color

So, I'm thinking it's officially a Victorian carriage house.

After a century without, I hope the two get along with one another.  It's likely a close match to what was there originally, although the photo below is all we have to go on.  And, as far as we know, it never housed horses, but rather a chauffeur and an automobile that featured prominently in all the social pages (although, cruelly, they never mention what kind)!

The photo was strategically taken, as all but the front is awaiting paint (and the front is awaiting additional coats in places), and only about half of the sashes are glazed.  Still, it's gratifying, even if moving the big ladder is still a bit agonizing.

So, do we think the fascia should be green, or blackish purple like the doors?  It's the only placement I can't seem to commit to...  In the oldest photo of the house the trim does seem to be darkest around the topmost moldings (which are actually the built in gutters).  But I haven't made it up there to scrape and see for myself.  As an aside, we're certain the sashes were originally Indian red, and there's evidence of early bronze green and purplish black, hence our choices.  As for locations of said colors, nothing seems to add up in that department.  Keep in mind, the first floor brick is dark red, and the upper shingles have always been dark brown.  By 1920, the entirety of the house's trim had been colonial revivalized in mustard, at that point the sashes may have still been red, or may have already been painted black.  All the careful scraping in the world won't tell you what was what color when.  Oy!

the future master bath

There are times when words just don't cut it, and I'm afraid the last post was one of those times.  So, floor plans, drawn just poorly enough to still be useful!

First, here's how the room was originally...  The largest bedroom in the house, southwest exposure (stunning in the evenings), overlooking the original front of the house all the way down the hill which used to be part of it's estate (now filled with small infill 20's homes).  Judging by the size and masculine fireplace, I'd guess that this was Mr. Kelly's room.  His wife Agnes' likely adjoined on the left (our current master, and the smallest of the main bedrooms) given the art nouveau fireback, gas sconces, lincrusta, tower and feminine wallpapers.

Next, the room as it was when we bought the house...  Drop ceilings, no working electrical or plumbing, leaking badly, saturated with cat piss and missing moldings.  What else, hearth tile missing where the wall was built on top, rotted corner where they had ripped out a window and not properly closed up the hole, missing flooring and burst pipes from the radiator freezing when the house was empty, caving in plaster and badly damaged double hung windows.  I'm sure there's more, but that's enough to give me nightmare flashbacks.  It's also the list for most every room in the house I suppose.

And now...

If you know me at all, you know making these changes upset me.  After the indignities this house has suffered there is nothing it deserves more than a true restoration.  At the same time, even though we plan on being carried out feet first, we have to think of the house's future, and insure that there is no excuse for future travesties.  It's unlikely that future owners will have need of 9 bedrooms, or be able to fit their clothes in an armoire in the bedroom, so some changes are inevitable.  In the case of this room, it was the only one with access to plumbing, or that lent itself to being split up.  On the plus side, no structural changes are being made, and we've restored a hidden window and added a stained glass window.  Is it a net gain?  Probably not...  But a second floor laundry is certainly all it's cracked up to be, and having a decent shower in the distant future won't be so bad either...

An addition to these plans is Ross' fantastic entry - woe that we couldn't have made it work without major expenditures.  It also brought an issue to my attention - the basis for these drawings were done years ago now, there is in fact NO WINDOW next to the bay window in the bathroom.  It was theorized at the time, and historical photos have proved we theorized wrong.

the wall goes...

It took a week to decide, but the butler's pantry wall eventually came down...

wide open spaces now

We took the time to find a door that would fit the opening, and tested various pocket door rollers, but time had mangled the whole thing too much for it to function as it was built.  If there had been more indications that it was original to the space we would have reframed the pocket door track with modern hardware, but everything looked suspicious.

As it turns out, we were right, the track contraption was put together with shiny wire nails, not the iron square nails that should have been there.  There was also lathe on the adjoining wall (behind where the wall we demoed met it), so all in all, no guilt.  I'm sure something would have been in this spot originally, but it likely would have been the door to the stairs going down to the coal room, not a fully walled off hallway.  If anyone's interested in a floor plan I'd be glad to draw one up...

