Things you find in the walls.

There's no good way to explain how Saturday morning went without pictures.
I'm well into working on the back (and last!) bedroom upstairs. I was confronted with this weird built-in bookshelf/basin? Thing. And I didn't really want it to be there any more. The doorway was narrow, and I felt like it just didn't belong.
On with my trusty dust mask, and ready the tools of demolition!

It's just... not pretty. And full of nooks and crannies if I wanted to repaint it.
What a potential pain in the butt.

See? It jut doesn't look right. All those panels when the rest of the room is dry-walled.

Mystery though - Why does the lid lift off?

Why are there holes? And Slots?

It was put in *over* the door trim, so it must be a later addition.

And the trim has been scabbed in (badly.)

Enough. Time for it to come out.

Removed the scabbed in piece of baseboard trim - what have we here?
More trim disappearing back into the darkness? And more trim after a gap?

What on earth is going on here?

After carefully having removed the shelves, the baseboard trim, one horizontal plank and two vertical plank, I'm getting a better picture... of the chimney.

But let's talk about the metal clad box for a moment!
Ever so carefully nestled in the fake wall.

It's only metal on 3 sides! THe back isn't metal at all!

Also, freestanding on it's jenky little base. The metal box wasn't attached to the base.
And the base wasn't attached to the floor. The only thing holding this all in there was the sheathing.
And a lot of caulk.

Ohh! Holes!
For what, I have no idea.

One of them even lined up with the "drain" hole in the box.

Oh! A secret space behind the chimney!
There were no secret treasures in the space behind the chimney. Not even a news paper.
Just a rusty paper clip.

This... Thing... was put together with a variety of left over materials, in such a way that
I wondered it this was some kid's woodshop project.

Revealed! Look! A Chimney that once was finished!

The only little clue left behind was this tiny scrap of mangled copper that had come to rest in one of the floor holes.

Chimney finish - it had a coat of at least bleu and then light green pain on it before it was boxed in.

This floor probably hadn't seen sunlight in a very, very long time.

Cleaned up holes. Evidence of moisture with the finish shot, and fittings wearing around the edges of the holes.

The bottom of the almost-metal clad box - pencil measurements? Not sure what for.

This was another case of getting kind of excited for treasure and coming up empty. But the room looks more open already. I'm trying to decide what to do with the chimney - take it down, leave it? (Taking it down would be expensive, but give about 4 more square feet to a small room.) If I leave it, do I re-plaster it, or expose the brick?
So many decisions.

While thinking about that, I scrubbed, taped, and started spackling the rest of the room.

The whole room needs to be skimmed. This was just the first pass.

This room is coming along pretty quickly though. I'm getting better at this (or I've given up trying to be a perfectionist about it.) There's a lot of fiberglass tape and there's going to be a ton of drywall compound in this room to fix where the insulation guys blew out some walls. I wandered around with my screwgun and a box of 3" drywall screws and shored up anything that looked saggy.

One other neat detail of this room is that the top moulding where the walls meat the ceiling is picture rail moulding. At some point, someone didn't like the look of it and stuffed the gap full of rope caulk and painted over it. I have been carefully scraping it back out.

Profile of the picture rail moulding.
It's all muddied up here because of the paint, but it's actually quite a graceful moulding.

A rail hook. There's 2 or 3 of them kicking around the house.

The hook would go over the top round bit, and the weight of the picture
pulling down on the hook would keep everything in place.

The little pressed hooks have pretty little details too, under the paint.
It will be nice to get these cleaned up and be able to use them again.

So there you have it. I did some yardwork too - cut down the Rose of Sharon in the front yard and plotted out where I'm going to put the blueberry bushes. Picked up branches and kind of tidied up.
My goal is to get the back bedroom to a place closer to done by the weekend.

Photo dump

Lots of little things going on, and it's easier to explain in pictures.

Got some air grills water-jet cut at the shop I have access to.
Sandblasted them and hit them with a coat of matte black spray paint.
They look great, can't wait to get them on the wall to cover up the hole in the small room at the top of the stairs, affectionately called the "Harry Potter Room".

