Taking on the living room

The living room is not a pretty sight. The contrast against the recently finished dining room makes it look even worse. I can't put off dealing with it any longer. Here are the before shots.

The woodwork was painted at one time. It looks like someone tried stripping it, but gave up. Given how sloppy it looks up close, I am amazed I didn't notice this before. Check out the sweet mid 80's track lighting. Honestly, these are the world's dimmest lights. Given that I don't have any art on the wall, the only thing they light is a 4 foot section of plaster with a nice big crack in it.
I really think this is going to look great when it is done. I would just like to skip the many steps it takes to get there. The dining room took me a ridiculous 8 months, so I have to do better than that this time.

Paint and Something for the Wall

We finished painting the dining room last week. I was a little nervous as the paint was going up, but I really liked the way it turned out. The color is Benjamin Moore Forest Moss.

We also added a vintage map of our neighborhood to the wall. Actually using the picture moulding as opposed to the 30 nail holes I patched in the wall worked out very nicely. The map is from Althea Maps and Prints which can be found in the Coe and Channell Antique shop at 2727 Hennepin Ave S. The frame was custom made by Dard Hunter Studios.

Finally!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The dining room woodwork is finally all refinished. I was determined that I wouldn't post anything until it was done. It took me 10 months and who knows how many hours (definitely in the hundreds), but I am extremely happy with the results. While incredibly tedious, the 5 step refinishing technique worked very well. Here are some before and after shots.

Column header before

Same header after - none of the wood grain was visible with the old finish.
Built-in before
Built-in after
Bank of windows

Close-up of the board shown in a previous post

Another close up

Unfortunately, there is a little bit of bad news. We still need to repaint the dining room and I have the entire living room left to refinish. It better take less than 10 months this time. I am going to work on some other projects before I get up the motivation to go after that one. Here is what the refinished woodwork looks like next to the living room woodwork.

Woodwork Update

I have finally removed all the old finish from the dining room woodwork and have started the almost equally painful process of refinishing it. Normally, I think refinishing would be much easier, but I am using the same 5 step process I used on the crown molding. So far, I am almost done with step 1, which is the dye stain. I am using Transtint Golden Brown. I make up 8 ounces at a time: 1/4 ounce dye, 4 ounces denatured alcohol, 4 ounces lacquer thinner. You can see the difference between with dye (on the right), and without.
When I took the hardware off the windows, I was surprised to find the original finish. This is the color I am trying to match. In the course of stripping the woodwork, I realized it was previously painted, then stripped, bleached, and refinished (poorly, I might add). Somehow, through all of that, it appears the window hardware was never removed.

The Future Projects Tour

This future project/online house tour is an excellent diversion from my never ending woodwork project. My wife and I moved into our house a little less than 1 year ago. It seems like most of my projects since moving in involve removing paint.

One of the things we like best about our house is that it has all of its original windows. The front door opens to a large sun porch, which is one of our favorite rooms. We only plan to make a couple changes to this room before we call it done, namely an upgrade to the ceiling fan and the current flooring, neither of which are original. I am amused by the shear number of Phillips head screws in the ceiling fan every time I look at it. I have been checking out www.vintagefans.com for a replacement.

In the living and dining rooms, we are lucky enough to have the original quartersawn oak woodwork and unpainted, wood burning fireplace. We are unlucky enough that the woodwork has been painted, stripped, and poorly refinished over the course of 85 years. See my previous posts for more fun with woodwork.

Several of the rooms still have their original, bare bulb light fixtures. From the tiny chip in the picture below, you can see that these are brass underneath. I am betting there is some polychrome coloring as well. Stripping the paint off these will be the subject of a future post. The popcorn ceiling pictured below will be dealt with at some point as well.Working on the side entry is another project I have in the works. You can see where I have picked off some of the paint near the lock. The old linoleum floor has oak underneath, but I am worried that it might be in pretty poor shape from all the water that has gotten tracked in on people's shoes over the years. I am also in need of two new storm doors. The current aluminum ones are terrible. I have been checking every salvage store for a vintage one, but I am thinking I may need to go the reproduction route. Any suggestions on a good place to find an authentic looking wood storm door? Creating a full bathroom upstairs is another long term goal. The room pictured below is the nursery off our master bedroom. Our bungalow has a lot of headroom upstairs and this room is actually the rear dormer. Right now I think the trickiest part is going to be fitting a shower stall in this room somehow given the angled ceilings.

Slow Going

I will be really happy when I am working on a project that doesn't involve stripping paint or finish. That said, I am making slow, but steady progress on the woodwork. The great news is that the wood underneath looks awesome. With the weird glaze finish removed, you can really see the rays in the quartersawn oak. At least now that the weather is improving, I can actually work with adequate ventilation, which is nice.

Push Button Switches

Since we moved in last summer I have been meaning to replace the light switches on the first floor. At some point, one or more of the previous owners clearly fell in love with dimmer switches. Literally every switch was a dimmer. I guess I just don't see the need for that much dimming. I finally got up the motivation this weekend to switch all the first floor lights back to non-dimming push button switches.

I started by ordering 6 single reproduction switches from Classic Accents. Normally I try to get original versions of everything, but starting a quest for 6 matching, antique, functioning push button switches sounded pretty painful.

Once I had the switches I made a trip to Guilded Salvage in North Minneapolis. This is my favorite of the salvage places in Minneapolis because their stuff is well organized and the service is great. I was able to find 5 matching switchplates including 4 singles ones and 1 double. All 5 are solid brass, but the double one has a great copperish patina on it. The 4 single ones needed a little work. They really didn't have a lot of patina to begin with, so I decided to fake it. I used lacquer thinner to take off the remaining paint, lacquer and grime. I then used 0000 steel wool to even out the color a little. I followed that with the cleaning instructions on this blog. I used the "baking method" to age the brass.

I baked the switchplates for a little over an hour and am very pleased with how they turned out. They still don't have the patina of the double one, but I am going to let time do the rest.