The next step in the process is plastering the holes and closing the space back up.  Doing this means we finally need to finish the framing around the fridge.  The fridge sits in the space that was likely the doorway to the back stairs that went up to the second floor of the addition (which would probably have been maids rooms).  In honor of the occasion we bought a new framing nailer, and since we can never catch a break, my beloved 3 year old Hitachi compressor sprung a leak halfway through.  We're only a few boards from finishing, so we'll just finish it off with screws while the compressor gets repaired.  And if you're wondering why the framing is done oddly, well, that's what happens when you change your mind halfway through about the design and don't want to go out in the snow for more lumber!

A few miscellaneous notes about the space we've uncovered:

-  The door from the dining room into the (once) hallway was the spot of the original door to the porch/conservatory.  Above the existing door you can see where the original sandstone lintel was removed to be used for one of the added windows elsewhere on the house.

-  The butler's pantry was closed off to be used as a child's bedroom, at least it seems that way from the pink paint and puppy stickers we keep finding.

-  This floor was originally grained like the current entry, then had linoleum put down (it currently has awful teal carpet, the last piece in the house).  We will likely re-grain and stencil it for the time being, but we also know of a big kitchen with original 1895 linoleum we may be able to salvage at some point in the future.
-  The wall between the butler's pantry and the kitchen was never fully demoed.  They only took down and re-plastered (on board) the plaster that was above the baseboard.  So when we removed that section of trim (which was out an inch from the existing wall), we found more of the same shiny dark green paint that was original to the kitchen.

-  As we suspected, the yard side of the addition is at least partially brick, while the front is wood framed.  If someone could explain this to me I would really appreciate it, because I've never seen anything like it.
-  We can see the 7 wires that belonged to the kitchen annunciator and a tin speaking tube, where they go, nobody knows...

The annunciator wires are the thin black
ones in the center of the picture

Those are all the updates I can think of at the moment.  Next stop, plaster.

agent orange

At least that's how I felt about the crummy orange oak on the first floor.

badly stained oak on our first walk through

it's easy to forget how much WHITE there was...

It was laid around the time the house was split, presumably to help hide some of the floor plan changes, as well as the then out of fashion pine planks. The discrepancy between it and the original 1880's quartered oak with inlaid mahogany floors makes one wonder how the two woods could have originated from the same type of tree. To add insult to injury, it was laid against the original shoe molding, the same direction as the original floor, and was covered in rather severe stains.

right up against the shoe molding

I removed the first section when we restored the layout of the staircase, before I started the blog. This revealed a discrete patterned landing area that confirmed that I made the right call on how to build the stairs (only off by one inch when all was said and done)!

this was hiding under the oak...

Removing that section showed that it butted up to faux finished pine in the current entry room, which carries through to the dining room.

it'll be so nice to have even floors!

The next section we pulled out was the hallway to the bathroom (in this post here), both of which used to be part of the dining room. I was hoping to find ghost marks of a built-in on the floor, which weren't there. We can now assume that any built-in would have been on the wall that was demolished when the kitchen addition was built in the 1890's. There is some evidence on this section of where the passage from the front parlor to the dining room was, just based on wear, as well as two strange sections I haven't figured out yet. This floor is also faux finished pine, and most likely had wall to wall, or a tacked down central carpet from day one.

The current project is stripping it from the current entry room (eventual library/music room). While the timing is admittedly strange with the (futile) yearly rush to winterize the house and schoolhouse, I have my reasons... Our antique square grand piano is being rented for the Vin Diesel movie "The Last Witch Hunter," which started filming last week. What this means is that professional piano movers will be here to pick it up at the end of the month, and it'll be off being famous for the next three weeks, along with four of my light fixtures. It would be a shame to waste the opportunity to restore the floors while the behemoth is out of the picture. On that note, there had been talk of renting our bed - luckily for my husband that didn't pan out, the fact that Vin Diesel had been in my bed would have remained my default icebreaker small talk until the day I died....

obviously a bed worthy of Riddick...

