is all cracked and really messed up i ran plaster on this entire wall it's got a really weird shadow on it now coming from the hallway along with that first attempt of plaster was the maid stair handrail here which was plain painted completely white um this newel post and the top rail there are walnuts and this is a pine bead board which i really really love and took a very long time to clean out all the grooves a few people always asked when i showed this oh i wonder what's behind it just to re-clarify so i don't get more questions about it there's no such thing as behind it it is this wall it goes all the way down to the first floor right on this quarter anyways it goes all the way down to the first floor and it makes up that wall that wall is extremely thin and holds no weight or at least let's hope not no i know it doesn't but uh i think it came out really cool it was one of those things where i just needed to see it done so i could have a one big win for this area in here all the woodwork back here was all painted so i've been slowly getting that all stripped off this room here is the original bathroom which we can't get to completely strip out so nothing because they had put a lot of textured stuff well texture patterns on all the walls and stuff and it was just it was not good looking so this is one room that we actually took the plaster completely off we did find the original bead board you can see these rails here and so the bead board will be going back on these walls of course it won't be the original stuff because it was extremely beat up so we'll get some replacements for that and make this place shiny again and we'll get that oak tub in here we have a marble top sink and i can't wait to see those come into place but the amount of plaster removed from this room was uh quite a lot um in fact you can see a little bit of the remnants of that ugly texture up there that was on top of the plaster maybe in hindsight that would have been easier just to take that off but also having this area open has been a godsend when it comes to running electrical because i do have an up up and down route for wires between the whole way downstairs in this restroom so it has been helpful regardless i almost forgot but uh this entire floor hat here actually before we even get the bathroom out had to be completely redone so this is new flooring we put in it's of the era of the house or maybe a little bit older but it's the exact same size as the old stuff you can see the transition here but yeah it was a big deal to get this back in because it means we could safely come through here and carry heavy things through here and it hasn't given us any problems since no pop-ups no weird boards everything has stayed down permanently even though it's all top nailed so uh pretty good here pretty happy with it you can see again the big change between here and there i know a lot of people were very mad about these seams but simply put feathering these boards and meant cutting those square nails and you can't really feather underneath the wall because literally the floor was put down then the walls on top of that so this is all just underlayment i don't know if this floor or that floor will necessarily get moved but i can put a transition piece right there like most of these doors had anyway so not too worried about those cuts so coming into this room now this is the library and this is the room that's probably seen the most work out of any of the rooms in the house mostly because i'm trying to prepare this for a space for me to move into i had to completely strip this fireplace firstly with the inappropriate material which is a chemical stripper and then secondly with a heat gun which i wouldn't recommend for most things but for this it came out to be the most gentle approach so i can find these original eastlake you know patterns everywhere and something i can recreate for the feeder future because i know what these all look like and i can paint these back on so this was a huge find this is just painted ugly brown of course with that we found the history of it too it got made by a guy named pickle who worked very closely to the original owner of the house mr brown so we know that they would have known each other and all of these walls were just failing plaster in here and these are exterior walls obviously you see there's windows in them so of course but i had to redo and learn plaster on this sometimes successfully sometimes less than lesson learned don't do plaster in the summer it's way too hot for that as you can see um old new plaster this had completely failed up here you know and basically i just tapped on it with my hand like knocking on a door to figure out what was bad what wasn't but this winter this is all going to get completely done um i did clean up the ceiling in here this is one of those ceilings that have been completely dried over and or drywalled over in the past and so i ripped all the drywall down that was the only moldy part of this house was the drywall because drywall is an inferior product when it comes to walls then plasters so it does not hold up to moisture nearly as well and therefore molds but i've got that completely cleaned out got these areas done we even tuck pointed the tops of the walls here inside the wall and anything before i plastered behind here this window was having a huge problem that all to be re-tuck-pointed this wall or floor here you can also see the seams this had to be completely rebuilt as well because the water had come down this wall as i showed you guys outside with that big bumped out area we corrected that and then we had to come correct this because the water seeped in here and this heavy radiator had compressed the floor a bit mostly it was just in the boards themselves though i didn't have to do anything with the beams thank goodness or else that would have been real fun um but yeah so we have a perfectly good floor and good to go here i also found a nice wafts nest in there luckily it was a unoccupied one so i was able to remove that which was uh yeah it was nice to see that get out of there and then here you can see some of the plaster failures i've had again don't do plaster in the summer it's way too hot for unless you have a way to cool the space you're working on so lesson learned and that can be corrected now that we're back in winter