Learnin' time

There's been no progress in the dining room while I've been waiting on the crown moulding to get milled. It finally arrived today. And since we've officially dismissed out contractor, I now need to go watch a bunch of youtube videos to learn how to hang this stuff.

Nerd alert

My curiosity about anything architectural or historical apparently knows no bounds. I just googled "history of storm windows." Fascinating stuff that I will one day, no doubt, enthusiastically share with uninterested people.

One room done

BTW, forgot to post these last week when I took them, but the bedroom is done. We're slowly moving back in. But, like moving into it house, it seems to take a lot longer than the moving out.

"Eh. No one will notice."

 To make myself feel less bad about the window stools, I took a couple pictures of what real renovating ineptitude looks like. 

These are both on the third floor, which doesn't get used a lot so it's low on the priority list to fix. Two things make me slap my forehead about these pictures. 

1. The fill-in piece of baseboard is by far the house flippers' most valiant attempt at being authentic. What kills me is that the top of the baseboard isn't stocked anywhere in town (that I've found) which means they actually had someone cut it. Both the major suppliers of replica wood have a blade that matches our base cap. And yet they still got the wrong one. 

2. The wall on the right side of the hallway is a new wall. But instead of running the new wall into the small section of wall that was already existed past the door, they built it in front of that wall. Take a flashlight and look in the gap and you'll see they didn't even bother to remove the baseboards. They just built the wall in front of those as well.

Stool nose and the angry 1/2"

Insomnia. Which means I can't turn off my brain. Which means I get obsess about things I normally don't have time for. 

 Take our newly installed master bedroom window trim (original on the left. New on the right). Looks great, right? Except that since the day he finished installing it, I've thought something looked off. Tonight I figured it out. The stool nose extends too far past the edge of the casing. By 1/2". It's my fault. He asked how I wanted it done. I pointed to one of the only two windows in the house with their original woodwork fully intact and said "make it look exactly like that". 

What I should have told him was the exact formula to use in order to get exactly that. Just like every other piece of woodwork in this house, they didn't just eyeball and cut what they thought would look good. Everything is the size that it is and cut the way it was cut using formulas that produce a well proportioned finished product. It's bad enough he mitered the returns rather than coping them with a hand saw like the originals. Now all I see this useless 1/2" that's begging to be cut off.

closet view

Our neighbors staircase window as seen from our closet. 

We have the exact same window (yes, exact, even down to the stain colors) except the bottom pane is missing on ours. There are 5 houses in a row on our side of the street that were all built by a guy named J. Straus in 1899. As far as we know, he was the architect as well. 4 of the houses are near carbon copies except for the facades. 

Cookie cutter houses have been around much longer than most people think. The difference is the craftsmanship that is sorely missing in today's homes.

Faux light

"Kevin, how do you get such consistently good lighting in your photographs?" 

I'm glad you asked, reader. I use a cheap set of photography umbrellas I got from Amazon with some not-so-cheap CFL photography bulbs I bought a few years ago. I also used the lights while I've been working in the house. They're fantastic for seeing what you're doing but because they're very nearly daylight (96 cri for the nerds) they fuck with your inner-clock like no other. 

They're also great for freaking out neighbors around midnight when they drive down the street see a dark house except for two upstairs windows which are emitting a blinding, poltergeist-like light. (I was working on the windows and had both lights pointed directly towards them)

Dining room update

*Mostly* done. 

The first picture was taken just before demo started. The windows were cased in cheap MDF (read- sawdust and glue) Victorianish trim. I know why most developers use the stuff:
1. it's cheap. 
2. It has *some* character. 
3. They're lazy. 

Those little square corner rosettes mean you don't have to know how to, ahem, cut corners. But if you're ever in a house built after 1900 and see those rosettes, 99% chance they're not original to the house. And if you're within 10 miles of a home depot, 99% chance they're not wood. 

As soon as I knew the window wall was going to be coming out, I knew I was going to change the casing but also knew I wanted the windows to mimic a window in the living room. That window is framed like a door with the casing going all the way to the floor and 3 raised panels under the stool. I actually thought we might find evidence that there used to be panels under the windows but we didn't. The only windows that have panels are in the front half of the house... on both the first and second floor. The window that's in our closet (on the second floor) used to be part of a room that extended to the front of the house, hence the paneling. So instead I asked our carpenter to create new panels that came as close as possible to matching the originals. The moulding is slightly different but I may be the only one who ever notices. 

