It has been 1O months...

...since I last posted.

Here's what I have been doing since then.

January... got rid of all the old knob and tube wiring in the basement


The house is all rewired but there is still old stuff in the garage. Do you like this tuna can receptacle?


February, March and April in were spent in a funk and I couldn't get my mind around doing anything but sorting Legos














May
Worked on the sewing studio


June
Stripped the stairs and landing


July
Spent three weeks in China!!

Hangzhou


Shanghai


Beijing

Three wonderful weeks visiting my son and his girlfriend and seeing as much of China as possible.

August
Tore up the kitchen floor and emptied out the main level of the house



September
Had all the wood floors stripped, sanded and refinished


October, November
Stripping trim, restoring windows, painting, aargh it has been a full year. The house is still empty and working like crazy to get the windows back in their frames.

Windows

I worked on this set of windows this weekend. This is the south end of the sewing studio. Before: They don't look bad but most of the glazing has deteriorated on the outside.

I used a utility knife to score the paint between the stop and the side trim. My windows have interlocking weather stripping all around but that was easy to pull off as it was attached with only a small nail at the top and bottom. Once that was removed I could slide one side of the lower sash out and remove it after I pulled off the sash rope. I pulled out the parting bead (it came out in one piece!), and then I was able to remove the upper sash easily as well.

In the picture above you can see the little hole on the right that give me access to the sash weights for that side of the window. I also took out the center trim piece in order to access the cavity shared by both windows. I took this opportunity to put a piece of foam insulation in this space. There is enough room in there that this will not interfere with the movement of the weights. Here is a view at the top of the cavity.

I stripped the paint on the sides and bottom. The storm windows will keep out unwanted guests until the sashes are put back in place.

I then spent hours scraping out the old glazing compound. Fourteen pieces of glass remove without one breaking. I marked their specific locations on a piece of painters tape indicating the space it came from. Each piece was cut to fit its individual spot. R is for right window and an arrow for up.

I made this little thing to protect the glass when using heat to soften the old glazing for easier removal. It is a piece of sheet metal and thick cardboard sandwiched together and held together with foil tape. The metal reflects the heat and the cardboard insulates the glass. I made it the same size as the smaller panes of glass. It worked great, no cracked glass!!









Here is an upper sash, all the glass removed. This is the interior side.

Here is the exterior side with the white paint taken off. Here is the original color of these windows. I stripped all the paint, the green has stained the wood, or maybe it was a stain.

Now here is the problem. Below is a picture of a lower sash. I stripped the paint off of this because it had been overpainted and because it was easy. What I have is a perfectly nice wood window.

The problem? This whole room has painted white trim and I do not want to strip the paint in this room, at least not in the next couple of years. I just want to get these windows reglazed and protect the exterior wood and them get them installed again. I have a whole house full of painted wood on the lower level that I am working on.

My options-
1. Don't strip the old paint on the interior, just sand it lightly and repaint.
2. Do a full restoration, strip the old paint, restain and or shellac to bring the windows back to their original condition. Leave the surrounding trim white until I can refinish it at a later date. After all, with windows are out and accessible, might as well go all the way.
3. Strip the old paint and prime and repaint it white to match the rest of the room. I am not happy with this option because I HATE when people paint over the original finish of wood.

I think I am going to go with number 1. By not stripping the wood now, it will be easier to strip it later as there is that easy melt layer of shellac still there. By repainting now, I may not get the crisp detail I want, but it will be ok. Any thoughts?

Small things

The grossness of the attic insulating needs to be balanced with some smaller, simpler tasks that move me closer to my goal of getting this space done this spring.
Here are the doorknobs that have been spray painted (I think) a weird silver finish.

And I will be tackling these windows. They need to be reglazed. The glazing is in very rough shape.

The window latches were painted some weird glitter/gold color. Spraypaint, again I think. See the chunks of glazing ready to fall off?

The sash lifts (is that what they are called?) only have a bit of paint around the edges. They have a nice patina. Are they bronze? brass?

Into the cooking pot they went....

...But this method did nothing to loosen the glitter paint. Anybody have a method to remove what I think is spray paint?

Another Great Mess

Well, this is what the upstairs looks like today. I cleared everything out of the west attic and pulled the rest of the rock wool insulation out. That was the last section that needed to be done. I used every last trash bag, empty dog food and mulch bags that I had in the house and there is still more insulation and trash to be bagged up.

There is no insulation on this side of the attic now. And the temperatures have dropped near or below freezing again. In truth, I don't feel it much because the old insulation wasn't insulating very well.


And in other news...
This was the weedy, lumpy section of my lawn last summer.

Last night after work, I covered it with landscape fabric in hopes of smothering all that is there in order to prepare the area for some new garden beds.


It was a cold, gray day today. I am glad to have all that insulation pulled out. It was the worst job ever. I still need to figure out how I am going to insulate the attic above the ceiling. There is no access as far as I can tell. I may have to cut a hole in the ceiling. I really don't want to do that. I also do not want to crawl up there. I may hire that job out.

Bowling...

This past week, I pulled up the rest of the carpeting in the room upstairs. The padding was dust but came up easily and there were not too many staples to pull. Looks like a bowling lane, it is one long, narrow room. My house documents say it is 37 feet long... ooh, I just looked and I am not even close, a bowling alley is 62 feet long... yikes.
Well, after I cleaned up the floor, I put the rug back down in anticipation of painting. I like this color and probably will not change it, just freshen it up.
I hung the new ceiling fan when I ran new wiring up here. I am not a big "fan" of ceiling fans but this room always has temperature extremes and I thought the fan would help with air exchange.