this was the maids room here and uh we cleaned this floor off there was a plywood on it and the amount of nails in this floor was really ridiculous there's also a lot of stuff stuck to the walls and various things this this place had been messed with more than a lot of the other rooms in the house it's of course also less ornate we also have a lot of failing plaster in here which i need to take care of and get flattened out i think most of these walls in here will probably come down to nothing so they're easier to build back up again not as much work done in here quite yet i have started doing a lot of wiring in this room trying to get it ready again this would be one of the rooms i use initially when i move in so trying to get that in of course i'd love to again as everybody asked why don't you put the ceilings up i'm trying to get my hvac system and my electrical ram first because doing or cutting holes in the drywall after it's back up will not be very fun so with that comes inspections and quite a bit of money to go ahead and pay for the system so working on that first and then we'll get to that point so coming back into the hall now that goes back up to the third floor where we started this goes back to the first floor where we're heading at the moment so most everything i've done on this floor besides the kitchen has just been testing trying to figure out exactly what everything was you know just curiosity getting to be so like this archway here which is really pretty coming over and looking and seeing okay what's underneath all that white paint and this is actually what one of these would look like minus the corners that would probably hit as furniture came up and down and you can see one before when it had all that thick coat of white paint on it many many layers and then of course there's some gold up there in the paint and so you know just kind of testing out seeing what's underneath these layers of well just years and years of people living here and changing things um this newel post was a gift um which is really awesome we were actually missing our new post here so that'll be something in the very near future that will get reinstalled all the logical running into it so i could put a new post on top we've done a little bit of poking and prodding at the woods the shellacs just to see what the original colors were obviously this is a bit lighter than it should be because i probably pulled a bit much of the shellac off but reanimating the colors of things like this the doors you get just really beautiful reds here on the cherry side of the door the other side being oak and so lots of kind of poking at the structure if you will just trying to figure out what colors were stripping medallions like that one up there so you can get more of the texture back and you can see more of the flowers the bouquets the leafs and just really uh figuring out what things are supposed to be some of the things i've been working on here has nothing to do necessarily with my house uh but this door here belongs to my neighbor i'm trying to show her what's possible with paint stripping that's covered in about three layers of lead paint which is really wonderful to get off but huh you know i can fix this door and show her hey look you know because this is something she was going to throw away she thought it was completely shot and uh it's not i think the board's cherry and actually was given a piece of cherry by a friend to replace this little bit that's missing here by the lock set that was also missing so i'll be able to replace that corner and fix that up so that's something that'll be coming here in the near future again in the hallway lots of the electrical this is a tied to that switch we threw earlier and it's awesome we also have one in the back there right there that's tied to that same set as well so you have three locations to turn it off and on and then to the parlors you see we enter through these absolutely gorgeous pocket doors there's three sets of them so one there one there and one right there as you can see just past the ladder and these rooms again most of everything that's happened in here is all about kind of picking at and figuring out what was uh wrong with things um so you know picking up paint here and seeing what's under it picking at the old paint here and seeing what the medallion's actual shape was of course very minimal very non-invasive just with a dental pick just kind of picking away flex of paint because uh you know you get curious about these things what did it actually look like and i'm driven by things like that so the more i could find out about what this room looked like the better because these are the rooms these two parlors are probably the reason why i bought the place to begin with because i mean look at this shutter bank and the way it looks it's just absolutely stunning and you can't get that in a modern house and you really can't get into very many old houses either because these things typically don't survive so you know just making sure that i preserve everything here these ones are folded and by the way for those who don't know these fold into panels the shutters so this is the shutter here as you can see comes out comes the shutter and when you don't need it simply just push it back into the wall and paneling it becomes another thing you might have noticed in this room is all of the artwork and various things of course we've been looking at wallpapers and i've started to collect a lot of antiques i've been really into the newer posts the art nouveau newell posts lamps and trying to figure out how to get as many as possible because i think they're absolutely gorgeous we've been getting clocks and all these chairs because when you have a house this big and you want to restore it to its original aesthetic well you have to go with antiques so the original owner's wife as well was a organist and so this is one thing i had to buy pretty much out of the gate this is an old pump organ and so you would these two pedals here pump them back and forth it would create air that you could sit through the bellows and it's an organ you know that's how it works it's a reed system just like any other organ but on a very small scale and i would say about almost these items i've purchased but there's a lot of ones that have been given to me from you guys the