Our New Old House

When we left off last time, our living room and dining room looked like this:

On Saturday, it looked like this!

Actually, that picture is from after I’d cleaned up after the party a bit. But you get the idea.

Friday night Brandon put up the last of the wallpaper border in the dining room.

I’m very pleased with how it came out.

On Saturday morning he put the attic door back on with freshly painted hardware.  (I still have a little more clean-up work to do on that door, but it looked pretty nice having it back up.)

On Saturday night Our New Old House was full of friends and laughter. We finished all the projects on our list in the knick of time and it was a wonderful party.

We’re so grateful for everybody who came and celebrated with us! Our house is so much warmer with friends to share it with.

Here’s where we were on Tuesday night. Party’s on Saturday. Can we do it?

I think we can.

We’ve made some good progress on the dining room. Here’s how the dining room windows looked mid-chemical strip:

And with chemical stripping done, waiting for wood filler to dry so I can sand it.

The rest of the woodwork in the dining room is coming along nicely. I finished stripping one side of this door.

And the rest of the woodwork on the doorways:

Here’s the kitchen doorway mid-chemical strip:

Brandon took off the door so I could get the rest of this doorway stripped. It’s pretty much done now except for some minor clean up of putty between the pieces.

And the kitchen doorway very close to finished:

In the living room we still had a section of wall that needed priming.

So Brandon primed it.

Also, I heat stripped the paint off the window frame and baseboards on that side.

There are still sections of the floor that need to have the carpet padding scraped off so I’ve been finishing that job this week.

Finally, in preparation for the party, I made a batch of cookies. Ok, really this batch was just to motivate myself to keep working. Well, ok it was to bribe myself to keep working. Whatever. Cookies rock.

Last night I painted the whole living room with the same bone white that is in the dining room. I was only able to do one coat, but it’s a huge improvement from the stark white primer. Tonight I’m going to finish scraping the dining room floor (finished the living room floor on Tuesday,) do a couple of touch ups on the wood work, and possibly heat strip the woodwork around the living room front door and front windows. Brandon started putting up the wallpaper border in the dining room last night and we’ll finish that tonight. Then Friday will be for arranging furniture and cleaning up.

Phew! There’s nothing like marathon house fixing!

I have big dreams for my dining room. I love the dining room. It’s one of my favorite rooms in the house and after living in a house for a while that didn’t have a dining room I remembered how much I love them when I saw the spacious one that came with this house. I want the dining room to have a slightly more formal feel than the cozy living room and the retro kitchen. To achieve this, I’ve picked out some classic warm colors (“Bone White” and “Merlot” with gold and bronze accents.) I’ll put a strip of arabesque wallpaper where there once was a chair rail and paint the top portion of the wall Bone White and the bottom portion Merlot.

The room has the original crown molding. Sometime in the 60s or 70s, the previous owners had the room paneled and the ceiling was sprayed with popcorn. Rather than having the crown molding covered and painted or something, they just popcorned right over the crown molding.  Yup, I cringed too.

Here are some “before” pictures of the dining room.  (And that’s not a bed in the middle of the dining room, it’s my piano and dining room table bunched together with an old polyester bedspread draped over them for protection.)

Here’s a closeup of the popcorn-stricken crown molding. You can see on the left I rubbed some off with my hand. I found out that it actually comes off really easily with water.

So I scrubbed…

And scrubbed…

And finally had it clean enough to paint.

I thought about stripping the paint off and restoring the original wood underneath but I already have too many wood stripping projects that are unfinished. I decided to spare myself this one and paint the crown molding with a layered metallic technique the paint guy at Menard’s told me about.

First I put up masking tape, of course.

Dutch Boy has combinations of base colors and metallic glazes. Here are the labels of the two colors I used so if you want, you can duplicate them.

I applied the first coat of the base color. “Keoki Coffee” is a rich chocolate brown. After a couple coats of this I’d go over it with a metallic glaze with little gold flecks in it and the result would be as subtle dark bronze.

It turned out pretty good! Here’s a picture with the masking tape still on:

Check back for Part 2: more prep work!

Hi all,

I haven’t written here in a very long time and I’m so sorry to have left you hangin’. We rushed up on a deadline to have the house appraised last month and so we did TONS of work but I haven’t had time to blog about it until now.  But don’t worry, I took pictures!  I have no idea what order anything happened in now, so I’ll just go room by room and get you up to speed.  Let’s start with the bathroom today.

When last I blogged, the bathroom looked like…  this!

There was still some wallpaper residue on the walls so Brandon scraped it off.

Then he scrubbed the walls to make them ready to prime.

With this latest push to get work done on the house, we’ve had to cut some corners in the short term so we could have it appraised. We haven’t abandoned all our long term plans yet, but in the interest of time and sanity, we had to just give many things a quick going over to make it look clean and finished for the bean counters. Hence, everything got painted white and we had to come up with some quick fixes for some problems with the walls.

For example, in the bathroom we want to put beadboard paneling on the wall below the wood trim that splits the top and the bottom half of the wall. We didn’t have time to do that so my friend Tiff (who’s a GENIUS!) suggested that we put contact paper on the walls as a kind of temporary wallpaper. So that’s what we did.

I guess it’s time for a before and after look, huh?

Before:

…and AFTER:

Oh, I just noticed that the spot under the sink where the pipes go into the wall looks a lot better now in real life than it did in this picture.  This was before we did a little more work to clean it up.

But anyway, that’s the bathroom, getting close to being done!

And here’s a bonus photo of Brandon scraping the hallway wall (coz I don’t know where else to put it.)

[tags] bathroom, wallpaper, ceramic tile, paint, paneling, photos, future plans, flooring [/tags]

Will the wonders of my kitchen ever cease?  Maybe.  I worry I’ll start to miss the disgusting walls and the gag-me-with-a-spoon froo froo trim.    And then I start pulling it down and the act of destruction solidifies my rage over the tragedy that is the decorating job done to this poor old classic house.  Case in point:

Behold! My kitchen. It sucks. But not for much longer. Here you see the stupid trim (as I’ve taken to calling it these days) on the left and the area where I pulled the stupid trim down on the right.

Some fascinating wallpaper choices. Just fascinating.

Is that strange golden grainy stuff on the wood sap that has oozed out of the wood?

Anyway, trim is coming down and a new drywall ceiling will be going up very soon.

[tags]wallpaper, photos, kitchen, ceiling[/tags]