Empty Wall!

This is the same wall in the pictures below. A bit dusty, but done! Yay! The right tool sure does help... (I went to the REAL hardware store this morning.)

Blisters and Blood

I'm fairly sure I will have blisters on my fingers by the time I go to bed tonight. At the moment, I am using a razor blade to scrape the wallpaper, and while it's going quite well, it's a bit hard on my fingers. (Not to mention that I broke a juice glass this morning and sliced my pinkie quite badly. Ouch!)

But hey, that goes with the territory, no?

I realize there are specific tools for wallpaper removal. I went to our local store (not hardware store--we don't really have one. We have two lumberyards that carry hardware supplies. The one right down the street is never open when I need to go there, and the other one isn't open on Sundays) to see if they had anything, but they only had paint scrapers. I did buy one, just to see if it would work any better than the butter knife, but it didn't work very well at all, even after I tried my best to sharpen the blade.

Ah well.

My house-related goal for the weekend (ends Monday night) is to have the one wall finished so I can put the bookcases back. My office is a mess because of all this rearranging, and I have a coat rack in the middle of my room that I'd rather have somewhere else. After having everything nicely organized for a while now, clutter gets on my nerves fast!

I keep reminding myself that my fingers used to look like this all the time when I did polymer clay regularly and used the very same razor blades to cut the canes of clay. But I still don't remember any blisters.

(However silly it sounds, I think I need to get some of those soft thimbles to wear while I'm working. Hmm. You would think in the piles of sewing stuff I possess that I would already have some of these, but I don't think I do. I will have to check in the Secret Sewing Junk Drawer, though, just in case.)

I only have one thing to say...

Hmm. I could write my to-do list on the wall and scrape off the wallpaper as I complete the task! Brilliant!! :)

Hey, you strippers!

Got your attention? Good. :)

I have a question for all the house bloggers out there about paint strippers. I have four sides of four doors and three doorways to strip paint from.

The paint looks like this:
There is actually two layers--a weird-o salmon puke and the yellow. The paint is shiny and I don't know what kind it is. It's almost like lacquer paint instead of paint, if that helps any.


I am not sure why these doors were painted and no other woodwork in the house was touched. It is only in one room, and it's been there for at least 50 years, or whenever they put on the kitchen/bathroom/laundry room addition, because when they put on the addition, they moved the real side door to the back (in the kitchen) and it's painted as well. If that makes any sense.

I don't want to spend a lot of money for the little amount of paint stripping I have to do here, but I'm also not sure what the best product would be to buy. I would like to use something that will not make me ill while working, too. Does that soy stuff really work? Or is it citrus stuff?

As you can see, there aren't really any carvings or whatever to worry about. It's pretty plain.

Underneath, where the paint has flaked off the dining room door (the one on the left in the picture above) over the years, the door is stained or whatever you call that. Is there a way to strip the paint off without harming the stain/whatever underneath?

Thanks to anyone who replies--I am rather clueless about all of this. :)

Playing with colors...

I decided not to tear down any wallpaper today. However, I've been playing with the Benjamin Moore Personal Color Viewer, and trying out colors for my hallway. What do you think? Here are my two favorites (currently, the first one is my favorite.)

I am thinking about doing an stencil in the band between the colors--period, of course, but I couldn't find anything earlier that I could make look decent.



I am, however, in love with this:


It is an illustration from Decorative Flowers, which is a book full of Art Nouveau designs. Not the right period, I know.

I thought about replicating the original wallpaper that I uncovered last night (or close to it, at least) but I don't have a big enough piece to see the entire rest of the pattern (Here's a picture, though.)


However, I do like the first stencil on the list from this site as well. (The Craftsman Vine.) But it's too big. DE13 from this site is cool. (There doesn't seem to be a way to see individual ones on this website, which is kind of irritating when you're trying to link.) I also like DE22, 24, and 28 from the same site.

Here's a really bad photoshopped border:

Obviously, it wouldn't be done in black. But I don't think it would look too bad, do you? (It's not like it will be very visible, especially in this spot, since the bookcases would cover it. But it would be fun to try.

The Dark Green Wallpaper of Doom

Aha! So maybe I am getting a little obsessed with the wallpaper, because I ended up tearing more down this morning before church. And look what I found:

I still haven't been able to get a good picture of one of the flowers, but at least you can get the idea. This portion was obviously put up by someone who couldn't see straight, because it's about three pieces all pasted together. Definitely not a good job.

