the family room

 

We never actually saw all four corners of the family room before we moved in. Frankly, it was just too dark to see much of anything:

     

Believe it or not, this is an east-facing room, and these photos were taken on an early January morning when the sun was low in the sky and coming right through that double window. We've lightened them as much as possible, and you still can't see the far corners of the room.

This room was added some time in the 1930's, and is located here:

The dark paneling on two of the walls is actually real wood, not the plastic stuff found in most of the rest of the house, and was really not bad, if you could ever have actually seen it through the gloom. The floor was glue-down dark wood parquet tiles, to match the dark stained molding and paneling. The focal point of the room is that humongous fireplace covered in fake half brick. The ceiling is only seven or so feet high.

*sigh*... Gollum would have been at home here.

Since this room is the first one you enter from the rear entry way, and connects to the kitchen, we knew we'd be spending a lot of time here, and so it was one of the first rooms to receive an initial sprucing up to get it liveable. We painted the walls and trim, and tore out the parquet tiles. We replaced the tiles with maple engineered hardwood designed for a glue-down installation:

The advantage (at least aesthetically) of the engineered hardwood is that actual wood, not a plastic picture of wood, is laminated over the substrate. Does it look like real, honest to goodness hardwood? Nah, not on your life... not even if you tilt your head, squint a bit and hop up and down on one foot after a few beers. But for a temporary measure designed to make the floor liveable for just a bit until we decide what we're really going to do with it, it'll work just fine.

For a year and a half, we lived with the family room is in its mid-level incarnation, which you can see in the photos below (click either image for a larger view):

 

Rolll your mouse arrow over the photo below for before and after images, or click it for a larger view):

Now, normally, we don't show our mid-level incarnations... well actually, we don't normally do mid-level incarnations. We live with the disaster until we can turn our full attention to it, and then we live with the disaster we've created while we gut it and put it back together. We've found it's less painful that way-- do it once and fix it up right.

You know... "first cut is the deepest" and all that.

But even after seven years of renovation projects, it just didn't happen that way with this room, and even now, we're not really sure why. Who knows-- maybe we got optimistic and thought a fresh coat of paint and a new floor would do the trick. Or maybe the room just got the better of us. Or maybe, just maybe, we spent a couple of hours tearing out the subfloor in the master bedroom above this room, and realized that despite Uncle Sam's exhortations, this room really was not "all that it could be."

See, we thought we'd just have to deal with the low ceiling in this room, thinking it was reconfigured in the 70's when the master bedroom was added over this 1930's addition. But in digging around in the floor above during the master bedroom renovation (what, doesn't everyone pry up their bedroom floors on the weekends?) we discovered that the ceiling had been dropped, and could be raised back to its original height of over eight feet. So we figured...

well, we certainly ought to raise the ceiling, and while we're at it, we might as well replace this window with french doors out to the patio and pool area:

 

 

and we might as well remove this wall between the family room and kitchen:

 

A few days before Thanksgiving, in November 2003, we found ourselves with an unexpectedly free weekend, so we turned our attention to the dreadful dropped ceiling, which, as far as we could tell from preliminary excavations, had no reason to exist, except that Bad Joey had decreed it so. So we tore out the ceiling:

   :

And lo and behold, we were right. The ceiling had no reason to exist, except for a few really bizarre framing decisions Joey made, which we'll have to fix when we re-install the ceiling.

A few months later, in March 2004, during a demolition bonanza, we took down the plaster on either side of the wall between the family room and kitchen to expose the framing:

And the next month we removed the remaining wall studs, and replaced them with 7" square Parallam columns and beams, tied to the original framing members with steel plates:

   

Once we reduced a perfectly functional room to a mass of exposed studs and tangled wires, well, what else was there to do, except move on to something else? And so we did... summer was upon us, and we completely abandoned the room, taking advantage of the warm weather to continue our exterior renovation. We managed to get back to the room for a quick weekend at the end of August 2004-- it was raining, and we needed a quick weekend project indoors, so we started running wires for phone, cable, and a whole house speaker system from the attic, down through the second floor into the family room to ultimately run to the basement:

Hmm. Can't say what we've done to this room is exactly an "improvement," and any renovation that's gone on is certainly for the worse and not for the better (whoa... could we possibly, for the first time in all these years, have something in common with Bad Joey? Eww, eww, ewww... nooooo!)

But we promise our wreck is only temporary-- we don't intend to leave it like this, and we'll get back to it soon. Really, really, soon. Just as soon as this season's exterior renovation is done...

 

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