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

Progress report

Well it's been another few weeks since I've updated the blog. I've gotten a few things accomplished but not nearly as much as I had hoped. I've got less than 2 months to get the major projects finished so I can get a conventional mortgage. I've taken this Thursday and Friday off and Monday is a holiday. That will give me 5 straight days to hopefully get a lot done to the house.

Last week I painted the Study walls, I took down all the picture rails and started stripping them but there are so many layers of paint and so many little grooves that I gave up after a while. I'll decide later if I'm going to buy new picture rail or finish stripping the old ones.



I painted the wall above where the picture rail will go a light olive color. I wasn't sure about it at first but after I put it on the wall I think it came out nice. The dark stain of the picture rail should give it a nice contrast.

The next project I worked on was the breakfast room floors, I pulled up the old floors and laid a new subfloor over the winter. I finally got tired of looking at the subfloor so I finished leveling the back half of the sub floor then laid the flooring.




Now I'm scraping and sanding the beadboard walls. Hopefully I'll have that done in a day or two so I can primer and paint.

I also temporarily installed the toilet upstairs in the master bathroom. A few of the gaskets are old and dryrotted so they'll have to be replaced before it can be used.



Last week we built the driveway circle in the backyard. I planted Azaleas in the circle that came from the ones along the front porch. The statue in the center is temporary, it will be replaced with a 3 tier fountain eventually. I still need to add about 40 more bags of top soil before I can plant anything else.