Breakfast room update

Yesterday morning I sat down and created a project list. As I've mentioned before we need to hurry and finish the major projects in the house to get a conventional mortgage. Our construction loan is at 9 1/2% right now. In another month or two it will jump at least another point. It's hard enough as it is now making the payments and buying all the supplies for the house. Our construction loan money ran out last month and I decided not to borrow more so I'm having to pay for everything out of pocket now. this is making it hard to stay on schedule. I wouldn't normally do this but because of the situation I'm adding a PayPal donate button to the site. I don't really expect to get much of anything but every penny helps.

Anyways, on to the house. Making that project list really helped, it's easy for me to lose my focus sometimes. This has helped me to stay on track so far. If I can stick to the schedule I've created I'll be finished in a month. On the list for yesterday was the Breakfast room. I finished the floors last week but have been avoiding the walls. They looked terrible as you can see in the pictures below:


The cutout in the second picture is a patch I had to install. It replaced a 1x12 that held the original fuse panel. I scraped and sanded the entire room in a few hours. then we primered the entire room. The primer is a one-coat primer from Valspar. I normally use Kilz2 but this was a little less expensive and it has a drying time of 30 minutes. I think it did a very good job so I'll be using this from now on.

Here are a few pics of the room after primer:




We had wanted to paint the walls today but unfortunately we dont have the extra money right now for the paint. The color is going to be Homestead Resort Tea Room Yellow from Valspar. It is one of their historic colors.

In the last picture is the wall with the back door and two windows. Eventually I'm going to take the entire wall out and install the other set of double french doors I have from the Anderson House. these are 3' wide each. The wall is not a structural wall so it wont be a problem.

Another great salvage find is an old corner china cabinet. It fits perfectly in the front corner of the Breakfast room. It was in awful shape when we found it so it needed quite a bit of work. Here is a picture of it being test fitted in the corner:


What you can see in this picture is the paint pealing off the insides. What you cant see is how bad the frame and shelves were. The bottom of the frame was rotten and the base was missing. I built a small platform for it to sit on and fixed the rest of the frame and shelves then scraped and sanded the entire thing down.




I still need to install a baseboard for the bottom of the cabinet, rebuild the two shelves in the bottom section, reglaze the window panes, and paint it (it's primered right now). In the last picture you can see the shelves have plate grooves.

We'll also be installing an old mantle on the breakfast room/kitchen wall. We have two matching mantles that will go on either side of the wall (one in the Breakfast room, one in the kitchen). They are just for decorative purposes only as the wall is nowhere near thick enough for a chimney. Once the mantles and the metal firebox surrounds are installed I'll be tiling around the firebox and placing a summer cover over it. They will then look like real fireplaces.

Breakfast room mantle

Kitchen mantle

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).

Brick patio install

Since it's been so nice out we decided to go ahead and put the brick patio in. The patio is in the rear of the backyard, where the gardens will be. This area was a jungle of bamboo when we bought the place but there is a lot of evidence that this was once a beautiful garden.

First I had to rake an area clear, once that was done I laid out the area for the patio. I used a drywall square and a long board to make sure the patio would be square then I spray painted the edges.

Then began the fun job of digging it out. The ground is not level, it slopes down toward the back of the property, so I had to dig deeper at the front end of the patio. I made sure it was level from left to right, and that it had a gradual slope from front to back for proper drainage.

One of the hardest parts about digging was the roots, Bamboo runs like crazy so there were roots everywhere.

Once the pad was level I began laying the brick. These are the bricks from the Anderson House. They are beautiful bricks but there are 3 different sizes so it makes it a pain to lay them properly. We decided on a basket weave pattern with a border.


It got dark on us so we had to stop here for the night. The next morning we got back to work.





I filled the edges back in with dirt so the pad is level with the ground. We're thinking about building a trellis over it with either wisteria or grapevine. I may also build a small fireplace in a corner of the patio.

Today I'll be getting sand to fill the cracks in with. then it's back inside to mud that damn wall I've been avoiding.

Foyer Wall sheetrocked

Yesterday I finished up the electrical for the Study and the Foyer.

The above picture was taken in the Foyer. The 2 white hanging wires will be for sconces, one on either side of the french doors.

With the wiring finished I hung the sheetrock.




Next I'll start mudding the walls, then it's off to the Breakfast room to finish leveling the subfloor and laying the final floor.

Study walls and electrical

The other day I got the drywall hung on the study side of the wall. I'm keeping the foyer side open until all the electrical is completed.



Yesterday I worked on the electrical for the Study and the Foyer. I rerouted the study overhead light switch from where it used to be by the old door (now a window) to next to the french doors. I used a double gang box because the other switch will control a set of sconces that I installed over the fireplace.

Then I had to install a new box when I wired up the foyer light, there wasn't anything here since the foyer and study were one room. Interestingly enough the overhead light in the study was centered on just the study, not the combined rooms. There was some old knob & tube in the ceiling above where I placed the box in the foyer. More proof that the 2 rooms were originally separate.


I still have to install some outlets in the new wall, then I can close it up and begin the fun task of mudding it.

Beadboard Study walls and built-in bookcase

I've spent the last few days working on the Study. I've begun hanging the beadboard on the walls. The beadboard is from a Textile Mill in Atlanta, It's the same stuff I used to build the Kitchen island.



The beadboard was being used as the sides for work tables in the Mill. I had to deconstruct them to be able to use it. First I had to carefully pry off the baseboards and trim, then I had to pull each piece from the 2x2 frame. The nail usually stayed in the frame so I had to be very gentle so the beadboard didn't shatter.

In the above picture I laid a piece of the baseboard against the wall to get an idea of how it will look. There will be a chair-rail piece at the top, same as the baseboard but just narrower, and trim above the baseboard and below the chair-rail. Everything will then be stained the same mahogany color, including the window and door trim.

I've been wanting to build a set of built-in bookshelves for the Study but hadn't come up with an idea that I liked. Yesterday I grabbed a piece of paper and began sketching ideas on it. Half way through I realized that the idea in my head was for some type of columned look. I realized that I just so happen to have a few columns laying around... the ones I saved from the Anderson House.

Originally I had wanted to use the columns for the second floor porch but I wasn't able to save enough of them for that. I continued sketching and eventually came up with this:


The columns themselves are just over 8' high, they come right up to the picture-rail(which will be removed from this wall). The entire bookcase will be 10' high, floor to ceiling.

I brought 2 of the colums inside to test fit them, they fit perfectly! So I brought them out onto the front porch and began working on them. They were in pretty rough shape. One column was very rotted at the base but I was able to take it apart, cut away the bad pieces, and use it to fix up the other 2 columns. While I had one of the columns open I decided to leave something for a future restorer to find. I wrote this on the inside of the column as well as putting a copy of my sketch for the bookshelves in with it.


Once both columns were structurally sound I began the long task of scraping and sanding them. They've got what looks like 3 or 4 coats of very heavy, thick paint. The first coat at the bottom looks like it might be milk paint.

The wood has beautiful color and great graining. I took one of the finished columns(minus the crown and base) back inside for a test fit.


The columns should be finished by today, then I can begin building the bookcase.