Our big adventure

The Weather has definitely changed to spring, the roses are blooming, town is bustling with visitors and the tasting rooms and vineyards are mad with the sounds of sipping. The farmers market is open again, and folks are buzzing about river races, the upcoming FFA parade and fair, and music in the square...

Roses amongst the ruins

"Sigh", such a wonderful place to live and where are we? covered head to toe in plaster, sawdust, primer, paint and filth, never seeing the outside light of day. Six weeks and counting to refinance and somehow we will make it.

We are currently plastering our way up and through the center hall, all three stories. And simultaneously, installing more woodwork, stripping more doors, and getting prepared to to finish more floors. The big adventure came with the rental of a Gradall. What a fun toy!

Step one: Drive 5 minutes to the rental company
Step two: Spend 30 minutes driving the Gradall back to the house (it does not go very fast)
Step three: Spend 10 minutes strapping a cast iron tub to the Gradall, and lift it to the second story
Step four: Spend 30 minutes driving the Gradall back to the rental company.

Lots of time driving it around town, and just a few minutes to do the job, but, it saved any possible damage to the tile floor in the center hall, or the staircase. And I have to say it was fun! Crazy to drive as it has rear wheel steering and bounces along the road like crazy, but you know...
"boys and their big boy toys!"

Arrival on the second floor, and in through the second floor hall door

And now, as much as I would love to write more and stupefy you with my humor and wit, I am afraid that I must get to work. On the agenda this morning, more woodwork. I am on the verge of finishing the installation of the three door jambs at the top of the third floor staircase, two original and one recreated. I need to get them in and trimmed out so we can plaster and once the doors are hung it should help to keep the lower floors cooler over the summer.

A couple of parting shots for the day...
Third floor staircase nearing completion!

So that's how that works

Now to work and more adventures!


#bobvila

Suck up and bust!

HUH?, what the hell is "suck up and bust"? 

I have a dear old friend from Tennessee, who speaks with a rathah difficult to understand Southern drawl. "Suck up and bust" was always one of her favorite sayings. A translation would be... buck up and get over it, move on, and work harder. 

We are at eight weeks and counting before our note term runs out and we must be refinanced. We have a list a mile long of walls to be plastered, floors to be finished, doors to be hung, bathroom fixtures to locate and install, door hardware, a temporary railing for the deck, priming and painting of trim, baseboards and doorjambs for the third floor hall.... the list goes on and on, so...

Suck up and bust!

We are living and working in a huge mess as we continue to plaster ceilings and walls, at times it is more than we can stand but we manage. That is until my meltdown last Thursday when our house keeper called to say he was sick and would not be here on Friday, I grabbed the sides of my head and shouted, "noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo"

I consequently took Friday off and spent the day putting the house in some sort of order, but when you are faced with the mess in pictures below it is hard to know where to begin.

Plaster work in the Master Bathroom, very inviting don't you think?

Plaster staging in guest bedroom 2, lovely!

We have plastered the Master Bathroom, and the ceiling in guest bathroom number two.

Basecoat being applied to the Master Bathroom

Guest Bath 2 wood all primed and sanded ready for paint, and the ceiling complete

At the same time we tackled the Master Bedroom. Of course that meant moving out of the room and into guest bedroom number one. We now know what it is like to spend the night with us. Not bad actually, I was afraid it would be noisy as the guest rooms are on the front of the house, of course I would never have told that to anyone visiting us. It took a couple of hours to move the furniture out of the master bedroom, and an entire day of sorting, dusting, and purging to empty the master closet. Who would have thought that so much crap could be shoved into one closet in just a single year.
With the space empty, and the floors covered the fun began.

Seams taped and the ceiling basecoat applied

We finished the ceilings in a white color coat and then moved onto the walls, basecoat and then color. As with all color integrated plaster we grabbed the dice and rolled, when they landed we had...

SMURF BLUE!

Well not exactly, as it has calmed down quite a bit to the soft blue grey we had hoped for, but at first it was alarming to say the least.

Working along the walls with the color coat

Phillip working over the door

Blue walls and bare wood floor

ready for trim paint

Trust me, the color is much more ALIVE in real life

We spent two weeks in the front bedroom while we worked our way through the Master bedroom. We made the decision to go ahead and finish the floors while we were moved out of it, along with the dining room. Although I have yet to take pictures of the Master Bedroom floor, I did grab a couple of shots of the Dining Room. Three days of fuming hell and we have exactly what we were hoping for. Black walnut with the soft glow of tongue oil. Best part of this finish is the upkeep, if we get a wear spot or traffic pattern we can simply wipe more finish on.

