The Dining Room

6/1/2004-3/31/2010

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6/1/2004       With the kitchen almost finished we've started a little work in the dining room area.  This room should be child's play compared to the kitchen with a much lower budget.  We've decided to go with a Tuscany vineyard theme so here's all we have to do:
     Clear the room.
     Strip the old wallpaper off.
     Repair four area of drywall, one of which is where a window is being removed.
     Paint a mural on the ceiling.
     Install the new silver chandelier.
     Install all of the dental crown moldings, baseboard moldings, wainscoting, chair rails, and corner beading.
    Rework any necessary electric lines.
    Apply a knock-down finish to the walls and paint them purple.
    Clean and Polyurethane the floors.
    And that's it!  That's all we have to do and then we'll have a beautiful dining room we can be proud of.  Remember I said those words:  That's all we have to do.
    Kid's stuff.  Child's play.
6/2/2004     While I am wrapping up the kitchen, Beth has been taking care of prepping the dining room by removing the wallpaper.  This was supposed to be a fairly simple plan but she discovered that the ceiling was also papered with a light, gauzy covering that easily steamed away in long, flowing strips with almost no effort.  Beneath that was another layer that must have been applied with barnacle glue.
     She also unearthed a new type of wallpaper that we hadn't yet encountered, a simple and somewhat tasteful pinstripe pattern that was probably used for a short time and then covered over simply because it was simple and tasteful.
6/18/2004      The walls are all stripped as is the ceiling.  Beth discovered that there were two layers of wallpaper up there, a faux texture layer probably put on to mask the imperfections time was causing as well as a glittered layer. Removing them has made it apparent that the ceiling has settled from sheer weight leaving the ceiling somewhat wavy, high at the joints where it is screwed in and sagging in the middle.  I've begun filling it the depressions with joint compound and when this is finished Beth will prime it so that she can take a shot at airbrushing in a sky mural.
6/25/2004     The kitchen is still being fine tuned but the good news is that dining room ceiling is almost like new and, better news, the official web domain we bought for this project is almost up and running.  
     As far as actual work goes for today?  Beth and I celebrated our 4th anniversary yesterday and we're just too tired to do anything.  We had absolutely the worst meal at Ruby Tuesday in Charlestown, West Virginia and then hit the casino until midnight.  We lost more than we won so all in all it was a tragic day other than the fact that our marriage is as great as ever.
7/11/2004      The dining room is underway.  Beth is learning to use the airbrush and is painting the sky mural.  The molding and wainscoting installation is beginning.  So far the artwork makes the room look even larger.  We are looking forward to completing this room by the end of this month (July '04). 
7/15/2004      I was surfing the Internet looking for other sites like our own and stumbled across a site that made me ill.  It was created by a woman who was ever so impressed with the Victorian she and her hubby had purchased and were now renovating.  The house was spectacular and needed a little paint here and there but that was about it.
     As I perused her website I began feeling more and more irritated at her flagrant use of the word 'renovated'.  Her before-and-after shots looked almost identical other than wall colors.  There was no mention of so much as filling a nail hole with painter's putty and I got the distinct feeling that she was one of those mindless morons that would no doubt refer to herself as a Renovation Diva if given the opportunity.
     I just wanted to punch her lights out.
7/19/2004     If we'll ever get our replacement chandelier and finish up the French doorway the dining room will be 100% finished.  I've been going nuts working on the latter.  It seems the edge of the French doors landed right on the air vent so I had to move that up the wall and then insert a floor plank where there was nothing when the doorway was cut through.  That's all finished so the next step is to build the framing and then hang the doors.  They won't fit and I refused to cut away anymore support beams (smart, huh?) so we have to trim the doors down and inch or so each.
7/24/2004     10:25 AM..... Fleas.
     We have discovered that we are infested with fleas.  They haven't been bothering Beth or me and since Christina is in Florida she hasn't even been here to notice but it's in her room.  The animals have been acting strangely and avoiding that area of the house.  I went in there this morning to remove her bedding and was literally swarmed by the little monsters.  This means I have to do a fast porch screening job so that we can toss the cats out there and then bomb the house for 4 hours.  All of that will be followed up with flea baths for each critter.
