Guest Bedroom 1

Well I've finally started working on the main guest bedroom. It's been my storage room/work shop for as long as I can remember.


I spent the day yesterday clearing the room out.


The few things left in there will be removed this morning and then I will begin the fun job of sanding and scraping. The ceiling is heavily stippled and will need to be sanded down also.

Repainting the Master Bedroom

I repainted the master bedroom last night. I used the same color as I did in the living room. It's Cincinnati Hotel Carl Tan from Valspar. It's one of the colors on their historic pallet.

I didnt get a chance to finish it last night, I still have to cut in at the ceiling and paint the trim, it's still primered. Here is a sneak peek at the color:

Brief update

I've finally started working on the house again. Most of it is just little things that aren't picture worthy so I dont have any new pictures today. I've started clearing out the house, I have way too much stuff in here to be able to work efficiently. I'm going to be taking a lot of stuff over to the Woodbury house to store it there temporarily.

I've been clearing out the laundry room. It was the kitchen for the second apartment for a long time. I've been using it as a storage room. I removed the 5 door cabinet from the wall above the sink and will be replacing it with a much smaller 2 door cabinet that matches the one above the washer. I'm hoping to be able to paint it this weekend. I'll be painting the walls a sage color and the floors will be flat black.

I'm also hoping to repaint the master bedroom soon. I've hated the color ever since I painted it over a year ago.


I'll be using the same tan that I used in the living room, the bedroom is a fairly dark room so it should benefit from the lighter color.

Big changes

A lot has changed since the last post. I went back to the bank, got a 6 month extension and also got more money. This will allow me to get all the things I need done quickly as well as add a few other things. This extended my project time by over a month but I believe it's well worth it. A few of the things added to the list is a deck, rebuild of the front porch, painting the house, and plumbing upgrades.

The other day I finished painting the second guest bedroom. I used the same blue that we used in the dining room.




Sorry about all the spots, there was dust on the camera lens. The trim still needs to be painted and we still have to figure out what to do with the fireplace and doors, paint them or poly them.

I started hanging the pendant lights in the kitchen. Only one of them are up at this point, I should do the other one today or tomorrow.


Over the weekend we tackled the front porch. The wrought iron railings were ok but we really wanted wood baulisters and railings. In the shot below you can see the old iron railings, they appear to have been put in sometime in the 40's or 50's:


I removed the iron railings (we're going to use them in our garden) then built and installed the new railings in a day.



The baulisters are $2.29 from Lowes but they didn't have hand rails long enough so I had to make my own our of 2x4's. I put a bevel on either side of the top railing as you can see in the above picture.

The top rails are anchored into the wood portion of the column. The bottom rails had to be anchored into the brick.I used a Forstner bit on the bottom rail about 2" from the edge then used a 3/8's bit to create a channel to the edge of the board. Then I drilled a 3/8's hole in the brick and installed an anchor bolt. Then I brought the bottom rail up from underneath and thghtened the bolts. The hole will be covered with a small piece of board. I forgot to take a picture of this but you should be able to see it in the above picture. If anyone has any questions on it I can take a picture of it later and post it.

I will be rebuilding the second floor porch. We still haven't decided how we want it though. Once we do it will have balisters like the 1st floor just a bit thinner though.

The next project is the shutters. We decided on board & batten style since it's easy to build. I'm using 1" thick 1x4's and 1x6's to build them.


Once we paint the house the shutters will either be black or dark green. the house itself will be some type of pale green or olive and the trim will be an off white.

Next I'll be finishing off the shutter for the front of the house, painting the Foyer, installing the other pendant light then starting the demo for the old porch so I can begin the deck.

Foyer update and guest bathroom demo

The second guest bedroom and the foyer have both been scraped, sanded and primered.



None of the trim has been primered in the foyer because it will all be stripped and stained instead of painted. We had been thinking of wallpapering the foyer with some type of Victorian pattern but I may just paint it for now.

Next on my list was the guest bathroom. When we moved in it was being used as a kitchen for the upstairs apartment, here is what it looked like:

and this is what it looked like once I removed the kitchen:


As you can see in the above picture the plaster was in terrible shape and couldn't be saved. I wanted to tear the walls down months ago but I had to wait until I put the kitchen ceiling up so I didnt have a huge mess in the kitchen below. so yesterday I finally got around to tearing the walls down.



This was as far as I got because I had to get ready to go out of town in the morning. I'll be out of town for work for the next few days so unfortunately noting will get done on the house. Hopefully I'll be ready to tackle the rest of the house when I get back.

I'll leave you with a picture of me after demoing the bathroom:

Second guest bedroom update

I finished sanding the walls in the second guest room yesterday. Then I primered. I'm not completely finished primering yet. There are still 2 small areas that I have to patch before I can finish. I also have to scrape and sand the baseboards and window and door trim then primer them.



