Our Old House

The hallway upstairs before we moved in. March 6, 2017

August 2022

August 2022 - Stripping and refinishing the walls in the bedroom

October 2022 | After a false start in the summer, we finally got a team in to refinish the 140 year old Douglas fir floors in our room and the living room. Between the floors and the newly finished walls, things are starting to look really good around here. Now we have to actually decide how we want things to look though. More decisions…

We decided to put up the old trim in the kitchen. We will probably want to replace it eventually, but for now it made a huge difference in making the place look more finished.

With Dad visiting to meet Baby H, he also helped us tackle a couple tricky projects. First, we installed the wainscoting upstairs. It’s ready to attach the chair rail. The finish line is in sight for the upstairs hallway.

With Baby McZ on the way, Alex’s mind turned to the biggest potential lead paint offender in the house. This project was a lot more complex than it originally appeared. With David’s help, it turned out beautifully.

The first big project before the school year started. David surprised us by doing a lot of work to finish most of the sanding and skim coating of the hallway walls. We put drywall over the unsalvageable plaster at the end of the hallway. No more darts in the hallway, but also no more crumbling exposed plaster anywhere in the main living space.

When we returned from Wisc. we were met with a dying refrigerator. Bunny hair was likely the official cause of death, but it was also decades old. Unfortunately, it finally died just as a hurricane rolled in, so selecting, picking up, and installing the replacement was a little tricky. Alex chopped the cabinets and they should be pretty easy to put back together.

The before and after… Unfortunately, I didn’t take a good picture before we started work on this room, so all I have to offer is the photo from our tour of the house from the inspection (which was also our first time seeing the place). It does show the original look of the wallpaper, carpet, and ceiling. Pretty satisfying transformation.

Floors done, all that was left was to paint. I chose the paint colors from the Colonial Williamsburg collection, to complement the salt box colonial style of the house. They liked their bold colors back in the day, so I decided to be brave. I’m still tempted to install a chair rail and paint the bottom half of the room teal, but this is a good start. We gave the lousy hollow core doors the same treatment as the ones in the kitchen.

Catching up on our big project from summer 2020: finishing the south bedroom. Tearing up the carpet was refreshingly simple, but before long complications arose. The floor underneath was not level. Of course it wasn’t. A quick test of laying down the engineered hardwood planks we got at the Habitat ReStore showed that this wasn’t a problem we could ignore. The good news: self-leveling concrete compounds work great! They are easy to use and provide a great finish. The price added up though, particularly since we had to go back and get more about four times. Always too optimistic about how much we’d need to solve the problem. After that, the project was fairly simple. Working around the closets and door casing wasn’t simple, but it was manageable. Big reveal of final floors yet to come…

Spray paint on the door knobs looked better than expected. The chair rails are up now, and the wainscoting is coming together. And the obligatory before-and-after reveal...

Operation: disguise hollow core doors. This was the worst remaining eyesore in the kitchen. We’re reading wanted to get salvaged doors, and hopefully we still will at some point. But without a vehicle to transport large items with all of the trial and error that this will entail, we needed something that will work for now. Strategically placed trim and paint to the rescue.

For an accent wall in the kitchen we decided on a simple pattern. The yellow of the first layer is the same as the bird-on-wire stencil in the laundry room. I used the same green as the walls. It’s nice to break things up, but it’s also not a very dramatic effect. I boosted the contrast in this photo for visibility, but the effect in person is more subtle. Just a little something different.

By the end of Day 1 the dishwasher was in and successfully hooked up. Even with the big gap in the cabinets, we could see a path to the finished project. Alex confided in me that he didn’t really believe we’d actually install it right away. He figured it would sit in the back hall for a week or two, because we never finish a project all at once, in just a single weekend. I have to say, it feels really good.

Whether or not we were ready, our dishwasher was set to arrive on Saturday. Alex was feeling confident after our neighbor took at look at the cabinets and declared it a simple job to demo, install dishwasher, and rebuild the cabinets. I had trouble imagining it would be that simple, but onwards we forged.