A few weeks ago we told you about our heated debate involving just how we'd ultimately refinish our new home's nearly 110 year old antique heart pine floors. We didn't want to go the old stain and poly route and we were assessing at all of our various options to achieve the look we wanted. 

If there's one thing you might know about us, it's our mutual understanding that this isn't a matter to be taken lightly. (We take our antique floors perhaps a bit too seriously.) What we do now will set the tone for our home for many years to come. What's more, what we do now will have a lasting impact on these beautiful floors, so we'd better make the right choices now for the sake of the floor's future. 

Well, after going over all of our various options and doing a ton of research, our wheels were spinning a little bit. We knew the direction we wanted to head, but we were discovering it was difficult to find a contractor that was familiar with and wanted to work with some of the newer approaches to refinishing. In steps fate.

While spending a bunch of time on Instagram I stumbled across the account of wood floor refinishing company called Royal Oaks Flooring that is working down the street from us on a beautiful old home in Old Town. As I looked at some of their other photos I saw several newer techniques in use that we had been researching, including a photo that looked a lot like what Wendy wants our floors to be one day. 

As a result I sent them a message to see if they'd be interested in working with us on our home. A few days later I met Roland at our house to give him a tour and show him what we were interested in doing. Can I tell you, I wanted to work with him almost as soon as I met him.

Roland is dedicated to his craft and seems to really like the work he's doing. He knows how to work with old floors and material, knows how to respect the character of old houses, and knows how to make things look good. We talked about the portions of the floor that would need to be repaired vs the things we'd leave put. Pretty much we just came up with a game plan for how he should tackle the whole thing. 

After we agreed on a start date I had my tasks ahead of me that I'd need to accomplish before he could get moving. This included a few more holes to plug in the corner of the living room....

...and a suitable patch for a particularly nasty looking section of floor where radiator pipes used to run.

I spent last weekend getting everything I could ready for him to start at the beginning of this week. I'll tell you one thing for sure, getting a house ready to have the floors refinished is a serious pain...even if you don't really even have anything in the house in the first place. 

For the floor patch I ended up using my cordless oscillating Sonicrafter, a chisel, and a whole lot of time to turn that horrible looking plywood and chewed up hole patch into something a little worse at first.

Then to something that was more of what I had in mind. 

The idea here was to use some of the spare pieces I had to cut a patch piece to fit right into the opening but sit on the edges of the old floor. That way it could support weight on it without much support from below. So I cut the piece we'd eventually use to patch...

...then marked the back of the piece so I could cut out the back of it on the table saw dado blade. It may not be perfect with the lines of the floor, but this is a floor that's already full of character, so why not just a little bit more?

Beyond the patch and plug I spent the whole day on Sunday moving the little stuff we had out of the rooms and covering them in plastic so that Roland could sand. He dropped by on Sunday to test sand a section of one room and even helped me move the couch out on the porch, since it won't fit through any of the doors to non wood floor rooms.

I ended up wrapping the whole thing up in plastic where it will live until the floors are ready for it again.

I even had to take apart the cabinets in what we're calling the "Hobbit Room" and put all of them on the porch as well. It was a ton of work and a long day filled with moving things.

Before Roland could start on the floors there were a few repair items I took care of. I mentioned the two holes, but there was also a large square cutout area in the upstairs back room where a chimney once stood. That hole has had a stained piece of plywood sitting on top of it since we bought the house. Rather than leave it like that, I put a little support bracing in place so that Roland could patch the the hole and make it sort of disappear. 

Roland started sanding on Tuesday and we paid him a visit on Wednesday to see some of the progress. When we started looking around our jaws almost hit the floor. Simply from sanding the floors had instantly transformed the house. And that large square patch above? Yeah, I could barely even tell where it was.

Roland and his guys were furiously scraping, sanding, patching, and repairing all over the house. 

Walking from room to room Wendy and I both felt like it was practically a new place. It's amazing what changing the color of the floors will do.

The worst patched job area in the house was in our master bedroom. When the original wall was removed back in the 1990s and the old fireplace taken out, the floor was patched very poorly. Roland and his guys were taking up this bad patch and weaving in new pieces of heart pine to make the room feel correct once again.

