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.

Living room cleanup

I've been working on clearing out the storage room... sorry... the living room since Sunday and I'm still not finished. It is almost completed though so it will be done by tonight. Then I can start scraping, patching, and rewiring.

Here is a picture of the room after almost a full day of working on it:


I really wish I had gotten a picture of the room before I started, you literally couldn't walk into the room it was so full. The above shot was taken after I had filled two full sized rolling trash cans, two full sized rolling recycle cans, removed almost all my tools, sorted into boxes all kinds of miscellaneous parts like electrical, plumbing, screws, nails, and bolts, and removed 2 large piles of left over flooring.

This next picture was as of monday:

I had to de-nail all the wood I removed so that I could stack it cleanly in the wood shed. This took a lot of time. I'm also having to cut up all the scrap wood so it will fit into contractor bags. I'm having to throw everything out with the regular trash since I cant afford another dumpster.

Here is the room as of last night, as you can see it shouldn't take long to finish emptying it.


I really hope that I can get this room painted by the weekend, all that purple is starting to hurt my eyes!

Pole Shed part 3 and the living room

The pole shed is about done except for the last wall panel, trim, and paint. I'm thinking barn red. I'm waiting until I finish putting all the large pieces in the shed before I put up the last panel.




The living room and the main guest room have been our storage areas for almost as long as we've been in the house. We are finally getting these two rooms cleared out and moving everything into the shed. So far I've moved about 22 doors and 20 sets of windows into the shed along with a lot of wood.

As soon as the living room is completely empty I'll begin on the scraping and patching of the walls and ceiling. They're in decent shape so I expect to have the room painted before the weekend. I'll post some pics of the room in the next post.

More on the pole shed

Yesterday I started building the walls for the pole shed. The shed will have two windows and one or possibly two doors. One door will be a 3' door at the end of the shed for bringing large objects in. The other door will be on the side if I decide to install it.

The walls are vertically grooved plywood supported by pressure treated 2x4's. The windows are salvaged upper panes. I'm installing them on their side with hinges so they will swing out. The floor will be pallets for now but I may install plywood down the road.

Pole Shed

I've spent the last few days building a pole barn. I have a lot of salvaged wood, windows, and doors sitting in the living room and first guest bedroom. I need to get these rooms cleared out so I can begin working on them. The pole barn will house all of my salvaged material.

I found a level spot in the back yard for it and cleared it out. The barn will be 8x12 in size so I guess it's more of a pole shed than a barn. The inside ceiling height will be close to 9'.

I began by laying out the footprint with string tied to stakes. I made sure it was square by using a drywall square and a 4' level then checked it with the 3-4-5 string method. To do this you make a mark on one of the strings 3' from the corner, and 4' down on the other string then you measure between both marks. The measurement has to be exactly 5' for the corner to be square.

With that done I marked out the locations of the posts and began digging the holes.


I dont know about you but digging post holes by hand in 102 degree weather is not fun.

after all the holes were dug I cemented the poles in place making sure each was perfectly level on both sides.


The next step was to install the headers. These are what the roof trusses will sit on.


After installing the headers I began building the roof trusses. These were fairly simple to build. I used spiked metal mending plates on each side to hold the trusses together. I then installed the trusses on the header roughly 2' on center using hurricane straps.

Next I installed the purlins across the roof trusses. these tie the trusses together and gives you something to screw the tin to.


Next came the tin for the roof. The tin is galvanized, I'll probably paint it green or red. I screwed it to the purlins with steel screws with neoprene washers so it wont leak.



Left to do is the ridge cap for the roof, the face boards on the truss ends, a few windows, a door, and the walls. I'll be using the windows and doors that I have on hand. The plywood for the walls is going to be the most expensive part, costing from $150 to $250. I guess I should mention that I've only spent less than $200 so far.

side yard steps

I havent done much of anything on the house in the last few weeks. There have been too many other things that have taken my time. I'm hoping to be able to get back to work on the house in the next few days.

The only work accomplished is the steps in the side yard.


These were originally supposed to be brick but I ended up building these in the meantime. I'll be building the gate and installing it hopefully today.

Study bookcase finished

I have not completed near as much on the house as I had hoped in the last few weeks. Most of the delay being from a hospital stay and a week of forced recuperation time. I have managed to accomplish a few things however.

I finished the built in book cases in the Study last week. I might add one more coat of amber shellac though.




It's very hard to get a good clear shot of the entire bookcase and to also get the lighting adjusted properly to show the true color of the bookcase. These images will have to do though. The one thing left to do on them is build the doors for the bottom shelf on either side.

I've been working on the master bathroom but I dont have any pictures of that yet. So far we've sanded and painted the clawfoot tub, painted the walls, and I've begun installing the beadboard wainscoting on the walls. Once the beadboard is done I need to paint it then finish building the double sink vanity. Hopefully I'll have some pictures of it soon.

Dr. Darnall

I'm still doing research on the history of the house as time permits. Dr. Thomas M. Darnall was the first owner of the property, having moved his family here from Atlanta in 1852. As I've found out he was very respected throughout the community. Here are a few articles about his death on 8Jan1885 in the Griffin Daily News:

This first one was published just before he died.

