Molding

The last step to be done on this wall was the crown molding. Though we have invested in many tools thus far, one thing that we haven't purchased is a compound miter saw. SOOO, I had to cut the miters by hand with a coping saw. Let's just say it took a few tried to get a joint that butted correctly!

Jeff installing the corner molding blocks. We thought it would add a more formal look (and reduce the number of miters!) to use these.

YAY! Molding on one wall is up! You can see the corner block, and then the crown molding that runs across from there.

DONE! Not the whole room mind you (I still need to cut a few more baseboards and crown molding strips), but ONE WHOLE WALL of this room is completely done! HORRAY! (pardon the white orbs in the picture, I need to clean my camera lense). What do you think of the room?

Trim!

The next step was to make the baseboards. Of course, since nothing in this house is standard, we had to go out and buy 1x10 lumbar to make the baseboards out of. I cut it with the circular saw, and then had to use the orbit sander to bull-nose (round) the outer edge to match existing trim in the house.



A dry fit of the trim. I actually cut it right on the first try! (that never happens!)

OK, so I'm skipping a few steps, but here is the trim and corner-round, installed. The coloring looks a little off in this picture- you'll have to come visit to get the true effect of the wall!

A Lesson on Windows

So here's another history lesson about old houses, for those of you who have been wondering :-).

You may have been in an old house before and noticed the ropes attached to either side of the lower window. These sash cords are actually how the window stays open.

Within the casing of the window, there are lead counter-weights recessed into the walls. One weight weighs half as much as the entire lower window (so about 40 pounds in this case). The sash cord runs up behind in casing, and out through the pulley at the top. It then attaches to either side of the window. When you open the window, the weights move down, counter balancing the window so that it stays open where you put it.

Unfortunately, if the cords snap (which they do over time) and you try to open the window, 80 pounds of window will come slamming down on you! So, I need to restring the windows with new sash chain (stronger than the rope, and looks cooler!). Ironically, no place near us sells it! The only place I can find restoration pieces for the windows is... in New Hampshire! So, next trip out to see my parents, I will be heading to the store to pick up the pieces to fix the windows in the house that currently slam shut!

Trim

Originally, we were just going to leave the trim around the doors and windows "as is". However, the more I looked at it, the more I realized that I would be really annoyed putting all of this work into a room, and then leaving the scratched up, dinged up trim the way that it was....

So... out came my good friend, the orbit sander! Here is a pic of the two side pieces of trim nicely sanded down and ready to be stained (I did sand down the top too).

Ta-Dah! SOOO much nicer looking than it was before. The other nice thing about redoing the trim was that I stained it with the stain we're using for the molding, baseboards, and corner round, so now everything will match!

Paint!

We opted for a deep red paint which was textured, in order to hide any areas where my drywalling was less than wonderful, and also to hide the fact that the walls were not completely square (darn settling houses!). It actually has ground up pieces of granite in it (an ode to NH- have to have a little NH in each room :-), so it's pretty cool looking. It even has the a little sparkle to it! The process to apply it was to roll it on with the roller, and then go over it in a criss-cross pattern for a second coat with the brush. Painting was Jeff's job. For those keeping track, the paint was $29.99/can, and we needed 3 cans.

A Little House History

So for those of you who are curious, I thought I would fill in a little house history here that I've found in my digging. The house was originally built for Eugene Ward. How do I know this? Because as I have taken down the trim around the windows, on the back of the top casing molding is written "Eugene Ward, Caledonia, Michigan". This lends credibility to our original thought that this house was a "Sears kit house". Essentially what that means is, around the turn of the century and on into the 30s, you could actually BUY your house from a Sears catalog! You would order the house, and it would come precut and ready to assemble. Imagine going to the train station to pick up your house!!