I started on the ceiling, too. The first layer is printed pink and white mottled wallpaper. Ugh!

Progress!

I am working on uncovering a bigger patch of the Dark Green Wallpaper of Doom--I can actually see half of the huge yellow and cream colored flowers that evidently were all over this wonderful vintage pattern. *coughchoke*

Yeah, right. My mind is still trying to imagine all the hallways (upstairs & downstairs) wallpapered in dark green with large cream colored flowers. I would post a picture, but Blogger (I tend to type Blooger when I'm mad) isn't letting me post pictures at the moment. Argh!

However, I did move two of the three bookcases and start on the wall behind them.

So, progress!

Curses to the Dragon Smaug!

For some reason, as I remove the wallpaper in my hallway (my wing of the house hallway, that is) that phrase keeps running through my mind. Maybe I've been writing too much lately or something; I don't know.

Today, in between chapters, I decided that I might as well start pulling off more of the wallpaper in my hallway. I started doing this a couple of months ago, since I figured that if I didn't start now I'd be dead before all the wallpaper is gone from my house, but I hadn't made much progress since then.

(You all are going to get pretty tired of me talking about wallpaper, I think.)

This is three layers down. At the moment, the current layer is just peeling off in sheets, which is nice. Under that is light blue where they painted over it at some point, and then there and layers under that as well, including the Dark Green Wallpaper of Doom, which I haven't been able to uncover a big enough piece of to take pictures of yet.


You can see a small strip of the DGWoD in this picture. The grey color is the plaster, the white in the picture is actually the light blue painted wallpaper.

I figured I might as well start in my hallway because it's accessible (I can reach the ceiling without too much trouble and a small stepladder) and if I screw something up with the patching and paint job, the bookcases should cover up my mistakes. This is my practice run. I should be an expert by the time I'm finished, since I have sooooo much wallpaper. (That nice white ceiling is painted wallpaper. Yes. How anyone actually managed to wallpaper ceilings, I will never know.)



Again, the white in the picture (pardon my flash; it's a dark hallway) is the light blue. So I have a lot of work to do.

You can see the lovely pink wallpaper in my studio/office in this picture as well. It's actually not in bad shape, and my bedroom and the office will probably be two of the last rooms I work on.


My supervisor--aka, Mabel--isn't very pleased with my progress yet today. She would rather me be finished so she could reclaim her rug in my hallway and not have to listen to me curse. Considering that my weapon of choice in removing wallpaper is a butter knife (I can't find my paint scraper) I think I'm actually getting a lot done.

If I could only train the cats to scratch the walls...

Crazy Neighbor

I have a crazy neighbor. Well, two of them really, but one is really crazy and the other is harmless-crazy.

I am also an advocate for garbage picking, if you do it properly. I even wrote a little essay on the subject after Dad and I cleaned out the little building a couple of years ago.

However, the lady crazy neighbor (herein LCN) is a bit much. When Mom and Dad and I cleaned out my basement--old moldy garbage the PO left behind--(and it was garbage, too. Like mildewed and moldy masonite boards and dirt and filth and woodshavings and a pressboard entertainment center that was dripping wet and falling apart, etc., etc.) we ended up with about 6 or 7 contractor bags of garbage to set out to the curb, along with piles of the other debris we couldn't fit in the bags.

LCN took everything. As soon as the sun set, she snuck out of her house and took all the stuff lying in piles, and then she came back for the bags as well.

She claims she intended to recycle them, but I just don't know. Neighborhood gossip says that the house (which is a rather nice Victorian farmhouse (she says my house is older, but I disagree--there's always been a house there on the fire insurance maps, so who knows) is full of crap. Like, hoarding full, if you get my drift.

So anyway, the other day we took some leftover stuff from the basement out to the garbage. The bag stank of mold and mildew. And I mean stank. Not only did she take that (leaving just my garbage can behind) she also took the bag of cereal boxes and stuff we didn't put in the can (milk bottles? Cartons?) and everything else that was sitting out. My across the street neighbors also moved out last weekend, and all she didn't take from their pile (and it was a large pile) was a broken porch swing and a box. I did check out the porch swing myself, but it looked like it was beyond repair.

Yesterday, I cleaned the bathroom. There's a bag full of dirty paper towels, hedgehog litter and droppings, cat litter (used, of course) and nasty gross stuff out at the curb. I told my sister that if she takes that, we know she's got a mental problem.

