More hidden treasure

Our house? Is disgusting right now. We finally got rain, and it's just as muggy inside as it is outside. And there's all the dust from the work they're doing in that one room upstairs - it just goes everywhere. There's plastic sheeting and a door to try to keep it contained, but there's just no stopping it. I should clean a small section of the kitchen floor and take a picture of the comparison, just so we can remember how dirty that floor is. But I really don't feel like it. So, downstairs, not a lot going on right now. We've got mud on the walls and ceilings to cover up the seams and nails in the sheet rock.

You get the idea. It pretty much looks the same everywhere on the first floor. One small thing, though, is the wall on the front of the house is whole again, sort of:

The section on the left had been bare for a while; we're leaving the plaster on the rest of the wall and not replacing it with sheet rock. We went over moldings, baseboards and door frames yesterday with the contractor. That was a little frustrating because all you've got to go by is a drawing to-scale of the profile; they all start to look the same after staring at the pictures. That whole budget things gets in the way, too. I don't even know what we decided to go with. It'll look great, though, I'm sure. Our kitchen cabinets and counter tops are supposed to go in next week, then floors the week after that. I cannot wait to use our new kitchen. Or, rather, I can't wait for Michael to use the new kitchen while I sit there and not feel gross because our new kitchen will not have a layer of dust over everything. Upstairs: more demolition. The laths are gone from the ceiling, and it now looks a lot like the ceiling on the first floor used to look:

And that wall is completely gone:

We're starting to see more of the layers of walls in this room. I've gone over the wallpaper; there's also some lovely wood paneling. We can also see the brick underneath everything in some places.

They tore out the baseboards, too:

Which leads me to some sort-of exciting news...they found more stuff behind the baseboards. These were also found near the fireplace, so they're covered in soot and are a little burned.

This looks like an invitation or a reply card to the Grand House Social at 109 East Clay Street on September 2, 1932. That's all I make of it.

A photograph; no idea who it is. There's nothing on the back or anything else found to indicate who this might be.

This is holiday greeting card of some sort, but it's about the size of a business card. It says (or what I can make out):

Day and night, rain or shine,
The telegraph messenger comes to your door,
Bringing glad tidings of loves ones afar;
Please remember him now with a half or dime

Through the hot sun's rays on Summer's days
...blasts of Winter's night
He comes with "...sh" and a smiling...
...him a su...ntial mite.

Merry Christmas. Happy New Year.

Compliments of the Season

Not sure what this is. I think it's made of wood; all it says on it is "Glee Club."

Jack of Diamonds. From a really old deck of cards?

A magazine, but I can't find the name or an issue date. It's probably from 1955, when Dorothy Dandridge was nominated for an Oscar (thanks, Wikipedia!).

An issue of the Richmond Times-Dispatch from December 12, 1954.

And a key.

This house is always full of surprises

Work has moved upstairs. I wish I'd known that more demo would happen today - I would've taken before pictures of the room they're working in. They started taking down the ceiling in one of the rooms on the second floor - the same room where they took out the wall a couple weeks ago. This is the same room that has had a giant hole in the ceiling for the last four years. Here's what the ceiling looks like now:

This room used to have a closet that I wish I'd gotten pictures of before they tore it down. It was poorly built and just plain ugly. The walls inside the closet had what looked and felt like really old wall paper:

Here's a close up of the design:


But it gets better. There are at least two layers of wall paper under the green one. As far as we can tell, there's a blue pattern and then a pick floral pattern:

This room is a mess right now, but I can't capture just how messy it is:

This room also housed the litter boxes, so we had to move those upstairs to the third floor, where everything else is already crammed - we'll see how that goes.

On a completely different note, they tore off the plaster of one of the walls on the first floor - this wall is the other side of the dining room, with the stairs just to the left of it as you walk into the house. The surprise? They discovered that the stairs used to be up against this wall:

So the stairs used to face the back of the house and must have gone up to a landing before the structure was partitioned. Our plan, for now, is to clean up this brick and white wash it - it'd be a nice tie-in to the exposed brick in the living room.

Floors and walls and ceilings, oh my

The big news this week is that we have new walls - they've been putting up sheet rock on the ceilings and walls on the first floor, and they're pretty close to being done.






That last picture is the kitchen; that's the pantry there in the middle. Here's a look at the ceiling, with the recessed lighting:

We picked out a floor for the kitchen. We decided to go with a fiberglass floor. We were able to take home a sample to see if we still liked it, and we do:

It goes very well with the laminate counter tops we picked out and the white cabinets. We'll need some color, though, probably in the form of a back splash. We'll probably use small white mosaic tiles in the laundry room and smaller black and white pattern tile in the half bath.

