Yay! Light fixtures! (and trim!)

The big project this week has been trim. The dining room and kitchen have baseboards and door frames, and they're beautiful.



The living room and dining room will have the rosettes and fluting in the frames, in keeping with the history of the house. We're very happy with how it's all turning out.

We have crown molding in the kitchen along the top of the cabinets:



The new light fixtures were installed today. I didn't break down and buy a Restoration Hardware fan; Home Depot's website has a pretty good selection, and there was one that we both really liked, so we just got that one. It looks fantastic in the living room.

And here's the chandelier for the dining room, the pot rack/light for the kitchen, the light for the laundry room (which I LOVE), and the light for the half bath:





There's a light over the kitchen sink - love it:



And last are the two hallway lights:



They started putting the boards down in the living room today, too:

All this time I've been looking forward to having floors again, and it's the lighting that I just can't over how great everything looks - who knew you could get so excited over light fixtures?

Another lesson we've learned

We may as well live at Lowes, as much as time as we're spending there these days. Here's something we learned recently: don't pick out stuff after work, when you're tired and haven't eaten yet. It really clouds your judgment. We went back to Lowes this morning to return the two fans we bought. Turns out we don't need a fan with a light in the kitchen; we totally forgot we already have recessed lighting in there. And the living room fan? I just don't like it. We had dinner at Zuppa (seriously? Zuppa doesn't have a website? I guess the food's so good it doesn't need one) last night, and I remembered from the last time we went there how much I liked the ceiling fans. So now we need a fan in the kitchen without a light and something similar to the fans at Zuppa for the living room. Sounds simple, right? Not really. For the kitchen, we need a fan with short blades so that we don't get strobe light effect from the recessed lights. For the living room, as much as we love the fans at Restoration Hardware, which are quite similar to the ones at Zuppa, we just can't spend that much on a fan. At least not yet. I'll probably justify the expense later, after several unsuccessful trips to other stores. We are not pleased with the selection at Lowes, so we're on a mission.

We had other things to take care of at Lowes, so it just seemed like a good time to return the fans. We were short a light for the hallway, and we still needed a light to put over the kitchen sink. We also had to pick out hardware for the kitchen. So while we were looking at the lighting, again, but with fresher eyes, we decided to get something else for the hallway and the laundry room. So now we have to return more stuff. So that'll be a total of four items, so far, returned. And this is why you shouldn't pick out things for your house when you're tired and hungry; it just creates more work to do later.

In other news, we have floors in the dining room:

Yay! Floors! For real this time.

The new kitchen floor is down, but covered up mostly for the time being. Here's a sneak peek:

And the tile is down in the half bath and laundry room:




Our dining room floor should be down soon; we finally picked out something and have the boards ready to be installed.

We have some of the trim on the first floor; the doors have frames now:

And there's wainscoting on either side of the mantle:

All this trim will be fun to paint. One last thing from downstairs is our new sink:

Complete with a garbage disposal AND built-in soap dispenser. It's the little things that make me happy.

As for upstairs, they started framing our new bedroom and bathroom. Here's the ceiling:

A view of the bathroom from inside the bedroom (special appearance by Tanga):

And a view of the bathroom (and Tanga) from the hallway:

We went to Lowe's last night to buy all of the light fixtures and ceiling fans for the first floor; those should be installed next week. We also bought a new microwave to install above the stove. We're leaning toward buying all new appliances for the kitchen since the ones we're currently using aren't as pretty as brand new stainless appliances.

Yay! Cabinets!

Kitchen cabinets and counter tops are going in this week. We're very happy with what we picked out. The kitchen is starting to look the way we both had it pictured in our heads.


Here's a look at our new sink. We're also getting a garbage disposal, which I'm very excited about.

And it looks like we might get real floors soon, at least in one room. We've also got a big pile of moldings and baseboards and such.

Scrubbing Brick, or What I've Learned about Mosquitoes

We survived Hanna with just a drip. The roof was worked on last week before all the rain got here, but there was still one drip. Fortunately, Michael saw it coming and made preparations for it:

"What is that?" you may ask yourself. Why, it's a tarp suspended by twine nailed to the walls, of course. There's a hole cut in the middle of the tarp so that any water it catches will drain into the bucket. This was not Michael's first time setting up this contraption.