In this one you can see that the Mayor shut the city down during his funeral and also that he was a Mason.

This article was written 2 days after his death. It gives a lot of information about his history and about how well he was respected.

This last article was written in the Macon Telegraph. Macon is about an hour south of Griffin.

I would really love to find a picture of him and his family and especially of the house. I'm still trying to track down his relatives. His family moved back to Atlanta in 1899 and that's where their trail ends.

Study built in bookcases and main bath vanity

Even though I havent posted any updates in a few weeks I've been pretty busy on the house. We also had to get the house ready for the big cookout on the 4th. It's hard to entertain guests in a construction zone. It turned out great though.

After finishing the deck last week I turned my attention to building the bookshelves in the Study. In this post I mentioned how I was going to use some of the front porch columns from the old Anderson house in the design. Unfortunately I didn't have enough salvaged 1x12 stock for the rest of the bookcase so I've had to use some new wood, worse yet it's not even Southern yellow pine, it's white pine. Lowes and Home Depot dont carry 1x12's in Southern yellow pine except for a few special pieces. I hate white pine but in the end I really dont think it will matter all that much. The bookcase is going to be stained dark walnut and very little of the white pine boards will be exposed once the books are in. The two main columns in the center are what will show the most and they are the old columns from the Anderson house, the two outside columns are a mix of older and new white pine but only 2" of their face shows, I'll probably do a faux grain on the face of them. Most of the shelves are white pine with the exception of the shelves that are directly above where the doors will be, those are Southern yellow pine.




I still need to build the top portion that will connect the two bookcases.

The other main project I worked on was the main bathroom vanity. We found this vanity totally by accident. We found some free old doors on Craigslist over a year ago. When we went and picked them from the couple that was giving them away their neighbor just happened to stop by. We got into a conversation about how we loved antique furniture and how we were in the process of searching for an old house that we could restore. He mentioned that he had some old furniture in his shop that he had intended to restore but had never gotten around to it and offered to give the pieces to us. He ended up giving us the vanity (an oak dresser), an old gas stove from the early 20's, and a very old, ornate victorian love seat (just the frame actually). He found the dresser on the curb years back about to be picked up by the trash truck.


Not much to look at but I knew that it could be fixed up very nicely. Once we got this house I knew it would be perfect for a bathroom vanity.

I stripped all the ugly brown paint off of it and stained it with a combination of mostly english chestnut and a little red mahogany and then polyed it.





We found the mirror frame in an antique store in Alabama, I have an old mirror that I need to get cut down to fit it. The sink is hand painted in Mexico and the faucet is brushed copper from Nottingham brass. I've already rebuilt the two top drawers to fit around the sink. The brace between the second and third drawers go will be removed. Then I'll biscuit join the drawer fronts together and cut them in half vertically to make two swing open doors. I still have to find some nice brass hardware for them.

Deck update #2

I got the deck boards down the day after my last post but because it rained almost the entire time I dont have any shots of the progress. Here is the deck after the boards were laid:




After trimming the edges of the deck I started on the stairs. I wanted to do something to the deck to separate it from other plain decks, so I decided to make the stairs L shaped. This ended up being a lot more complex than I had first imagined but the end result was well worth it.

First I had to calculate the run and the rise of the stringers. the run is the depth of each step and the rise is the height between steps. Once I had that I had to recalculate for the corner stringer, because this one is at a 45 degree angle the runs are longer.




With the stringers in place I began installing the treads. Because the run is 10" the boards would hang over the edge too much so I had to rip the back board on each step. Here are the stairs completed.

I'm not sure if I want to install riser boards or not. I think it looks pretty cool with the stringers exposed.

The next step was to install the posts, handrails and baulisters. This job went so quick that I didnt get any progress pictures. The reason it went so quick was that to install the baulisters I built a tool to speed the process. The tool basically looks like a capitol "I" and is made from the baulisters. I cut the cross pieces to the length of the gap between the baulisters. In this case 4 3/4". All I had to do was measure and level the first board then set the tool between it and the next baulister. It gives you a perfect measurement and level every time. I installed all the baulisters in less than 1/2 an hour.


Now that the deck was done it looked very empty so we had to go get a patio set for it. The one we chose is from the Better Homes and Gardens collection. We got it for about 1/2 it's original price. It's constructed of all wrought and cast aluminum.



At the last minute I decided to change the design a little and add tall posts with lanterns at the top of the stairs. The lanterns are the french wrought iron style.



Installing these was a lot harder than I thought it would be. I had to remove the base from them as it was too wide. I then had to modify the hollow threaded nipple that the base used to attach to by threading the inside of it with a 3/8's tap. I was then able to attach it to the post with a 3/8's lag bolt. I routed a groove on the backside of the post for the wiring and had the intention of covering the back of the post with 1x4 stock to cover the wiring but I've come up with a different idea. It will require that I buy 2 more posts to replace these. I'll rip the posts lengthwise about 3/4" in, route a groove on the inside for the wiring then nail the post back together. this should look much nicer when it's done.

Here's one last shot of the deck taken last evening. I'm hoping to stain and seal it before the 4th.