Living Room Projects

We continued to work away on the living room renovations throughout the week. We got a lot accomplished and we have a little bit more work yet to go. While we worked on several of the projects simultaneously, I have broken the room down into the various projects to make it easier to follow along and to see the before and after photos.

Large & Small Windows
The living room has two windows. The first window is a very large one looking outside the front porch of the home. We plan on eventually replacing all of the windows with period style reproductions, but in the meantime, we are working on the trim. I just wanted to explain why one window looks wood (originally installed in 1950-1960) and one is plastic vinyl (originally installed in 1990s). Here is what what we started with:

Not the best view, but as you can see, the original window frame was painted white. Unfortunately, whoever painted it white, did not do anything remove the old varnish and so the paint was starting to peel and chip off, especially at the sill. Removing all the paint was a chore! It took almost an entire day of scraping and sanding to remove the paint. We first removed as much as we could using a heat gun and scraper and then sanded the frame with 50-grit and 60-grit sandpaper. My hands began hurting from the constant holding of tools and vibration of the sander that I enlisted the hubby to help with the top.

(Nothing sexier than a man on a ladder working on the house, in my opinion!)

We finally got as much of the paint as humanly possible off the window frame. We lost an entire corner on the upper right in the process. We repaired this using a wood putty mixture.

 

A couple of days later, I was finally able to add the first coat of stain. We used the same red walnut stain that we used on the floors.

We then had to repeat the entire process with the second, smaller window. That took almost as long as the first window. The interior of the smaller window was made up of four different pieces of wood, one of which was a curved, decorative type of molding. Sanding that was a real chore. Here is where we started.

 And once it was all sanded (finally!):

 And with the stain added.

Repairing the Walls
Another fun project this week included working on the over-textured walls. A while back, my husband had slipped on the ladder and broke off a large chunk of the original lath and plaster. Repairing that hole took a few days to accomplish. First, I had to install new laths.

That was the easy part. Next, I had to apply drywall compound, making sure a good portion stuck between each of the laths and that the compound remained rough so that an additional layer would adhere once the first one dried.

After a couple of days, I added the second coat of drywall compound, trying to get the repair as smooth and level as possible. I used an extra long stir stick that we had purchased and used that to ensure the drywall compound was as even as possible across the entire repair.

After a  couple more days, the second coat of plaster was completely dry and I was able to sand it down. I purposefully did not make it perfectly smooth because I felt that would make it stick out from the rest of the walls. They are no where near smooth either and have a slight texture to them, but more on that later. Here is the final result of the repair.

So, when we bought the house, just about every square inch of the walls was covered with a plaster texture treatment. I honestly do not understand why anyone would want huge chunks of plaster skipped on the walls. I hear that this is an expensive treatment to do. Well, it is not one for us. We believe that it was done at our house to hide the various repairs done that butted modern day drywall against original plaster. Nothing like a lot of drywall compound throughout the wall to hide the work done underneath! Using the Porter + Cable orbital palm sander, we smoothed out the walls as much as possible. Our finish is now more Tuscany than modern cover up. Talk about a dusty job!

And while I was busy making a huge dusty mess sanding the windows and two main walls, the dear hubby was busy installing the ceiling insulation (see below).

Finally, we opted to paint the lower half of the room a warm chocolate pudding brown from the Behr classic collection called Library Leather. With the Tuscany style texture, it actually does look like leather. We are very happy with our choice. We have yet to decide what color to paint the top half.

Ceiling Insulation
We have opted to install a nice thick insulation between the ceiling/floor joists on the main floor. We are doing this for a few reasons. First, the sound echoes through our house like crazy! You can hear every sound, cough, sneeze, and snore through the ceilings. It drives me crazy!

Second, our budget bill for heating and cooling this house is insane - as in excess of $300 per month. We do not have central air (yet) and we want to make the home as efficient as possible.

And finally, we are planning on installing tin ceilings on the main floor. Tin is a very noise conducting material (see point number one above) and we do not want to amplify the noises from upstairs. Hence, the insulation. My husband decided what was the best - one that was good for sound proofing, a fire break, and allergens. He also did all the heavy lifting and stapled it into place.

Installing the Woodwork
Finally, I got to start installing the woodwork. When we purchased our house, it had the pre-primed fake looking trim nailed and, in some cases, glued in place. Not only was the trim way too small in scale for the period of the house, but it was of such an inferior quality. This may have been due in part to the original installation of the pre-primed boards that were never painted. When I washed them the first time, they turned a nasty dingy gray. And that first super hot and humid summer saw the glued pieces fall of the wall - literally. Anyway, we have been planning to replace the woodwork for years, based on some of the wood we found hidden on the second floor and our research of bungalows, particularly the Craftsman style.

