Area August Updated

Here's another catch-up post, featuring paint stripping and the arrival of a new Area Family member:

Area Cat, a.k.a. Dougal McKitty is a stray who showed up on our porch and adopted us in August.




Having a pet is a bit of a lifestyle change for us, and it has made things interesting on the house-project front. The new kitty is another reason for procrastinating the gaping-holes-in-floor stage of construction. The first time he discovered my basement work area, he managed to get a long strip of duct tape stuck to his hind foot, and promptly panicked and tore all over the house trying to to run away from it. LOL!

In spite of the kitty's help, and some time away visiting family, I managed to get a lot of paint stripped off of the living room beams and doorways.

Here are the beams before I started:



And here they are at various stages of completion. (I can only do an 18 inch long segment at a time, because it's so hard working over my head on a ladder).






This is a more detailed view of a beam with paint stripped off. Unlike the woodwork in the dining room and around the doorways, it hasn't been mangled and never had the original finish scratched off with an angle-grinder. I'm reeeeally hoping I can get away with refreshing the finish without having to sand it down and start from scratch! *crosses fingers* I'm about halfway done with the stripping, which should be the hardest part. :)



Here's more paint-stripping progress in the living room/entryway:



(note drips of yet another kooky paint color that was once on the walls and/or trim)

Area July Blogged Belatedly

Oops, I can't believe how long I've managed to neglect the blog! Here's the first of several catch-up posts, (I hope). First, here's what happened with the floor repairs and the garden:

In July I used a birthday gift-card to buy plants for the back yard!



We got a Japanese maple (near the center) and a lot of ferns and perennials (that don't show up so well in the photo). This area was long-neglected and filled in with invasive honeysuckle and garlic mustard when we moved in. Tom cleared the worst weeds and I've hauled countless bags of peat and mulch up the hill and into the back garden, so hopefully the soil is on its way towards being a little less cement-like, and by next year when these plants fluff up it might start looking like something. :)

Also in July I finished adding new flooring and sub-flooring to repair the hole in the dining room.



We tried out a couple shades of finish for the floor on some scrap pieces of flooring, and the tinted shellac layers (covered by water-based polyurethane) look like they will do a pretty good job of hidinig the differences in grain between the brand new unfinished oak boards and the 80 year old boards. (Here's the test strip sitting on top of the repaired area. The top two rows are new boards and the bottom rows are old. The left side has 3 coats of walnut-tinted garnet dewaxed shellac, and the right side has 2-- I think we're going to end up going with just 2).



However.... I decided the rest of the floor repairs and refinishing are just going to have to wait until I see the overall condition of the living room floors (i.e., liberate them from underneath all that green paint), and see how many of the original floorboards I can salvage for patching the holes. My method of feathering the new floorboards in with the old in the dining room was successful enough, but WAY too tedious and time-consuming to ever use again! (And coming from me, that's saying a lot!)

what's wrong with this picture?

I've been working on replacing a small section of hardwood flooring in the dining room that was an old duct patched with plywood. I figured it would be good practice for the more extensive floor repairs in the living room. So I bought some new 2 1/4 x 3/4 inch red oak flooring to fill the hole and feather in with the surrounding floorboards. The new and old boards' tongue & grooves fit together beautifully. The only problem is, when I line up the tongue & grooves along the length of the new and old boards, the tongue vs. groove on the ends of the boards don't match.

The original flooring in the house seems to have the ends of the floorboards milled backwards. (That, or each board was upside down when it had grooves milled into the underside???).

What the hell? Has anyone else heard of this happening?

So I guess this is why there was no apparent attempt by POs to make the newer hardwood on a third of the living room feather-into, or even line up with, the rest of the flooring in the room!

(Here's the living room now, with the bulk of our furniture crammed into the corner with the previous-owner-repaired flooring section that isn't painted green)

And here's the lovely line down the middle of the floor with misaligned (though exactly the same sized) boards:


So even though my original flooring is a standard size, I am not going to be able to use new flooring to make repairs and feather it in with the older floorboards the way I planned. (I'm tired of making splines and new grooves at the ends of the new floorboards to make them fit-- it's way too much work, though I am loving my $50 craigslist table saw :)).

This means a major change in strategy for re-doing the floors. I guess the new plan is to rip out some of the old living-room boards to patch the duct-holes. (I had hoped to use a few new boards to patch the duct holes before I had to start tearing up three quarters of the living room floor). Among other things, this means more of our floors are going to be torn up at any given time and we'll have to huddle against the walls for fear of falling.

Area window trim is finally up!

A generous neighbor with a nail gun helped me get the refinished trim back onto the window. Yay!

(I have no idea when I'll get to stripping and refinishing the actual windows, but ignoring that for now, it's so nice to see another part of the house re-assembled!!!!)




