Well, I originally intended today’s post to be about those landscaping improvements I mentioned briefly at the end of the six month baby update… But as I was looking at the before and after photos, I realized just how big and obvious-looking a change had happened to the outside of our house, and yet had somehow never made it to the blog. So to get caught up, let’s turn the time machine back to last year, before we had the tuckpointing done.

Views of the bricks on the front of the house (left), side of the house (upper right) and above the basement window (bottom right). Taken during the home inspection.

Our house has two different kinds of brick — the fancy red, which is on the front of the house, and the drab dull brown, which is on the sides and back of the house. (This seems to be pretty common among Chicago bungalows, which are typically placed close enough together that the sides aren’t easily visible from the street.) The photos above show what the brick on various parts of the house looked like before we moved in, complete with worn-out mortar, damaged bricks, and cracks so wide that the bricks looked like they would fall out. All in all, it wasn’t pretty.

Especially due to the cracks, we considered the brick work one of the top maintenance priorities when we bought the house. It wasn’t bad enough yet to be irreparable, or to cause any serious structural damage, but we knew that the longer we waited the worse it would get. (Granted, this was before the electrical problems came up, and in retrospect the wiring was probably a bigger priority, but you know what they say about hindsight.)

So we got started on the tuckpointing last fall. (And by “we,” I mean we brought in a contractor to do it — this sort of thing goes way too far beyond our skill level to be a DIY project.) And even though it seems like one of those “boring” things that wouldn’t make for very interesting before and after photos, in our case the result was pretty dramatic.

Bricks on the front of our house before the tuckpointing (left) and after the tuckpointing (right).

The above photos show a section of the front of the house before and after the tuckpointing — not super different when looking at it from a distance, but definitely noticeable. They used the same red mortar that the house originally had, although it was deeper in the cracks and generally less obvious prior to the tuckpointing.

But moving on to the more serious issues, some of the bricks in the worst shape were in the arch above our basement window. The mortar was completely cracked around them, and the bricks were actually starting to come loose, although thankfully it hadn’t gotten so bad that it couldn’t be fixed:

The bricks above our basement window before repair (top) and after (bottom).

The end result is so smooth and seamless that it’s hard to tell anything was ever amiss, especially considering how crooked and scary-looking it had gotten.

But I think one of the most dramatic changes took place along the side of the house, where the chimney extends from the wall a little. When we bought the house, this section was in particularly bad shape, and it had gotten to the point that the bricks were actually starting to erode away in places. As the photos below demonstrate, some of the ones toward the top had to be replaced entirely:

The chimney before the tuckpointing (left) and after (right).

The funny thing is, despite walking past this section of wall every day (it’s right by our front door) I don’t think I really noticed how big a change had happened here until I looked at these two photos side by side. Compared to the crumbling “before” shot, the wall in the “after” picture looks smooth and solid and practically as good as new.

So that’s the belated story of another big maintenance project we’ve tackled on the house, and hopefully the last one I’ll have occasion to write about on this blog for a while, especially considering that we just had the whole-house rewiring done. And I’ve gotta say, it’s a nice feeling knowing that the house (probably) won’t fall down or burn down anytime soon thanks to these two improvements!

Last week, I blogged about our finally-finished whole-house rewiring. While the most important thing was to avoid the possibility of an electrical fire due to dangerously outdated wiring that was shorting out in the walls and ceiling (more about that here), a secondary concern was how badly the inside of our house would get destroyed in the process of fixing it. After all, we had a young baby to think about… and if we had to move out of our house for a week or two while an electrician worked on the wiring, it was hard to figure out how we’d even manage.

Fortunately, while a few of the Chicago electricians we called foretold total doom for the interior our house, others promised minimal damage and a space that would remain livable throughout. And the one we ended up picking did a better job than we thought we could have hoped for — they kept everything neat and tidy, cleaning up as they went, and even patching and re-painting the walls afterward.

But we still had some pretty spectacular holes in our walls during the process, and in case anyone was wondering how bad walls might get ripped open during a whole-house rewiring, look no further than this post for some pictures. To start with: our bathroom ceiling, which seemed to hold the worst of the wiring problems, looked like this for a few days:

Massive hole in the bathroom ceiling.

This was actually the worst and biggest hole inflicted during the entire process. The rest of the house had smaller holes around the outlets and light switches — which is quite a lot of little holes when you think about it, but our guys did a really great job covering our furniture to protect it from dust, as well as cleaning up the wall debris by sweeping, vacuuming, and even mopping. If it wasn’t for the holes, you wouldn’t be able to tell anything was going on.

