Getting Our Heat On

One of the side effects of taking down walls is that you end up with these new, fun, but no so cool, hanging decorations.

In the front, is the electric box that controls the kitchen and dining room lights. These have to be rerouted and are on our never ending list of projects and things to do. More importantly, though, the thermostat is just hanging around on the left side of the chimney. This was the perfect height for little fingers and resulted in a few adjustments. One night we all woke up freezing because someone turned the furnace off! Other nights, the fan ran all night long....again, because someone turned it from auto to fan. Of course, whenever Mommy or Daddy asks, we are told it was "not me". Apparently, we have a child running around that we have not personally met yet named Not Me!

Anyway, Daddy took a few moments and with the help of the little man, reran the thermostat wires so that it could be relocated to its new home, just around the corner and in the living room.

It actually moved about three feet from its original location, and since we want to put in a wood stove some day, hopefully, it will no longer be needed as much. Don't worry, little fingers have trouble reaching it now, since we have a coffee table blocking direct access except for the taller members of the family! Yeah....one more thing improved! See, we are starting to make progress!

To See or Not To See

We decided to start working upstairs after all. First stop, the girls' bedroom. When we moved into the house, we noticed an odd little access panel in an alcove shaped area of the bedroom. At the time,we were not sure what the layout of the house was, but we were too busy moving in and getting settled to do much exploring.

The alcove is located opposite the window. It was obviously going around some obstruction, but was the perfect space to put one of the dressers, until it was eventually relocated and replaced with a crib.

Here is what the alcove looks like mid renovation. As you can see, it was hiding a body! Not really, that's just my wonderful husband checking things out. Apparently, the alcove was made to go around the chimney. The method for doing this was to screw this really, really cheap plywood up and then glue, yes glue, the drywall to the plywood.  It took us a few hours, but in short order, we had it all cleaned up and looking good.

I am sure many of you looking at this picture must think that we are crazy to open up the alcove area the way we did. We can understand that, except for one thing....it was never meant to be closed off like it was! How do we know? Once again, we have found original wood flooring and baseboards behind the alcove wall!

I have no idea what this space could possibly have been used for originally. Do any of you dear readers have any suggestions? Or seen anything like this before? We are actually thinking of opening it up on the opposite side into the master bedroom and turning it into a built in bookcase, since I love to read so much. But we are not sure yet. Do you have any ideas?

Of course, cleaning up the chimney upstairs made us reconsider the chimney in the kitchen. When we last worked on the chimney, we thought we were "finished" with this look...

Obviously, the plaster would need to be cleaned up and the old adhesive removed. Since it was obviously originally plastered, based on the remaining chair rail and base board pieces, we thought we would simply clean it up and leave only the dining room facing part of the chimney exposed. However, since I loved the look of the chimney upstairs so much, out came the hammer and chisel...

With the chimney exposed this way, our house is really starting to look kind of "lofty" - exposed brick, beams, and wood floors. One thing that really surprised us was discovering the original stove pipe still in the chimney.

Unfortunately, the chimney is currently being used to vent the hot water heater and the furnace. We were pleasantly surprised to see that the venting was going up through a metal conduit (which you can just barely see on the left side of the hole), but we were still concerned about any fumes that might escape. We didn't have time to order a proper stove pipe covering, so we decided to improvise.

The trick was trying to figure out how to affix our improvised covering. Using Gorilla Glue, a piece of scrap wood, and my husband's trusty Little Giant Ladder, we had something that would work at least long enough for the glue to dry. We left it this way all night. Of course, we had some trouble keeping the little one off the ladder!

This morning, I was finally able to take the picture of our improvised stove pipe cover. Originally, I was planning on painting the kitchen red and decorating with vintage coffee cans, mills, and advertisements. Now, I think we will go with a sage green, similar to what was on the plaster, but decorate with watering cans instead.

I really love the finished look! The green in the plate is a good match to what we took down and I like the kind of vintage look of the watering can. This plate was part of a mixed set that my mom had given to us last summer when she was moving. (Thanks Mom!) I am finally feeling as though we are actually making some progress and actually making improvements!

Top Down....Or Bottom Up?

Now that the pantry is finished, my husband and I were discussing what would be the next project. This resulted in a lot of overlapping and complications. 

• If we start on the downstairs bathroom, we have to fix the upstairs bathrooms pipes, since they are interfering with our ceiling in the downstairs bathroom. 
• If we build the missing wall between the kitchen and dining room, we may have to rebuild it down the road to add the master bathroom upstairs (the pipes will most likely need to be run through that new wall).
• If we finish the basement stairs the way we want, they are at risk for getting damaged and needing to be redone since we will be using the basement as our workspace (this was awesome while working on the pantry, by the way).

I'm of the mind to just work on the downstairs first, since it is already torn up quite a bit. On the other hand, I really don't want to have to do any of the work twice. Complicating matters, my husband wants to rewire the entire house. Thus far, we have found:

• new electrical cables wired into old cloth insulated wires; 
• fake outlets (meaning the outlets are there, but nothing is connected to them. What?);
• really weird circuits (like the bathroom all on its own except for the kitchen overhead light);
• we have a jump box in the master bedroom from when the house was converted into a duplex (and the jump cable runs from the basement to our bedroom along the exposed chimney. Great.);
• and old circuits that someone decided to just leave hidden in the ceiling, light fixtures, cabling and all.

We have removed all the drywall ceilings. The downstairs walls are primarily drywall, with a really nasty plaster technique on them that I really don't like at all. So these all need to be redone. I suggested to my husband that we just take the drywall down and flip it so that we have a smooth side to work with. Apparently this is not a feasible option. Sigh.

Upstairs, everything is the original lath and plaster, except for the girl's bedroom. Someone thought that rather than fix or replace the crumbling plaster, that it would be better to just put drywall on top. This means that all the moulding is now flush with the walls. Oh yeah....one more thing....they actually textured the woodwork with plaster. Like that was going to hide the fact that they put drywall on top of lath and plaster without adjusting the woodwork. Yeah, well, that did not work.

The upstairs is also not insulated very well, if at all. We can really notice the difference now that we have added a door to the bottom of the stairs. We are talking about a difference of at least ten degrees, if not more. Since we keep our thermostat set at 68, that means it can get cold at night.

So, back to our discussion. Upstairs? Or downstairs? Or upstairs.

I think maybe upstairs. We could insulate the rooms, reuse the original woodwork, refinish the floors. Yep. Our only cost will be disposal of all the lath and plaster, the cost of the insulation, and of course drywall. And paint. And stain. And shellack. And drywall screws. And we would have to rent a sander. And a drywall lift. Yep. This house is never going to get done.....