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!)