Now, windows

 There are about 100 windows (more or less. Well, more) in the house. 

Each window needs to be assessed, cleaned, perhaps repaired, and painted.

What we have:

Bogk House today

What we want:

Bogk House from the Avery Library collection. Probably from the 1920s

This is not a small job.

We talked to three different groups with three different approaches and three wildly different prices for this job.

The first approach is the most expensive. You look at each window, remove the window and take it to a woodworking shop. Strip, fill and repaint. Repair all the hardware that needs to be repaired. Return the windows to the house and reinstall - and make sure everything opens and closes as needed. A fantastic way to solve the problem, but also very time consuming and expensive. We love this group, but are somewhat intimidated by the process and the cost.

The second group will work on each window in situ. There will be sanding, and filling as necessary. The repair on the window hardware may be out of this groups reach, but they will do what they can. We may need to follow-up with a dedicated window repair specialist. It will take much less time, is much less intrusive, and the person who is offering this service has painted many houses in the neighborhood, so they have an incentive to do this right.

The third is simply to hand the job over to the general contractor, once we select one. We are not leaning in this direction.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation is having their annual meeting in Milwaukee, and will be stopping by the house in September, and we would like to have the painting finished by then. That might be a tall order. They are mainly talking about what we did for the Air Conditioning, and some work that was performed before we bought the house.

We will not be messing with the art glass windows, which you can see in this image:

I can't remember how many of those windows are in the house, but I think it is over 50. They are all in good shape, because they are all recessed and protected from the weather. 

You may recall that these are the windows that Great Nephew Oliver used as a model for a cake he made:

Which was not only spectacular, but delicious as well.

We will have a decision this week, and as the painting starts, I will have updated posts.

Selecting vendors and contractors - let's focus on tile

 Oh boy.

After we got the first quote back for our General Contractor, we were shocked by the size of the bid. Not that we expected this to be cheap, but it felt as if there was a "Frank Lloyd Wright" premium. And maybe there was, or maybe the extensive work we needed, and some of the choices we made for materials force the price up.

There are some "rules of thumb" in construction, and that usually works pretty well. But in our first pass, we sort of ignored the price of various materials (tile, especially) and focused on the "look" of the results.

Original Pewabic tile alongside the Casota Limestone, and my foot.

The problem with that is that one of the rules of thumb is that the installation of the tile is about equal to the cost of the tile. (just like in the olden days when you expected the cost of software should be equal to the cost of the hardware.) But that resulted in a cascading price that added probably 30% to the overall cost of the project. The tile we like (and will now use sparingly) is Pewabic, a ceramic manufacturer that was founded in 1903, and used in many Wright houses. You might recall this:

You can see the layout of the tile on the floor. I don't think this is the final design.

Here are some other designs we are considering:

It is more complicated that it should be selecting what we want.

The first prices of the tile and installation came to about 13% of the total project cost. That seems unreasonably high, so we are looking at other options.

When we "Value Engineer" (term of art) the tile project, we can get the total tile cost down to under 10% of the total deal. Maybe less. That is a big savings.

We have a total of about 443 square feet of tile we will be installing. 45 in the "little" bathroom, 158 in  the primary, and 240 in the guest. The guest is the largest area because we are replacing the floor and the wall. It was originally the most expensive due to the tile we were looking at, but we changed that selection (we Value Engineered it) it became much more reasonable.

We are still working through these numbers, but we are getting close.

A Month in Milwaukee

 We've been settling in fort the summer, and spending a lot of time talking to contractors and service providers as we try to figure out the path forward.

I can't even tell you how explosive all the flowering trees were when we got here. Doreen called it a "rolling spring" since we had already been through these blossoms in Houston.

Japanese Magnolia

And the sunrises were just as spectacular as we remembered.

Though we are trying to not get up so early as to see every one.

The Canada Geese are having goslings/

and they are very cute.

Our trees look pretty good, too:

Lulu seems happy enough to be back.

and we are stating to make some selections that will affect us for as long as we own the house.

That being said, (and of which I will say more) we also have time to visit the West Siders, who seem to live in a pot of gold under the rainbow.

and the turkeys are strutting/

We found Frederick Bogk's grave while visiting Forest Home Cemetery on Memorial Day. (They have reenactors!)

And we had some nighttime visitors stop by to check out Doreen's new Dahlias. 

And that seems to be enough for now. I will expand on our contractor selection process soon.