that brown house

We just got back from spending the evening putting a coat of primer on one wall of the bathroom:

The wood paneling was only just installed today, but we had to paint in a hurry because the toilet is due to be set tomorrow, which will make the wall much harder to get to.

The other news of the week is that we took down the masking tape from the dining room ceiling woodwork — and took down some paint with it. Some of the wall color also leaked under the edge of the tape in some places, so between that and the paintless spots we’ve got a bunch of touch-up to do.

The weekend started out frustratingly slowly. In spite of Tracy, Alex, and Charles coming by to help, just about all we got done on Saturday was getting the patches on the dining room walls sanded down and some plastic drop cloths and masking tape put up in preparation for painting. Tracy had the big success of the day: getting the last of the painted-shut windows to finally open.

We were able to get more done on Sunday. Sonya and Robert stopped by and helped put a coat of paint on the dining room walls and another coat on the ceiling:

We then moved on to putting a coat of paint in the kitchen, which turned out kind of scary:

The ceiling is really still white, not green! It must be a reflection in the picture. Anyway, the walls look better on the parts that got more paint on them, so we hope that another coat or two will make the whole thing look nice. If not, we can try a different shade.

As it got dark, we had time to get in one more coat on the dining room walls and ceiling. We will still need to do another pass around the woodwork to get the edges neat, but hopefully this takes care of the big surfaces.

In other news, the tile is almost all done in the bathroom, and it’s looking nice:

A couple of weeks ago, Steph mentioned that we were worried about whether we could get the electrical upgrades done before our homeowner’s insurance freaked out and cancelled our policy. The deadline continued to creep closer and closer and it was getting increasingly clear that we were not going to make it. But now we have an extension that gives us another two weeks, so it all ought to work out. Whew!

Meanwhile, the bathroom floor tile is coming along nicely:

First of all, the big exciting news: there is now some tile around the bathtub! I think it’s going to look great.

In our last episode, you may remember, we were preparing to do some more patching on the dining room wall that we had stripped all the wallpaper off of. I went over Thursday night and made a big mess of that, scooping on big blobs of spackle and then scraping almost all of it back off.

Saturday morning we were ready to give that another try. I went over to the hardware store and got a new jug of joint compound that did not make the quick-drying promises of the last stuff but fortunately was easier to work with. Steph fixed up the rough wall and patched up some seams in the painted-over wallpaper while I started masking the woodwork in the kitchen, and we both went around using more joint compound to fill in cracks where the woodwork didn’t quite meet up with the wall properly.

Then we were finally ready to do some painting in the kitchen. All the formerly-wallpapered walls and the wainscoting are now all nicely hidden behind primer and ready to repaint.

Sunday morning Steph had to get some stuff done at work so I went over to the house alone to sand down the patches in the dining room and clean up and mask the walls for painting.

The sanding all went fine, but things started going downhill with the cleanup, because the vacuum cleaner kept wanting to eat the plastic dropcloths. When the plastic dropcloths pulled off, it revealed that we shouldn’t have tried to fill the cracks after masking because we got masking tape trapped under the spackle, and digging the tape out opened the cracks back up. And then I discovered that there was no way to mask a clean line at the top of the wall because the previous paint and wallpaper slopped up onto the molding in a bunch of places, and not even by the same amount everywhere. We had done everything in the wrong order.

Steph came over to reassure me that it was all going to be OK, that we could refill the cracks that reopened, and that we could repaint the molding after we finished the walls to get a clean edge. She then discovered that more of the old wallpaper was pulling away above the fireplace, revealing cracks behind, and before long we had a big new area of wall stripped of some layers of wallpaper and needing to be patched up again.

Nevertheless the wall by the windows was still in a condition suitable for priming, so we got a layer of paint onto it and scraped down the wall over the fireplace to a point where we ought to be able to patch it back into shape.

Steph went back to work, and I made another quick trip to the hardware store to return the backup wall sconces we had bought for the bathoom before finding ones that we really wanted. And I think that’s about it for this weekend.

