Our ca. 1880 house

[Don M]

That's interesting about the fireplace; Do you think the study may have been another parlor at one time? I suppose removing the fireplace made the room a lot bigger but what a lot of work!

[Texas_Ranger]

Well firring strips sounds much better than liquid nails directly on the plaster I'd say!

YOu could paint over the paneling to make it more bearable though.

[nezwick]

Don, I'm still trying to figure out exactly what function the study would have served. You are probably right calling it a parlour, though that may have been too fancy of a term for this house. The original first floor plan was originally just these 2 rooms (along with the entry foyer/staircase) - the study is the front room and the current dining room is the back room.

The chimney goes right up between these two rooms and would have served the fireplace in the study. There is also a flue hole in the chimney on the opposite side in the dining room. So it stands to reason that the front room was the parlour / living space and the back room was the kitchen (with a cook stove connected to the chimney), eating area, and utility area?

The second living room (and second half of the foyer) was added on later, with the "master" bedroom on the floor above. Then the full-width back porch was enclosed to contain a kitchen, laundry/utility room, and pantry. The larger laundry room was then split in half in 1958 and it became a bathroom and laundry room.



Texas, yep we do plan to paint the paneling eventually. We did that in an upstairs bedroom and it turned out great. We need to paint the paneling in our master bedroom too. Those just keep moving down on the list of priorities - I'm sure we all know how that goes!

[nezwick]

Well here are a couple of updates on the floor project. I also started another thread here to see if we can identify the flooring type: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=30032

Yesterday, Nikki and I started the painstaking process of scraping all the "mud" out of the grooves between the boards. I say "mud" because it seems to be old dirt/dust/fibres which got stuck there and over time, turned into cement. It comes out using a flat screw driver that I filed down to make slightly dull and a dental pick. Very minimal, if any, damage seems to occur to the wood - it's just a slow process. Talk about dusty and kinda gross though - that stuff has been trapped under sub-floor since 1955 and may very well be 100+ years old!

Here's a before picture of some of the grooves:




An area we got done scraping:




Here are the pics of what the flooring looks like after a quick couple of sanding passes. The board in the third pic is some salvaged wood I bought thinking I'd use it to patch the bad places, but it turned out to be a totally different type of lumber.








One Friday night last month I got really sick of looking at those stupid faux beams in the living room, so I ripped them all down. They were affixed with construction adhesive so some of the ceiling texture came with them, but it's ok because it was already missing in several other areas. I slapped some primer over the freshly exposed areas for now - the entire ceiling will be painted when I do the rest of them. Next step in here is to vanquish that wagon-wheel chandelier.




And here's a couple shots of the foyer/staircase I've been working on. I think I need one more coat, as the red paint is still thin in some places. Talk about tedious - I started off doing this by hand with a 4" brush but quickly got tired of that and switched back to a roller for the large wall surfaces. Those tight corners and the areas above the doors are too small for the roller though, so I still get to do them by hand. I took a gamble with the red, but we LOVE it and our guests always complement it. It's the "historic" colour because according to our PO, it was red from when they moved in until the late 1990s when she painted over it with KILZ green.

[Don M]

Wow that light sanding makes all the difference! I have a huge wagon wheel light in the attic---6 bulbs!

[Texas_Ranger]

I know that kind of grime... we had to scrape it off our salvaged flooring. Some of it came off easily, on others we really had to get creative with various kinds of scrapers. We finished cleaning all the "good" boards but I'm not sure if we have enough of those for the entire floor. So there might be more cleaning in our future.

[lupinfarm]

You know I have that "crud" too. I did some reading up on Victorian cleaning methods and apparently Victorians used sand
to keep floors clean so your "crud could be mostly sand that has solidified.
Fran

[nezwick]

Interesting. I knew the 'housewife' would get down on her hands & knees and scrub the wood floors in the house, but I figured it was with hot soapy water, not sand. We thought that maybe the mud in the gaps was actually a primitive way to "seal" the gaps so the air from the basement/crawl space would not travel up through.

[Texas_Ranger]

Yup... read about the sand too, eons ago. I strongly suspect this is the reason why some of our kitchen floor boards were worn down to less than half their original thickness in spots!

[melissakd]

Thanks for keeping us supplied with current photos!

I wonder whether that light fixture was placed on the wall above the door rather than on the ceiling simply because they were building that wall, but the ceiling already existed and they didn't want to tear it up. ??? A plain porcelain socket would have been period-accurate for, say, the kitchen, or the back porch, but is it in the foyer? Are you thinking of moving it? There might be a neat wall bracket at a salvage or antiques shop somewhere, maybe a hanging-lantern model....Don't mind me and my vicarious shopping

I pried that *exact* crud out from between the boards of a homemade table we inherited with our house. It seemed as if it was partially horsehair or something, and it was stuck in there really, really tightly.

MelissaKD