Still not sure on a color yet but I'm thinking some type of gold and maroon. I should finish up everything except the small areas that need to be patched today then I'll be finishing off the kitchen cabinets and starting on the Foyer.

Kitchen cabinet crown

I didn't get as much done yesterday as I'd hoped. We had company over and also had to run a few errands.

I've almost finished sanding Guest bedroom #2, I'll finish sanding and primer it this afternoon. We haven't picked out a color for the room yet. I may do that tonight.

I started installing the crown on the cabinets. I was really nervous starting this project because the pieces are so expensive ($35 for an 8' piece) so I went online to make sure I did it right. I found a really good site on cutting crown here. There are 2 different methods for cutting it; flat, and in position. In position is easier because you only have to cut on one angle as opposed to the compound angle needed to cut it on flat. The fence on my miter saw wasn't quite tall enough to cut it in position though.

I also had to figure out the spring angle of the crown. The site recommends using a protractor but I dont have one. I figured it out by tracing the crown angle on a piece of paper, extending the lines, and using my speed square. Good thing I didn't just assume it was 45/45 degrees because it wasn't. It ended up being 52/38. They have a really good angle generator chart on the site so you know what angle to cut. My miter saw happened to have the correct degrees for 52/38 highlighted in red(31.6 for the miter, 33.9 for the bevel). When cutting crown for an outside corner, one thing to remember when marking your measurment for cutting, you need to measure and make your mark at the very edge of the crown, almost on the back side. Then when you cut it you need to make sure that you line the saw up so that you hit the mark once it passes all the way through the wood. If you just mark it on the face of the crown once you make your cut you'll end up about 1 1/2" short because of the bevel. I know I'm not explaining this very clearly.

Anyways, I got 2 of the cabinets finished, I'm going to finish building the last cabinet and hang it before I put the crown on the last 2. Here are a few pics of the 2 finished cabinets:


I still need to add a thin piece of plywood above the crown so we can set things on top of the cabinets. Once I've finished building the last cabinet and installed the crown I need to paint all of them. I'm still up in the air about painting the entire cabinet white or if I should leave the doors and shellac them. Now that the crown is installed I think shellacing it too would look good, so the crown and doors would be shellaced and the cabinet itself would be white. Any comments on the idea are greatly appreciated as I need to get this done ASAP.

Kitchen ceiling done!

A lot was accomplished over the long weekend. I didn't quite get everything done that was on the schedule but it was still a very productive weekend. Scheduling the project out has really been a fantastic help. there is no way I would have gotten as much done as I did without it.

Guest bedroom number 2 was first on the list. This room was easily in the best shape of all the bedrooms. That's not saying that there wasn't a lot of work to be done though. First I had to move everything out of the room. Both guest bedrooms have been storerooms for the last 9 months. Instead of just dumping everything in guest bedroom number 1 I decided to organize it first. There was a lot of wood scraps and trash in there from using the room as a woodshop. Once it was organized and everything was moved over I scraped and sanded the walls. Once that was done I patched the bad parts of the walls with my usual mixture of drywall mud and sand.




I still have to patch a few small areas and sand. Hopefully the walls will be primered by tonight. We haven't picked out a color for the room yet either. We hope to have this room, the breakfast room, the foyer, and maybe the laundry room painted by this weekend.

The next project and one I've been avoiding for many months now was the kitchen ceiling. Over the last 4 months or so I made every excuse I could think of to not start on it. Once I finally did start it I finished in 2 days and it wasn't all that hard.



There are 2 parts to the ceiling, the part on the left in the first picture is underneath the upstairs guest bathroom. the part to the right is a fairly large attic space. I plan on making an access door from the guest bathroom into the space to use for storage.

I used R-19 for the part of the ceiling under the bathroom. R-30 will go down on the other part after I demo the upstairs guest bathroom walls. The wood is salvaged wood that I got last year before we even got the house. I laid alternating rows of 7" and 9" boards.



Most of the boards are pretty dirty so I'm going to scrub them down and then use some type of wood treatment on them like Murphy's oil soap. I might do a very light sanding and light coat of poly but I doubt it, I really like the patina of the boards as they are.

I also got a lot of small projects taken care of that had needed to get done for a while now. I installed the dryer vent in the laundry room. Everytime we would run the dryer it would become a sauna in the room, great when it's 30 degrees out, not so great when it's almost 90 out.

I installed the HVAC vent in the breakfast room now that the floor is down. Unfortunately I didn't get to hook it up to the system because the HVAC guys left the wrong sized ducting for me. On payday I'll be buying 6" ducting so I can hook it up. The back of the house gets hotter than the front because of the lack of the vent, the lack of the dryer vent, and because we didn't have the ceiling in the kitchen.


