The only thing left to do is sand and refinish the little back hallway floor. I’ll start on that after the holidays.

Photo taken from the dining room. We selected a blue green color from Benjamin Moore’s Historical collection called Wythe Blue HC-143. It’s a darker version of our first paint color attempt. Our bedroom plaster was originally tinted a similiar color to Wythe Blue and served as inspiration.

Top of the stairwell. Light fixture is from Rejuvenation.

Taken at the top of the stairway landing, looking down.

Taken at the top of the stairway landing, looking towards the sleeping porch.

Photo of the antique leaded glass doors, taken from the upstairs bathroom. It is difficult to adequately photograph these beautiful doors due to the narrowness of the back hallway.

Photo of the back hallway taken from our bedroom.

This project somehow doesn’t seem as exciting as some of our past projects but it was just as much work!

The antique light has finally arrived! Isn’t it beautiful?

Looking into the den from our living room. The new plaster walls are such an improvement.

The drywall is now up. We found a salvage baseboard that is a perfect match. It just needs to be stripped and installed.

Remember this?

We have a ceiling.

The sleeping porch has windows on three sides of the room allowing the natural light to stream in. Light fills the hallway when the door is open. There used to be windows on each side of the door but a previous owner removed them to make a third bedroom. Photo taken at the top of the stairs looking towards the sleeping porch.

I purchased these doors off eBay. Let me state for the record how much I love eBay! The doors are from the early 1900′s. The door opening will need to be enlarged a little bit to accommodate the French doors. I’m really looking forward to having light in the back hallway and stairwell.

The wood is a little beat up but not beyond repair. The beveled glass is in perfect condition.

The design is a tulip pattern.

This isn’t a how-to article. I don’t think there is any need for a step-by-step guide on how to blow your restoration budget, that is if you are organized enough to have created a budget. The first room we tackled was our dining room and we were cluesless about how much it would cost. Budget? What budget? Our philosophy was it costs what it costs. We have since become a little wiser, but just a little.

This time around we created a rough estimate of what we would spend restoring the living room and den. But, things like having the plaster completely fall off your walls in numerous places tends to blow any budget, er, rough estimate out of the water.

Fortunately, or unforetunately depending on your point of view, our budget is expandable. Kind-of like my waistline after eating at In-n-Out Burger too many times because everything in our kitchen, including the dishes sitting inside our cupboards, is covered with a fine white dust from when our new plaster walls were sanded, and sanded again, and yet again.

The death of our budget was a 1910 Arts & Crafts Chandelier made from hammered iron with a brass plated finish and caramel/white slag glass in excellent condition that glows a warm amber when lit. The fixture has very classic Arts & Crafts lines with a tapered body and upper “cut out” windows in the center shade, riveted construction, a hammered finish and a nice dark patina. The antique dealer’s website said, “Another great piece of early North American lighting that is becoming hard to find.”

I looked at the light once, I looked at the light the next day, I looked at the light every day for a week, I showed David the light, I spoke incessantly about the light and finally I emailed the antique dealer to see if he would come down on the price a little bit. He wouldn’t, but starting my email with, “My husband and I have fallen in love with a light fixture featured on your website,” probably wasn’t the best bargaining position. The dealer smelled blood and we caved, or splurged – that’s what we are calling it, our splurge – and we bought the light. “Our splurge” sounds so much nicer than we have lost our minds! But, hey, every restoration project deserves one splurge, right? Right?

We finally got the chandelier hung in the den. It sat in the corner for over a month after we had it replated. Now that I see it up I wonder why we waited so long?

We needed more light outside for security reasons. The previous owner had placed lights around the house. Although large, they didn’t really put out enough light and were clunky looking. We decided a better solution would be to romove those lights and place motion sensor lights inconspicuously under the rafters.

We lit up the porch area with two lanterns I purchased last fall from The Bright Spot. We were a little behind on hanging our lights!