Sometimes it's the little things.
Looks sharp.

Have a new hive of bees on order, as well as 6 blueberry bushes, 3 cranberry bushes, and a Redbud tree.

The oddity in the back bedroom. Maybe one of you knows what the heck this is.
it's behind the bedroom door.

The top comes off, but you can see where it was nailed shut at one time.

It was installed after the room was finished, because it goes over the trim.

There's pipe holes in the cover of the bottom "shelf" but nothing through the upper shelves.

The is the view into the chamber. One hole in the bottom. Here's one weird cut-out in the back board.
There's an inverted one in the board right above, to the right,
From here we see that the box is actually clad in metal.

The inverted cutout. It's hard to tell, but past that upside-down U is a small space behind the chimney.
The bright white part behind the boards to the left is the chimney.

Here it is from the side. The only part that's clad in metal sheeting is the second big section down.
The top board is wood, then the metal box, then more wood below it.

This was thrown up pretty hastily, with little care about matching trim or anything. The outlet is in wallboard, the rest of the wall to the corner is panel board. Frankly, I'm tempted to tear the whole thing out and expose the chimney - it would let the door swing open wider, and give back a tiny bit of floor space. But I have no idea what's going on behind the paneling. I would have to explore.

Emptied out the back bedroom into the master so I can start working on this room.
The new drywall and spackle lines are from where the insulation guys blew out the wall.
This room is going to take a lot of spackle.

At one point, all of the trim had a slight gap above it so that hooks could be secured over it,
and pictures hung rather than putting nails in the wall.
It was all very civilized. There's still some of the hooks in the house. But someone, at some point, decided they didn't like the look, so they filled in the gap with rope calk and other various caulks, ran some scotch tape over it in some places, and called it good.
Now I'm painstakingly picking back *out* all the caulk (at least just this end of the room.)

So that's my excitement for now. Hopefully this week, we'll see the doors go back on the Master bedroom.

Another room, so close to done

This weekend saw the push to really get the master bedroom painted and done. I got there, all but for some window caulk and getting the doors back up.
I had already put up 2 coats of ceiling paint, but it really needed a 3rd. So I got that done, and then put up two coats of "Van Cortland Blue", and "Super White" trim.
I also discovered the joy of Frogtape for delicate surfaces. I used to be really good at edging, but that hand steadiness has diminished, and I was tired. Now I tape for straight lines. Of course, taping for straight lines means that there actually are straight planes to begin with.
I thought this room would be "easy". There's a lot of weird angles and awkward spaces to try to get. The ceiling is just a hair too high for me to get to, so I was perched on a bucket for part of it, and on my knees the rest of the time. I ache today, let me tell you.
Even with all the spackling, the last bedroom of blown-out walls is bound to be more easy, just because it has straight walls.

Before. The whole room was an slightly tan off-white.

After! I even got the light fixture back up.
I'm going to swap out the outlets for white ones with white plates to match.

I started stripping the doors for this room (main door and closet) and found this perfect little repair.
I am not the first person to re-purpose these doors. Reduce, reuse, recycle!

Oiled, you can see it a little better there were pencil marks on this door too, but nothing legible.

Oiled closet door on the left, un-oiled bedroom door on the right.
I've been treating them with 1/2 linseed oil, 1/2 turpentine. The wood is alarmingly dry.

At some point this week, I'll put on the respirator and give the main door two sides of oil primer. The closet is only going to get one side of primer, and a clear coat on the other. Here's why:

Now there's a pinterest-worthy door.

It's actually much prettier in person. This green over/green over/brown surface is what happened when I sanded off the top layer of white latex paint. It's the inside of the closet, so for the most part it won't be seen. It's a lovely little nod to the history of the place.

I also got the kitchen faucet fixed! For real and for true this time! It only took a whole new fixture to do it.

Old, dead faucet, with a box on the handle to remind me not to try to use the water.

