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).

finishing (something)

Finishing projects isn't something that happens around here.  Every square inch of house requires major work, much of which will be costly future projects.  In the meantime we work on the structural and stabilization aspects, and then apply a bit of lipstick and salvage to make everything look passable in the meantime. Our stairs are a prime example of this.  We lived in the house for a year before deciding that the roundabout route to get upstairs was intolerable.  As I've mentioned before, the house was split into a multi-family in the '20's, at which time the ornate stairs, entryway, and most of the woodwork was removed (see this post and this one if you've not read along from the beginning).

the route to get up the stairs

looking up the stairs in the addition

looking down into the addition

After finishing the first round of structural work we didn't touch the stairs for over a year besides just patching the plaster.  It was only when we had friends with a baby coming back in March that I got the itch to make them prettier.  What we were working with were the very beat up pine treads we reused from the 1920's stairs that were removed, a salvage newel post, and qswo handrails we had salvaged from two different houses.  

As you can see, they were rough...  They still had the outline of the rubber treads I had removed, and were covered in worn paint (as well as the requisite holes and splintering wood).  The treads got sanded by hand with my orbital sander, with 60, 80 and 120 grit.  Since the risers would have been a bear to clear finish, they got sanded with 80 in preparation for paint.  

 As you can imagine, this turned my house into a dust bowl, since there is no feasible way of sealing off two runs of stairs that span a three story house.  Obviously I was thinking very clearly when I decided to undertake this project two weeks before we had guests.

Did I mention I also decided it was the appropriate time to strip the ornate newel post and the handrails?

Needless to say, it's six months later, and the project is only now finishing up.  Hopefully the sun will come out today and I can try to take some halfway decent photos - hey, there's a first for everything right?

the voice of god

So I made a promise in the last post, and I've now seen the error of my ways, and PROMISE never to do it again. Truthfully, I'm entirely too scatterbrained to commit to finishing and posting things in any sort of orderly fashion. Oh well, at least I've been trying to use a real camera for my photos, baby steps. So, despite being behind on things I would otherwise have posted about, I did finish staining the shingles (for those not familiar with the project, the center is entirely new restoration work, replacing a bumped out addition).

It's amazing how once you get used to being up on the scaffolding you feel like you're now qualified to run away and join the circus. Also amazing is how my being up there led to my chatting with about 50% of the people that walked or drove by, while the other 50% had no idea I was there and proceeded to be idiots, and do things like pick my flowers (or park on top of them). Luckily, yelling from on high is ridiculously effective.

mostly unmolested . . .

My favorite chat was with a couple of contractors in a big truck that drove past, backed up the street, gawked for 5 minutes, noticed me, said they have never noticed the house till now (a huge compliment), asked me about my hoarding of cobblestones, and said next time they found some they'd drop them off along with a case of Red Bull.

Although I still need to finish painting the corbels and sanding the beadboard (the beadboard is from about 4 different houses, and you can trace the decades through the shades of pink), staining the new shingles and painting the new trim is done.

I'm beyond thrilled with the shingle stain, as it ended up being a near perfect match (Behr's Russet solid stain). The colors for anyone who's interested are Roycroft bronze green, Rookwood dark red, and Raisin (sashes and accent). We had hoped to use a terracotta/pumpkin color instead of the red, but the lovely Victorian two houses up (also a shingled house) beat us to the punch (red shingles, green trim and cream and pumpkin accents). We also have to clean this section of new masonry, does anyone know if the muriatic acid would mess with the paint? If so, I supposed I should do that before I paint the corbels. I desperately want to paint at least the front of the house now, but so much of the trim has completely rotted away and replicating it is way in the the future . . . In the meantime though, be jealous of my dogwood . . .

there's a few new shingles back here too . . .

brick by brick by brick

This won't be exciting to you at all . . . But for me, a glorious day indeed . . . The last of the bricks from the stair bump-out demo have been moved to the back yard to await future projects. Our house is looking less and less like a salvage yard every day. Lets start at the beginning (a year and a half ago)!

shortly after we bought her

that caution tape was our only Halloween decor

no longer an illegal three family!

this is after we started the clean up

last cart!

I'm still working on staining the new shingle work on the reconstructed stair cantilever, next post will be full frontal, and you'll get to see just how much more work we have ahead of us . . .

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!