Primary Bathroom

 This is the last bit of the house that we will be changing "all in". We will add new furniture, and do something with the carpets upstairs, but I think that this will be quite enough for now. (well, for then).

Here is the current layout:

This give you an idea of what it looks like:

It is small, but then bathrooms were small back then. It is hard to capture the height of the shower, though. I can stand up in it, but just barely.

There is a window behind the mirrors, though. And that is pretty cool:

This is what we are putting in:

The shower:

The Vanity:

Looking west with a fancy toilet:

That is about it!

I will be updating these posts bye and bye.

Guest Room

The guest room in the house is the original maid's room. It has an en suite bathroom, which makes it very nice. We will be adding some built in furniture in the style of FLW, so that should be very nice, too. When you come to visit, you will probably stay in this room, and you will like it quite a bit.

Here is the layout now:

Plenty of closets, and that window on the bottom (plan south) is an art glass window.

This is roughly where that bed is:

but I don't have the dimensions correct, so don't use that to design the curtains. 

For you sharp eyed readers, you will have noticed in the previous post about the bathroom how the picture rail detail was painted white and sort of blended away in this bathroom. You can see that here, through the door:

We will be restoring that.

Here is the new design (you can see the bed to scale here):

It might be hard to see what is what on the plan view. Here is a perspective (Orthogonal? I can't remember what these are called in architectural drawings) 

Nice! That will be on the top (north) of the drawing above.

Section view:

View in the other direction, toward the south, of the bed:

This will be a very nice room.

In the first plans we saw of the house, the lettering was sort of hard to read, so this looks as if it was to be called "Mad's Room". So our niece Madeline claimed it as her own. And of course, she will always have first rights of refusal for that room because of that.

Guest Bathroom

 This is the layout of the current guest bath:

and it looks like this:

It feels and looks, old fashioned. But I love that tiny radiator and the hex floor tiles. (same as in the other bathroom)

Here is the plan for the update:

We'll be taking out the tub (sorry Chas) and putting in a shower. Updating the vanity, leaving the toilet. Putting a towel rack over that little radiator.

It is hard to see in the drawing, but the lighting along the mirror above looks like this:

Doreen found these old sconces from the Biltmore Hotel in Arizona from 1929. They look perfect for this bathroom. It will make it very cool.

The shower looks like this:

It will be a very nice, functional bathroom.

Boiler Breakdown

Last week Friday we were informed that the boiler in the house was not working. It is an industrial sized boiler, (which sounds great, except when you are trying to get it fixed, as I will explain)

The house was cold, and the temperature over the weekend was supposed to drop to below zero, air temperature. 

Burnham KV905 low pressure steam boiler

So I did what you do. I called Teko Mechanical, who installed this boiler in 2022 (!). But they said they don't work on that anymore!

They gave me the name of Butters-Fetting, a big mechanical service company in the greater Milwaukee area.

But first I tried Gross Heating and Cooling, since they're installing some additional air conditioning in the house this spring. With earlier conversation with their rep, I got the idea that they had been asked to quote for this installation, but didn't get the job. I figured that they would be able to go there and fix the problem.

They called me almost immediately and said they can't work on this system.

So I called Butters-Fetting, and the sent a person right away. (A down boiler is an emergency in Wisconsin in the winter) Their guy there for three hours. He called me up and said he could not fix it. So what do I do now? He didn't know

I called back Teko, and they gave me the name of PBBS, who only works on industrial boilers. 

So I called PBBS, and they said they do not work on residential units. I told him this might be in a residence but it is an industrial boiler. He said, nope. And he also said they don't work on Burnham boilers, so I guess that was that.

From PBBS I got the name of Becker Boiler, but at the same time got a name from Brother Matthew, of their boiler guy - a fellow from ProServ.

I called them both, but got hold of John from ProServ first. By this time it was about 7:00 PM Friday evening. John asked if he could go in the morning. Since it wasn't going to get TOO cold (maybe 25) that night, I said ok. He promised to be there at 6:00 AM.

Then Jake from Becker Boiler called me back. I said I had someone from ProServ on the tap for the morning. He said that's fine, but call him if I needed to. He seemed to imply that the ProServ folks work on residential only boilers, and he might not be able to fix it.

