Haven't done one of these in a while, figured it was time for an update.

A month or so ago, once the weather was halfway consistently above freezing overnight, I started on another parapet section rebuild. I picked up where I left off with the previous parapet section rebuild, which puts me on top of the porch.  

It's kinda nice to have a little more room to work than the scaffold provides, but because it's a finished roof, it also means I have to do a pretty good job of both containing and cleaning up the mess I make...every...time...I...put...in...some...work. Anyhow, this section was interfered with by somebody in the past. Not rebuilt, not repaired, just interfered with; their work is absolute garbage. And, of course, that roof membrane and liquid flashing (the white stuff, which is junk) wrapping up and over the parapet -- 100% the wrong way to do it. 

Obviously, there isn't supposed to be green stuff growing out of the walls, but that's been the story at the north end of the house for who knows how long, and the primary motivation for rebuilding the parapet. The silver lining is that these parapets are in such bad shape that zero power tools are required for deconstruction. 

I haven't taken many pics of the rebuild; it's the 4th section I've gotten into and the novelty has worn off. But, as far as progress is concerned, I got everything tore out and 90% rebuilt. There's still another course of brick to set, but I need to terminate the roof membrane under galvanized flashing on the inside of the parapet first. 

That part of the parapet build is tricky and to do it right, I really need the corners (where 1 parapet section runs into another) prepped and ready to go. This meant tearing out the adjoining parapet section, which was in even worse shape.    

Again, pretty easy deconstruction, but it makes a giant, dusty mess. Because I tore out some of the ceiling in this section of the house when I rebuilt the porch -- had to tighten up the brick where ledger carriage bolts went through it -- a lot of the debris falls into the house, so I keep the shop vac handy and ready to go. Also, there's an insane amount of framing in the roofs of these old houses; a layer of 2x10 joists is what the plaster ceiling is hung from, and then there's ANOTHER layer of 2x10s on top of those that create the roof pitch.  

I've got maybe 80% of this section rebuilt, but rainy weather has slowed the progress. I don't handle rainouts real well, so today -- a rain day -- I decided to get into another project I've been wanting to tackle for a while: the main floor windows.  

These things are original to the house, as best I can tell. The sashes are held in place with trim (stops), and they operate by way of chains, rollers, and weights. The sashes have one end of chain connected on each side, the chains runs up the window jamb, around a roller, and down into the wall, and a weight is connected to the other end of the chain. The weights, in theory, balance out the weight of the sash so that when a sash is raised or lowered, it stays right where you want it to. Without that setup, the sashes, which sit loosely in the window jamb, would come crashing down.  

With the stops pried off, the sash comes right out of the wall. Then it's just a matter of disconnecting the chains, letting the weights drop, and fishing the weights out of the wall. How do the weights come out? There's a little section at the bottom of the jamb that's removable. In my case, the meatheads that redid this place in the 80s -- wood studs and drywall -- drove nails through the framing and into the window jamb, including the piece that's supposed to be removable, so I had to fight that situation a little bit. But, I prevailed. 

Probably saw that coming, didn't ya? 😉 

Lots going on in this pic. If you look closely, you can see the 2 right side window weights (long, cylindrical cast iron things), 1 for each sash. And, there's the 1 little piece of wood I snapped, but lessons were learned and if that's the only thing I have to repair or replace, I'm in great shape. 

I'd love to try and figure out where the sash weights were manufactured. My assumption is right here in St. Louis, but this is the only marking any of them have. That may not be enough information to solve the riddle.  

The lower sash came out easy enough, I figured I might as well get the upper sash out while I was there. I should mention that, for as much as I detest the aluminum storm windows somebody put on the house, I'm glad they're there; I can do all this work, take the sashes out, whatever else, and not have to worry about boarding anything up. 

The upper sash had been painted in place, which was a bit of an obstacle, but with a little cutting and tapping and cussing, I got it freed up. With both sashes out of the way, I was able to take out all 4 cast iron rollers and get them cleaned up.

The hardware will probably need another round of cleaning but I was able to get most of the paint off with 1 boiling. And if that's the best I can get them, so be it; anything pushing 150 years old is gonna have some battle scars.  

