Quote:
Originally Posted by Vlajos
Really? I'm sure, this is not a Federal Historic Tax Credit deal with National Park Service involvement. Doors are easy to replace if you need a fancy new wood door. Maybe you can chip in?
This is a rental I'm sure. That building was saved and looks beautiful compared to what it was. Thanks to LVDW.
I live in a 100+ year old home. We did some extensive rehab and looked at replacing an exterior door with a replica. The price was $10K FOR A DOOR. We didn't do it.
|
Yeah, the old doors were literally see-through on that one. I mean you could literally see the light through them, they were basically cheesecloth. I saved the doors on the building to the left myself, personally scrapped 130 years of paint off of them. The steel doors were used because I didn't have an extra two grand in the budget to get new wood replicas built. I spent that money restoring the two art-glass windows next door which cost me $4800. I did spend $1500 on a sold wood 8'x 36" three inch thick solid wood door on my other building down the block though.
Here's the glass before and after:
----
The before pictures are difficult to see, but both of these windows were budging outwards as the lead failed and the smaller one was literally falling apart because the fire had gotten hot enough to melt the lead. We literally just put plywood on both sides of the frame to form something of a box and took it to the restoration shop in pieces. Both were totally rebuilt and we only had to replace 6 pieces of glass out of a total of over 100. Sorry if my preservation isn't good enough for y'all...
PS I also salvaged as much of the original trim 3 piece Victorian trim as possible and used up almost all the scrap wood we got from demolition doing things like making salvage wood shelves or even ripping down old 1x6 underlayment into baseboard. We bought almost no trim for this entire project because we reused or salvaged all of it. My goal on these projects is 100% efficiency of waste, anything that is usable I use. I even sell the old 2x4's or other scrap wood I don't have a use for to people for restaurant build outs. If you've ever been to Paulie Gee's in Logan Square, about 80% of the salvaged wood used for the table, chairs, bar, benches, walls, etc. came from one of my buildings. Even the lathe is sometimes reused like at Paulie Gee's where the contractor used it to create a cool "weave" style wainscoating in the bathrooms. Pretty much the only thing that comes out of my buildings that doesn't get "preserved" in some capacity is the random garbage and horsehair plaster.
Edit: Here's the doors I did save in their 95% complete state. I saved the door jamb, the transom, the brick mould around the windows, I even had custom unibody window assemblies made with the exact dimensions of the original Chicago style wood windows (fixed center pane with a double hung on each side). This building was stripped of the old dental moulding and brackets which I am going to be recreating over this winter at a friend's woodshop. So next spring those pressed metal doors will literally be the only thing on the front of these two buildings that isn't original or an exact replica of an original. Busy Bee can call me when he has paid for the restoration of even one piece of art glass like those.