It was a long and sleepless night. And NOT because it was Valentine's Day!

At 6:15 the next morning, I got a call from John. He said he cannot fix it, he was unfamiliar with the burner and the control system. So I called Jake back. He would be there at 8:00 AM.

Around 10:00 AM I got the text that I had been hoping for. 

Jake called me an explained what had happened.

The pressure transducer (a control unit that measure the pressure in the boiler and then turns the flames on or off) had been improperly installed IN the boiler itself, just above the waterline.

Pressure transducer

This cause the transducer to get plugged with scale, and fail.

Luckily for us, Brother Matthew was able to visit the house to make sure everything was running. I am very grateful for his help.

I am now getting way outside my level of knowledge so I will turn this over to Jake, who sent this explanation:

Removed the pressure transducer from the boiler, (it was installed direct in the boiler just above the waterline, directly in the steam area). 

Observed scale in the orifice, plugging t transducer. Attempted to clear it out and was able to get it to clear, however it was not functioning. Reinstalled it but disconnected the wiring. Tested all safety limits to find out why the boil was stuck in the "OFF" position. 

All safety controls were operational and calling for boiler to fire. Checked in the Siemens AZL and noticed it was not communicating with the RWF and flashing in the "off" condition.  through the AZL programming and cleared the communication error. Succeeded in getting the boiler to fi and set the operational pressuretrol to act as the main pressure control for the boiler. Ordered the new transducer and installed it after it was received.

Reinstalled it using a pigtail to protect it from direct steam and debris from the surface of the boiler water. 

Reset pressuretrol back to original pressure and fired boiler. Observed operation and boiler modulation.

Everything was functioning properly

The transducer was installed on Tuesday.

It looks like this:

So the boiler is OK, as far as I know.

Of course, this leaves some very big questions we need to have answered:

1. Why did they install this boiler?
2. Did they know that the installer would not be able to maintain it?
3. Did they have a backup plan for the maintenance and repair of this boiler?
4. Was the price justified?

Anyway, this is not the end of the story.

Shared Bathroom

We are rich in bathrooms in this house. There is the powder room downstairs, and then three upstairs bathrooms. The one in the principle bedroom, the one in the guest room, and then the one in the hall between the other two bedrooms. (One of those bedrooms will probably be an office).

This is the second bathroom.

Here it is now:

and some photos:

I love those large hexagonal floor tiles. And the windows. Nice touch.

We are not making many changes. Mainly adding some wall tiles, and removing that hand shower. (NB to anyone who will be staying with us and using this bathroom - you will have a tub)

We will be adding a new mirror, but note that it will not be over the lavatory. The window is over the lavatory. We will also be adding wall sconces similar to what we have in the kitchen. 

We are keeping the original toilet. I think this one is the "Expulso" (the one in the guest bathroom is an "Ejecto")  There is an error here in that we will get rid of that hand shower.

It will be a nice, functional bathroom. 

Andirons

 We saw the plans for the original Niedecken andirons at the Milwaukee Art Museum:

We are not sure if they were ever built and were then sold, or if they were never built at all.

But our architects made a sketch of what they would look like:

and what they would look like in-situ:

We are hoping to use these as a base for a gas log installation, at least in the big downstairs fireplace.

The Meyer May house in Grand Rapids did something similar. They have the original andirons in place:

It looks good:

The Bogk Rug

From the book: Frank Lloyd Wright Drawings, by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, we learn:

"Wright was not always able to design carpets for his homes and buildings. He did so on certain rare occasions, such as for the Heurtley, Coonley, Robie, Meyer May, and Bogk houses in his early work, and the Price, Gillin, David Wright, and Hoffman houses in the later part of his career. But of all these works, the most extensive was unquestionably the carpet designs for the Imperial Hotel."

(emphasis mine)

So that is why we are taking so much time on the rug, and why this will be a long post. I think it will be mostly images, though.

You might remember this photo. It is the first thing you see when you enter the house:

And you probably notice that you see a lot of orange.

A LOT of orange.