Today was the easy part. Now I have to remove the paint from the sashes, assess the condition, and go from there. I can already tell that the upper sash will need some work; the bottom rail must have come loose at some point and somebody kept it in place with metal "L" brackets on the exterior side. I can't have that, so I'll either have to disassemble and reassemble the bottom part of the sash, or just make a new piece altogether. 

And that's just the beginning. Then there's work to be done to add weatherstripping, getting glass, painting, and...glazing. More glazing. Yuck. Following that, I'll get new sash chain and reinstall everything...and then get started on the next window.   

Been a while since I wrote one of these. Not sure why. Could be that I haven't tackled any big, noteworthy projects lately. Could be that I don't get on social media much anymore so I'm not taking as many pics of the work I do. Could be that I do all this rehab stuff 'cause I just like doin' it, and publicizing it isn't usually something that even occurs to me to do. 

But, sometimes it's good to remind myself that I got some work done in the past year, even if none of it felt like a "big" deal. Truth is, every step in the right direction is a big deal because it gets me that much closer to the goal. 

​I started 2025, once it was warm enough to comfortably work outside, by digging a bunch of holes all over the yard.

I had found a piece of old glass while picking up dog poop, and while finding glass in the yard isn't real uncommon, I decided to make a concerted effort to see if I could find any glass that was reasonably interesting. 

Spoiler alert, I did. 

I wound up finding several medicine bottles, dishware, knobs, spark plugs, and more than 1 piece of what I'm pretty sure was a bicycle or motorcycle. 

When I'd made a big enough mess that I decided to call it quits, I shifted my attention to the basement windows I'd started the previous year. In 2024 I rebuilt 3 limestone basement window openings and built news jambs and sashes, but they needed storm windows to keep the rain out. And, they needed new brick mould, which I also built. Somehow, I got all 3 windows finished up in 2025.   

In between some of the window efforts I got a little repointing done.

One of the larger projects was rebuilding another section of parapet, which is always a bit of an adventure. I'd rebuilt 2 sections of the 3-sided bay in previous years; in 2025 I rebuilt the section closest to the porch.

Everything above the windows was SUPER saggy and crumbly when I bought the place 5 years ago. Now, it's pretty rewarding to look up at the parapet and see straight lines and some of the original detail that had been covered up by sloppy, ineffective repair jobs done forever ago. And, because they were fully rebuilt down to the windows -- not just repointed -- I know they'll be plenty solid for a long, long time. 

When the parapet was done I moved the scaffold to the other side of the porch and rebuilt a chimney. Like the parapet, the chimneys (there are 3) are all in rough shape and require full rebuilds. I had to tear out more brick than I wanted to, but I think the new chimney is a whole lot better than the previously rebuilt version. And, because I was able to sneak a stainless steel liner into it, technically, I can safely make a (small) fire in the fireplace. 

​This was what I tore out:

And this is the rebuilt version:

Like the parapets, reusing the existing brick is challenging and time consuming. The pics don't show it, but just for the record, I try to use the shittier bricks in spots most people won't ever see. So...the pics from the roof, you're seeing to worst couple of sides.

The last little project I 95% snuck in before it got too cold to work outside was upgrading the original porch door opening. Somebody covered it with plywood and stuck a chintzy little window in there, and it looked terrible. I don't have any plans to make the doorway functional, but I wanted it to at least look like a door.

Fortunately, the original jamb was still there so I didn't have to build any of it, although I did have to build a transom sash. I have no idea what the original door would have looked like -- the front door is original but mostly glass and I doubt the porch door would have been the same, and the back and basement doors are replacements -- so I copied the dimensions of the only original interior door left in the house. Minus about a coat and a half of paint, she's done.

In retrospect, maybe I got more done in 2025 than I thought or remembered. 

And now it's 2026. What am I gonna do this year? Excellent question.

I would really, really like to rebuild the parapet between the new chimney and where I left off with the last parapet rebuild, but that's like 20 linear feet, maybe more, and 4 different wall sections. For 1 guy, knowing I'll have to rebuild about the top 3 ft of all of it, that'll take some time. And, I have to get more scaffold; I need some skinny stuff to get the section just south of the porch. 

