Hellooooo Dining Room!

Hello again everyone!!

Consider this your first peek at the next major project.

With items going back into the kitchen, as well as to goodwill and freecycle, things are starting to disappear around here and we are gaining ground in the house.

Rooms are opening up and the first one to do so was the dining room.

So there you have it. The next big room to be tackled will be the dining room.

That being said there are also some other projects that will be worked on as well such at the powder room and attic so expect a lot of non-dinning room posts as well.

Remember this scene from many, many months back?








Trust me, it got a lot worse…a lot LOT worse…before this post.

With Christmas coming we’ve been excited here around the Folly. This will be the first time in three years we can decorate in the manner we’re use to!

In order to do this a lot of cleaning had to be done. So, we’ve been frantically cleaning the main level of the house and this includes the dining room.

For the first time in history I conceded to start decorating for Christmas the week after Thanksgiving. I was raised that you did not decorate until about two, maybe three, weeks before Christmas day. In fact, the phenomena of decorating immediately after Thanksgiving, or even before that in some cases, is less than 50 years old! I digress though…I’ll ramble on about this in another post.

Moving on… It was decided to start decorating ASAP but before this could be done the cleaning must be done. Honestly, the desire to get it done was dashed by reality on the rocks. I really thought I’d be able to get the lower level clean enough to start decorating in two days, three tops.

It took over a week!!!

Anyway, let’s get back on the subject, I’ll rant about this later.

Here’s the dining room after about four days of sorting, removing and cleaning - but before we cleaned the floor.

You might notice some of the furniture has changed, We moved a few items around with Christmas in mind.

For those of you interested, the settee in the middle of the bay is the gift I gave SWMBO for our 1st Anniversary.

The Singer sewing machine, as well as the notions box on the peddle, belonged to SWMBO’s Great Grandmother. Get this, I’m a HUGE WWI buff and SWMBO’s Great Grandmother used this sewing machine to make uniform shirts for the Doughboys!! My mother-n-law has the actual sewing instructions (somewhere) the Government sent SWMBO’s Great Grandmother and I have an original shirt like the ones she made.

The lamp on the sewing machine was a family heirloom belonging to our friend Bill. It appears to have been made in either the late 10s or early 20s. It is missing one stained-glass pane and needs rewiring though.

Just another view.

In this picture though you can start seeing the little ’problems’ that will need to be looked at in order to prep for restoration.

You can see water spots on the ceiling as well as along the joint where the left side of the bay meets the main wall. The stain stops right at about the beginning of the window top.

You know, there are times I really hate digital cameras!! Look close and you can see the built-up dust on the chandelier crystals and the bulbs.

BTW, the door has what we think is the original stain. Not sure why it looks so splotchy, perhaps it’s the way the shellac aged.

The French doors.

Note how the finish on these doors are different than the other one? We know these doors are not original to the house but were installed some time in the 50s (we think). Originally there were pocket doors here and the hardware to hang them are still inside the walls. I’ll deal more on this later as well.

With the light on you can see more stains on the ceiling.

SWMBO has also just finished cleaning the floor and are still wet. She did something funky to clean it and treat it and it took two days to dry!!

Did you notice the white dresser on the wall to the left? That is the dresser we are considering for the lavatory vanity in the upstairs bathroom. We are wanting to put a buffet/sideboard in this spot so we thought this would be a good way to see if we like this size.

More of the wet floor.

The amount of time it took to dry definitely put a crimp in the cleaning and Christmas prep plans.












Here it is - FINALLY - dry!! I think it’s about 1 A.M. when I snapped this shot.

Okay - now we can get down to the nitty-gritty of looking at some of the ‘issues’. Right now they are nothing major but one never knows what lurks beneath.

This is just one of a dozen places where the wallpaper (installed in the 50s?) is trying to escape the clutches of the walls.


Note that the tear is jagged. This could indicate a crack in the wall or it could just have been caused by something snagging it. I know the answer, but you will have to wait.

Another spot where a piece of the wallpaper came loose and popped off.

If you follow along the top of the mopboard and you will eventually come to a section of paper that has puckered/curled. Most of the spots where the paper is pealing away is along a seam and look like this.

Here we have a large piece of wall paper that sloughed off under it’s own weight (with a little help). Currently it is covered by a piece of furniture.

The plaster finish coat is very gritty/sandy and particles the size of sugar crystals come off if you run your hand against it. If there is no major damage to the wall, and the finish coat is still solidly attached to the base plaster, this can be stabilized. All-n-all this will be an interesting project.

