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.

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.

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.

Update on Study Walls, Master Bath floor and the garden

Even though it's been a while since my last post a lot has gotten accomplished. The reason I havent posted is that there's really not much to see.

I've finished mudding, sanding and primering the Study/foyer wall. Tomorrow I'll paint them and start hanging the trim for the beadboard wainscoting.




I decided to finish the Master Bathroom floors mainly because I'm tired of having to go all the way downstairs in the morning to use the bathroom. Unfortunately I dont have any floor sanding equipment so I've had to make do with what I've got. I began by rough sanding the floor with a beltsander with 36 grit paper. Then I used my 6" orbital with 80 grit. Then I SHOULD have gone to the store and purchased 120 and 180 grit paper for my orbital but I didnt. Instead I used 120 grit with my beltsander.



It looked fine until I began staining it. If the beltsander gets the slightest bit off level it gouges the wood because it's so soft. There were small gouge marks all over. Secondly, 120 grit was not fine enough so the color is darker that what I wanted. The picture below was after the stain had dried.


I've managed to do some damage control and fix most of it. Sanding in between coats and the 2 coats of poly have lightened it up a lot (though not as much as the first floor bathroom floors) and hidden a lot of the gouges. It's also taken on that reddish tone that the first floor bathroom floors has.


A lot of our time has been spent in the back yard creating a garden. It's still in the very early stages but it's starting to come together. The backyard was a jungle when we bought the place.


You wouldn't think from the picture that we lived in the city. the majority of the underbrush was bamboo which is hell to get rid of. Below is a picture of the area and a few of the plants we are in the process of planting (Roses, Hydrangeas, Azaleas, and many more).

Guest Bathroom floor finished

I finally got around to finishing the floor in the guest bathroom. It got put on the back burner because of my salvage operation at the Anderson House and because of the trees that needed to be planted.


Getting the toilet drain perfect was very important. As I mentioned earlier these old toilets have a larger drain than modern ones, they wont fit in a 3" flange so I had to rip out the plumbers work and use a 4" flange. It was very close but I managed to get everything to fit perfectly.


I went by the Anderson house on Saturday, most of the debris has been hauled away but there were still plenty of bricks laying around everywhere. I managed to collect another couple hundred. I now have a grand total of 1011 bricks.


I also managed to get our porch swing hung yesterday.

Next I hope to get the kitchen ceiling hung then it's back to the guest bathroom to rip out the walls and ceiling.

Guest Bathroom - Work begins

Yesterday I started on the guest bathroom. It still has it original floor and none of it is rotted, the bad news, it's very sloped. The wood is way too brittle to pull up without destroying it so I'm having to lay a new floor. Since we're running out of time on getting the house done I've decided to use the original floor as a sub-floor. I'll add shims to the low spots to level everything out. I hate to do it this way but I dont have a choice.

This is the room to begin with:



Before I could even begin on the floor I had to do something about the plumbing for the toilet. The plumbers used 3" Schedule 40 for the drain line. The problem with that is that the flange on many old toilets will not fit into a standard 3" toilet drain flange. The toilet going in this bathroom has an especially large flange on it. I'm having to go back and redo all three toilet drain flanges in the house because of this.

The way I fixed this in the main bathroom downstairs was to cut the drain a few feet back and use a 3" to 4" coupling, then run 4" pipe to a 4" flange. This wasn't a problem since the plumbing extends down into the crawlspace. The problem here is that there is no room for that. The plumbing is constrained by the 2"x10" floor/ceiling joists. Luckily I was able to find a 3" to 4" 90 degree elbow, the 4" flange will be attached to the elbow with a short piece of 4" pipe. Luckily, there will be just enough room since I'll be installing the new floor on top of the old floor.

The part circled in red is what I replaced, notice the 3" to 4" elbow.

The elbow from above.

With the plumbing taken care of I started carefully taking out the baseboards. This was a major pain as I'm trying not to get too much debris in the kitchen below which pretty much turned out to be an exercise in futility.

You can clearly see the kitchen below through the studs.

In removing the door sill I found more evidence that this wall was the original back of the house, the studs were cut off at the floor to make the door, this was most likely originally a window.

With the baseboards out of the way I cleaned up the floor and removed any stray nails in the way. I was now ready to begin shimming the floor.


The first step was to find the high point, this turned out to be the wall between the bathroom and bedroom(the original back wall of the house), luckily it's pretty much level all the way along this wall, from there it slopes down and to the right(if you're standing in the doorway). With stringline I measured the drop at each joist. The total drop ended up being just over 1 1/2" in the far corner. Using measurments at 3 points along each joist I cut the shims and installed them. So there is no confusion I write the measurement on the sub-floor and on each end of the shim as I cut it.


With the floor leveled I began laying the new floor.



Because of the shims I'm face-nailing the boards for the the extra strength the added depth gives. I'm using 8D cut-nails. You can really see how unlevel the original floor was because of the shadows in the second picture.

Hopefully I'll finish the floor today and begin demoing the walls and ceiling.