I bought a fixer. I live in it. We touched on this last year, at a higher level, in an early blog post, this one. Today, we are going to focus in on one room: the breakfast room.

The house was built in 1920. I’m only the third or fourth owner. When you have that sort of long-term ownership profile, it’s a good news-bad news scenario. The good news is that usually, it hasn’t been messed with too much. It can be hard to undo some things. But the bad news is basically the same thing.

How so? Well, when you live in a house, you don’t see the problems. You get used to them. This can lead to deferred maintenance. How many of you, when getting ready to sell your house, were surprised by the number of things your realtor wanted you to do? Now imagine you lived in your house for 40 years.

Even when I went to paint my breakfast room the other day, I was like, “Oh. Right. I don’t need to remove that outlet cover because I never got a new one in the first place.” (Blushing.) I’m getting ahead of myself here, but maybe that’s a good segue: we are going to talk about my breakfast room, and just my breakfast room.

I have frequently made the joke (not a joke?) that renovating a house is like one of those plastic number puzzles you got in a party favor bag as a kid. This kind:

This venture was a great example of that, and since I haven’t blessed you with one of my ramblings for a while, I thought I’d get back to it and tell you a story.

You see, my breakfast room used to be a service porch. See how this arch looks ominously load-bearing? It is. This was an exterior wall. As you can see, my tv room was a porch, too. That’s an old transom.

(Let’s just all give thanks that we are no longer walking through two porches to get to the bathroom in winter. That’s that door on the other side of the butler’s pantry.)

As another aside, the house was built two years after the 1918 virus, and the advice was to get as much fresh air into the house as possible. Thus, my office is also a former porch, and parts of my children’s bedrooms (converted in the 1990s, we’ll cover that in another episode). This is a bad panoramic of my office, since I don’t have a wide-angle lens.

So merging inside with out wasn’t seamless (pun intended) when they first winterized these two rooms, probably around the 1950s. And when I first moved into this house, I could see daylight through this junction.

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(Yes those are my new sneakers.)

There was a giant space heater that the former owners left behind. Again, somewhat ominous. So this begins step one of the breakfast room process. We needed insulation below. Ha, guess again! That was not step one.

Lesson one in renovation and living in the fixer: whenever you think you have a step one, you need to go back three steps. First, we had to pull out the ceiling below, and update the wiring to the light and install new LED can lights, which requires permits. Okay, now we can do the insulation.

NOPE, remember, there is no heat in the breakfast room! The pipes had to go through the floor, which means before insulation can be blown around them. So I had the pipes installed and attached to the existing radiator system for when I decided to put in a new radiator. Why didn’t I put in a radiator then? Well, you see, there is wire molding and an outlet there, which would need to be moved. And honestly, I thought I’d be gutting the whole room imminently anyway. Ha.

Finally, with the systems in below, we could put in new bead board and blow in insulation and then paint the ceiling.

Next step should have been new windows, new paint, and a little touchup on the missing molding from our electrical project on this wall. You see, the old light switches were on the door frame, and I had replaced the door. Do not ask me, I don’t know why or how they got away with this.

Then the primary bathtub sprang a leak above. Lesson two in living in the fixer: you do not know what is going to happen when. Your hand will be forced by fate.

And lesson three comes right up behind: you do not know what happened in the past or why or who or how… It’s a mystery waiting for your solution. As the plumbers found when they opened up the walls and ceiling, the primary bath outlet was not put on a regular modern PVC drain, but routed through an old cast iron vent stack, which is why it started leaking. Alas.

Anyway, my plan was to renovate the primary bathroom and then deal with the breakfast room, since the source of the holes in the wall is the bathtub plumbing issue. However, I have been dithering about how I want to deal with the upstairs bathroom. There might be wall moving and window rearranging, and I’m trying to avoid that. And meanwhile, I’m using most of my creative juice on my clients and the other aspects of my creative businesses. I think I know what I’m going to do, but it’s hard to find the time, sometimes.

Meanwhile, we were living with the rattling windows and a space heater in the breakfast room. The plumbers broke one of the window tracks (not hard, I’m not blaming them, the windows were from the 1950s, probably) so one of the windows wouldn’t close. There were ants coming through the cracks in another window looking for Kitty’s food. And it was also hot in the summer, and making the AC work harder to cool that side of the house.

Enter lesson four from living in the fixer: doing everything at once is not always the way. Sometimes you have to batch it out, and go slowly. You simply don’t know at the beginning how you are going to use your living spaces. Since I had repurposed the breakfast room into an art studio, we were spending more and more time in there.

Suddenly, being able to take a bath in my bathroom (when we have two other bathtubs) versus being able to paint comfortably seemed insignificant.

So I called up a window company and scheduled a consultation.

Lesson five in living in the fixer: the salesman is not a construction expert. These cross pieces are load bearing, so the initial design had to be altered to be more like the original, but in many ways, that comports better with the history of the house, so it was about a $1000 more, but in the end, looks great and is fine.

I painted the room myself, and yes, I still need to get after those spots on the floor. Remember to prime everything and just have a good time. And take some ibuprofen both before and after.

Next step, getting a narrow-profile radiator for that outside wall, and getting the outlet moved. We’ll focus on the bathtub plumbing, the hole in the ceiling and wall, and some new crown molding in 2025. It’s time to hunker down for the coming chilly weather with our new snug windows and paint and dream.