I am grateful to all of you who have read my Carter G. Woodson posts, but now it’s a new month and I need to post something new. When I look at the analytics for this blog the most popular posts are about the Spacepak system I had in the house and my UPS woes. So I’m going to write on a non- Truxton topic, that is slightly Truxton related, exposed brick walls.
Painted brick wall in Baltimore.
Back in our old house, the one we sold, we had painted brick walls. You could see and feel the texture of the wall. But it was safe. Because it was wearing latex protection, in the form of several coats of paint. I loved painted brick walls so much I did the same thing for my rental in Baltimore.
On the odd occasion we have been somewhere, for longer than a week or two where the brick walls have been exposed. After a while I noticed bits of wall that come off. This may have something to do will how well sealed a wall is. If the wall isn’t sealed or poorly so expect to get bits of mortar in things. You will constantly need to sweep off mortar/ brick dust from the stairs and anything else that abuts the wall.
Sometimes a brick wall has too much character in the form of holes and cracks. Yeah. Paint that mess. Shove a bunch of latex caulk in the crack and paint over it again and again. Or just pay a mason to fix it. Holes can have the odd loose rock or chunk of mortar that decides to pop out at unfortunate times.
I’m going to take a break from Dr. Carter Grumpypants Woodson to bring up a presentation regarding Truxton Circle’s eyesores of Langston and Slater schools.
I’m just going to copy/paste Bradley A. Thomas’ letter:
The final presentation of the ten proposals for the redevelopment of the Langston and Slater school buildings will take place this Thursday, February 11, 2021, beginning at 6:30 pm. Please review the slides from each of the applicants which I want to thank Bates Area Civic Association President David Hall for putting together into a single link.
Five days later, on February 16, 2021, ANC5E will vote on a resolution specifying which elements of the various presentations our community wants to see in the final development plan. We are not being asked to state a preference for one development team over the others. We are being asked to indicate which ideas we like best. If you want to, and haven’t already done so, you can submit to me your individual preferences anytime between now and 11:59 pm on Friday, February 12, 2021. After that, over the weekend, I will put together our collective thinking into a concise resolution which I will ask the Commissioners of ANC5E to support at our public meeting on the following Tuesday night.
For the record, so far four residents have sent me their thoughts and I suspect that after the final presentation on this Thursday, I will get several more. Thank you all for participating in this process which will impact our neighborhood for decades to come.
—–
Because someone’s bedtime is around that time, and Destructo is the king of delay (5 more minutes!), it’s unlikely we’ll see all of this live. But for you with children who go to bed or put themselves to bed or without kids, please participate and finally do something with this. It is possible.
Last one in this particular series looking at the above segment of the General Assessment 1933-1934. I was not going to look at Ms. Julia W. McGuire, as she is in a trustee position. My dad is a trustee at his church (why. lord. why) and so his name shows up on the tax database for his county for his church’s parking lots. But another quick look at the Recorder of Deeds database showed that she transferred ownership to Corinthian Baptist Church July 23, 1931. I guess I’m looking up Ms. McGuire.
Mrs. Julia Wise (Grayson?) McGuire (1862- 1952), lived at 531 T St NW was the widow of Robert L. McGuire, and was an African American woman. That’s as much research as I want to do. I’ll write a bit about Corinthian Baptist Church. It was part of the 1957 Church Survey, so I have that link here.
Corinthian Baptist was at 3rd and Q before they moved to the unit block of Q. Corinthian Baptist at some point gave way to Ebeneezer Baptist. They sold their property to Mt. Sinai Baptist in July 23, 1948. The database says 7/20/1948 but that is definitely a 3 not a 0. Seems like July 23rd is a special date.
As you can see with your own eyes, the lots owned by the church managed to survive the urban renewal which created the Northwest Cooperative and Florida Avenue Park.
This is from the pile of stuff I have on my computer about DC History and while reviewing Church Survey uploads that hadn’t a lot of views, I noticed this one. I got this from the Sumner School Archives, a great resource and it is from DCPS Public School Buildings Past and Present, which appears to be an unpublished manuscript.
The Twinning School used to be a school at 3rd and O Streets NW. It was an 8 room school house built in 1883 and demolished sometime around the time Dunbar expanded. When it served as a school it was a segregated white school. It appears that it served as a school for white students until 1918. It became a school for African American students in 1925. In 1930 the Truxton Circle neighborhood was predominately African-American. It soon got absorbed by Armstrong on the other end of the block and became an auxiliary building. Now there is an empty field where it stood.
