Paint

The photos from the last post were taken February 9th and nothing had been done since then aside from waffling about what to do with the walls and how much money it should cost.  All of the large furniture in the living room was clumped together in the middle, all of the small furniture in the living room was stuffed into the solarium, and all of the objects d'art were sitting dust-covered on the dining table.  I shouldn't be using the past tense here because all of those things are still in that condition.  I could very effectively ignore this because I've been out of town Monday thru Thursday every week for the last 3.5 years.  This Monday, I started a job where I'll be coming home to the Alamo every night and suddenly finishing the project has been moved up the priority ladder.  I made a motion to finish the scraping and slap some paint on the walls because it would be fast and cheap and then we can think about papering when we're rich and bored (I can't wait!)

There are two inspiring rooms that contributed to this idea.  Unfortunately I can only scan one of them in low resolution black and white, so here's the other one which was stolen from the Rejuvenation website.  If you have a lot of money to spend on really great fixtures, check the site out.

The other room is a dark grey-green-brown color that I have a hard time explaining and an even harder time matching.  Maybe someday I'll break out my own scanner which is collecting dust at the very top shelf in the office and scan the magazine page.  Of course, scanners and monitors never show colors exactly right so no two people will agree on what color the room is and it won't do any good anyway.

I picked what I thought were close matches for the inspiration rooms and painted swatches on an already scraped portion of the living room.

I also painted the ceiling with metallic gold paint in keeping with the idea that historic ceiling papers would've been painted with metallic pigments to reflect the new fangled, but dim electric lights.  Well, neither of the swatches made me happy and Steve The Scraper said that the gold ceiling looked like a 1970's discotheque.  Time to continue scraping and mull this over...

Scraping

This is posted a little (or several months) late.

After the burlap came down, we were left with lots of wheaty cellulose glue on the walls which fortunately comes off with hot water and elbow grease.  This is a slow and very boring process and these types of jobs are not really my specialty, I would prefer that Chris take care of the scraping while I look online for new light fixtures.  Chris would prefer that I not pull the burlap down in the first place, so we are at an impasse.

Our very good friend and fellow old house enthusiast Stephen can be bribed fairly easily with a batch of Buffalo Chicken Mac n' Cheese and a 12 pack of PBR, so we lured him over one Friday night to do some scraping.  Here are their smiling, happy faces and our beautiful glue-free plaster:

Wallpaper Stripping

Today I had a plan that I would empty the living room and start stripping the fabric / paper or whatever it is off the walls. Since Chris was suffering from the after effects of drinking unnecessary amounts of LaBatt Blue, I was on my own. First I cleared everything out of the room and put together my fabulous Christmas present that I received specifically for this project:

Then, with much trepidation, I started very carefully pulling away the fabric at a spot where it was falling down already:

AND, due to some amazing balance in the universe, the fabric peeled away in seconds leaving the plaster undamaged underneath. When I stripped the wallpaper in the kitchen, it took most of the finish coat of plaster with it and I had to scrape it with gallons of hot water and it took days. Today it practically fell off the walls. I thought I had it made, I was going to pull down all of this paper while Chris laid on the couch in the den nursing his hangover and when he came downstairs finally the room would be finished and I would be a hero and I could totally milk it for at least the rest of the day and he would be forced to go out and pick up takeout for dinner.

Unfortunately he emerged too soon and saw that the fabric was coming down very easily and that I was actually having a good time, so I was not off the hook at all and had to clean the kitchen and then make dinner while he did man-jobs outside.

Here's how the room looks now:

There's still a large amount of glue on the walls, but the condition of the plaster isn't as bad as I expected. Some areas will need fairly simple repairs, but most of it just needs to be skimcoated. First I have to figure out if I need to do anything about that pesky glue...

New Roof = Dry Basement?

Here are some photos of the new roof that went on right after Thanksgiving, and also the beautiful decorative sheets of plywood on the porch (I'm sure the neighbors love us). We had a bunch of snow early in the season, so I couldn't take any photos sooner than now. All of the snow and then the thaw in December showed us how great the new roof is. One huge unexpected benefit of the roof is that it keeps our basement dry.

The roofers enclosed the Yankee gutters. I felt bad for eliminating this original feature of the house, but it was prohibitively expensive to have them relined and they were far beyond easy fixes that we could do (even if one of us was brave enough to go on the roof).

Happy Thanksgiving!

This fall I had the great idea that I would go back to school. Then Jude (the dog) decided that he would gallop around the countryside for a month. Then Chris and I both decided that we would apply for graduate school. All this while I am still working in NJ and living in a hotel three nights a week. My class is winding up and our applications are submitted and the dog is back, so hopefully we can get back to the fun stuff.

We got some motivation for house work just in time for Thanksgiving. I was thinking of picking up a used range and sticking it in the basement to use for bigger dinner parties. Chris suggested a wall oven next to our current range, I looked at craig's list and viola! A short drive and 25 bucks later, we have a second oven.

It's not exactly a showroom kitchen, but it really helped for cooking Thanksgiving dinner and I'm happy to have it.

New roof starts tomorrow. My favorite kind of work, things get done without me doing them. Plus, the added benefit that it stops raining in the kitchen!

We've Got the Funk... Seriously, not the good kind either.

Work on the house has been slow and frustrating. We finally got all of the parts for the kitchen island light fixture and Chris installed it last week while I was lolling around with a bad attitude. It looks good and it's nice to be able to cook at night, but I haven't solved the big hole next to the fixture problem. I need to get on that so we can zip the kitchen up and call it done. The hoosier style cabinet still has not arrived, we're going on 14 weeks for a 6-8 week lead time, so our dishes are still all on the dining table.

We had a roofer come and give us an estimate for new (cheap) shingles, epdm lining in our yankee gutters and new downspouts and it was a whopping $13,000, twice what we were expecting. Now I feel certain that if we don't do it the house will fall down this winter and if we do it, it won't matter if the house is still standing because we'll be living in a trailer park at the edge of town. This is a major cause of the funk, we have a lot of water problems and I wanted to at least stop the water this fall before working on the structural problems next spring. It looks like the best we're going to be able to do is dig a french drain and install new downspouts, and maybe I'll take up religion, although I'm not sure if it works for houses.

In the midst of all of this I have decided to go back to school, so projects are going to be extra extra slow and project money is being diverted for books and protractors and pocket protectors. Fun fun fun...

A Little Elbow Grease

For the last two years I have thought that the chandelier in the solarium looked dull and yellowed due to age. It's probably the only light fixture that remains that was original to the house, so we have never even considered replacing it, but it wasn't all that pretty. The previous owner was very energy conscious so all of the bulbs in this house were/are compact florescent, so there are many bulbs that we still haven't changed since moving in. One of the lights in the chandelier finally went out the other night. I dragged a ladder over and looked inside the chandelier and the scene wasn't pretty. We took the bowl of the chandelier off and immersed it in a sink of hot ammonia water and rubbed gently and viola!



It's all sparkly and pretty again! This is definitely going to be added to the spring cleaning chores from now on.