Sears would actually build their "modern homes" in a lumbar yard. All of the pieces were cut, and assembled on site when the house was ordered. Then, each piece would be marked, crated, and sent by rail or by barge to the location where the new homeowner was. Everything from the wood to trim to paint would arrive in crates, and would be brought by wagon to the new homesite. From there, it would be re-assembled according to plans supplied by Sears. Everything was numbered. For example, the large picture window in our front room has "Eugene Ward, Caledonia Michigan" written on the back of each piece, but there is also a number on each trim piece. There are 14 pieces of trim and casing to assemble the front window, and all of the pieces are marked. Floor joists would be stamped with the Sears Robuck name, so we'll officially know if it's a Sears house when/ if we find that stamp. I may be crawling around in the rafters with a flashlight sometime soon :-)

As best as we can tell, our house was the "Hamilton house" style. The original cost of the house would have been approximately $2000 (it could have been more or less, depending on upgraded options which might have been chosen). I think if you click on the picture below, you can see it bigger in order to view the floorplan.
For those of you who have been IN our house, you know that the upstairs floor plan shown confirms another suspicion of ours- that the room which is now Meg's was actually the original bathroom in the house. And, the 11x14 chamber is now where our bathroom is. When the bathroom was put in, whoever did it made the room smaller and also took out the closet. This created the secret room which we found hidden between the bathroom and Teddy's room (found by cutting into the wall).

Anyway, a little more on the original owner- Euguene Ward was born in Thornapple Township in 1884. He died in 1968 and is buried in a cemetery in Yankee Springs. Eugene and his wife Pearl built this house, and had 5 children (Robert, Roy, Ardis, Edward, and William) during their time in the house (all born between 1915 and 1926). According to the 2007 census, one of them (Ardis) is still alive! Wouldn't it be cool to find them and see if they remember anything about the house?!

One more note on a previous owner. Tucked away in the floor joists, I found several rolled up LARGE arial photographs of Thornapple Township, as well as a 1968 school-sized pull down map of Grand Rapids in 1968. From the names on these (Cal Kooiker), we know that another owner of the house was a graduate of South Christian high school in the 50s who became a surveyor and eventually a local developer. Kooiker Tool and Die is located on 68th street in Caledonia, and I think perhaps since it's not a very common name, that there may be a link to that as well.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed the history thus far. Stay tuned for more as it is discovered :-)

The Floors

We were so happy when we moved into this house to find out that the original hardwood floors were still there. Underneath layers of crap, mind you, but still there! This holiday weekend, we rented a sander in our quest to rediscover these floors (since we want to take the whole downstairs back to hardwood). You saw in a previous post what the entryway used to look like (layers of linoleum). The layers of the old flooring were held down with 1 inch staples, all of which I had to pull out of the floor by hand. So, that also meant that each one of the HOLES from the staples had to be filled prior to sanding. What a pain!

Here, Jeff loads the sandpaper into the monstrosity of a sander. All of the light spots which you see on the floor and holes which I had to fill one-by-one with a putty knife and wood filler.

Here is the entryway after one pass with the sander. It needed a lot more work, but was still encouraging!

The dining room had this weird-textured seafoam green carpet in it. We left it down while we worked on the ceiling and walls, to protect the floor from the mud, but now, it was time for it to come up!

While pulling it up, I discovered yet another layer in the house! At the top of this picture is the carpet pad, and at the bottom is our kitchen vinyl floor. In the middle is some weird, snake-skin like vinyl, which is apparently under the current kitchen floor, which we found out is sitting on the same wood floor that runs through the rest of the house. YAY!

In the 40s and 50s, if you were going to lay carpet over a hardwood floor, a protective tar was painted onto the floor first. This would protect and seal off the hardwood. So, THIS is what we saw underneath when we pulled up the dining room carpet!

It took Jeff pass after pass to get this crap off. It would first melt, and then it would turn green, and then it would turn brown and melt onto the sandpaper, and then finally it would come off!

Left behind after the drum sander was done, were little spots all over the floor which the drum sander just cound't get off.

So, I got to use our 5 inch orbit sander and sand each one out by hand.

Also, around the edges of the room was about a 5 inch wide swath which the drum sander could not reach. This meant that I had to take the orbit sander and get everything back to the wall cleared. I literally spent 6 hours doing that, and because the tar melted onto the sanding discs, I had to change discs every 18 inches or so. We went through a 50 pack of them!

