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.

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.

Kitchen

Somewhat concurrently with the entry way, I started to work on the kitchen which had fallen victim to our initial wallpaper-stripping madness.  I can't even remember what the wallpaper looked like, but apparently it was something we thought we couldn't live with.  We chose a pretty sky-blue for the walls and a warm beige for the inside of the cabinets, which were lime-green.  (Must have been last painted in the 70's.)  Except for the glass cabinet, which was rust red.  Go figure.

The drill was similar to the entryway:  wash, patch, sand, prime, paint.  The hardest part was the inside of the cabinets.  Just to make things really difficult, I used the wrong primer:  it was tan instead of white, so I had to re-primer and then put down 2 coats of paint.  What a pain.  I was literally painting upside down sometimes.

Of course, once we got the walls painted, the trim - which had looked pretty good - looked dull and too beige, so I painted that white.  These pictures were taken before the trim was painted.

Patching

Red cabinet

Much better

Trim still needs paint, and let's not even get into the orange formica countertops

Foyer Updated

Turns out it wasn't done after all.  In the end, I didn't like the color blue we chose, so I had to do 2 more coats of the new, darker blue.  It was worth the effort!  I also forgot about the switchplates which still had the old wallpaper around them, and one of which needed some major plastic repair.  Not sure how I missed those in the weeks/months I've been working on them, but I understand it's not uncommon.

We're still waiting for the wainscoting to come so we can stain it and put it up.  We also had the floors redone and soon we'll be able to put down some area rugs to brighten it up and protect the floor.  We added 3 paintings and they look fantastic.

These pictures were taken before the floors were redone, and you can see the unfinished switch plate on the wall.  Billy and Bob Hernon did the stairway.  Next job there will be to replace the carpeting, but that won't be until the 2nd floor project is finished.

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