the viewers people donate things to me all the time uh books and furniture and giant pieces and i can say that's one thing that's been absolutely incredible about the youtube community is is how well at least my youtube community is how amazing you guys are and how kind and and how uh i don't know i don't know i'll never know how i'll pay you guys back but uh i do thank you greatly you might have noticed behind me that the mantle is missing there would have been a mantle here uh it's one of the two mantles in this house that are missing and very early on because of the youtube of me talking to the campbell house which is a local house museum here in st louis a guy had mentioned to the curator of that museum that he had my tiles to one of my missing mantles which would have been the one here in the front room and i was amazed enough to find out they actually are my missing tiles i belong here and uh so i think that's one of the bigger accomplishments of this channel and this year is the fact that i was able to find a missing piece of my house that i think that doesn't happen to very many people that you find the exact piece for what you were missing that have been gone for a decade so that in itself is uh quite the accomplishment in my eyes this year i think one of the cooler things that's happened also this year is this collection here which we had phil come out a friend of ours and do some metal detecting so these are all fines from the yard and a lot of you may know but for who those don't the second owner and when we hold the basement you'll see where he worked ran a veterinarian clinic out of the basement and these if the camera will focus are dog tags vaccine tags from 1928-1929 i have five of these little things and to know that i have something such was such a direct correlation to one of the owners of the house is absolutely incredible along with that we have a 1889 peso in there mexican peso uh the year the house starting to be built was 1889 so it's really cool to have something like that and just all of these various really cool things are something that you know when you i said on this journey i didn't know i'd find such amazing cool things that this little lock i think here is really cool this is supposedly it's missing its top lock bit but the base here says st louis and supposedly these were sold at the world's fair which i think is really interesting so that sits at about 1904 1903 here in the second parlor still i know uh you probably saw it on the last one or those yellow wires but those are my electrical wires and why are there two coming out of here um well it's because i'm going to have one line on a dimmer and one line just regular electrical because this house was built had half electrical and half gas uh chandeliers so both these two parlors in the front room and probably the dining room will all get that treatment so you can turn the gas section of the electrical down to gas light levels like it would have been back in the day so the lighting could have been period correct so again trying my best to make sure everything is as period correct as possible without actually having gas pumped into my house any longer for lighting because i think that's a little bit overkill this bathroom here coming down the hall was the butler's pantry at one point in fact this doorway did not exist it was added later but this was turned into a bathroom by the second owner and we can tell by the tiles here which are a tile called vitrolite which was only produced in the 20s 30s and potentially 40s before they come two companies that made it shut down they're glass actually but this is the next project we'll be taking this back and i'm going to turn it into a powder room uh take out the bathtub and this will be something that'll be coming here very very shortly in the next few probably month as you can see i've already started taking down some of the tiles just trying to figure out how hard they are to get off without breaking them and uh turns out not too bad so i'm gonna take these all off and find a homeowner with a 1920s house or thirties house who would love to have uh some vitrolite tile and uh try to donate it to one of you lovely people who have given me so much and coming down from the bathroom which is right here into the hallway you can see we started stripping a lot of the paint here all the woodwork was painted including this little silly window which i'm not sure what its purpose was i'm assuming it was to let light in when this was a butler's pantry but we started trying to get all the woodwork back we've got this door almost back and that beautiful beautiful wood grain i don't know if i mentioned it already or not but all of the doors in the house are this curly pine um which was really amazing to see because it's fairly rare i've heard from sony that potentially that this tree doesn't exist any longer that's extinct i don't know that to necessarily be true however i know the only place i can buy this stuff from currently pulls logs out of a river from old milling operations and one at about every 400 pine logs has the curly character to it so pretty nifty that all this is in here it's not walnut or anything else but men are they really beautiful and this is a very holographic grain to it which is really wonderful so this here is our dining room uh again with more things i've collected over the years you might have seen the library upstairs this is actually a big stack of the flooring i'm going to use up there and this here is an example of what that flooring will end up looking like in fact if you can see behind us here that the line here that is what i'm mimicking because this is an original inlaid floor uh nothing too super fancy just these two little stripes i do think this pattern here though where they've made the connection to turn the wood is a rather beautiful i believe this is called a herringbone joint and it's really really gorgeous and i plan on doing this to the library floor upstairs with this wood i have in a stack over here and not that anything's been done with this but i do always love showing this mantel and the tile off because it's probably the best preserved one in the house it's missing its summer cover right now it's not missing it it's sitting right there against that radiator but uh i've got it open so i can see more into it and just