I looked up the address on Google and according to Streetview, the True Gospel Baptist Church is at that spot now. And just for my own records the SSL now is 0303-0052. This page barely has any useful information, except the name of the then pastor Rev. Truman Dixon who lived on the premises at 1104 W Street NW.
I know it has been a good long while since I’ve put out the church surveys, so here’s a quick refresher. So the city and other authorities conducted a survey of churches in the Northwest Urban Renewal Area, which was a precursor to the Shaw School Urban Renewal Area, which is just now known as Shaw. The thing is there was never a survey like this one ever conducted again. The survey included steeple churches, storefront churches and even little house churches. And the churches that did bother to answer most of the survey questions provide a wealth of demographic information.
Looking at their survey response, in 1957 they were a large white middle class church with about 2000 members. Now looking at their website, they appear to be more multicultural as they have a 11AM Sunday worship service in Spanish.
It’s hard to say if they were a commuter church in 1957. About 40% lived in the suburbs of Maryland and Virginia, but half of the congregants lived somewhere in DC. Just not in the survey area, that was 10%. That makes sense as they were Downtown, and not a lot of people lived Downtown. Not did many of their congregants live in Shaw. But Dupont and the West End are sorta in walking distance.
What was renovation #4? I just wanted to add an addition over the top of my 1 story kitchen. Apparently that was too much to ask for. We needed an architect because, despite the fact we were not changing the footprint of the house, we needed one to deal with the fact we were almost 2% over FAR. So it was an addition and new windows.
So this was 2014 and we were planning to adopt. We wanted a little bit more space for a little one. So we contacted our contractor and he put us in contact with an architect. In this project architects do more than draw pictures and plans. This one went to DCRA with me to talk to whomever I needed to talk to so we’d be approved to build on top of the kitchen. Which seemed stupid to me, still does. But apparently my back yard wasn’t big enough.
A few houses up the block had expanded back, knocking down their rickety old 1 story kitchens and building up. We sort of wanted to do the same, but we couldn’t build as wide because of the basement entry. I figured that gave us some wiggle room. Wrong.
As you may remember, renovation #1 was the kitchen. I had no intentions of changing that. But things happen when you’re renovating. I knew the alley facing wall was crap and bound to tumble into dust at any moment. That we planned on replacing. But when they were tearing down that wall, the wall facing the basement entry crumbled down too. Surprise! On the plus side, we gained 6 inches of length and width when the old brick walls were replaced by frame walls. yay.
Entrance beforeEntrance under construction
Then there are things that fell under, “well since we’re doing this we may as well do this other thing.” That was the entrance to the kitchen from the main house. The entrance was wider at the top and getting things into the kitchen required lifting things up. While the walls were opened up, we figured, why not widen the entrance and even out the width. We also decided, why not new windows? And when the guys removed the plaster from the wall the were about to tear down to extend the bedroom, I saw the beautiful exposed brick and wanted to keep it. So I kept it. All that probably added $20K to the bill.
Speaking of the final bill, it was $65K, not counting the architect. If you add those services, along with other fees and costs, it was about $80K. No one seems to account for renovations and the costs of updating properties when looking at why housing in the neighborhood costs more than 5- 10-20 years ago. Sometimes, it is not the same house.
I’ve enjoyed my term as owner of the house. I think I did right by it by improving where I could. But due to limits there were some things I didn’t do. Typically those limits were financial. I never did any work with the idea of making up for it in the eventual sale of the house. It was all for my comfort and I hope that it will be comfortable for the next set of owners.
I have a ton of photos of the basement renovation. About half of them are grainy and out of focus.
When I bought the house back in 2001, I had a finished basement. There was cheap Home Despot brown carpet there and the mechanicals of the ancient furnace and the hot water heater in a utility room. Then a few months later came the flood. Water flew from the exterior drain and breached the basement door. Water also seeped through the walls. I vaguely remember coming home to this and reviewing the damage with my insanely tall boyfriend. Insanely tall boyfriend did not want to bother with my problem, probably because the basement, was a short people basement.
The next day, or several days, I ripped out the carpet, and the baseboards and tossed them in the trash. And from 2001-2012, I had an UN-finished basement. Under the carpet and padding were cheap vinyl tiles and concrete. I used the space as a laundry area, untrustworthy storage, and an office. After renovation #2, I had ethernet cables and the wifi hub centered down there. And after this renovation the ethernet no longer worked and the phone signal was weak. Something got cut or damaged.
So for some reason, we decided to finish the basement, but with some improvements to deal with water. I didn’t trust the basement. So we got french drains. Later, after the renovation, I got a bigger sump pump pump. These helped deal with the water as we were the first basement. One winter, a neighbor up a few doors had a pipe burst while he was out of the country. Water rolled down and for days our sump pump kept going off. And off. And off. It had snowed or rained but I figured out it was a burst pipe and not water seeping through the ground. This last flood event, we fared pretty well. Just a tiny bit of water when others got flooded out.
