So long painted wood!

Hey Friends! I made a "How To" blog post! 

One of the first things I noticed in the house, which turned into a list containing at least one million "oh that's not right" or "that needs to be changed" things, was I could see brush strokes on the paneling in the dinning room. The wood just looked sort of gross. To glossy, dinghy and dark.  The picture below, you can see to the upper left some of the brush strokes. 

Instead of plain paint or shockingly much more expensive wallpaper, I'm going old school and using fabric to line the paneled walls that are not wood. I'll have another post up soon with all the choices so you can help vote for which is the best. So now that the wood is actually much lighter, this changes the game a little for which fabric we like.  

But for now.... I figured I would show you guys a quick little demo of how easy it is to remove paint from wood, with out using harsh chemicals! I always cringe and usually blurt out something along the lines at resale shops, "yuckkkk! That would have been an awesome dresser, that could have made them more money if they didn't paint it!" If you have a nice piece of furniture but it's beat up, DO NOT PAINT IT! Please. In a weekend or less you can refinish it back into the beautiful piece of art it originally was. 

But some times we fall in love with a piece that is some ghastly purple color, buy it for ten bucks and add it to the grave yard of other, "I'll get to it" projects. Not, that I speak from experience of anything....

What You Need.

- A Heat Gun

 - A Putty Knife

You can find these near the paint or drywall 

department. Don't get too wide of one, three inches 

max. Also buy the one step up from cheapest, you'll 

drive yourself a little crazy using too thin and flimsy

 of a knife. Remember to keep it clean and free of 

bends and dents

 - Something to lay your heat gun on and tools

The heat gun stays hot for quite sometime,

 so make sure you don't leave it laying around 

on something that could catch on fire. Also,

 your other tools likely will have sticky hot 

paint on them.

 - A Mask that blocks out vapors and odors. 

Spend the $6.00 for the one mask, don't be cheap

 and get the five pack of"dust masks" for a buck. 

  -  Wire brushes 

 I like brass for cleaning out the

 grain and nylon as a cleanup

 after cooled brush.

I have a big ol' respirator to use as my mask. 

If you do a lot of projects, it's worth the 30-60 bucks

 to not constantly be buying new masks. 

Please don't burn you're house down! Be aware of everything you do! 

Lay down a crappy towel or newspapers below your work space, the paint is gooey when hot. Turn on your heat gun, not a blow dryer, to medium, maybe high, don't be antsy, start low and move up in heat, you don't want to burn your wood. At first it takes a little while to warm up the paint, but once you see it start to bubble you're ready to go! ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS scrape with the grain! Did you get that? Always scrape, scrub, brush, wax, oil, whatever with the grain of the wood. If you don't do this, just give up and pay someone to do projects for you.  You need very little pressure to scrape the paint off. Once you get through to the wood it is really easy to get the feel of how hard you scrape. Then go to town, scraping along the grain!  I like to use a wire brush to help get the gunk out of the grain, I use a brass wire brush gently and once the wood has cooled I use a nylon brush to dust off any left over paint globs. 

And, Now! The time lapse uncovering of the beautiful 

quarter sawn white oak that lines our dinning room walls.

Once I have the wood all clear of paint, I might go back through with super fine steel wool and a chemical remover. But I don't think I will need to do that here unless there are a few nasty spots that are being fussy.  Then I will move on to the next steps of cleaning, feeding and finishing the wood! 

Enjoy and be Careful! 

The Kitchen, Part Two

Welcome back friends!

So, along with fun discoveries of wallpaper we found a few other surprises.

I found this looking for more pictures, this was part of the wallpaper finds, this was behind the cute teapot style paper. So cute!

Part of our discovery that the ceilings had been dropped came with a mighty big surprise.

The mudroom, the room that is immediately left after you enter the house from the side door, also our laundry room, which then merges with the actual kitchen. The mudroom's ceiling was not as fast or easy to pull down as the kitchen. Right above it is the remodeled handicap assessable bathroom, the largest bathroom in the house. When who ever remodeled it, they thought it was just fine to shove all the debris from it under the floor, on top of the ceiling for the mudroom. 

