RIP Sailor

Well, Sailor died in recovery after surgery today. She went into cardiac arrest and did not respond to any of the emergency procedures they tried on her.

She will be greatly missed.

Please help save Sailor!

I haven't gotten any work done on the house lately because we've had a bit of an emergency here. We foster dogs for our local humane society. Last week we got in a very weak and emaciated American Bulldog from the animal shelter. she had been left tied to a pole outside the shelter.


We took her in and began her rehabilitation. Things were going great at first but soon she began throwing her food back up and started getting lethargic. Christmas morning she didn't even raise her head to greet us and we knew then that something was seriously wrong.

We spent the day at the emergency animal hospital. it turns out that she has an intestinal blockage that requires emergency surgery. The vet has agreed to perform the surgery but the Humane Society does not have the amount of money required to pay for it.

We have decided to setup an online fundraiser for Sailor to try to raise the money ourselves. Here is the link to the site:

http://www.fundable.com/groupactions/groupaction.2008-12-25.6311233069

If anyone can help out it would be greatly appreciated! It only takes a few seconds to donate and even $10 will help out greatly. If you know anyone else that can help please forward the link to them.

Thanks in advance for everyone that can help, Sailor thanks you!

Hall Tree

This is a small project we worked on last year but never completed. It sat in the Laundry room since then. Recently I moved it out into the Breakfast room and then just yesterday added the hooks to finally finish it off.

It's a Hall tree made from a heavy old door from a textile mill and some old, reclaimed boards. The seat lifts up for storage underneath.


In other house news, I've been working on stripping the stair railings, it's slow, boring work. I also added some low-voltage lighting to the front yard. No pictures of either project yet.

Woodbury house

I haven't gotten anything done on the house lately because we've been over at Woodbury house for the last three days. I'm trying to get the electric redone so we can get power on over there.

2nd floor porch, new front door.

Work has been progressing slowly but I have gotten some work done. I finally finished rebuilding the second floor porch. There were two very small areas that were leaking but they were letting a ton of water in. This has caused some of the beadboard on the first floor porch ceiling to come off. Great, another project.



While I was fixing the leaks I made a design change that had been bothering me ever since I first built it. In the picture below notice the 2x4's running left to right, they are what the decking attaches to:


Notice anything wrong with this setup? There's nowhere for the water to drain! It will get between the floor boards then be trapped behind the 2x4's. I don't know what I was thinking when I did this. It's a really stupid mistake. This wasn't what caused the leak but water would have pooled and eventually caused rot.

The way I fixed this was to pull up the 2x4's, take some 6' fence panels and rip them in half lengthwise to make 8 6'x3"x3/4" pieces, then lay them front to back. Then I placed the 2x4's on top of them. Now the water can drain. Sorry I didn't get a picture of it but I think I described it clearly.

Anyways, while I had the 2x4's up I took the time to add another layer of some heavy duty roof cement to the sub floor. I also used a ton of roofing caulk wherever I thought it might be a possible leak area. We got a good bit of rain the next day after I did this and no leaks!

I went ahead and primered and painted the railings before I reinstalled them since it's much easier that way. Here's a few shots of the completed second floor porch:




I went out on the porch roof this morning to get these next two pictures without realizing that there was ice on the roof! Of course I didn't slip until I was about 8 steps out and turning around to take the pic. That could have been bad...


One of the things I did a few months back that I never got around to posting is the Dining room mantle. This is how it looked when we first got the place:

This is as far as I got on it last Winter:

I finished scraping the paint off of it then sanded it 3 times with progressively smoother sandpaper. Here it is after the final sanding:

Then I applied 2 coats of amber shellac:


I still have to scrape the paint off the tiles, repair the hearth tiles, and put up oak trim around the hearth (the original was removed for the 70's shag carpet).

We found a beautiful door at a flea market out in Alabama last month. We picked it up for $50! It's a wonderful Victorian door with a purplish glass inset. In the pic below I'm test fitting it into place. I had to trim about 1" off the bottom:

The mortise for the lock was on the wrong side, I would have just hung the door the opposite way but I've already installed all the light switches on the left side of the door. The outside of the door is different so I couldn't just flop the door around. So I had to make a new mortise on the other side of the door and fill in the old one. I took heavy paper towels and packed them in the mortise as hard as I could then used wood putty to fill in the rest.

Cutting out the new mortise by hand was a real pain in the ass! I used a drill bit of the same diameter as the mortise lock and a chisel. Old school... I also had to cut out the area for the hinges and fill in the area where the hinges were.

There were also a lot of small holes where things had been nailed into the door over the years and even a 9" long chunk of the edge that had come off. Also someone had gouged a rough hole in the door for an old doorbell at one point. All this had to be repaired. Once it was repaired I installed the hardware, I used the door hardware off my old door. Here is a shot of the test fit after all this was done:

Then I put on a coat of amber shellac and a coat of satin poly:



I think the wood putty is a bit too noticeable where the old door knob and door bell had been. I may strip those areas, stain the wood putty to match the rest of the door then re-shellac and poly it.

Our latest camper

Once again it's been a long time without a post. Sorry for that folks. I've dont a few things on the house but not really a lot.

I had to go back and tear out the second floor porch I built because there were a few leaks. I've gotten all the leaks under control and am in the process of rebuilding the porch.

we've spent much of our time trying to stay warm. I refuse to reconnect our service with the gas company because they are a bunch of crooks. Up until the other day we only had one space heater for the whole house. Once the temps got into the low 50's in the house I broke down and bought a few more space heaters. Now it is much more comfortable in the house.

In other news we've bought another camper to restore. Some of you may remember the Airstream we restored this past spring that we subsequently sold. Well now we've bought a 1948 Spartan Royal Mansion. it's going to need a ton of work but in the end I think it will be worth it.



There's a lot more pictures on the blog.

Laundry room complete

We finished up the Laundry room the other day. Here's an old before shot:
Here are the finished shots:

I'll be replacing this back door with one similar to the Breakfast room back door.

I still need to paint the door on the left.

We painted the floor black, we'll see how well it holds up over time.

Breakfast Room repaint

We've repainted the Breakfast Room. The yellow color we used just wasn't doing it for us. We ended up going with the same color we will be using in the Master Bedroom at the Woodbury House. Here are some pictures of the room:






You may remember that the 2 doors on either side of the wood burning stove had it's original finish on them when I first uncovered them (They were boarded over and then had cabinets hung over them some time in the 40's or 50's).


Instead of just painting over it I reversed both doors. This ended up working out much better for the layout of the Laundry room and the Bathroom anyways.

We FINALLY have a room that is almost completely finished. The only things left to do are a few trim pieces, outlet and light switch coverplates, and refinish the floor.

Porch roof complete

I've finally finished the porch roof project:




I'll paint the railings in my next project, which is to finish painting the house.

Building the second floor deck

I didnt get as much done over the weekend as I'd hoped but progress was still made. Saturday morning I got back to work. First I installed flashing in the deck area:
Once that was secure I installed the beaded wood siding to the porch roof. I still need to add some flashing to the top, I'll cover it with trim:

Next I sealed the tin floor with an aluminum and tar mix that I found in the roofing section of Lowes:

And then installed the 1x6 decking:

The next day I got to work on designing a railing. I had a newel post from the stairs of the old Anderson house, plus the cap to a second newel post. I was able to dig up enough wood and matching trim to build a second post just like the first:


The one on the right is the original, the one on the left is the one I built.

I sanded and primered them and installed them on the deck. I also installed the railing. I have about a dozen spindles left over from the railing I built for the first floor but it wont be enough, I'll have to get some more.