Survived the Party

It seems odd to pass over the house's 100th Birthday party open house and not even mention how it went. I think it went pretty well. We were ready only with the amazing help of my father, Lloyd, and my stepmother, Maxine. We surely never would have been ready through our own efforts, without hiring outside help.

My father arrived and quickly hooked up our washer and dryer and installed a light fixture in the guest bedroom. I'm excited to have the laundry machines upstairs! (I guess I haven't taken a picture of them yet after they were hooked up. They're up in our back enclosed sun porch.)

Then, on Friday my Dad installed all the new door hardware throughout the house. At one point in his career he was a locksmith, so his skill at fine-tuning mortise locks is excellent. Even so, it still took several hours. (On Sunday, he also installed a deadbolt on our new garage and started installing our new solid brass hinges.)

Maxine worked pretty much since she walked through the door on Thursday until Saturday, cleaning the house. With her help, the house was quite respectable by the time noon rolled around on Saturday. Thank you Maxine!

Jeff, on the other hand, spent three days in the kitchen prepping the food for the party. All was quite delicious and there was plenty of food. I don't have a good picture of all the things he served, but here is a photo from early in the open house.

Unfortunately, Saturday was a very rainy day, so the house was not looking its best in the dreary overcast light. But we turned on all the lights and had quite a few visitors drop in. We got lots of nice compliments and it felt wonderful to show what we'd accomplished in 2½-years. Thanks, especially, to all my blogger buddies who dropped in for a visit; it was so wonderful to meet you all in person.

I didn't manage to take any photos as I was busy visiting and giving tours. But my friend, Storm, and my father took a few pictures of the rooms. Here are the best of them.

Master Bedroom

Guest Bedroom

Linen Cabinet

Living Room

Den looking toward Dining Room

Den Area (also called Parlor)

Dining Room Built-in China Cabinet

Linen Cabinet Almost Done

I forgot I needed to buy new hardware for this one, so it's not quite done, but we're oh so close.

The floor refinishers are supposed to start tomorrow; I hope they show up.

Almost Done

I've been busy this week. I finished staining the upstairs hallway today. The doors and drawers for the linen cabinet are also stained and drying in the garage.

That painted door is the very last one and will probably go in for dipping when we have the floors refinished—or I'll strip it myself if I'm not too busy with getting ready to move back upstairs.

The entryway is shellacked and finished. I finally got to pull up the floor masking today.

The fireplace is finished and the paint is touched up. If Mia ever chews on the fireplace again, she will probably find she has lost her cage spot in the living room.

Just a couple coats of shellac on the upstairs hallway and linen cabinet and we'll be ready for the painters on Monday.

Finish Trimwork

There are lots of pictures to post today. We "rented" Nathan from Craftsman Design & Renovation for a day and a half of carpentry help.

He helped us install crown moulding in our entryway. It wasn't installed quite as we were hoping because the picture rail would have had to be tipped too much to make it work. I think the rest of the rooms must have had the wood installed, then been plastered, then had the cove moulding and picture rail installed. The materials we had wouldn't have worked without digging into the plaster. So, we installed the picture rail with a small gap between it and the 1x6. It will have to do.

I've finished staining it, but I still have to shellac it.

Nathan also helped us install picture rail in the hallway/stairway. I had pre-stained the pieces so I wouldn't have to shimmy my way up the ladder to finish it, but, unfortunately, I was a piece short. I ran over to McCoy Millworks this morning and Nathan cut the last piece for us. I'll finish it at ground level and Jeff can crawl up the ladder and nail it in place in a couple days.

Nathan installed new boards on the fireplace to replace those damaged by Mia's adventure. We sacrificed some of the salvaged baseboard we stripped for the closet built-ins. It's old growth and has nice grain and is actually prettier than the piece that was there. I stained and shellacked it yesterday afternoon and this morning, though I still need to do some paint touch-up—again. Sigh.

And, finally, Nathan helped us with our shattered fir on the linen cabinet. It was really beyond repair. Our best option was to cut out the broken part and replace with another piece of wood. (Another scrap I stripped the paint off of.) Now that this piece is fixed, I can finish staining the linen cabinet.

