Almost as soon as we arrived, the plumber had to put a hole in the living room ceiling to repair the shower in youngest daughter’s bathroom.  Much like the music room, this began as a small hole to see what was going on and slowly more and more needed to be opened.  We soon discovered that the radiator in her room also was in need of repair.  We had the option of through the floor or through the ceiling.  Since the ceiling was already opened we went in that way.  Eventually the hole had to extend into the coved ceiling.  We all worried that we would not be able to repair the cove in the plaster work.  Although I seem to have not taken a picture before the work began, I do have this picture of the patch.  It may not look like it,  but this was a rather large corner of the living room ceiling that is missing.

The dust and sometimes water that came out of the hole made me crazy all summer.  It has been an impossible job to eradicate the dust.  Now that we have the hole covered I am hopeful that my daily dusting will be a little easier.

The repair came out great.  We will need to repaint the ceiling (and maybe skim coat the whole thing) but once that is done I don’t think anyone will ever be able to tell this was patched.

We talked about all the damage done on the first floor music room.  We have nearly finished the restoration work there.

The room had some funky metallic and orange wallpaper.  You can’t tell from the photo but there was plaster crumbling behind the paper above the confessional window (have I mentioned our home has a confessional?!) above the built in leaded glass cabinets on both sides of the room and visible damage on the ceiling.  The ceiling is clearly not original and while the period art deco chandelier is pretty, it doesn’t fit with the home’s architecture.  We put the room on the to do list.

Soon we discovered most of the problems here came from the leaking plumbing in the master shower.  So we had to open up the ceiling:

Then open  it some more:

Eventually we had to remove the whole ceiling, actually there were at least four ceilings.

My guess is whenever the water damage got noticeable or perhaps when an owner decided to sell the house they didn’t fix the problem but covered up the ceiling with a new one.  In the process we found the original lay out for the ceiling and the painted canvas mural that was original on the ceiling.

The plumber found the first pieces and we were shocked to discover most of the mural was still intact.  We made the decision to try to take the ceiling back up to its original height.  This was made a little complicated due to the plumbing repairs we had made.  We couldn’t restore the ceiling to the original height with just the corners dropped down.  The plumber actually suggested having the center of the ceiling at its original height and adding a cove or tray to the edges that would give the room a more modern look and hide the plumbing.  We thought it was a great solution and moved forward with the plan.  We decided to put can lights in the tray to highlight the cabinets and doors and not put a center light back in since there was not one here originally

We still need to paint and plan to add trim and a rope light around the tray. Here is how it came out:

My sister was an art major in college and she thinks she can recreate the ceiling mural in the tray.  I am looking forward to seeing if we can do that and think it would be so great. I wonder how long it has been since anyone has seen that original mural? It will be great to restore that piece of the home’s history.

There has been a lot of action at our home in the last few weeks.  The kids are all back in school and we have been hosting family from both coasts and from another country.

Our home is far from completed and is still in fact a construction zone but we did manage to knock a few items off the list before all the guests arrived.

The biggest project to come off the to do list was the completion of the third floor bathroom.  The bathroom that was here when we bought the house looks like it came from a 1970 mobile home.  Really, it was that bad.

This little bath was wedged in under the rafters.  You stepped up one step from the narrow hall into this nightmare.  There is carpet on the floor and none of the fixtures is working.  Rather than remodel this awkward and ugly space we decided to convert the smallest of the four third floor bedrooms into a new bathroom.  They say bathrooms and kitchens are good investments and I don’t think having eight bedrooms instead of nine will negatively impact our home value.

The project was a great success.  We are really pleased with how everything turned out.  There are still a few loose ends to finish, trim pieces to put back up, a new light fixture in the toilet room but it certainly made having guests here easier.

There are still plenty of bathrooms that need some attention but it was nice to have the third floor one completed.  All the other full bathrooms in this house are en suites so this is the only bathroom that is accessible from a hallway.  Much nicer option for guests than to have to go through someone’s bedroom to get to a shower.  Oddly, the master bath will also have hallway access once it is finished.  Work is under way on that one again this week and we may finally have a master shower by the weekend!

I explained the trouble we had with the master shower pipes and floor pan leaking into the music room.  We had made a bit of progress inside the bathroom getting the shower rebuilt.  This project seems to be one step forward and two steps back at almost every turn.  Unfortunately, I failed to get a picture of the shower prior to demo.

