Making Repairs in 2003

This page shows the condition of the home when we bought it and our initial attempts to turn on electricity and begin making the home habitable.

December 2003: Drywall, wiring, cabinets

	December 27, 2003: Joel of Second Generation Painting and Drywall Repair gets ready to put up a new ceiling in the front bedroom.
	December 27, 2003:  Here we see Joel using his Dewalt screwgun to attach a 12-foot sheet of drywall to the ceiling.
	December 27, 2003: The bathroom ceiling so small a 12-foot sheet of drywall almost covered the ceiling. Note that we have removed false ceiling and a short wall at the end of bathroom. This expanded the room and restored its original height.
	December 27, 2003: Danielle raises a cloud of dust with a push broom.
	December 27, 2003: The dining room looks better with new walls.
	December 27, 2003: The electrical panel box continues to fill up. To the left, you can see the new coax cables and Cat5 wiring.
	December 27, 2003: Today we covered the ceilings in the front bedroom, dining room, bathroom, and utility room. Shortly we will cover the walls in these rooms as well. Before we cover over the utility room walls, I wanted to document what the first layer of wall paper in this room (which was the original kitchen) looked like. Such bright, cheery colors. We will be using the same color scheme in the kitchen.
	December 26, 2003: David Helton's first finished kitchen cabinet. Barb has painted it a butter yellow ... the original color under all the other layers of paint in the kitchen.
	December 26, 2003: The front bedroom has been wired with power, coax cable, and Cat-5 wire, so it is finally ready for insulation and sheet rock.
	December 26, 2003: Dave puts in insulation ... a messy job.
	December 26, 2003: The room looks more organized as the insulation goes up.
	December 26, 2003: The kitchen ceiling. Early in the clean-up process, we removed one layer of wood from the ceiling: a 3/4-inch layer of bead board that was almost completely burned through. But a smoke smell remained, so I removed the next layer as well -- revealing ceiling 2 by 4 inch (full size) ceiling joists.
	December 26, 2003: With the kitchen finally stripped, Barb and Chris stop by to admire my handiwork.
	December 26, 2003: We found this fixture in the garage, so we cleaned it up and replaced some worn electrical parts. Doesn't it look great? We need to buy crystals to hang from the many small holes on the bottom of the fixture. They must have been there originally, so it makes us wonder -- what happened to them?
	December 26, 2003: Old houses often have outdated wiring. To avoid this, I decided to put in a new 200-amp breaker panel and wire the entire house with coax cable and Cat-5 wire. The Cat-5 wire can be used to connect computers, or it can carry many phone signals. Here you can see all the new wires coming up from the crawl space under the house.
	December 24, 2003: David Helton just sent us this picture of the kitchen cabinets under construction. We've decided to go with the style on the left, so each door will have two panes of glass.
	December 10, 2003: Not much has been repaired here ... I took this picture as a "before" shot.
	December 10, 2003: At least this picture shows some improvement: I've removed the old aluminum windows and put up plastic. New wood windows will eventually replace the plastic.
	December 10, 2003: Another shot of plastic covering where the aluminum windows used to be.

November 2003: Wiring, demolition, porch repair

	November 28, 2003: To restore lights and plugs upstairs, I begin pulling wire up from the new 200-amp panel box in the kitchen.
	November 28, 2003: A sample of wire being removed from above the kitchen where the fire was hottest.
	November 28, 2003: The house is cold without the gas furnace or water heater, so I begin repairs on this area. The first step is to remove the water heater and pry up the flooring below it. Then the water heater gets hooked up again. Since the PVC overflow pipe has melted, I replace it with galvanized pipe and drill a hole in the floor so any overflow will dump on the ground. I also wrap the flexible gas line entering the furnace with some garden hose. While this fix isn't elegant, it will keep the gas line from rubbing against the furnace, busting, and causing an explosion.
	November 23, 2003: Bruce Taylor spent most of the day tearing off the front porch roof. He began with a sweatshirt and pitchfork.
	November 23, 2003: Your can see Bruce in action. He still has his sweatshirt on.
	November 23, 2003: The day hasn't gotten any warmer, but the sweatshirt is long gone by the time we were installing plywood. Because the framing was so sparse on porch, I bought 3/4-inch plywood.
	November 23, 2003: The finished porch ... well, at least it now has fresh plywood on top. Both the pickup and trailer are full and ready to go to the dump. At the end of the day, I put on tarps on the roof.
	November 23, 2003: I also continued removing layers of flooring from the utility room floor (which was the kitchen in the original house. I finally got down to a quite nice layer of fir or oak below several layers of linoleum and particle board.
	November 18, 2003: I decide to pull down the lath from the outside front bedroom walls. This will make it easier to install wiring and insulation.
	November 18, 2003: Another view of the front bedroom.
	November 18, 2003: After removing paneling from the utility room, it becomes obvious that the aluminum window is a crude addition. Whoever removed the original window and put in this one didn't bother to adjust the framing properly.
	November 15, 2003: I took out the transom window, cleaned off the layers of burnt paint, and put in new glass (because the old glass was broken by the heat of the fire).
	November 15, 2003: The utility room needs to be gutted of old paneling and dirty ceiling tiles. Fortunately, it appears an earlier restoration effort removed the plaster from the lath and plaster walls, so we didn't have to do that.
	November 15, 2003: I decided to see what is under all the burnt paint on the utility room door. The result is rather artistic. It looks like this door will clean up quite well. The fire simply made it easier to remove all the layers of old paint.
	November 15, 2003:  Time to pull down the old ceiling ...
	October 1, 2003: We bought a bunch of double-hung wood windows from a home being torn down on the way to the coast. Our original plan for the windows was to use them in a garage next to our current house (the N. H. Allen house). They look perfect for replacing the aluminum-frame windows in the kitchen addition.

