I know, I know, we've been remiss about blogging about our project - I can't believe it's been 3 months since I last posted an update. But the intervening months have been busy, busy, busy. And with the arrival of those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer, yours truly simply hasn't felt like sitting at the computer on weekends. Not that I've been outside cultivating our gardens, oh no.
Please permit me to whine a bit here about our summer thus far - basically it has been hotter than hades and so humid that we've run the A/C practically ALL summer!!! Hello, if I'd wanted hot and humid weather I certainly wouldn't have moved to Wisconsin.
In the 19 years that we've lived up here, I thought that the bargain struck by the early settlers with the weather gods was that we would endure miserably cold, snowy, gray winters that last for ten months and then we would have 8 glorious weeks of dry, sunny 70 degree days and evenings that were cool enough that you just might want a light blanket on the bed.
OK, maybe 8 weeks of WI summer is overstating things a bit - one of my Kentucky cousins maintains that our summers up here last 3 weeks...and he may well be correct because I can remember many a rainy cold June when we turned on the furnace in the evenings to take the chill off the house. But even if shortlived, summer up here is usually glorious - the payback for suffering through winter.
But I digress from the topic at hand: Ellen and Steve's Remodel Project and how did it all turn out.
Since our last post in early May, the tile guy and Steve the plumber were the first to finish up their areas of responsibilities. The third week of May, we went on our annual Kentucky sojourn to visit family and friends. While we were gone, Evolving Wood Floors sanded and applied the 2 coats of polyurethane to the new bedroom, new hallway, old hallway and old staircase and landing.
Poor Molly the Cat was sequestered in the family room with access only to the kitchen and the basement nether regions where her litter pans reside. We used the huge, unopened Pottery Barn boxes that contained the vanity mirrors to block both the doorway to the living room and the doorway to the dining room.
When we came back home, our favorite feline was no where to be found and wouldn't come when we called. We finally found her in the crawl space under the family room, perched on some rolled up rugs, glaring resentfully at her feckless owners. Steve actually had to crawl up and bring her out. She forgave us quickly, especially when she saw that she could have full run of the house again. Sheesh, as Queen-Of-All-She-Surveys, her humans should realize that they reside here only at HER pleasure.
The final week of May found Jason finishing up the old west facade; all the other trades were gone. So now we could remove rosin paper from the floor and return the rest of the house to normalcy.
But the remaining work to be done was ALL Steve's:
- doors to be hung, then taken down and stained;
- bathroom pocket door to be installed, then taken down and stained and painted;
- windows to be trimmed/painted;
- baseboard and shoe molding to be installed/painted;
- mirrors and towel bars to be installed in bathroom; and
- trimming the gaps where the stair treads had separated from the risers since the staircase was constructed 80 or so years ago.
We started on the staircase. We'd painted the risers "Linen White" years ago, but the sanding process had really bunged up the paint. And the existing paint was oil-based. Ugh. Because of the close work required for this, I was assigned this painting project (Steve still had his cataract at this point). It took an entire afternoon to just tape off all the surfaces! But the results are stunning, if we do say so ourselves!
The view down the stairs:
The view up the stairs:
And the landing:
Steve spent almost 2 weeks trying to stain the doors, to no avail. Solid wood, they were not cheap, but the wood was fir. And fir does not like stain. At all. Finally, after consulting with others who had attempted to stain fir, we decided that it was time for another of those compromises that one has to make in order to survive a remodeling project. We would paint all the doors in the new part of the house. As a transplanted southerner, where painted woodwork and doors are a way of life, I've always loved that look anyhow.
Of course the poor spousal unit had to strip all the stain off of the pocket door (with its fluted glass insert - nasty work) and the linen closet door before he could paint them. Fortunately, the garage didn't afford enough space for him to work on more than 2 doors at a time, so the double closet doors were spared the stain experiment. And the double entry doors to the bedroom hadn't arrived yet and so were untouched by stain as well.
Here are the stained/stripped/painted linen closet door and the painted double closet doors:
We reused the original glass door knobs on both of these closets, but had to buy reproduction glass knobs for the other doors.
We decided that, since the doors for the washer/dryer closet were in the existing hallway where all the other doors opening into other rooms were stained, we would pay an expert to stain those double doors. The painter (who more accurately should be called an artist) had to apply a faux grain finish to achieve the stained wood effect. Amazing job (but not cheap - cost was prohibitive to even think about letting him have-at the others):
We actually have Martha Stewart in both the linen closet and double clothes closets in the new bedroom. No, Martha is not in the closet herself, rather we used her modular closet kits from Home Depot. Steve determined that it was actually cheaper to buy her kits than for him to stick-build shelves and poles. Here is the linen closet:
And here is the clothes closet - as you can see, this closet still holds some project paint cans and the like - we have some touch-up painting yet to do:
So, thus endest part 1 of The Grand Finale. More to come, I promise. And you won't have to wait 3 months for the next installment!
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