I would really, really like to replace the garage roof, and maybe even go in the garage for the first time. That's right, I've been here since 2020 and I am yet to open the garage door, let alone step foot in the thing. But it needs a new roof, fascia, soffit, gutters, pretty much everything. Maybe even new roof joists. It's not a huge job, but tearing off the existing roof won't be fun. 

I would really, really like to finish the porch. This would include another coat of paint (with dif colors, so prob 2 coats), getting the ceiling light fixture installed, and making the space under the porch a little friendlier. 

And, I would really, really like to demo the deck. It's a total piece of shit. The stairs are rotten and legit dangerous, it looks hideous, and there are a lot of tangential jobs -- repointing stone and brick, replacing doors, etc. -- that require the deck to be gone to tackle. I'd have to build a little temp thing, just to get from the back door down to the yard so the dogs can go in and out, but otherwise, a new deck would be a project for another year.

And then there's the front of the house. It's always on my to-do list, but I never quite seem to get to it. If I could sneak in some repointing, even if it's just the limestone, that would be a huge accomplishment. 

The other thing I want to do more of, which isn't really house related other than it cuts into the time I have to work on the house on weekends, is take the dogs out on hikes. We didn't get out as much as we should have in 2025...but we still got out, and the dogs got to do plenty of swimmin' and explorin'. 

So that's 2025 and plans for 2026. Time to get to work.

The structural part of the chimney rebuild, for all intents and purposes, is complete. 

Last time I wrote something here, I left off at about this point:

Seems like forever ago that I was at this point. I'm glad I covered up the flu going down to the basement; this allowed me to add some stoutness to the structure and make it a little more solid, hopefully, than what had been entirely single wythe walls.

From there, up she went:

Doing this work is a lot like tile work in that no matter how dead on I get things, I kinda hate all of it until it's done. These bricks are slightly different sizes and there ain't a straight edge or square face on many of them, which makes level and plumb tough marks to uniformly hit. But, once it's all pointed and cleaned up, the mortar does a good job of softening all the brick edges that don't quite line up with each other.

I kinda liked the style of damper the chimney had, but they require a clay liner to sit on. Luckily, there's a place a couple miles down Gravois that sells that sort of stuff (I get all my brick mortar, type o, which the big box stores don't carry, there too) so I was able to pickup a 2' section pretty easily. I cut it in half and mortared it into the top two courses.

The chimney needed a cap and concrete is typically the material of choice. I could have formed and poured it in place but I didn't like that option -- I didn't think I'd be able to form it real well given the imperfections in the brick. Instead, I took some measurements, built a form in the shop, and poured the cap there. 

The cap is 2" thick at the outside edges, 2.25" thick around the hole for the clay liner, and wound up being heavy enough to be a super challenging thing to get up to the roof. But, I think the whole thing turned out pretty well, especially compared to what had been there previously (identical to the chimney towards the front of the house).

I still need to run a stainless steel liner down the flue and get the damper and damper cap installed, but that shouldn't be too painful. And, it can wait; completing the masonry portion of the job called for a celebratory hike and swim. 

With any luck I'll get the chimney buttoned up, inside and out, before it gets too cold to work outside. Got a basement window in about the same predicament, and a whole other exterior project I want to tackle before winter sets in, so we'll see...

One of the projects on the 2025 to-do list was rebuilding at least one of the two chimneys on the east wall of the house. A couple weeks ago, I started that project. 

The chimneys, which were previously rebuilt in the half-assed fashion that's typical of most of the prior "rehabs" the house has undergone, are in rough shape. The chimney I chose to tackle is the northernmost of the two; the cap was cracked, the unnecessary parging on the yard side of the chimney had delaminated and allowed a ton of water into the wall, and the roof membrane "flashing" was absolute trash.   

Here's a better look at some of the problems:

See the leafy thing in the bottom lefthand corner of the pic below? Vegetation isn't supposed to be growing out of walls, let alone 18' up the wall. This is how the parapet vegetation in the bottom righthand corner of the pic starts out. 