     So much for getting the French doors up today.
     2:30....Okay, this is what happened....
    I built a temporary screening for the mud room so that we could store the cats outside while we bombed the house.  I then gave each of the cats a flea bath and put them out in the newly screened-in mud room.
     Nash, the brat of the two, made a mad dash into the house.  We looked everywhere and finally, with the use of a compact mirror and a flashlight, we found him under the floorboards hiding.  I beat the floor with hammers to scare him out but he just ran off in the skeleton of Our Victorian (Grrr!) and our plans are now temporarily interrupted.
     6:30PM....Nash is still MIA so we're calling the bombing off and letting our very confused other animals back inside.
7/25/2004      12:30PM.....We have trapped Nash and Keokie and they have been bathed and stored in the mudroom.  We are about to set off 15 bombs in 3,300 square feet of space, perhaps three times what D-CON calls for but that's okay.  We are setting off 5 of them in the basement alone because I saw a spider down there.
     5:30PM....We're back and have opened the windows to air the place out.  We killed 4 hours in some Leesburg, Virginia antique shops.  Cool little town and we highly recommend it.  I have to go noww.  The're ar still fumes in heer and I feel funy.
    10:30PM....Got home, let the cats in, bathed the dog.  What a pathetic waste of a weekend as far as renovating goes. 
     Still, some of this house's virtues are its neighboring areas.  I have to admit it was a blast taking our time and hitting those shops.  We ate dinner at a killer rib joint and while the house aired out we also rolled through the casino and we won $300.
     And now we live in a bug-free home.  I guess the weekend went okay after all.
11/16/2005      Almost a year and a half later, I'm now repainting the dining room a nice eggplant color.  It looks better but it's a lot of work and is only being done for aesthetic reasons.  We have to be careful about backtracking.  It wastes a lot of time even if the results do look terrific.
3/24/2010      More than four and a half years later, I'm in the dining room again.  The boards I used for wainscoting have since warped, and separated so badly that the dining room had become less than impressive.  Beth is in Florida visiting her 2 year-old granddaughter Maya, so I decided to take advantage of her absence by ripping out all the old stuff, and putting up a better material.  I did most of the work today.  I came up short one length of the wainscoting, so it's off to Home Depot to buy one more sheet plus a ton of boards I'll need to create a custom molding for capping this new thinner material.  I'll probably have to replace the top and bottom caps to do this the right way, so I'll need to fashion 150 feet of whatever I decide to create.  Incidentally, if you're new to this website you may want to look through the other areas.  I don't buy moldings anymore.  I've become much more skilled since that last set of entries through all my work on the rest of the house.
     I'll probably drag the floor sander downstairs from the work being done in Beth's Dressing Room, and sand here and there when I need a change of pace.  Multitasking is the best!  By tomorrow night I hope to have the first coat of Polyurethane down.  If all goes well I should have the second coat down by Friday night.  This will give it three days to dry before I put the furniture back into the room.  Beth will be home on Wednesday, so that will give me an extra day to work on the Guest Room Closet in peace.  I've found that I get very distracted when anyone else is around when I'm working.
     By the way, Jasmine died since those last entries.  A couple of years later, we picked up Sasha and Rogue, a wonderful pair of Golden Retrievers.  Nash doesn't like them, and stays upstairs most of the time.  Keokie acts like she dislikes them, but she really doesn't.
    I'll post some pictures in this page's photo section when the work is completed.
3/25/2010      6:54am... Got up early to the overpowering stench of a puppy accident wafting through the house.  I have a hyperactive sense of smell, and something like this can actually wake me up.  Beth usually handles these matters, so I was forced to clean it up.  I gagged my way through it.  I suppose it was a small blessing that it was on the dining room floor where it's currently a nice open area.
     Game plan: I hit Home Depot last night, so today I'll put up the final pieces of wainscoting, and then make the moldings I need.  once they're in place I'll begin moving the appliances from the kitchen, and then the sanding will begin.  Beth wants it right down to the wood, so this may take a while.