The brownish stuff you see is the old wall paper glue and looks like mold in real life. The finish coat was something along the lines of a fresco. At this point the glue appears to have obliterated whatever wall color, or design, that was originally there. It would be nice to know what the original color in this room was.

The thing hanging above the spot is the bottom edge of one of SWMBO’s tapestries.

Okay now, keep in mind that ALL this work was being done so that we could start decorating for Christmas.

That being said; as you can see…

…we have decorated and are ready for the fat man’s visit!!







Till next time…

Cheers!
Larry ~

New Year - Slow Start

Hello again everyone. Well, as the title says 'New Year - Slow Start'. It has been a while since my last post so I thought I should go ahead and do one.

I have not done a lot of work on the house since Christmas time, well not a lot that you would notice, just busy work. I will share more about this later.

First off, the following pics are for SWMBO. She was NOT happy when I posted the pics of the house with all the junk strewn all over the place. So, here are some updated pics of the same areas, just cleaned up. It's still the same junk, just organized a little better.

The dining room.

I guess I should fess up. SWMBO and I had such a withdrawal with not being able to decorate for Christmas we decided to have some family over for New Years Eve.

Basically, it forced us to 'clean up'.

Here is another view of the dining room.

Through the doorway you can see the door leading to the utility porch.

You can also see one of the tapestries SWMBO owns. It actually came out of the room we stayed in on our wedding night. The pink stuff below that is a sample of our wedding decorations. Her mother found them in her house and brought them over.

The chest of drawers, those are sitting on, is an auction buy that’s in the middle of being restored.

Here is the ugly wood burner that came from West Germany sometime in the 70s. There use to be a very ornate pot-bellied stove here with a twin on the other side of the wall in the dining room.

One of the stoves is now in a museum and the other has been restored and is a person’s new house here in town.

We are planning on ripping this thing out and replacing it with a fireplace.

More on that later.

Just another view of the living room.

Hard to believe we could clean the mess up isn't it.

We can't wait to get rid of the rest of the junk sometime this spring.

A better view of the columnar entrance to the living room.

The foyer.

See the splotches on the walls? The dark patches of cream and the pale green are the original walls. The lighter patches (as well as where the wallpaper is) are areas where the walls were patched for various reasons.

Once again you can see the termite damage on the floor in front of the stairs. There is also some slight dame to the stair runner under the 3rd & 4th steps of the second string.

Here is a view I have not shown in the past (at least I don't think I have).

It is from the first landing looking up to the ceiling over the second one. The whole is where a light fixture will go.

Notice the walls. They are the originals with some patching done in the 50s.

The other picture is from the second landing looking down onto the first.

Here you can clearly see the patching that was done as well as the original fresco coloring of the walls. We do kind of like those colors. Perhaps we will repaint in those colors?!

One last thing. The wall the mirror is on - we have no idea what's keeping it up. From what we can tell, termites have eaten away all the lathing behind the plaster. It was a real trick wiring the light switch you can see.




This last picture is looking straight up to the stairwell ceiling from the first landing. It's almost 20' up. This will be fun to paint or do something with.

Not much happened....

Well, not a whole lot happened this weekend in the way of the house.

I started feeling a little like I was getting sick Thursday and Friday started with a bad soar throat and congested, stuffy, head. So I spent the Friday taking drugs and taking it easy so we could hit it hard Saturday and Sunday.

Well, Saturday came around and SWMBO and I just didn't want to work on the house - it was way to nice outside to stay indoors!!!!

So we went to a friends house who was having an open house at their furniture restoration shop/showroom. After this we walked next door to SWMBO's parent's house (the friend that does the furniture has lived next door to Annette's parents for over 30 years) to see the work that had been done on their basement. We then went home and decided we SHOULD work on the kitchen. Well, as soon as we got home I laid down and crashed. Guess I wasn't as well as I thought I was.

Anyway, after a couple hours napping we decided it was STILL too nice to work inside and ended up working in the yard and having a bon-fire.

We ended up having our best friends over, as well as the wife's kid brother and his wife. Along with all of these were there kids and my brother's youngest daughter.

So, Saturday wasn't a complete waste. We got to rest a bit, do some much-needed brush burning and enjoyed time with family and friends.

Sunday we decided to actually do some work on the kitchen, yet it was still so nice outside!

