Albemarle Reno

Opening up the walls of our house as part of its renovation was an inevitable inconvenience and expense since we knew we needed to replace the electrics and update plumbing. It was pointed out to us by Groovy Contractor and Intrepid Architect that having the walls open was a golden opportunity to consider air conditioning options. The house was loaded with lackluster, outdated window a/c units upon purchase. These poster-children for planned obsolescence were not only eyesores, but stressed out the house’s 1905 window frames to the max.

I had done my blog-writing homework by reading Mr. Brownstoner’s reno blog, and gleaned from his air-conditioning escapades that the Ductless Split System while offering lots of zone control was tough to integrate into the look of a historic home. Our non-brownstone house also doesn’t offer the transom-style concealment opportunities he was able to utilize.

Another option we floated briefly was the kind of a/c that has those round holes in the floor — the Space Pak — the web site even has an old house like ours on its home page! I agree that this is a visually unobtrusive system — but in the houses I’ve been in that have this system, the vacuum-cleaner-y whooshing — dare I say space-pak? — sound was undeniable.

This left the full-on, ducted, central a/c system as our remaining, priciest, most disruptive option. We decided on dual-zones — one on the third floor where our home offices are and another on the second floor for the four bedrooms and playroom. For reasons of cost, and curiosity, we decided against central a/c on the first floor, the location of 2 parlors, the dining room and our future kitchen. The roof of the wrap around porch

seemed to keep our first floor a reasonable temperature. We noticed this on several visits to the house last summer while we were in contract, so we wanted to live through this summer without a/c to see how often we’d really need it downstairs.

But where to put the ductwork, compressors, and air handlers in this olde house?

Above the third floor we have this attic

It is enormous, and when we bought the house there was no access to it via a closet or pull-down ladder. We first got a look at it when we were bidding out the renovation job and an industrious a/c installer put a ladder against a wall in an eaves room, and peeled back some insulation between the joists. So mercifully all our ductwork issues for the 3rd floor were easily solved.

The second floor was big trouble, though. Closets could be utilized for ductwork and equipment, but that was just a small sliver of the space we needed — ducts would still need to be run from room to room. I learned all about “soffits” which create the needed space for ductwork by adding a rectangular bump-out along a length of wall. We had all kinds of these in our last apartment — and while they weren’t great architectural beauties, they didn’t overly offend in their incredibly spare and modern setting. Intrepid Architect was particularly intrepid in her vehemence that zero soffits be put upon our Colonial Revival Style grande dame.

To get that ductwork done soffit-free, the option that remained was — drop the entire 2nd floor hall ceiling.

We dropped the ceiling 8 inches — to where the picture rail had been, leaving a ceiling height of just over 8 feet. That’s about 3 feet taller than I am so I’m content with that.

And although no ductwork would be needed in the ceiling over the stairwell, it made sense to drop that area too — to make the ceiling even throughout the hallway, so up went the scaffold and down dropped the ceiling

The hallway drop was sheetrocked and finished seamlessly to join the stairwell drop — here’s the view up the stairs from the landing:

Now the ceiling over the stair landing is 15 feet high — still pretty dramatic.

Closet ceilings on the 2nd floor came down too:

and one closet is dedicated to an air handler,

these alterations resulted in the sacrifice of some great looking wallpaper

that couldn’t be preserved once all the cutting, patching and plastering from a/c and electric work had been done.

We chose registers (vocab alert: these are the metal plates through which cold air blows into the room) that seemed to fit well with the look of the house

and decided to paint them the same color throughout the house — instead of making them the same color as whatever the wall or ceiling color is where they’re installed. That second option seemed like we’d be trying to camouflage something that there’s really no hiding, so I’d rather recognize the registers as an element of the room. We went with a grey-ish brown color that seemed to work well with our interior paint color choices (more on those, next post).

Here’s a before and after on that 2nd floor hallway drop — the first picture is from when we were in contract last summer

The caution tape hanging from the middle of the ceiling is not a decorating choice — small squares of sheetrock have been left open so we can balance the amount of air-flow to each room before closing the ceiling for good.

The remaining question mark is a/c for the kitchen-in-progress, for which we may have to use a window a/c unit until we are are able save enough to add a 3rd central air unit to our budget. For the past 3 days, the paid-for central air has enjoyed a much needed rest. To have it up and running through the July and August heat-wave convinced us that allocating such a hefty chunk of the reno budget to the system was a wise move.