Saturday was one of the first warm days, it was glorious. I opened the windows for the first time in months. My upstairs windows had these weird awning things.

A closeup look shows it is nothing but a piece of siding nailed on to some wooden supports. I do not like how it blocks the light. A couple whacks with a hammer....


Gone...



Though I hate them, it was time to wash the aluminum screens and storm windows. I'm going to take these screens in to have some tighter weave screening put in. Many nights I am up late sewing and little bugs seem to make their way through the screens in toward the light.

Workshop

My basement workshop needed attention so I spent Saturday morning cleaning it up. It was getting hard to find things.


Finally, a clean surface.

This workshop is in the corner of my basement. Two walls are stone and cement block and the other two walls are made out of a collection of doors. Who knows where the doors came from, I believe I have all the original doors in the house.

The pink cabinet came with the house. The brown cabinet I found on the street. It is on wheels so I can pull it out when I use my miter saw. It is a nice space for the grinder ($5 at a estate sale). I never knew how much I needed a grinder until I bought this one. It is so nice to be able to sharpen tools when needed.

Today, I tore up more carpeting in the room upstairs. I am trying to save the tack strips for reuse. Does anyone else get freaked out knowing this sharp row of nails is surrounding the perimeter of every carpeted room?!? Seriously, someone could step on them...

I Just Can't Stop Tearing Things Apart

I had a nice sewing studio. I used to spend a lot of time up here sewing baby slings to sell to fund my house rehab projects.

I like the space. It is the upper level of my house. It is the "+" in my "2+ bedroom" house. The space is one large room. One side is my sewing studio and the other side is a guest area with two beds for sleeping. There are two doors that lead to huge walk attic/storage spaces.

I have everything I need here for sewing and quilting.

But with the attic insulation project, everything got packed away or moved downstairs. Luckily the boy is away at college, so there was room.

Due to the process of rewiring the whole house, every room has been torn apart a little, including this one. The attic area provided access to a lot of the wiring that needed to be done. This space suffered. Once I am done insulating, this space needs to be put back together and cleaned up. This winter I added new outlets and ran new wiring to the ceiling fixtures. This week I worked on patching the plaster in preparation for painting. I decided to tear up the carpet.

I wanted to leave the old carpet down until I painted but I worried that the mess of tearing up the carpet would get the walls all dirty again. So I did a partial tear up. Under the carpet there are wood floors of unknown origin. The padding is dry and brittle. I removed all of that. I also removed the tack strips at the edges of the room and the shoe molding. Typically this is removed when carpeting is put down. I may reuse this downstairs.

So in the middle of the room, there was this strange bulging up of the floor boards. There was patching compound in the cracks (up to 1/4 inch wide). So of course I had to pull up the boards to investigate.

This is the center of the house and the joists come together to rest on a center beam. The joists are not uniform and there is a high point in this area. Or worse case scenario, the front and back of the house are sinking and this is the folding point of the whole thing. I can see where some of the board were chiseled off, but not all. This floor is uneven all over the place and I think this room was done later in the history of the house. The walls are plaster over sheetrock. Downstairs walls are lathe and plaster.

It would be quite a job to strip and sand this floor. The pictures may not show it well, but this floor is totally painted. The edge is a different color brown. It is uneven and not installed with much care. There is no subfloor!! My plan is to keep it as is. I have some carpet from the Restore that I am going to put down.

I pulled all the staples and nails, pulled up the shoe molding and vacuumed the floor. Then I put the carpet back down in anticipation of painting. This is just one half of the room, I still need to do the same on the other half.
(Those boxes on the wall are actually four separate drawer units designed to hang on the wall like cabinets. The are 1950's Conant Ball-Russell Wright blond maple. I bought them at an auction many years ago. They were $5 each and I like how they can be configured in different arrangements, but they will be removed and have to find a new home.)

Sewing table

I sew a lot. Lately I have been sewing baby slings for distribution by a local home visiting program to new families. I have made over 300 at last count. This was my sewing table. When I am not sewing slings, I sew quilts and a large table makes quilt wrangling more manageable.

I found a nice set of drawers at the local Habitat Restore. It is solid wood, with nice gliding drawers and it was just the right height to fit under my table. But it stuck out past the end.


I kept my eye out for a new table top and the ReStore came through for me. It is wider and longer and I like the gray color better than the false wood grain. So I decided to recreate my sewing table with the recessed machine for a flat surface to work on.

I used a jigsaw to cut the opening. I hung a little shelf using four 4 inch bolts that I countersunk into the table top. My sewing machine is shown with the front removable section taken off.


I then routered out a little lip to hold a piece of custom cut Plexiglas (actually, it was a clipboard in an earlier life). This pops out to allow me access to the bobbin case.
The locking nuts on the end of the bolts allow me to fine tune the machine placement so I can get it level. I need to make some plugs for the holes left by the bolts.



A much larger sewing table with drawers for the stuff I use. I moved most of my sewing things into my extra bedroom. I am still working on insulating the attic and it is dusty upstairs. I also cleared things out in anticipation of painting the space and replacing the carpeting.


A dog's-eye view of the sewing studio as it is now.