More delicious pictures!

Here's the front entry this morning, now fully painted, before the floor guys arrived to start the patching and sanding. I think the new paint color is gorgeous! You can see the new AC return vent under the stairs. Don't you think I need to splurge on a vintage brass cover?

Remember this? 

 

Ta-da! Now it's gone and has been nicely patched. Also, you'll see that the difference in color between the foyer and kitchen is almost gone with the sanding.

The kitchen floors are the best surprise of all. They were very dark and discolored. You can see the difference here--they haven't sanded the edges yet. Wow!

In an odd turn of events, the sanding revealed this stain, which hadn't been visible before. It's right in the doorway of the dining room. Drat. So far this is the only negative result of the floor project. Perhaps the varnish will hide it again. We'll know tomorrow!

Floors are coming along!

The first layer of finish is on the upstairs floors!

Paint and floor progress

Everything is moving along swimmingly! The entire interior is almost painted, including kitchen cupboards, and the floor guys filled holes upstairs and did most of the sanding up there yesterday. Today, they will finish sanding the upstairs and lay down the first layer of oil finish. That means I can't go upstairs anymore for at least a week!

Since they will start the downstairs tomorrow, and I realized I'll be kicked out of the house for several days, I thought I'd snap a few progress pictures for your delectation. Here, they are shown as "before" and "during" shots. Unfortunately, I can't get to the house easily in the daytime so the "during" pics lack the beautiful natural light in the befores. But I hope you can see the improvements!

Living room before

Living room in progress: door trim is now white like the rest of the house, and the sconces are higher on the wall. I really want to make a stained glass window for the transom!

Kitchen before. The wall color is a cream with a greenish tinge. Not flattering.

Kitchen during: Walls are painted a lovely cream, cabinets are a brighter white above and a dark purply-brown below. Small wrinkle: the screw holes for the hinges AND the handles don't match the originals, so all the holes needed to be filled.

Front bedroom (sewing room) before

Sewing room during: baseboard heaters and covers are gone, revealing the beautiful high baseboards. Walls are painted a lovely light green, trim is a much brighter white, floors have been sanded, and there's a new outlet visible in the picture.

Back bedroom before

Back bedroom during: floors mostly sanded, heating gone, lovely cream paint on the walls. I've removed damaged shoe molding at various spots in the house and will replace it after the floors are done.

Hall before.

Hall during. You can see a new heating vent in the ceiling at the end of the hall. Lighter paint on the walls, floors sanded. The floor guys' equipment is where the window seat will be. They cut out the floorboards there to patch the heating pipe holes. There were at least 19 such holes to be patched throughout the house.

I'll end with one more picture that is not a before/during. This shows the condition of the baseboards behind the heating pipes (this is actually one of the better spots) as well as the floor patching in progress. You can see in the sub-floor the round holes that were also in the white oak floorboards. The floor guys were planning to put round plugs in, but when I came by to check things out yesterday, they had decided to put board pieces in, which is much nicer!

What you are NOT seeing in these pictures is all the wonderful prep work the painters did on the plaster walls. They look remarkably smooth for plaster. You can only truly see that in person.

Pride cometh before the fall

Last night, I was on top of the world. I learned how to remove my copper heating pipes all by myself! (Thanks, internet.) With a really cool copper cutting tool I got at Lowes for ten bucks, a bucket, and a sponge, I removed almost all of the downstairs pipes in an evening! I was hauling them out onto the porch, shopvac-ing the mess, and feeling mighty pleased with myself as I released the baseboards from their aluminum and copper bondage. GIRL POWER. I CAN DO IT ALL.

And then I totally screwed up. I blithly cut into a pipe running from the kitchen upstairs, and it spurted water. No problem, that had happened on another pipe that went from the first to second floor. The heating pipes will have a bit of water remaining after they're drained.

BUT THIS ONE DIDN'T STOP.  Yes, I had cut into an active pipe that just happened to be carrying hot water to the upstairs bathroom.

"HOLY FUCK, NO, NO, NO, NO! SHIIIIIIIIT!" First I ran around like a chicken with my head cut off. Then I made like the little Dutch boy trying to stop the flow and promptly got showered all over my face and glasses. Then I stood there whimpering for a minute before dashing to the basement and running around looking for water valves and finding none, as water began dripping from the floorboards onto my head.

I pictured the entire first floor turning into a sea.

And I called the Barchi.

"Hello?"

"Issac. Molly. Crisis. I cut into a pipe and there's water everywhere and I don't know how to turn off the water. How do I turn off the water."

Isaac, in his I'm calm but Molly needs help voice: "Janine--Molly needs to know how to turn off the water."

Now, Isaac is one of the most competent people I know, but he also knows that Janine is the go-to girl in a home-related crisis. The little Dutch boy might have stuck his finger in the dike, but this little Dutch girl would have either had a tool to fix it right in her pefectly labeled toolbox or would have found the proer dike-repairman in, like, a minute and had it fixed for good.

After discovering that I had no idea where to find any of the water shut-off spots she suggested (through no fault of my own, it turns out, because they don't actually exist in this house, but still vaguely humiliating) she told me to call 311 or 911.

Genius!

Except that 311 got me the Hampton, VA info line, and they offered to transfer me to Newport News emergency.  WTF?? But I digress.

So it was on to 911. They said they would send a car.

Yay! A nice policeman was going to stop by and help me find the turnoff!

I called Janine and thanked her while I waited....I listened to the water in the kitchen. (Fortunately, there was no sea. The water was seeping down through the floorboards into the cellar at a nice steady rate.)

And then, the Worst Possible Thing Ever happened:

They showed up.

"Oh. No. Janine, they sent the fire engine. Oh no, no, no this is so embarrassing. Gotta go."

