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.

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!

• CitriStrip
• Mineral Spirits
• Fabric Softener
• Laundry Detergent
• Bleach
• Rustoleum spray paint
• Tea tree oil & lavender
• Nachos

It’s been a busy weekend in Our New Old House. We set ourselves a deadline of Dec. 19 to have the living room and dining room done - or at least done enough to host a big holiday party. That meant we have to get the following list of things done:

• Strip paint off woodwork
• Finish scraping up crustified carpet padding
• Paint the walls
• Rearrange the cables and electronics in the bookcase
• Paint the cold air return grate
• Make everything tidy and pretty

I think we’re on track to make all of those things happen. Dining room is painted. Today Brandon primed the last bit of the living room that needed it. I spray painted the grate. Woodwork is done except for a couple of troublesome spots with stubborn paint. Sections of carpet padding in the dining room are soaking, to be scraped tomorrow after work.  I bought the supplies I’ll need to stain parts of the woodwork and polyurethane it, but I think those final steps will have to wait until after the party. For now, the woodwork looks lovely just stripped of paint. It’s got a nice rich color and a smooth finish so that’s good enough for now.

It’s time for me to take a shower and get to bed. I’m exhausted, but I can’t wait to show off our progress. I’ll have some pictures soon of our living room and dining room, as well as a little treasure Brandon found behind one of the built-in bookcases.

Remember this?

And this?

Yeah, those are memories I’d like to forget.

Anyway, I don’t know if I ever told you the story of how we put the feet and the tub back together. After having several friends, including a mechanical engineer and some other house fixers, look at the detached feet and the bottom of the tub and express dismay that there seemed now way to hold them all together except by gravity and prayer, we just decided to put things back the way we found them and hope it lasted another 100 years.

So we had a couple of strong friends assist Brandon in lifting the tub while I scrambled underneath placing the feet one by one and shouting instructions from under the tub as they lowered one corner at a time onto the feet I was balancing. It was harrowing, but we did it successfully and the tub has been resting comfortably on the feet ever since.

Well, except one. There’s one foot that I’m SURE is slipping. It makes me nervous every day. I sit on the toilet looking at that foot and I just know it’s moved another millimeter while I was sleeping. I know it! That stupid sneaky foot. And then I give it a look and shake my fist at it. Like this:

Anyway, I’ve been looking around online for solutions that might work better than bubblegum, plumbers putty, and upside down welding. (All suggestions offered to me by well-meaning but ultimately cracked individuals.) Today I found this and I think it’s the right answer!

Sadly, the picture’s not great, but this makes perfect sense! The feet have bolts attached so they can screw into SOMETHING but there’s nothing to screw them onto on the bottom of the tub. Okay, you need more pictures.

If the feet were screwed into a brace that would hold them all together and the tub rested on the brace and the feet, then that would be super stable and I could sleep a whole night through not worrying about one of the cats getting squashed under the toppling tub!

I doubt such a thing is available ready made, though I’m planning to check out American Plumbing, the awesome store I went to for my previous plumbing conundrums. I might have to have someone fabricate what I need from metal straps. The search begins.

Pictures!

Oh yeah, and I accidentally touched the metal tip of the heat gun to my arm as I was reaching for the paint chip bucket. I burned my arm, but it will be fine.

More to come! Come back soon!

Yes, Kelli. NOW it is time to paint.

“Woo hoo!!”  *Kelli does a little happy dance*

I started with the Merlot paint for the bottom section of the room.

Ooh, this paint is thick!

First coat looks more like Kool-Aid than Merlot, but I’m gonna go with it.

I did the very first coat with a brush because the wall is so uneven and has so many imperfections. I wanted to make sure to get paint in all the little nooks and crannies before I started going over it with a roller.

I cut the corners in with the brush one more time so I could use the roller next and not get too close to the edges. With this second coat the color’s starting to come through nice and rich.

After the first pass with the roller. You can see that I’ve cut the corners in with the Bone White above too.

With the first coat of Merlot drying below, I tackled the first coat of Bone White. I left a little undone for this pic so you can see the contrast between the paint color and the primer.

Also, a quite note about the woodwork: I intend to strip all the woodwork to expose the original wood, but since that’s time consuming and I needed a project that would show me fast results, I just stripped the outer edges where I’d have to put masking tape. I did a couple of extra spots to expose the wood and show what it would look like later, so you can see the top corner of this window is done and the top corner of the attic door is also done. I’ll do the rest after I’m done painting.

Check back soon for Part 4 in which… I’m still painting. Guess which color.

Check back soon for Part 3 where there will be actual paint!

I’m not really expecting any better answer than “Nope, that’s what you gotta do,” but if I’m wrong and there’s a faster/easier/less painful on my knuckles (from scraping against the wall repeatedly) way to do this, I’d love to hear it.

And don’t say “Have your husband do it!”

To sweeten the deal, here’s some pictures:

I used the heat gun to strip the paint off the top of the baseboards first. Between the baseboard and the plaster wall is caulk. It’s brittle and breaks pretty easily when I chop it with the scraping tool.

Like so…

Sound effect for this picture: “chop.”

Also, just to remind myself that I’m still a girl, I painted my toenails. See? Yeah, I spent the whole afternoon chopping at caulk, barefoot with pretty red toenails. It’s the little things that keep me going.

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!