The Living Room

5/10/2004-7/30/2009

Click here for photo page

5/10/2004

     The living room has taken priority over the dining room for two very good reasons.  First, the dining room can't be worked on until the kitchen is finished.  Too much stuff piled up in there.  Second, the living room includes the grand staircase and so while the living room itself isn't exactly free of clutter, the stairs are.  We therefore have opted to begin stripping the wallpaper off in our free time and hope to soon have it painted.  The odds are that it will be the first completed area.  It's a small step but a happy one.
     To all of you potential Victorian restoration artists I have some strong advice: get yourself a steam machine for removing old wallpaper.  The one we bought was around $50 at Lowe's and it plows through to the bottom layers in seconds.
     An interesting thing happened as I was clearing off the wallpaper at the landing.  I started seeing words written on the bare plaster beneath 3 layers of old paper.  It read:
"Dec. 12, 1957......Cat 2 and B.U.S.T.......Paper Hanger for the Heat....1957....1957"
     We have no idea what it means but I found it interesting that someone wrote it, never dreaming that a kid born two years after it was written would own the house 47 years later and be stripping away their handiwork.  For all we know the 'paper hanger for the heat' is now about 70 years old and still living in this town.
     I just find it interesting when we stumble across things like this.
5/11/2004      Beth is still asleep at this late hour of 10:00 am and so I went ahead and knocked out all the detail drywall work in the kitchen.  I'm sitting here while the steamer heats up so that I can finish removing the wallpaper from the stairwell.  I may even get on one of my manic jags and go right through the living room.  It would be such a kick to be able to paint it before this weekend but the realist in me knows that won't happen.
     We agreed that Eddie Bauer 'Suede' is a good color for that room.  It's a soft, yet rich earthy color that should look nice with the stone fireplace.
5/18/2004      Our progress has slowed down because my regular job has picked back up.  This has two advantages.  First, it's a good thing to have money coming back in again.  I loved having a week off and we accomplished quite a bit but income is pretty important at this point.  Second, it gave Beth a chance to start getting us caught up in the clean-up department.  The dust was beginning to accumulate in drifts.
6/18/2004     We ordered the new windows for this room as well as the den and guest room.  The kitchen windows (24X36") were $225 each and so we were ready to take a huge hit on the other rooms because they measure 30X60" and we need 7 of them.  What a pleasant surprise to discover they were only $150 each!  The guy at Lowe's said, "This can't be right", but we just told him to punch it in and he did.  Yahoo!  Windows for three rooms for only $750!
9/25/2004      Spent most of the day converting an antique armoire into an entertainment center.  Looks nice but I wired it wrong or something.  Still, it's very nice watching TV from a big sofa instead of the crappy old chairs we have in the parlor.
10/14/2004      We've been scraping, steaming and patching the walls of the living room.  The old wallpaper is quite an adversary and is putting up a real fight.
10/17/2004     One wall down, three to go...plus one ceiling. Plus three window installations.
    But, hey!  Our front door now has a deadbolt on it.  That's at least something.
10/22/2004      It's getting there.  Much easier to work on this room than any of the others but it's just so huge that it's taking us a while.  Beth has been scraping off wallpaper and is making great progress.  I'm focusing on the stairway.  It needs a lot of work but is shaping up very quickly.
11/14/2004      A wedding in Boston plus a particularly nasty strain of a virus that has been going around really knocked our schedule to pieces.  At this point we've painted the ceiling and the painting part of the stairway's renovation is finished but it still needs to have old paint scraped off the woodwork.  Not much, just some splatters and blotched from the previous tenants. 
    The North and East walls are coming along and have their color, which is a nice olive green, but the trim has yet to be tackled.  The wall at the front of the house (South) has been stripped and I've started plastering it while Beth has moved onto the East. 
     Our goal of installing the new windows before winter just isn't going to happen this year because it's gotten too cold and we can't risk yanking out a window and being forced to do structural work should we find rotted wood.  We've instead put up plastic sheeting to help retain the heat and that will have to do until later.  We're settling on having the walls plastered and painted so that the room looks nice for the holidays.
     On top of all of that, the roof has a huge hole in it and the insulation in the cellar is another ongoing project that absolutely must be addressed.
11/17/2004      The living room is down to the final stages as far as 2004 goes.  It should look terrific within about one week's time.
     Beth has begun work on the library, too.
11/22/2004      It's done.  I can't believe it's actually finished.  Oh sure, there's a small punch out list of things to do on a rainy day but every room has one of those so we're not worried about it.   And there are those three windows to install next spring but that's not really a big deal at all, trust me.   All we care about is that the living room is now livable and we can go work on the other side of the house.
     What did that take?  35 days or so?  With days off and actual labor hours tallied up I'm guessing it only took us about 10 or 12 days total.  Add in the trips to Lowe's and I'd guestimate it took about 34 days.  Close enough.  Time to move on.
12/05/2004      The fireplace works just great and we roasted marshmallows this evening.
5/26/2005      I find it so amusing when we have to get back into a room we had previously considered finished.
     Ha ha.....ha ha ha.