We purchased a selection of 1 x 8 open stock boards (baseboard), quarter round (toe kick), and chair railing. We also purchased 1 x 6, 1 x 4, 1 x 3, and 1 x 2 open stock boards to create our board and batten following some general instructions we found online. The first step was to wipe each board and trim piece with our favorite stain. Yep, you guessed it - red walnut.

The dear hubby had an emergency call and so my 12-year old son was voluntold to give me a helping hand. Together, we installed the baseboard (1 x 8), the quarter round (toe kick), the chair rail, and the 1 x 6 (under the chair rail). We had a lot of fun using the new compound miter saw and pneumatic electric nail gun!

This made a huge difference in the look and feel of the room! But we were not finished yet! A couple of days later, we installed the vertical 1 x 4 (framing and corner) pieces, the 1 x 3 dividers, and the 1 x 2 horizontal bar.

While researching the installation of board and batten, we stumbled across some information about wood putty that can be used to fill all the nail holes and cracks between the different pieces of wood. And guess what! It can also be used to fill the cracks in the floor (groan). Our next big project is to buy several tubes of the walnut wood putty and start filling in everything, including the floor cracks. I am then going to do a second coat of stain on the windows and wall woodwork, before finishing with polyurethane. Once again, I am planning on doing 3 to 4 coats on the windows and trim. And, we are planning on adding a fifth coat (yes, a fifth!) to the floor, to seal the cracks.We have learned after our sanding-the-wall project that dust fills those cracks and is a real pain to get out.

Moving Forward
Here is the list of things to do to finish the living room:

• Wood putty floor cracks
• Wood putty all wall trim pieces
• Install wood trim to upper portion of windows
• Apply second coat of stain to window trim pieces
• Apply second coat of stain to wall trim pieces
• Apply second coat of stain to window trim
• Seal with polyurethane all trim (1, 2, 3, and 4 coats)
• Seal the floor with polyurethane (5th coat)
• Paint upper wall
• Build built-in bookcases for third wall, to surround wall mounted television
• Build built-in bookcases for room divider and support (fourth wall)
• Install plywood ceiling
• Install tin ceiling
• Caulk tin ceiling
• Install crown moulding baseboard
• Install crown moulding
• Replace current light fixture with track lighting

Just when I think we are "almost" done, more things get added to the list. Regardless, I am bound and determined to get at least one room 100 percent finished this spring!

Redoing Your Floors Is NOT A Weekend Project

We discovered the hard, slow, and painful way that redoing your hardwood floors is NOT a weekend project. It is not a week-long project either. It is more like a two week one. Our floor quite literally has our blood, sweat, and hair in it. Who would have thought something that looks "so easy" would be so time consuming. Still, I would rather do the work myself than pay someone else $7,000 to do it for us. Here is our floor journey. First, this is where we started:

Day 1
Realize that you cannot possibly hand sand the entire floor using a Porter + Cable orbital sander. Not only will you have to change the sheets of sandpaper, but you have to sand the same spot several times. Give up! Rent a sander!

We found a round buffer sander for $21 for 4 hours or $31 for an entire day. Sounded cheap enough. We then had to pay for a red pad ($9.99) and four sheets of two grades of sandpaper: 36 grit ($9.99/sheet) and 60 grit ($8.99/sheet). Regardless, it was money well spent. We started sanding with the rented sander at around 1:30 in the afternoon; the floor was finally sanded to our standards by 10:00 pm. First, we went around the whole floor using the 36 grit sandpaper. This did a good job removing the old varnish, but left some weird black streaks on the floor.

Second, we went over the entire floor again, but this time we used the 60 grit sandpaper. It did a really good job smoothing out the floor, removing the last bits of varnish and most of the black streaks. We had to do some touching up with hand sander around the edges and in some spots where the big sander seems to have trouble. All in all, we thought that the floor looked pretty good - especially once we were all done vacuuming it and called it quits for the day.

Not too shabby, if I say so myself! I'll be honest, I was really tempted to leave the floors the natural color. It just looked so clean and nice. The dear hubby still wanted to stain the floors in keeping with our restoration goals. We have decided that we might leave the bedroom floors upstairs the lighter color, but are not sure yet. Why are we having so much trouble making up our minds? Well, we really love our stain color!