It has finally sunk in that we don’t have the stamina to have house projects going all the time, one after another, lets hurry up and get everything done so our house is restored all ready. Our what seemed realistic at the time plan, the one where we complete all the work on our house within five years? It’s now the 10 year plan or the hopefully we get the house done before we die plan. Considering this is our fourth year in the house and we are barely halfway done, I think the new plan is a good call.

We have decided that completing one project a year is a more realistic pace for us. Although, it would have been nice to have restored the kitchen and our main bathroom before we hit upon the one-project-a-year-for-a-more-balanced-life approach. I think it is going to be a while before I have the ever changing kitchen of my dreams.

January
My dad came to visit and finished some plumbing work he had started the year before. This culminated with hooking up the sink in our downstairs half bath. It only took us 3 years to actually have water running out of a faucet in one of our bathrooms. Yeah!

February

The episode of “Restoration Realities” featuring us aired on the DIY television network. Along with the show’s host and carpenter we built a period appropriate screen door and weather stripped our windows and front door.

Heather + Dave on Restoration Realities Part 1
Restoration Realities Part 2
Restoration Realities Part 3
Restoration Realities Part 4

March
Did absolutely NO work on the house.

April
Did absolutely NO work on the house, but may have scared a very nice sounding family away from the idea of restoring a rundown Craftsman home of their own.

May
Did absolutely NO work on the house. Starting to see a theme here?

June
Did absolutely NO work on the house.

July
Did absolutely NO work on the house, but I finally resolved the ownership issue of the oil and mineral rights to our property.

August
Finally, some work on the house! Stripped the woodwork and doors of the stairwell, landing and upstairs back hallway. I purchased leaded glass French doors from the early 1900′s off of eBay for the upstairs back hallway.

September
I publicly confess that I have resentful feelings towards the house for the first time. I think I used the word “hate.” And, in certain moments I do hate the house. There, I said it again. We are at an odd point in our restoration experience. The honeymoon period with the house is definitely over.

Maybe this is normal? Maybe around year 4 of an extensive restoration project everyone starts hating their house a little bit, or at least all the time, money and energy that goes into it? After all the work on our house year, after year, after year, we are barely at the halfway point of having our home fully restored.

It’s not like I hate the house all the time. It comes and goes. There are moments when I also love our house. Most of those loving moments are spent in the completed portion of the house.

October
We discovered that the upstairs sleeping porch, a 1918 addition, was inadequately framed. I’m not sure if inadequate is a strong enough word to describe opening up a wall and discovering two 2×2′s as the sole support for a load bearing wall. Shocking comes to mind, so does what the hell were they thinking, quickly followed by I wonder how poorly the rest of the sleeping porch is built?

Pablo rebuilt the wall and installed the leaded glass French doors.

November
Ah, November…November was a month chock full of resentful, or maybe even hateful feelings. There was a lot to hate.

Getting right to it, we both hated the color I selected to paint the stairwell and hallway. I was going for silvery sage but ended up with baby nursery mint green. We received alot of wonderful paint color suggestions, but in the end decided to go with a blue green color that matches the original 1912 wall color of our bedroom.

This leads us to the most mysterious occurrence that has happened during our entire restoration process. Two weeks after the woodwork was stained and sealed with several coats of varnish the woodwork faded. Drastically. Overnight. We have no idea how or why this happened. It’s so unbelievable. I didn’t even know that such a thing was possible? We are hoping that someone out there might be able to provide an answer.

December
Our stairwell and back hallway project is completed. One more down, seven major projects left to go…

Lulu and Winston underneath the Christmas tree

David and I spent a quiet Christmas in our little bungalow, just the two of us.

Looking forward to 2007!

And yet, without the wall the fairly small sleeping porch and even smaller back hallway seem…so large.

So open…

Light fills the normally dark stairwell and back hallway.

David and I kind-of like the idea of leaving the space open – not rebuilding the wall or putting in the French doors. Just goes to show that you can have a plan, but once you get into a project you are sometimes confronted with other possibilities.

The lack of framing between the addition and the existing house also continues into the attic. Check out the ceiling.

I can move the whole ceiling by pushing up on it with a board. There is no support between the original house and the sleeping porch.