The fire engine was about half a block long.

Picture one just like this at 11:30 pm. Lights flashing. All traffic blocked. I actually hung my head in shame as three men, wearing their big fire-fighting coats, climbed down from the cab. What must my new neighbors think of me??

It took officers Antonucci, Parkinson, and Henderson at least 10 minutes to figure out how the heck to turn off my water. Turns out there are no valves on the hot water heater. They never found a shutoff where the main water line entered the house. They used a special tool to turn off all the water at the street. Crisis resolved. I sopped up the mess, went home and took a long shower, and slept remarkably well.

So, girls and boys, the moral to this story is:

The word "car" means different things to different people.

Tune in next time for more exciting house antics! 

A picture is worth several thousand dollars

Hooray! The new heat is on! Paint color looks pretty nice too.

 

Move-in minus two weeks

Hi everyone! Things are moving along at the house. I found a couple of nice guys from Staunton (a town in the Shenandoah Valley, about 30 minutes over the mountains from here) who are going to sand and refinish the floors. They love old houses and have a lot of experience with them, so I'm really excited to have them take on the project. They start next Wednesday the 18th, which means I'll probably be able to start moving my kitchen, bathroom and pantry stuff into the house over the Christmas holiday, and then can actually have movers transport the heavy furniture and books on the 27th or 28th. It will be the best birthday present ever!

The HVAC system is almost entirely installed, and will be 98% done tomorrow, when they will hook up the system and turn it on for the first time. They will drain the hot water pipes, since they'll no longer be needed, and I'm going to see if I can remove them myself this weekend (!!!). All it takes is a hacksaw and some courage, if the online tutorials I have read are to be trusted. I already warned Rod and Rod Jr., my valiant painters, that they can expect to hear some very unladylike cursing while I'm working.

I hope to have some pictures to share next time!

HVAC update

Hi everyone! Lots is going on at the house: the painters are actually painting today, and the HVAC project is coming to a close in the next 3-4 days.

I spent several hours over at the house on Saturday removing the protective metal sheeting that surrounds the hold hot-water heating pipes, so those can be removed quickly and at a lesser expense by my carpenter. The upstairs units are no longer operational, so it was safe to do this. Downstairs, the pipes are still heating the house, so I expect to prep those on Wednesday or Thursday after work, when the new system is turned on.

Here's what the baseboards look like with the sheathing removed:

The master bedroom. The space under the window was never painted.

Hall window. You can see the holes for the old radiators as well. This is where the window seat is going.

The office. With a room this small, it actually makes a difference to have the bulky old heating units gone! Now each upstairs room just has a single ceiling vent.

I got a tour of the installed upstairs HVAC system from Ryan, one of the installers. You can see that it is positioned right next to the chimney, on top of the walls straddling two bedrooms. The rigid ducts are metal covered in insulation and the flexible ducts are puffy and somehow make me think of Moomins!

Ryan was excited to tell me about the challenges of attaching the system to the old wood beams in this house--true 2x6 beams (not the modern 1.5" variety) that are hard as a rock. He was very impressed.

I know that some people might disagree with my decision to remove the old heating system, since it is known to produce a wonderfully cozy heat. But it's less efficient than modern electric heat-pump heat, and I had to install the new ductwork anyway if I wanted central air, plus I am an architectural snob and don't want pipes and ugly baseboard heaters all over the house disrupting its beauty. Tradeoffs! I think it will be really good for resale value, too.

My next posting will probably be about paint, so stay tuned! Exciting things are happening...

Choosing Paint Colors

I officially submitted my paint colors to the painter today. This is very, very, very hard to do! I love color so much (quilting anyone?) and I love playing with color combinations so much, that I simply couldn't make a decision until I got very strict with myself.

I went online to get some advice, and liked the idea of picking an artwork or similar whose colors make you really happy and making it the source of your color palette. So I picked my two favorite quilting fabrics of all time: Kaffe Fassett's Paperweight, in "Pastel" and "Sludge." These are the only fabrics I have bought more than once:

These images from the web are a bit darker than the fabrics are in real life.

Here's the resulting paint palette.  The trim is a very bright white, for which I can't seem to find a swatch. I tried uploading pics from the paint company's site, but it won't work, so here's a snapshot of the paint chips, which doesn't quite capture the colors, but gets reasonably close:

Fans of Live Oak Cottage will notice that the blue and green are similar to the exterior colors I painted on that house.

And no, I'm not telling you where they're all going. It's a surprise!

Busy, busy, busy

Hello faithful fans! All is moving along, very quickly all of a sudden. The Sunday before Thanksgiving, I took an epic trip to IKEA to procure lighting, cabinet hardware, and a range hood. The rewiring project is complete. I've got HVAC installers working hard on the upstairs unit, the painters have started prepping the walls, and most exciting, I've officially given the go-ahead for a wonderful carpenter to build some cabinetry for me. Here are some pictures for your delectation, though I doubt you will find them as exciting as I do. Enjoy!

Pirate protects the range hood. I can't wait to install all this stuff. And to get out of the cottage and into the house!

In the upstairs office, HVAC ducting is waiting to be installed...

The ugly chair rail in the dining room is gone. It wasinstalled too high AND upside down, so while I'm not opposed to chair rail, it had to go. You can see some sanding has exposed evidence of a previous bright red paint job.

Paint prep in the upstairs hall!

Kitchen prep. Note the lovely new recessed lighting. I've got seven of these babies.

The only serious plaster patching is here in the living room. Those are kitchen cabinet doors removed for painting.

A sketch (out of scale) for my built-in bookcases. This makes me so happy.

The painters did so much in their first day. There's lots still to do.

All right, I'll do my best to keep you updated. Thanks for visiting.