I've got five days to finish all these staining and shellacking projects before the painters come next Monday!

Busy Weekend

Now that we've got folks hired to come in behind our project, we're compelled to keep moving.

Yesterday morning I gathered the last of the douglas fir moldings for finishing the entryway and replacing the picture molding in the upstairs hallway. At CDR's recommendation, I decided to stain the wood before installing it, so I spent a couple hours sanding the pieces and I'll stain them in a couple of days after I finish the interior woodwork.

Today I stained the two stairway windows. I hate this Mohawk Wiping Wood Stain. It's awful. It's way too drippy and it doesn't stir up well so it's hard to get a consistent color from one session to the next. I think we must have gotten an old can or something.

I am thinking about buying a new can—I don't want to because it's something like $27 a quart at our local suppliers—but we're not going to get a second chance at getting this staining project right. So I'll probably just suck it up and get a new can and see if it works better.

Today, Jeff mostly finished installing the support boards in the shelf-side of his closet. We need some larger finishing nails to better secure the pieces, then I'll be able to shellac them.

And now this evening Jeff is working on installing the hinges on the new linen cabinet doors. We need to get this upstairs woodwork stained and shellacked so the painters can come in soon.

Garage Progress

When he wasn't busy with agility training, Jeff managed a fair amount of progress on the garage this week. He found it easier to fit the rigid insulation in between the trusses by cutting down the pieces another 1/4-inch. (Just for the record, we used Rmax Thermasheath-3 in the 2" thickness; sold at Home Depot.) He still needs to finish filling in the lower edge, as the sheets were 8' long and there is about a 3' gap at the bottom.

It has already made a big difference in the temperature in the attic—almost 20 degrees!

We're still debating about whether we should install a second radiant barrier over the top.

For now, we decided not to sheetrock the garage as it's so much easier to move the electrical outlets and lighting while the wall framing is accessible. Once we get the shop set up, we will probably insulate and sheetrock the walls the rest of the way.

Jeff also spent a few hours installing tool hanging technology.  He installed the scrap of pegboard leftover from the workbench project on the short wall and I bought him a bunch of pegboard hooks so he could start organizing his hand tools.

Jeff also got our large tool hanging racks hung on the wall. We've been storing our garden tools in a garbage can for several years, so it is nice to finally get them hung up and organized.

I guess we can finally start moving stuff back into the garage from storage.

On the paint stripping front, I totally lost motivation to work on it this week. But this afternoon I managed a bit of forward progress, by working on sanding the new linen cabinet doors.

New Linen Cabinet Doors

I'm excited to finally be able to show pictures of this week's project. My brother Jeffrey has experience with woodworking and was able to help my husband Jeff get our new tools properly set up and get to work on our newest project: new inset linen cabinet doors.

Upstairs linen cabinet

Bathtub access door in master bedroom

We built these doors because while paint stripping we found evidence the linen cabinet originally had inset doors. There was an outline of butterfly hinges in the paint as well as evidence inside the cabinet where hardware had once been installed. So, we thought we would go ahead and just replace the doors now rather than strip the later-period painted doors. We don't know what the original doors looked like, so we just duplicated the rail and stile doors in the dining room built-in.

Right now, the doors are just taped together and sitting in the openings for the trial fit. They still need to be glued—and stained and shellacked, of course.

I'm glad to be able to finally finish this woodwork in the upstairs hallway.

Thank you Jeffrey

Paint Stripping Progress

One of the funny things about paint stripping is it always takes so much longer than you think it should. More than a week ago I thought I was almost done, but here it is—eleven days later—and I'm still only almost done. Sigh.

I spent something like four hours a day over the last several days and I do feel like I made good progress. I have mostly cleaned up all the crowns, which is the most difficult task, and I have cleaned up the woodwork around the linen cabinet.

I'm still working on cleaning up the baseboards, which isn't particularly difficult to do, but it's unpleasant because I end up sitting on the floor, which has by now gotten pretty gross.

Yesterday afternoon, I finished the second dining room curtain—the last curtain I plan to make for the main floor. I'm pretty excited to get this project finished!

Once the oil paint dries in several days, I'll start embroidering the panels.

