Upstairs Hall

We've been doing a lot of work on the house lately. One of the projects has been the upstairs hall.

This is what it looked like when we bought the house:

And here are some current pictures:

For the past two weeks I've been running electrical to new lights and outlets, putting up crown and trim, caulking the cracks in the walls and ceilings, and painting.

Here are pictures of two of the upstairs bedrooms:

The first is our daughters and the second is ours. I have not cut in around the trim in our room yet.

I dont have any in progress shots because I was too busy to get any.

I'm going to throw in a picture taken from the Parlor looking into the Foyer:

Parlor Redo

We ended up selling our Parlor furniture and moving the Living room furniture in here because we turned the Living room into a Bedroom in preparation for the new baby.

Here are a few Parlor pics.

Primer

Well I've finally decided to start primering the house. I cant paint the house until I've rebuilt the front porch but at least I can primer it so it doesn't look so bad.

So far I've gotten most of the first floor front done:



In the first picture you can just see another project I recently finished, the mailbox:


I used a cedar post and then put on a coat of amber shellac. The numbers are oil-rubbed bronze.

I've also been working on the electrical in the house. I've gotten the upstairs hallway light wired up and also our bedroom ceiling fan:



Today I'll be back at work one the primering...

Wedding invitation 104 years late

We went out to Woodbury today to try to get some work accomplished. We wanted to concentrate on the upstairs bedrooms. We picked out neutral paint colors because we dont want anything too drastic.

Today we worked on the front bedroom, you may remember this room as the hideous pink room, come tho think of it I dont think I ever posted a picture of this room because the color was so terrible:


Here are a few after pics:





Much better.

Tomorrow we will tackle the Master bedroom and the upstairs hallway if we have time.

After we finished the bedroom I was exploring around the house. The top of the mantle in the living room is missing and the PO stuck a 1x12 on some shelf brackets to rig up a top mantle piece. I removed it because it was so ugly and started thinking of what might be behind the mantle. It was loose and hanging from the wall so I got a flashlight and started looking behind it. At first I found nothing, I was about to give up when a small envelope wedged way down caught my eye.

It turned out to be a wedding invitation to the second owners of the house dated 1904! and it was still sealed! Here are some pictures of it:




The first pic is of the outer envelope, notice the Ben Franklin 1 cent stamp, the second pic is of the inner envelope, and the third pic is the invitation. It had a very fine piece of tissue paper inside it.

I also found this:


I wonder what store this was from and how old it is...

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.

Master Bedroom

We've spent the last few days clearing out our storage unit and taking it to the Woodbury house. The $100 a month we'll save on that will pay for half the Woodbury house mortgage.

Yesterday I got to work on the Master bedroom, this is the room that someone put drywall over the wood walls.



The drywall is very old, probably 50's or early 60's. It was installed with drywall nails. Removing it consists of tearing off small chunks with a prybar then removing the nails from the wood wall.

I only had enough time to remove the drywall from the walls before it got to be too late. There is still drywall on the ceiling.



We probably wont be back out there today since I'm sick as a dog. Hopefully in the next few days we'll be back out to finish up the room. Once the drywall is removed from the room we'll install the trim, sand and paint.