So what changed from the finished basement of 2001 to the finished basement of 2012? Well, indoor/outdoor carpet for one. Secondly it was set up for storage. There is storage along the wall and we used it to store our seasonal clothing, tools, food, little used small kitchen appliances and craft items. This allowed us to keep the upper floors uncluttered. We also changed the layout and moved the sump pump. The laundry was moved from the center to the front of the house and the dryer could finally expel air and lint to the exterior. Those interior boxes for dryers are okay in the short term, but not for the long term.
There were some things left undone with the basement renovation. I really wanted a window in the rear office. But we were running out of money. The renovation cost us over $40K. One of the unexpected costs was moving a gas pipe. There were some other things but I forget what they were.
So the things you get to brag about when you have a big renovation are things you can point to and see. I did that. The cool things you can see are the exposed brick wall, the clawfoot tub, the updated bathrooms, and the improved layout. What you couldn’t see or wouldn’t notice were the more appropriate sized radiators, insulation, updated wiring and plumbing, and central air.
Prior to the 2007 renovation the radiators in some areas were above or right at the bottom of the window. This was noticeable when putting in the window AC units. The iron pipes that feed the 2nd floor radiators were behind unsightly (and dangerous) false walls on the first floor. The iron was replaced with copper and those pipes were neatly tucked behind the wall. Some of the old radiators were reused, and others were replaced with more appropriate sized radiators. All that cost money, but it was a small change that I felt made a world of difference.
Insulation is another thing you don’t see but made a world of difference. There was no insulation in the wall when they were opened up during the demolition. I got insulation in the exterior walls. I asked for insulation along the party wall that wasn’t exposed. And I even put some insulation between the 1st and 2nd floors. Later this and the improvements with the radiators helped keep the house toasty warm, especially the master bedroom.
The Spacepak system I put in actually came in 2008. As I mentioned in the previous post, I ran out of money. So the AC was tabled until the next year when I saved up enough for it. The vents had already been installed, I just needed the mechanical parts. I chose this system because I didn’t like the boxy look that came with most AC systems.
There were some other updates and things not in the house. The Ethernet wired system was messed up with renovation #3. I’m not sure what happened but something in the basement was cut or damaged. Wi-fi kind of made the system unnecessary. The 1st floor bathroom is larger than need be because I was going to put a shower in it. That never happened. There are pipes to feed water to a shower in the wall, but not a drain. We wound up just using the space as a pantry area. The new layout made the rear bedroom cramped. That was corrected in renovation #4. But in changing the layout it lost a closet. A closet was planned for renovation #4 but I wanted flexibility and figured a wardrobe would work just as well, so it never got its closet back.
Renovation #2 is the renovation I am most proud of. It is the renovation where I went down to the bricks and the joists. I replaced the floors, changed up some of the radiators, and completely changed the floorplan. Since it was such a big project, I’m dividing this into a couple of posts.
Let’s start with the permits. I was able to get the permit myself, with my own drawings. The poor Sikh gentleman at DCRA was patient with me, pointed out things I needed to correct and I think he really wished I had used an architect. But I sort of did. Ira, my architect neighbor, had given me a book on how to draw up plans and advice. This was 2007 so no Google Sketch-up, I hand drew the plans. So I got permit, and it cost me $1000. Just for the permit. All the permits are up on SCOUT, so anyone can look at them.
Then there was the money. I vaguely remember budgeting $87K for the project. It wound up costing around $100K. I had a sweet loan with Countrywide where the 30 year loan had a very low interest rate for the time because of the DC Housing Finance office. But for this project I refinanced with a bank and wound up with a higher rate. My mortgage went from $600 a month to over a thousand. It was worth it. I may explore in another post why I can dare to try to sell a house I bought for $108K for $750K.
With any large project like this there were unfortunate discoveries made when all was demolished away. One scary thing were joists that at some point in the past had been hacked away to make room for plumbing. Or joists rotted from leaks in the bathroom. I had told our Realtor we didn’t mess with the joists, but looking back at construction photos, those were replaced. Another scary thing was the big hole in the load bearing wall, hidden by a false wall. Anyway, I fixed, or had things fixed and made decisions that made the costs creep up.
People would say old houses had good bones. Because of unhappy discoveries the contractor found hidden behind the walls and ceilings, that saying I found to be an annoying lie. You don’t know until you go down to the bricks and joists. The bones are now fine.