And my personal favorite part of the job, the sanding of the stair treads. The stairs are often the real soul of an old house, and seeing these stairs starting to come back to life was simply fulfilling.

At this point we know Roland has finished sanding and has applied the first coats of finish, but we've not seen it throughout the house yet. We really can't wait to see how it all looks. However, we did see a sample of the finish we chose in the back "Hobbit Room" of the house. Keep in mind, this is a slightly different wood than the rest of the house, but we're pretty thrilled with how it's looking.

What do you think? Can you see our vision? This sample is without any sort of top coat, but it gives you an idea of the beauty of heart pine almost completely on its own. I know a lot of people prefer a dark floor to the lighter look, but with this house, these floors, and the more informal feel Wendy is going for, this seems perfect to us.

Roland should be done with everything next week and I absolutely cannot wait to give you our next update. Those photos will really show how this project has transformed the house!

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For anyone who has been following along the last several months, back in February we experienced a catastrophic failure of the boiler in our new home, resulting in a house full of frozen and burst pipes, a busted boiler, and even toilets that had cracked. We knew it wouldn't be a fast process to work through the insurance claim and get the house back in working order, but I certainly didn't count on months of little to no action.

It dawned on me this week that for officially half of the time we've owned the new house, it's been without heat, running water, or functioning plumbing. Ugh. But while that's a downright depressing thought, and honestly one that's resulted in multiple meltdowns on my part including a full on tantrum that included a flying pry bar, I am happy to report we've made some progress on this front.

We've officially hired HVAC and plumbing contractors! Yep, you read that right. After a tediously slow process of finding companies that service the area and do the kind of work we need, getting companies out for estimates (and actually showing up for the appointments), following up for estimates, submitting estimates to our insurance company, filing the necessary contractor paperwork with the insurance, and discussing approaches each contractor would take to complete the work until we found one we liked, we're thrilled to report that we've selected pros for each of the two major areas of work and have given them deposits to start the work.

I'm not trying to get my hopes up here, but from what we're being told this week, work should begin within the next week. The HVAC work inside the house has to happen first before the plumbing can start, and the exterior HVAC (digging the trenches in the yard for the new geothermal system) can't start until the contractor hears back from Miss Utility, but even with those contingent items we're feeling excited.

There's a list of items we need to do in order to prepare the home for the work. Some of the items include demo, like removing the tile walls on the outside of the two showers. 

We needed to open up the wall cavities so the plumber can run new lines through these areas. We've knocked these two items off the list, and boy are we glad we're completely re-plumbing the house rather than fixing what we know to be broken and then conducting a leak test. In both bathrooms, the pipes we've exposed that were hidden behind walls were completely busted open, which only goes to show what a giant disaster we would have had on our hands if the pipes had thawed before we could have turned the water off. 

Oh, and remember the downstairs bathroom that was our first "on the fast and cheap" makeover? Well, we've gone from this...

To this...

Talk about disheartening. Even Lulu agrees.

In addition to messy demo that we're doing, we virtually have to pack up the house in order to protect what little furniture we have from the dust and mess of installing ductwork both upstairs and down. We spent last weekend at the house with my best friend from high school and her husband, and after we enjoyed a restful weekend eating, drinking, spending quality time together, and finding creative ways to enjoy a house with no running water or HVAC, they were kind enough to help us stack everything into piles in just a few rooms of the house.

This way we were able to cover each and every item in plastic in order to protect it from the shower of dust and debris we're anticipating as the duct returns and vents are cut into various ceilings and floors.

Our goal here is to keep all of our fabric items from being inundated with the construction debris that will surely be impossible to fully clean.

We have a few closets in which we were able to stash the rest of our stuff, like sheets and towels, and seal them off with painter's tape. I hope it's effective.

While I know it's going to kill Alex that he won't be able to be part of each and every step of the HVAC and plumbing install, he has plans on a lot of progress photos to report back as it's completed. But as far as I'm concerned, I just want the work to start and be completed as quickly as possible. I guess we make a good team here, I'll keep the work moving along while Alex will make sure it's being done the way we want it to be done.