2 x 4′s have been put in to temporarily shore up the wall.

Gibbs Brothers Electric was here yesterday. Our hall light stopped working and the electricity to our bedroom kept shutting itself off. We discovered that half the electrical wiring in the house has been updated and the other half is running off of the 1912 knob and tube wiring.

The electrician got everything back up and running but he suggested replacing some of the original wiring because the insulation has worn away in places making it a fire hazard. We plan on doing this but I’m not sure if I will go with Gibbs Brothers. After discussing the work, it became apparent that the electrician was more comfortable opening up the plaster walls (which we want to avoid) than fishing wire through them.

The push-button hallway switch will need to be replaced because it’s not up to code. This is probably a good idea since we have had a few sparks from that light switch. We will replace it with a 3-way push-button switch (7837) from Rejuventation. I selected a hanging lantern based on a 1905 design from The Bright Spot, Inc. to replace the bare bulb dangling from the ceiling (which is also not up to code). I thought the price was very reasonable. I also purchased a light for our front porch while I was at it.

Photo taken from our bedroom. It’s difficult to get a good shot due to the narrowness of the back hallway. These photos were taken at night so things look a little dark.

At happy accident – the doors are the same width as the stairwell opening. Um, I mean, I planned for this all along.

Being enamored with the idea of opening up the back hallway to the sleeping porch and letting in more light, I decided to have another door built to match the antique doors. I thought it would look more symmetrical with four doors instead of three. We met with and hired a carpenter to build another door. The carpenter didn’t show or call to cancel.

I decided to keep the project going and use the doors we had. This is one time I am happy to have been stood up by a contractor! One thing I have learned through our restoration experience: Going with the simplest, most straight forward solution is usually the best choice and always the cheapest one.

Close up view of the doors framed by the stairwell.

The Douglas fir wood floors are installed.

There is a light in the bathroom (but no toilet yet).

The bathroom sconce from Restoration Hardware.

The back porch light. The shade was an eBay find. Who wouldn’t want a parrot light on their back porch?

The light in the area for the washer and dryer is 6.5″ off center. How does stuff like that happen? No, we’re not going to leave it like that.

This is one of the most frustrating things about the back porch remodel. The plumber and I didn’t see eye to eye on where the washer and dryer hook-up should be placed. After arguing with him that it should be on the back wall under the window, the plumber installed the hook-up where he thought it should go anyway. I wanted the water lines moved but the plumber convinved me that where he had placed the lines would still work.

Even though I knew things weren’t the way I wanted, in that moment, I felt worn down and to my regret, I said ok.

We have some plaster repair work to do. One step forward two steps back.

Oh yes, it was a bang up job. We have the holes in our walls to prove it!

The 3-way switches are in and the new hallway light is hung.

The faded woodwork debacle left us feeling discouraged. If it had been a bedroom insead of a hallway that we pass through several times a day, we might have just shut the door on the room and our project for a few months.

Pablo mixed stain into varnish and sprayed that on our woodwork with a paint sprayer. No one was sure if this idea was even going to work or how well it would turn out. It took several tries to get the color right, but the end result looked much better then we had hoped for.

The downside was that the varnish tinted more then our woodwork. Right now we have a pink bathtub, toilet, sink, fishtank, computer desk, computer monitor, mirrors and anything else we forgot to cover. It should have occured to one of us to cover these things in plastic before we turned on the paint sprayer.

Good thing we already needed to repaint the hallway.

We have been asked a lot of questions about the process used to refinish our Douglas fir woodwork and have finally wised up enough to write it down!

Paint Removal
We tried many different methods to strip paint off the woodwork, everything from off the shelf Home Depot chemical strippers to the Silent Paint Remover.

Although we really liked The Silent Paint Remover, it was too bulky to fit into small corners and I had difficulty using it on surfaces that weren’t flat. In the end, a chemical paint stripper called Master Strip, Formula A Remover sold in 5 gallon drums from the McBride company (Los Angeles, CA 818.507.8900) was the weapon of choice. Be sure to wear a respirator and to have good ventilation because this stuff is toxic.