Finally, all stripped and ready to stain!

TA-DAH!!

Don't they look AWESOME! Jeff tack-clothed them tonight, and then I stained them before bed. We are VERY proud of the results!!

Project Costs (for the floor only, in the dining room and entry way)

Sanders and sandpaper $120

Stain $19

Staining sponge $6

Tack Cloth $0.89

Polycrylic Sealer $24

TOTAL COST $169.89

More on the Dining Room

There have been several people lovingly reminding me that they've been checking my blog rather frequently, looking for updates on the house and wondering if we're still working on it. The answer is YES, however I've been up past 3 AM for 7 nights straight now working on the house, so blogging about it has been low on the list. I do get more than 100 hits a day though on this blog, so either I've gathered a following in the blogosphere world, or one of you guys is WAY too obsessive about seeing if we've finished yet!

Anyway, so the next step on the walls was to mud the areas with drywall mud that were either cracked, or low-lying, or to smooth areas where I couldn't get the wallpaper off. Essentially, my job was to apply mud until I had smooth walls. I went through more than a 5 gallon bucket!

Here's an example of my handiwork. This is what the walls looked like post-mudding. And yes, all of the LIGHTER stuff is what I mudded. Thankfully there was no taping involved, as I used an adhesive sealant to allow the mud to stick to the plaster walls (which also allowed me to just mud over cracks)

Hard at work, mudding over a section where I couldn't get the wallpaper off. This meant that I had to bring the surrounding areas up as much as a half inch, in order to be even with the mudded over wallpaper. I also included this picture b/c I thought my hair was particularly cute :-P. All of my blog readers are going to be seeing a lot of Jeff and I at not exactly our best, so I'm always on the lookout for pictures that are actually flattering.

The idea of the room getting done really started to sink in as Jeff applied primer to the walls. It was so nice to see some uniformity to the room again!

I wanted to include a picture of our mudded ceiling, since our neighbor Brad did such a great job on it! I feel like making a commercial: "Drywall mud- $11, Drywall tape- $6, Mudding tools- $23... not having to nag your husband for weeks to get a job done that took a professional 3 days- PRICELESS!). Actually, the total cost of having the ceiling mudded was $80. SOOO worth it! I'm texturing it myself, and have the first coat on, so I'll have to post a pic of that soon. In the meantime, LEAVE ME A COMMENT! I'd love to know who's reading this :-)

A One Day Project

In search of a project that I could work on and actually FINISH quickly, we took a rainy day and turned to Meg's room. Other than the long-term projects which are on the "someday" list (more effecient windows, and eventually tearing out the carpet when we take the whole upstairs back to hardwood), the only thing which needed to be done in her room was painting. The whole room was a baby blue (including the trim and wainscotting), ahd she had her heart set on a Hannah Montanna room with various shades of purple. We had one shade in the curtains, and her bedding was another shade, so she just needed the walls to complete her perfect room.

It was quite the challange, painting without removing the furniture. Considering her room is 8 feet by 7 feet, and that we had to work around a loft bed, dresser, desk, chair, and book shelf, I think we did a good job. It's a good thing she's tiny though, or we would have missed a LOT of spots.

And the best thing about this project... it was done by bedtime. YAY!!


Before (pardon the mess- she's allowed to keep it as messy as she wants, as long as the door is closed and I don't have to see it)


We bought several different "Oops paints" from Home Depot (wrongly mixed colors- they mark them down to between $3 and $5 a gallon) and allowed Meg to mix them to her heart's content, until she got the perfect "Hannah Montana" shade of purple that she wanted.



The deal was that Meg had to do most of the painting herself. I tried not to step in and correct her too much, since she'd be the one living in the room, not me :-P


Repainting the wainscotting back to white. Who on EARTH thought it looked good in blue?!


An example of the finished room. I need to take a pic of the whole thing, but you get the idea at least for now :-)


PROJECT COSTS

Oops paints $9.50
Roller cover $1.07
White trim paint $5.00
(we already had the painters tape and paintbrush, as those had previously been charged to the "general house" project budget, so I'm not counting them here)

TOTAL COST: $15.57