Well, guess what - nothing much happened in the way of work on the kitchen but the entire day was not lost!!!

As some of you know - I LOVE JUNK!!! SWMBO calls me a pack rat, I call my self a 'collector of the trans-mundane'.

Anyway, I offered to take the wife's car to have it washed and on the way I found a pair of chairs thrown out by the side of the road. I drove by several times and 'looked' at them, but that was about it. On the last 'drive by lurk' I saw an older couple out in the yard that was next to the curb the chairs were on. So I stopped.

I asked if they were getting rid of the chairs and they said "that's why they are out there', so I brought them home.

Here they are!

At first I thought they were going to be some of those cheep ones you can buy at big-box furniture stores, but these have turned out to be very nice, solid wood and heavy. These are not cheap chairs!

Now the cushions have been replaced at some point and really don't look good. I plan to restore these puppies and put better seats on them.

Once they’re done we might keep them or sale them.

What was so interesting about these were not the things list above but the fact that they were more of a 'sign'. I have been kicking around for ideas of starting a sideline business I can do out of the house. My wife, as well as the furniture restoration friend of ours, have pointed out numerous times that I have a 'knack' of finding quality furniture pieces. Bill, the furniture guy, has been trying to get me more into furniture restoration to compliment this 'knack' of mine (unfortunately - the furniture I find is usually the wrong style for us but the right style for others). Anyway, after visiting Bill, and his wife's, furniture restoration shop on Saturday Annette and I once again talked about getting into furniture restoration and selling.

Well, finding those chairs on the side of the road was as much of a sign as I need to give it a shot!! It doesn’t take a brick hitting me between the eyes to give me a clue. I will post pictures of these once they are underway and completed.

We did get one other project done inside the house we have wanted to do since we bought the place.

Remember this picture? You can see a mirror and a file cabinet under it (as well as all the junk around it).

Believe it or not, there IS a window behind those!! The file cabinet is actually hiding a an air conditioner window unit that was installed sometime in the late 60s or early 70s.

We decided to get rid of it.

It was not as easy as it sounds. The previous owners put that thing in to stay. It took aver three hours just to get it out.

Then it took the wife and I about two extra hours to clean the 35+ years worth of dirt, grime, cobwebs, dead bugs and spiders cleaned out of the windows. The dirt and dust was so bad you could not really even look out the window. The glass was like a permanent, double layer, of shear curtains!!!!

Can you believe this is the same window?!?!

We were amazed at just how much light come into this room now and how much bigger it looks!!

The light is so bright now it was hard to get the picture.


So, Sunday was not a complete waste!

Don't Mind the Mess

Recently, a cyber friend, from Missouri, and I found out we have something in common. We both have houses that are virtually identical. So, through several e-mails we have been comparing the two homes.

Two of the main differences between the two homes are architectural features that his house has and we want on ours. The bay windows in his house extend all the way up into the second story and his wrap-around porch has an ornate pediment over the front entrance.

Anyway, I snapped a few pics to send to him. They are of rooms on the ground floor. Sorry about the quality, I'm using my phone camera. As soon as I can I will get better pics and post those.




This is our front door. Nothing too special about it.

However, I am really dreading the work that needs to be done on this room.

First off, the part of the floor, right in front of the stairs, has been eaten away by termites. It is just as bad as the damage in the back door.

The termites also ate the woodwork that the right hand window sets on. Not sure how that will be fixed.

Also, notice the big patch of white plaster on the wall where the stairway starts? That is not original. We do not know when the work was done, but a gent in town believes the plaster was put there in the 50s. He was in high school at the time and helped hang the wall paper and he remembers it.

Anyway, it is there to replace the original plaster that was destroyed when termites ate away the lathe that holds the plaster. We do know the wall will probably have to be replaced. As you can see, most of the wallpaper has been removed.

Now you can see the north side of the foyer where the stairs go up to the second floor.

See the wallpaper that's still on the wall?

For some reason we can not get it to come off so we are thinking that there might be some plaster damage behind it also.

If you look right up at the top of the stairs you can barely see the bottom of the mid-landing window. We are hoping to put a stained-glass element there.

While your looking; keep the triangular part of the wall, which the stairs are on top of, in mind when you look at the following picture.

Okay, let's get the triangular wall taken care of first.

Remember the problem with the termites eating the lathe?

Same problem here.

We try not to use the plug-in receptacle you can see because when we unplug something that part of the wall wants to come out also.