The stripper was brushed on with a paint brush, allowed to sit until it started to work and scrapped off with a wide putty knife. This process is repeated until all the paint was removed.

Here is a trick to remove any paint residue left on the wood. Brush on the paint stripper and use steel wool to wipe it off. This will also help to sand down any of the wood grain that was raised by the chemical paint stripper.

It is difficult to remove paint from cracks or crevices. People with the patience of Saints use dental tools to go in and chip out all the particles of paint. That didn’t happen at our house. A good effort was made to remove all visible paint but the paint in cracks and crevices was dealt with after the wood was stained and I’ll explain the way that was handled once we get through the staining process.

Any cracks, holes or gouges in the wood were filled in with *gasp* Bondo Body Filler, which is normally used in car repair. Bondo has several things going for it. It’s cheaper and more pliable than wood fillers and putties. It is also a brown-red color that blends in well and is barely notable once the wood is stained.

Finally, lightly sand the wood with a handheld sander.

Wood That Was Originally Painted (instead of stained)
If the woodwork you are stripping was originally painted, the wood will need heavy sanding prior to staining.

Bleaching
To bleach or not to bleach…ah, that is the question.

This step is not necessary in many cases. It really depends on your situation and the type of look you are after.

The original finish on our woodwork was very dark, almost black. If our woodwork had never been touched and was in original pristine condition, I would have learned to live with the dark wood, although it’s not my taste. But our woodwork had been touched, many times. We decided to refinish the wood in a lighter tone more to our liking.

Perhaps because our woodwork was originally so dark the grain of the wood stood out and was considerably darker after stain was applied. We wanted a more uniform finish so a bleaching product was applied. This allowed the wood to accept the stain evenly.

Woodwork that has been bleached

A word of caution, be sure to tape off the edges of the floor with several layers of painter’s tape because the bleach will run off the baseboards and onto the floor. We found this out the hard way.

A furniture wood bleach product was used. It comes in a bag and you follow the directions on the bag regarding mixing the product and the amount of time to leave it on. You will need to wear a respirator, goggles to protect your eyes and gloves to protect your skin.

The bleach is brushed on and left per the manufacturer’s instructions. Bleach was left on our wood for a few hours. The bleach is washed off with water soaked rags and a bucket of water. You will need to change the water bucket often and to rinse the wood several times to be sure all the bleach is removed.

Let the wood dry overnight.

Wood That Was Originally Painted
The bleaching step was skipped for our upstairs woodwork which was originally painted. Bleach was not necessary to get an even stain coverage.

Staining
Select several stain colors that you think you will like and apply the colors to your woodwork. Apply a large enough portion so that you can get a clear idea of what the different stains will look like. It is also good to view the stains at different times of the day because the color will shift depending on the light. Another thing to keep in mind is that the stain will get slightly darker after varnish is applied.

Don’t be afraid to mix different stains together to achieve just the right color. Be sure to write your formula down, especially if you are planning on doing another room in the future. Another lesson learned the hard way.

We have used Watco brand Danish oils and also a mixture of several Minwax stains with great success. I don’t see any benefit of using one over the other.

Woodwork after a few applications of wood stain. Several more coats were applied to achieve the desired look.

Apply a light coat of stain with a soft, clean rag. Let it sit on the wood for a little bit, then very lightly wipe it off with a clean rag. A cotton tee shirt type of material works well. After that coat dries, keep adding coats and letting them dry until you achieve the desired color.

The dining room which was done earlier is actually a slightly different color than the rest of the wood in the house. Another thing to keep in mind is that the color will get a little darker after the varnish is applied.

Here are the 2 “recipes” that were used in our house:
Dining Room:
Watco Danish Oils – 3 parts Dark Walnut to 1 part Cherry

Living Room, Den and Back Porch woodwork:
Minwax Stains – 2 parts Special Walnut, 1.5 parts Cherry, .5 Red Oak

Just mix all the colors up in a big bucket.