The big change from my original idea are the sides of the window jambs. After seeing the depth of the windows in the master bedroom and being instantly reminded of windows I'd seen all over the east coast in historic buildings, I knew I wanted something slightly different downstairs. It's an old European technique that's meant to allow more light into a room called splaying. 

But try explaining window splay to someone who's never done it. Good times. Though they're not *exactly* what I had in my mind, (I would have rather not had the window stool extend past the casing) I'm in LOVE with the overall look.

Door jamb rebuilt.  Now i just need to learn how to cut a mortise for an antique strike plate.

Kinda looks like an alter to me

"But, Kevin, WHY did you paint it???" 

Because I can. But mostly because you're looking at 4 species of wood there. The casing and stool nose are poplar. The stool is oak. The inside jambs are maple. And the paneling is old growth pine. Even though the wood looks very similar when uncoated, each species absorbs stain differently and each has a predominant tanin (color) that only makes itself known when stain is applied. (Poplar is the worst about it) There are ways to make it work but it's way more time and effort than I'm willing to invest.

All I wanted to do was replace the trim. I Swear.

It was, by far, the worst trimwork in the house. The tiny victorianish casing was comical at best. And like the whore who worked Redbud Lane, it screamed "I ain't pretty but I'm cheap and get the job done." Which, for a closet window, is totally acceptable. If this re-renovation wasn't happening, I'd have been fine with it to stay. In fact, to this point I hadn't even seriously thought about who to blame for this sad, sad trimwork. Was it the flippers or the pre-flip owner, Louisiana Sam? 

I was lucky enough to come across about 50 pictures of the house pre-flip. So now whenever I find yet another incredibly poorly planned, poorly executed repair job, I go back to the pictures to see if I should laugh or scream. See, if I know the owner, Louisiana Sam, did it I laugh because the guy was apparently as earnest about the renovations as he was unqualified to do them and was completely unaware he was ruining the house. Plus, similar to the bond shared between people who went to parochial school , anyone who lived in the neighborhood when Louisiana Sam lived here has a story about him. So I can't be completely upset by a guy who unknowingly brought a neighborhood together. 

But the flippers... The flippers knew better. And when it's their work I'm fixing, I scream. Since we had the woodwork and the room was still empty, I decided to do the window. Which made me finally wonder who to blame. So I went back to the pre-flip pictures. (the red outline is my doing showing the current location of the master closet)  And there, in a picture of what used to be a huge L-shaped room that Louisiana Sam created by combining two rooms, is that window, chintzy casing and all. Oh, Sam.  (I outlined the current master closet in red)

I take the 3 screws out that had been holding the casing on (and, no, he didn't try to hide the fact that it was all held together by screws) and discover that the sides of the window bay, which should be wood, are drywalled. No biggee. I've got some extra maple plywood I can replace it with. 

The funny part is that after I removed the shitty drywall window sides, I discover the first good renovation work I've yet to see of Sam's. He built out the wall with 2x4s and insulated pretty much exactly the same way we have. Except he actually went a step further and added a vapor barrier. I was slightly impressed. I'm also going to replace the window stool so I can make it match the original windows. So I take off the two pieces of wood that Sam had used as a stool and, not surprisingly, discover the original stool underneath. (when you build out a wall, you essentially have to replace or cover the window stool anyway, so, again, no biggee) 

But then something catches my eye. There's a small gap between the old window stool and the 2x4 wall in front or it. I look down into the gap and under the window stool isn't brick or plaster. It's completely intact wood paneling. I make the decision that the drywall in front of it has to come out and the paneling incorporated into the new window casing. I try to be super gentle and careful to remove the paneling but discover pretty fast that the whole thing is held to the window with just two nails and the panel itself is so well built that it holds together like a rock after I take it out. In the end, I decided to strip the paint so it would be as crisp looking as the rest of the wood. Two days later and the chintziest little window is now the fanciest closet window on the street. (allegedly)

footstool fun

You may remember the Christmas Footstool Fun post where I wanted to add new legs to a Footstool and ended up building a new from scratch. 

Well, I just realized I never posted an "after" pic. ]

So here it is. Sadly, it looks exactly the same except for the legs. It's the same fabric that was on the original just slipped over the new frame and new batting. The new stool is just slightly overbuilt. In fact, inside of it is probably the safest place to be in this house during a tornado.