Three Clean-up Parties!

Party #1: The Friends of Historic Albany ...

... held a work party to clean up the house on Saturday morning, October 4, 2003 -- before we bought the home. It is too bad I took these pictures near the end of the work party, because it would be nice to see "before" pictures. The clean-up made a HUGE difference.

	Oscar Hult puts up plywood to cover a broken window.
	Front view ...
	Ann Giffen at work ...
	This dumpster was filled to the brim.
	The kitchen ...
	My hand after dealing with soot ...

Naming the home: Kendall House or Althouse Home?

Not knowing any better, we did minimal research initially about the home and decided to call it the Kendall house after the people who lived in the house beginning around 1920. We purchased Kendall-House.com and began calling it the Kendall House. So in February 2004, Elva Angelique Van Devender wrote:

Dear Barbara and Dave,

You may not remember me, but my husband Tye and I have met you at a few “friends of historic Albany” meetings. We are looking forward to seeing you this evening for February’s meeting. I wanted to write you in advance because I was curious about “the Kendall House”. I am not sure where this name comes from. I am aware that the house at 140 East Fifth belonged to John Wesley Althouse and was sometimes referred to in the old days as “The Other Althouse House.” The Althouses, as you probably know, were a very prominent family in Albany’s history. They were among the first families to settle the area…they were good friends of the Monteiths, in fact. John Wesley was a brother to Samuel Althouse, who lived a few houses down with his wife and daughters. John Wesley never had children. I can’t remember his wife’s name, but I think he may have been married (I will have to check on that). I believe that he left the property when he died to his nephew Phil Althouse Goodwin (who was the original owner of our house). Phil’s name appears on John Wesley’s death certificate. I do not know anything about the Kendalls, but I do not think that it is likely that they owned the home before the Althouse family did because John and Samuel came West from Ohio on the Oregon trail and were some of the first settlers in Albany. I know a bit about the Althouses because I have kept in touch with Phil’s great niece, Mary Lou Erratt (Goodwin). John Wesley would have been her great great uncle.

Also, I believe John Wesley’s wife’s name was Katherine (Kate). I believe that they are both buried in Riverside cemetery. They didn’t have children.

You may already have this information and understand the significance of your house in Albany history, but I just wanted to inquire about the Kendall name.

Kind regards,

Elva

Elva Angelique Van Devender, Ph.D.
Business Development Associate
Intellectual Property and Licensing
SIGA Technologies, Inc.
4575 SW Research Way--Suite 230
Corvallis, OR 97333
 

So, based on her ideas, we purchased www.althouse.info, and moved the Kendall-house.com site to the new domain name.

Party #2: Bill Cutter and I ...

... decide to remove fire damage and other junk from the home on November 1st and 2nd, 2003.

	Day 1: First step is to load all the extra roofing debris from our Allen House roofing project into a trailer.
	Day 1: Next, Bill takes a careful look at the kitchen before actually swinging into action.
	Day 1: This close-up view of the electrical panel shows the damage it sustained in the fire.
	Day 1: A cabinet is propped in front of the kitchen door to keep casual visitors out.
	Day 1: Once work begins in earnest, we discover three layers in the kitchen wall. First we removed the sheet rock, then a layer of plywood, and finally we reached the original wall surface. After looking things over carefully, we conclude the original wall surface was part of a covered porch area.
	Day 1: The kitchen-bathroom wall comes down. The last layer of wainscoting was held on by square nails.
	Day 1: We took all layers off the kitchen-bathroom wall. It seemed best to start afresh.
	Day 1: If you look closely, you can see Bill working in a haze of dust. We worked until it got dark and the room was filled with charcoal soot and plaster dust--all of which bounced back from the camera's flash.
	Day 1: When we removed the shower doors, we found the tub surround had melted down the wall.
	Day 1: Removing the carpet from the stairs was a dirty job. But it revealed a nice wood stairway that seems worth cleaning up and painting.
	Day 2: Bill spent most of the second day ripping out plaster and other burned items.
	Day 2: The utility room has been stripped ...
	Day 2: Before removing the carpet from upstairs ...
	Day 2: I'm resting with loose carpet under my feet ...
	Day 2: We only removed about 1 square foot of plaster from the lath and plaster in the front living room. It will all have to come down soon ...
	Day 2: What the kitchen looked like at the end of the day ...
	Day 2: At the end of the day, it was too dark to see this partially completed panel box without a flash, so I had to stop work before completing this project. You might want to compare this image with the original electrical panel box shown earlier on the page.

Party #3: Dave and Peggy Helton help ...

... install windows and remove plaster on November 8th and 9th, 2003.

	Dave sits in the living room removing old putty and installing new windows.
	Peggy took on the job of demolition in the bathroom. Notice how clean the toilet looks ... it cleaned right up after the fire.
	This shows the downstairs front bedroom after removing all the plaster. The next step will be to wire, install wood trim and dry wall, and paint.
	Another view of the front bedroom ... this time the shot is taken from the utility room.