Dining Room

I took Thanksgiving week off to finish up some projects around the house.

The Dining Room was what I really wanted to get done the most. It has been half done since I moved the wall to make more room in the kitchen almost three years ago.

Here is what it looked like at the beginning of last week.

First I moved everything but the furniture out of the room, then I moved the furniture to the center of the room.

Next I scrapped the peeling walls above the picture rail. Once it was all scraped I mudded above the picture rail completely around the room.

With that done I worked on the door casings for the exterior door and the door that leads to the hallway.

The casings on the door that lead to the hallway had separated and were loose. I removed them and reinstalled them properly.

Next I worked on the door casings for the exterior door. You may remember in previous posts that the original doorway was closed off in the past and I reverted it back to a doorway.

First I finished mudding the area.

Next I began working on the casing and rosettes. the only two rosettes I had left were both split in half. I used my doweling jig and glued them back together with dowels.

Once they were dry I installed them above the door along with the casing.

Next I installed the picture rail on the wall that I rebuilt.

With that done I was ready for paint. I went around the room and glued down any loose wallpaper.

I really hated to paint over the wallpaper but there were just too many places where the paper was in too bad a shape.

First I primered and painted the trim.

Then I primered and painted the walls. It turned out that there was something wrong with the paint I chose, it was way lighter than the paint sample at the store. I didn't have a choice though and had to use it. I painted on Thanksgiving morning so we had to hurry and get the furniture back together for Thanksgiving dinner so I didnt get any pictures until after the dinner.

I also had to do some last minute electrical to get an outlet in for the china cabinet light.

I still have a lot of wainscoting to caulk and paint, I need to have some casing replicated for the door to the kitchen, and the ceiling needs to be primered and painted.

Dining Room Door part 2

A year ago to the day I rebuilt the dining room door. You may remember that this door was rebuilt as a window at one point and then closed in altogether.

I rebuilt it as a door as it was originally and installed an old french door that I had on hand.

As you can see it was missing many panes of glass and was in terrible shape. I installed a door knob and replaced all the broken panes except two that were only cracked but that was it.Not long after installing the door it started separating on the hinge side at the dowels so we stopped using it. It sat that way for a year.


Since the weather has been so nice lately I figured this was a perfect time to fix the door.

I removed the door and pulled it apart, then glued and clamped the door back together. Once it was dry I filled all the holes with wood putty, then sanded the entire door down.

Then I primered and painted it and reinstalled the door.

As you can see I need to finish the inside door casing.

The door works great now. I will be getting a screen door for it very soon. I will add brackets to the screen door like I did on the screen porch a while back.

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.

Stump Removal

The stump removal company came out last Saturday and removed the stump.

It only took about 40 minutes to grind it to mulch. I used some of the mulch for the beds in my front yard as oak mulch is great for retaining water.

Before the stump was ground down I counted the rings on it several times and got an average of 109 (it's very hard to count the rings as they are very close together and very faint). So the tree was probably planted sometime around 1902. I know the house was built sometime between 1895 and 1902 so the trees were either original to the house or planted not long after it was built.

Oak Tree Removal

There are two very large Oak trees in front of our house. I'm pretty sure they are as old as the house. There used to be three but one was hit by lightning years ago and came down. I removed the stump from that one last year with the help of a friend and his back hoe. The root ball was over 6 feet in diameter and lifted the front wheels of the tractor 4 feet off the ground when we picked it up with the back hoe arm.

The next tree over (the one that would have originally been in the middle of the three)  was starting to look really bad, there is a large rot hole at the top of the trunk where a large limb had fallen off many years ago. It's been getting steadily larger over time.

I've become increasingly concerned that the tree will come down on the house in a storm so I spoke with the city about taking it down as it's in the right-of-way on their property. The city council voted to have an arborist come out and make an assessment of the tree and go ahead and take it down if that's what the arborist recommended.

The arborist came out and immediately recommended that the tree come down. The city got the tree removal service out a few days later.

Look at that trunk, almost all heart. Too bad I dont have a sawmill handy.

They had to cut the trunk in half because it was too heavy for their crane to pick up.

I hate to see the tree go but it was becoming too much of a danger to the house and us.

Dining Room Wall sheetrock complete

I finally completed the sheetrock and mudding on the Dining Room wall.

I'll be pretty busy at work this week but hopefully I can squeeze in some time to get the picture rail hung and then primer the wall. It will probably be this weekend before I can scrape, primer, and paint the entire room.

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.

House History Update

I've updated the House History page with a lot of new information that I've found recently. You can click the tab at the top of the page or just click here: http://woodbury-house.blogspot.com/p/house-history.html

Dining Room Walls

Two and a half years ago I moved the wall between the Kitchen and the Dining Room three and a half feet to make more room in the kitchen. I put sheetrock up but never got around to mudding it.

Yesterday I finally decided to finish it. I had to put up a few small pieces first. Then I taped and mudded it.

Today I will sand and put up the second coat.

On another note, we have unfortunately decided to paint over the wallpaper. I really liked it but it has a lot of issues. I would just tear it off the wall, it's vinyl and comes off real easy, but there are two other layers underneath and they are paper. That's a nightmare I dont want to get into right now.

Finishing the brick walkway

After spreading sand over the bricks and waiting two days for a vibrating sled compactor to become available I finally went ahead and raked and swept the sand down in the cracks as best I could. As it settles I will add sand to the cracks.

I should have swept the rest of the sand off the bricks before taking these pictures but I didn't.

I will eventually run the walk all the way out to the sidewalk.

Bricking the front walkway

We've been wanting to tackle this project for a while now. The front walkway was nothing but weeds and broken concrete.

Across the street from us is the old Woodbury Oil Mill, it was built in 1902, now it's a fertilizer plant. A section of one of the brick buildings collapsed a few years back and all the brick was left where it fell. I asked them about it and they told me that I could take as many as I needed. Perfect! The brick is from the same era as the house.

I began by breaking up and removing all the concrete, below is an in progress shot..

With all the concrete removed I leveled the pad.

The ground slopes downward towards the right in the above picture. The soil is a combination of gravel, coal, and a little bit of dirt mixed in, needless to say it was quite hard to level off. I had to borrow a tractor from a friend to get it level.

Next I put down a layer of sand then began the process of laying the brick... well almost, first I had to gather up the brick, then scrape all the old mortar off of them.

Here is an in progress shot, I'm using two rows for the border then a standard stretcher bond pattern for the infill.

It took all three days  of the three day weekend but I finally finished it.

This afternoon I'll get some more sand and fill in the joints.