House Painting

Yesterday I painted the front first floor of the house.

House painting and other things...

Even though I haven't posted in over 10 days a lot has been going on here.

I finally finished laying the insulation and sub-floor for the laundry room/attic.

We also decided to hire out the scraping and primering of the house since we are running out of time before the baby is born.

It doesn't even look like the same house with some primer on it. It's about half way done now.

Last night we installed the attic stairs that go to the main attic. The main reason for this is not really storage but the huge amount of debris up there. It's full of 120 years of coal dust, bits of cedar shingles, and mortar from the chimneys. The coal dust and other debris is slowly sifting down through the beadboard ceiling and getting all over everything. The existing attic access was barely large enough for me to squeeze through, let alone a shop-vac.

Here is the opening framed out.

Here is the stairs in place.

I will clean up the ceiling and add the trim later.

This morning I painted the porch floor. It's a Valspar porch paint, the color is brownstone.

Paint colors for the exterior

We picked out the house colors and decided to start on the porch area to get an idea of what it will look like.

I also got one column finished. I primered it and painted it with our white trim so we could then experiment with the accent colors.

Our accent colors are a medium blue and a dark maroon. It's a lot harder to decide where to put accent colors than I thought. As soon as we've come up with the final color scheme for the columns I'll post a picture of it.

Stripping the columns Pt. 1

I cut the curved section of the floor boards the other day but I didnt get any pictures of how I did it. I went back and forth on how to measure to get the perfect cut. The floor boards need to be 2 1/4" out from the joists, 1 1/2" for overhang and 3/4" for the facia board I will be installing over the joists. Because the joist is on a curve and the floor boards are straight you cant simply measure the distance out from underneath and subtract 2 1/4".



I toyed with a lot of ideas, all of them very complex but in the end what I came up with was very simple and worked perfectly. What I did was take an 8 ft section of quarter round and clamp it first on one end just before where the porch starts curving, 2 1/4" out, then bent the quarter round all the way around to the other side. I checked the measurement in the center of the curve to make sure it was 2 1/4" out from the joists. Then I traced the curve with a pencil to make my cut line.

Then it was just a matter of making the cut with my jig saw.

I still have a few small floor pieces I need to glue and nail at the center.

Next I turned my attention to the boxed beam in the gable section. Most of it was rotted and needed to be replaced. I took out the old beam and started installing the wood for the new one.

With that finished I could begin working on the columns.

I'm hand scraping for the most part. Stubborn areas get the heat gun.

Here is the upper section of the first column scraped.

The capitols are in really bad shape, they are covered with tons of layers of paint so I'm going to completely dismantle each one to strip the paint.

Once it was completely dismantled (didnt get a final dismantled picture) I started scraping each piece. I had to use the heat gun for most of it.

Here is one section stripped of paint and put back together.

This was as far as I got last night. Stripping all the columns is going to be a long, painstaking process but in the end it will be worth it.

Porch floor

I finished the porch floor yesterday. It took two days to complete.

For the curved section of the porch I laid the new floor the same as the old one was. I started by adding 2x10's laid flat in between the joists for the edge of the floor to rest on. Then I snapped a chalk-line from the corner of the house to the center of the curve.

Then I took a straight piece of flooring and temporarily nailed it along the line. This gave me something to butt the mitered ends of the flooring up against.

Once all the flooring was laid on that side I removed the nailed down board.

And then began on the other side.

Here is the finished floor.

If I have time today I will cut the long ends of the flooring and finish installing the trim boards. Then it's on to the columns.

Framing the porch floor

The front porch is now completely framed out.

I used pressure treated lumber on all the outside edges. The rest is a mix of Pressure treated lumber, original lumber and full dimensional antique lumber given to me by my friend up the street. I used joist hangers on all the straight joists.

I should be able to start laying the flooring on Friday.