Tackling the upstairs hall

My next disaster area to tackle is the upstairs hall. It's now the worst area upstairs now that the nursery is completed.

Here's a quick before shot to get everyone reaquainted:


One of the tasks I accomplished last week was to get the hall lights wired. there are two 3-way switches at the bottom of the stairs: one for the downstairs hall light(haven't wired it yet), the other for the chandelier that will hang upstairs:



Two 3-way switches at the top of the stairs: one for the previously mentioned chandelier, the other for the light at the other end of the upstairs hall(the plaster was so bad in this area that it fell apart when I tried to cut the hole).


And last the other 3-way switch next to the master bedroom door for the upstairs hall light.

Here's a closeup of the box at the top of the stairs. I always make sure to label where the wires come from so there aren't any crossed wires.


Here's the original light switch at the bottom of the stairs:


It was connected to a socket that stuck out of the wall near the top of the stairs and to another switch just like it at the top of the stairs. The knob & tube wiring connecting these had been disconnected long ago thankfully. However I do have two more of these switches in the foyer by the front door. One of them controls the porch light and still works! It has a patent date of 1906 on it.

As you may remember a while back I ripped out the horrible dropped ceiling at the end of the hall at the top of the stairs, I then framed it and started drywalling it. I redesigned it so that the ceiling sloped up to meet the original ceiling giving a lot more headroom. This is where I started back in on it. I finish installing the smaller drywall pieces and began the long task of mudding. For those of you who have not had the pleasure of mudding when sand is mixed in, let me tell you it's a pain in the ass!! The larger pieces of sand always end up catching on the trowel and gouging a huge line through an otherwise nice pass. It takes a lot of time to get it right. then of course sanding it is even worse. Just think sandpaper on sandpaper, that's essentially what it becomes when it drys. I go through a lot of sandpaper when sanding.

Anyways... To be able to finish the area above the stairs I had to build a platform to reach the ceiling.


This thing scares me to death. I'm always sure that my next move is going to send me plummeting down the stairs... fun fun.



This is as far as I've gotten. I'm hoping to finish the first skim coat tonight and start in on scraping all the loose paint off the other end of the hallway ceiling and walls.

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.

Researching the history of the Darnall House

Sorry for the lack of posting lately but after the last post on the timeline of the additions I decided to research the house some more. (what little work I have accomplished on the house is not really worthy of pictures, mostly rewiring the upstairs) I've found some more interesting information but still no old pictures or solid information on the beginnings of the house. I really wish I could find an old picture of the house but every old picture of the area I find has the house just out of view or just a tiny sliver of the house.

Here are a few old pictures of the area to illustrate what I mean (house is circled in red):



This is a picture of the Planters Inn. It was one of the first structures in the area having been built in the early 1800's. It was moved about 100' NE on log rollers sometime around 1885 to make way for the railroad. It used to be an inn for travelers along the indian trail, what is now Meriwether St. This picture was taken after it was moved, probably taken around 1909. Sadly it was destroyed in 1968. I'm pretty sure that's the roof of my house in the distance.


This next picture is taken from the top of the old water tower and looking down Meriwether St. It was taken sometime around 1920-25. As you can see there is my house right there behind that clump of trees.

This is the First Christian church, built in 1906. the picture was taken sometime in the 40's or 50's. There's my house on the right.

This picture and the next one aren't all that old - 1994 I think - but I wanted to show them for a few reasons. First, in the above picture you'll notice the lovely grey, bland building in front of you. It's a branch office of the Dept. of Children and Families. This building is what was built after the Planters Inn was torn down. There was another beautiful house - a Victorian - in the empty lot in front of it. Grrr.... Anyways, there's my house in the background, it still had it's chimneys then too.

This one is taken looking up New Orleans St. This is probably the best shot of my house. Too bad the pic is from 1994.