Last night we did some more sanding and patching in the dining room and kitchen in preparation for painting the walls. The part of the dining room where we stripped all the layers of wallpaper off is still lumpy, so we’re going to try putting on some more joint compound there to see if we can get a level surface.

Meanwhile the bathroom seems to be coming along pretty well. Here is the new shower plumbing:

and there are more pictures of other walls that have been torn open or patched back together on flickr.

i’ve been pretty frazzled the past week. i have a fairly significant deadline creeping up on me at work that is demanding more attention than i want to devote to it, i’ve been taking long “lunches” to meet with contractors at the house, and i still need to attend to my responsibilities toward my mother…and she’s been extra moody lately because so much of my attention has been devoted elsewhere. this all came to a head saturday morning when she made a few remarks that lead to our whole little household having hurt feelings.

i was still quite emotional when we got to the house, so instead of just sticking with our plan of priming the kitchen walls, i started listing all the flaws in our plan and griping that covering the counters and cabinets with plastic, etc. would probably be in the electrician’s way (since he had started on the work he is doing for the kitchen, but didn’t seem to be done in there). i just needed to vent, but somehow my venting lead to a decision to paint the dining room. the dining room, like the kitchen and, well, much of the house, has painted over wallpaper, but we had previously discussed leaving it for the time being and just painting over the ivory to get some color in the room (most of the room is woodwork painted white, which we are currently leaving that way). so eric went to buy the paint (dockside blue) while i stayed behind to start masking the walls. i started with the fireplace mantle. the wallpaper overlapped the mantle and had these little jagged edges, so i started trying to “clean up” the joint, then i started picking at little edges of wallpaper above the window, and then i accidentally-intentionally ripped off some wallpaper.

so instead of making anything look better, we spent saturday stripping dining room wallpaper and making the room look worse! the kicker is how many layers of wallcovering we discovered: paint, then wallpaper, then at least two more colors of paint, then two layers of wallpapers (one an old textured wallpaper), then a layer of some sort of dusty plaster (?) coating, then scarlet red paint, then the plaster. wow. in some areas we went down through all the layers, but mostly we just removed the top layer of (poorly applied) wallpaper and paint. we washed the walls with tsp and applied fiberglass tape and joint compound to a few cracks before calling it a day.

today we had afternoon plans, so there wasn’t enough time for patching and sanding the dining room walls or priming the kitchen, so we treated ourselves to our first dose of color: we painted the ceiling between the box beams! even though it will probably need a second coat, it was so very exciting to do something that when we were done resembled what it should/will look like completed! i think we really needed that…it’s made me feel much better, at least.

our bathroom is naked! the awful shower stall has been removed (it’s in pieces in the driveway, but having it out of the house is a big step in the right direction) as have the toilet, lavatory, and the lower 54″ of wall finish! we’re so excited that we took 70+ photos of the wall studs, pipes, and drains…in the dark. no, seriously. the flash worked impressively well, but i’ll spare you a photo montage here. we will probably add a few photos to flickr however.

on the other hand, the electrician saying that he’d be back today was obviously an april fool’s prank…sigh. i wouldn’t be too concerned about his schedule except that we’ve been given notice by the homeowners’ insurance that we need proof of the (completed) service upgrade to not have our policy terminated and the clock is ticking. i was so freaked out about this when we first got the notice that i couldn’t write about it, but we seem to have the situation under control…i’ll just be very relieved when the work is done and the insurance stress is gone.