The picture also shows the first of three landings in the stairwell. It isn't noticeable in this picture, but the window is made up of leaded, diamond panes.

You can also see more of the termite damage on the floor.

This picture also shows how the walls were originally painted. The bottom half of the wall is a greenish color while the top is a parchment color. We were fortunate in being able to remove all the wallpaper out of the stairwell with no problems.

In this picture you can see one of three matching chandeliers.

This one is the smallest of the bunch.

The double sconces in the stairwell, as those in the kitchen, match these.

You can also see what's left of the wallpaper that was applied to the ceiling. Originally it was painted to match the walls.

A little word about the original paint application. It is a fresco style, i.e. the paint was applied while the paint was still somewhat wet. This allowed the paint to absorb into the plaster. This is also the same type of technique the Ancient Romans used in their homes.

This is the last major pic of the foyer.

It shows the coat closet as well as the detail of the wallpaper.

Okay, now keep in mind that we are in the middle of renovating this place so PLEASE don't mind the mess!!!

This pic is looking into the living room from the foyer.

Here you can see the right hand column and base.

You can also see one of the other chandeliers.

Here is the left column.

Living room bay and more crap.

We have decided that most of this stuff is going 'bye-bye'.

In fact, most of what you are seeing is already boxed up for a garage sale!!

Here is the doorway that leads into the dinning room from the living room.

You can't see them, but there are French doors attached, there just opened into the dinning room.




This doorway actually had pocket doors.

Not sure why they were removed, but all the hardware is still in the walls.

We think they were removed in order to make room for the central heating.

You can also see part of the chandelier close-up.

This is the last shot I will bore you with tonight (I think - LOL).

The windows match the one above the first landing in the stairwell.

You can also see the third chandelier as well as one of Annette's tapestries.

'SWMBO' collects antique tapestries and we are planing on using those to decorate this room once finished. Un-seen in the pic, but on the wall to the left, hangs her largest tapestry. It is about 3'x5' and comes from Belgium. That one, plus a large, gilded Edwardian mirror is to be the focal points for this room.

Do you see how grey the floor looks? Even with protective plastic covering the doorways the dust is everywhere - especially the floors!!

Kitchen Details

Following are several shoots of various details in the kitchen.

This is part of the 'egg-n-dart' crown molding that can be found above every-single-window-and-door of the house.

At first we thought that the kitchen only had this above the door leading into the foyer. However, once we started striping the wood work we found the evidence that shows it was above all the doors and windows in the kitchen as well. Unfortunately we have not found the extra pieces.

The pic here is the paint in the process of bubbling up from the chemical stripper.

Progress is being made with the stripper.

Now all we need to do is finish it off with a dental pick and it will be ready for staining.

What is frustrating is that we can not find this exact pattern. We find molding that is close, but not quite. So now we need to decide on whether or not to replace the molding with something similar or just not put any of it up except for the piece we have.

This is one of the pair of brass wall sconces. We have no idea when they were installed, but they match all the chandeliers in the rest of the house. From what we have been told, they were installed in the 50s.

We are kind of torn between these a original lighting. Everyone loves these lights and the matching chandeliers; and for most these are the only lights they remember in the house. You should see them at night from the street!!

On the other hand we would like to replace the light fixtures with the type we know where in the house when it was built - the dual gas / electric kind.

What to do, what to do......

They are stunning when turned on at night.

This is one of a pair of blown glass lights from the 20s, or 30s, we got for $25 dollars at a yard sale.

They don't go with the house either but are better than what WAS up there. The light in the eating area had been a lantern type light that looked like it came off a covered wagon (the kind that was popular in the 50s). The one that was in the prep area was the typical, ceiling hugging 'cake' type fixture. What was most bizarre about the two were not only their dissimilarities but the fact that they were only about 10' from each other.

Again, we are not sure what we will do with them; everyone seems to love them.

Another view.

Here is the right hand end cap of one of the original cupboards that had been in the kitchen when it was built.

The shear size indicates that it might have been located along the wall that the sconces are on now.

Close up of the top.

One of the first things people ask when they visit is "where is all the stuff that was in the kitchen?".

Well, the simple answer is "just about everywhere"!

So here are a couple pics that are rather embarrassing. Both are of all the junk from the kitchen that we have tossed in the dinning room.

Another wonderful view of our 'junk'.

They wife will probably kill me for posting these!! LOL