Long Day of Paint Stripping

It was cool and breezy today, so the weather was perfect for paint stripping. I believe I spent more than six hours and then this afternoon Jeff joined me and spent three more. We got quite a lot done.

I got a lot of the paint off the linen cabinet, though there's still lots of detail work left. I stripped the drawers a couple weeks ago. I'm not planning to strip the inside. 

We found our first bit of damaged wood. The face frame on the linen closet  on the lower door has been broken. I'm not sure how we'll fix this and it's really hard to strip the paint out of the large cracks.

Jeff stripped a lot of the headers in the hallway.

I made a lot of good progress stripping paint in the guest bedroom. I finished doing a first pass with the chemicals on nearly all the woodwork below shoulder level. I need to get that closet cleared out so I can finish the door jamb.

Random Paint Stripping

I spent today doing random paint stripping tasks; I'm trying to continue making forward progress on this project. Jeff uninstalled a couple of the smoke alarms, so I was able to begin working on the door jamb.

Then I got distracted with trying to see how difficult the paint would be to strip from the linen cabinet. It was fairly easy to remove the paint from the drawers, but the doors were much more difficult. 

I uninstalled them so I could bring them in for dipping, but I have realized the doors on there are not original. I believe Mr. Leonard may have made them to match the kitchen when he remodeled in the 1940s. The original doors were inset as there is an outline of butterfly hinges on the face frame. Too bad we didn't find any spare cabinet doors in the attic last year. 

So now I'm trying to decide whether we should go to the expense of stripping/refinishing these existing doors when we're going to want to replace them as soon as possible. Perhaps not.

I also spent a fair amount of time applying KleanStrip to clean up woodwork in the room. I'm hoping by mixing up the different tasks, it will make the last part a bit less tiresome.

Tired of Paint Stripping

We've made some progress on paint stripping this weekend, but I've realized I've lost my enthusiasm for this project; I just want it done.

Jeff worked several hours stripping paint from the picture rail. It's tedious and takes quite a while because of all those different curves. Thank you Jeff!

I started stripping the paint on the door jamb with the heat gun, but the smoke alarm kept going off. We simply must uninstall that thing or we're going to have to kill it! So I switched to cleaning up the wood around the window with the chemicals (KleanStrip).

I also did some exploratory stripping of a drawer in the linen cabinet built-in. It was interesting to find the interior of the drawer was stained with a semi-transparent green/olive stain. I think this was the original finish in the dining room (in 1912), at least that's what I think was at the bottom of all those layers. I'm now wondering if the bedrooms also started out with this same finish.

The large entry doors take 4 days to strip by hand, so I'm thinking about taking in the last one to be dipped. I haven't decided... I may not because this door only needs to be stain-ready on one side and I'd be paying to have both sides cleaned when it's not necessary. But I am getting so tired of this project.

I'm also thinking I'll take in the bathroom door and the doors of the linen cabinet to be dipped. I'm ready to finish this stripping and staining project and get the floors refinished and move back into the upstairs. We're approaching a year for this upstairs refinish project; it's way past time we finished it.

Project Creep

Sharon found herself upstairs this morning and was clearly channeling her inner perfectionist as she found herself going back over the woodwork again removing spots of paint in crevices.

She also decided the door jamb probably wasn't going to look good once we stained the interior of the bedroom. We had removed part of the paint, but had left some of the exterior hallway side still painted. But we had stripped too much. The stain would have extended out past the closed door. So there was only one thing to do—strip more woodwork.







She discovered one new problem pretty quickly. Our upstairs now sports a number of wired-together smoke alarms. Heat guns and smoke alarms don't pleasantly mix. If we don't figure out some better ventilation, we may have to uninstall these units while we continue stripping paint upstairs. After a couple hours with the heat gun (and the smoke alarms), Sharon decided to call it a day. Hopefully to resume tomorrow.

Though, before she quit, she couldn't resist checking out the wood underneath the paint on the linen closet at the top of the stairs. Yup, it's douglas fir.

Those big doors though aren't original. The doors that once hung there were inset. (You can still see the outline of where the butterfly hinges once were.) So, maybe we'll try to replace the doors someday. But not this year. For now, we'll probably strip what's there and call it good.