We'll keep you posted on our progress and hope you'll keep your fingers crossed for us. There's almost nothing I want more than to show you photos of finished decorated rooms in this house, but I think we've got a long road ahead of us.

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Last week, while up on our lower back copper roof, I was talking to my neighbor about some painting she recently had done (by a good contractor that I had a chance to chat with). During the conversation with my neighbor she said, "Should I be concerned about the nails coming up through the roof?" Puzzled, I asked her which nails she was worried about, and she mentioned that she had seen some coming up while looking our from her back bedroom window.

Both our upper and lower roofs are one large shared area, so I walked over to her roof to see what she was talking about, and I was simply blown away by what I saw.

It's a little difficult to discern from the photo, but yes, your eyes do not deceive you. What you're looking at are sheet metal screws put right through the copper standing seam roof material and screwed right into the wood sheathing beneath. I was FLOORED!

After stammering for a second or two, I got my words together and let her know that someone, likely through a complex combination of stupidity, ignorance, and sheer laziness, has more or less sabotaged her (which is actually "our") roof.

I quickly worked through what had likely happened and came up with a logical (well, logically stupid) and probably correct reasoning for the recent appearance of these screws.

This wasn't always a copper roof, it was actually shingles when we moved in. When it was shingles, it was easy to climb up on this single story roof, place a ladder from the shingles to the upper roof ridge, then climb onto the upper roof from there. Here's a view from our bay window that shows the shingles we once had.

We thought this all worked great until we noticed a significant amount of water working its way up and under the shingles. The slope of this lower roof is too low for shingles to properly shed water during snowy conditions, so the water was damming and backing up under the shingles and into the ceiling of the sun porch. This was actually part of the problem that ended up in our massive kitchen disaster.

Back in 2007, we coordinated with the owners of the house next door to have a new roof installed. I really wanted to do the job myself, but after breaking my collar bone, I was reduced to a sideline role of watching people work on my house and doing something I felt completely confident that I could do. It was not easy, I assure you, especially as I watched the contractors make a mess of the project (I'll fill you in on that another time).

Shortly after having the copper roof installed, and after my wing had completely healed and I was allowed to fly again, I setup the ladder to get up onto the upper roof, as I had always done. What I didn't take into consideration was the new, smooth copper surface.

In physics terms, the coefficient of friction on the copper is far lower than that of asphalt shingles. In English, the copper is WAY more slippery than the shingles. As I ventured onto the upper roof, and when I was nearly at the top of the ladder about 10 feet off of the copper roof and about 20 feet off of the ground below, the ladder started to slide out from under me.

Let me tell you, this is one of the most helpless and horrible feelings in the world. I felt the ladder start to go and I made a split second decision to scamper onto the roof. As the ladder fell I lunged forward to grab the edge of the gutter.  Somehow getting my right foot on the bay window roof, and then using the gutter I had installed as something of a pull-up bar (if it had been the old gutter it would have just pulled off of the house), I somehow hooked the falling ladder with my right foot, spun myself around, found my way onto the upper roof, and grabbed the ladder in time to catch it before it fell all the way down. I wish I had it on video, because I still don't know how it all happened. I just know I had a moment where things could have gone very very wrong...but luckily didn't.

That heart attack inducing event occurred about five years ago, and neither I, nor Wendy who was inside and heard the calamity, have forgotten that incident or how much worse it could have been. I got lucky, I know this and I don't take it for granted.

After that slip and near fall, I put together a brace of sorts that I assemble each time I need to get into the roof. The brace attaches a platform to a few 2x4s that wrap under the roof's eave. It's a great system, very sturdy, and has secured my venture onto the roof dozens of times since my life-flash-before-your-eyes experience of a few years ago.