The other day I went to the courthouse to research the deeds. I found quite a bit of interesting information. One of the most interesting is that the deed for Thomas M Darnall purchasing the land from Lewis S. Salmons is dated DEC 21, 1858 (the filing date is at the end of the entry, this date is not the same as the date of the deed. The date of the actual transaction is always listed at the beginning). There are no other records of the Darnalls owning any other land besides a vacant lot behind this property. So where did they live for 12 years?? It appears that the Darnalls were fairly well off so I highly doubt they rented or squatted. He was a surgeon who was one of the co-founders of the Medical College in Griffin in 1859. That date fits with the date he bought the land. It seems that they moved to town around this time from Atlanta (the deed lists him as being from Fulton county). Here is the deed:


So was the house built in 1870 or 1858...? I still think it was 1870 for one main reason: the house was built with a lot of reclaimed lumber. Immediately after the war between the states in the south no one had any money to do anything. Even well off people didnt have any money. The Griffin history books list 1869-1870 as the first years of relative prosperity after the war. It lists numerous building and houses finally being built. Many of these house were most likely built with a lot of reclaimed lumber to save money. Still, I wonder where they lived for 12 years prior to this house...

I found a few other interesting deeds as well:



The above 2 pictures are of one of the very first deeds to the property. It's dated 1850. Griffin became a city in 1841 By General Lewis Griffin, he bought 800 acres because he found out that 2 railroads were planning on intersecting on the spot(he owned one of the railroads). He laid out a city and then auctioned off lots. I plan on going back soon to find the very first deed to the property but that may prove hard as the original tracts were much bigger than the 2 (later becoming 4) original acres.

Another very cool deed I found was for a charter to the Griffin & West Point Plank Road Company to creat a plank road from Griffin to West Point (West Point is near Lagrange, Ga in Troup county). From reading the deed it would seem that this was done without the land owners permission. The Plank road was built on the Indian Trail, it later became Meriwether St.



The deed pictured below is from 1890 4 years after the death of Thomas Darnall. Mattie Darnall was one of his daughters, this shows a triangle of land being sold off to the house next door. Notice the road in the plat, it was still called Plank Road at the time and not Meriwether St. You may also notice the writing "Kelly's Barn" at the back of the property. The Kelley's owned the Planters Inn at the time. This was the original location of their barn and of the plantation house, that would explain why I find a lot of old bricks at the back of the property.


Well that's all for now, Hopefully I'll have some new pictures of my progress soon.

House addition timeline

Since I dont have any pictures of progress to post I figured I'd post this picture that I created one day when I was bored. The different colors show the different additions to the house.


Dark Blue - Original portion of the house

Red - Kitchen - late 1800's?

Green - Bathroom addition - 1915?

Yellow - Laundry room - 20's or 30's

Light blue - laundry room extension, breakfast room - 1955


The kitchen addition may actually have been the original kitchen that was separate from the house and was just moved up to join it.

The bathroom addition is a full 2 story addition with a shed roof. The 1915 date is from the date on both the tubs that were in the house. Of course that doesn't mean that's when the addition was built, they could have bought both tubs used.

When the laundry room was built the space between it and the kitchen was probably a porch until 1955.

In 1955 the house was converted to apartments. The laundry room addition was so that the apartment on that side could have a back door. The porch in between it and the original kitchen was closed off to create a kitchen for the other apartment. The original kitchen then became a bedroom. I've since converted it back to a kitchen and the old porch will be a breakfast room/informal dining room.

This is definitely the strangest house I've ever seen. At first glance everything seems clear-cut and simple. But once you dig beneath the surface it becomes a crazy maze that I have yet to figure out. I think a large cause of this is the major renovation that the house underwent in the 30's. This "renovation" took away many original features of the house. Most of the door hardware was replaced with plain, art deco hardware (grrrrr!). The study was totally reworked and I have yet to figure out how it was originally. The beautiful heart pine was covered over with red oak in the study, foyer, parlor, and the formal dining room. It appears that the stairs were moved/rebuilt around this time also. I have no idea if they are the original stairs and just moved or if new ones were built. I do know for sure they were moved back by about 8'. I'll probably never figure out every detail of how the house was originally.

Well hopefully I'll have some pictures of progress up soon.

shifting gears

I know I said I was going to finish the Breakfast room in my last post but we've decided to change our strategy a bit. Our construction loan is getting pretty expensive, not to mention the fact that all we're paying every month is interest only. We need to get the house done so we can refinance and get a regular mortgage at a much lower rate.

Because of this we've decided to move our attentions upstairs and finish the hell called plaster/drywall/mud work. As you may remember we finished the master bedroom last month but we still have 3 other bedrooms, a long central hall, and 2 bathrooms that have hardly been touched. We need to finish these ASAP so the floor guys can get up here and do their thing.

