Thursday, September 5, 2013

the two towers

In a previous post I made a joke about house value being calculated by the number of gables one has. I was mistaken, it's actually based on the number of towers.






























Although work has been going slowly, the guts are all there - the walls, roof and cupola are all just waiting for shingles and siding. While the bell tower will be slated, the rest of the roof will just be asphalt (can't have it all I guess). Luckily, we have enough in store for the tower that I'm fairly certain it'll be all that anyone notices, and if their eyes do wander, the oak carriage house doors will take care of that! Nevermind that the "doors" currently consist of an antique shop drawing, a box of hardware, a mountain of discarded oak flooring and some filthy barn track. I wouldn't be surprised if they're one of those DIY blogger projects that ends up looking far more lovely in photos than in person . . . On the other hand, I'm also convinced that I have superpowers and am invincible - so we'll see how it plays out.

check out those rafter tails!

Our bell has also been doted upon over the past week. It was in such nice shape I had intended only on going over it with a brass brush before painting it, but when the brush gummed up I realized that the bell had been painted in several thick layers of white latex house paint (enough so that I joked the bell was an inch smaller in diameter). I used several coats of chemical stripper (actually heavy duty adhesive remover that I had left over and would never use again now that nearly all of the glue down carpet has been removed from the house) and thankfully revealed no cracks, just a nice beaded detail that had been completely lost under the paint. The writing on the yoke is now easy to read as well, the yoke did get painted out in red, as that did appear to be the original color. The bell was cast in Hillsboro Ohio in 1886 by C.S. Bell, with the scraping and painting it should be maintenance free for the next hundred years (assuming no one steals it again, or lets the building collapse on top of it).



I'm nearly done with the windows, and rather miraculously finished the stained glass window yesterday. The window itself cleaned up surprisingly well given how much damage it had (the muntins were all individually glued and clamped, and the checked wood filled with epoxy wood filler), and I got each piece of glass perfect on the first try - a small miracle when working with textured glass. The glazing itself is rather pathetic, but I know when to pick my battles.

apparently I forgot to take a picture of the actual window,
so my mock up for color and placement will have to do...

2 comments:

  1. Very cool bell. It looks awesome after all that elbow grease.

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    Replies
    1. We were lucky to have found it, farm bells are easy to come by out here, but this is a far nicer beast...

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