Living Room: Before
An evening and an afternoon worth of work have prepared the living room for its upcoming restoration. We decided to use the dining room as temporary living space, since we wanted to have a space where we could relax when we weren’t working. Our evening music and news reading is an important part of our unwinding time after work and before bed, so we really wanted a room where we could unwind. We therefore had to first clean and move things around in the dining room, then move the necessary furniture and electronics into the dining room. We were able to find a workable arrangement and space for just about everything, except for one chair. We’ll end up just covering that chair and leaving it in the room.
My desire to start some demo got the best of me, and I removed some of the wallpaper
around where the fireplace used to be, before I had a chance to take the before pictures. Oops. 🙂
I hung plastic sheeting in the pocket door opening and in the doorway to the entrance hall. We didn’t do this while working on the dining room, and we ended up with dust everywhere. Of course, we also had to walk through the dining room to get to the kitchen from any part of the house, so closing off the openings in that room probably wouldn’t have worked so well anyway.
There are a few interesting features in the room. I am going to be interested to figure out exactly why some of these things were done, and what some of these things were.
First, on the left and right side of where the fireplace used to be, there are some patched spots with a rusty square inside each one. These look like places where sconces or uplights would have been at one time. Maybe these are the caps on old
Next, there was an overmantel. I know that this is in the basement, and I will be refinishing it as part of this restoration. When I removed the wallpaper, there is this large dark mark on the wall that looks like it is where the overmantel belongs. I’m wondering why this is there. No idea.
Finally, there is a set of two 2×2’s nailed into the top of the door to the entrance hall,
As part of this restoration, we plan to strip the woodwork, remove the carpet, maybe refinish the floor, and re-glaze the big front window (with the original glass, of course). The glazing putty there has completely dried-out, and is starting to crack in not-so-great ways. Also, since I want to strip and refinish the whole frame, it’ll probably be easier to do it without the glass in place. That part will have to wait for some slightly warmer weather, of course, but it should be a fun project. Of course, I don’t know what I’ll do if I crack the original glass, so it will also be one of the most nerve-wracking parts of the whole thing.
I’m going to build a wooden screen to go in front of where the fireplace should be. I don’t know where the original mantel is, and whatever insert may have been there is certainly gone. I do know where the overmantel is, and I’ll be restoring what is left of that, but I have been unable to find the mantel itself. The PO told me that a PPO (pre-previous owner? 🙂 ) said that it was in the basement. She never looked for it, though, and I can’t find it. I would imagine that it matched the one in the dining room, but who knows. If it did match, I’ll probably have a hard time replacing it. If it didn’t match, then I can probably find something similar to the upstairs mantels to put there. The overmantel is wooden, but I’m not sure if that would necessarily indicate a wooden mantel, too. Yet another mystery….
Now it’s pretty late. We watched SNL. We’re hoping that our angry kitties calm down soon (they are pretty calm now, surprisingly–change is a bad thing! 🙂 ). I’m hoping that the plastic sheeting lasts until the end of the project. That, I suppose, will depend on the behavior of the kitties. Hmm. This should also be interesting.
That’s it for now. I have to bring ladders and lights downstairs from storage tomorrow (er, well, I guess that would be later today), and then the ceiling starts to come down. I’m aiming to get all of the tiles out on Sunday. We’ll see how that goes. 🙂
– jonathan
