Putting up sheet rock in the guest bathroom

Wow! I went back and searched to see when the last post on the upstairs guest bathroom was and found that it was from November 2007!

I haven't done anything on the house in months as we've been out at the house in Woodbury most of the time. We're about to get a construction loan and will soon be going full tilt in the hopes of getting it livable by summer.

Anyways, we can't do anything more on Woodbury until we get the loan so I decided to do some work here.

Several months back I raised the ceiling joists up like I had done in the master bathroom, unfortunately I cant find the pictures of it.

Today I finally decided to get back in there and get the greenboard up. I was going to use the tongue & groove boards that I took down from the old second floor porch but in the end I decided against it and went with the green board.

First I put up insulation in the rafters on the sloped part of the roof and then put up the green board over that:

I can reach the flat part of the ceiling from the attic so I'll insulate that area later. Here is the completed ceiling:



Next I cut out and reframed the opening for the attic access:


The area's not very large but it will be nice to store small things and for access the plumbing and electrical.

After that I began insulating the walls and installing the green board over that:


That was as far as I got today, I'm going to need more insulation and a few more pieces of green board. Hopefully I can get this room completed soon...

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.

FINALLY! An old picture of the house!

Work has been progressing very slowly here. A lot of other things have been going on and it's hard to get back into that work mode in the little bit of free time I've had.

I've been working in the upstairs guest bathroom, check here if you don't remember how it looked when I left it last June. It doesn't look much different now except that I cleaned up all the plaster and I've removed almost all the lathe off the walls. The next step is going to be to remove the ceiling joists and rebuild them a foot higher like I did in the Master Bathroom.

With that out of the way, the only real news I've got is that I FINALLY got an old picture of the house!! It only took a year and a half of constant searching. One of the relatives that came to visit last week mailed me a picture of the house.

The picture appears to be from the 40's or early 50's. It says Aunt Helen's house on the back so it would have to be sometime between 1945-1955. What surprised me the most was that the house was apartments even back then. In the picture you can see the second floor deck and just barely make out the stairs on the left side of the porch. I believe at this point it was only two apartments, Helen and Kitty-Clyde lived downstairs and rented out the upstairs.



I took a picture of the house now in the exact same spot as the old picture:

Another thing I was surprised to see is that you cant see the huge oaks in the backyard above the roof of the house. I guess they've grown a lot in the last 60 years. The tree in front of the house is long gone, I believe it was an Elm. The large branch in the upper right of th picture was from the huge old Pecan tree next to the house, the tree is still there but the branch was removed at some point because it was too close to the house.

I was happy to see that I came pretty close on the porch railings. My railings are a little higher than the originals but otherwise look very similar. I will probably lower them later on to match the originals.

I'm also going to remove the second floor porch soon. For now I will remove the roof of the porch and cut the 4x4 columns off at the top of the railings. This should make it look very close to the old picture. Eventually I'm going to remove the it entirely and rebuild a much smaller deck in between the two upper windows. It will be just wide enough for a rocking chair on either side of the door. I'll also make it less deep, that way I can restore the original pitch of the porch roof without it looking like it was hacked into place like it does now. I may add some type of columns and small hip roof to it eventually.

Living room wall patching and new porch look.

Yesterday afternoon was spent patching the living room walls. The first thing I had to do was fix all the holes I made when running the wire for the lights.

I took some scrap lathing and cut it into short strips and placed it in the hole using my nailgun to secure it to the lathing around the hole.


Then I cut 1/2" drywall to fit in the hole and screwed it in place.

Here are all the holes covered and ready for mud.

And here they are mudded.

After the holes were patched I patched all the cracks in the rest of the room. As I've mentioned before I'm using drywall mud mixed with play sand. It gives it a texture very similar to plaster and blends in well with the existing plaster.


Unfortunately today I have other things I have to take care of so I doubt I'll get a chance to sand and primer today.

I've come up with a redesign of the front porch, originally it was just a one story porch but at some point a second story porch was added. The second story porch is horribly done with just 4x4 posts, 2x4 joists, and plywood floors. I had thought of removing the second story porch but we really love sitting up there in the evenings.

So I took a picture of the house, played around with a few ideas and came up with this:


I think it keeps with the style of the house nicely and gives us our second story porch to sit on in the evenings. This style of porch was actually popular in this area so it keeps with the period look.

I probably wont get to this project this year, it will have to be something I take on after the rest of the house is finished.

Living room mantle and electrical

Work on the living room has gone slower than anticipated... imagine that. Stripping the mantle took almost the entire day Saturday.


unfortunately the tiger oak veneer on the front edge of the mantle was in such bad shape that I had to remove it. The wood underneath is oak but it's very rough and it's not quarter-sawn so I'll probably have to get some new oak veneer.

Sunday was almost entirely taken up with rewiring the lighting. The original knob and tube was shoved back up into the ceiling at some point and metal conduit run along the ceiling and down the wall.


The light switch wasn't even by the door to the hallway. When the house was apartments the little door in the above picture was the entrance to this room, it is a small closet that connects to the study. These two rooms, along with the main bathroom and the laundry room were one apartment.

So anyways, the conduit had to go. Running the new wire from the fixture in the ceiling and down the wall was a pain. I had to cut a lot of holes in the wall to run it.


The rest of the day sunday was spent finishing up all the scraping of the walls and ceiling.



Hopefully I can patch everything today then sand and paint tomorrow. For the trim I've decided to try my hand at faux graining. The living room needs to get done fast and I dont have time to remove all of the paint from the trim.

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.

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.