Just some of what fell out of the ceiling as we ripped it down. I will forever love the memory of Rick and I teetering on our ladders, crow bars in tow, when suddenly I hear a huge crack and whoosh. The whole room instantly became a murky grey, I couldn't even see my hand in front of me. I stood on my ladder yelling, "HOLY SHIT! HOLY SHIT! Rick are you okay?!" "Yeah, are you?" "Yeah! That was nuts!" By now the dust began to settle and Rick and I were able to see each other, maybe eight feet away from each other on our ladders. It was hard to tell each others reactions because we were geared up and prepared for the worst. Rick had explained he managed to get a full sheet of dry wall to come off at one time, so about 24 square feet of junk came crashing down at once. "I think we need to take a break outside" Rick said, I couldn't have agreed more, or laugh in disbelief more. 

Luckily we were prepared. We had peeked into the ceiling before we pulled it down. "It's totally full of shit!" I remember Rick shouting to me with his head stuck in the two foot gap. He popped his head out with a copper pipe and part of a tile in his hand. We knew we were going to be rained on by broken tiles. Silly as we look wearing our motorcycle helmets in the house, it was a good thing we did. 

Of all that fell out of the ceiling, I collected some of the things I found interesting.

I didn't find Henry up there, I'm sure he would have had a blast exploring up there before we pulled it down. There's a few more wall paper samples too.

I had mentioned earlier we discovered the missing servant staircase. They had removed it and turned the top two stairs into a closet upstairs. Once the ceiling was gone we found ourselves in the closet! 

Evil Kneivle Helga, checking out how far she can explore. 

You can also see towards the top right, the old bell used to call the servants. We had also found a little button in the floor of the dinning room, where the head of the table sat, where they could tap it with their foot to call help into the room. What a hard life. ha. 

Another neat discovery was finding this little nook.

This nook has not only left Suzy curious, but us and some neighbors as well. It's a little tall to be a seat. It certainly isn't an icebox. This room was used for when you came inside off of the carriage. The floors are oak, so more than just the help would use this room. I'm rather certain that sadly someone may have really gutted this room. I bet there were nice built in cabinets/ pantry across from this spot. This, like the servant staircase, has gone through many different stages of what we want to do with it. It will be covered up with cabinets, but hopefully if we have the time, I want to strip the paint off the windows and replace the board that acts like a counter to match the rest of the oak in the house and make our own secret nook there. 

Eventually the whole kitchen was gutted. At this point, you don't get to just slap up dry wall and start building a kitchen. Remodeling a kitchen especially a really old house kitchen requires tons of work that no one will ever see, perfectly, strategically hidden behind the walls. We had one of four, maybe five, now that I think about it, circuit/fuse boxes in the kitchen. We moved that a whopping ten feet down into the basement were the other boxes are. Again, not as easy as it sounds. We had to remove 100's of feet of wires and pipes. Years of out of date, unused, used, exposed, ready to start a fire wires, old gas pipes, pipes for radiators, plus an outrageous amount of strange configurations of pipes put in more recently to add more bathrooms on the second floor. Also, while we had everything open, we updated as many wires and pipes as we could that ran through the walls to different rooms. 

This is what the mudroom looks like right now. Well we pulled up the HVAC tubes again to get some heat upstairs. This is another task we have to deal with. We need to update, and redirect and conceal the feeder tubes for the second floor HVAC. They go right up the middle of the master bathroom. This has bit a bit of a nightmare planning how to redirect them.

Mudroom as of lately. You can see the side back door we use. Now that I look at this, I realized Rick and I had made plans to open up the door/wall more.  Ah, just another thing to add to the to-do list.

We also gutted the side hallway. This is our side door we use most it's next to the driveway. Here was the first place we discovered the ceilings had been lowered. Gutting the wall also gave us full access to the library's pocket door hardware, giving us a chance to tune it up before it's hidden away for another hundred years. 

I'm pretty sure Rick's ipad has more pictures of the kitchen while we lived in it over the year, and all the different times we rearranged our card tables and other makeshift tables. For now, this is the best picture I have of what we came to accept as our kitchen for months. Rick worked at the electric and plumbing, I had spent more time outside working in the yard than inside the house, and then we couldn't move any further because the next step was the expensive step that we needed to save up a big chunk of money for. Plus, everything in the household came to a screeching holt for a little while when I suddenly got a job, that threw me into working 50-70 hour work weeks. 

Lookin' real stoked. Ha!

Here are a few pictures I took about a month ago. I decided to quit worrying about showing the world the mess we live in. We're not perfect people, I doubt we will ever have an always amazing sparkling perfect clean house. Hell, it takes days to dust the entire place. So, sorry for the mess, we did the best we could as our entire first floor has been turned upside down and wildly shaken like a squeaky toy meeting it's final squeaks in the jaws of Cosmo.

