Doors

I dragged my flu riddled body off the couch today and made the trip to Home Depot to buy two of these: I saw them in the flyer yesterday at half the price I'd seen them any where else...

I'm pretty excited. We've never had doors on the main floor. If someone is watching, for example, WWE very loudly; then we are ALL listening to WWE very loudly. To be able to shut a door on unwanted noise will be a wonderful thing.

One door will go here:


This is looking into the front hall at the closet (which also needs a door, but I'm hoping to find some unique bit of salvage in my shed that will work!...)

And one will go here:



This is looking into the kitchen and the little hall leading to the basement. In the above photos you can admire our newly sanded, filled, sanded, filled, sanded, verathaned, sanded, verathaned....original pine floors. Aren't they lovely? You can also admire bits of newly scraped, sanded and finished baseboard leaning here and there. These baseboards came from a house in Brooklyn, New York. When they are installed with their top bits, I'll post some photos. The mantlepiece also came from the Brooklyn house, and will be installed on this wall. There won't be a working fireplace but hopefully it will look like there once was...

Actually, we DO have one door on the main floor! The bathroom door! This powder room was added in the 1970's. To make room for it, they tore out the back staircase that led up to the master bedroom. Oh well, I have to admit this powder room has served us well! We bought the door at Habitat For Humanity in Ottawa, stripped it, and oiled it, and there it is.

Marching Along

March is finally here, and with it a bit of hope. Hope that it will indeed get warm, ice will melt, and things will begin to grow! Hope that major home renovations will indeed get done, and indoor life will return to normal!

It's been a while since we walked around town.... today we're walking through our neighbourhood to visit friend's houses...



Above is C's house. Gorgeous inside.Tasteful. Immaculate. Lots of blue. She is my interior design consultant!!


This is just around the corner. Our very good friends the R's live here, and we spend many an hour on that veranda in the summertime, drinking cold beer and watching the world go by. Their attached back shed still has stables in it. I believe a coal delivery service was run out of this house once...

This beautiful house is across the river. It was built in 1888, one year after ours. My friend A. lives here and is single-hand-idly working away at the renovations. It's a big job, and I totally admire her work and perseverance. It's going to be amazing some day!! See the funky upper porch above the garage? So cool.



This is my brother's house, just two blocks away. He's done amazing work too. When they bought the house it had dropped ceilings, and wall paneling and every other ugly thing ever invented. He's stripped it back to almost original condition and it looks great. He rebuilt the front veranda from photos a previous owner sent them in the mail.

Below is the old Carleton Place train station. The tracks going to Ottawa were torn up in the early 1990's (I think?) by a short sighted town council. The station was converted years ago into a town daycare centre, but now it is up for sale.



Below is our town movie theatre! The Carleton Place Cinema is run by our friends Ernie and Brenda's family. It has two theatres and great popcorn and shows first-run movies for cheap! The cinema is in the basement of this old church. The fitness centre on the main floor is up for sale too. Times are tough in town.




To finish off - my lawyer's shed!! I've always admired this nice little brick shed. The way it is set into the ground...the bow in the roof...the plank doors...and the neat rusty hardware...
What can I say? I like outbuildings. And I bet this shed won't be around too too much longer...

What I've been busy with.

Ok, so it's been awhile. Work and Christmas kind of got in the way! Things are very slowly moving along. This is what I am trying to hard to finish up...scraping and cleaning baseboards and door moulding for our family room.



Above is door moulding that we salvaged from a house in Brooklyn. It has about three layers of paint on it. Below is the same piece, half scraped. It comes off pretty easily, but it is so messy.





And here it is all cleaned up. (Well, except for that white line of paint near the bottom. Isn't it pretty? There are some cracks and holes and stuff, but I don't mind. All part of the history.




I have finished the main portion of the baseboards, and they look great, but they came with a decorative bit that sits on the top of them, and I haven't even tackled those yet. They are so picky. I figure I can install the baseboards without the top bit for now....(which translates to "I will get around to it in about 5 years!").

Let The Sun Shine In!

This is a defining moment in the saga of our house! Jake from Lambdon Windows cuts an opening for a new window in our south wall, and the sun pours in!! (Well, the light anyway!) I was so excited!



We'd always suspected that there were originally two windows on this wall; because our house is very symmetrical. When he cut the opening, he did indeed find the framing for the original window. One inch off our new hole!! What idiot would cover up two south facing windows to create a long, dark hallway of a room?


