The paint stripping team declared success on the front of the parlor.
They worked very hard to sand down through the nearly-black stain and dig white paint out of crevices, but there is only so much they can do. At this point, we'll stain and see if any paint shows through and touch it up. We can't strip the inside of the bookcases down to bare wood because they are fir bead board. The inside of the bookcases will just be a little darker than the rest of the room; once they're full of books again, we probably won't even notice.
The windows that still have white paint on them are going to be removed and dipped or stripped on-site; we're still looking into the options. They also didn't finish stripping the small windows with blue tape because it turns out we'll have to replace the sashes because we couldn't put storm windows over them. (We're keeping all the windows that will accept storm windows, but the rest are being replaced.)
The rest of the living room is also nearing completion.
We've found a bit of damage that needs to be repaired. There is water damage to the door at the left of the fireplace and quite a lot of the baseboard is pretty beat up or patched up. We'll have to replace most of the baseboard in the room. We're having a hard time imagining what they were doing to damage the baseboard like this?
We are not going to strip the fireplace brick. We really don't like the bumpy fireplace brick to begin with, so it hardly seems worth a fortune to remove the paint. We are instead going to paint it another color—maybe gray, because that's the color of the brick, or tan—and call it good for now. That's a project for the future after we have jobs. =)
Also, we've decided to spring for the extra $600 to get the wiring for the lights back in the box beams. This is likely our best opportunity since we surely won't want to open up the ceiling later on.
Today we have to work on emptying the last of the boxes out of the dining room. When we both got sick four weeks ago our move-out came to a halt, but now we have to get restarted on our efforts to empty the space. The paint stripping team will probably get started on the dining room next week.
The sheetrock went up throughout the house the last couple of days and it's starting to look like a house again, rather than a construction site. Though we're still really looking forward to windows! =)
The wallpaper stripping started this week and we discovered yet more woodwork has been removed from the house. The Leonards really stripped out that front parlor area, probably when they removed the colonnades. That must have been a cozy little library.
The living room is not attractive right now, as one of the early colors of paint was brown and it didn't remove along with the wallpaper. Sharon actually scraped into a fair amount of the brown paint in the living room because she wanted to try and see if that part of the house also had wainscoting. She couldn't find any evidence of it on the walls she scraped.
The roof over the driveway is being restored to its original profile.
The paint stripping team size has doubled, so they're making fast progress now. The dining room is looking awesome!
At the beginning of the job, we hired a retired woodworker friend to add columns in the living room at the little parlor area. It didn't go well. While they look pretty good in the pictures, they don't look so good close-up in person. Sharon doesn't want to disrespect the friend who put them in—he actually did a nice job for never having done this kind of work before, but we ended up spending more than $1000 on these two columns and they look like a DIYer project. Sharon was pretty disappointed.
These photos don't show doors on the front side but they'll be added. Wade didn't realize the existing bookcases had doors because they were off being dipped. They'll be adding doors that match the existing and will accept glass panels. They won't be providing the stained glass panels. We'd better start getting busy playing with glass! =)
The other AWA we added recently was a roof over the back door stoop. The brackets will be cut to match the existing brackets at the roof line. This will make it much more pleasant to come into the basement when it is raining.
The electricians have been steadily working for something like three weeks and they've almost finished rewiring the entire house and they've added a second box. The space left by the removed chimney proved to be a convenient location to run wires up to the attic and other floors from the basement.
They worked very hard to sand down through the nearly-black stain and dig white paint out of crevices, but there is only so much they can do. At this point, we'll stain and see if any paint shows through and touch it up. We can't strip the inside of the bookcases down to bare wood because they are fir bead board. The inside of the bookcases will just be a little darker than the rest of the room; once they're full of books again, we probably won't even notice.
The windows that still have white paint on them are going to be removed and dipped or stripped on-site; we're still looking into the options. They also didn't finish stripping the small windows with blue tape because it turns out we'll have to replace the sashes because we couldn't put storm windows over them. (We're keeping all the windows that will accept storm windows, but the rest are being replaced.)
We've found a bit of damage that needs to be repaired. There is water damage to the door at the left of the fireplace and quite a lot of the baseboard is pretty beat up or patched up. We'll have to replace most of the baseboard in the room. We're having a hard time imagining what they were doing to damage the baseboard like this?
