Framed!

Heat, humidity and mosquito population have skyrocketed in the last two weeks, and has turned chipping away at flaky paint on the exterior of our little old house into a slightly less pleasant task.

We have reached the eaves on the backside of the house and are gearing up for minor siding repairs, the restoration of some window trim, and lots and lots of caulking. I'll make sure to share progress and more detail on the window trim project soon, perhaps even this week (*keeps fingers crossed*).

Summerbreak with little trips here and there has begun in earnest, and Little Man is enjoying his camps.

Since it was just too hot to do much outside I decided to crank up the AC and tackle part of our upstair's landing. It may be too hot to strip the remaining stair spindles with the heat gun but I had a couple of doors and frames in mid-progress (i.e. partially stripped, sanded) and what better time to stop procrastinating and getting'er done when it's too hot to do anything else?

[A relic from the husband's bachelor days ...No, I have no explanation why it's still around]

So I cranked up the AC, turned on the music and got going. The process is the "same ol, same ol" - strip, sand, prime, patch, caulk, sand, prime and paint.

After a coat of primer and a quick spray of 'vintage brass' for the hardware

and with a first coat (of three) of sweet glossy Behr "Ultra Pure Premium White" it looks like this:

Why the prettifying inside?

Well, the inlaws are expected to arrive at our little old house in a week from now and, boy, do those visits ever generate a flurry of activity around here!

Dressing room

I can't believe it's been 5!! whole months since I last wrote about our dressing room. Five months?! How did that happen?
Last time I mentioned this former kitchen turned master bedroom suite, I finished sealing the stenciled floors. You can read about that here.

[After]

This is what it looked like then. We built in two shelf towers (his and hers) on either side of the door to the master bath, added rods for hanging clothes and pretty much called it a day. When I finished trimming out the master bath with baseboards and quarter rounds, I used up my left over bits in the dressing room.

Gotta use the momentum when you have it!

Then, when I added the door jamb and frame to the door on the master bathroom side of things, I kept the momentum going and did the same for the other side as well. Yesterday I finally got around to caulking the seams so now things are actually getting to the point of paint!

Sometime ago I also trimmed out the top and bottom of our shelf towers for a nicer, more finished look.

Woop-dee-doo!

[In Progress]

I need to pick up some quarter rounds to finsih off the base molding and touch up the paint. Of course, even though we've been using our dressing room, it's clearly not finished. So, what needs to be done?

• 
  
  finish base molding with quarter round


• 
  
  touch up paint


• 
  
  add light fixture


• 
  
  install threshold to bathroom


• 
  
  fix threshold to bedroom


• 
  
  add a rug


• 
  
  add an ottoman or bench


• 
  
  add a shelf for shoes


• 
  
  add window treatments

Plenty of stuff still left to do, right? Yep, it never ends. Of course, I'll aslo never grow bored.

Tricking the eye

There's one not-original feature to the house that I really and truly enjoy: the entry hall coat closet.

When the Ugly Duckling was a Duplex, the former entry hall was closed in and became a bedroom. The teeniest, cramped bedroom you could imagine, especially after the addition of a rather big closet. One of the first projects we tackled after closing on our little old house was to rip open those walls and restore the old floorplan.
However, since we need to be budget-conscious, we decided to postpone the restoration of the original staircase. The millwork is there, all the original trim is safely enclosed behind a drywall cover, so once that is removed all we need to install are spindles and a new wooden handrail. It's going to be beautiful, but it would mean losing this humongous closet of holding, and closet space does come at a premium in old houses.

Anyways, when the closet was built, the previous owner didn't care about matching the trim. They just slapped on some teeny baseboards and quarter rounds and called it a day.

These modern baseboards don't really deserve to be called base boards. I mean look at them! That's not a board. That's a sliver of a piece of wood! About a third of the size of the original baseboards, they appear insubstantial and flimsy.

Since the days of the closet and thus the days of its weeny trim are counted, we weren't going to replace it. That money is going right into the staircase fund.

What's a girl to do? Mismatched trim ain't gonna do it. Yes, it's mostly hidden behind a big ol' steamer trunk but still. It's there, I know it's there - something has to happen.

I have paint and I'm not afraid to use it. Turns out you can trick the eye just fine by painting the wall with the paint used for the baseboards. See what I mean? Here I'm just done priming the area. If you squint, you can't tell that the left side is the side with the wimpy baseboards.

Pennies in paint evened out the mismatched trim. You can catch a glimpse of the steamer trunk
that's usually sitting right in that corner serving as a bench and storage for gloves and hats and scarves (and some more boardgames).

Trim envy

Here we go again - trim it is for today's post! While the de-texturized zone was drying I made sure to spend the spare time in between coats on other projects around the entry hall. As you might have noticed by now (I have whined reported about it a couple of times already), all of the millwork at the Ugly Duckling is in dire need of some TLC. This usually comes in the form of scraping, patching, sanding, priming and painting or short, SPSPP.

It's now a serious effort to get excited about painting trim. Sure, it's rewarding. There're few things more rewarding than the look of crisp clean white trim. But, man, it's a bore!
Anyways, the original trim in our house has taken quite a beating over the past 97 years - too much to restore it to its stained wood glory. Besides, I prefer white trim and old millwork looks absolutely stunning in pristine white.