Looking East, towards the doorway into the dinning room.

Looking West. Basement door to the left, mudroom to the left, back kitchen door.

Looking southwest. Turning into the mudroom, which you saw above.

oh, we also had to replace some support beams that had been hacked into and were beginning to sag.  No one cared about the next person to own this house. We're doing our best not to continue that habit.

So now, I leave you with only a hint of the next step of our kitchen.

When Rick and Allie go to Ikea....

Check back soon!

The Kitchen, Part One

The holidays took a heck of a lot more time than I thought it would, back tracking me on writing a blog. Sorry! I'm planning to write a bunch of shorter blogs about the happenings in the kitchen. If I did just one, you'd be reading for days! Ha! So here we go!

It all started when this died, one year ago, today.

Then I fell in love with this....

The big range. 

Oh, and Cosmo 2.0, I think by now he had started to melt my heart. 

So, we were rocking a little bit of a torn up, but totally functional kitchen.

I miss that tall faucet so much.

Then, we didn't need these any more, and thank God, they were not that great.

Check, out those blonde cabinets! The kitchen was built to to serve the 12-25 disabled folks that lived here. The city didn't care if it matched the rest of the house, they needed cheap and functional. Puke. Puke. Puke. But, a year later, I miss those ugly things.

We posted the double oven on craigslist and a few days later, the entire kitchen was gone. A church came and paid up $500 and took the double ovens and all of the cabinets and counter tops, even the sink. 

So, this was our kitchen suddenly.

We had already begun ripping out the many layers of flooring, now that the cabinets were gone it make it easy to pull the rest up. That board in front of the range, that's totally preventing anyone from falling into a pretty decent sized hole. Luckily we had another tiny kitchen up on the third floor so Rick managed to drag the sink and cabinets down. This made me feel better since at this point we only had on bath tub/shower and I didn't want to do the dishes in it. And I couldn't justify eating off paper and plastic for however long (I was thinking maybe three months) until we had a kitchen again. You can see to the upper right we started exploring what all the walls had to tell about the past of this kitchen. 

The wall we started to knock out divided the kitchen, we called it the kitchen nook room. It once held a servant staircase that we took a long time deciding if we should rebuild it. The staircase shared the room with what would have been a butler's pantry as it was adjacent to the dinning room, and a nearly hidden door in the entry way to hurry out the answer the door for guest.

Hell with the wall and the kitchen nook and staircase. Sometimes bringing things back to original isn't worth it. But adding another 100-square feet to the kitchen, in a house built in a time that all kitchens were tiny, hell yeah.

  

So long kitchen nook! 

Near the time of expanding the kitchen we had also discovered a bonus of 2 feet more of ceilings! 10 Foot ceilings! Holy moly, what a total change it made to the entire room, once the ceilings were back to normal.

At this time we were able to took into the kitchen nook ceiling from here. That is when we learned more about how the room at actually been set up! 

With the walls coming down, we found some really beauiful wall paper. We figure the first major remodel of the house was in the 1930's/1940's then ~1973, then again early 90's. A few other smaller remodel projects happened through out the house at different times too. The kitchen could tell a story as we peeled it apart. Each time change happened they just covered up the old, or updated right next to the old. We had layers of floors, layers of walls, and you can see each new generation of electrical wires lined up side by side.

 This one above was found in the butler's pantry. We are 98% certain that it is original to the house. With out a doubt this was the most beautiful I had found through out the house. It was paper and ink. Nothing too fancy like silk, but nice enough incase the guests saw into the room as butler's went in and out of the dinning room.

But then there was this one. This one just makes my old fashion heart explode. There were apples,  plates, and clocks. Under this was another close in style of wall paper, but a bit older, that depicted more farm life, like a little person in a big hat turning the ground for turnips.

We also found  A LOT of wall paper like this. This is also a nice date marker for when they had lowered the ceilings. You can probably see it in some of the picture. 

So, this is starting to get long. So for now you wait! I have nothing else better to do right now, well, i have about a million trillion things I should be doing right now, but I rather do this. So, I'll set up an auto post for Part- Two to be posted tomorrow morning. 

SO CHECK BACK! This time I'm 100% for real, there will be another blog tomorrow!