December, 2011

What I did do over the Thanksgiving holiday week/weekend was painted the trim, windows, and doors in the spare bedroom white - so the only thing left that hideous yellow is the ceiling.

Here's a pic of the old door at night - I hated to put another coat of paint on it but rest assured it will be stripped and refinished someday with the rest of the original woodwork.  I just couldn't leave it yellow.  The rest of the trim in this room is a cheap replacement and will go away someday too.

Then, this weekend, I got to work on the Cat Room.  I painted the built-in wardrobe doors and trim, crown molding, window, window casings (not original), frame and doors of the built-in shelves, and ugly door.  Didn't paint the baseboards since I'd rather not have another layer of paint on them.  Also filled holes and skimmed cracks.

And for reference, this is how all that looked when we moved in.

Next weekend, I am going to paint the room the same colour as the living room (Lazy Gray) because there is a whole gallon leftover.  It's going to look SO much better.  I grew tired of the PO's orange colour pretty quickly.  Plus, it almost exactly matches the colour of the cat litter!  Ick!

This was actually the room the PO used as her bedroom after her husband passed.



Also, this railing upstairs is the only bit of unpainted woodwork in the entire house.  The PO started refinishing it (stripped paint and then varnished) but didn't do the entire thing.

The PO said the original front porch was constructed of chestnut and that she wouldn't be surprised if there was chestnut inside the house too.  Unfortunately I have no idea what I'm looking for - I am familiar with pine and that's about it.



Here are the pics of the Cat Room which we painted a couple of weekends ago.  This is the same colour grey as our living room.  I didn't do any plaster work or anything because I'm not looking for perfection here.  The old cracks give the room some character.

Also, the other night I was mad at my car so I felt the need to destroy something... I ripped down all the wallpaper in the upstairs landing area and in the downstairs entry foyer.  I got an unexpected surprise when I discovered three layers of wallpaper downstairs and the first layer was applied directly to the bare plaster.  This is going to be a lot more work than I anticipated, but that's the way it goes!

Downstairs (after about 2 hours of scraping):

Upstairs.  Not too much work to be done here to prep for primer and paint.  I need to remove the plastic "crown moulding" stuff, skim a couple of seams, sand a bit, and then I'll be good to go.  By the way, that ugly chrome coat rack thing is going to be going away, and I will be looking for an old armoire or such to store coats there.

By the way, I made a potentially interesting discovery up here.  The narrow door in the second picture leads to the upstairs bath.  That entire wall is hollow and finished with OLD sheetrock.  This confirms the bathroom was not there originally (makes sense in an 1880's house) - though it really makes me wonder what this space was originally used for.  It wouldn't have been just an open area would it have?  That seems like a huge waste of space, and not what this house is all about.  Since none of the bedrooms originally had closets, could this have been a shared closet?