Work Week 11: Good Riddance to Rot!

Hi friends! The most exciting things happening this past week were all indoors. It was rot replacement week! Now that the ceilings on the second floor are out, Paul has been recruited to show off his carpentry skills! Paul, Guy, and Dennis have done an incredible job attacking all areas that were in sad shape and giving them fresh lumber and extra support! Now it really looks like something is happening on the inside! Oh, speaking of the inside, there was a secret crawl space under the bump out, behind the basement wall! You can sort of see it in these pictures. It’s not a very big space, and alas, there was nothing inside it but dirt, brick dust, and cobwebs, so it’s all covered back up. Fun though, right? 

Meanwhile, my pet project was to start experimenting with the chandeliers! They are gorgeous, but nothing says “I’m a replica from the 1990s” like fake gold, so I thought I’d play around with some spray paint to see if I could get more of an “antique french chandelier” vibe. There was one hall light no longer installed, so that’s my official sampler chandelier. I took all the crystals off, washed everything real good, and for my first attempt, I created a spray box area in the basement (yes I wore a respirator!) and tried Rustoleum metal in oil-rubbed bronze. I chose this particular color because all the other similar possibilities were sold out, but hey, it turned out pretty dang nice, eh?

The final pic is a little whacked, it’s really hard to hold a chandelier straight and take a pic of it at the same time, ha ha. Also, I’m going to be honest, I’m not really sure if the glass topper is upside-down or right side up? It wasn’t assembled when I started, and there seems to be no clear reference. Now onward to picking out the perfect lightbulbs (harder than you might think!) and taking down the rest of the chandeliers!

I’ve been going around scraping wallpaper everywhere I find it to make sure the walls can breathe and we find all the leaks, but I’m so haphazard with the job that it doesn’t make for any satisfying pictures. It’s also probably just annoying for the guys, because there are piles of paper schnoovlies in nearly every room. 

Oh, here’s a cool thing! I managed to fit all our belongings and furniture into the front parlor, and Kevin cut a hole in the wall so we could finally get the gorgeous pocket doors closed! How beautiful are these!? And that Victorian hardware is sooo cool! I almost want to put glass in the wall so you can see it all the time.

I added a close-up of the finish on the side of the door that wasn’t scraped. This is the very popular victorian painting treatment of wood graining. In this case, it is painted to resemble crotch mahogany. Nearly every door and and every piece of trim in the house is painted this way, at least on the first two floors. I’m not sure what all happened in the front parlor, but in that room, it was plain brown and as you can see, someone scraped quite a bit of the wood. I would estimate about 75 or so percent of the room is scraped, so I see some more scraping in my future! At our old house, I spent the entire month of September in 2020 scraping and sanding all the paint off two big porch floors and doors, so me and this job are old friends. The secret is a good long audiobook or two. I did the Count of Monte Cristo (unabridged) and much of the Fellowship of the Ring for the porches; this job might be more of a Moby-Dick. Ok, that’s it for this week, let’s see what we can accomplish this week!