New faucet! Much higher quality. Gives me hot water when I ask,
and the faucet head actually swings the way it should!

One thing down.
The tile is still spitting out grout, but I can't figure out what tile is loose. Or maybe it was just a badly mixed patch of grout? Not sure.
Tonight! Fun with sand blasting!
This week! Painting doors!
Look forward to the next installment!

More things you thought were done but aren't.

On top of still fighting with Moen (I'm getting a new faucet, but need to contact them to pay for the shipping,) the new grout right in front of the door is starting to flake out (in a new section) and the patch to the shed door is blowing out.
Not just a little bit, but a lot-of-bit.

Sigh.

The patching material I used was rated for outdoor applications, so It might just be that this is on the north side and stays wet all the time.
This summer I have to figure out how I'm going to solve for this. Might be a metal kick plate across the entire bottom to just cover it up, and rain diverters above the door to keep it drier.

Simple Things

I tried to knock out a bunch of little projects this weekend. you know, the little things that pile up, and then you have a pile of stuff just staring at you?
I got tired of staring back.
I got the Welcome Cow hung up on the porch again. I got a new curtain and curtain rod for the porch too, and got it hung up (What is UP with the crappy screws included with things lately? Nearly stripped those screw heads too - they had oddly small Phillip's holes for such a large screw head.)
I got more coats of shallac on the second half of the porch coat rack. I placed the baseboard molding in the mudroom, but decided against mailing it down until the wall is built out. I cleaned, and tidied and put stuff away that had migrated to places it didn't belong.
Then I decided to replace the closet handle in the bedroom upstairs. Should have taken 5 minutes.

(It is here that the uncomfortable background music would begin to swell is my life were a movie.)

Here we see the unsuspecting heart-ended country-kitchy modern handle.
Other than the fact that it's black, it doesn't match the style of the rest of the
(painstakingly cleaned) hardware.

I looked and looked, and found this handle at a reasonable price.
(I found a lot of other Fabulous handles too, but I have to choose where to spend my $'s)

But lo!
The old handle screws in from the front!

And behold!
New cabinet hardware bolts through from behind!
And has funny little protrusions that have to nestle into the wood.

That's ok, we'll just drill through... crap.
Right into the cross piece that holds the door together.
Which make it too deep for the bolts.

It's time for tools.
Tools will make this better.

1/2 Spade bit to the rescue. It's not pretty, but I bored a hole through the cross piece
to the front board so the bolt would reach. 

Well, it worked.

New handle! Only took me about an hour.
But the form is much better.

All of the other board closet doors will be getting a similar treatment as I go. All the room doors have Blake #1 Norfolk thump latches. Some doors have been a bit cobbled, and I have to find some replacement parts. I also rehung it's main door, which was an exercise of how barrel hinges are handed, and you should really only remove/clean one door worth of hardware at a time, but I got it done.

I find it really funny that they hung the door this way, with the actual handle on the inside, and the bar side in the hallway.
All kinds of mortises were cut into the frame, so while the complete-est in me wants everything to be nice and matchy-matchy, I left it alone.

Handle on the inside. *shrug*.
Quirky.

This room is 95% done, (just needs curtain rods/curtains, and for me to finish the hole grill).

That was Saturday.
Sunday.
Sunday I tried to address the kitchen faucet. I had called them and let them know that it was grinding, and when it was tightened down the faucet head wouldn't swing. They told me it probably needed a new bearing and cartridge, which they sent to me.
I will spare you the gory, lengthy details, but the end result is today I have no water to my kitchen sink and a very strongly worded email out to Moen. If this doesn't get resolved, (quickly), I want my $ back and I need to get a new faucet.

Bearing wouldn't seat without extreme effort, now the whole thing leaks like a fire hose.

Got it back together, but the water's off. Box is impaled on it to remind me not to try to use it.

I also got paint for the master bedroom. I've decided to go with Van Cortland Blue (this is not my house, but here's an example of someone putting it on the walls.)
Still SuperWhite for the trim, and regular old while ceiling paint.
Photos to come!