I've been working in the Nursery for the past 4 days scraping and sanding off tons of old flaking paint from the walls and ceiling. For the past 2 days I've been bent over backwards sanding the stipling off the ceiling. Needless to say I find it hard to walk upright now.

For those of you who may not remember this was the condition of the upstairs bedrooms when we bought the place:


The upstairs was vacant long before the downstairs was. In addition to all the peeling paint, there were whole sections of the ceiling that were falling in. I patched those a few months back.

Here's the room after scraping paint and sanding stipling:




Looks like it snowed in here. I looked like that floor when I was done by the way. One thing you may notice is that the original skim coat of plaster above the picture rail and on the ceiling is green and below the rail it's a pale blue(the cream underneath the gold is paint that's on the blue plaster). I actually like that green color, not sure about the blue though...

After that I started in on skimming the ceiling with mud mixed with sand.


I didnt get much done because my back went out. Hopefully my back will be a little better by this afternoon. That way I can finish the mudding tonight, and sand and primer tomorrow.

I also wanted to post a picture of the doors upstairs:


I dont think I've ever seen 2 panel doors like this before. All of the doors upstairs are like this, they are all rim locks also. Downstairs we have the more common 4 panel doors like these:


Has anyone seen 2 panel doors like these before?

Kitchen island update

I haven't done much to the island with all the work going on in the breakfast room but I did get the marble cut. I bought a hand wet tile saw from Home Depot for $35. The thing worked great. We went ahead and lugged it inside to test fit it on the island.



It fits ok but I just wish it had a little more overhang all around. We salvaged this piece of marble from an old textile factory that was being gutted. It was broken on one end so we had to cut it this size.

The overhang on the front of it will serve as a small bar, we'll have 2 small stools there. We got the brackets off E-bay, they're shelf brackets from the 1800's.

As soon as the breakfast room is completed I'm going to finish the island. I still have to build the inside shelf, stain the unfinished edges and the inside shelf & floor, touch up the scratches, remove the cement from the surface of the marble, patch the holes in it with epoxy, and polish the marble. Oh, and find 2 short old stools.

Breakfast room floor

I finally tackled the breakfast room floor. It's been bugging me ever since I ripped out the old kitchen. The floor was in awful shape as you can see here:


The black stuff is the remnants of old linoleum tile glue. If that were the only problem with the floor I would have bit the bullet and scrapped the stuff off. Unfortunately the floor is also badly slanted and heavily rotted. 60 years as a kitchen were hard on this room.

In one corner of the room there was a patch that was very rotted. This corner held an old washing machine for at least the last 30 years. the drain for it must have overflowed often.


Because our driveway goes around to the back of the house this is our main entrance and the first room everyone sees when they come over. There's nothing worse than making all kinds of progress on the house and when you bring people over to show them the very first thing they see is this room... So the floor had to go.



Wonderful, as is usually my luck, many of the joists are rotted.


All 4 of these joists are bad and have to be replaced.



When I went to take them out most simply crumbled in my hands like Styrofoam.


A prime example of why I hate notch-cut joists. This is an otherwise perfect joist without any rot.



This entire house seems to be built from salvaged wood, This mortise still has the original dowel in it. There is other evidence of salvaged wood throughout the house, even in the original portion. The back sill in the original portion of the house has mortise cuts in it as well. From the look of it, it was once vertical and held the floor and ceiling sills on a 2 story house(the mortise cuts are very large on it). Most of the beams with mortise cuts in them appear to be hand hewn as well. I'm wondering if this house was built on the location of an older one, it's entirely possible as Griffin was formed in 1840 and there was an even earlier town here before that called Pleasant Grove.

Back to the floor... I removed all the bad joists...


...and installed new pressure-treated 2x10's with metal joist hangers.


We were having company over that night so I went ahead and hurriedly laid the subfloor without shimming it.


You cant tell from this picture but the floor slopes away and to the right by almost 1 1/2".

The next day I made the shims.


I laid them out on top of the subfloor for the picture to give a good idea of how much the floor slopes.

I pulled up the subfloor and screwed in the shims.


I then laid the subfloor back down.


Before I lay the flooring down I'm going to scrape/sand and prime the walls and ceiling. I'm not looking forward to that as most of the walls and all of the ceiling is beadboard. Hopefully the walls and floor will be done by this weekend... yeah right!