Alright, back to the original point of this post. It seems the person my neighbor hired to service her AC (which is up on the roof) may have had a similar slipping experience as mine. About a year or two ago I noticed that her gutter had been bent with the crease going away from the house. I've always wondered how that happened, since things like that don't often happen on their own. My guess is that her contractor had a similar fall and ended up hanging on the gutter and bent it. After that incident, I'm willing to bet that he decided on a more wreckless and destructive approach to securing his ladder, and rather than building a brace, getting someone to hold it while he climbed up, or just getting a longer ladder and going up from the side of the house, the contractor decided he'd just screw six sheet metal screws through the roofing.

Can you think of a worse "solution"? I can't. I told my neighbor that I was simply shocked, and if I had seen the idiot doing this, I would have probably flipped out on them. This roof was several thousand dollars to have installed, and it would last 100 years or more with proper maintenance. Yet this moron puts six screws through it at just a few years after it was installed because he didn't bring the right ladder or didn't have a helper to hold the ladder for him?

For a few reasons, I'm blaming the anonymous AC guy. Other than a roofer (and I highly doubt a roofer would ever do something this stupid), the AC guy is the only person I believe she had up on her roof. Beyond this, the guy used sheet metal screws. Who else would have used sheet metal screws other than an HVAC guy? Makes sense to me.

This right here is a prime example of why I don't like to hire people to work on my house. If it's not their trade, they often don't care, and you're left to put the pieces back together when they leave a mess.

So now I'm doing a bit of research for my neighbor to figure out the best way to repair the issue. I contacted a roofer friend to get some advice, and did a little bit of searching on the Internet. Though she could use a little bit of sealant, it's only going to last so long before it starts leaking, and she won't know it's leaking until water is in the house. The best thing will probably involve soldering two small patches directly to the roof, making a fully water tight patch that will last as long as the roof. A more agressive approach would actually be to unhook and completely replace the affected panels, but that's an expensive approach and one not entirely necessary.

Our neighbor will ultimately hire someone to fix it and ensure water isn't seeping into the house, but if she hadn't said anything to me, who knows how much damage it could have done and how long it would have gone undiagnosed? Though a roofer will correct it, and our neighbor will pay for it, the fact that anyone has to spend time or money on investigating and fixing this issue is basically criminal.

What do you think about this ridiculousness? Have you ever hired someone to take care of your house in some way, only to have them damage something unrelated? Or do you think I'm totally overreacting? Let me know how you would handle a similar situation.

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We had bad front stairs, but I wanted good front stairs, but I couldn't find anywhere to get the good stairs. I almost gave up, but then we were watching This Old House's (TOH) D.C. season where Fred Mashack was doing their stairs. Through the power of the Internet, I found Fred's contact info, he came to our house, gave us an estimate that almost made Wendy pass out, but then somehow we and our neighbors agreed to go for it.

And that brings us to the actual execution of the grand front staircase plan.

After we met with Fred Mashack one more time and confirmed our intent to move forward with the project, he went back to his shop in D.C. to start working on the construction of the stairs. As much as I hated that this wasn't a DIY job, I knew there was a big role for me playing the "General Contractor," so I jumped to work on the prep and approval process that we would need to accomplish before Fred could come back for the install.

Typically, when we mention to someone that we live in an historic district and are doing work on our "antique" house, one of the first things they typically ask is "Oooohhh, do you have to jump through a lot of hoops to get approval for all of the work?" To this I respond with something along the lines of, "To be honest, no, not really. You need to get the same permits for work that requires it, just like with any other non-historic construction. Beyond that, there are a few things that need to go in front of the Board of Architectural Review (BAR), but they are just there to ensure appropriate modifications to historic structures, and are probably less restrictive than your typical HOA. Primarily it's for full or partial demolition, anything that affects the facade of your building, or changes to something visible from the street." This is an almost word for word recount of what I say. I've been asked the question so many times that I basically have this memorized.

Even though I always give my "Eh, it's no big deal" response, this is was one of those semi-major items that was going to affect the facade of our house, so we had to go in front of the BAR for review and approval of the stairs -- something that worried me a bit. On one hand, I had no doubts the project would be approved. The stairs were historically accurate, made from salvaged materials, custom built just for our house, and we would look like the rest of the neighborhood. But on the other hand, we had no proof that the house ever had stairs like them, and we had heard so many stories about otherwise inoccuous requests being denied for "no reason," and felt like all that was needed to seriously derail our project was a single neighbor that wanted to be annoying and oppose the stairs. Perhaps I was being a bit paranoid, but we'd heard things...