    Since that last entry, our wonderful fireplace did indeed serve us well.  It also had a chimney fire, which scared the living hell out of us and we haven't used it since.  At least the bats seem to have vacated the outside wall.
    We've now decided to put some fancy moldings above the mantle and give the mantle a facelift.  It's all in the photo section if you want to see it.  It actually looks pretty good but I'll still feel better once we've had a chimney sweep out here to get it right for the coming winter.
5/27/2005      Just a nice, relaxing day today.  I'm putting on the final coat of gloss paint over the mantle and it looks fantastic.
     The next step is to finish skim coating the wall of the staircase so that I can paint it.  I also have to do something about the stairs themselves.  They creak like nobody's business and so sleeping in on a Saturday morning has become impossible if Christina is home as the staircase ends at our bedroom door.  I've read that sprinkling talcum powder on the spots where the nails attach the boards will fix it right up but I can't seem to find any nails.  Apparently the only nails in the entire house that haven't popped out happen to be the ones on the staircase.
6/15/2005      The front door has become the latest project...again.
     I'm taking on all the issues that affect the temperature while it's warm and the front door has been a headache since the first night we stayed here.  It was harshly kicked in and I did a quick fix on it at that time but it needed a real repair job so I just replaced the entire frame board by board, reset the boards that hold the weather strips and also unearthed the old transom window above the doorway.  It had been painted and nailed shut and scraping the paint off of all the old wavy antique glass took many hours.  Now that it's re-hinged and pretty it adds a new dimension to the room and I'm glad I didn't just wall it up.
6/18/2005       Haven't gotten much done in the past few days because Beth had to have a hernia repaired on the 16th.  Must have been something she lifted.
4/25/2005      Update:  we painted the living room mint green.  The hunters green was just too dark.
11/11/2006      It's now two and one half years after the first entry in this journal and I just put in the last of the living room windows.  Too funny!  This is officially the first time we've ever been able to open all the windows and allow fresh air in, and with the good fortune of experiencing an Indian Summer (74 degrees today) I even put in the screens.  Because I found some old newspaper shoved in the frames when the windows were nailed, caulked and painted shut we know they haven't been opened since 1986.
    Some of the old window framing basically disintegrated as I pulled it out so the demolition work went pretty fast. One important point to make here is that the single pane antique glass coupled with the dry rotted wood made it so we could hear every sound outside.  As the last window went in I looked over at Beth and said, "Listen."  The only sound we could hear was a pair of motorcycles passing by and then dead silence.
    You just have to wonder how much extra money we've been blowing on heat and AC over the past two years.
10/5/2008     Two years later...
    If you happen to have read the Parlor journal before this one, you know that we scrapped the formal Parlor idea in favor of making it a family-style TV room, so all the formal furnishings are now here in the main Living Room.  This was all Beth's idea, and the results have been nothing short of spectacular.  Once again, Beth has shown her amazing talent for decorating while I've been the beast of burden in carrying out her plans.
    Oh!  Wait a minute!  I see!
    So, this is how couples get to the point where the husband walks around muttering, "Yes, dear....yes, dear....yes, dear..."
07/29/2009      Has it really been five years and two months since we first started on the living room?  More amazingly yet, is it really still not finished?!
     So this is what happened...
     Beth's brother, Ric, his lovely wife Cheryl, and their 16-year old son, Kyle decided to come up from Otto, North Carolina for a one-week visit.  Beth made up this inhumanly long list of crap we had to do to make the house nice looking, and, to prove that I'm an absolute idiot, I decided to throw in refinishing the living room, dining room, and kitchen floors.  Why?  Other than the fact that I seem to be turning into a scatter-brained curmudgeon in my old age, I decided that it only made sense to make the house look as beautiful as possible by missing tons of sleep, and breathing toxic fumes for a few days.  On top of that, who wouldn't want to stack all their antiques in precariously balanced piles throughout the rest of the house for days on end?
    Seriously, it was all done as an act of unbridled vanity.  I wanted them to be impressed with our efforts of these past years, and that's about all there was to that.  I stand guilty of "The Pride of Home Ownership" to the umpteenth degree, and my back paid dearly for it.  You think the Southern Belles from the days of sprawling plantations were idiots for crushing their torsos in bodices to the point of asphyxiation just so they could appear thinner?  That's nothing.  We went through sheer agony getting the floors to look all clean and glossy in record time.
     And when they finally entered?  I acted like the way the place looked was no big deal.
     To top all of that off, the floors look great when they're clean, but we now have two goofy Golden Retrievers running around the place, so between their muddy paws, and the dust this place produces, the floors look good for only about two minutes each day.  That's okay, though.  The pups will eventually become more laid back as they grow into dogs, and some day when the housing market recovers some nice young couple will walk through with a real estate agent, and say, "Wow.  Look at this place!  We'll take it!"
     Quite a contrast to Beth asking me, "Do you think you can fix it", back on that day so many years ago.
7/30/2009     In 16 days I will turn 50.  That has almost nothing to do with this journal, the house, or anything else for that matter.  I just thought it was worth a brief mention in case anyone my age was wondering if it was too late in their life to take on something like this.  My answer? Yes.