Hi again! It’s been a couple of weeks since our last post and again, we had quite a lot of things going on which were larger projects nearing completion, thus it made since to wait. Plus 2 weeks seems to give us some good “meat” to talk about. One of the significant accomplishments this week was finishing our “test wall.” I know this doesn’t sound like much but this was the wall that we began scraping the very week we…
After we saw how beautiful the glass was in the old door, I began to look more closely at these doors. As you know, the house is a blend of Neo-classical and Victorian architectural elements. The Victorian side of things has details upon details. So upon further inspection of the door, we noticed even the INSIDE of the hinges (what a guest would see when the door is swung open) has a pattern on it. Seriously. See below… Once the…
A delightful discovery we came across this week was our front door glass! Although we’d walked past the door 100 times, we never saw it from outside in the evening with the inside lights shining through it. One evening as we walked in the yard, the light caught our eye. We noticed even through the old metal storm doors we still need to remove that the light was being refracted. Not only is the glass etched but it appears to…
Another one of our big projects which was just completed (sort of, I’ll explain in a moment); the completion of the front portion of the bay windows. With that, it was time to tear down the scaffolding. As you know Paul has been working on the scaffolding rebuilding the bay windows from top to bottom. He started by removing the old deteriorated rusted roof, applying a new one, then removing all paint on the front sections (each crevice, piece of…
Hi everyone. We never ended up making a post last week because we were very close to finishing a couple of big projects, so we held out wanting to instead, show you the finished result. We are there now! Our first relatively big projects, were the cellar doors and entrance. A big kudos to Paul on this! We knew this was something we needed to do but the true significance of this is that the boiler and hot water heaters,…
Here are a few other of the photos I found while going through one of the bins. Again, please know this is with utmost respect for the people in these photos and I am intentionally not posting any relatively recent family gatherings, out of respect for their privacy. The photos below are from a time long ago and a country away. As I sorted through the dusty old albums I found an old map of the Panama Canal and I…
This week, during the rains I finally decided to start sorting through some of the old bins I found upstairs in one of the bedrooms. The bins were left behind from a previous owner and appeared to have numerous old photos and other memorabilia in it. I had always planned to stop and sort through it with care and respect but hadn’t found the time to do so yet. As I slowly went through the 1st bin, what I found…
Even with the rainy days, we ultimately had a few clear ones to make headway on a few projects and found ways to keep our selves sane. With the heavy rain, came a wet cellar. For those of who don’t know, our cellar is quite large but only part of it is cement, while the other part has a dirt floor. We’ve done some reading on this and found this is actually not a bad thing for various reasons and…
This week at the house started off a little off schedule. Hard rains came in for a couple of days and our original work plans had to be put on pause. What’s more, we were given a whole new set of more pressing work plans instead. You see, although there is a new roof on the house, one of the side back rooms began leaking from the middle of the ceiling, straight into a box with speakers in it (that’s…
New Sneak Peeks! Also on one of our sanity/can we break the monotony moments, we started removing paint from the staircase rails and the columns in the parlor. And look what we found underneath! Beautiful Wood! More to come… Cellar Doors – Here are our current awesome cellar doors. Yes, a trip to the ER waiting to happen, complete with rusty nails and sharp metal edges exposed. So far, we’ve managed safely but, they are on the way out. Besides,…