Catch up - again

Not doing too well at blogging every day.

Lots has happened since the last time; unfortunately, not enough as we are officially 3 weeks behind schedule.  We want to talk to Josh about how we can work more in parallel - in other words, we start in on the bedrooms while they finish up the bathrooms - but so far no response from that quarter.  Frustrating.

Anyway, the dry wall upstairs seems to be finished and I think the tile work will begin next week.  We can now clearly see the bathrooms:  all the walls are up and the shower basins are down.  Yes, they're small but not tiny; they're going to be great.

The one on the left goes with the "French" room and the other goes with the "Ohio" room.  Guess we don't have a picture of our bathroom.











As for us, we have 3 main areas of attack:  Dom's office and the back staircase plus we've added the second floor landing.  Thought the landing was going to be relatively easy but of course it's not.  Lots of trim to be painted three times to achieve that "stained wood" look with paint; crown molding that has been plastered into the ceiling; and plaster walls in their usual poor shape.

Walls skimcoated, not yet primed; chair rail with first coat of base paint.

Pried out a piece of the crown molding which broke off.  Why they replastered the ceiling without removing the crown molding is beyond us, but this kind of thing seemed to happen often.  We have toyed with pulling it all down and re-doing the ceiling - especially since a light fixture that was installed on the ceiling was poorly replastered - but Reeny and Jon told us about putting a larger crown molding over this one which seems like the right thing to do.

Part of the landing project includes fixing the window cords.  Very interesting to see the inner workings of these old rope and pulley systems.  The (extremely heavy) iron weight has some interesting markings on them.

We're disappointed at the paint job we discovered on the exterior of these windows.  Billy did such good work everywhere else (that we've seen), but he really cut corners on these - virtually no prep work, just painted over all the old stuff.  Guess he thought they wouldn't be seen.  Dom's doing a better job.


The back stairs are the slowest project since I can only work on them during the weekend.  So far I've skimcoated about half of the area where the bookcase used to be.  I  plan to finish that area tomorrow and also finish patching and sanding the rest of the stairwell.

Dom's office, on the other hand, is voted "project most likely to be completed in our lifetime."  He's done his own electricity, he's hung his own drywall, he's done an amazing job of taping, skimcoating, and priming.  Tomorrow, I think, he's going to paint.  His motivation, if he needed one, is the fact that we bought a gorgeous 1862 bookcase to put in it today at the Medina Antique Mall.  We love that place.  (Got a dresser, granola jar, and salt/pepper shakers, too.)

This picture doesn't do it justice and is about a week old anyway.  Got to take some more tomorrow.

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.

Progress in the Foyer

One of the first things we did after taking possession of the house was run around and strip as much wallpaper off the walls as possible.  It came off in big sheets and was quite a lot of fun.  Once the wallpaper frenzy was over, however, we had to figure out what to tackle first.  We decided on the entryway.

In retrospect, it was possibly not the best idea to pick the most visible place in the house for the first project.  But it was a great learning experience, and so far it's turned out ok.  This is how it looked before the stripping madness:

Not bad, you think?  You had to see it close up, with its sea grass wallpaper and crumbling plaster.  With Billy the painter's help, Janet got to work on the long series of steps necessary to get it ready for painting:

Wash off the old glue

Patch the plaster

Fix this corner (Billy did it)

Skim coat

Strip the door (this was abandoned - not worth it)

Eventually it was ready for painting, which was actually the easiest part of the whole process (not to say that it was easy...).  The hardest part is skim coating, in my opinion.

1 coat of primer, 2 coats of paint

And finally, except for one small area that will need a second coat of finish paint, the foyer wall painting is done.  We still need to repaint the doors and trim, and we need to add back the wainscoting, so we're a long way from being altogether finished.

It probably took at least twice as long as it would have a professional painter, but we're pleased with the end result and the flaws are probably only noticeable to us (we hope).

And we couldn't have done it without our faithful helper:

Sunny