I decided I wasn't going to leave anything to chance, so the best opportunity we had to ensure approval of the request was to write the most complete and genuinely compelling proposal possible for presentation to the BAR. Being a software developer, I'm no stranger to creating tedious and technical proposals, so I got to work.

Step 1 - Research

Just as I had started my quest for the appropriate stairs, I once again began wandering around surrounding neighborhoods and digitally taking stock of the various newel post, tread, riser, and stringer patterns. I knew that Fred was basing the design of our stair on the following photo, so my focus was primarily on the elements associated with their stairs. 

The great thing about these stairs was that the riser, tread, and stringer (side support piece) patterns were what you most commonly see in Old Town. This meant that I would easily be able to justify why this pattern was used.

The riser pattern is fairly intricate with a number of interesting cuts. This pattern is actually what I first noticed on This Old House when Fred was working on their show. The pattern jumped out at me because I had seen it all over town. That's when I knew that he was our guy for the job.

Fred custom cuts the risers from steel with a plasma cutter and patterns that he made just for this purpose. He has several for the different patterns you find around D.C., but this is the one he always uses for Alexandria. You can also see the tread pattern with raised walk area in the photo above. 

The next significant element are the stringers along the side of the stairs. These have a pattern cut in them to give some visual interest to an otherwise unexciting portion of the stair. That's what Victorian architecture was all about, making the mundane become ornamental. 

And finally, probably the most important aspect of the stairs: the newel posts and hand rail. The newel posts Fred was using were nearly identical to the ones on the house we were using as an example. Ours would be made from a combination of salvaged materials and custom cast iron for individual element replacement (like the finials on the top).

The newel posts we were getting are some of the more decorative and ornamental ones in Old Town, but they are also consistent with several others we've seen. In addition, the handrails would be custom fabricated and the collars in the middle of the rails would also be salvaged items.

Our example home had everything we needed to make a compelling case for our install. With the research complete I moved onto...

Step 2 - Artist's Renderings

Since we weren't hiring an architect or general contractor, it was just Fred building the stairs and me doing the leg work with the city, we were at a bit of a disadvantage. The city prefers to have drawings and plans submitted to show the work that will be done. This gives everyone an accurate view of what is planned and how the execution of the project should look when completed. The problem is, professional drawings and architects are time consuming and expensive, and our budget was more than maxed out with the stairs alone. I figured I'm a DIYer and the GC on this project, so I would give the drawings a shot and hope we would be able to submit more than a napkin with a sketch on it.

Having worked in the tech world since before college graduation and building websites as a hobby since 1995, I knew my way around Photoshop a bit. So I started picking apart the photos I took of the example stairs and began a line drawing of what our stairs would look like, complete with their associated dimensions. The following is my best effort at an architectural drawing of the proposed stairs.

After that, I figured a "rendering" of what the installed stairs would look like on our house would be a good touch. Again, Photoshop was my friend. I took the stairs from the example house, edited out the stairs on our houses, and then applied the example stairs on the front of our house. Here are the original and then rendered photos.

Not to shabby, eh? "Professional" drawing: check. Cost: free (excluding the many hours of late night photoshop time I spent). Way cheaper than hiring someone, that's for sure!

Step 3 - Create the Proposal

With all of the materials we needed in hand, I was ready to start writing our proposal. I spent a couple of nights working on it. I would get home from work, watch a little TV, then work on the document. I felt like it was homework. I was horrible in school and I hated homework, but this was sort of fun. It was like homework...but I liked it. I definitely worked on this project way harder than I had ever worked on homework during any level of schooling. Sad but true.

The end result was a pretty decent proposal with photos. Not particularly long, but adequate for what we needed. If you're interested, you can read the proposal we submitted to the BAR here.