Touch Up
Now is the time to touch up any tiny places and specs where the paint wasn’t removed. The stain will make these areas stand out so they will be easy to see. Mix some paint until it is the color of the stain. With a small brush carefully paint over all the little spots where the paint wasn’t removed. Allow to dry.

Varnish
The varnish was a mixture of 2 parts clear coat, one part semi gloss. This can be applied several ways. It can be lightly brushed on but you can end up with visible brush strokes. A better and faster way to get a smooth finish is to spray on the varnish using a paint sprayer.

Either approach will require 3 to 4 light coats of varnish. Allow the varnish to dry between coats.

After the final coat of varnish has dried overnight, lightly sand all the woodwork with a very fine grade of steel wool.

A lot of people have had good luck sealing their woodwork with shellac or Linseed oil instead of varnish.

Dining room woodwork after restoration

Order
It is best to strip off all the paint first. If you have layers of painted wallpaper covering your walls like we did, now is a good time to remove it and patch the walls. If you wait to work on the walls until after refinishing the wood, you risk damaging the finish on the woodwork.

After the wallpaper has been removed you can see if repair work is needed on your plaster walls. Once you have addressed your walls you can begin bleaching and/or staining your woodwork.

After the varnish has been applied and is dried, you can tape off the woodwork with painters tape, and prime and paint your ceiling and walls.

I have been buying antique light fixtures for years. I adore eBay and find so many irresistible deals on vintage and antique lights. I buy what I love and store it away to use someday, in some as of yet unrestored room of our house. I have so many boxes of lights packed away that I don’t even remember what I have any more. And I am running out of rooms!

I went through all the boxes the other day and it was like Christmas morning. I was overjoyed to find this little light. It goes perfectly in our dining room. I smile every time I see it.

As a rule I try not to spend more than $250. I buy what speaks to me and don’t worry about it’s value or collectibility.

After we moved in we realized that we were the only white people living in the apartment complex other than the property manager. The realization wasn’t a negative one, simply an observation. Early one evening we heard the woman who lived above us screaming a stream of obscenities out the window at her boyfriend who was standing in the parking lot adjacent to our dining room windows. The crescendo of her words accelerated to the point where they became jumbled together and unintelligible. Her words kept coming louder and faster, without pause. At regular intervals her boyfriend bellowed back, “Ghetto bitch! Ghetto bitch! Go get your hair done. You’re a ghetto bitch. You live in the G-H-E-T-T-O, bitch.”

That was our first realization that we lived in such a bad part of town. The whole fight culminated with our neighbor’s boyfriend storming off into the open field behind our apartment and firing a round of bullets straight up into the air. At that point Amy Jo and I dove to the floor of our apartment. We were shocked by the brutal, raw emotion of the exchange. That fight was completely outside our frame of reference for the world.

I looked at Amy Jo and said, “I guess this means we live in the ghetto.”

She quipped, “Yeah. We should get some tee shirts printed up. GHETTO BITCHES.”

That experience was good training for living in our current neighborhood.

The Pimp – Ho Fight
On a warm summer afternoon David and I were doing the typically mundane task of unloading groceries from our car. A little black hatchback car erratically pulled up to the stop sign at the intersection catty corner to our house. I didn’t really pay much attention at first but soon heard a commotion coming from inside the vehicle. Suddenly, a fairly average looking man jumped out of the car and roughly pulled a woman out behind him. This instantly caught my attention. I was halted dead in my tracks by the words the man was yelling.

“I’m the pimp! You’re the ho! Give me my money bitch or I’m going to hurt you.”

The fight continued along these lines for several more minutes. Then there was something that I didn’t quite understand about being from East Los Angeles verses West Los Angeles. This man, the pimp, was apparently from West Los Angeles and because of this fact the woman was lucky. If he had been from East LA she would be dead, but, because he is from West LA, he is more compassionate. The woman did not appear to be intimidated by this information. On the contrary, she seemed angry and defiant. She mentioned seeking employment opportunities with a pimp who “hadn’t lost his mother (insert the mother of all expletives here)-ing mind.”

