one coat of paint

Few people realize the damage one coat of paint can do.  "The wood looks so old."  "Dirty." "It'll brighten the place up."  It'll help with resale."  This single coat of latex has been the cause of much angst.  And stripping it hasn't even begun yet.  See how all the lovely wood work blends into blahness in these before pictures?  Even the antique colonial revival fixture has been painted white!

This room is our main parlor, just off of the original entry hall.  It's the last room that's cut up (with a large closet and bathroom), although we won't be tackling that demo until we're ready to build the master bathroom above it.  For now though, we sold off our Art Deco living room set, which gave us access to the bay window.  Once again, our house rewarded us with a few lovely surprises.

cute, but too low for bad backs...

We haven't had room to look back here with all the furniture, so the first thing I did was whip out the heat gun.

Yatta!  More cherry (I think, I'm pretty sure, sorta?)!  No primer, just one damn coat of paint that will make stripping awful since I can't use a heat gun (too much chance of scorching the wood).  Also...

Ample evidence that there was a built-in bench wrapping around the bay.  Although cool, this is unlikely to be rebuilt because honestly, they don't tend to be that comfortable, and this is (and will remain) the tv room.  Also cool is that we still have the rods for portieres (visible in the first three pictures).  I can actually imagine this having been a Turkish corner with the beautiful painted ceilings (more about that here), portieres and built-ins.  Also, fretwork - we only recently looked closely at the uppermost piece of jamb around the arch, and it shows clear evidence of patched nail holes. Beyond exciting, especially since it prompted us to look at the other bay, which shows the same evidence of fretwork.  So yeah, terribly exciting, and yet sooooo utterly depressing...

pocket door no more

That gaping hole we opened up that was missing it's pocket doors...  Gone...

peephole opened

plaster down on living room side

We gave finding a set 6 months, they were all too short by at least a foot or two.  So since the next step is have a set made to match the originals (we have half of one door serving as a toilet partition in the basement for those new to the saga), and doing this will require a hefty sum of money (2 1/2 inch 9x3 paneled cherry doors, I can hear my bank account quietly sobbing), we decided to case in the opening for the time being instead.

The first step to this was unrelated to woodwork though.  Outlets had been installed in the filler section of wall, installed no doubt because it was the only part of the wall that was above a doorway set into the two foot thick stone wall that bisects our basement.  Since these outlets happen to be important in this modern age we knew we would have to move them, which meant dealing with drilling through stone and beams in the basement.  Suffice it to say, we put it off for a while...  This is one of those projects where buying the proper tools (three foot flexible masonry bit for one) would have cost more than having an electrician just do the work.  Tip for hiring a new electrician (our much loved one is awol), hire the one who seems completely unphased by the project - I make sure to point out all the issues and requirements, and hire the guy that says we'll get it done, as opposed to most who hem and haw over old house difficulties.  Since he was here, and since the outlets now flanked either side of the opening, and since I'm a hoarder of antique lights, we ran a wire straight up from each outlet for a sconce.  How exciting!

Ok, so demo - check, tripping over deadly tiger pits and electrocution hazards for six months - check, electrical - check... Wood!  Fixing the flooring was a breeze after repairing the other spots.  The new oak is just a hair thinner than our original floors, so after evening up the edge lines on either side of the opening by removing two destroyed boards, we laid down an upside-down layer of roll roofing in the hole.  We then installed two new edge boards with the bottom of the groove removed so they'd sit at the right height on top of the original tongues.  In an effort to make the opening look like a feature instead of a fix we installed the remainder of the floor 90 degrees to the original.  This was undoubtedly the right way of doing it - we didn't have to worry about ripping down a skinny board for the middle of the opening because of spacing, and it really ended up looking just so purty....

And since you can never have enough of a good thing, we played another round of "get this old thing off the floor!"  This game is a pleasing diversion to cleaning (much like writing blog posts) when you have guests coming to stay, and I highly recommend it.  Instead of making your home habitable for those not accustomed to living in a construction zone/back room of an antiques store, you install a bunch of old stuff that's been sitting on the floor taking up space.  This fools the homeowner's mind into thinking that cleaning/decluttering has been done (look at the dusty imprint on the floor of where xyz sat for a year!), while making no appreciable difference to the person coming to visit (you SIT on that toilet????).  In that vein, since trimming out the gaping hole wasn't good enough, meet our antique plaster corbels.

These really have just been sitting gathering dust.  The are rather enormous, and tremendously heavy.  So we brought them home, set them down and called it a day.  That was sometime early last year...  Since we didn't want anything permantly installed, we drilled angled pilot holes with a a small masonry bit, and simply screwed them to the jamb.  There was much swearing inbetween point a and point b, but hey, it's done now.

I think installing them on a 90 was wise

can't wait to put up the sconces!

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!