The light patch is the sun shining in the window behind me

Yes, the table legs are vintage radiators

I have to get myself upstairs and get to work. But a parting shot today is a new arrival. We purchased it out of a house up the street because it was in really fine shape, came with all of the hardware, and is only five feet long, which is exactly what we needed. Of course a four hundred plus pound bathtub is not very fun to move. Next Saturday we are renting an articulating fork lift to raise it up to the door above the front porch, as I put my foot down on the concept of carrying it up the front staircase, all that work could be ruined in the blink of an eye.

Cute little thing, it of course has claw feet and a shower surround

So I promise to get some pictures of our second flying bathtub this coming weekend.
:)
#bobvila

Four out of Five ain't bad

At all of the famous and not so famous places in the world a miracle has occurred, the sun came up an hour later. Which of course means that the sun will now...

You guessed it folks!

set an hour later. This event is a huge reprieve from the darkness of winter as we continue our daily work on 227 North Street.

Not quite the picturesque view, but it someday soon it will be.

The past weeks have been spent in the drudgeries of more dry wall (veneer board) in preparation of plastering the second floor, base boards, painting of the second staircase and yet another bathroom. Bathroom number four out of five. At least we can say we only have one more to go. Tweaking the plumbing to fit perfectly, installing the veneer board on the ceiling, adding a gazillion support blocks, insulation, preparing the doorjambs and the doors, and finally we began to lay the floor.

White marble like all of the bathroom floors in house

This time I am using QEP Lash leveling system This spacer system keeps all of the tiles level to each other, which means no lippage, or tiles that are higher than others. A great invention, and the tiles are incredibly level to each other, but I will say that the creators idea of a 1/16th inch grout line, and my idea of a 1/16th inch grout line are very, very different.

The floor is finished, grouted in bright white, and unfortunately covered in paper before I got a picture.
We then moved onto the walls. We had this brilliant idea (yes JT I used the word "brilliant"). Lets mix it up and put narrow, floor to ceiling beadboard on the walls. It will be fast and pain free and would mean... no plaster! Sounds great right? Wrong! We both now have a new appreciation for solid wood walls. Not only because of the ka-ching factor, way, way more than we could have imagined, but it was also incredibly fussy, and painstaking to install. Four full days of cutting and fitting, tweaking and adjusting, leveling and nailing. Followed by baseboards, baseboard cap, and crown molding, and we are ready to add two coats of primer and two coats of high gloss, white, oil base paint..... ARG! and we still have to plaster the ceiling! what were we thinking?

A view through the door. Just add paint, a vintage claw foot tub, a pedestal sink, and commode.

As the sun sets an hour later here... I will repeat my earlier feeling about this... "Yeah!"
I want to tell you about one of those interesting moments that happen around this place we call home.
I received an email from a man who was doing some research and came across my blog. He had been reading my entry entitled "When Queens come calling" The entry involves a photograph of the 1896 Healdsburg Floral Festival Queen in a carriage, in front of what is now our home. The queens name was Alice Haigh Dixon.

Alice Haigh Dixon, surrounded by her court, May 1896

The Queen in front of our home

The email was from a gentleman by the name of Brian Dixon. Brian had an old painting in his garage and wanted to know if we would like to have it. It was painted by Alice Haigh Dixon. Of course I said yes and we were thrilled when the painting arrived in the mail. The Queens painting is back in Healdsburg. Perhaps when she stopped by the house in 1896 she meant to bring the painting to the then Mistress of our house, Mrs. Marshall. Perhaps Alice accidentally left the painting at home, and promised to bring it at a later date. Perhaps it only took one hundred and sixteen years for the painting to make its way here. Perhaps the painting is here now resting above our fireplace.

Perhaps someday I will consent to nails being driven into our new plaster walls, and the painting can hang a bit higher.... Probably not!

#bobvila

Déjà Vu

Our favorite saying around here is...

"Anything that can be done, can be done again!"

But in this case, or shall I say "staircase" we are doing it again, but not redoing it his time.

"what the hell is he talking about???" 

Staircase number two or Déjà Vu! The center hall awaits its plaster walls, but this can't be done until the second staircase (the stairs from the second floor to the third floor) is disassembled, stripped of all it's paint and finishes, sanded, sanded, sanded, primed, filled, painted, new treads and trim installed, and the banister reassembled. Whew! what a load of work! We have already done this once before with the main staircase, and now we are doing it all again. Yeah! what fun! (there seems to be a lot of exclamation points in my writing today, I guess I am being very expressive!) 

Take it apart, strip it and sand it...

Stripped and ready for sanding. Bondo applied to the steps where deep gouges existed.

Kind of pretty. Bare and naked old growth redwood.

Let the priming begin.

All primed and ready for filling.

