Our New Old House

I don’t have any exciting dramatic pictures of progress to show off this week, but I did spend some time moving things along in my refinishing workshop. Let’s take a tour!

This room in my basement is where I do all the wood refinishing projects that aren’t stuck to the wall. Currently I’ve got a door propped up on sawhorses soaking in Citri-Strip, a table for heat gunning paint off the trim pieces for the windows, and a table for Citri-Stripping other trim pieces. You can see a door propped up on the right that’s been refinished — I just have to put the hardware back on it and hang it back in its doorway — and a stack of windows from the front bedroom waiting to be reglazed, stripped, and refinished.

Closeup of the trim pieces ready for Citri-stripping:

So that’s my little workshop! Hopefully I’ll have some nice progress pictures for you soon.

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!

My arms were really sore from my yoga class this week so I didn’t so a lot of “up high” work in the front bedroom, though I did heat gun off some more paint from the window frames.  They’re pretty much ready for a coat of Citri-Strip to take off the varnish that’s left.  I cleaned up the room a bit, swept out the window sills, swept the floor, organized my tools, and prepared for the next day’s work.  Every little bit helps, I keep telling myself.

[tags]woodwork, bedroom, windows[/tags]

I forgot to upload these photos yesterday. Here are some more pictures of my windows in the front bedroom as I’m removing them.

One thing I learned is that because I need to break the stops between the sashes to get them out, I need to access them from the side. Luckily, there are access holes to get to the weights and these allow me to access the sides of the stops too.

Here are the weights. Notice the unusual knot used to tie them on. Someone told me this knot was commonly used for window weights. I’ve seen it in two different houses so far.

Here are the window frames after I removed the sashes. It was very weird having gaping holes in the side of my house, so I took a lot of pictures of how that looked before I put the storm windows back on.

And I took a few at night so you could see the room itself and not just the light from outside.

So here’s my nice stack of windows ready to be refurbished.

Mark that task off my list!

[tags]bedroom, windows, photos, woodwork[/tags]

Spring is here, people! That means I get to work on my windows!

My goal for the windows is to take them apart, reglaze them, refinish the wood, and put them back together better than ever.

Here I am with my first window to dismantle.

I took off the front stop and then the lower sash came right out.

The stop between the two sashes was a lot harder to get out. It’s not just nailed onto the frame. It is inserted into the frame about half an inch. I’m going to have to break the stop and then insert a new one when I put it back together.

Once I got that stop out I was able to lower the top sash to take it out too. The top sashes were all terribly painted shut and I spent a good 20 minutes tapping a putty knife into the cracks around the edges to loosen the paint.

Here are the ropes for the weights. Someone must have replaced these sometime in the recent past because they’re in great condition.

Now with the sashes out, there was a giant hole in my house!

Here are the windows waiting to be restored. I need to finish stripping the paint off the frames before I start working on these.

I made sure to label each one so I know where to put them back when they’re done.

I took more pictures but I guess they haven’t ended up on my Flickr account yet. All the windows are out of the front bedroom now, though, and I’m working on stripping the last of the paint off the window frames.

[tags]bedroom, windows, paint, woodwork, photos[/tags]