We will be able to use some floor boards from Caravati's in the front room...at a price of $10 a square foot. We still don't know what we'll use in the dining room. We're definitely going with hardwood, we just don't know what kind yet.

So my parents are coming to visit this weekend...they haven't seen the house yet. I'm a little nervous; they might drag me back home with them.

It's beginning to look a lot like a house

I've been lazy the last week, so I've got a lot to cover. Our house is starting to look like a real house again. They've taken out part of the wall between the kitchen and the laundry room; a new wall will go in its place, with the refrigerator in front of it. And they've put up the studs in the rest of the first floor, preparing to put up drywall next week.




There's been so much work that we won't be able to see once the new walls and ceilings go up. I've mentioned all the electrical work that's been done; here's a look at new plumbing on the first floor in the front room, for the new bathroom that will go directly above it on the second floor (more on that shortly).


The threshold between the front room and the middle/dining room needed some work; it needed more structural support, so here's what it looked like before it was fixed. This is looking up at the threshold, where we had just wooden beams supporting the brick:


And here's the after, supported by steel beams on three sides:


In the middle room, we have one oddly placed window. It's between the chimney and the wall shared with the front room. It's also an odd shape, tall and narrow, and is the only source of natural light in this room. Of course, just like everything else, it needs to be replaced. That's not surprising; just look at it:

They've taken it out, and we have a board in its place for the time being:

And that's about it for the first floor for now. They didn't want to start the drywall on Friday, so they moved upstairs and did a little work. I'll post pictures of the entire second floor eventually, but here are a few that I took before they demolished one of the walls upstairs. This is looking from the bottom of the stairs on the second floor and is directly above the entrance way on the first floor. The wall on the left is the wall they tore down. A new wall will go up farther to the left, and a closet and a bathroom will go in the space between the partition and the new wall.

The door leads to a small balcony, but since we're putting a closet in front of it, it will be sealed off. It needs replacing anyway (shocking). Here's a view of that wall from the other side:

This room will be a bedroom. We're using it for storage right now; all of our crap is shoved up against the other side. We'll be moving it out this weekend; most of the stuff is trash anyway. So here's what that wall looks like now:

The work done taking down the wall left a nice layer of dust over everything in this room and the kitchen, which is off to the right. The cats don't seem to mind, though, but their paws sure do get dirty. Kirin is gray, so it's hard to tell when she's filthy, but Tanga the orange tabby can't hide it so well:

Now that we have subfloors throughout the first floor and no access to underneath the house, we've the let the cats have free reign again. I never posted a picture of our system that kept them from getting downstairs. We originally just put up a large map at the top of the stairs, but Tanga isn't as fat as we thought and can fit through the railing on the side, so he would just jump down onto the stairs and make himself at home under the house. That is until the workers showed up and he couldn't get back upstairs. Anyway, after several attempts, we finally came up with something that prevented the cats from getting downstairs. Behold:

That's a door turned on its side and old framed posters lined up along the railing, plus the map at the top of the stairs. Stupid cats.

I mentioned last week that we were going to Lowe's to pick out some stuff. That was exhausting. It's hard enough to choose things when you need to stay within a budget, but picking out things that don't necessarily reflect our tastes because we want to be able to sell the house, ideally within a few years, makes it even more difficult. We don't want to spend too much money on something that we love but won't enjoy for very long. We don't want the house to look cheap either. Plus our tastes are very different from each other anyway, so we spent some quality time with Lowe's last Sunday. I think my feet still hurt from it.

We still need to pick out floors for the first floor. We're reusing original boards from the front room, but we're about 30 boards short to complete the room. The middle room will get new hardwood. We're still undecided about what to put in the kitchen. We thought we would just suck it up and put hardwood back there, too, but one of our friends pointed out that with all the appliances that use water in the kitchen, that might not be such a good idea. We're going to Caravati's today to see if they have boards to finish the front room, plus I've never been and would like to look around. I'd like to see what moldings they have; our house has door frames and windows like this:

It'd be nice to have that throughout the house. We're also going to a couple more flooring places. We've got a pretty big Saturday planned. I know this is exactly how Michael wants to spend his birthday.

Holy Crap, We've Got Subfloors

I'll save the subfloors for last; they've done a lot of other work this week. The water heater is in its permanent spot under the stairs in the new laundry room:

The electrician has been here all week, installing new outlets throughout the first floor. There are wires everywhere, too, which makes me very happy. Soon we'll be able to run more than one appliance on the same circuit at the same time! If you look closely, you'll see the new wires and outlets.





Here's what things looked like when I left this morning, the insulation piled in the front room:

And here's what the first floor likes now with...drum roll please...subfloors! Woohoo!



We're supposed to pick out the fun stuff for the kitchen this weekend: floors, counter tops, hardware, etc. So it's been a good week.