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.

Breakfast room paint

Not a whole lot accomplished yesterday. I painted the breakfast room walls. It was hell painting them too. It only took about 10 minutes to go over them with the large roller I have but the grooves in the beadboard weren't getting paint. I was using the coarse roller too. I got my paint sprayer but it broke when I tried to install the nozzle, I guess a little bit of paint was left in the nozzle which didn't allow the plunger to move against the spring causing it to break. So I was forced to paint the entire job by hand... with a 2" brush. I had to dip the brush then paint along a groove only going about 1 1/2' before having to dip the brush again.

I finally finished the walls around 1am. And of course now that I see the walls with paint on them I can tell that the larger cracks are going to need to be filled with wood putty. It shouldn't be too big of a deal to paint over those areas once it's done though.





I still need to add 1/4 round to the corners that I took it out of, install the baseboard below the corner cabinet, put the door frame back up in the entryway to the kitchen, then paint all of the trim.

The colors for anyone that's interested are from Valspar. The walls are Homestead Resort Tea Room Yellow and the trim will be Bellegrove Antique White. Both are Historic Trust approved colors.

The only other thing I accomplished was to finish installing the Breakfast Room vent. I'm sure that will come in handy today as the high is supposed to be 91.

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.

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).