Breakfast room update

Yesterday morning I sat down and created a project list. As I've mentioned before we need to hurry and finish the major projects in the house to get a conventional mortgage. Our construction loan is at 9 1/2% right now. In another month or two it will jump at least another point. It's hard enough as it is now making the payments and buying all the supplies for the house. Our construction loan money ran out last month and I decided not to borrow more so I'm having to pay for everything out of pocket now. this is making it hard to stay on schedule. I wouldn't normally do this but because of the situation I'm adding a PayPal donate button to the site. I don't really expect to get much of anything but every penny helps.

Anyways, on to the house. Making that project list really helped, it's easy for me to lose my focus sometimes. This has helped me to stay on track so far. If I can stick to the schedule I've created I'll be finished in a month. On the list for yesterday was the Breakfast room. I finished the floors last week but have been avoiding the walls. They looked terrible as you can see in the pictures below:


The cutout in the second picture is a patch I had to install. It replaced a 1x12 that held the original fuse panel. I scraped and sanded the entire room in a few hours. then we primered the entire room. The primer is a one-coat primer from Valspar. I normally use Kilz2 but this was a little less expensive and it has a drying time of 30 minutes. I think it did a very good job so I'll be using this from now on.

Here are a few pics of the room after primer:




We had wanted to paint the walls today but unfortunately we dont have the extra money right now for the paint. The color is going to be Homestead Resort Tea Room Yellow from Valspar. It is one of their historic colors.

In the last picture is the wall with the back door and two windows. Eventually I'm going to take the entire wall out and install the other set of double french doors I have from the Anderson House. these are 3' wide each. The wall is not a structural wall so it wont be a problem.

Another great salvage find is an old corner china cabinet. It fits perfectly in the front corner of the Breakfast room. It was in awful shape when we found it so it needed quite a bit of work. Here is a picture of it being test fitted in the corner:


What you can see in this picture is the paint pealing off the insides. What you cant see is how bad the frame and shelves were. The bottom of the frame was rotten and the base was missing. I built a small platform for it to sit on and fixed the rest of the frame and shelves then scraped and sanded the entire thing down.




I still need to install a baseboard for the bottom of the cabinet, rebuild the two shelves in the bottom section, reglaze the window panes, and paint it (it's primered right now). In the last picture you can see the shelves have plate grooves.

We'll also be installing an old mantle on the breakfast room/kitchen wall. We have two matching mantles that will go on either side of the wall (one in the Breakfast room, one in the kitchen). They are just for decorative purposes only as the wall is nowhere near thick enough for a chimney. Once the mantles and the metal firebox surrounds are installed I'll be tiling around the firebox and placing a summer cover over it. They will then look like real fireplaces.

Breakfast room mantle

Kitchen mantle