A neighbor’s sprinkler was watering his lawn, I could hear the sound of children’s voices playing in a yard up the street and in the distance I faintly heard an ice cream truck rattling it’s bell and playing “Pop Goes The Weasel.” In the middle of our tranquil summer setting was this absurd exchange straight out of a really bad made-for-tv movie. I stood in the yard, transfixed, mouth agape.

The pimp saw me standing in the middle of my yard staring at them. He pushed the woman back into the car, drove around the corner, parked and pulled the woman back out of the car to yell at her again. By this time David walked up to me and asked what was going on. After I told him he ran inside and dialed 911.

David waited on hold for 10 minutes before he reached an operator. The 911 operator said they couldn’t do anything since we didn’t have the car’s license plate number. She instructed us to get a license plate number the next time this occurred. David requested that a squad car be sent to our location anyway. By the time David hung up the phone with the police the pimp and ho had resolved their dispute and driven away. They were long gone by the time the police drove through our area 45 minutes later.

The discussion in the Comments refers to the continuation of this article: More Tales From the Hood

Our house has it’s own quiet language. The rooms flow into each other; the spaces are intimate yet provide views into other rooms so they don’t feel enclosed. The arch of the living room fireplace is repeated in the curve of the dining room china cabinet. Seeing these repeated elements provide consistency and a sense of security to the house – nothing is jarring, nothing seems out of place. When making a decision, I consider if an alteration is in tune with the house.

We recently had to decide between adding a wall to separate the back hallway from the sleeping porch or leaving the space wide open to form one big room. I am planning on using that space as a studio so having a big, open area is appealing.

Pros For One Big Room
1. We feel comfortable with the idea of leaving the wall out because the sleeping porch is a 1918 addition, granted that’s an early one, to the original structure.

2. This room is on the second story in a private area verses the public rooms downstairs.

3. The room feels larger and lets in more light without the wall. Being a product of my time, I understand the desire to tear down walls and open up living spaces.

Cons For One Big Room
1. The space will be out of character with the rest of our house.

2. If we decide to use the room in a different way, for instance as a guest room, the space will have limited privacy.

3. Noise from downstairs could be an issue because the space is open to the stairwell.

4. We won’t use the beautiful antique doors I found on eBay. This reason is not as practical but it’s still a major consideration. I’m also aware that doors this nice would have been used in a public area of the house, not in the private area of our humble bungalow. So, even this choice is not historically accurate.

Continuity and those beautiful antique doors won out. We decided to have the wall rebuilt.

Pablo and crew framed in the wall and added drywall.

We get to use the beveled glass doors.

Related Topic: Historical Accuracy: Where Do You Draw The Line?

This month we will celebrate our 4th year in the house. What a journey this has been.

Buying The House – Are We Really Doing This?
Gee, I can’t believe we are actually going to do this. What if we want to move to another country someday, you know, like next year? Are we sure we really want to do this? 235K is a LOT of money. Oh my God, I can’t sleep.

I can’t believe we have to go through all this paperwork just to buy a house.

What happened to our house? Why does the house look so different now that we own it? It looked so much better at the open house. Why didn’t we notice that the floors are all black and the house is so dirty? Wow, just look at this place. It’s kind-of dumpy. Make that totally dumpy. I can’t breathe. I need to open a window. Oh crap, all the windows are painted shut.

First 6 months – Euphoria and Unrealistic Expectations
I can’t believe we finally have a house to call our own. I’m so happy. Oh, what a beauty it will be someday when we get it all fixed up…like in 6 months from now. Hmmmm, it does need a lot of work. Well, maybe in 8 months then. This place just needs some tender loving care.

Man, we are so busy all the time now. It is hard to stay in touch with friends and family. All this unpacking, looking at paint chips, trolling eBay for antique light fixtures, reading everything I can find on bungalows and home decorating really takes a lot of time.

How romantic that our second wedding anniversary is spent together in our own little home. I’m so lucky to have a husband who is as excited as I am about starting our very first restoration project. I love my husband. I love our house.