through the power of the internet eric and i have ascertained that the light fixtures i posted about yesterday are by markel lighting - new england electrical supply, of boston, mass. somebody selling a brightly painted version of one on ebay dated it to the 1920s. i found light fixtures like those from two of the bedrooms in a markel catalog from the 1930s (original price $2.10), but the style of the more ornamental fixtures in that catalog had evolved such that i’m confident ours are from at least the mid-20s, if not earlier. based on markel catalog descriptions, it is entirely possible that the paint is original to the fixtures; one of the finish options for cast fixtures is ivory paint with gold or pewter painted accents. i know, gasp! we’ve found three for sale, all with a pan that looks like our dining room fixture. all describe it as “cast art deco…” but none say if it is cast steel or iron and all three of the ones for sale are suspended while ours is flush to the ceiling. two have been repainted in victorian revival colors and the other, amazingly, is ivory with gold paint in the places ours has silver paint:

so this introduces a few new decisions. the debate in my head has moved from plated vs. painted to restore vs. refresh. i like the idea of restoring and/or preserving aspects of the house that don’t hinder modern convenience & safety, but neither of us find the fixtures terribly attractive in their current semi-restored state. does the hypothesis that they were originally painted somehow validate the concept of re-painting them?

i’m leaning toward painting over plating because i think i can make them coordinate nicely with the cast iron heating grille we ordered and with whatever cabinet hardware we get for the built-in. i’m not much of a fan of brass or bronze and nickel doesn’t seem to go with this type/age of fixture. a pewter finish would be nice with our intended decor (i’m designing the dining room to coordinate with my mother’s dishes: white with a wedgewood blue pattern and silver trim.) plating in chrome, nickel and brass seem most readily available, though there also appear to be options for gold, silver, copper, tin, etc.

after meeting with the electrician yesterday afternoon, i’m even more confident that opting to rewire the entire house is the right decision. none of the existing receptacles that he has removed so far have been in boxes, some of the wires were literally crumbling, the heavy light fixtures that i’ve been describing were only being held up by the lathe strips for the plaster (no wood blocking)…eep.

as far as electrical work progress is concerned, all there is to see so far are the new receptacle boxes in the baseboard in the living room and dining room (but with the new wire poking out!). the outlets existing in the house are placed horizontally in the baseboard. we’re continuing this trend in the living and dining room (for aesthetics), but installing vertical outlets elsewhere.

the electrician isn’t working monday, but tuesday there should be a full house since the bathroom contractor is slated to start tuesday or wednesday. exciting!

the electrical work started yesterday. we stopped by the house after dinner to marvel at all the coils of wire in the dining room and pick up the light fixtures that are original to the house that we want to clean up, fit with new sockets and wiring, and have reinstalled. there wasn’t much else to see (in the dark with all the light fixtures gone). the electrician spent much of yesterday afternoon trying to get the new service coordinated with pg&e (pacific gas & electric)…even though he wants to recess the new panel in the exterior wall, pg&e wants two bollards in front of it…in our neighbor’s driveway. if we put the panel on the other side of the house, we’d need bollards in our driveway which is only 8 feet wide to start with, so we’d probably not be able to park in our driveway if we add bollards. the neighbor’s driveway is about 20 feet wide and where the bollards would be would technically be on/at the edge of our property, but in their concrete. it seems like they’d still have ample room to park, but they’ve been really nice so far and we don’t want to piss them off…especially since we are going to need to be encroaching on their driveway and yard when we replace the shingles, work on the foundation, etc.). anyway, will (the electrician) is still trying to negotiate something, so we’ll see.

so we picked up some of the fixtures. here’s a “before” photo of the fixture in the center of the dining room:

it looks like a brass fixture that needs a good cleaning, right? at least, that is what i thought. so will removed it from the ceiling and eric & i took it home and removed the old electrical bits so that we could clean it up. it is heavy and was filthy! cleaned up, however, it is not even remotely what we expected:

yes, at some point in time they were painted beige and silver. ick. we could see what looks like antique brass where the paint has chipped off, but more likely they are brass-plated (then painted) steel (a magnet will stick to it). we scrubbed that dark spot on the smaller fixture (which was in the foyer) and it looks very much like steel, so i’m not confident we’ll be able to strip the paint off and keep the brass in tact.

i’m not sure where i want to go from here. we should probably try stripping the paint first, and i suppose we could look into having them re-plated, but neither of us want them to be new shiny brass…so more spray paint? i’m afraid they will loose all their definition and detail if i paint them…decisions, decisions, decisions.