I've stripped a third of the floor of the oak so far, revealing, as expected, faux finished, random width southern yellow pine just like upstairs. The center is as naked as the day it was installed, just missing it's carpet. What wasn't expected is just what good condition it's in. The only flaws are a slight warp at the wall where the oak had a huge number of stains (likely from the pets of previous owners), one buckled board from the weight of the radiator foot, and the inevitable nail holes from the oak. Surprisingly, the faux finish is in incredible condition as well. It was designed to look like rift sawn oak, and is fairly convincing while you're standing. Although we had it throughout the house upstairs, this has been the only time it's been in good enough condition to get the full effect.

Which leaves me with a decision... We had planned on just sanding and waterloxing, which would look lovely. But now that I see the finish (on this section at least) seems to be restorable, and it's become so rare to see in antique homes, I feel quite obligated to save it. This was put in by a man who could have afforded whatever he wanted for his floors, and he chose to have an artist paint them. If it was good enough for him I feel like it should be good enough for me too...

as it stands now, still need to scrub off the paper stuck to the shellac

So there seems to be three options:

a. sand everything down, stain and waterlox
b. sand only the center, waterlox it and restore the faux finish border
c. try my hand at restoring the faux border, and faux finish the rest of the floor as well

I'm vacillating between all these options, and would really love to hear your ideas! In the meantime, three little discoveries...

See how the building paper jogs in about an inch just past the plinth? This suggests that I was almost dead on in deciding how much to open up the doorway (it had been just a single door when we bought the house). The longer section of paper likely protruded into the original doorway.

The second is more of a question.

See that hole? I can think of only one reason for it's odd location. I've seen historic dining rooms where there was a servant call button on the floor at the head of the table (you would tap it with your foot). The location would be dead on, and this house had speaking tubes and annunciators - BUT, as far as we know this wasn't a dining room. At the same time, we now know that the kitchen wing was an addition, meaning that there's really no reason this couldn't have been the original dining room.

Lastly, proof that there are no new ideas...

"Factory Finished Flooring" Williamsport PA

All the fuss over today's pre-finished floors and it turns out they've been around for a long while. They likely went out of style when people figured out that they offered no protection for spills (or pet accidents) that go right through the joints. I wonder how long it'll take people to figure that out this time around?

the lottery, luck and helpful ghosts...

I won the lottery folks. Not the kind that will pay for carpenters and fancy woodwork, the better kind. The kind where a few days after firing an e-mail off into the aether I get a few scanned documents back. AND PICTURES! (And let me preface this post by saying please don't pin these images yet - we're not clear on permissions and such, and only have these for research purposes at the moment).

The J.G.Kelly house just after it was built
Courtesy of The Frick Collection

Every few months we do a variety of searches online to see if anything new has appeared, which happens frequently as libraries continue to digitize their collections. Last week we found some promising leads through the Frick Collection, a collection of Henry Clay Frick's correspondence in New York City. Mr. Frick sat on the board of Braddock National Bank, and so we were hopeful that they would be able to provide us with business letters etc... While they had that in spades, what we didn't expect were several stray pictures they had that were simply labeled "Edgewood." The suspense as we downloaded them was excruciating.

Isabella Coleman around 1890, our house, the J.G. Kelly house is in the background
Courtesy of The Frick Collection

Most of them were extraordinary interior photos of our neighbor's home before the turn of the century. Everything from young women in togas (maybe for May Day), to handsome cross dressing men with guns and guitars. My jealously is absolute and knows no bounds. And yes, I'll post them once I get proper permissions.

The wonderful thing about the photos of our house are that since it's likely they were taken by the Colemans, they show what was the back of the house. We can now confirm the placement of the original paint colors (dark red and mustard primarily, with two as yet unknown lighter colors). More importantly, there's no kitchen wing! This resolves so many questions for us, why there's evidence that the basement was finished, why the addition seems so awkward in how it attaches to the house etc... Sharp eyes will notice that instead of a kitchen wing there's what looks like a three sided conservatory coming off the dining room on the left. It looks as though it sports large half-round stained glass windows, with lattice work in the lower sashes. I would consider living on take-out for the rest of my days if someone offered to rebuild it for me.

Courtesy of The Frick Collection

We can also see the reason for the mismatched windows in the guest bedroom and library - it's because they're not original! Actually, they're original, they're just not in their original locations. After the addition was tacked on they took the windows that were blocked and added them to other locations on the house. This also explains why the bedroom is missing it's linen press, and why there are so few built-ins downstairs - they were removed in favor of additional windows.