really the the ornate carvings along these spindles and stuff are just really pretty tough to see but i'm assuming there would have been some either gilding like some gold or some black ink or something in there to make those really pop because there's a lot of it's all over the place and in fact this one's a lot easier to see because it looks like it has some ink or something in it and those are obviously a leaf of some sort so but amazing i plan on cleaning this back up i don't know if it'll be next year or not but this will be a room that will be done somewhat-ish soon because it is in my second phase setup so um of course i do have a lot of plaster to fix in this room because of that bulge above that window this room actually is really gorgeous plaster so that'll be something we have to fix and of course the plaster medallion in here is one of a kind in the house most of them rooms share medallions there's two for the parlors that match two for the bedrooms upstairs that match but this one stands alone as its own independent thing and i love that it has the grapes and everything so it's something we're definitely i'm gonna start patching this roof together just putting plaster screws and washers up and making sure everything sucks back up that way we can go ahead and fix the ceiling to perfect status again because it's too beautiful to let it go that's for sure this door here is a swinging door so it swings both ways the hinges it's got a double hinge on it and has these really amazing push plates on it and if you push it open it leads into the kitchen which is a bit of a mess if i have to say so myself you can see they've painted the other side of that door which we've worked on stripping and double checking that it is curly pine like everything else is in the house and of course it is because everything is in the house but there's a lot of work that has to be done in here and a lot of work that has actually been done here this is one of the first rooms i started taking apart mostly because it was completely 1960s in here the cabinetry was awful and not great and it was filthy and gross and i just wanted to get it in a dumpster i had a dumpster that week and it was it was just get everything out of here and into a dumpster including the floor the floor head had some kind of overlayment put on it you can see the linoleum that was on top of the overlayment here the only reason i haven't removed that piece is because of the radiator right there those things are heavy and they work so i don't want to get rid of them my boiler system is operational which is why i'm on a t-shirt now because it's rather cold outside but eventu but in the next year at least this kitchen will be fully operational it's one of the easier rooms to get together even though i might not be using my final house appliances quite yet but the sink will go here you can see some of the original bead board there and so that's how the entire kitchen will be laid out the sink was always right here because of the old lead pipes and stuff i can tell that's where it was so a sink here this is the smoke stack so for that you would have needed to connect you can see there's a hole right there or a patch where a hole was where the tube would feed up for the exhaust of the stove and so that's where the stove has to go so back into place i have a really awesome 1920s one that's going to be going there and this used to be the door to the butler's pantry like i said the other door didn't exist on the other side so this is the bathroom now yeah this uh little butler's pantry door here will be sealed back up and uh the fridge will live there so that's the plan basically for the kitchen not a whole lot of cabinetry to speak of i do have to build one cabinet on this side of this door um kim my girlfriend wants me to hide a dishwasher under there i will see about doing that of course i know a lot of people want it to be next to the sink but because of where the sink original sink was and because the chimney is right next to it i don't really have much of a choice luckily the water is very close to this so it wouldn't be that hard to hook it up so that's the plan currently so right next to where the butler's pantry door used to be is another door this door leads to the basement so let's go down there and i'll show you guys a lot of the work that's been done down here because quite a bit has been done so just here at the bottom of the stairs you can see it's a bit of a mess here because a lot of things have been ripped out but the first thing you might hear is a bit of noise that sounds like fire or burning that's because the boiler which is this thing right here is on and functional it was uh one of the things we had to get going rather quickly we first got the place because we needed heat to be able to continue our work or at least make it comfortable enough to want to work up here and that was achieved of course we had a little bit of issues this year as well but she's back up she's going and i think it's going to be a rather nice and warm winter for us in the house because we have this thing functional again and it's quite a joy to see the you know this thing firing up and the smoke coming out of the smokestack again it really gives the house a heartbeat and i don't think i'll ever not have a boiler system in this house because i love the heat it gives off i love the radiators and this was an amazing addition to get back up and going another thing that uh you can see is obviously some of the electrical here but more than that you can see that there's these little white stripes down all the things that's where plaster used to be this entire basement was actually finished in plaster if you can believe it or not it's also really tall so it's a quite usable space we've been using the space to clean this all out but we had all of the plaster on this entire basement down here on the ceiling removed so we can get to and hang all these uh these or put all these wires up and manage our electrical systems and furthermore the ceiling was not doing so well so we had to remove it we've been using this area right here as our chandelier storage as i told you guys before we need half gas half electric chandeliers and you can see the upturn bits were for gas even though these have been converted to electric and the downturn were for electric