We had hoped to be able to reuse at least a portion of the marble in the new shower.  We contacted nearly everyone we could find to get a quote to polish and cut the old marble.  Waiting to figure this out has kept this project at a standstill for nearly a month. Only one quote came back.  The price tag? $3,500!  This would only put marble on the bottom three feet of the new tile shower. The marble is old and nobody wants to cut it.  It is also nearly an inch thick. As much as we had hoped to reuse the original marble and have it be a feature in the updated bath it just isn’t in our budget.  Our plumbing and heating problems have dipped into a lot of our renovation budget.

So off we went to the tile store.  Deciding what to put in was a difficult task.  The bathroom has the original cream subway tiles on the walls and a black and hex tile that is not original on the floor.  (The original floor was, you guessed it: marble! At some point it was tiled OVER)  Modern tile will not match either of these.  We decided to do a more contemporary shower so it doesn’t look like we tried to match the existing features and fell short.  Hopefully we will have tile up by the end of the week to show you.

We took a week off and enjoyed our vacation.  We are now back home and ready to tackle the challenges of repairing and restoring our home.  Everything came to a screeching halt while we were away.  First order of business, get the master bath in working order.  The antique tub is the only functioning fixture in the room at this time.  The master bath is an active construction site at the moment so you can’t even enjoy the tub.

The plumbing problems have been the most challenging thing we have dealt with so far.  When the previous owners had the water turned off to the house we should have suspected there were problems.  They kept promising that all plumbing would be in good working order before closing and all work was being completed by a licensed plumber.  Four days before we closed we finally discovered that the plumber had not completed any of the repairs he was paid to do and most of the plumbing was not in working order.  In fact out of 36 fixtures in the house (toilet, faucet) only three were actually working.  The sellers had contracted another plumbing company to complete the work and gave us the money to pay them out of their proceeds of the sale.  We went forward with the purchase and hoped for the best.

We moved in two weeks later and had only slightly more functioning fixtures.  In fact, the first two weeks here a cold shower or a hot bath were your options. My kitchen faucet leaked (still does) and the sink didn’t drain.  The washing machine drained into the kitchen sink which did not drain.  I am sure you can imagine how that worked out!  Some sinks had cold water, only one had hot.  Four of the six toilets were working, that was a plus.  Where there was hot water it took 20-30 minutes of running the water to get it to the faucet because of the way the plumbing runs in the basement.  The water goes a long way before it reaches its destination!

The good news is much of the plumbing is now functioning.  The bad news is most of it is not functioning that well.  The master bath is the current priority.  Hopefully this week that project will pick up speed and get wrapped up.

We returned home from vacation relaxed but the restored part has a long way to go!

The master bath is currently the only nonfunctioning bathroom in the house. Well, other than the horrible 1940 RV bathroom on the third floor.  That one we decided must just go away.  All of it.  We will talk about that when we eventually get up to the third floor.

The master has some issues.  Major issues.  We were unable to get water to the shower.  The shower pipes were sandwiched between the nearly one inch thick marble shower walls and a chimney.  The only way to access them was removing the marble.  We also discovered the shower had been leaking into the music room.  For years.  Maybe decades.  With more research we determined the ceiling damage was due to a leaking shower pan and not roof damage. The original marble shower was going to have to come out.  I was not entirely unhappy with this.  The shower was a small marble cave.  Floor, ceiling, walls…all marble.  No lights and no vent.  I am claustrophobic so the shower terrified me more than a little.  I did not take a before picture I am sorry to say.

We opened up the music room ceiling. We knew the ceiling that was visible was not original and expected the music room to have been coved the same as the adjoining living room.  We discovered however that the ceiling had been replaced several times.  Rather than go after the leak, previous owners had just added a layer of drywall over the bad ceiling.

The project started with this:

And then this:

We found this!!:

The original ceiling was a hand painted canvas.  The pattern is similar to what is carved in the mahogany wood work.  It was very deteriorated due to the years of water damage.

Eventually the scope of the project changed and we had to open up all of the ceiling.  This is what we found once we took back the layers of drywall:

The original canvas is in remarkable shape except for the part under where the shower had been leaking.  I am hoping that my sister might be able (and willing) to recreate this for us and we can put the reproduction one back on the ceiling when we are done.  The corners of the room were dropped down several inches to accommodate the master toilet drain.

Next we were down to this:

Still not enough access for the plumber, so the music room currently looks like this:

I have lived through a whole house remodel so I am not surprised by the ever changing scope of work and all the mess.  It is still hard to watch this pretty little room endure so much. I know in the end it will be beautiful again.  We hope to restore the original lines of the ceiling, redo the canvas covering and find a period appropriate chandelier. The art deco one that was there is pretty but historically it doesn’t fit.