Also, I'm working hard on the floors this week-- mostly I'm concentrating on paint stripping, getting started on repairs to the flooring and subflooring, and trying to acquire the necessary tools via craigslist.

I pulled the laminate parquet flooring off the hallway to reveal more painted hardwood and a layer of glue. (So far the paint + glue is coming off much more easily than the paint in the living room-- maybe because there are fewer layers?

here's the hallway-- the laminate now starts at the entrance to the kitchen. :)


soon-to-be-removed paint/glue on the hallway vs. living room floors

Area couple amazed by newly painted walls

The dining room has finally been painted! Yay!! We're still sort of stunned by the change. Whenever I see the room I briefly wonder if I've somehow gone into someone else's house by mistake, and my husband keeps saying, "I can't believe we did that!" The final coat of glazing/ragging was a team effort and we're really pleased with the results. :D

Here are the photos: (backlighting makes the color appear darker than it really is)


And to see how it will (eventually) look with the trim, I set up some of the refinished baseboards here:


The colors we used were:
Ceiling: Sherwin Williams' "hyacinth white"
Wall base coat: SW "hubbard squash"
Glazing: 4 parts glazing liquid and 1 part SW "eastlake gold" (painted on as a solid coat, then blotted off with crumpled paper towels)

area walls slightly less lumpy

I am about halfway done skim-coating the dining room walls, and it's going pretty well.

I'm using the magic trowel recommended by steve. It is difficult to get each segment smoothed before it starts to dry, but I'm getting better at it-- hopefully by the final coat I'll be a pro. Even thinning the joint compound with our cordless drill seems to be working fine.

The other nifty tool I've been using is this drywall sander that attaches to my shop vac. The vac has a drywall dust bag plus a hepa filter that I'm knocking the dust out of a couple times a day, and it seems to be holding up well. So far the drywall dust hasn't gotten into the rest of the house. *keeps fingers crossed that this trend will continue*

Area walls finally prepped...

All the prep work is finally done so I am set to start knocking the bumps off the walls and skim-coating with joint compound. Whew! Since the last post the following has occurred:

- construction-zone converted back into dining room for a lovely visit from my parents
- dining room converted back into construction zone, with plastic on floor, doorways, french doors, and windows.
- last coats of shellac and varnish applied to window frames
- walls finally de-glossed with TSP-substitute. (Ugh-- I didn't even get to the ceiling and I don't know if that will ever happen. The walls were hard enough!)
- last sanding/scrubbing old stain and remaining paint off oak beam and post surfaces where they meet the wall

Here's the dining room now:



And boy will I NOT miss this spot on the wall where I took off the giant 1970's motion detector. (LOL, I wish I had taken a picture before tearing it out).



There are 2 things I don't know how to address prior to slathering on the joint compound...

Around the windows and doors some of the plaster is flaking off. Should I start knocking off all the loose bits, or just hope I can anchor them in place with the joint compound?? I'm afraid that if I start knocking loose pieces off, there will be no wall left. How will I know when to stop???



Also, I am still uncertain how to deal with this area where the post and wall intersect. I'm hoping I finally have enough of the messy sanding/stripping done that I can just mask off the wood and do all the skim coating and painting of the walls, then mask off the walls and add the finish to the post and beams, without ruining the adjacent areas in the process.



(here's the same post a couple months ago before I finished scrubbing the one side).

Alright, well here's hoping that eventually redoing the walls is more satisfying than all the fussing that it took to get to this point!

springtime stuff

I'm catching up on posting some things from this past month. I'm so glad I finally dealt with most of the upstairs blinds. They were in bad shape when we got the house and every week of use mangled them further.




I trimmed off the shredding parts and I sewed in some battens, which seemed to do the trick! The neighbor's Callery pear across the street is in full bloom, so it's a nice view this time of year. :)



Which reminds me-- I saw my first ever one of these just over a week ago. I just wish I could have shared this photo with my grandmother before she left this world. *sends it into the ether to share with you all instead*


<3

aaaaand I'm still fussing with the door and window trim..

Well, the dining room walls are still lumpy. >_> Somehow after all this time I'm still stuck fussing with the trim and I haven't done the first thing to the walls. Here's hoping that a picture post will help snap me out of it!

I finally stripped the paint off the last dining room door casings, but unfortunately in addition to those requisite swirly scratches, I found one piece with a new sort of damage throughout that I can't sand out or repair. Basically, it looks like previous owners used it to chop firewood on:






The only solution I can think of (short of making new trim from scratch which I do not have the tools or $$ for) is that I'll have to flip all 3 of the boards over and try to finish the backs to look like the fronts. I don't know if the door is symmetrical enough for me to pull this off. *frets*

Another unexpected challenge I've had is getting the paint off the 1/4 inch reveals around the door and window frames. It has involved lots of thankless scraping and scrubbing with steel wool & alcohol above my head, and I can't imagine how the number of hours I've spent at it could possibly be worth it.

