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:

Whole House Fan

We've talked about getting a whole house fan for a long time. On cool mornings I open up the house and use a few box fans in the doors to cool the house down, I can usually cool the house down enough to last most of the day without running the air. We've talked about how much quicker and easier it would be with a whole house fan. The other day we finally decided to look into it. We searched Craigslist for a used one and found on in Atlanta for $75.

It's an Emerson 5550 CFM 30" fan. The overall dimension is 42". It had been installed as an exterior gable fan and needed to be removed.

We were able to remove it in about 15 minutes, a lot easier than I thought.

I brought it home and cleaned it up. It is composed of two main pieces, the larger part with the fan and motor, and the smaller part has the louvers. These pictures are before it was cleaned. I had to use CLR on the aluminum louvers to get all the grime and corrosion off.

Next I cut out the ceiling above the stairs and framed in a box to support the fan.

First I used 2x6's to frame the opening then used 2x8's inside the 2x6 frame for the box the fan goes on.

Next I installed the louvers underneath and then the fan on top.

I still have to wire the fan up, it came with a 3-way wall mount switch. I will be installing it downstairs in the foyer. I'm also going to paint the frame that holds the louvers. It will be painted the same white trim color the ceiling will be painted.

Baby Gate II

Over the weekend I built the upstairs baby gate. You may remember earlier when I built the baby gate for the bottom of the stairs.

I built this one a few inches shorter to match the railings upstairs. I used the same walnut balusters that I used for the downstairs gate and poplar for the frame again.

Here is a picture of it ready for primer.

Once it was primered and painted I made another handrail out of heart pine.

Here is a picture of the railing after the rough cuts were made.

I dont have a round-over router bit of the correct size so I'm having to make the cuts on my table saw then round them over with a sander. After this picture was taken I used a dado blade on my table saw to make the recessed cut on the bottom of the railing so it will fit over the top of the gate, sorry I didnt get a picture of that.

Once the railing was sanded I used Red Chestnut stain from Minwax to get the correct tone to the wood then put on a coat of poly.

Once it dried I installed the railing then put up the gate.

Here are a few pics.

As you can see from the pictures I still have a lot of work to do upstairs. The railings and the balls on top of the newels will be stripped and stained, everything else will be repainted.

Baby Gate

Yesterday I finished up an important project.

Our little baby is not a baby any more. She has been getting around on her own for some time now.

One of the first discoveries she made was the stairs. She loves climbing the stairs and has done so by herself on a few occasions now. We started walking her up the stairs at night and down them in the mornings so she could get used to them but in the meantime it's just way too dangerous for her to try to climb them by herself.

So we put up one of those cheap baby gates, but it was ugly and a pain to go up the stairs, especially if you have anything in your arms.

I decided to build a baby gate that would look like it was original to the house. I didnt have time to turn baulisters to match the existing ones but I found some in our local antique mall that would work.

They were beautiful walnut baulisters from the 1840's which made it very hard to paint over them but they were the only ones I could find.

I used poplar for the frame and spaced the baulisters very close together. Then I made a hand rail out of some old heart pine. I stained the hand rail with Red Chestnut from Minwax to match the existing hand rail, then added a coat of amber shellac, then a coat of poly. Here is a picture before I finished the hand rail:

Here are the finished pictures:

I still need to install a latch on it. For now I left a little extra on the edge of it so it's tight, that way she cant open it, but with as quick as she learns things I need to hurry up and get a latch on it.

Now I need to build one for the top of the stairs.