Some New Trim

I put the existing baseboards back on, on the weekend. We took them off to strip them and varnish them. The fit isn't perfect I noticed, I guess it's from the house settling, I'm sure the fit was tighter when the house was built. I didn't think of fixing it until it was nailed back on. I guess I'll live with it.

I started on the trim around the door today. I need to buy wood for the header, it's a full inch thick, so it's a little harder to find. I didn't really want to cut down 1.5", seems like a waste. I need to fix the plaster on the wall to the right, it was difficult getting the existing baseboard off. I got the baseboard on to the left. I can see that the wall isn't very flat where I fixed it, there's a lot of gaps between the wall and the baseboard. I don't think I have enough paint left to repaint if I repair it now. I'm going to repair it when we tear the ceiling off in a couple years. I have a lot of small repairs I'd like to do to the walls.

I got a pretty big splinter from the fir, while refinishing the door frame. Fir can be really splintery, depending on the orientation of the grain. I have a few days off work (unplanned, so I'll have to make up the time), so I'm going to see how much I can get done this week. I'm going to see about getting the 6/4" fir tomorrow, and we're going to look in to getting windows for the front and french doors for the dining room.

Living Room Painted

I finished painting the living room yesterday. We used the Benjamin Moore Ecospec paint, a cheaper low voc paint. It's a custom colour that will match the wallpaper that's going on one wall. The wallpaper is from Graham and Brown and it's called Sophia-Pebble. We should probably order it now, before it's discontinued. We still have to pull the ceiling down and do the box beam ceiling before we wallpaper, which won't be for at least a year. The paint seems just as good as regular Benjamin Moore. I think they gave us a discount at the store, since we buy a lot of paint off of them, it was cheaper than Behr paint. Since we spend so much time in this room though, we thought we should give it some TLC. I've taken the 2 remaining baseboards off, for some reason one of the P.O. took off the nice trim, and put in crappy smaller trim on a couple walls, including trim made out of plywood around one door. The one baseboard is about 15' long, the other just over 12', and they're both 8" high.

It took around 3 hours to heat gun most of the paint off. There's a really strange undercoat that's really sticky and thick. It dissolves with methyl hydrate, so it's shellac based. There's the trim around the front window to strip, and the stool of the piano window. Someone cut the stool smaller on that window, so I'm going to have to make the trim a little smaller, so it doesn't look weird. I need to redo the trim on 2 of the doorways as well, I bought most of the wood for that already. The top piece of trim is 6/4 fir, so I need to go to a different place to get that. We need quite a bit of the 6/4 in other rooms too, because someone cut them all shorter, to make it easier to wallpaper, geniuses. We ordered some more Waterlox to varnish the trim. We got enough to do the floors upstairs, we'll see if the gloss is too much for downstairs. We're going to try and re-shellac the living room floor, since it's going to be a while until we have time to sand them down. I 'm going to clean the floor with de-natured alcohol, and then add a coat of shellac. The floors still have the original shellac, but they aren't in the best condition, there are a couple stained areas that might have to be replaced.

Living Room Plaster Remastered

We haven't been posting lately, we haven't been idle though, either. We've been removing the low plywood doorways that a previous owner added, the 1/4" plywood off of one wall, and 80 years of wallpaper.



We knew the ceiling was dropped in the living room, we didn't know it was plywood though. It's going to be harder to remove when the time comes. It seems to be these weird plywood boxes, that someone told me they use on theatre sets. It's 2 layers of plywood sandwiching 2x2's. We plan on removing the entire ceiling down to the joists, since there's no way the plaster is good underneath. Then we're going to do a box beam ceiling.

The 4 or 5 layers of wallpaper didn't come off that easily. The room had wallpaper originally, and the plaster has never been painted. I ended up washing the walls 3 or 4 times to get all the paper bits off, and would end up with an inch of glue in the bottom of the bucket each time.

Here's one wall that's already painted, we did that one first, then decided to do the rest of the walls at the same time, since it was taking longer to do one wall at a time. You can see the plaster washers on the one wall. The exterior walls were nearly as cracked as the interior walls.