Here's a section where I've stripped the left half of the frame already, and the right half still has the white paint. (We're leaving the actual doors & windows white for now, since we can strip and refinish them at some later date without having the whole room dismantled). Dude, it looks like such an insubstantial amount of paint to remove!!! *shakes head in disbelief*




I think I'm finally nearing the end, though. I put 3 coats of garnet shellac on one of the windows, so it's looking a little better:


Today I got the first of a couple coats of polyurethane varnish on it as well, and I'm hoping to get the other windows to that point by sometime tomorrow.

(Then maybe I can tape up the windows and frames and get on to making a huge mess of the walls and ceiling!)

revised plan for fixing plaster walls

Hey, I may be able to get those walls smooth after all! I was hesitant to post my vague plans and ask for help from fellow housebloggers, but I'm really glad I did. :) I am now convinced that I can try smoothing out my plaster walls by skim-coating with joint compound. I may have to knock some of the wall-texture off in places, but getting fairly smooth walls shouldn't really be that much harder than globbing on more texture, and I think the results will be more desirable.

The new plan:
--> de-grease walls, and knock heaviest texture off
--> tape cracks with fiberglass mesh
--> apply several skim-coats of joint compound. (I think I will experiment with doing at least some coats with the magic trowel method).
--> sand
--> prime
--> paint

need a quick fix for messed up plaster walls..

As I continue to sand and shellac, I'm thinking I need to try to make the dining room walls look a little better before the trim goes back up.

The problem:
The walls are old fashioned plaster, with a lot of very badly-patched settling-cracks and hideous uneven (up to 1/4 inch thick) texturing. The repaired cracks all bulge outwards, and a few have hairline cracks starting to open up again.



What I would LIKE to do..
I love the look of the original plaster in the few areas of our house where it isn't messed up. So if we still want to own this house after 5 or 6 years (when my husband is up for tenure) I would want to get the plaster walls properly repaired and restored, and I would put in some insulation >_> and shore up the foundation under the dining room while I'm at it.

Why we can't do that right now..
Unfortunately there's no way I'm up for tearing into the walls or messing with the larger structural issues at this point. The heavy texturing is going to be a serious bitch to get rid of. We don't have the funds for a big project now or any nearby friends/family to help out. I've done drywall in the past, but I have no expertise with plaster. And, most importantly, we need to put the room back together ASAP so this place can start feeling like home! :)

We need a short-term fix..
So basically I need to do something to make the walls look slightly less bad for a few years! (*cough* and my entire budget for this is a hardware store gift-card I got for X-mas *cough*). A flat surface is pretty well out of the question, so I'm trying to decide what to use to apply yet another heavy texture to the walls. I'd probably go for a stucco look (something like this), which shouldn't look too out-of-place in our house, given that the 2nd floor exterior is stucco with Tudor half-timber style trim.

Here's the plan I've come up with so far:

-> wash walls with TSP
-> fill existing cracks with painter's caulk
-> slightly roughen existing (heavily textured) paint surface (?not sure how)
-> prime (?before or after texture, depending on method used?)
-> apply sand-textured paint or a paint/drywall mud mixture, knock down with swipes of a trowel
-> paint

then I can get to:
-> sand and refinish floors
-> re-install wood trim

Can anyone here help me out with some advice on this? Does my plan sound like it would work? And if so, would it look substantially better than just throwing a fresh coat of paint over the existing lumps and bumps? Would one type of texture material be less likely than another to crack over the next 5 years? (The house is climate-controlled, but it sits on a hillside that gets saturated during heavy rains-- so some settling is going to continue).

Thanks in advance for any of your thoughts on this!

Clues found beneath layers of paint...

I finally got the paint off the beams between the dining and living rooms and found out how the house is supposed to look. O_O

To tell the story, I should mention that when I first saw the house, the open L-shape of the entranceway, living and dining rooms seemed unnaturally... open. I guessed there had originally been some walls and French doors that the POs removed, and I immediately set my heart on putting in some built-ins on either side to define the space a little better.

How wrong was I on this?? The photos tell the story, I think:

Here is the view from the dining room during the paint-stripping process. (Note helpful spouse in background) ;)


And here's what it looks like right now-- with solid oak exposed beams the size of railroad ties. :) [EDIT: Oops, they aren't solid after all, but I can't tell quite how they're constructed]


But oddly enough, I found some marks on the underside of the overhead beam...


...and two rows of holes along the base of the side posts...