So here I am again, scraping off loose paint and filling in with wood filler.

[In-progress: Notice the fine layering of drywall dust on the floor.]

See the corner of the window peaking in on the left of the photo? That's where our big entrance door with the sidelights (and the now missing transom) should be.

It got moved years ago, replacing a window in the livingroom, when the Ugly Duckling was turned into a Duplex. I'm hellbent on squirreling aside enough funds to move the ol' door back to its original location sometime in spring next year. That'd really rock my boat even though it means construction dust and painting everything all over again.

[In-progress: Now with primer!]

Next step, primer! That usually gives you a really good idea of how the end result is going to look. Lovely, don't you think?

All done! yes, I even painted the archway. Isn't it pretty? Phil trimmed this one out for us and he did a beautiful job. It looks like it's been there ever since the house was built and feels just right. I'm so glad we returned the house to its original floor plan as much as we could; it just makes so much more sense and flows beautifully.

And just before it got too dark for pictures I snapped this one with the furniture moved back into place. Yes, we have vintage typewriters all over the place. This is an old German one that I flew in all the way from Hamburg for Christmas one year. The things you do for love ...

With the jamb firmly in place, I finally got to tackle the pretty part: the door casing. That's the fancy schmancy name for the trim that goes around your door frame. I'd picked up two 1x4 boards, 2 plinths and a piece of trim called a "stop" to mimik the existing trim in the house.

Lucky for me, no miter cuts were required for this project!

First up: the plinth. That's the decorative part at the bottom of the door frame. For the most part, the plinths in our house have very little decoration - some our just plain pieces of wood wider than the trim - and so the ones I found at the Blue Box fit the bill quite nicely: they have a little bit of carving which mirrors the top of the baseboards and the price was right too.

After installing the plinths aka nailing them into place, the sides of my door casing came next. All I had to do - thanks to the ingenius design of historic trim in our house -was measure the distance between the top of the plinth and the upper edge of my door opening, cut my boards to size and nail those into place as well.

I'd bought a length of plain "stop" trim to cap off the sides, just like on all the original door casings in our house. Since our bathroom and dressing room are a later addition to the house (years ago, a previous owner added a second story to the originally one-story part housing our kitchen), the ceiling is quite a bit lower as you can see. Thus, the husband and I are musing about bumping out the ceiling for a vaulted and airier headspace. It's not as bad as you'd think - especially since we painted everything white, both rooms feel light and spacious and you notice the low ceiling more like an afterthought.

A short length of a 1x2 board tops it all off. Voila! - historically accurate looking door casing. Oone side down, one more to go!

This whole project didn't take me that long. Of course, now we're back to the basics of caulking between boards and filling in those nail holes, priming and painting. It -never- ends, does it?

Jammin' the jamb

In our master bathroom we have finally reached the "finishing touches" stage. Over are the days of major construction (ahem, aside from the husband and me musing whether to remove the ceiling to create a vaulted ceiling above the bathroom ... it's really just a crazy idea ...for now ..maybe later. You know, when we've pleasantly forgotten about how rotten a thing dry wall dust really is.) and we have a basic room with working fixtures! Yay us!

[Before: In its former life as Duplex, our master bathroom was the kitchen for the

upstairs apartment. It was nothing but gross and grungy. It gets great light, though.]

And here, for a collective sigh of relief, are two of the "close to the finishing line" shots

[Getting there: baseboard in place but not yet nailed and caulked]

There's very little that's not new. We have

new plumbing
updated electric
new subfloor
partially new drywall
new tile
fresh paint
new baseboards
new fixtures (sink, clawfoot tub and toilet)

The next item on my project list for this room was "frame door" so I investigated the design of our existing doors throughout the house and started poking around on the internet for pointers as to how to frame and trim out the door between our master bath and the adjoining dressing room. The nice thing about a historic home like ours is that you don't have to worry about perfect miter cuts.
While door and window casing is put together from more pieces than the average modern casing, it is cut at square angles and stacked rather than cut at intricate angles that require mega accurate measuring and cutting.
Lucky me!
I found this carpentry ebook online and found it rather helpful in learning to name the various parts of a door frame and how exactly things go together http://www.woodworking-online.com/chapter8/1.html. That's how I learned that a door jamb had to come first. The door jamb is the vertical inside portion of the frame onto which you secure your door.

I hopped over to the Blue Box and after browsing the aisles I decided to pick up this simple door jamb kit. It had all the pieces in the right amounts in the right widths which cut down on any unnecessary guesswork and measuring on my part. I -did- measure my door opening before going to the store, though, to make sure the jamb was wide enough. Live and learn, baby, live and learn.

Fortunately, I got to reap the rewards of having had great contractors build the wall and door opening. The existing door frame was plumb and level so all I really had to do (and did) was measure the length of each side, cut the 'legs' to the appropriate length, measure the space for the header and cut that one as well and then slide the whole frame into the opening and tapping it lightly with the hammer for a nice flush fit.

Tada! Our door way started looking like an actual door way right away, even though the casing aka the trim along the outside of the door frame was still missing. A handful of nails later we had a jamming jamb and were ready to move on to the actual casing. More on that tomorrow!