Monday, February 4, 2008

A cool discovery and floor plans

We decided to go back out to Woodbury yesterday afternoon. I really wanted to get that Master Bedroom done. I started by removing the drywall from the ceiling, this was quite a dirty job as years of soot from the chimneys had sifted down through the beadboard ceiling and was laying on top of the drywall.


Here are a few shots of the room with all the drywall removed.




I've been using one of the other bedrooms to hold all the garbage I've ripped out of the master bedroom and main hall. Here is a pic of our garbage pile:


Once the drywall was down I took the old carpet up. As is usual for an old house there was another layer underneath, more linoleum.


This one came up very easy compared with the stuff in the hall. I just pulled up a corner and rolled the entire thing back. that was when I made my first cool discovery in this house.


A bunch of old newspapers from 1950 & 1951! They are all in almost perfect condition. All the newspapers I've found in the Oxford-Boynton house were brittle and fell apart the second you touched them, these are like they were the day they were made.

I havent had time to look through all of them yet but I did find a really cool article on an upcoming tour of old homes in Madison, Ga. Madison is loaded with old homes, most of them are beautiful Greek Revival plantations (my dream house).


The article mentions Boxwood, which is a very well known home. The gardens are beautiful, filled with boxwoods and camelias. The article talks about the woman that lived there at the time, Miss Kitty Newton. It says that every 8 or 10 years she trims the boxwoods and the entire town would come out to get clippings. Unfortunately as you can see from the picture above the bottom edge of the page is damaged so I couldn't read part of one paragraph but I was able to read the rest of the article.


I've drawn up a basic floor plan of the house. I'm using this to get a better idea of what we are going to do.



The first floor is where the changes will occur. The large area at the back of the house that is listed as the deck is currently an addition that appears to have been built in the 50's. I believe it was once a porch that was closed in. It's in really sorry shape and needs to be torn down.

At the front of the house is the current sun room. I'm pretty sure this is not original but it is very old. I believe that early on they closed in the wrap around part of the porch to make the room. If that is the case I will be opening it back up and using the windows for the new sun room at the back of the house next to the deck.

Here is a picture of the double doors for the sun room, the windows look the same:


Were hoping to get back out there in the next few days and take the trash pile to the dump and decide what to work on next.

6 comments:

Sandy said...

I wonder why they put newspapers under the linoleum... My son's house (built in 1927) had newspapers under their linoleum.

Jennifer said...

Neat old magazines and newspaper! Quite a difference for the room.

Jodi said...

We had newspapers under some old linoleum in what used to be an entryway into the house. Only ours were from the late 80's and not nearly as interesting.

I wonder why people put them under linoleum.

housemouse said...

We recently decided to take up all the carpet in our house and go down to the original flooring and found newspapers from 1941 and 1942 under the floors but only around the edges. We too are wondering why people did that. We can read bits and pieces of the paper but they are pretty brittle and some are stuck to the floor pretty good. The coolest thing I think from the papers is an old Vicks advertisment.

housemouse said...

We recently decided to take up all the carpet in our house and go down to the original flooring and found newspapers from 1941 and 1942 under the floors but only around the edges. We too are wondering why people did that. We can read bits and pieces of the paper but they are pretty brittle and some are stuck to the floor pretty good. The coolest thing I think from the papers is an old Vicks advertisment.

housemouse said...

We recently decided to take up all the carpet in our house and go down to the original flooring and found newspapers from 1941 and 1942 under the floors but only around the edges. We too are wondering why people did that. We can read bits and pieces of the paper but they are pretty brittle and some are stuck to the floor pretty good. The coolest thing I think from the papers is an old Vicks advertisment.