…was written in the warning label on the tin of paint stripper. in other words this product was not intended for us. we bought it anyway. then we proceeded to spend easter sunday playing with toxic chemicals and chatting with neighbors. we did, however, start the day with easter baskets & homemade biscuits and end the day having dinner with friends…thank goodness the days are getting longer…too bad that means the nights are getting shorter…more sleep would be good.

anyway, we had another busy weekend of running around getting and doing odds & ends, but not accomplishing anything monumental. here’s what has been accomplished since the last post:

• the heating contractor stopped by and adjusted the dining room duct so that the register fit properly, reimbursed us for the two registers we ordered (we wanted semi-period ones for the living & dining room and didn’t like the ones in the contractor’s catalog), installed a filter to keep pet fluff out of intake grille (we kept the brass grille from the 1940s floor heater as our intake), and gave us the permit. we’re not having the heating inspected until the electrical work associated with the heating system is done.
• the electrical contractor pulled the permit for the electrical work. he was supposedly starting today, but when i popped by at lunchtime it didn’t look like anyone had been working. last night eric and i walked through the house contemplating what we would need to plug in where and left a trail of post-it note memos in our path. hopefully, our electrician doesn’t think we’re psycho. most of the memos are about which light fixtures we are keeping and which we are replacing (and what they are being replaced with), so i think it’ll be fine.
• we have yet to purchase all the light fixtures on our shopping list (if i could afford to buy everything from rejuvenation, we’d probably be done, but finding fixtures that both of us like in the right finishes that are within our hazily defined budget that also coordinate with whatever existing condition/fixture/hardware/etc. that we are trying to coordinate with is a quest) but we did pick up two of the three 1920s schoolhouse style fixtures we had ordered from berkeley lighting (the other won’t be in until late april!?!), returned the sconces that didn’t fit my cala lily glass shades, and purchased some vaguely craftsman/mission style exterior lights for the front and back door. mom scoffs at pictures of any fixtures designed to be reminiscent of the period/style of the house and seems to only like neo-colonial fixtures that, while attractive for a formal dining room in a colonial home, would look out of place in her bedroom. sigh.
• we picked up the new pedestal sink and (part of) the new toilet (there was a snafu with the order that should be correct by the end of the week) and purchased a eco-toilet (half flush to save water) for the quarter bath. we forgot to buy a wax ring, so we haven’t tackled actually replacing the toilet yet…
• we removed all the gummy-with-paint hardware from the bathroom door, including removing the bathroom door from it’s hinges (which are now boiling away to get the paint off) in preparation for rehanging the door and adjusting it to close and latch properly.
• we bought a tool to turn the water on and off at the point of connection
• eric stripped paint (and mold) off the wainscoting behind the stove (fun with chemicals!) while i did some general clean up and started washing the kitchen walls with TSP (more fun with chemicals!). then eric finished the walls while i attacked the rust(?) stains on the tile counter tops. the rust stains aren’t gone, but with several liberal doses of CLR, they are noticeably faded (and the grout in those areas is really clean), so maybe there is hope for eradicating them. in any case, i think we are finally ready to tape and prime the kitchen walls & trim. we don’t want to paint any of the finish wall colors before the electrician is done poking at the walls, but i’d like to get it done with time to air out before we move in (and no, i’m not using low VOC paint in either the kitchen or bath because i want “washable” walls…this is another reason why i want these areas done before we move in, despite the fact that the kitchen really won’t be *done* for quite awhile).
• i’m very into spray paint right now. i used to hate it and i may regret my current trend of “refreshing” dingy misc. hardware with it, but i decided that since i’m stuck with it for awhile, i’d try to clean up and spray paint the dorky crooked duct that attaches to the wedgewood stove. i figure i can’t make it look too much worse. right?
• i also bought enough sheer fabric to make a curtain with a pocket rod on both ends for the front door and either a matching curtain for the living room window or curtains for the side lights…now to find time for a sewing project…

so, i think that pretty much sums up what we’ve been up to with the house the past few days.