Day 2
Even though we thoroughly vacuumed the floor, and wiped it down with microfiber cloths, we learned a very important lesson here. You must use some sort of denatured alcohol or some other liquid to remove all those minute little particles that you cannot see with the naked eye. If you skip this step (as we, unfortunately did) all those little tiny minuscule mites of dust will magically appear as soon as you put on your first coat of polyurethane. Anyway, after wiping down and cleaning the floor really well (or so we thought), I added the stain with a paintbrush. We had tested the stain in a small corner the night before, but there was nothing to wipe off, so we decided to use a paintbrush and spread the stain very thinly with minimal overlap. We wanted good coverage and we had already discovered that our boards were thirsty.

Isn't that just a beautiful color? It looked so nice and we were thrilled with our decision. So we just let the floor stay and waited for the stain to dry.

Day 3
And waited for the stain the dry.

Day 4
And waited for the stain to dry.

Day 5
At this point, I admit, we were getting a little nervous and were wondering if the stain was ever going to dry. I mean, we expected a few delays since the temperature skyrocketed to 75 degrees and we had rain. The subsequent stifling humidity meant it would take longer. But four days! Come on! So we did a little bit more research and discovered that really dark stains (like ours) can take twice as long to dry! What?! So, we waited patiently some more.

Day 6
Yeah! The stain is finally dry, or so we debated. My wonderful husband wanted to wait another day just to be sure. I did not. The weather was perfect - not too hot or humid - for putting on the polyurethane. I won the day and put on the first coat.

It looked a little weird when we put it on. I mean, the surface was all ripply from the lambskin paint roller. I confess, I was very nervous and wondering if my husband was right. I had put on the polyurethane just before bedtime and by morning, this was the glorious sight.

Day 7
I was in love and doing the happy dance. I did not even notice the funny little bits in the polyurethane. I simply rolled on the second coat and thought we were done. Finished. Ready for the next project.

I just had to let the floor dry for 24 hours or more to cure the final coat. Apparently, my husband was not as satisfied as I was and had some issues with the little bumps caused by the missed grit. Sigh.

Day 8
Do absolutely nothing to the floor but admire it (me) and debate the merits of what we should do next to fix the grits (my husband). We did some more reading and research. A lot of it. We found some really great sites with lots of advice - the main one being do not do this at home yourself and why staining is a bad idea. We test a few things we had around the house, including a brown paper bag, scotch rite cleaning pads, and 100 grit sandpaper. The results were, well, scary. We finally discovered a site written by a woman that had done a lot of floors. She recommended that we sand the polyurethane floor very well with 1000 grit sandpaper.

Did you know that they even made this kind of sandpaper? I didn't. Learn something new every day.

Anyway, she recommended that you sand the polyurethane really well, clean it very thoroughly and then put on the next coat of polyurethane. So we planned a trip to Home Depot.

Day 9
I had a nice long list of things that I wanted from Home Depot anyway, so we made the trip worth our while. We purchased all the woodwork we needed to install the baseboard, board and batten, and chair rails. We also purchased another gallon of our floor polyurethane. I even found a sanding attachment for my extension pole so I would not have to sand the floor on my hands and knees. And my wonderful hubby bought me a nail gun. Oh the projects I will build! I was happy (even though I was coming home to work on the never-ending floor).

After we came home and unloaded everything, I rigged up my little sandpaper holder to the extender pole and discovered that the sand paper strips were about two inches too short. Really! Come on! I did not give up. I taped that stupid paper down good and went to work sanding the entire floor. Over and over and over again until it and I were covered with dust. Then it was time to get on my hands and knees and wipe down the entire floor with a damp cloth. In a stroke of brilliance (if I say so myself), I rigged a microfiber cloth to the sandpaper holder and polished that floor as well as I possibly could. No little grit mites were going to ruin my floor. I finally put on the third coat of polyurethane. And went to bed. I was too tired to even take a picture.

Day 10
We checked the floor again as soon as we woke up. This was becoming monotonously routine. But actually, we were pretty pleased. The sanding tip worked and removed about 75% percent of the imperfections we had seen in the previous coats of polyurethane. The larger ones were knocked down a bit but still visible. At this point, we exhaustedly agreed  to do one final coat of polyurethane. Most people stop at three coats but because this is our home and we only want to do the floors once in our lifetime (should I mention that we have seven more floors to go) we decided to do four coats. The floor had washed up very nicely with just the two coats, but we are pretty rough on our floors. They get mopped a lot. And we have dogs that have puppies. That floor needs a lot of protection. So four coats. Yep. We agreed and it was done.

Day 11
The floor is finally dry. We are just letting it cure very well before we protect it with brown paper while we work on our other projects. I must say, we are happy with the final result. And, on to the next project.