We're also able to see our front stained glass windows on the stair landing for the first time. Staring at them till my eyes bled revealed that the middle sashes are a branch and leaf design (the pair are inverses of one another), while the lower sashes seem to have a garland design. I have no idea what the transoms could be though. These pictures reveal just how much stained glass has been lost from the house - the only remaining pieces are the third floor windows, which are blessedly intact. Besides those, we're missing at least 11 stained glass windows. The shards of colored glass in our yard can't account for that many windows - the thought that there were likely sold off and are now installed elsewhere brings me to tears...

Courtesy of The Frick Collection

A quick rundown of other changes, there's one dormer instead of two, obviously the porch (although you can see another set of stairs winding under the stair bay which is very interesting), the enormous wrought iron fence on the stone base, the shed over what used to be the basement entrance (again explaining some strange architecture), and the terracotta cresting. The cresting is still visible on the initial antique photo we found, although the corner pieces are gone by that time. We can be fairly certain now that our initial photo dates to around the second time the house was listed for sale around 1915, since it was sporting a considerable number of Colonial Revival "updates," including the cream paint job and paneled porch railings.

In the distance through the snow, now with the kitchen addition
Courtesy of The Frick Collection

The last thing worth mentioning is the strangest tidbit of all. The day before we found the Frick Collection I had a dream in which Mr. Kelly took me on the tour of the house - I've never had a dream like this before. It was quite clear to me in the dream that this tour was something special (akin to a behind the scenes historic home tour). The only thing I remember quite clearly is Mr. Kelly walking me around the back of the house, and my thinking of how lucky I was. While I don't remember what I saw in my dream, I do remember being absolutely ecstatic about it. A few days later, and these pictures are mine....

moving mountains

We've been running in a hundred different directions at once here, without much photo worthy to show for it, so instead we'll go back to last fall and take a look at our mud pit project. When we bought the house the driveway was a mostly decomposed concrete mess centered on our front door, with an overgrown pea gravel track circling around the house (on the aerial it looked like we had a go cart track of our very own).

we're the house with the track - we originally
faced the main road and owned those lots, as
well as half the lot above us

When we found the historic photo several months in we could see the entrance of the historic driveway far to the left, along with what looks like a carriage house on what used to be our property - that lot now has a Prairie Foursquare on it (although it's now devoid of any distinguishing features). Strangely, the mystery building doesn't show up on any plat books.

Since we needed to do the sidewalks (they were a serious hazard) we decided that this was our only chance to fix the driveway. And with the aid of heavy machinery, we dug . . .

And in moments of unbelievable brilliance we:

a. thought it was a good idea to pile the dirt on a tarp.
That tarp is now three feet underground serving as the most ineffective weed barrier ever conceived . . .

b. removed the original driveway before moving my pt cruiser, leaving it stranded on the hill with a dead battery, and 20 feet of 3-4 foot deep soft fluffy dirt to roll through . . .

Despite those setbacks, with the help of friends we managed to dig through the hill of trash in the backyard and use some of those broken cinder blocks to start to fill in the missing berm (we cut the existing driveway opening down by 2/3, leaving space for a walkway), and moved all the dirt to make the front yard a more gentle slope.

To try and manage the mud (this happened in late fall, well after grass would have time to grow) we tried winter seeding and laid down a thick layer of shredded leaf mulch and stepping stones. I was doubtful that it'd work, but sure enough, there is a smattering of green poking through. There's still an enormous amount of work to do now that it's warming up, but behold, driveway!

catching up is hard to do . . .