Now, far be it from me to question TAA and Oglivanna on their design choices. And I can tell you this - that color really grows on you. It is a very bright and cheerful color. And if you think about where TAA was based, out in Arizona at Taliesin West, you might appreciate the colors more.

But this house is in Milwaukee.

And I also want to say that we are not going to live in a museum, as the Elsners before us did not want to live in a museum.

But that carpet is at least 50 years old, and we felt it might be time for a change. So we decided to do some research and find out what the original rug looked like, and maybe take some design hints from that and make our own decision about what we are going to do with the rugs.

Here is the original rug design we found at the Avery Library at Columbia University. (Thank you to them! Very much)

The designs are slightly modified (the living room icons are a bit shorter, I believe) but the layout corresponds to what we have in the house now.

Then, this is the rug design from TAA for the Elsners:

Mostly the same designs, but one transcription error crept in. The icon from the dining room to the living room was reversed:

Check the drawing above.

The TAA folks did a very good job of documenting the icons. But we only found one complete design - and this is the one that is reversed above. These are the original colors:

and here it is as rewoven (and reversed):

The design is slightly simpler, but the colors are changed to compliment the orange field.

This is one of the three identical icons from the living room:

This is the other big icon that goes to the front door. There is some confusion about how this one ends up on the left side of this photo:

This is a detailed look at that rug, the current one:

And because we have furniture in the room, I don't have a great photo of the icon here. So you get a photo of some chairs and Lulu, for scale. She likes to be in my photos.

When we started doing research on the original rugs, we has some yarn samples and descriptions. The yarns are shown here:

You can see the body calls for grey, and other colors for the details and icons. (Thanks to the Milwaukee Art Museum for letting us see and photograph these samples). You can also see that some of the samples are twisted colors (the bottom three). So we were drying to see the original colors in place.

Now if you do a web search for the Bogk Rug, you find out many things. There was a poster made buy the Milwaukee Art Museum showing the original colors, or as close as you can get with an image of a reproduction on a website:

Doreen did a lot of research and discovered that the original rugs were purchased by the Tom Figge and for a time were on display at the Figge Museum in Davenport, Iowa. We tried to contact the museum, but did not have much luck. But through the previous owners of the house we learned that Toomey & Co, an antiques dealer in Chicago could make an introduction, and indeed could help us see the rugs.

We contacted John Toomey and he could not have been nicer or more helpful. He had access to three of the original rugs, and would have them delivered to his warehouse if we wanted to come to Chicago.

And we did! And it was pretty amazing.

First we stopped by the Tai Ping (Rug weavers) showroom at the Design Center and picked up a "Pom Book" with sample of many of their yarns. 

We had two of those huge books. That is 480 different pom color samples that we could play with.

Then we had to get to the warehouse where the rugs were being stored. Not to make this a travel blog, but this was the week of the big November snowstorm in Chicago. It was a mess.

But when we got there, we were greeted by John, and this:

Incredible. The original rugs, the original designs, the original (if worn and faded) colors.

We spent several hours on our hands and knees looking closely at the designs and the colors of these original rugs. 

It was a treat.

This is the dining room icon

North Living Room Rug Icon, by the front door

Living Room icon, one of three identical

Details

Poms, and original yarn samples (images) that we had to play with

Matching poms and colors

More matching.

But as I said above, we are not trying to create a museum. So we took the poms back to Milwaukee (Thank you Tai Ping. We promise we will return them!) and started to compare the colors with colors of our brick and floors.

Here, we have an image of the plebian poms paying homage to their pom overlords.

Whew. That is a lot of about these rugs. And it really only scratches the surface. Luckily for us, Domi and Nate are helping us digitize the designs, which we will need to get to the weavers:

Each square will have to have a pom color. each line will have to have a color as well. 

We also learned that the Meyer May House in Grand Rapids, Michigan has rewoven their rugs. That house was constructed in 1909, only a few years before the Bogk House, and we decided to take a trip there to see the house, and the rug. (Another bad travel story with this trip. Maybe I will tell about that on my other blog. But we made it there, and we made it home)

The icons of the Meyer May House are much different, but the colors are not dissimilar.

And the large field of color is very pleasing.