Well here we are. As you recall this began simply enough to fix a broken pipe one cold winter morning. Alas, that was not the house’s plan. As many of you I’m sure know, once you peel back, open up, expose, etc…one thing leads to another and now we found ourselves in the middle of a full on kitchen remodel, months ahead of schedule. The broken pipe lead to exposing molded cabinets, which led to molded drywall, which led to…
Hi everyone. It’s been a little while since I last posted. We’ve been out of town visiting family in two different states and so things have been coming along, but a bit slowly. Now we’re back on track and I do have a few interesting things to show! And oh yes, I’ll update the front profile pic to show spring time for the house very soon. 😉 As you might remember, the entry way was being stripped of all of…
Hi everyone. These past couple of weeks with the heavy snows and cold temperatures worked well with our schedules as we would have been inside anyway, working on our kitchen remodel and I was still in the entry way doing updates. We don’t have a lot of new things to post but we’ve definitely been busy. Paul has had the brunt of the hard work; demolishing the kitchen walls and their four layers on each one (plaster, lathe, wire mesh,…
Remember when I said that we basically show up for “work” at the house and it “tells” us where we’re working today? With all the beautiful snow came very cold temperatures in this area. A couple of nights down to 5 or 6 degrees. We weren’t worried because we have two main water lines coming into the house. One, the most massive and being fed by the new hot water heater in the cellar, had all of its piping replaced…
We LOVE wood and all its beautiful grains. Anytime we go somewhere that has beautiful exposed wood, we both stop in awe and can’t help but admire it. Therefore our initial thought on the house inside was take it back down to the bare wood and stain it, at least in the entry way, parlor and ballroom. But did the wood under all those years of paint have a grain and quality to stain? And before you say it, yes,…
Do you remember the entry way wallpaper removing project I started? Well I think I am making some good progress on it. With the years of not only what appear to be 3 layers of wallpaper but also at least 1 paint job over it all, it’s been a very slow moving process. The typical wallpaper remover products aren’t won’t go through it all, so it’s simply the warm water and then scraping. Unfortunately most of the wallpaper is coming…
These past couple of weeks here have brought quite a bit of rain. Not all day rain but every other day rain, for an hour or so, or three, etc… As such, yes we have the contractor contacted who will come out and work to repair the leak but in the meantime, the rains keep coming and now with the snow sitting and melting, the leak continues…drip, drip, drip…can be heard from that room. Therefore we keep looking at the…
I am sure for all of the local West Virginians, this is old hat and a real inconvenience, but for these recent CA transplants, we truly enjoyed waking up to the beautiful view outside of our windows yesterday! Wow, what a winter wonderland! Because it was snow, not ice, it was so nice. We spent the day working on tearing out a bathroom downstairs. That is, when Paul could keep me from being distracted by the beautiful views outside of…
Paul decided to tackle the attic this past week. There are parts of it completely open due to rotten wood and you can wave to the neighbors. We’ve needed to get up there for some time to close it up and seal it from passer-bys, rain and any more forest friends visiting (yes, we’ve had a few, lol) as well as wasps. We’ve done some quick work up there but the major overhaul we knew would take time. There was…
When we first bought the house and even after walking through it several times, the number of rooms and their layouts continued to perplex us. There were so many that you walked through to reach another and seemed to connect to a second one. Some of the layouts began to seem almost as though these rooms were a “set.” This happened throughout. It was time for a little more research. After all, if we know how it was, hopefully we…