Remodeling The Miracle House: Was this house really built in the 1880s?

the courthouse burned down in 1910. so houses that were older than that just got the 1910 label we believe this house was built in the 1880s and you'll see a little bit later why we think that we bought this house in early 2019 for 250 000. my plan was to put about a hundred thousand dollars into it and finish in six months it was in rough shape the joists in the living room had separated from the rim board so we had a floating floor kind of like a diving board there were cracks in the walls the bathroom was leaky and holy and malodorous the kitchen was falling apart and it was cramped necessitating an addition and full remodel the first floor bedroom and stairs were also claustrophobic and the old horsehair plaster was crumbling a small and scary basement had been dug out at some point but the retaining walls were falling apart the exterior siding was in decent shape but there was work to be done [Music] the roof was one of the few things we wouldn't need to touch huh wonder why the foundation's compromised here we bought it from an old timer dodie who was in his 80s and he had grown up in this house i find a lot of beauty in decay it tells a lot of stories but there's also a lot of potential to make news stories [Applause] [Music] it's a frosty morn and we are getting ready to start this new project here comes mike we're doing some dowsing after the house tested negative for asbestos we started the demo in earnest was homer simpson the original builder of this house some of the old studs seemed to be held up by nothing more than moral support we added some structural support to that our floor is a lot less bouncy now in the kitchen we plan to blow out a couple walls and add an addition to an existing slab to make the stairs feel less narrow we opened one wall and to make the upstairs bedrooms more livable we decided we needed to add a bathroom meanwhile we had to shore up the structure underneath the house so i dug out a little path in the crawl space and we spent a couple days playing in the dirt the kitchen floor dropped about four inches over six feet so using my experience from the big dig we set about shoring up all the walls and adding some structural beams to the small basement [Music] meanwhile work continued on the upstairs bathroom and further demo work [Music] the mice had enjoyed quite a fine setup in this house we ran new mechanical and plumbing and electric throughout [Music] it's reminiscent of a marcel duchamp installation [Music] to create a little more headroom in the stairwell i dropped the landing and added a step to the left i think people were more lilliputian in the 19th century the old first floor bedroom which would become the dining room had a vaulted ceiling so we decided to expose that [Music] at some point we realized that the kitchen was actually an addition and when we exposed the walls there was newspaper insulation that indicated it was actually built in 1888 which means the original house was built sometime before that in april work continued on the downstairs bathroom and converting part of the old kitchen to a laundry we insulated the hell out of everything and you don't want to get this stuff on your skin easier to shave [Music] in may we vacated to let the drywallers do their thing and i worked on another rental project a little hiccup kept us out through june but then we were back at it in july and ready to do the addition we got these beautiful old glass black windows from my buddy nells at dry land distillers who had salvaged them from the old denver post building and we placed them in various spots throughout the house in the wall of the addition we had included structural support for the future deck finally something i'm decent at it was time to paint the exterior and we're ready to add the french doors [Music] [Music] we salvaged some of the old doors and found some others at restore and cleaned 100 or so years worth of paint off of a lot of the beautiful old hardware we began to work on the 1920s barn the cabinets were new cabinets purchased from restore through a vocational training program for prisoners for my 125 year old house remodel project see above many people had strong visceral reactions to all the concrete work i did in the bathrooms i toned it down for this project but couldn't resist doing a concrete shower pan we refurbished the steps with oak treads and a metal railing and made this a centerpiece of the house built-ins made the closets more functional and we even put a secret compartment in one of those [Music] we salvaged the 1940s stainless steel counter by angle grinding off decades of grime then orbital sanding with finer and finer grit we hired pros to do the tile and floors [Music] i repurposed a child's armoire to make the upstairs vanity base while mike took the lead on the murphy door or hidden door [Music] outside we got ready for landscaping and fencing [Music] and continued with the painting at some point some relatives of dodies came by and took a look at the progress they dubbed this the miracle house as they had assumed we would scrape the whole thing this is another way of tele commuting to work [Music] i brought in the reinforcements for interior painting [Music] many of our lighting fixtures were also from restore we had soapstone counters installed we had to replace about 20 feet of the old clay sewer pipe it was finally time for the p.s de reyesis stalls the grand rooftop deck [Music] long as you look pretty we got the place rented to a great tenant heather in mid-december so it was crunch time to get the interior done [Music] i like it heather was fine with us continuing to work on the barn and landscaping after she moved in i love the look of the old barn sheathing so we just battened to that added a couple windows and a new door [Music] even with the original homer simpson building technique this house managed to stay standing for 140 years hopefully now it'll stick around for a couple hundred more [Music] do [Music] [Laughter] [Music] do [Music] do [Music] do [Music] do [Music] [Music] hmm [Music] foreign [Music] hmm [Music] hmm [Music] it's still pretty scary down here but [Music] foreign [Music] the house is now worth well over five hundred thousand dollars so uh in addition to being able to pay myself for my labor we will have made a decent profit [Music] we do a lot of other fun videos so check out our channel papa's cottage and subscribe and if you like this video hit the like button interestingly i spent a lot of time wearing a mask in 2019. little did i know it was preparing me for 20 20. that dairy queen is going to get a lot of business today

Channel: Poppa's Cottage

Views: 3,537

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: house remodel, house renovation, old house restoration, old home, 1800s home, home remodel, old home renovation, this old house, 100-year-old house, house fix, house flip, murphy door, hidden door, secret door

Id: D9lDYcZQMAA

Length: 17min 14sec (1034 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 27 2020