Christmas Tree

Here is our Christmas tree in the Parlor, it's a ten footer. We decorated it with silver, gold and white ornaments, though it's hard to see that in the picture.


Some of the previous owners relatives are coming by again this weekend, so I'll be doing a bit more work in preparation for that.

Lots of painting

Sorry for the lack of posting lately. We've been really busy Working on the house. We decided to bite the bullet and go ahead with converting to a standard mortgage. All the work we've been doing was in preparation for the appraisal.

We did not finish the main guest bedroom or the guest bathroom but were told not to worry about it as the house should appraise for well over what we have in it even without finishing those rooms.

We've already been approved for the loan and the appraisal was yesterday. They are wanting to close by the end of the week. We haven't heard back about the appraisal yet though.

Here are some pictures of the work we've been doing on the house, it's mostly painting but it has really helped to give the house that "finished" look. A large part of the painting was going around and painting all the trim on the first floor. I had not painted the trim before now because my original intention was to strip it all and stain it dark. Then we painted the walls above the picture rail in the Parlor and the Formal Dining room. We also painted the kitchen cabinets, that made a huge difference in the kitchen.

Back hall taken from the Foyer looking back to the Breakfast room

Back hall taken from the Breakfast room looking forward to the Foyer

Back hall from the stairs

Back hall Dining room door

Parlor

Parlor

Parlor

Formal Dining room

Formal Dining room

Kitchen

Kitchen

Kitchen

Kitchen

Kitchen

There's still quite a bit left to do on the house but I will be doing it at a slower pace now. It will be nice to finally take a little time off.

One of the reasons for getting our standard mortgage now is that we might possibly be taking on a new project soon. Nothing's definite yet but if it works out I'll write a post about it soon.

Previous owner's relatives visit

We haven't gotten much done on the house for a number of reasons. One of them being the new TV we got:




It's a 47" Westinghouse with full 1080P HD. The picture is incredible. It's $700 or $800 cheaper than anything else in it's class. I got it for $1299 from Best Buy. I fully recommend it to anyone in the market for a flat panel LCD.

We had a visit from the relatives of the former owner of the house, Hazel. I've mentioned her in the blog before, she lived to be almost 105 and owned the house since 1955 when she inherited it from her 2 aunts, Helen and Kitty-Clyde. They inherited the house in 1945.

The relatives brought some old photos of them over for us. I gave them a tour of the house and showed them all of the progress we've made, they seemed impressed with the work done so far. Here are a few pictures they brought:

Hazel in front of the house

Helen

Kitty-Clyde

Helen with her husband

They also brought some photos of the front porch after a car hit it back in 2001. A man that was a convicted felon got into a fight then shot at someone that tried to break it up. He then car-jacked a vehicle and didnt get 2 blocks away before losing control and crashing into the front of the house. I've found some evidence of this a few months ago when I was planting new bushes in front of the porch. I dug up what appears to be a front fender reflector and some safety glass that probably came from the drivers window.



In anticipation of their visit we rearranged and straightened up many of the rooms in the house. We completely rearranged the Parlor:



The Buggy is a recent find that we got free off Freecycle.





I'm hoping to get back to work on the house soon.

A nice surprise

The living room has finally been cleared out and I have begun the task of scraping the walls.


Once the walls are scraped I need to run some romex for the chandelier and light switch. Then I can begin patching all the cracks.

The wood shed is pretty full now. I need to make a few shelves so I can stack all my wood so I can fit more in there.


Now that all the large pieces are in I need to put the last wall up.

I made a very nice discovery while scraping yesterday. I decided to scrape some of the paint off the mantle, I was expecting pine but what I found is so much better.


That's Tiger Oak! The entire mantle is tiger oak veneer. Somewhere along the way some genius decided to put nails in the top part of the veneer on the face. I should be able to repair that though. I just dont understand how someone could have just painted over these mantles.


The mantle is Empire style. The ones in the Parlor and formal dining room are also Empire style but they have the more common curves on the legs of the mantle. I decided to check those to see what was under the paint:

Formal Dining Room

Parlor

Both are also Tiger Oak! The mantle in the parlor appears to be solid tiger oak, not veneer like the others. They should look great once they are refinished.

Lots of updated pictures

Well, another two weeks have gone by since my last post. I really, really need to try to keep this updated a bit more than this. We've been going non-stop since my last post and have accomplished a lot since then. I finished roughing in the upstairs hall at the top of the stairs.




I still have a few small pieces of drywall to hang then I'm going to skim-coat the entire thing with mud mixed with sand. I'm hoping to finish this up some time next week.

We were trying to finish as many bedrooms as possible because we had guests staying over for the holidays. The only one we managed to finish was the master bedroom. We had to scrape, sand, patch the walls, and sand again.


We then primed the walls and ceiling.


Then painted the walls.


We were a bit nervous about the paint color at first, turns out that it just needed a second coat to smooth it out. I didn't realize that the dark colors we've chosen required a dark primer so the white primer was changing the color a bit. Once we put the second coat on it looked like we wanted it to.




I say we finished the room but we really haven't. There's still a lot left to do. We need to paint the trim the closet and the mantle, redo the electrical, and the floors still need to be refinished. Once the entire second floor is finished we'll be getting the floor guys in here to refinish them.

I finally took out the built-in cabinet that was in the Study. As I suspected it is not original to the house. It's built out of T&G white oak, the lumber yard's name is stamped on the back of each piece. From researching it online it appears the lumber yard dates to the '30's. This reinforces my belief that the house underwent a major renovation in the '30's where a lot of the original detailing of the house was removed.



I still haven't figured out what to do with the space. I was thinking of building some type of secret compartment or possibly making it into an alcove similar to what's on the other side of the wall in the Living Room. The new wall dividing the Study from the Foyer will be right where the return register is in the picture above, this will cut down on the space available to work with.

Next on my list was the dining room ceiling. It was sagging about 3" and in serious danger of falling. We're going to put a tin ceiling up in the next few weeks. We were using the Dining Room as our bedroom so we had to move it into the Study.



Pulling the old ceiling down was a hard, dirty, nasty job. There was 5/8" drywall put up over the original plaster. Our construction dumpster is on the opposite end of the house so I had to remove the debris one dustpan full at a time, carrying it through the center hall and living room to throw it out the window into the dumpster which is actually about 12' away from the window.




Once the ceiling was down and the mess cleaned up (2 days later) we began painting. We're using only Historic Trust approved colors from American Traditions throughout the house. Here's the finished product, we're really happy with how it turned out:





Of course we still have a long way to go in here as well. We have to stencil above the picture rail, hang the tin ceiling, strip all the trim and shellac it(including the mantle and doors), and refinish the floors.

Next we painted the Parlor.





That last shot gives a great view from the Parlor to the Dining Room and back to the Kitchen. In here we still have to wallpaper above the picture rail, strip and shellac all the trim, and refinish the floors.