Step 4 - Lots of Paperwork

Once all of the major proposal elements were done, we had to do mountains of paperwork for the process. We needed to:

• Submit the application for the BAR hearing
• Mail letters to all of the neighbors who were either in direct contact with our property or had a line of sight from their property to the alterations
• Obtain and post a sign on the house that noted the date of the hearing
• Address any questions that came up before the hearing
• Create 12 copies of each document I submitted to take to the hearing
• File requests for various building permits since it would impact the right of way
• And other things I'm sure I forgetting

It was a lot of work, not particularly difficult, but still a lot. I can see why people like to hire this out.

Step 5 - Attend the Hearing

Our BAR hearing was quite interesting. We were nervous since we had never been to a hearing or submitted a proposal for one. This was when the wheels on our project had the potential to come off. Fred was back at the shop working on the stairs, and there was only one BAR meeting that month, so we really needed this to be approved. Our neighbors, Wendy and I had to be in attendance, and we were first up on the docket. So we all went down to City Hall and found our way to the meeting room.

Looking back on it, it really felt like a scene from Parks & Rec. There was a head table where all of the BAR members sit. This table looks out over the room full of folding chairs where everyone was sitting who had put in a request, was there to protest a request, or was just there to watch the drama.

Before getting to new items, they dealt with a few items that had been tabled since the previous meeting. One of the requests was for "demolition and encapsulation." These particular owners wanted to tear down the back portion of a home that was built around 1820 and replace the demolished portion with an addition. These people had been working on getting their plans approved for the good part of 8 months, each time having their request denied. This meeting was no different. Several neighbors and seemingly random citizens had shown up to speak in opposition of the plans. The architect and general contractor attempted to appease the crowd by offering up concessions on the fly, moving around pieces of their scale model. Each concession was only met with more opposition. It was a sight to be seen, and something that made us quite nervous. Obviously their request was far more invasive than ours, but so many people basically hated these people for the work they were trying to do. 

After the first item was denied, it was our turn, and we were sweating. They brought up our names, mentioned the proposed change, said "Any objections?" pause...pause...long pause... "No? Ok, approved." 

Wait, what? What just happened? Was it just that easy? All that worry for nothing? I like to think it was because of all of my totally awesome work on the drawings, etc. We will never know for sure, but I'll assume so. :-)

Step 6 - Install Time

With the BAR hearing behind us, we were able to move full speed ahead into the install.

I paid a visit to Fred's shop in D.C. to see the progress he had made on the stairs. Having worked in a few construction shops in college, I have to say that his place was pretty awesome. The picture of our stairs in progress should give you an idea of what his place looked like. Essentially it was a small scale industrial looking throwback of a shop, and I loved it.

It's in a bad part of D.C., right near where Nationals Park now stands. It's a lot nicer now than it was back then, but here is the current street view of the shop. 

We had to start demo on our stairs before the new ones could be installed, and what a pain in the ass the demo process was. We had several long days with a sledge hammer and Wendy lookin' sexy!

Once the old stairs and railings were removed, the old concrete under the stairs had to be cut and jackhammered away to make room for the new frame.

Fred had delivered the frame and we placed it for install. It was HEAVY! The guy who was cutting the cement above and I placed it in its intended location to make sure we had cut away enough cement. I would say that it was probably about 350-400 lbs. My back was sore for days afterwards.

It was starting to take shape, and we were ecstatic!

Fred (on the left in the photo below) came the next day and started working with his two man crew to install the stairs.

And before we knew it, they were in!

We needed to fix a little bit of brick that had broken in the process by using Aboweld 55-1, and we had to touch up some areas of the house that had never seen paint. But it was looking great!

Even though our sidewalk is cement, I have this distant longing for a brick sidewalk. Some of our neighbors have it, so there is a chance. Rather than pour concrete under the new stairs and kill any hope of ever getting a brick sidewalk, we decided to go ahead and lay brick in the void under the stairs. We had a bunch of extra bricks in the back yard that came with the house, so I put them to use.

It was my new secret spot. I laid under there for hours working on getting the bricks in the right place. All the while I could secretly listen to people talking about our house as they walked by. It was really a lot of fun.

Once the bricks were in, and the paint was on, we were finally able to take a step back and look at the end result of all of our hard work.