And in a lucky break, we had just visited with some of our new neighbors over the holidays, so I realized that the marks I found correspond EXACTLY to what they have between their dining and living rooms!!! (We went by again yesterday to take photos):


Yep, our house used to have massive beautiful built-in cabinets, and someone went to great trouble to rip them out. *sigh*

I suppose it's nice to know that my instincts were right, even though my prediction was wrong. And now we get to decide what sort of cabinets to build!! It would be fun to try to replicate the original features, but at the moment that seems very intimidating. (I was hoping to use mostly salvaged wood, but I can't quite imagine stumbling upon huge oak timbers that are just the right size =/).

Luckily I've got plenty of time to come up with a design.
*continues to keep an eye out on ebay for sets of old, glass-paned cabinet doors*

(And here are a couple more shots-- no flash, sorry!-- of the woodwork at the neighbors' house for inspiration). *drools*

Stinky room saga

We have a room with a persistent pet-odor(?) problem. When we moved in last summer we figured the smell was probably cat urine, but the more we thought about it the house's history raised a few red flags that it might be a methamphetamine lab odor, instead. =/

The house was clean and newly painted when we bought it, and there were no obvious signs of drug activity (overpowering chemical odors or stains). But we were a bit concerned that if there were any dangerous chemical residues that had been sealed over to make the house habitable, we would be exposing them all over again by tearing into the walls and floors to renovate and try to get rid of the smell. So hopefully it ISN'T meth lab residue, but on the off chance that it IS, the consequences are serious and we wanted to be sure we knew what we were dealing with. I'll summarize what we found out here in case it is helpful to anyone else facing a similar dilemma with a fixer-upper house:

The more we looked into this issue, the more troubling it all was. Though Ohio is now one of many hotspots for meth labs, the state still has no meth-disclosure clause when houses are sold (like it does for lead paint and mold). (To date only 4 states require meth lab disclosure). The health dept. could order a meth lab house to be cleaned and the walls, floors, etc. "sealed" to the point where chemical residues in the air are at a safe level for habitation, but then the next owner could buy the house without ever knowing that! The information we found recommended calling local police records dept. to see if there is any indication of past drug activity at our address. I did this, resulting in a helpful (but embarrassing) visit from several police officers. I've also spoken to some of the neighbors, and this is as much as we know:

possible signs of a meth lab?

• persistent ammonia smell that got worse when we removed the carpeting (in one room and in an area of the basement just below that room)


• the house had been rented, and sat vacant for a long time after the last rental ended badly


• the last renters left the house in poor condition with belongings/trash abandoned (*red-flag for meth houses*)


• neighbors complained of extra people living in/visiting house during last rental

or just pet urine?

• pet hair found in ductwork


• neighbors say renters had a dog that was often left alone in the house


• a neighbor who helped haul the renter's belongings/trash away remembers no unusual amounts of lab glassware or coffee filters


• no obvious stains on walls or drains (though everything was cleaned & painted over)


• no drug-related police reports at this address

For now we are going to proceed under the assumption that the odor is from pet urine, though the police did give us the number of a local person who can test our house for hazardous chemicals (at our expense) if we have further concerns.

We plan to tear out and replace the flooring and subflooring in that room, (it is badly termite-damaged beyond salvage, anyway), and strip, sand, and refinish the baseboards. If that doesn't solve the odor problem, we will start tearing into the exterior walls in search of any stinky wet blown-in insulation (which can also cause an ammonia odor). Unfortunately, for the time being we are not in a financial position to do this work, so we just have to keep the door shut to keep the rest of the house from stinking. =/

It's a pity because it really is a beautiful, sunny room! Though in addition to having an offensive odor it is a complete mess right now. The damaged/patched floors are all exposed and it is designated as my spouse's "special room to ruin." (As in "Homer!! I made a special cake for you to ruin!")

[ETA: thanks so much for all the helpful comments. An update on our stinky room can be found here]

What are these swirly scratches?

Restoring the oak trim in the dining room is going slowly, but I'm almost done with all the baseboards and I'm starting on the window & door trim. The paint is coming off pretty well with the peel-away 7, but I'm finding a lot of really deep scratches in the wood underneath the paint:



What on earth caused these circular scratch marks??!! At first I thought maybe they were from someone accidentally bumping the baseboards with a sanding or cleaning machine they were using on the floor, but now I'm finding the same marks on the trim above the doors!!!















Was someone purposely scratching up the woodwork to help adhere the paint or something??!! Has anyone else encountered something like this?? (*boggles*)

Anyway, because the original finish is all so damaged, I'm refinishing the trim the hard way. After I get the paint out of the gouges, I'm removing the original finish with alcohol, sanding down the boards and finishing the wood with garnet dewaxed shellac. I'm very pleased with the results, and I can't wait to someday get the trim back up. :)

(Thanks to Gary and Aaron & Jeannie for all the info about shellac-- I am in LOVE with the stuff, and now I'm considering a few coats of it on the floors, as well).