February 2004

February 10, 2004: Well, when you left us last month, we'd been buzzing right along, refinishing the bannisters and posts of the staircase, and had made quite a dent in the first coat of paint on the balusters. We were sanding, brushing, and detailing...  until the wheels fell off.

Don't quite know what happened. No doubt that we hate painting trimwork with the fiery passion of a thousand flaming nuns (oh, wait, we think that's supposed to be "fiery suns"... eh, never mind, just insert it on your own mentally) and will find any excuse not to do it.

Or maybe we're just easily distracted (ooooh... shiny!)  

At any rate, we haven't put a centimeter of paint on the staircase since our last Journal entry. Haven't done a whole lot else, either.

The weather's still limiting us to things we can do primarily inside, and we're still researching and gathering materials for the bathroom remodels. The good news is, we located a source for wall-mounted, period-appropriate sink faucets. The bad news is, the vessel sinks we wanted (which looked like old, chunky mixing bowls you'd find in a farm kitchen's Hoosier cabinet) have been discontinued, and the last source we found for them only had one left.

Of course, we need two.

Back to the drawing board...

Anyway, we have managed to do a couple of smaller things in the last couple of weeks. First, we finally replaced the wholly inadequate return vents in the hallway with one that actually works...

Only in an old house is a freakin' return vent a progressive project. Of course, it complicates matters when it's the only return vent in the entire house. When we first moved in, the vent was an 18" x 2" hole covered by a wall vent cover, that you can see just to the right of the staircase in the photo below:

And even though the furnace was only a couple years old, it was wheezing like Ruben Studdard singing a power ballad, so we knew the return vent had to be enlarged. We did that when we restored the hall floors, and put in two 4" x 10" floor vents, centered over the return:

Still not enough-- no more pre-cardiac arrest Ruben, but the air whistling through the new brass vent covers sounded like a jet engine taking off every time the thermostat kicked on. We removed the vent covers, which at least solved the FAA problem, but increased the likelihood of an unanticipated trip to the basement with a single mis-step, and went hunting on the 'net. It took us a couple of months, but we finally found a vendor that made an 8" x 30" vent cover at a reasonable cost. Some stain custom mixed to match the floors, a couple of coats of polyurethane, and voila:

The furnace purrs along quietly, and the risk of broken ankles is substantially reduced. Hey, when you reduce the risk of orthopedic bills just from moving about in your own house? Life is guuuuddd.

A few more returns are in order upstairs, but we'll work on those soon, once the walls are open during the bathroom renovations.

Our second recent project was the usual "old house" story-- it arose suddenly and unexpectedly, and became immediately necessary.

The Kitchen Pantry.

Now, we'd been dodging bullets in the Pantry since we moved in, to be sure. We knew from first glance that the entire kitchen, and the bathrooms, were disasters that were waiting to happen. Kind of like Michael Jackson, circa 1984... Or maybe Janet Jackson, circa... a week ago? It may be a toss-up-- Michael Jackson exposes his private parts to a few underage boys in his own home... Janet Jackson exposes her private parts to millions of underage children in their own homes. Eh... You decide.

Anyway, we originally had a water leak in the pantry from the master bathroom, about six months after we moved in. The leak manifested itself in the form of a dark stain on the pantry ceiling, that eventually grew mushrooms large enough to make the Caterpillar in "Alice in Wonderland" really, really happy. No kidding-- we discovered 8-inch mushrooms hanging from the ceiling and sprouting heads so funky deformed and large, we were going to call National Geographic.

Unfortunately, we panicked before we could get pictures of our never-before discovered flora, and emptied the entire pantry. We cleaned it from top to bottom, fixed the leak (which turned out to be from the master bathroom sink) and put everything back. Then we prayed with the fiery passion of a thousand nuns (hey, forget the %#&$* suns, the nuns are actually useful-- they've got access to the red phone direct to God) that the repair would hold, and we wouldn't have to worry about the pantry again until we could tear out the kitchen.

The nuns didn't do too bad, we have to admit. We had no troubles with the pantry until now-- when it spawned not flora, but fauna, in the form of teeeny, 1/4 inch flying things that multiplied, and multiplied, and multiplied, until no amount of emptying and scrubbing could rid us of them.