But seriously. I can see taking useable recyclables. But actual garbage? Please!

(She has offered to pull her van up to my shed when we clean it out this spring and fill it up so we don't have to carry everything out to the curb. I don't mind doing this--as long as I already know what we're tossing (I'm keeping all the copper piping, for example, and useable stuff) but I feel like I'm really just feeding the problem. So who knows what we'll end up doing.)

Guy Crazy Neighbor (GCN) is an alcoholic who suffers from dementia and probably early alzheimer's. He is the one I saw standing naked beside his garage last summer when Mabel and I were on our way home from a walk. I don't walk past their house anymore for that reason. (I did not need to see a naked crazy old guy. Ugh!) He's also really hard to understand, because he's missing a lot of teeth and he tends to stutter. And he kind of scares me a bit, since he's verifiably crazy. But anyway. He hasn't bothered us for a long while. (Knock on wood!)

Cleaning the Bathroom

My house has two 'full' bathrooms. The downstairs bathroom is pink and green and the upstairs bathroom is pretty old, with a three-legged clawfoot tub, an old but cool sink, and a toilet that tends to overflow if you go #2, according to the PO. (I've never actually put that to a test.)

We don't use the upstairs bathroom. With only three of us in the house, we've never really had any reason to, so it's been the home to the upstairs litterboxes and Hildy-the-hedgehog's cage for a while now. It's also been getting filthier and filthier.

Oh, I should probably add that the hot water is turned off in the upstairs bathroom. Early on, Dad turned it on and it started spraying everywhere. It probably has something to do with the way the plumbing was put together. We will fix it eventually.

The upstairs bathroom is in my 'wing' of the house, so of course I get to clean it.

Here are some during/after pics:

The 'tile' is actually fake--it's wallboard or something and will be *cough* quite fun to take down. As you can see, I had a couple of helpers, although they were more interested in checking out the birds out back and the clean sink.

(Cleome is on the back of the toilet and Chloe is in the sink.)

Before I started, Hildy's cage was straddling the tub. It wasn't the best of setups, but it worked for the most part until I got the idea that I could put the cage overtop the litterboxes--if it fit. As you can see in the next picture, it's a bit tight.


As in, if the toilet was any further over, it wouldnt' have fit. Luckily, I can fit between the tub and the cage just fine.

Don't you just love that wonderful tile on the floor? As far as I can tell, there's hardwood underneath. Probably more oak, like the rest of the house.

That is Cleo's tail, and Misty the kitten.

You can't really see her, but Hildy's in the little pink house.

There are two litterboxes in the bathroom. Since the round one fit quite well in the corner under/beside the sink, guess where the other one went?

Okay, don't kill me. I know it's an antique tub. I know. But I can't take a bath upstairs anyway (at least not at the moment) so...

There's some good points about this--it will virtually eliminate the tracked litter I kept having to clean up on the floor (hence the reason why the floor was so filthy.)

Again, don't you just love that tile?

We will have some old water leakage problems to repair once we take the floor up, because the PO didn't take her own advice to go downstairs to the bathroom.

Instead, she let the toilet overflow many, many times, in fact, badly enough that there's a nice large expanse of water stains on the dropped ceiling in the entry room below.

Luckily, there's nothing sitting below the clawfoot tub, so if the floor is really rotten and it ever falls through, it will just end up in the crawlspace. (I'm kidding, really. There's probably a hole, but I don't believe it's that extensive. *crossing fingers*)
This project, of course, will have to wait until I can save up some money, because I have a feeling it's not going to be easy or pretty.

There is a nice built-in cabinet in the bathroom--someone defaced it with a wooden mirror long ago. But here's a not-too-great picture of it:


It might be original to the house, but I'm not sure. It's hard to tell.

I will, of course, eventually either take off that mirror or make it so it doesn't look so terrible on the cabinet.

The radiator is under the cabinet. It's a small one, but the bathroom heats up really well in winter, so Hildy is happy, since she needs more heat.

That is my elbow in the picture. :)

And since my office is unheated (the radiator in here leaked at one point, so it's unhooked) that helps as well. Although I really don't think my office got much colder than 62 all winter long this year.

It was so hot in the bathroom while I was cleaning it that I opened the window. It's raining outside, but it's not that cold. The fresh was very nice!

Wallpaper!

