finishing up

So, this may be the first time that I've ever written an appropriate follow up post. I was trying to convince myself that I should wait on the picture taking until I had done things like clean the floor and dust - but realistically, that would just have delayed a post indefinitely. So, pictures????

redwood burl clocks made by my grandfather

armoire not tall enough? add leather trunks!

As you can see, we're halfway done with repainting (dark reddish brown to blue). The dark brown was done to make sure we could live with that color when the time comes to replicate the original anaglypta.

poppy pods, sparrows and moths - aesthetic movement designed just for me

We actually love the color, but once we started refinishing our temporary woodwork everything just blended together. This won't be an issue in the future, between the cherry woodwork, and the luminescent metallic wallpaper, this room will be dark and elegant once more... In the meantime, the tealish blue will do nicely (the color is juniper ash).

still need another coat of shellac and paint.... and so much stripping....

check out my dog gate and dead plant!

a stunning church pew recently given to us

one of many overloaded barristers at our house

Finally found this print at an estate sale, so filthy I had to clean it with a razor blade

Obviously we're still missing things like an entry door, vestibule, overmantel and too many other things to list. But in the meantime, I'll settle for refinishing the floors and rest of the woodwork and getting the painting finished. Small steps (at least until I win the lottery or inherit the estate of a Nigerian prince).

the back porch

When we bought the house, one of the first things we had to shore up was the two story back porch.  While it was a large and glorious space, the wood was rotting, it was home to thousands of honey bees, and had a variety of odd patches and makeshift walls.  There's no way of knowing what would have been here originally, but we did find a fair number of artifacts in the dirt under the porch, including the decorative iron brackets to the original screen door.  Our guess is that the brick replaced the original decorative woodwork...

Luckily, the three brick columns added in during the 1920's conversion to multi-family were stable and well-built, and the brick used was even a good match to the original brick of the house.  The first thing we did was tear off the bizarre attempt at a stud wall and remains of the fence picket railing on the second floor (first that is after taking care of the bee problem)...  After that we patched the rotted original floorboards on the second floor, and rebuilt the first floor porch from scratch, reusing as much of the original wood as was possible and moving the stairs from the side to the front, giving us a nice sitting area.

second floor "railing" there was only this one section...

Although the ends of the fir tongue and groove boards were rotten, we figured out that they were all reusable if we cut off the rot, and made up for the shorter lengths by laying a border around the perimeter - doing this just required extra framing underneath to attach it to.  This wood is far better than anything you could buy today, it was a shame we ended up painting it.  

After building a railing to satisfy the bank's requirements, we let it sit.  And sit and sit and sit.  At the time we did the work there was no money to buy nice materials, so we had to make due with 2x4's and salvaged spindles.  Coming up with a design that looked decent and met building code was more than a little bit aggravating.

2x4 Victorian railing with salvage spindles and newel posts

Truthfully, I'm not all that pleased with it, which may be the reason I put off doing any more work on it.  Now that it's not falling off, we won't be investing any money into it anytime soon, so it was time to try and prettify it somewhat.  We straightened some of the pieces that had warped, and renailed others with the better nail guns we now own.  After that we scrubbed the railings with bleach (actually my mom did last time she was here), and after everything was dry we primed and caulked all the joints.  Finally, 2 years after we built them, we painted....  Although we still haven't finished the second floor since some bees have moved back in *sigh*

Next time, the door...

 

But as ugly as the porch has been, it's had to argue with view like this out your kitchen window while you're doing the dishes....

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!