This is the west wall. We took out the horizontal, 1970's window and replaced it with a vertical window to match the originals. Now the room has three identical windows. You could feel the house breathe a sigh of relief, I swear!

Looking to the backyard from inside....




And looking into the room from the back porch...




Here's the finished window.



I took this while the workers went to lunch. Tomorrow (if we don't get the 15 cm. of snow predicted!), I'll take another of the finished product!

Red Pine Plank Floor

Well, this is pretty much the state of our t.v. room right now. (Anyone want to buy a hockey table?) In this view we are looking from the middle of the room towards the front of the house. The 1970's baseboards have been removed, and the plywood floors ripped off. This end of the room's floor has paint only around the perimeter.



In this fuzzy picture, we are looking towards the back of the house. This part of the room has a brown paint on it. Only one layer though. See the little jog in the paint cover in the top photo? It's the same on each side of the room, so I wonder if there was an archway wall dividing the room up. That's what we have on the other side of the house...




Here's a close up. It's like this on both sides of the room. Any ideas?




Here is the trap door we uncovered in the front hallway. In the middle of the photo you can just see the stairs going up. Directly across from them is the front door. In the background the living room. The wall built over the trap door is new; the door into this room used to be just like the one going into the living room - right at the bottom of the stairs. Following all this?!


You know, looking at this from this angle, it reminds me of a house I lived in in Ottawa that had a GIANT heating vent right in the middle of the room. The oil furnace was right under it, and we used to stand over it to get warm. Maybe that's what this was. I'm pretty sure it wasn't a trap door, even though we call it that...



This bit in the floor is where the original wall was that held the original doorway into the t.v. room. Which wasn't a t.v. room of course. Probably a kitchen originally. Confused? So is the house! That naked lady with her legs wide open is a boot jack by the way. Just so you know!!



A close up of the floor.



I sanded a patch just to see what it will look like. This weekend we are renting a sander and doing the whole room.

I LOVE hardware!!

Big excitement! My parents decided to get new windows put into their beautiful old house. After having a hissy fit, and telling my poor Mum that new windows would wreck the look of their house, I calmed down, and meekly asked her to at least save me the hardware.

Look! She brought me a bag full last weekend, and I was so excited to see these two piece window closures...




And look! Thumb latch things!




So, in my excitement, I'm ignoring things I really should be doing (floors, mainly...) and stripping hardware!! Look - here's a clean one sitting on a window beside a painted one. Yes, my Mum brought me some whole windows too!




Here's a close up of it, all cleaned up! Isn't it beautiful? This is the open position.



...and in the locked position....

Thanks Mum!! I'll be installing these babies (and the thumb latches) on the four original windows downstairs. Three in the living room, and one in the t.v. room. I think they will look wonderful!

Late Night Destruction

Late last night, when we should have been getting ready for bed, we decided to pull up that plywood floor in the front hall. It's a tiny space, so we didn't think it would take too long.... Here's a view looking down the stairs as Pete starts to cut into it...



Look! The pine plank floors underneath were in really good shape! Thank God. We thought this spot by the front door would have water damage, but it doesn't. We very seldom use the front door - it's just too tight of a space. I guess all the previous owners felt the same way!



Note we had to remove all the door mouldings in order to pull the plywood up. The mouldings were new (1970's) and ugly and not right anyway... The only wonky spot on the floor is right at the bottom step, but even that isn't too bad...



There was this little piece of linoleum left by the front door! I cleaned it off to take a photo, 'cause I'm not sure I can remove it without ripping it... Looks like a funky starburst/floral pattern to me!




When we took off the cheap '70's door mouldings, we revealed the original door casement, and look! The original beautiful, ornate door hinges were still there! Broken, of course. I figure they just bashed off the door, breaking the hinges in the process. It's kind of comforting to know the house had nice features at one time. As I've mentioned, there's virtually nothing left. I bet the original doors were nice too. And the knobs...



I removed the hinges. I'll clean them up today and do something with them. Who knows, we might still find intact ones hidden underneath a different doorway! Wouldn't that be nice!


So, it was a fairly productive evening, even if we did keep the kids awake with all the horrible sounds of plywoodbeing ripped off! Pete was pleasantly surprised at the good condition of the floors, and is now excited about ripping up the t.v. room floor!!!

Here is the view into the hallway from the living room just before we went to bed. We are going to try and figure out a way to leave the original door casing exposed when we reinstall the moulding. I just can't bring myself to cover it up again.