Another day, another length of trim to strip.

 I sat down and had a hard think about what was going to be next, now that the heavy lifting on the office is done. I settled on the hallway between the office/living room/dining room because it seemed I might have just enough stripper left to do what needed to be done. I'm going to need another bucket for the living room and all that window trim.
I have discovered that I'm getting faster with the stripping. Things that help - Schmear it on with a 4" putty knife, treat it like toxic frosting, pre-cut all your lengths of fancy Dumond paper and stage it ahead of time. I can't recommend that last one enough.

Looking towards the dining room.
The trim on the lower right is tight, so I'm just going to hit it with the sander and call it a day.

View from living room into the office (with stairs to the second floor on the left)
Here's where Big Wally's Plaster Magic had to happen on the ceiling. The plaster was a big flexible.
Other than tuning up the ceiling, there's remarkably little spackle work that needs to be done here.

Big Wally's and Stripping now takes time to set, so I worked on a few more things in between. One is finishing up closet door #1 of 2 in the upstairs hallway. I don't have any good before (or after, yet) photos for door #1, just a hole where it was before I took it off to the basement.

Door #1 (hole) and 2 that need to be finished,

Door #2. This poor door has seen some things.
The hinges are wrong, the latch is wrong, the handle latch isn't functional.

It might be hard to tell from this photo, put I want Door #2 to mimic door #3 - The bedroom door on the far left.

Here's where they cobbed on a piece of wood to get the Victorian era brass latch to catch. The gap that would have been easily spanned by the bar of the thumb latch was too big for this little brass latch.
Here we also see the handset for the thumb catch that is currently doing nothing more than being a handle.

This is what the exterior of the bedroom door looks like. In order to make it work with the orientation/door jambs, they used the thumb latch assembly backwards.

Back over here on the other side of the hall, in the closet, we see that the original hook is still on the inside of the door. I don't know why they didn't just flip it around like the other door.

Oh wait. This is why. The back hardware is gone. Removed, one would assume, so it didn't interfere with the door swing, now that it swings out instead of in. You don't want a door opening into the closet.

More evidence that it used to swing in - there's the old mortises on the inside (to the left).
Looks like they tried to move the lift off hinges, but the screws ripped out of this top set.
Going to have to fix this. The bright brass hinges you can see peaking through from the exterior of the door are not acceptable in a house that has zero bright brass hardware.

So the little closet door is in the basement drying (no action shots there) but tonight it will pobably get remounted.

That left me with the Mantle.
You might recall that a while back Ian and I ripped out the nonsense that was holding back the interior of the mantle. It was filthy and interesting. I had it covered up with a piece of paper for a while, but the tape started to give up and it would blow ever so gently in the breeze every time the heat kicked on.

I tore off the paper and leaned a leftover piece of bead board over the hole.
It wasn't quite big enough to cover the hole.
The cat also like the hot air vent.

This is what's back there. Old coal stove pipe with brick infill.
(cinder block modern furnace chimney behind)

Issue is the pipe protruded. Well. Let's solve that.

Got out my tin snips, collapsed the pipe and stuck a time capsule in there for whoever rips apart the wall in the future. Seemed appropriate.

Cut a piece of 5.5mm plywood to fit. It's not perfect, but.

This will at least keep the cat from stuffing her head in the filthy space, and also keep the heat from coming out of the vent and going right up into the wall.

Next up: Fishing the dang hallway because plastic drop cloths are slippery.