The Rest of the First Year – All That Glitters is not Gold
I can’t believe that David is acting so mean! Why did we even buy this house if he is going to get angry at me every time we work on it? How could I know that stripping paint would be so damn difficult? It’s not my fault that I caught the wainscoting on fire. The heat gun got super hot.

We should be able to restore the dining room in a month, six weeks tops.

2nd Year – Reality Creeps In
I can’t believe we are STILL working on the dining room. How could we have spent six months working on one room? I can’t believe I actually thought we could restore a room a month! I was so naive. We might need to get on a five year plan.

I had no idea it would be so expensive to fix up the house. How did I think we were going to be able to restore the whole house with 15K? I mean, our house needs EVERYTHING. Why does everything cost so much?

All the cashiers at Home Depot greet me by my first name. We gotta get out more. I mean to someplace fun. I can’t even remember the last time we went out to dinner or to a movie.

Wow, our house has really appreciated in value and we have only been here a year. Interest rates keep on dropping. Lets refinance and take out a Home Equity Line of Credit so we can afford to get our roof fixed and to hire some plasters.

David started a web blog about the house for me. I’m not really sure why. I mean, what could I possibly have to say?

3rd Year – Restoration Full Steam Ahead
I can’t believe how awesome these plasters are! They can do everything. They can strip paint, plaster, do carpentry work and so much more. I think I’m in love! With the money we got from the Home Equity Line of Credit we should be able to swing lots of work on the house. Everything is going so much better now.

All my free time is spent on the house. I’m trying to schedule the carpenter, plumbers, electricians, oversee all the work being done and balance the budget. It really upsets me when these people don’t show up or even bother to call to say they can’t make it. What other industry does business like that?

David is refusing to talk with me any more about what colors to paint the house. Just because I change my mind once or twice a day, and maybe I am being obsessive, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about it. I need to consider all the possibilities and all he wants to focus on is the end result.

Wow. The back porch needs to be completely ripped off and rebuilt. Our little back porch project has somehow spiraled into a full-on exterior restoration. This is crazy. I don’t think we can afford this.

Good thing interest rates are still low, but everyone says they are going to rise. Lets roll our Home Equity Line of Credit into a fixed second mortgage and take a little extra cash to finish up the work on the exterior.

It’s hard to remember how horrible our house used to be. I’m feeling really good about the house. It’s so exciting to see my vision for it coming to fruition.

4th Year – Maybe We Should Sell?
I can’t believe that we have spent all this time and money and are only half way done. I hate this house and all it’s problems. I am SO over working on the house and all things house related. I will never, ever take on a restoration project this extensive again. I must have been out of my mind!

Wow, the house across the street listed for over 600K and it needs lots of work – like our house needed lots of work when we bought it. Maybe we should sell? We could travel or move to Europe.

Hmmmm, I’m getting really bored. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to do some work on the house? It was really nice of David to clean out the back hallway so I can start restoration work upstairs.

5th yr – Who knows?

Update: 9th yr…oh, why didn’t we sell the house in year 4?

The color is too light next to the golden dining room walls and woodwork.

My beautiful sage/silvery green has transformed into baby nursery mint green.

Even David, who has never met a color that he didn’t like, admitted,”Yeah. The color really doesn’t seem to be working. There is just something not right about it.” And that, my friends, means this color is just so very, very wrong.

Off to the paint store. Hallway color round #2.

The old adage “No news is good news” doesn’t always ring true. I haven’t written in a while because we ran into some problems with our back porch that required us to rethink our exterior restoration. We halted work completely for the past month so that we could figure out what we are going to do about our back porch and how much we can afford to do.

Back porch appears to have been enclosed with wood scraps and odds-and-ends, but no real framing.

The back porch used to be open. It was enclosed sometime prior to the house being shingled with asbestos tiles in the late 1940′s – early 1950′s. We discovered that the enclosed wall and windows have NO framing! The walls, windows and door are all different depths from the house. The back porch is a hobbled together mess inside and out.