so normal bulbs so that's the area my house was built in and so it's the lights that we need unfortunately they're a little more rare than the usual just straight gas which is what this one is right here or the even more common electrical just straight electrical which is that one there so we've been uh searching out and finding various things and we'll use different pieces in different areas but uh it's good to have a collection would you have a house like this to you know figure out where certain things need to go so you can start planning ahead and getting your lighting ready so coming back down to the front of the basement so this would be the front of the house we're actually staying in the bay you can see this wall that moves in it squares back up right here but this is actually where our water source comes in so you can see the big deep hole that was in the front the new sidewalk and everything and this is what they put in this is what all those holes were about this is our new water system our new water inlet but it's about an inch and a half or maybe two inch copper so we have a huge water supply for whatever the future throws at us so good clean lead-free water for the wind this is another well it was a big expensive thing and it's good that we have it so again no lead in our water which is a really good thing and i think a lot of the houses around here probably still have their original lead inlet pipes and uh we're glad we don't have to deal with that now coming over to the other side of the basement this would be the back underneath the dining room in the library which are you know dining room first floor library being second floor we've started collecting these amazing pieces like this which is a needle shower a really cool little fixture which will be going down here in this room this was a bathroom probably in the teens twenties that was added into the house and so we're going to use 19 teens 20s fixtures which this needle shower fits perfectly into for those who don't know what a needle shower is these bars right here have little holes in them and when you hit the bottom switch here bottom handle uh little jets of water come out of those little needle shaped holes uh therefore what's that that's where it gets its name needle shower of course this isn't looks a little bit low and that's because it's just sitting on the ground but it actually would have been mounted on the walls you can see the little feet there that mount so that'll be mounted down here and you might have noticed the tile in this room uh earlier i said that we had a veterinarian who ran a business down here well this was his practice and uh he had a great taste in mosaic floors so this is where he would have ran his practice and i think this is absolutely wonderful we started cleaning this up it was really dirty like it is over there so much duller gross and my lovely girlfriend has done a pretty good job about starting to clean these things up and get an idea of what this amazing floor will look like one of our absolute favorite features in the house and really blessed to have it of all places in our basement so this would have been the door here which is now currently blocked uh but we'll open back up you can see it on the side of the house so you know if somebody does come and stay here they have their own little private room down here which i think is really rad um and we started ripping off these old acoustic tiles um yes we've had them uh inspected they don't have any asbestos in there or anything like that but these were acoustic tiles to stop the if there was you know a dog having or a cat having surgery or something done it wouldn't be so loud on the rest of the house so these were acoustic tiles for that purpose now this here is on the back of the wall in that room the vet clinic this is our panel boxes 400 amp service we've brought in here we really went overkill on it because we didn't want to have well we wanted a future proof of the place to make sure that we had enough electricity always in this house so we went we went big i guess and uh it should be enough to fire to power everything we need in this place and this was a huge milestone getting good reliable power in here because the original power we had i'd come through here and mess with the breakers and some of them would spark at me some of them wouldn't work at all i had no idea where half of or well all but one went even so i just kept everything off in this house except for one outlet and most of the work that was done in this house that i've shown you guys so far was done literally on two one box two little outlets because it's the only ones i trust in the house and run extension cords all the way through the house of course i still have to run extinguisher cords all the way through the house but i have some up in the kitchen that i know are reliable and good and safe so i can run them a little less far so this was a huge huge milestone to get this working functional it adds more life to the house there's always lights on in here now and it looks alive when you drive by at night and that's really what i want i want this house to not be the decrepit one on the block i want it to be one that people see coming back see people people see coming back to life because uh it's a very deserving place and i'm just happy to be the one doing it and lastly before we leave the basement here you can see that one of these concretes is not like the other obviously this concrete is new this little river of concrete as it looks and so are these pipes coming out of the ground these will be our new stacks and this is our new sewer lateral we've completely replaced it because it was pretty broken up and water wasn't getting down and out and through and so it had to be completely replaced so that allows us to add our two stacks back tie in our one remaining old stack which is actually for the sink upstairs which is in that far corner over there so we've tied that back in and this goes all the way down back to the backyard and now it drains freely again so glad you have that up and operational so now we can get water in get water out now we just need to get water to where it needs to be in the house and we'll be good so i just got to get a few of those things done uh talk to a few people and um yeah spend a little bit more money than i want