Once I really took some time to assess the chimney's condition and knowing some major brick surgery was going to be required, I decided to first repoint a section of the wall below the chimney and parapet. I feel a whole lot better about tearing out and rebuilding sections of parapet when there's a solid area beneath it. 

Repointing a lower section first also gave me some time to figure out how to erect another level of scaffold, which I needed to get up to the parapet and chimney elevation. My scaffold just barely fits -- I had to cut some tree branches to make it happen -- in this little corner between the house and the porch, and getting that 4th set of scaffold frames up to the top is no picnic.

Then it was time to start the deconstruction. I figured it would go fast; the walls with rotten, waterlogged mortar come apart without any real effort. 

I'd never given it much thought, but I realized that these chimneys have two flues: the one on the left goes to the basement (finished, livable space when the house built in 1878) and would have served, presumably, some sort of wood or coal burning stove or furnace; the flue on the right goes to the fireplace on the main floor. 

I also discovered that the flue to the main floor fireplace had a liner...except it only goes halfway down to the firebox, which makes it pointless. Remember the comment about half-assed work...example #381. 

The stainless steel liner comes in 4' sections, but I couldn't for the life of me bust this section free. It wasn't until I worked my way down a little further than I could see why: the sections had been riveted together. 

If you look closely, just above the seem between two liner sections, you'll see a little hole. That's where I drilled out one of the rivets. Unfortunately, there was another rivet on the roof side that I had no way reasonable to get to horizontally. Fortunately, I own a lot of hammers and a lot of long pieces of steel, and I was able to stick some steel down through the top of the liner, catch the rivet, and beat on it until it snapped, allowing me to remove that liner section.  

In that same pic, you can see the top of the wall section I repointed. I'm super, super glad I made the decision to do that before I started this demo. 

I tore out just about everything I could reach and called it quits once I started hitting mortar that was still pretty solid. After a little cleanup, I was able to start rebuilding walls.

I had a hard time reaching some of the first few chimney courses I needed to reset, and on the yard side of the wall the parapet bricks stair step and protrude and do all kinds of things that require a strong attention to detail, so the work started off slowly. 

I will eventually rebuild this entire length of parapet, but for now, I'm just dealing with this section. I use shims to keep a little pressure between the freshly set bricks and the existing bricks while the mortar sets up, and I try to leave myself some strategic places where I can interlock the subsequent parapet rebuilds into this one.

The slowest courses to deal with, by far, are the rows of brick that protrude past the brick in the course below. The easiest way to deal with those rows is to finagle some wood in place to act as a shelf for the bricks until the mortar cures.

After that, it's off to the races (unless I get rained out, like I did today). I decided to cover up the basement flue, because it's not needed and will give me a little more structure to help keep the chimney solid and plumb for many years to come. 

I had to custom cut a bunch of bricks to make it work, but I covered the basement flue with some 1/4" cement board to prevent a ton of mortar from dripping into the basement, and then I stuck 1" steel angle I had laying around under each row of brick that went across the flue. That should be more than enough strength to keep the bricks from sagging, and will allow me to go vertical on a solid base.

Today I finished setting bricks on that layer and was ready to start going up...and then we got about 4" of rain in 20 minutes. Chimney work will have to wait for another day, but the next step will be to get the roof membrane flashed around the chimney.  

The yard is full of glass, this has been well documented. Most of it is tiny pieces of indeterminate trash. Vintage trash, but trash nonetheless. Occasionally, if I'm really digging, I'll kick up old medicine bottles or busted soda and beer bottles. Those are fun to find.

A couple weekends ago, when I wasn't looking for any glass, I found this while spreading some excavated dirt:

I didn't know what to make of it -- 10 ounces of PE-something. I was thinking soda or medicine (beer would have been brown/amber glass), Google wasn't much help, and I was pretty content to let this thing be a mystery. Later in the day curiosity got the better of me and I tried a little more research.

I don't remember how I figured it out, but I figured it out -- and I should have figured it out much sooner. 

It's a 10 ounce jar that contained a Pevely Dairy product, like sour cream or cottage cheese. Here's a picture I found online of an intact, 10 ounce Pevely jar:

Pretty similar, eh? It's gotta be a 10 ounce Pevely jar fragment. 