More plaster washers... and our lovely plywood valence. We can't take it down until the ceiling comes down. Ahh, those lovely 60's makeovers. They even made trim for one of the doors out of 1/4" plywood. How that's better than the original fir trim, I don't understand at all.



The first coat on the cracks. We used concrete fill, which is a fast set drywall compound, with fibre in it. You could use mesh tape as well, but I've found it's unnecessary when using the concrete fill. Now I'll do 2 coats with fast set finishing drywall compound, then it's ready to prime and paint. Most of the time seemed to be taking off the wallpaper, and washing the walls. I found the 6" drywall knife worked the best for removing wallpaper, it has a thin flexible blade, that gets under the paper. We gouged the wall a bit, it's pretty minor, and a little Spackle will fix that.



I started stripping the trim as well. Better to strip it before the wall is painted. I removed 2 of the baseboards. I cracked the bottom of them a little, it's below where the quarter round will be, and I'm gluing the pieces back on as well. I started buying the wood to replace the door frames I had to remove, that were in poor condition, and the baseboards that were removed from one wall. The first place I went to didn't have 6/4 fir, so I'll have to go to another store to get it. They have 8/4 fir, but it seems like a waste to plane it down. They aren't open on the weekend, the other store, but they open at 7:30 in the morning, so I could go before work. We still have a ways to go, but we've made a lot of progress.

Coffered ceilings in the living room

I found a good article on coffered ceilings, from Finehomebuilding. We want to add them to our living room. The ceiling was dropped a few inches in the 60's, so we'd have to remove the ceiling. I'm sure the plaster underneath would have to be removed as well. The ceilings are 8'-4" currently on other parts of the main floor. The dropped ceiling its 8'-1". We were thinking the coffered ceiling would be 5.5" thick, so I guess the ceiling would be 7'-10.5" so hopefully it wouldn't feel too low.

Here's a reflected ceiling plan showing a layout we're thinking about. We're thinking of just doing crown around the fireplace. We'll keep the crown and other mouldings simple, since all the other mouldings in the house are simple. We were going to start on this project now, since I have a week off, but I think we're going to try and wrap up some projects first.

A Tale of Two Vents

This weekend, we moved the furnace duct for the living room. After almost 4 years of living under the entertainment unit, I decided it was time to move it. I made something to divert the air before, so it didn't all blow under the unit. We're planning on putting a piano on that wall, so we can't have a vent under the piano. I moved it as far to the side as I could, there's a beam underneath, so I couldn't move it back any farther. It was scary cutting in to the hardwood floor, I did a plunge cut with the jig saw, and scored the crosscut, it still splintered a little. It's covered by the grate though. I cut up a 2x8 to put under the old hole, and put a piece of plywood on top. The old hole was no where near square though. Moving the duct was a little bit of work, I had to cut some of the pieces, and remove the tape with the asbestos in it. I wore a mask, and wet it all down, then removed it.




It's nice having the heat come out in it's new spot. I think the grate has some kind of bronze coating underneath the paint. I'm going to try and remove the paint, without the coating. The last one I did, the coating came off with the paint.



I left the baseboard off, since it's not the original, and we have to refinish this wall anyways. We'll wait until after Christmas though, since it's disruptive. I need to add a wall under this wall, beside the basement stairs, it's sagging quite a bit. We're planning on a flat screen tv above the piano, I was looking at the mounting system they have at Lee Valley. I've been thinking we'd go with the articulated mount, so we can have it's a couple feet out from the wall, and it can swivel et cetera. We're planning on having the dvd player, cable box etc. in a cabinet on a different wall, so we need a transponder to send the remote signals. We need a rather long HDMI cable as well, since it's at least 20 feet away, (including snaking around).
I just placed the pieces or flooring from the new hole, in to the old. We'll have to do a better job when we refinish the floor. I don't know how to do this exactly, I want the joints to be staggered. I can use a chisel, I think the router could work as well, in conjunction with the chisel, to stagger the joints, I think the grooves might have to be removed on the bottoms at the ends, and face nailed. Well, it's a first stage for the living room.