Bob Anderson's new home.
 

I was looking for something on U-Tube, next thing I know, I'm going through a tour of Bob's new home. Looks like a little more elbow room.
Congratulations are in order! :thmbsp:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1O51PFMuOw

Congratulations, Bob!

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Like your tree, need to hang an antenna or two from it.

Thanks! We've been slowly moving in over the last two weeks. Many of my TVs have been put into a climate controlled storage facility to keep them out of harms way.

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Bigger consoles and some of my favs will be going into the new house. For sure the Dumont Clifton, Zenith porthole and Philco 37-690 radio will be shown off.

It'll be a while before a new workshop is up and running again.
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Nice digs!

I'd keep the POTS wiring, get 2-5 rotary dial phones, and get a Bluetooth to POTS phone adapter for that smartphone. That way you can enjoy period correct phones, and if your charging your smart phone in another room or floor and need to make or answer a call you don't have to run to your smart phone.

WOW!!! I should live so long. You really have something here. I can't get my mind around it.

Goal is to be moved in by the end of the month Figured I'd better do a little cleaning first :drool:
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I love hardwood floors!
My 15 YO home is all carpeted except for the baths and kitchen areas. I hate rugs!
You're concerned about the Electrical service. There's nothing wrong with using the old fuse box as a pull box. It's done all the time, when doing a service upgrade. It helps to keep the new panel neater.
It looks like a lot of home-owner wiring present. :scratch2:

TV room on the first floor and radio room on the third floor, looks great Bob. That easy access from garage to basement is fantastic!!!

Change all those standard Leviton switches to 1920's pushbutton types with brass plates, now that's original. The receptacles, where you do not have a ground wire to the box, can be changed to GFCI type. A 200 amp service panel will give you more breaker pole space but the meter base and service cable outside will need to be changed also. Since load is not being increased, it may not be worth it. That is still a good 100 amp panel.

Your house is old enough to have been heated with coal, so maybe the area under the front porch had a coal chute coming in.

No, third floor unless you mean the attic ;) Yes, it's so much easier to move stuff into this place :yes:

Not sure what I'll do about the electrical situation. First up I think I'll have a crack in the foundation repaired then maybe some plumping issues. I'll be doing some painting too.

The spare first floor bedroom is going to be my display area for now. Only have a few radios in there so far. I'll be doing some swapping around to see what works in there. Need to install some shelves too.
I don't want to cram it so full they can't be enjoyed.
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Put a few more sets into storage and still have more to go. Moving the big stuff into the house on Sunday with the help of a friend and a moving truck.

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:DJust imagine all the run time you will get on your "portables" as you move from room to room doing stuff.

A 100 amp service is enough for a single family home that has a gas range, furnace, water heater and clothes dryer. It looks like a few extra circuits were installed.
The code in Chicago, requires all wiring to be "Vermin Proof" meaning the use of EMT, BX or Armored cable or Greenfield. Not sure about the rest of Cook county!
Regarding the use of grounded receptacles in an area that didn't originally have them, there might be a return to ground through the BX armor. The real problems come into play, when the home was wired with K&T, which wasn't allowed. :scratch2:

The vermin-proof code amendment still makes sense and I bet that is an old requirement. When NM cable was first introduced in the late 1930's, it was tar-coated, tight-woven jacketed and paper wrapped the rubber-insulated copper conductors. A veritable feast for rodents:yes: As NM cable evolved into the present thermo-plastic jacketed cable in the 1960s, the restriction remained because plastic cables are so easily damaged. I use a lot of MC cable (armor clad with separate insulated ground) in my own house, which is another 50 years older than Bob's. We get lots of mice, being surrounded by farm fields. My grandfather used BX (armor clad two-conductor) when he built their stone house in 1937. He wanted better than knob and tube, the universal method at that time.

Chicago, NYC and others are big enough that the "code" was amended to enhance safety due to population concentration. Unfortunately, few places with these risk factors could actually win against allowing the compromises inherent in "affordable housing". Philadelphia allows NM cable (aka romex) at least in low-rise buildings where the NEC permits it.:sigh:

I've always preferred conduit and other fully shielded building wiring...It helps reduce grid based RFI, and if the insulation inside is old and lousy the conduit will impede fire outside the conduit should the wiring inside of it go up.
The first place I lived in was in the Chicago suburbs and all the original wiring was conduit.

I don't envy you, Bob. Moving is a lot of work. When I moved from a three-bedroom house with a basement to a one-bedroom apartment seventeen years ago, it took me the better part of a year just to get settled, mainly because I had brought a lot of stuff with me from the old house. Much of that wound up in the trash area behind my apartment. The place looked nice enough when I moved in, since I had gotten all new furniture which was already in place when I got here, but the cleanup, not to mention it taking another year (!) to get used to living in this area (Fairport Harbor, Ohio, where I live now, is a village of about 3100 population, thirty miles east of Cleveland but not considered a suburb of the city; I came here from the Cleveland suburb of Wickliffe, which is a city of 15000+ population when I moved here--it's a lot less now) took quite a while, as I mentioned.

It looks as if you will have your work cut out for you when you move into your new home, with all your furniture (unless you are buying all new furniture, as I did), not to mention your antique/classic/vintage TVs and radios and all. If you are going to use one bedroom of the house to store your collection, however, it shouldn't be much of a problem.