The master bath project that started this project is a story for another day.

The dining room was a bit of a dilemma for us.  There was a hand painted mural there that I hated.  It was one of the first questions I had for the realtor, “Is it original?”  Thankfully the answer was no.  With a little research we learned it had been added in the late 90’s.  I am sure that owner loved it and it was painstakingly done. My dilemma was leave it or cover it up.

Due to the house being left unheated last winter several sections of the mural had pulled off the plaster wall.  What we thought was plaster damage turned out to be a much more manageable problem.  I suppose we could have tried to re-adhere the paint but since I really didn’t like the mural it seemed scraping off all the loose pieces and painting over it was the solution.

Here are the before pictures.  You can see to the left of the fireplace where the paint had come off.  It was also bad to the right of the leaded glass windows.

Coming up with a new color scheme was more difficult.  My dining room set does not fit the room but it will be what we use for now.  The chairs were originally white (what were we thinking! We had two toddlers when we bought this dining set.) and later I recovered most of them in a red and gold but those colors seemed too dark in this room.  The wainscoting, built-ins and HUGE pocket doors in the dining room are wormy chestnut.  The wood is beautiful but dark.  I am not sure if it always was this dark or if this is the way this wood aged.  The fireplace is a dark red brick. I felt like we needed something in a cooler color to brighten up the room.  This is also the north side of the house and there isn’t much natural sunlight.

I don’t know how most people go about choosing paint but I started with the rug.  I started searching on line for something with no clear color palette in mind.  Since we have been here I have decided I don’t want the house to look like a museum or to have the rooms feel like they are stuck in 1900.  I have decided clean lines and more contemporary furnishings will let the beauty of the original features be the star of each room and be comfortable to live with.  I ended up choosing a blue/gray and ivory wool rug. (Hopefully sister in law will approve!)

From there we tried several paint options.  All were too blue or too light or too silver.  Matt called me from work and said go to the big box store and buy a gallon of paint.  Make a decision.  It was going on the walls when he got home.  I didn’t like any of my samples enough to commit to them.  Youngest daughter and I went to the fabric store and chose a new fabric for the dining room chairs.  From there we headed to get paint and had them match the gray in the fabric.  I was still not sure about the paint but true to his word, Matt painted that evening.  We are happy with the results and now I need to find time to do the dining room chairs.

The entry way is a huge space.  It is really a room itself, measuring 16 by 24 feet.  It has beautiful quarter sawn oak molding, beams and paneling.  The pillars that frame the living room are stunning.  We are told the ceiling is original gold leaf.  The first floor has a very open floor plan for a home built in 1901.  Most of the rooms and the grand staircase here open off this stunning entry.  The wallpaper however was scary.  Large scary birds. That seem to watch you.

The birds needed to go.  We decided to continue the stairwell paint into this space.  It makes it feel brighter and we need all of that we can get.  Our previous home had a ton of natural light.  The front of this house has a huge enclosed front porch that prevents a lot of the natural light from coming in.

The wallpaper came off easily.  I give credit to whoever put it up.  The paper pulled down in complete strips without any spraying or scraping. I was surprised to see the original plaster walls underneath.  This space has never had paint, only wallpaper.  We found remnants of two other papers under this one.  We scraped off  the wallpaper paste and skim coated all the walls.  The original plaster had some cracks as you would expect and some were fairly large.  With the help of a friend Matt took care of the walls and they came out great.

You might also notice that the runner in this space is gone.

I am fairly sure it arrived about the same time as the pink paint, early 80’s.  It was threadbare, stained and falling apart at the seams.  I took it out on move in day.  I couldn’t clean it and hated the feel of it on my feet.  The same runner is on the stairs.  Oldest son and I took off one section but Matt says I need to figure out what to put on there before I take it off.  I am still considering leaving the steps bare but the last time they were refinished the centers were left unvarnished.

The kids all wanted to have their rooms painted before we moved in.  Oldest son painted his room grey.  It is a vast improvement over the yellow that was there.  Younger son is out of the house in an apartment off campus for now so we didn’t have to do anything in what will be his room yet.  Oldest daughter chose a pretty minty green.  Her walls are in rough shape due to water damage so we just painted inside her decorative wall moldings for now.  It feels clean and looks nice.  Youngest daughter went with Tiffany blue and silver trim.  She is really happy with her choice.