And, quite honestly, I am still absolutely thrilled with the project! It is one of the projects where we really went all out on it and threw caution and reasonable cost to the wind, but the end result, well, I just can't say enough about how happy I am with it. I get a little bit of joy each time I leave the house and walk down these stairs. I know that we were probably our house's only hope at getting something like this. The stars aligned and our wonderful neighbors opted to work with us on it. There is no way we could have afforded it if we hadn't been able to split the bill.

Fred was as great of a contractor as any I've ever worked with. He was reliable and did a spectacular job. He is truly a craftsman and is part of a very rare breed of people. He left a small plaque on the front of each side of the stairs.

I'm quite proud to have it on there. I just hope that in 100+ years someone can look at these stairs and know the hard work that went into their existence.

Do you have any projects that you threw caution to the wind on? Maybe said, "Ok! This is a ton of money, but...why the heck not?" We would love to hear about your project so we know we're not the only people out there devoted to crazy about their home.

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I have an attention to original detail that annoyingly permeates almost everything we do in our home. I will painstakingly obsess over the smallest details, especially when it comes to architectural elements and period ornamentation, usually to the point where Wendy contemplates divorce. Many of our home's true original elements have been lost over the years, but I've spent our time in the house attempting to reclaim the known character elements through salvage and restoration. I think it is well worth the trouble. Besides, with a more modest and simple home such as ours, it isn't nearly as overwhelming as it would be with a large Eastlake Victorian.

Last week we covered some of the major items we've accomplished that impact the curb appeal of our home. Within that post, a brief mention was made regarding our home's front stairs. This project, although much of it was hired out to a pro, was the single largest project to humor my obsessive attention to appropriate detail, and remains our most significant contribution to restoring a bit of period Victorian character to our home.

When we moved into our home, a large brick staircase lead to the front door of our house and our neighbor's house. It didn't strike anyone as particularly horrible or wrong, but after living in Old Town for a bit and seeing all of the other houses of similar age, I knew that something was amiss. Through as much research as we could perform, specific details of when the stairs were constructed and what stood before could not be uncovered, but it was obvious that what we had was just plain wrong. 

I decided to start looking around online and in magazines to determine a suitable replacement. Walking around our neighborhood and the rest of Old Town, it became apparent that the proper stairs were most likely a heavy cast iron configuration. 

The photo above shows the stairs that our neighbors have, and the following photo is of a large house across the street, again with a cast iron setup.

Beyond the area right around our house, all differnt styles of cast iron stairs can be found, each similar but with unique characteristics, from small and simple to large and grand. 

As you can see, many have similar cast iron stairs with slight variations in the newel posts, risers or paint color.

Through our research we came across a few different options that ranged from custom-made wrought iron railings on stone or wood stairs, stamped metal stairs, spiral stairs, and beyond. But in the cast iron stair department, I kept coming across a Canadian company named Steptoe and Wife. They have a model called the "Kensington" that is a heavy cast iron stair based on a multi-part assembly of individual pieces. The pattern they use for their stairs was created as a replica of stairs from a Canadian foundry. I was going in the right direction, but the look wasn't historically accurate for our area. 

I paid close attention to all of the various patterns of risers, treads, and newel posts on our many evening walks, hoping to see the Kensington style stairs on an older home. I was able to find several installs all around town, but unfortunately they were all on row homes built from the 1970s and beyond. It seemed that Steptoe was the only option for a very long time.

Feeling a little discouraged that I couldn't find an example, I finally stumbled on a house of a similar age to ours that had the Steptoe stairs. 

There had been a car accident in front of this house back in the 1980s that took out the original stairs on this and the next three houses. Each homeowner at the time had the opportunity to choose the replacement. The first house used Steptoe and Wife products, while the remaining used salvaged materials. I don't really think the picture clearly shows what was obvious to me, but the first example just doesn't fit with all of the rest of Old Town. Only the salvaged stairs really look like they belong. I know this is completely and totally obsessive, but I wanted to find something that looked original, not almost original. 

