Another Wall

Today, the kitchen/dining room wall was drywalled, and the wainscoting in the bathroom was finished!

Run On Sentence

By the time I meandered downstairs today (not counting when I rescued my beauty sleep from Dori's ridiculously pitiful howls as she realized she was left outside while watching Papa drive away...sorry for the run on sentence), Scott was nailing wainscoting in the bathroom, Jim was putting together the start of our back stoop and stairs, and Randy was hard at work measuring and squaring out the new kitchen/dining room wall. He also fixed the giant hole in the floor between the two rooms.

As with the rest of the kitchen, squaring out this wall required boards cut thin at the top and thick at the bottom...which is easier to see if you make the picture bigger

Old Fashioned Glitter Glue

Not much to take pictures of yesterday..just some more window trim and more painted windows, but that's about it. Today on the other hand, was quite the adventure! Jim, our contractor, took out the kitchen/dining room wall! The plan is to mimic the entryway between our living room and dining room between the dining room and new kitchen.

The rest of the doors also came! 

The lovely "dust shield" erected to minimize dust from cutting out the wall,  as well as a dark view of the doorway we are going to mimic between the dining room and kitchen

Stage One. 

Tearing away plaster

Adding new 2x4s to give the structural dimensions and support for the new doorway

Action shot! The little thing poking out of the wall in the middle of the picture is a saw blade! 

Sliding double doors for the closet

Bathroom doors drying after a coat of paint

Stage Two: no more wall!  

Some crazy nails in an old 2x4

Check out all the layers! Plaster, lathe, a paper thin layer of wallpaper, some more wood and then new 2x4s

The Jackpot of the Day: Some old wallpaper! Still in the wall at this point

The piece of wallpaper Jim found after I pulled it out of the wall. Hand painted. Dennis, one of our painters, told me they used to put up the paper and paint it afterwards. The fancy part is a border that was up next to the ceiling and the plain part where my thumb is is just plain wallpaper. Also, this piece was facing into the dining room.

If you click on this photo to make it bigger, you can see all the awesome colors and details still on the wallpaper! Dennis thought it was probably original to the house, which in this room means it is probably 110+ years old! Pretty awesome as a history buff. And just awesome in general. Also, if you look at the picture blown up, you can see something that looks like glitter glue. Dennis thinks it is probably real gold flakes! So. Glitter glue with real gold. Naturally this makes this souvenir that much more awesome. It must be the reason that mom and I like to craft with glitter glue in this room. 

The finished product for the day

Hard to get good depth perception from this picture, but the orangey/brown rectangle in the middle of the picture is actually the basement floor! It's a little easier to see blown up. Leftovers from the chimney removal. Not sure how they will patch that one up...

Window Ledges

And the adventures continue....today, in the form of window ledges, window trim, and painting the windows. The vertical sides and the ledges were trimmed. Still need to cap them off and add another board to the bottom of the ledges. The top will be fancy, sort of like the old living room window trim. Sorry no picture for that, but you'll get the idea when it's done!  :)

To paint the windows, Dennis took the storms completely out of their sockets!  And then leaned them against the walls to dry before putting them back in place

Bathroom window

Old dining room

Kitchen window

Odds and Ends

Nothing at all happened here yesterday, but today was a rather miscellaneous day.....quite a few little things were done! The painters were here again and sanded the mud around our living room and dining room windows and then the mud was painted to match the walls. On the front porch, they framed up the new window. In the addition, two new doors were delivered and one is currently sitting in the kitchen, but the other was installed as one of the bathroom doors. Outside, they trimmed up the last two windows, one of mine and the old bathroom window, added a downspout to the new gutter, and painted the first coat of red on our garage and back doors match the front steps and to give our house some zest! It's looking good!

Paint!

Yesterday was a big day! They painted the inside of the addition! We went with a brown color for the dining room area, and a blue/green for the bathroom. The kitchen only got a coat of paint on the ceiling because eventually there will be no exposed walls. We have decided to have a stone backsplash between the cupboards and the counter top, which takes up all the open wall space that would have otherwise been painted. In the bathroom, they also only painted the top 3/4 or so of the walls because we have decided to have wainscoting that will go from the floor to about 42 inches up on the wall. For those of you who don't know what that is, it's basically wood paneling that we will have painted white.

Heads up about the pictures: it is hard to get an accurate photo of the color, especially because there is so much variation in natural light in the rooms and no electric lights are installed yet. So bear in mind that the colors in the pictures are a wonky version of the actual color. One more reason to come visit us! So you can see what it actually looks like!  :)