The ceiling underneath the stairs and in the second floor hallway have been torn down.



Our new $750 window was installed last week:

Here's what the old window looked like:

Much improved. Also, our new kitchen cabinets were delivered last week...

...and installation of the cabinets began today!


We've been cleaning up the brick in the living room, and it's starting to look pretty nice. The section above the mantel has not been cleaned yet, but both sections on either side of the fireplace have had one good scrubbing:

This is yet another thing that I cannot capture with a camera. In person, the cleaned sections look so much better. Speaking of cleaning brick, I would like to take the time to note that in cleaning up this brick, I have learned no matter what the conditions are, mosquitoes will find me, and they will feast. It's not surprising that all kinds of bugs get into the house; the doors are open a good portion of the day while work goes on, and the house isn't completely sealed off from the outside world (see the previous post about birds getting in). So I tend to get one or two mosquito bites after coming home and looking around downstairs at that day's work. However, I was dumbfounded when I discovered six bites on my left ankle alone after working on the brick Labor Day weekend. I had not bathed in close to two days, and I was covered in plaster dust. Yet that didn't stop the mosquitoes. So now I know that no matter the conditions, no matter how filthy I am, the mosquitoes find me just as sweet.

Yay! Air conditioning!

Yes, when we walked into the house this evening, it felt...different. It wasn't the same temperature inside the house as it was outside. It was a comfortable 73 degrees inside and not stuffy. Our new heating and cooling system is up and running!




We also have the new window for the dining room. Our new $750 window for the dining room, that is.

The mudding is still being done on the first floor, and that's about it for the first floor for now. Work on our new bedroom upstairs is coming along. We've finally decided on the layout for the new bathroom and closets upstairs, too. We'll have two closets, one on either side of the fireplace in the bedroom.


The picture above is the outline of one of the closets, to the left of the fireplace.

On the other side of the room, the new bathroom will be where the hallway and the wall used to be:

We'll have a little alcove between the wall of the bathroom and the door that leads to the balcony. We didn't want to lose the light from that door or the access to the balcony; we'd originally planned to have a walk-in closet in front of that door, with the bathroom next to it in the space where the hallway used to be.

A history lesson

I've been collecting bits and pieces of the house's and the neighborhood's history, and while there's probably a lot more information out there, here's what I've been able to find so far.

We refer to our neighborhood as Church Hill, but Church Hill is also made up of other smaller neighborhoods. According to the National Register of Historic Places, our house is in the Oakwood-Chimborazo District. It is bound by the Southern Railway tracks and East Broad Street on the south; North 30th and 32nd Streets, Melton Avenue, and the western edge of Oakwood Cemetery on the west; Nine Mile Road and the city line on the north; and the city line, North 39th Street, Crestview Road, and the eastern edge of Chimborazo Park on the east. The district's buildings are a mixture of Late Victorian, Queen Anne and Colonial Revival styles.

James Malone built our house in 1843, according to one source; another lists Richard Malone as the original owner. James Malone also owned land north of Leigh Street and east of 34th Street and several scattered blocks. All of the houses built before 1819 were demolished, making our house the oldest one in the district. The Malone house is a two-and-a-half story Greek Revival-style brick house. It has a side gable roof with a stepped parapet. Two chimneys are in each of the parapet ends. Two original gable front dormers flank a central pediment above the front entry. A Late Victorian cornice with a plain panel frieze and sawn brackets was added to the house. It was partitioned into two houses in the 1880s, as far as we can tell.

In 1965, the city conducted the Richmond Esthetic Survey and Historic Building Survey, in which our house was included. The remarks of the house include: "Handsome brick house largest in 'Shed Town'. Earliest example dated of step gable. Later extension in rear (wood) a curious structure which suggests the 1880s. Curious dormer enlargement, two-story porch and cornice are also later." The Library of Virginia has these records, which include a photo of the house from 1965, I assume. Since I need permission to use or reproduce these records, I'm not comfortable linking to them, but you can view these documents by going here and searching for "malone" to pull up the record of our house.

That's all I've been able to find using the Internet. I have to give credit to Michael's dad for finding the information about the Esthetic Survey and to Church Hill People's News for posting the information from the National Register of Historic Places.