Pevely Dairy was once a massive, local dairy operation that got its start in 1887 in Pevely, MO. A farmer there named Mark Kerckhoff started running butter and milk to St. Louis, and the products' popularity grew following Kerckhoff's son Daniel winning a prize for the dairy products at the 1904 World's Fair (held at Forest Park in St. Louis, MO).

At that time, Pevely was still a small business, operating out of 1312 South 7th Street, just south of present day downtown St. Louis.  

The business would quickly grow, necessitating multiple larger facilities. In 1917, Pevely Dairy moved to the corner of Grand and Chouteau, which is about a mile north of my house. 

The factory was expanded in 1943, 1945, 1975, 1985, and 1997. A garage was built nearby in 1928, and the smokestack, barely visible in the above pic, was built in 1943. Business was good for many, many years.

In 2008, Pevely Dairy was bought by Prairie Farms Dairy, another prominent name in the local dairy scene. Prairie Farms closed the Grand & Chouteau factory and sold the property to St. Louis University (SLU) in 2011.

Sadly, despite being listed in the National Register of Historic Places, protests, and general public uproar, SLU tore the Pevely complex down in 2012. I wrote a 100-page graduate report on just how shitty St. Louis University is when it comes to urban land (re)development, and that was BEFORE this happened. But, SLU has deep, deep pockets and apparently threatened to move their entire medical campus to St. Louis County if St. Louis City didn't allow the demo, so...it all came down.

To be fair, the site is now home to SLU's new hospital, and a new children's hospital is currently under construction. The hospital complex is a good-looking set of buildings, albeit not the same architecture as the buildings they replaced.

Can't preserve 'em all, and there are worse things that could have happened to the property.

All that said, this little chunk of glass isn't my first connection to Pevely.

In the 1920s-1940s, Pevely Dairy had a 700-acre farm in an area known as Crescent, MO, which is about a 30 minute drive from my house down HWY 44. 300 cows, 200 employees, greenhouses, barns, the big Kerckhoff family mansion...the farm property was quite an operation.

Today, it's all gone, replaced by houses and golf courses. 

Except it's not ALL gone. Not entirely.

At the time I didn't know that Pevely's dairy operation had been nearby, many decades ago. To me, the park was just a big suburban flood plain field next to a wooded area next to a river, with a bunch of trails running through all of it. And, a railroad track bisected the park; we always stayed on the river side of the tracks.

One day, when Roscoe wanted to keep going after our usual jaunt to the river and back, we crossed the train tracks to explore that part of the park. Just on the other side of the tracks, we were greeted by this: 

If I see an old building, I instinctively need to know its story. I went home, did some digging, and that's when I realized that the park land had, at one time, either been part of the Pevely dairy farm or adjacent to it.

The structure in the picture is one of the Pevely farm pump houses. A little further into the woods there's an old, moss-covered concrete wall that must have served some farm purpose at one time. 

Over the subsequent years, Roscoe and I walked every square inch of the lower portion of that park. All weather conditions, all terrain types, all distances. Every hike there was a great hike. 

When Roscoe got himself a little sister (Freckles), he got to show her around the park a handful of times before age caught up with him and his legs stopped cooperating. 

Puppy Freckles was as exploratory and high-energy as they come, she didn't hesitate to check out the Pevely farm remnants. 

When Freckles got herself a little brother (Farley), she carried on the tradition and showed him around the place.

Roscoe passed away almost 2 years ago and we don't visit this park and the Pevely remnants quite as often as we used to. Freckles, who's almost 6, and Farley, who's almost 2 and definitely every bit of 120 pounds, are high-energy pups that prefer running, swimming, and playing fetch; they're not laid back trail dogs like Roscoe was.

But, a year after Roscoe died we took his ashes out there to scatter some of them in the river, and I'll always think of the park as the place where I spent hundreds and hundreds of hours with my buddy. Because of that, no matter how spazzy any dogs ever are, I'll take 'em there from time to time to walk the trails, splash around in the river, and sniff out what's left of the old Pevely place, just like Roscoe did. 

Finding what turned out to be old Pevely glass in the yard was kinda cool, but being reminded of the many trips Roscoe and I took to the old Pevely farm was even better.