So we decided that it was time to get rid of the pantry. You can see the bump-out for the pantry, and its door, trimmed out in the style of BadJoeyPrinceofDarkMolding in the photo below:

After an entire day's worth of demolition, trudging 55-gallon contractor bags of black molding, drywall, plaster, and BadJoey jerry-rigged framing to the ever-growing pile outside the studio, the pantry was, blessedly, gone. Another day's worth of finding and assembling chrome utility-shelving to take its place, and we had this:

It ain't pretty, but the bugs have been evicted, and as much as we hate to yield form to function in such a Neanderthal manner, the open shelving is really, really convenient. It's the first time we've seen all 16 place settings of casual dishware in two years!

We're now back to praying to the nuns, fervently, that the kitchen will continue to hold fast, in its present incarnation, until we can tear it to the studs for its ultimate remodeling... renovation... Reincarnation?  Ok, how's this...

Until the thousand nuns train their divinely-inspired flaming wrath upon BadJoey's Baalzebub-inspired design decisions and magically reduce them to dust, and reincarnate them in a kitchen, inspired by the purely Divine, reduced to mortal understanding and perception by DeVol Kitchens of the United Kingdom:

We pray humbly to the nuns that the refrigerator doesn't break down, the dishwasher doesn't fall through the floor, the double-oven doesn't break (it's the only original appliance in the room that still works) and, a n d, a...n...d... we can actually replumb, renovate, and finish the three upstairs bathrooms before the kitchen gives up the ghost completely and we're forced to sell our bodies on the street to do a kitchen remodel before we're able to afford it.

How's that for supplication?

Anyway, while we're still waiting for the nuns to get a dial tone on the Red Phone, we figured we'd spend this weekend repainting the hallway, both upstairs and down. The purple gray we originally chose just didn't work-- way too cold. So we've chosen a warmer gray (nope, won't tell you what it is until we're sure we like it) and we'll see how it goes on this weekend.

February 17, 2004: Wahoo! The hall color looks great, as it has been (mostly) repainted. Roll your mouse over the photos below for before and after shots:

The wall color is Valspar's "Woodlawn Colonial Grey," a warm elephant grey, and the ceiling color is Valspar's "Montpelier Madison White" (a very grey toned off-white). Despite its aesthetic reference to pachydermal epidermises (epidermii?) it's so much more the color that we'd envisioned for the hall than the cold purple-grey we started out with, and we're really happy with it. But, as is always so with the OldHouseGods, they giveth, and they taketh away.

They bestowed upon us a great paint color, but unfortunately, our old standby for wall paint for the last eight years, Lowe's One and Only Low-Lustre (made by Valspar paints) has been discontinued. *Sob* Sometimes the gods can be so cruel...

We discovered this at the most inconvenient time... when we actually approached the Lowe's paint counter on Saturday to have the color mixed. We were surprised, to be sure, but honestly, we felt (quite unexpectedly) a bit heartbroken, if you must know. Kind of like back in 1980, when the guy had your eye on at the roller skating rink all of a sudden picked another girl to skate to Styx's "Babe" during Couple's Skate, you know? We can't say we didn't expect it, what with the re-branding of Valspar paints from "Southern Heritage" to "One and Only" to "American Traditions" in the last few years, but still... we kind of felt like we were dumped to go sit with our soft pretzel and Coke at the snack bar while some other chick with feathered hair and Jordache jeans got to skate with our boy...

But we made a quick recovery, and elected to have the color mixed in American Traditions satin. American Traditions is also made by Valspar, and we've used the high gloss faithfully for the trim throughout the house, so we felt pretty confident. It went on smooth as could be... raves on the coverage and the ease of application. Unfortunately, the satin has a higher gloss than the old One and Only Low-Lustre, so it didn't quite come out as we expected. Still, we're happy overall with the paint performance, and we'll see if the sheen doesn't grow on us.

Now we're relegated to the nitpicky details-- edging the few areas we couldn't see very well as the light faded, and repainting the parts of the trim that the wall color inadvertently encroached upon. It never ends, does it?

And speaking of the Never Ending Story, we actually managed to get the second coat on half of eight of the sixty staircase balusters, and we were pleased to see that only 2/3 of them will need a third coat. Can you see where this chapter of the story is going? Yup, y'all will be hearing about the staircase balusters and trim until June, when we'll still be plugging away on them during rainy weekends when outside projects have ground to a halt. It's going to be a long, mind-numbing project...

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