Moving into the 1795 cape (maybe 1830?)

[jharkin]

Its been a WHILE since I posted but we did get some things done in spite of the heat waves...

We put a lot of effort into cleaning up the gardens, expanding a couple of them, mulching, reworking the borders. Now the gardens are great but the lawn is a disaster.

I got most of the foundation re-pointing done. Still some work on grading and drainage left.

I finally cleaned out the crawl space this weekend. Mike Holmes would have condemned the place. I took out something like 8 contractor bags of old rotting insulation that had been stapled up to the underside of the floor with chicken wire. Glad I got it all out too because it was covering a rats nest of old wiring including one cutoff LIVE run of BX that's just dangling there waiting to set something on fire

I got the new exterior doors ordered and lined up help for the job. We decided to redo the front hall as part of the project including restoring the removed thumb-latches on the original interior doors etc. I'll post up a separate thread with before and after shots as we do the job in September.

No gutters yet. Still on the list.

A bunch of other projects we had in mind got back burner-ed as i need to work on converting the office into a nursery.........

-Jeremy

[wrylass]

^ Congratulations on that need to convert the office

[lavender_bush]

A bunch of other projects we had in mind got back burner-ed as i need to work on converting the office into a nursery.........

I do hope the nursery is for a baby - and not plants

Congratulations to you both

[jharkin]

Yes its a baby nursery. We have 2 on the way
... Actually we are but the mrs thinks I have no idea what we are in for (and she is probably right) hence the

Still prepping on my front hall & doors project. Have 2 new exterior wood doors ordered and just got the reproduction hardware from Historic Housefitters. I'll be starting the progress thread soon.

[Don M]

Congratulations; nothing like twins! Twins are "two" much! Don

[lavender_bush]

Twins?? I'm not suprised about the How wonderful - girls? boys? when will we know?

Doors?? you should have said, I managed to persuade Civil War Seamtress and her lovely husband that she would be doing us a huge favour by taking a few off of our hands (she fell for it ) but we still have extras, our PO was/is a hoarder

They got doors - We got space in the carriage house and she lovely was enough to bring me a lavender plant which I believe was more than fair payment

[jharkin]

Twins?? I'm not suprised about the How wonderful - girls? boys? when will we know?

We know, but a guy has to keep some secrets... Watch for the big announcement probably around the holidays...

About the doors. Our front door looks like some effort to make a reproduction board and batten door. Its a solid core slab with plank paneling laminated on both sides to look like boards. It appears that the painting wan not kept up over the years as the paneling is peeling off and the core is rotting. Its pretty bad - you will see when I put up the pictures.

For the replacement, even though a lot of the period houses around have reproduction batten doors and fake strap hinges, I decided to go to a 6 panel colonial door. The interior of our place is more in the federal style and not that rustic so I thought that would be more appropriate. I haven't had the time to try and chase down a salvaged door that would fit and budget is limited so we just ordered a Simpson wood door. I didn't think to ask around here!

While we replace the door I decided to finish the front hall restoration as well. We DO have all the original interior doors (Not positive but they have to be a good hundred years old - only 1in think and real pegged construction). The POs had already stripped the paint and I can see where the thumblatches were removed and replaced with knobs. We I have the historic housefitters reproduction thumb latches to put back and then we are going to repaint everything. In the process I need to strip and do some epoxy patching and window putty touch up to the sidelights and we are going to make a new Oak threshold.

-Jeremy

[jharkin]

To give you an idea of what we are dealing with re the door damage...

door.jpg (160.6 KiB) Viewed 745 times

[jharkin]

Not very exciting, but in between time with our new family additions I actually found a little time to work on the house this summer. So I had to share my small achievement.

Ever since we moved in the sad old "leaning tower of lamp post" has been bugging me. This summer it was listing at about 30deg and just had to go.



The "post" was just a short piece of fence pole cut down with the wire stapled to the side. It was only buried a foot down or so. I ordered a real cedar post to replace it (the kind with a PVC base), stained it white and set it. 3 ft down I hit a boulder so I just set it on that and packed it in gravel. I'd rather not deal with a lump of concrete and the packed gravel should drain better.

The lantern itself is copper and in pretty decent shape - only problem was the glazing was faded plexiglass (why POs, why ?), so I had $10 worth of glass cut down at the hardware store and reused it.

The end result turned out quite good I think. Of course now we have to paint all the fence white

[Don M]

Very nice, I was wondering if there was enough wire to actually allow the post to be taller. I had a similar issue but I had two posts on either side of the front walk & stairs from the driveway. One lamp was lower than the other which I found annoying . The snow plows finally had their way with the posts so I had to replace them. I found the wire of the lower lamp was encased in concrete & steel plates from an earlier repair so once I broke up the old concrete I was able to replace both posts & finally got the two lamps installed at the same height