I finally moved the stove outlet to where it needed to go. It was directly between the cabinet I built and the stove, creating a large gap between the two. I moved it to under the stove, now both the stove and the cabinet are centered underneath the cabinets above them.


I also painted the little metal bistro set we got for free last year, it was painted some bright purple color. We're using it on our brick patio until we get a larger patio set, either wood or wrought iron.


I even had time to help Heather build her bird feeder for the back yard.


Next on my list will be to finish Guest bedroom 1, finish the Foyer, and finish the last kitchen cabinet then paint all of them. I hope to have all this done in the next couple of days.

Where to now??

Now that the upstairs hall is complete as my last post shows it's time to decide which disaster area I'm going to tackle next. there are 4 rooms left to work on upstairs, the 2 guest bedrooms, and the 2 bathrooms. Here is each room with what needs to be done with each:

Guest Bedroom 1

This has been my work and storage room for a while now. This room needs moderate work. There is a LOT of grease on the upper walls (the guest bathroom adjoining the room was a kitchen during the houses apartment life). there is heavy stipling on the ceiling that will have to be sanded off. There are some cracks and chipped paint on the walls that will have to be patched. The mantle needs to be replaced with one of our spares as it's nothing more than a few 2x4's and thin plywood (no idea what happened to the original). then of course I have to sand, primer, and paint.

Guest Bedroom 2

This room is in a lot better shape. The ceiling was replaced with drywall at one point, it's in good shape except for the poor mud job done to it. I'm going to skim just the joints. The walls are in relatively good shape, not much chipped paint or cracks in here. The only other thing to do in here besides the ceiling is a light sanding of the walls then primer & paint.

Guest Bathroom

The guest bathroom needs a lot of work, starting with the floors. the floors are sloped so I'm going to have to take them up. From prior experience in the other 2 bathrooms the floor boards wont survive this, they are just too brittle. So a new floor needs to go down. I need to tear out the plaster on the bottom half of the walls and install beadboard. The rest of the walls have to be patched. I need to install a GFCI outlet near where the vanity will be and rewire the lighting. The ceiling is in rough shape. I really want to take it out anyways because I want to raise it up a foot. If I do this I'll have to decide what I'm going to replace it with, T&G wood or greenboard, not sure yet. Then of course I have to sand, primer, and paint.

Master Bathroom

The master bathroom needs moderate work. I've actually already removed the plaster from the bottom half of the walls and installed the plywood base for the beadboard but I didn't have a picture of the room from after that. So, in here I need to re-frame the ceiling since I'm raising it up a foot in here just like in the guest bathroom. I've already removed the beadboard from the ceiling because some genius decided to stiple it at one point. I'm going to try to clean it up and reinstall it. If it doesn't clean up I still have a lot of regular 4' T&G wood left over that I can use for the ceiling. In here I also need to install a GFCI outlet near where the vanity will be and rewire the lighting. I need to patch the walls, hang the beadboard on the walls, then sand, primer, and paint.

In both bathrooms I still have to sand and paint both tubs and install all the plumbing fixtures. Plus I still have to build the vanity for the master bathroom. All that will be done after the floors are refinished though. So those are my options, still not sure where I'll start. I guess I'll find out when I go upstairs and just see where I end up.

Nursery walls are finished!

Another room down! At this rate I should be done some time in the early 22 century...

Anyways some of you may remember what the room looked like originally.



If you look closely in the first picture you may notice the original colors of the room, a light blue below the picture rail and a green above it. I'm pretty sure these are the original colors because the paint is in the skim coat of plaster and not painted on. We decided to try to match these colors. For numerous reasons we've decided to paint all the trim upstairs instead of refinishing it. One being that we dont have time to sand every bit of trim. We really need to hurry and get this done so we can get a conventional mortgage. Even so, it's very hard to paint over all that beautiful heartpine. We still plan on refinishing the downstairs trim though.

I've already posted earlier about all the work it took to scrape and sand the walls and ceilings in this room. Once all the loose paint was scraped and sanded off I patched everything with mud:


I then sanded the walls and ceiling again. Once all that was done I primered the walls, ceiling, and trim.



Next it was finally time to paint. I painted the trim first. It's much easier that way.


Then at last I painted the walls, blue first, then the green.




I cant wait until the floors are refinished! At the last minute I decided to refinish the mantle instead of painting it and I'm really glad I did.



It should look great once I finish stripping it. I still havent decided if I'm going to use poly or shellac on it though. I think poly should be fine, there's plenty of color in it already. Also, I didnt paint the doors because I'm going to refinish them too.

My next task will either be the upstairs hall or guest bedroom #2, I havent decided yet.