So, having decided that the one supplier I had found was not a good match, we casually looked for stair parts at area salvage yards, but we were quite discouraged and figured we would need to do a stone or hybrid stone and salvaged materials approach like some of the following examples. 

Fast forward to early 2006. Wendy and I were thrilled when This Old House's (TOH) Season 27 focused on a dilapidated D.C. row house built in 1879.

Each week we eagerly anticipated each episode just to see what we could recognize from the area. We also enjoyed the renovation since the age and location of the home were so similar to our house (though we didn't care for the thorough gut job the house had to undergo). Then, we caught the lucky break our stairs needed. 

Many D.C. residences in the historic neighborhoods have iron stairs similar to what you see around Alexandria. It makes sense, since there were probably only a handful of local iron foundries selling stair kits back in the late 1800s. As a result, if you take a stroll around the various historic neighborhoods of D.C., you will probably see patterns of newel posts, risers, and treads that are similar to the neighbor's. Well, the house being profiled on the D.C. season of TOH happened to be one with a large cast iron stair that was in really bad shape.

The TOH crew brought in a local craftsman, Fred Mashack, owner of Fred Mashack Iron Works, to give the deteriorated and unsafe stairs the TLC they needed. To say we were intrigued is quite an understatement. They were looking at the stairs when noticed what I was seeing and yelled "HOLY CRAP! That's the same style of risers around here!"

I immediately jumped onto the This Old House website to look up the contractor list for the season. To my joy, Fred's phone number and address were available and I gave him a call the very next day. About a week later Fred came out to our house to look at what we had going on and to provide us with an estimate. If you have ever had the chance to work with him, you know that Fred is a great guy who seems to love his work. First we looked at the stairs we had and our immediate neighbors' stairs, then we took a walk around the blocks surrounding our house to look at other examples to see what was appropriate.

Remember the photo from above where the car accident had taken out the stairs in the 1980s? Well, we came around the corner where those houses are, and Fred said "Wait a second, I've worked in this area before. See those three stairs there? I built those a long time ago." It seems that three of the four houses with the new/salvaged stairs had hired Fred to do the work. How fortuitous, right? Here is a photo of his handy work from a few decades ago.

One of the primary issues with our stairs had to do with the proximity of our front door to our neighbor's door. As you can see from the first photo on this post that the space is really only a couple of inches. There is no way we could only replace our stairs, it had to be a package deal where we would replace both at the same time. Luckily, there was a stair on two houses with very similar age and architecture to our's that we could use as an example. 

We talked with our neighbors about the possibility of replacing the front stairs and splitting the cost of the work. Luckily for us, they were on board with at least getting an estimate.

During our meeting with Fred he threw out a ballpark cost for the work. If I'm remembering correctly, Wendy's response was "Well...ok, so much for that, thank you for your time."  Apparently custom fabricated cast iron stairs from salvaged materials do not come cheap! As Wendy went inside and I got over the shock of the estimate, I told Fred we'd talk it over and would be in touch.

Not expecting either ourselves or our neighbors to go for the idea of spending a large amount of money on replacing stairs that were, by definition of stairs, perfectly functional, we still discussed our findings with them. Somehow, by some strange chain of events, we found ourselves in a renovation perfect storm. As a naive young couple, we were apparently foolish enough to sink a chunk of our savings into a completely aesthetic upgrade, and our neighbors, who also had the money available and passion for better curb appeal, also opted to go ahead with the upgrade. This is just one of many reasons why we really loved these neighbors.

A few days later I gave Fred a call and started the process for the project. However, before the work could begin we would need an approval from Alexandria's Board of Architectural Review (BAR), which we had always understood to be an intimidating and difficult process. But I'll save that for part two of this post. We still had a long road ahead of us, but the first steps of a) identifying a contractor that would be able to do the work, and b) agreeing to the project with our neighbors, were behind us.

For good measure, I'll leave you with a few more photos of stair configurations below. What steps (no pun intended) have you taken to improve the curb appeal of your home? Oh, and just for the record, it was at Wendy's insistence that I included an NKOTB reference in the title of this post. I guess I'm not the only dork on our crew. 

Continue to part two...

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