As much fun as it is to revisit the past, I'll be starting finish work on the laundry tomorrow, so I'll give you a brief run down on how we got to where we're at. Although we're trying to do an accurate restoration, we'd also like to make sure the house is "livable" as far as future owners are concerned - not so much for resale as for keeping the house from decaying again once we're dead and gone. That said, this bedroom is paying the price. When we bought the house, this room (which was likely the "master") had been chopped up into a kitchen that had never been finished, had one wall completely rotted from where a window had been removed and never patched, a drop ceiling rat super-highway, and cat urine soaked asbestos tile floors.

this 50's steel sink had never
been installed - it's awesome
and is now installed in our
office kitchenette

this door now opens into the
laundry, the dark spot is urine
revealed as we took up the tile,
the plaster ceiling was all that
was left after we removed the
dropped ceiling below it

Although this was the biggest/nicest bedroom, it was the only one that lent itself to the chop - and it will become a laundry room, walk in closet and someday, a master bathroom. Luckily, we have eight other bedrooms to toy with.

red = fireplace, blue = windows

In the laundry room we will have a teal electrolux washer and dryer (got them 80% off retail), a stained glass window that will let light in from the bathroom window behind it, a hex tile floor (the proper unglazed rectified type), and a salvaged built-in linen cabinet. We may put up beadboard on the lower walls - I had nice inch thick beadboard I meant to put up before plastering, but I forgot about it and plastered the full wall. I don't have the clearance to install it on top of the plaster as the washer and dryer wouldn't fit, so if I put up anything it would be the thin modern stuff. We'll see I guess. There's also some salvaged baseboard to clean up, and a gas light to rewire. We have some antique tin we intend to put up as well, but that'll wait till we circle back around. Cement board will go in tomorrow hopefully, and I'll take some pictures for you then.

easier with lincoln logs?

Since the layout of these big old houses isn't necessarily obvious or easy to describe, I spent yesterday working on my old school paint skills to make up a couple of simple diagrams of the first floor.

You can see our hall of mirrors in the middle of the image, the bane of all who came to visit in the early days. That vestibule section was what was ripped off in the pictures in the last post. Although we do what we can ourselves, the cantilevered staircase that we built to replace it was an engineering feat - and after doing all the demo, salvaging materials from condemned houses (legally!) and rerouting electrical, we were happy to turn this over to our architect/builder, leaving us with:

Determining how the staircase was supposed to run was the most mind-boggling part of the project. It was clear that the floorplan had been changed dramatically, but no one was quite sure how. Before finding the early photo, I spent days examining the exterior brick and mortar for holes, shadows and patches indicating where the porch was supposed to be, and many hours climbing through the secret holes and rooms that had been walled off because of the changes - the spelunking was just as exciting as it sounds . . . . Luckily this house wants to be restored badly enough that she's told us what to do; through more shadow lines, bits of woodwork and wallpaper fragments we have the stair layout close to what it would have originally been (we think). Sadly, in all those walled off spaces no one bothered to stash the missing stair parts, not even the newels . . . Here's where we are as of today on the stair bay (nothing like getting a few square feet painted to make you want to drop everything and PAINT)!

semi-permanence in all it's glory!

I could write a novel about the first year we spent in this house, the fact that we just got our occupancy permit a month ago - meaning the house was considered uninhabitable and we were technically living here illegally - may illustrate just how bad things actually were. But since I'm not ready to revisit that trauma, lets talk about the first project we chose to do, the stairs. The 1st to 2nd floor stair was ripped out during the conversion to a three family, leaving what should have been a grand hall a 15 square foot space with 5 doors, and getting upstairs required winding through another 5 doors and three flights of stairs.

to the upstairs and closet

to the first floor and basement

There was no heat, water, or electricity upstairs (and very few walls), so every morning our first winter in the house we'd throw on our winter coats, hats, gloves and boots and go to work.  You'd think after that we'd be content to appreciate having some working radiators the following winter, instead, we tore the front off the house . . . .

the wart is gone!

cantilevered platform, yeah, we like our engineers

Guiding this restoration was a turn of the century photo (seen in the first post) that we were able to find after about a 1000 hours of research. Not only had the stairs been torn out - the room you see being removed was a vestibule for the 2nd and 3rd floors - the orientation of the house had been changed. The current front doors are cut into what used to be a bay window, and as we found out the house's original entrance faced down the hill, and in fact had owned all the land down to the main road. We're saving up the major funds needed to work on the porch, but until then, we have a semi-permanent stair by which to navigate our shack. Why semi-permanent you ask? Well, because quartersawn cherry (what the original stair was) is incredibly expensive - so our salvaged bits and pieces will have to do, but at least the framing is good to go!