W. Las Cruces, Interior

This page details the work we're doing inside our main house. For now, we're leaving the guest house as-is until we finish off the main one. I'm only posting pictures of things that we've finished, or at least worked to a state of improvement. As we complete projects, I'll add before and after shots.

There are plenty of problems with the interior here. Since the house was built around 1910, it's suffered from a lot of "improvements" and "renovations." It would be pretty much impossible to restore it, because there is no way to understand what it looked like originally. We are fairly certain the sun room and mud rooms in the back used to be open (or at most, screened-in), and were walled in long after the house was built. Sadly, the original plaster walls got textured over in the 1980s. We found some original colors where the texture has come off, but we'll always have to guess about that. Arts & Crafts houses almost never had painted wood trim, although it was more common in the southwest than elsewhere in the country. But every last piece of wood that wasn't on the floors here got painted at one point or another. It's also possible that the oldest parts of the house had stained wood, while the additions had plywood trim that was painted when installed.

All this makes it difficult to decide what to do. In the end, we thought we'd stick to typical Arts & Crafts colors for the walls, and paint the wood trim in colors that would have at least been possible in the southwest during the 1910-1920 period. The colors we picked were generally related to the originals ones we found under the texture, if not exact matches.

We like the existing floor layout. The only major change we foresee is walling in the unused attic space, and adding a stairway to it, probably in the existing sunroom.

The bathrooms are relatively usable for a house this old. The guest bathroom is decorated far beyond the typical austerity of a bungalow bathroom, but other than improving the wall color, we won't be changing it much. The bathroom in the main bedroom is serviceable, but non-period. When we have more funds, we'll do major surgery there.

The kitchen is also serviceable, and even a little bit period correct. But it needs some things to make it suitable for the kind of cooking we do, and the floors, counters, and backsplashes are pretty tired. A major renovation should start in August.

One thing that would really be nice would be to eliminate the old swamp cooler ducts in the ceilings and add some nice overhead lights. That will have to wait for more funding.

 

This is the attic, looking toward the rear of the house (the south wall). The only access up there right now is through the tiny hatch you can see back in the corner. Look at how there is absolutley no sealing or insulation anywhere. Somehow, those louvers in the vents have prevented creatures from coming in and nesting for almost 100 years. Hard to explain. You can see the backs of the siding shingles here too.

This is the front wall. Again, no evidence of bird droppings or insect nests. Very curious. It also looks like the siding shingles may be original, though covered with decades of paint. At first, I though the inch of dirt on the floor was put there for insulation, as was common in old adobe houses. Now I'm convinced it's merely 100 years of dust blown in through the vents.

This mess is the ducting from the swamp cooler we removed. We're told this flexible ducting should never be run more than ten feet or so, but it's more like 40 feet in places up there, probably severely hindering cooler performance.

This shot gives you some idea of the enormous open area. The man you saw in the first attic picture is an architect we met who may help us design a useful space up there. He estimates we can recover as much as 1,000 square feet. Also, insulation is a pretty obvious need.

This room is the northeast corner of the main floor. The door in the background connects to a bathroom. Previous owners preferred somewhat contemporary, subdued shades. We plan to turn this into a combination library/guest room.

Most of our asian art and furniture will go in here. It's the only interior room we've completely painted so far. On the line that divides the main wall and frieze colors, there will be new oak picture rail. I'm staining it a dark red/brown right now, and I'll give it a satin polyurethane finish. Curiously, there was original picture rail in the guest house, but in the main house, it only survived in a small hallway.

Now we're in the basement. This picture was taken before we closed on the house. The monstrous old furnace to the right of Carol had to go. Notice how the owners had the access panel open, probably because the pilot light refused to stay lit.

Here we see the massive heat exchanger that was inside the old furnace. Look at how dirty it was. It was probably 60 or so years old, and of very questionable thermal efficiency. Going down to light the pilot by hand whenever we wanted heat got really annoying quickly.

This is the floor under the old furnace. You can easily see the outline of something else. We're told there was a coal furnace there originally, and no fireplace or hearth elsewhere in the house.

Here's the new furnace and a/c combo unit. Extremely quiet and comfortable air flow, but we don't know yet if it's a lot more efficient than the old furnace and swamp cooler setup (sure hope so). Look at how much smaller the new furnace is compared to the ducting on top.

This water softener was probably installed in the '80s, but the previous owners never hooked it up. Many of the plumbing fixtures in the sinks around the house are corroded, so we definitely wanted softening.

This is the system we added. In addition to a softener for the whole house, there is a reverse osmosis water purification system that feeds the drink system in the fridge and a tap by the kitchen sink. The quality of the water is now superb. It's amazing how much less soap we're using too.

This wall opposite the softener is quite interesting. These are hollow clay blocks, sometimes called "pen tile" in New Mexico, because they were manufactured by prisoners in the state penitentiaries. The ribs you see are molded into the blocks to hold mortar. By all accounts, they were an excellent material to build house walls with here. We think this little wall is the only place in the house they were used.