Enjoying the Living Room

We have finally reached the point where we can once again enjoy our living room space. It was a lot of work but we pulled it off. First, I had to fill all the cracks in the wood (note to anyone attempting their floors themselves - do this step before the initial sanding!). It took six tubes and three 32 oz. tubs of wood putty to fill all the cracks.

 

The next step was to mop up the excess. And mop. And mop. And mop some more. It took a lot of mopping to get the floors relatively clean. I say relatively because there always seemed to be a bit of dusty residue after the floors dried.

After letting the wood putty cure for a few days, I had to get ready to literally paint the cracks with stain. I stole one of the kids' paintbrushes to do this step as the fattest one was the perfect size for those filled cracks.

 

Here is what a section looks like once it has been "painted" with the stain. Again, you can see that our old floors had a lot of cracks.

The final step was to buff the floor with a microfiber cloth to remove any excess stain and to see if I missed any spots. They were pretty easy to spot due to the major variance in color!

After a few days to allow the stain to cure and dry really well, I had to sand the floors with 1000 grit sandpaper...again. And put on two coats of polyurethane. This time we used a high gloss finish. My husband loves the final look because the floor looks "wet;" I hate it. You can see every dimple and roller mark. The semi-gloss finish left a nice, dull smooth finish that looked much better in my opinion. Alas, I am stuck with shiny imperfect floors. I am planning on doing some more research on applying the high gloss finish so that the other floors finish up more smoothly.

We also applied a second coat of stain to the board and batten wainscoting that we had installed. It is now a much darker, richer color that better matches the coloring of the floor. Those also got a coat of polyurethane to make them easy to clean. And the same was done for the two window frames.

Finally, we painted the two walls Champlain Blue. I was able to find an 8' x 10' area rug that had the blue of the walls, the beige of the couch, the dark brown of the recliner, and the yellow from my overstuffed chair. With some new curtain rods installed and natural, light blocking drapes, the rooms has been reassembled.

We are not finished yet as we still have to install the built-in bookcases and we also have to finish the ceiling and install crown molding; but at least the room is a usable space once again and we are enjoying it quite a lot. This is what it looks like today!

More Windows, Trim, Walls, and Pennies

We have continued to work diligently on various projects around the house as we are able. Sometimes I feel as though we are a bunch of snails crawling all over these projects! A lot of times the long hours spent on things is because we are figuring out what we are doing (after extensive research) and just have no idea how much to order of things. Take, for example, our wonderful living room wood floor renovation project. We saw a nice video about how to fill the cracks (yep, after we stained and put on the polyurethane, we learn about this - nice timing, right?) So, we ordered six tubes of wood filler thinking that would be enough to finish the living room floor. Not! As you can see from this picture, we filled approximately one-third of the entire floor.

All those really light colored lines are cracks that have been filled. The plan is that I buy a quart of that wood fill putty stuff and literally scrape it into every crook, crack, and cranny using a putty knife. Once it dries, you mop the excess stuff right up. (Note to self....do this step before you stain and seal next time!) I am now trying to find the right stuff in quarts or gallons. It is not as easy as you think. Additionally, the video we saw had this guy rubbing it on with his fingertip to ensure that each crack was completely and smoothly filled. He's nuts. By the second tube, I figured out how to use the putty knife. Way faster and much better for the said fingertip, especially when the cracks are as wide as some of ours unfortunately are.

Remember the wonderful bathroom penny floor project? This is the first picture I showed you with about $14.00 worth of pennies.

Here is another picture with an additional $25.00 worth of pennies, for a total approximately $39.00 and some change. I mean, we do find odd pennies here and there around the house and friends and family members have been donating some to the project as well. We just keep track of what we get from the bank.

As you can see, $25.00 in pennies can cover quite a bit of square footage. My family (read my children) were really pushing for us to put in some kind of design. We debated all sorts of things from the Green Bay Packers logo to a music symbol like the treble clef or just our initial. I opted for our initial. The kids thought it was funny because the "F" could stand for "fart." As you can see, our humor is still in tact, even with all this wonderful remodeling. This is what the floor looks like with about $64.00 worth of pennies.

