New project!

We await the advice of a dry wall expert to determine what we're going to do on the second floor landing.  In the meantime, for whatever reason, we decided that it was the right time to dismantle the enormously tall bookcase that was built in the back staircase.

I suppose Professor Ganzell is rolling in his grave, but honestly, books put in this case must have been ones that no one ever wanted to read - they were completely inaccessible after the 5th or 6th shelf.

View from the top of the stairs

We knocked down all the shelves and supports - happily, the bookcase had been built on top of the stairs so this actually opened up some new space in the staircase which is pretty narrow.  The walls were in bad shape with so many nails so most of yesterday was spent patching them.  It's impossible to work on them during the week since this is the crew's only access to the second floor, so it's going to stay roughly patched for a few days.

Dining room

Apart from the exterior painting, the dining room was the biggest project we tackled by sheer virtue of its size.  The fact that the wallpaper was underlay by a bright red paint did not make the prep work any easier.

The bulk of this work was done by Dominique with some help from Billy and Bob and to an infuriatingly lesser extent, from Danny.  Oh yes, we got Dom's daughter Marie involved, too.

There were a lot of issues in this room - maybe it was the most used?  I don't know.  But the plaster was in pretty bad shape, and there were dangling wires that we didn't know if they were live, or what they went to.  We're still sorting that out. 

Needless to say, there was a ton of prep work and endless sanding.  Weeks later, we learned that there was a thinner kind of skim coating we could have used that would have made this work much easier.  That would have been nice to know before we basically turned our dining room into a facsimile of the surface of the moon.

To add that special complication that each room seems to have up its sleeve, we discovered that the trim had been done in oil paint.  Being told that it was very difficult, messy, and smelly to work with an oil-based primer, we asked Billy and Bob to do that for us.  Later we found out it wasn't really that hard - Dom did it himself in the library.  At least we learned the technique for determining whether a paint was oil or acrylic. (Paint some acrylic on it, let it dry, and see if you can scrape it off with your fingernail.)

It's still not quite done in this picture:  we have some wainscoting to replace, the floors haven't yet been redone, and the cabinet inset hasn't been reworked.  We're still experimenting with furniture and paintings.  But we're using it now, and even had our friends Reeny and Jon over for our first real guest meal.

Library

The library is a wonderful room, with floor-to-ceiling shelves on three walls and dark wood paneling everywhere.  One of the former owners was an English professor who need a lot of book space.  Over the years, however, like everything else, it had become a little worn and needed some TLC to get it back into shape.  This was largely Dominique's project.

The worst part was the wallpaper, as usual.  Turns out there were 4 layers of wallpaper, and we think we got down to the original one.  There was a small square of it that was in pretty good shape - not torn and not too faded - so we saved that as a sort of window into the past.  The rest was eventually stripped off. 

There was a tremendous amount of prep work that had to be done and at the time we were only spending about a week a month in Oberlin, so it was very slow going.  We also had to move our tool area from the dining room to the library which provided another little obstacle to work around.

One good thing was that we learned about the very wide plastic sheets that can be used to protect furniture, bookshelves, etc.  It would have been nice to know about them before we took all the shelves down.  As it was, sanding powder got all over everything anyway; I'm not really sure why we bothered.

In a surprising departure from his usual conservative approach, and against our painter's recommendation, Dom painted the small area that wasn't covered by bookshelves a bright but warm yellow.  Ok, it's not to everyone's taste, but we really like it.

This has turned out to be one of our favorite rooms, if not the favorite room.  We have coffee here in the morning, and an aperitif in the evening.  It's comfortable and cozy.

Like all the rooms, it's very much a work in progress.  We're planning to put a small bar in here, and we're in the process of moving our books in.  I'm sure we don't have as many books as Professor Ganzell but we'll fill these shelves up before we're done.