Quick Introduction and Our Diningroom
I wrote this to post on a bulletin board, but it is a pretty good introduction to our home. Enjoy. Oh yeah, and it isn’t a very “quick” introduction, either. 🙂
The quick story:
First, a quick note: The pictures are in order by number, but they don’t show up by number on the page. Since I’m the person who wrote the script to display the pictures, one would think I could fix it easily. Unfortunately, I just haven’t given it any time. 🙂
I bought this big old 1890’s frame Victorian in 2002. I always loved the area (about 20 miles outside of Pittsburgh, PA), and spent my later elementary and high school years living in the same city in a classic 1950’s era house that my grandfather built.
The house was in move-in condition when I bought it. I was fortunate to find most of the woodwork and many original features intact when I was looking for a home–this area has many large and historic Victorian houses and buildings, many of which were sadly divided into apartments or left in poor condition. I was renting a house in Pittsburgh, and I couldn’t afford to rent and own another place at the same time, so I absolutely needed a place I could live in while I was working on it.
One of the odd things that I found with the house was that, despite having almost all of the original woodwork and many of the original interior doors (including the glass transoms above them, glass painted white but otherwise intact), there were some odd “updates” that had been done during two periods in the house. One set of updates happened at some point in the late 1960’s or early 1970’s, and the other set happened in the late 1990’s. The 70’s updates were a short drop ceiling in the living and dining rooms, a door frame to the living room that was shortened by having two pieces of 2×4 nailed to the top of it, and a first-floor powder room in the place of what I think was a pantry and hallway from the entrance hall through to the kitchen. I believe that aluminum siding was also put on the house at this point, though someone was at least partially intelligent and used a siding that still retains the look of the older narrow clapboards (rather than the classic 1970’s-ish wide board siding). Many of the exterial details were left intact, too, which was great. Sadly, I believe that this was also the point in time when the smoking porch was enclosed as a small add-on to the kitchen. I’m not sure exactly when this happened, but it was by someone who didn’t care much about the house, as it is the only renovation that was really destructive and in generally poor taste (door removed from the dining room to the smoking porch, big opening cut in the kitchen wall, wrong wide-board siding used, etc.). I believe it was also around this time that the living room fireplace was bricked-in and the surround removed, but it is hard to tell. The upstairs (and possibly downstairs) windows were replaced with poor aluminum windows, though most of the original wood frame is still intact.
The 1990’s saw “country-style” crossbuck storm doors added to the front and rear doors (the rear door is now where the smoking porch was–I wish I knew what happened to the *real* rear door that was in the dining room). This period also saw installation of wall-to-wall carpets in the living and dining rooms, and the stairs and upstairs hall. Another coat or two of paint was added to the woodwork, too. Downstairs windows were replaced during this time, too. These are slightly better vinyl windows. Fortunately, nobody touched the large front window with its awesome wavy glass and stained glass transom.
The woodwork is all painted, except for the pocket doors. Fortunately again, these seem to have escaped the painter’s brush, leaving me a good idea of what the original wood finish was (and it is beautiful). We had to slice the paint to get the doors to close, but they are fully intact. I removed and cleaned the latch and handle mechanisms, and they roll perfectly–I couldn’t ask for better luck. We found a few of the other original doors upstairs on the third floor (it’s a 2.75 story, I guess one could say–the top floor is finished with two bedrooms and a bathroom (non-functional at the moment), and the other half of the top floor is a large set of cedar-lined storage closets and shelves), and they have the same finish.
Some other odd things were done in the house that I don’t understand. For instance, the door from the dining room to the smoking porch, its transom, and its trim were all removed, and I have no idea where they are now. There are a few doors that have nice finished trim on the outside, and a plain flat trim on the inside. The second floor bathroom door was obviously cut (poorly–the mortise and latch plates are off by a few inches, and the bottom of the door is obviously hacked by someone who didn’t know how to cut a straight line) to fit the opening height-wise, but there must have been a door to this space *somewhere* before this one was cut. Most of the original hardware from the interior downstairs doors seems to have been saved, though, so someone was paying attention there.
Other strangeness… All of the rooms, except for the back bedroom on the second floor, have fireplaces. The one in the living room was bricked-in at some point, though, and its surround removed. All of the hearths are intact. The chimneys are still intact for all of them, too, though I wouldn’t try to use them without having them lined. Oddly, all of the fireplaces have gas inserts in them, and I have to imagine that those aren’t original, though they are quite old (maybe 1930’s?). I found an overmantle that neighbors tell me used to hang in the living room over what apparently used to be the fireplace, so I can’t imagine why that would be saved and the original surround wouldn’t be.