As an example, this is what it looked like around the outlets during the work:

One of the outlets in our bedroom during the rewiring.

And when they got to ripping up the ceiling fixtures — including the one in Lillian’s room — they covered the holes with tape and plastic to keep everything contained:

The hole in the nursery ceiling, covered with plastic.

All in all it was much less intrusive and messy than we might’ve feared, and as I write this, it really isn’t possible to tell that any of the holes pictured in this post were ever there. Which is really great, all things considered.

Anyway, there’s still more to be said about the whole-house rewiring project, including various light fixture upgrades and adding ventilation to the bathroom, but since Lillian just passed her six-month birthday and has her routine six-month well baby checkup scheduled for tomorrow, I think a baby-related post is due for the next bloggy update. Stay tuned!

After those major electrical problems surfaced, we started searching for an electrician to replace all of our ancient outdated wiring in one fell swoop. It took a week of comparison shopping and over two weeks of work, but I’m happy to finally report that the project is finished, the holes in the walls are repaired, and our entire house now has safe, modern wiring.

Right now, we are happily basking in the glow of our working light fixtures (pun intended), because for almost two weeks, this was the scene in our bathroom:

The bathroom, lit by a camping lantern.

Shopping for an electrician was an interesting experience. The quotes we received varied wildly, from $1,900 on the low end all the way up to $10,000 at the highest, plus one guy who insisted he couldn’t give us an exact price until he ripped open our walls and measured exactly how many inches of wire he would have to add and/or remove. They also varied quite a bit on the amount of construction chaos they predicted. Some basically said, “we’re going to have to tear the walls down and you’ll need to move out while we work” while others promised smaller, more strategically-placed holes and a house that was livable at night.

The quote we ended up picking was for $2,800, and it actually came from the same contractor who refinished our floors. It turns out he’s a total jack-of-all-trades who works with a licensed electrician, and came with a glowing recommendation from some friends of ours who’d had him do similar work on their place. And even though the quote wasn’t quite the lowest, it included patching and re-painting the walls afterward — everyone else we called had a pretty clear “not my department” attitude toward that.

Granted, it still wasn’t cheap by any means, but it also wasn’t as bad as we’d originally feared. Plus, the timing was actually pretty fortunate: we had filed our tax returns good and early, and the electrical problems started right around the time our refund check arrived. So that eased the blow quite a bit.

Anyway, here’s a handy breakdown of everything that got done:

• All new wiring everywhere in the house. No more random partial power outages, no more scary buzzing sounds in the walls, and peace of mind that our house won’t burn down while we sleep. Hooray!
• Upgrade to a newer larger circuit box. The box that was there when we moved in only had 12 slots maximum, with 9 in use, although the vast majority of the lights and outlets were concentrated on just 2 of those for some reason. The new box has a maximum of 20, with everything much more sanely balanced across 13 of those, and some extras for if we ever want to add some real electric-powered rooms to the attic someday.
  

  The old circuit box (left) compared to the new circuit box (right).

• All new outlets and light switches. When we moved in, almost every outlet in the house was of the two-prong variety, but they’ve all now been upgraded to the three-prong kind. It feels oddly luxurious to be able to plug our laptops straight into the walls without having to mess with adapters.
  

  Shiny new 3-prong electrical outlet.

• A new light fixture and fan for the bathroom ceiling. There was no ventilation in our bathroom when we moved in, and tons of moisture would build up when we took our showers. It was no coincidence that the electrical problems started in there — apparently the situation had gotten so bad that when they took apart the conduit, water actually dripped out of it. (Yikes!) It ended up costing extra for the fan, a vent for the fan, and the labor to install it all, but it’s made a dramatic reduction in the amount of fog in there every morning.
• Some other light fixture upgrades. The fixture in our kitchen was so old that its wire was brittle and frayed, so we had no choice but to replace that one. We also took the opportunity to add a few other nice-to-have but not strictly necessary lighting upgrades. This included a ceiling fan for the living room, since summer is on the way and we have no central air conditioning, some lights for under the kitchen cabinets that add some much-needed visibility to whatever you’re trying to prepare on the counter, and a light for above the bathroom mirror to make up for the shadows that get cast on your face from just the one fixture on the ceiling.
  

  The stack of new light fixtures as seen before installation.

More details about the new fixtures, and the various holes that got knocked into our walls during all this, could fill an entire post — so I’ll aim for making another update in the next couple of days about that. In the meantime, have you ever heard of humidity in a bathroom causing problems with the wiring like that? I’d always assumed that the worst you had to worry about was mold or mildew building up, but live and learn I guess…