We are awesome construction workers.

As we may have written before, we wanted to open up the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room. We had taken down a lot of the plaster and lath about a month ago, and here is where we began the day. To date we had succeeded in adding more walls rather than taking any away. What you see in the foreground is a temporary support wall which we put up in hopes that it would save us from disaster if we should remove the wrong piece. We ran this by our structural engineer Andy, whom we had over to the house one evening after a long dinner with many drinks, and he seemed to think it was a great idea.


Before we could begin, we had to remove a little more plaster and lath.

There goes Reagan tearing things apart. She just hates all those original finishes....


We decided to install the header one half at a time to try to keep some of the structure intact until the new structure was in place. A co-worker informs me that chipping out the slot for the header, as you see here, is called "hogging". It goes without saying that if it had been called something else we might not have tried it.


Hogging complete, we are ready to put in the first half of the header.


Here is the job half done. A purist will note that we have begun to remove the temporary supports before we are completely done.


Despite everything, we and the house, survived and we can now see the TV from the kitchen.


One might wonder why we went through so much effort to get this view, but we assure you the view will improve. Stay tuned.


Adam is learning to be a very good preservationist/archaeologist. On the new header and the re-used post for the new opening he wrote "2007" so that, just in case, when future preservationists investigate our house and try to figure out its construction chronology, they'll know when this one was altered.

Drop the dropped ceiling.

We had taken the paneling off the dropped ceiling several weeks ago, and we took down the rest of it on Saturday. It was our first step towards the kitchen renovation, and it was somewhat satisfying. There were a few trick steps, such as disconnecting the electrical fixtures that were attached to the ceiling structure. Like the exhaust fan from the 40's, which had about a 1/2 inch of grease and grime all over it. Lovely.


Adam disconnects and takes down the exhaust fan. Note the greasy soot marks on the ceiling from the old stove that used to be underneath that spot. Used to, as in before the dropped ceiling went in, as in pre-1950 or so.


The exhaust fan, black and grimy, though still pretty tasty with the right wine.


We have to take the overhead light off the ceiling structure, and it's left pretty much hanging like this. We have to rotate it depending on which side of the room we want to see.


The hole above the sink - there's definitely some water damage up there, which makes sense, since the bathroom is directly above it. We're hoping that those leaky days are over (no troubles yet). Though we do sort of like the rustic look.


And more of the lovely old wallpaper is revealed. Now visible: country houses and another carriage! It's hard to describe with words the feeling of discovery we had when, having burrowed through soggy ceiling and 100 years of mouse poop, we came upon this scene of pastoral bliss.


A full-height kitchen. Adam thinks that it's changed the proportions so that the room now feels smaller, but Reagan thinks it's all going to be worth it in the end. Unfortunately, one thing that this demolition revealed is that we're going to have to take down all the plaster. We don't know about you, but we're not totally into the cracked and fallen plaster look in a finished room. It looks too, eh... Olive Garden.....

The Living Room, finally for living.

We've been a little delayed in our housework due to Adam's sister's wedding (which was totally awesome), but now we're back to work. We finally finished off the living room. Trim color, as it turns out, is very difficult to choose. We had picked a wall color, and we wanted to choose a trim color that would compliment the off-white walls and blend with the wood floors. As it turns out, we were a little off. "Sandy Brown" turned out to be more of a greenish-beige that looks orange in sunlight. It got a little better when it dried, but really it looks like a 1970's mustard color. It's great in the dark, though.

Before, with the painted walls.


After (yes, it's almost exactly the same color as an earlier trim color, as seen on the doors).


Adam worked on patching some pretty big cracks in the ceiling, and they're invisible (for now).


The finished look. We're not totally happy with it, but it's better than it was before. At least we can watch the football game on our couch, in our living room. Maybe someday when we have tons of time (or money) on our hands we'll get the trim repainted some other color than baby poop.

Moved!

After a week of 65 degree weather, our moving day, of course, had to be 104. With the help of 3 strapping young men, we got out of our apartment and into the house in no less than 5.5 hours. All 150 boxes, most of which are still on the 3rd floor and will be there for some time. But we're in! We're Dorchester all the way now. Now if we could only get our paper delivered...

Floored.

After some prodding, our Vietnamese flooring guy made good on his promise to get the floors done in 2 days. Not in our greatest or even most realistic hopes did we expect those dirty, black, gunky floors to look so good. Now that we know the potential...


After sanding



Ok, so there's stuff in the room so you can't see the pristine beauty of the floors, but you get the idea.

The finished look.

Paint History

Our house has been yellow for a long time. We have been able to scientifically verify that. Reagan has only taken a few paint samples of the exterior, but where she has, yellow yellow yellow. Except for a couple early layers of drab, variations on a theme of yellow. Even in the trim.

Totally delving into the nerdiness of her new profession, Reagan took advantage of the microscopes at her office. Here's what she found:

This sample came from the front door frame. The colors don't come out so well, but in the lower left corner is the wood, then a primer, a couple layers of a taupe/drab color, then a peachy color, then several layers of yellow.

This tiny piece (not the best sample) came from the underside of the front porch, at the cornice. Again, lots and lots of yellow, except for a little bit of blue peeking through. Bright blue! It may be spill-over from the porch ceiling, which is commonly painted a bright color...haven't found blue anywhere else.

Goodbye parquet, hello pine!

The wood floors in this house are generally in excellent shape, except for 2 rooms: the guest bedroom and the study. Blocks of parquet flooring were popping out all over the place - you could've lost an eye! So, we decided to act fast. Reagan spent about 3 hours pulling up the cheap parquet to reveal dirty, gummy, tar-like glue on original pine boards. Incredibly, we found some guys who were willing to deal with them and get them all refinished by Friday, just before we move in.


Rooms with parquet (and dust and paint chips fallen from the ceiling)


Rooms without parquet (but with their dusty outline and lots of black goo, I mean glue)

Close up - purty, ain't she? Photos of the finished floors to come...after Saturday.