     8:42pm... What a day!  I created all the moldings, hung them, caulked them and cleaned up my work area.  I then moved the fridge (had to remove the doors, and the food) into the library (where I had to reassemble everything.)  Had to move the stove, too.  The library is currently impassible.
     Beth wanted the floors sanded down to the raw wood (such faith in my skills!), and this required a trip to the Home Depot.  I brought Sasha and Rogue along so they could bite some air on the way there, and back.  Sasha's a total freak about it.
     Picked up my stuff, sanded the floors mostly to the wood, and will hand-sand the edges tomorrow.  I don't mean like "Karate Kid" hand-sand.  I'll be using a freaking arsenal of power sanders, trust me.  Half my day will be spent hauling sanders around unless I happen to hit on just the right one.  I'll try the orbital first, but my belt sander will be next in line.
     I've only used this belt sander once.  Truthfully?  I'm scared to death of the damned thing. This monster has the most powerful imaginable action, its initial forward thrust so determined that it could possibly dislocate its user's shoulder.  It could probably sand a small car down to a pile of mixed dust in less than an hour.
      If the floor is lucky the orbital will do the trick.
3/28/2010      It's taken a lot of work, but the floors have been stripped, and I put down two coats of Fabulon Primer II followed up with Fabulon Finish.  While the floor itself took one hell of a beating over the years, the sanders effectively removed every last speck of oxidized wood, and that's the big bonus I was hoping for.  Oxidized wood creates dust.
    The biggest obstacle I faced was getting under the counters in the kitchen where I only had a few inches of clearance.  None of my machines could reach, so I want back to basics, and spent around 5 hours applying and scraping away a powerful stripping liquid.  It worked, but the labor was intensive.  I just couldn't bring myself to not put out the effort, and settle for a half fast job with dark areas all around the kitchen counters.
    The chemical odors from the Fabulon were unbelievably strong, and I had to get out of the house for a few hours while it cured.  It was awful,  In fact, I still feel a little dazed from them.  While Fabulon is a remarkable product, these odors are probably quite dangerous.  The upsides are these:
    - No 72 hour waiting period for furniture. Fabulon cures in only 24 hours.
    - Less scratching incidents from the dogs.  This is the same product used in bowling allies.
    - Easier application.
    Well, I suppose I should get my act together.  It's Sunday, so if I can get the second coat down by noon, I can start getting the house cleaned up tomorrow at about the same time.  This will give me two days for a total cleaning, and I'll need the time.  It's a real mess right now, and the last thing Beth will want to come home to will be a dusty, disorderly home.  That can wreck a vacation in about ten minutes.
3/30/2010     The floor is done, and the big clean up started yesterday.  Today is Tuesday, and Beth will be at BWI airport at 9:00 am.  That means I have about 12 possible hours of cleaning ahead of me, nowhere near the amount of time needed, but if I can get it somewhat decent looking I think everything will be okay.  Beth said, "If the floor is done, and you can make a walkway through the place so I'm not tripping over everything I'll be happy."
    I'm holding her to that statement. In the future, if she has a single complaint about anything, and I mean anything, I'll be sure to fling her words back at her.  It would be too easy for her to say, "Hey, I'm feeling a little down today.  We should do something fun together", at which point I would say, "You've already had your shot at being happy, babe. Deal with it."
    This is why we have such a great marriage.  We keep it real.
3/31/2010       The countdown is just about over as Beth will be home this evening.  I let myself sleep in today so I have about 5 hours to do any last chores, which will include shampooing the rugs, and doing a thorough spring cleaning in the kitchen.  Anything else will just be a bonus.  Some of the main floor rooms are completely cleaned up, so my hope is that she'll walk in, and notice those, not the bad ones.
     I'm just tired.  It's been a tough week.  Other than posting some new pictures on the photo page, this should be the final entry for this room.  If you happen to be following the chronology of this website, I should be back up in the Guest Room #2 Closet for a while when I leave here.