The house clearly had gas lighting, probably when built (this is an industrial area when these houses were built, so I would imagine that they would have had municipal gas service of some sort). There are still some gas pipes (presumably for lighting) in places where I would expect them, then sometimes they aren’t there in other places where I would expect them.
I met my wife in late 2003, and she liked the house. I guess she liked me, too, since we were married this past April. 🙂 In early 2005, I started to work on taking the drop ceiling out of the dining room, and removing the nasty smoke-stained wallpaper. She happily joined-in. The nasty wallpaper came off easily–someone had apparently removed the old wallpaper quite professionally before this was installed (I did some work in an upstairs bedroom that had about eight layers of nasty wallpaper with a nasty, thick brown-ish glue or substrate against the plaster that was really hard to remove). Then I pulled-down the drop ceiling, and found that the people who did the prior wallpaper removal stopped at the drop ceiling line–there were those eight layers or so of nasty wallpaper and the nasty wallpaper glue, all in a 6″ band around the top of the room.
The project was put on hold for a little while as I was working on other things, and my soon-to-be-wife convinced me to get moving and get it finished before the summer of 2005. We chose a green to compliment some of the colors in the stained glass transom in the living room, and because most of the wallpaper we found was dark (though some was gold with a gold embossed detail). Since this room gets sun all day long through the bay windows, we weren’t worried about light. We did the ceiling in a somewhat lighter shade of the same color to offset it and add some dimension, while avoiding being “white”.
Stuff we found: The old door to the smoking porch had been replaced with a piece of drywall. I think that some of the old framing is still back there, though, because you can see the outline of where the transom should be and the frame and trim members should be.
We found a dark band running the entire way around the room on the plaster at about 5′ off of the floor. The band had fastener marks in the plaster, so something wrapped the whole way around the room here. Was this a plate rail? It seems too low to be a picture rail. We can’t figure it out, but we marked it on the trim with painter’s tape so that we know where it was prior to primer and paint. We still have it marked, and I have good measurements taken in a few areas of the room. The width of the band was about 1.5″ or so. Any ideas? 🙂
The ceiling had been papered, too, and we had a really hard time getting this paper off. We ended up leaving some if it in place and just dealing with the not-so-pretty look on the ceiling. Unless you’re really staring at it, it is hard to see anyway. We figure that maybe we’ll get back to that someday, but we just couldn’t get that paper to budge. We removed the loose stuff, and primer and painted the rest.
There was a large hole where something heavy must have hung above the fireplace. We patched the hole. I have a picture hanging there now.
The floors underneath are nice looking wood, but have unfortunately been painted a fairly ugly gold color. We’re going to want to strip them when we pull up the carpet, so we’ve left the carpet in place for now.
The woodwork was deemed to be too much work at the time to return us to a functional dining room, so we bailed on that, too. I do plan to revisit that soon.
We’re pretty happy with the result. I could feel the house breathing a bit of relief as we pulled the anchor bolts for the drop ceiling out of the walls and ceiling, so I hope that we have a slightly happier home now. I know that we love the room.
I have to get some “finished” pictures up to this site, too. This is pretty much only the “work-in-progress” photo set, but it should give you a basic idea of the before and after of the room. BTW, the orange tape on the light fixture was just so that I would stop whacking my head on it every time I walked through the room.
Lessons learned:
- Cats think that dropcloths make excellent litterboxes, likely because they trained on newspaper. Pick them up when you’re not using them. 🙂
- Clean plaster walls hold primer well. Dirty plaster walls don’t hold anything well.
- That old chandelier fitting in the ceiling is capable of holding a large, solid-brass chandelier that is probably somewhat lighter than the original fixture it held.
- Square? What is square?
- And level? Huh?
- Old wallpaper can be a treasure trove of information. I found dates and company names on the stuff upstairs. I could only find partials on the small strip in this room, but I might have enough partials to match with some of the names from the upstairs rooms.
- Old wiring sucks. Period. End of story. The house has a breaker box, but since most of the outlets and the ceiling fixtures in the living room, dining room, and one of the upstairs bedrooms are on the same circuit, it probably doesn’t matter all that much.
- Cats will play with the wet paint on the walls.
- Shop-vacs are wonderful inventions.
- Plastic yard rakes are great for cleaning-up stripped wallpaper bits into big piles.
… and probably a million other lessons.
My wife and I love our home. We’re doing the living room after the Christmas decorations come down. Now that we know a little bit more about what we’re doing, it will hopefully be a bit easier. I want to do the woodwork this time, too. And maybe the carpet. And maybe some rewiring. And and and and and….
We continue to research the roots of our old house. It was, after all, constructed by the second-in-command at the local town bank. Maybe we’ll find his “stash” at some point. 🙂
– jonathan (and Jenny)
