Sunday, May 17, 2009

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.