I have enough wallpaper removal to do to last me the next ten years. All the rooms in the house except for two bedrooms, the living room, and what we call the Green Room (Yes, it's green, but not a color I'd ever choose) are covered in multiple layers of wallpaper.

One of the POs even nicely painted over the wallpaper in the hallway at one time, which consists of at least six layers. (I peeled six layers apart once, early on, just to see the patterns.) I think the dining room has about eight layers.

My plaster walls have never been painted, so that will definitely be interesting to do. :)

So today after I discovered that I inadvertently damaged part of the damaged dining room floor (the 'conservatory' part of the dining room where all my plants reside for the winter) I peeled the wallpaper away from under the bay window, because I was just disgusted with myself for not realizing that a clay saucer will make a mark on wood and that after sitting on said wood for the last few months, it will bleach and mildew the wood so I have a nice circle of yuck, and I was sick and tired of the sagging wallpaper.

I pulled, and about five feet of wallpaper came free, all the way behind the radiator. (Why they would put a radiator in a bay window, I'll never know.)

I then picked at some on the wall where it was starting to peel off.

The plaster walls don't look to be in bad shape. There are cracks, of course, but not major ones, and they are lily white. Even the wallpaper paste of yore did not stick.

I know I have a lot of work ahead of me--did I mention that the ceilings upstairs (hallway ceiling and two bedrooms) are also wallpapered? And painted?--but I have plenty of time to do it.

Although I will admit that the varying layers of wallpaper showing in the dining room would be a good history lesson, if I could date them.

"And this is how the dining room looked in 1924..."

(I did keep a piece of the old and nasty carpet to show visitors what was covering my beautiful oak floors since before 1978.)

Introduction

This will be my house project blog, where I can keep things straight and post plenty of pictures without clogging up my main blog, DisOrganization.

My house is:

--located in a small town in Southern Ohio
--frame, with a stone foundation
--over 100 years old--it shows up on the 1904 Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps
--currently home to me, my sister and nephew, five cats, an English Bulldog, a baby ball python, a hibernating box turtle, and a hedgehog

I decided to call the blog "House St. Clair" because that's the title of my website, and it's all connected anyway. (And I've been meaning to make a blog for my house for a while now.

The story:

In December of 2002, I got a divorce, moved back in with my parents and spent the next year and a half paying off credit card debt while also saving to buy a house. My parents own an 1850s Colonial Revival-style brick farmhouse, so I grew up in old houses and could not imagine myself in anything that was in any way, shape, or form, cookie-cutter-ish.

In truth, I envisioned myself in a cottage or a bungalow. Instead, I ended up buying (a year early, too) a four bedroom, eleven room white monster.

In August of 2004, my dream home was put on the market. Since I had always been partial to this particular house (and stone houses in general) I bit the bullet and went to the bank, despite knowing that I would never be qualified for the loan. I wasn't, but my credit looked good enough for me to qualify for something, so thus started the mad race of the next month as I decided to try to get a house a year before I had even planned to start looking.

(I had never really stopped looking, but once my dream house was put on the market, I decided that I might as well try.)

My current house was the third house I looked at. It was billed as just needing the final touches of restoration--it needs a bit more than that--but the house is sound, the woodwork is unpainted except for three doors, and the stained glass window in the dining room was (to me, at least) to die for. And I have a front porch. And a porch swing. Among other things!

There are eight layers of wallpaper in my dining room.

The old lady who lived in my house had lived there since 1978. Her husband had died a few years earlier, and she just couldn't handle such a big place on her own. (Not to mention she kept the thermostat cranked up really high, so she had some major gas bills.) Before that, as far as I've been able to tell, the house was owned and rented by the Shafers (haven't been able to find anything about them yet.) The courthouse burned down in the 70s and most of the property records were lost, so I don't know if I'll be able to go back any further than what I have already.

At the moment, my house is covered by aluminum siding (white and peeling.) As far as I've been able to tell, the original wood siding is underneath. Eventually, finances permitting, I plan to remove all of that, but I will paint the aluminum siding first, because I can't afford it at the moment.

While I like cottages, my high ceilings and huge windows are growing on me. I sure can't complain about the nice oak floors we found under the carpet (that didn't have to be refinished) but I can complain about the state of the house when I moved in (filthy.)

I got the keys to my house on December 11, 2004. Two weeks later, an ice storm raged through town, knocking out the power for 48 hours. That was only the beginning!