to but uh that's okay we'll get it moving get it going as long as i can save up and get it done we'll be good to go so that's it guys that's what this place has uh come to this year it may not always look like there's been a lot done but to be honest there's been a lot of little nitpicky things done and you know each window for instance took an entire week to do scraping and and getting all the paint off but it's one of those things i'm doing it the right way it's mostly me doing it myself and of course you know there's the problem sometimes of not having enough money to complete the next step to complete the next step if that makes any sense to anybody like completing the essential air system so i can put the ceilings up and i came into this project knowing that i didn't have enough money to complete it right away that i'd have to piecemeal everything that it had to be slow boated that would have to be done over a period of time but i also coming into this project knowing that if i didn't take on this project it could have easily been destroyed this house is an amazing survivor she's a really pretty old gal and somehow nobody changed her very much most of her features are original and intact and beautiful and she's a good candidate for preservation and had i not taken on the role would the person after me take on that role and i don't think so so i have given up a lot of what i would have maybe done other in life to do this instead and i don't feel like i've given up much it's uh it's been a really wonderful ride and i cannot wait to see what the next year holds the next five years hold um i think so much of my life will be lived in this house and so much of my children's life and i think this becomes a part of me um like many people's houses do and uh i'm really really use a british term here chuffed to bits that i get to participate in something so amazing so to close this out guys what's this year been to us what's this year been to the house i think it's been a lot of things for me it's been a huge learning experience i've learned so much about history architecture my city uh on and on and on about human kindness about learning just how how great the world actually is and that things aren't all doom and gloom all the time for the house i think she's learned how to be loved again i think she knows how to shake off the years of neglect and how to get right back into swing of things and in this year there's been a lot of ups and downs there's been breaks and failures and doing things the wrong way and finding without things the hard ways it's been a very expensive year of course of course i knew it would be and progress has been slow at times and faster at others slow mostly because it's expensive you have to save up for these things but it's been such a pleasure and probably the most exciting year of my life to maybe some stripping paint revealing what isn't the most exciting in the world or are seeing something breathe life like seeing the smoke come through the smoke stack for the first time but for me that's what i live for it's the excitement of it it's it's so therapeutic to work on a building because i feel in many ways once you work on something like this you kind of in a lot of ways repair yourself you know you repair your soul and for me for this channel for everything it's repaired my faith in humanity i never expected the kindness that i've received from this channel or the enthusiasm or just the shared beautiful stories but it's been wonderful so best busiest craziest most amazing year of my life and uh that's where it comes into the next topic which is you all you guys have been so overly kind to me and my girlfriend kim throughout this entire project the encouragement the kind words the letters the the coming and meeting us the the coming on tours the house the giving up of antiques to us um things we never expected kindness we never expected to receive and it's been so abundant um and we we thank you deeply and we really love the fact that a lot of you guys have shared with us that this house has helped you through hard times or or this project has helped encourage and light the fire and you to to learn something new or try something new or to get into preservation or to try and save something people that have done this whole project before and people who are just starting just like us it's really amazing to know that we have an audience that that cares so deeply about this place and care so deeply personally for me and kim it's really really rad i guess it's the best it's the world i'm gonna use um it's just amazing guys um so i don't think we'd be nearly as far along as we are without you guys you guys really complete the project and i think you guys should all take ownership of this it's your house too um so we can't wait to to have you by one day really um i'll figure out a way to make sure all 129 hot thousands of you guys get in at some point but uh yeah it's been brilliant guys and um i can't wait to share the next six months with you the next year the next 10 years the next 30 years of my life uh restoring this house and hopefully others you know hopefully we can get more preservation done in the city of st louis and hopefully the city of st louis can thrive after we're done with many of these things and uh that's my goal in life is to make my my my house my neighborhood my city and um people everywhere proud of what this all is and uh as i've said before this is my great love letter to architecture to my neighborhood to st louis and i guess now to you guys thanks guys have a wonderful wonderful rest of your week wonderful wonderful rest of your year and we'll see you guys in the new year bye [Music] you

Channel: The 2nd Empire Strikes Back

Views: 1,466,543

Keywords: renovation, restoration, hgtv, home restoration, victorian, abandoned, 2nd empire strikes back, abandoned mansion, house tour, abandoned house, victorian home, home renovation, this old house, kevin berry, laine berry, mansion, historic home, restoration home, time lapse, old house, do it yourself, the 2nd empire strikes back, fixer upper, victorian house, house makeover, magnolia, restore, urban exploration, exploring with josh, empire strikes back, how to, house renovation, diy

Id: OYndcMQqxnA

Length: 48min 10sec (2890 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 30 2021