Nail holes are next and it will be at least three weeks before we can move onto plaster work. But it is exciting to be up this high in the house and working away.

Last weekend found us in the first of the guest bathrooms installing, or attempting to and failing numerous times, an antique sink. The sink was purchased from the same lady we bought the marble fireplace from, and although the purchase price was a song, there are certainly reasons I would not recommend this. First would be the lack of any clear and present hardware for mounting the unit to the wall. The sink is over one hundred years old, and what ever means of mounting it once had are long gone and we were left with a trial and error situation. Scheme and plan and prepare we did, but every turn seemed to be a brick wall. After having missing pieces reproduced, tackling the issue of really short people back then, and giving up on the perfect solution to faucets and a drain, we got her in and functional. We will find the perfect nickle finished faucets, and an aged brass drain to match the legs, but for now she gives you water and sends it away.

Rocks from the Russian river became the answer to the height problem.

In this shot you really see the need for a brass drain.

Crazy chicken legs, they are kind of funny!

And now a word from our sponsor

If you need your old lighting revived and redone, refinished and rewired, reworked or recast, or simply re-anything, Be sure to call Paul Ivazes of Qualitylighting.net.

Paul has returned to us the light fixture I wrote about in my October 5th post (read it by clicking here). This Renascence Revival gas light fixture definitely has a colored past, but is truly beautiful to behold. It now hangs proudly in the Library/Drawing room, hmmmm.... we have no books in there nor have I put pencil to paper, hmmmmmm, but when we do, or if I do, I will have amazing light from which to read, or draw, or draw about reading, or read about drawing, or simply sit and drink vodka.

The spur shaped stars give it a touch of the old west.

This weekend we will be back on the second floor working our butts off. So if you happen to ring the bell of give us a call, wait a moment or two so we will have a chance to get down to the first floor, because as of this date, there is still not a butler in this house, exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point!

A quick parting shot for today.... as I came down the stairs from taking pictures of the second staircase I was struck by this view...

Many are asking so.... the tile came from Lundi at Villa Lagoon tile, click here to visit.

#bobvila

Ho, Ho, Ho and mistletoe, and suddenly its 2012

Oh the weather outside is frightful (actually it's amazingly beautiful), la la la, la la, la, la la, hm hm, hm hm hm hm hm hmmmmmmm....
wait... what happened to Christmas? Somehow it came and went and we kind of missed it. We did not have time to make cookies and spend endless hours in front of the fire stringing popcorn, sipping toddies, and communing with dear old friends. Sigh. Maybe next year, although it seems I said that last year and the year before. We did manage to have some fun, and get somethings done all at the same time. We made a big push in the two weeks before Christmas and accomplished a multitude of little things that had been on the list, and also began a few larger projects.

The Monday following Restoration Art our tile for the center hall arrived. We spent a day installing the marble threshold for the front door, laid the underlayment over the subfloor, and began what we thought would be a fairly straightforward and quick job of setting the tile. Boy were we wrong! In all it took seven entire days and once again I have acquired a slight limp in my right leg due to kneeling on the floor for hour, after hour, after hour.

A few days into the job I realized it would not happen for Christmas, so we tabled it until the 27th.

Tabled is actually a good way to put it because we turned our focus to that which we had asked Santa for.... a table for the dining room. The table top was built from the original ceiling joists that once held the ceiling for the dining room. When the second story was added over the rear section of the house, the engineer felt the old two inch by six inch by twenty foot old growth redwood joists were not sturdy enough for today's standards, and they were replaced. They have sat in a pile in the back yard for over two years.
Charly of Exceptional Wood Products in Geyserville, the town just north of here, picked them up and created a fifty four inch wide by ten foot long table top and delivered it three days before Christmas. Two coats of tongue oil and three coats of wax, add some antique radiators for the legs, fourteen rented chairs, dishes, napkins, flatware, and a pair of over the top candelabra, and...

Voilà, Christmas dinner!

Daylight view just after we finished setting the table

Magical and ready for guests.

Eighteen in all feasted at the first sit down dinner in the house. It truly was an amazing evening.

 Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle all the way....  And suddenly before we knew it was here, Christmas was over. Between Christmas and New Years Day we went back and tackled that tile floor in the center hall. It took us all week to finish it, all that is left is a short waiting time and then we can seal it. But I will tell you it is breathtaking in person!

As a parting shot for 2011 I wanted to share a picture of the fireplace finally finished and burning. These sorts of projects take so long to complete that I sometimes fail to post the finished product. So next Christmas we shall while away the hours in front of it, stringing popcorn, sipping toddies, and spending much needed time with dear old friends.

Now all we need is some furniture... details, details!

Happy 2012 everyone!