Been awhile since I've been on here. I sat down to update the website today and forgot that I had started this blog as a companion to the website. Since the last time this was updated our home has gone from a single family home with an accessory apartment to simply a single family home. It was not the happiest of circumstances; Old Moe passed away in his bed on New Years' Eve, December 31st, 2012. He told us many years ago that he would be going out feet first and he got his wish.
The room sat empty for a good year before we started to do any work there. We normally try to stick to pretty original but in the case of this room we opted to add a little touch of modernity. We decided that, due to the size of the room, we would add a soffit with can lights and a rope light around the perimeter. This room took a great deal of construction, drywall, taping, mudding, sanding, painting and all. Up until this point the living room had been our biggest project. This one now is.
Here are a couple of before pics:
The rug was pretty gross, but not as gross as the old mohair carpet pad underneath. I'm pretty sure I contracted some terminal lung thing when I pulled that out. The room was pretty bare if you don't count the old 60's hot-glue-over-a-balloon constructed disco ball. Shoddy white carpet, battered walls, yellowed ceiling, rusting radiators and windows that had less glazing than a Dunkin' Donuts doughnut. The first thing to go was the carpet.
The next thing to do was to start building that soffit and running all new electrical for this room.
I elected to remove the plaster on the North wall in order to be able to run electric easily. I agonized over this decision as I wanted to keep as many walls in their original plaster as I could. I felt much better when I realized that the wall had actually been repaired/replastered during an earlier modification to the house and was in terrible shape. At least that's what I tell myself at night.
In the end I was genuinely glad that I did it, otherwise I never would have found what is, so far, the coolest wall relic to date. In the wall I found a little space above
the hall closet (they share a wall) and inside was this little chamfered (ooo, my
spell check doesn't like that word) wood block containing the names of John
and Ruth Cushing's three children and their ages at the time; Whitney
age 2, Sally age 3 and Billy age 1.
So I lined up these dates with the known birth dates of the kids. This is the earliest confirmed date
I've found on the house and it dates it to around 1919. Still a little
late for a shingle style Queen Anne but I'll keep looking. I'm hoping
to track down one of the Cushing children who I think still lives in the area,
Sarah Cushing and see if she can tell me anything about the house.
We added a little memento of our own, a family picture/collage and a 4 pack of Heady Topper (empty! I'm not crazy).
The space can be seen in this picture on the upper right.
In the soffit we opted to have bucket lights above the bed wired on a separate switch from those that would be located on the East and West walls. With the rope lights being on a separate switch and the ceiling fan being on its own it was starting to look like I would need a row of switches on one wall. Then I remembered combo switches and our problem was solved. One normal sized double outlet box for 4 switches.
The trick was just remembering what went where and keeping track of the hot lines the whole time.
Leaving up the ceiling meant a little extra work when it came time to electrify the ceiling fan.
The worst part of the job was the sheetrocking and basic plaster re-attachment/patching. Everything tasted like joint compound.
I opted not to use a sheet rock lift for such thin spans of sheet rock; instead I used Bethany and the top of my head.
My FAVORITE part of this work is putting down a fresh coat of, as my daughter puts it, polathurnyane (pronounced exactly as it's spelt) on a freshly sanded floor.
After a balk on the originally picked paint colors, we repainted and came out with something we like, sort of a South West, terra cotta-y looking thing. We opted to use LED lights instead of incandescent lights.
Overall we think this room came out really well. Each project we do, the work gets better and better. Pretty soon I'm going to want to start back at the beginning and do over all those things that I didn't quite get right the first time around. Nah... I'll leave that to the next guy!