And I have also been playing with my new miter saw and wood. We had a lot of weird things going on with our wood floors. Everything from pieces being cut out to install funny angled walls, to the original staircase being reconfigured (to our best guess) and repairing the floor with cheap sub-floor materials. We wanted to keep the wood floors as original as possible, but where to scavenge the wood? We opted for the side entryway. Some of the original flooring had rotted over the years and while most of the boards were in good shape, it was not the best place for a wood floor. We decided to pry up all that wood as part of our side hallway project (more on that in a bit).

This is our side hallway. As you can see, it is fairly long and narrow, with stairs that lead to the landing. Additional stairs (not visible) lead to the basement. This area gets a lot of traffic so working on it gets kind of chaotic. The other challenge is that our house has really no storage space, as in coat closets, on the main floor, unless you consider the built-ins in the formal dining room. I have some ideas on how to tackle that based on some other blogs I love to read and use for inspiration. But more on that another day.

Here is another view from the end of the hallway looking towards the door. As you can see, the landing is not all that big so we have decided to tile it. I found some beautiful coppery glass tiles that I plan on using. This will make it easier to clean up and protect the wood underneath. But first, we had to pry up all the original hardwood flooring.

My wonderful husband figured out the best way to get the boards out with the least amount of damage. We still had to remove a lot of nails, but since I was cutting each board to fit, we were able to eliminate anything too damaged or rotted. Then the fun really began. It was a lot like completing some strange jigsaw puzzle - but with a miter saw. I had to measure each gap and then find the right boards to fill them. Some of the pieces had to be cut in strange ways and I was not always very successful at getting the perfect fit. (Thank God for wood putty....see why I want to buy it by the gallon?)

For example, here is a section where someone in their infinite wisdom cut part of the wood floor out so that they could build a wall to block the hallway. As you can see, each piece was a bit, well, unique. And of course I had to do some repairs around the chimney to fix the gap left after we removed the plaster and exposed the cream city brick.

But I was able to somewhat successfully repair it so that it now looks like this. Not too bad, if I have may say so and pat myself on the back. (And of course you see that really wide crack....more putty needed).

There was also the area where the original staircase had been built and later reconfigured. This was a cheap board covered with black adhesive - the same black adhesive that we removed from the entirety of the kitchen and back entrance floor. You can see a bit of it on the edges around the repair. I am assuming that the sander will make short work of that little bit. I also forgot to take the before picture, but here is an after.

I am hoping that once the cracks are filled (yep, more wood putty) and the entire floor is sanded, stained, and sealed, it will look almost seamless. You will most likely be able to see that there was a repair, but hopefully it will add character and not be quite as obvious as it is at the moment.

And the rest of the work has begun on the side hallway. I admit, it is terribly difficult to stay motivated. And I am finding that my wrists hurt a lot after about an hour worth of work. So, I have been working in one hour increments with an hour off in between. This means it takes longer, but the space is really just too small for two people to work on it at the same time.

I have one of the walls almost completely sanded and the long baseboard piece stripped of paint and lightly sanded. Because it is such a small area, I have found that I have to clean up after every hour of work because the dust just has nowhere to go but down on the floor, making it very slippery. The trim here is also harder to clean up than the trim in the living room. For some reason, the original baseboard was first varnished. Then at a later date it was painted to look like wood. Whoever did the painting did a good job because that paint will not scrape off - it has to be heated and then scraped. Finally, the painted wood look was painted yet again with white paint. Whoever did the white paint was clueless though, because that paint chips and peels right off.

I am still in the process of heating and scraping the paint off of the window. The outer part has been done, but now I am working with three different pieces of wood, some of which is curved, on the inside. Talk about tedious! The living room has provided plenty of practice so I just take it a little bit at a time. I already know that it will take me about six hours total just to finish the window. By then, the rest of the room should be ready to reassemble.

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!