Detail of the “construction”

One of our dining room windows looks out onto the ugly back porch. When the view was open to the outside I am sure a lot of light streamed in but now the dining room tends to be dark and the view leaves much to be desired.

View from dining room window

Our goals are to let in more light and to relocated the washer and dryer to one end of the porch and enclose them in a cabinet. We want to put in new windows and relocate the back door to the middle of the porch.

Window juts out 10 inches from the wall.

Another concern is an upstairs sleeping porch that was added to the house around 1918. The porch is built to the end of the roof rafters right on top of the old cedar shake roof. We are concerned that the porch isn’t adequately supported. Prior to buying the house we had a structural engineer look into this and some other problems with the house. The structural engineer felt that the support for the room was adequate.

Several other people, who are knowledgeable about old houses, have told us that the room is sloping downward and we are at risk of having it fall off the back of our house during an earthquake!

Sleeping porch built to the edge of the roof rafters

We also found evidence of termite damage along our new foundation. All this had me sticking my head in the proverbial sand because, in truth, I just “didn’t want to deal with it.”

Wires hanging off the back of our house. How ghetto is that?

It is hard to get excited about spending money on the back porch, a room that we use for washing our laundry, housing the litter box and our Sparkletts water dispenser, especially when our kitchen has holes in the ceiling and plaster falling of the walls and we are still brushing our teeth in the bathtub.

I had decided to reside the back porch and to revisit it in 5 years when the rest of the house was completed. Unfortunately, that won’t really work since the walls aren’t framed. Our neighbor, an old house buff, assured me that residing the porch would be like trying to “fix a skull fracture with a band aide” and that our back porch is a complete mess that should be gutted and rebuilt right away.

Exposed plumbing pipes.

So here we sit, we two, trying to decide just what we want to do with that back porch anyway?

All advice and opinions, especially regarding the sleeping porch support, are welcome and greatly appreciated!

We just celebrated our 5th year of home ownership last week. We are a little over halfway done with the house. What a journey this restoration project has been! We often receive questions about buying and restoring an old house. So, on the occasion of our anniversary with homeownership, here goes…

Would we do it again? Hmmmm. Halfway through our restoration I started to have fantasies about building a completely Modern house, something that you would see on the pages of “Dwell” magazine, where everything would be brand spanking new and streamlined. A few months ago I would have said NEVER. EVER. AGAIN. But, you know what they say about never saying never. 

What have we learned from our experiences? If you are going to restore a house with someone, have a conversation or two about how you actually plan to accomplish this before buying the house. When we talked about fixing up the house, I imagined us lovingly working on it together. I had no idea the images floating around David’s head were of us interviewing general contractors…lovingly together. What can I say? We were young, in love and not so focused on the details. It never occurred to me that David wouldn’t “like” working on the house. 

Things will cost so much more than you expect and take much, much longer than you imagine.

Know your limitations. Sometimes it is much cheaper and safer to hire someone than to attempt to do a project for which you have no skill or aptitude. Hire a licensed electrician, plumber, roofer, or foundation contractor.

It is just a house, just a paint color, just a piece of furniture, just a light fixture, or just a kitchen design. Try to keep things in perspective. If only I could have back all those hours spent pouring through magazines, books, and on eBay. I spent way too much time, and probably too much money, on things that seemed important at the time, but really didn’t matter all that much in the bigger picture.

If I could do it all over again.
1. I would spend more money upfront and purchase a house in the best condition that I could afford. We thought we would save ourselves money by purchasing a fixer and we were worried about house payments. We ended up spending MORE money fixing our house up than if we had bought the nicer, more expensive house.

2. You will save yourself so much money and frustration if you find a house with unpainted woodwork, if that is important to you. Stripping paint is a horrible, horrible process. It is not fun, it is not exciting…it is hard and expensive work.

3. Get to know your potential neighbors. We were lucky that we ended up with great neighbors. If I had been smart, I would have knocked on some doors and met my future neighbors before we bought our house. In my neighborhood, there is not much that happens that my neighbors don’t know about. Your potential neighbors can probably give you the lowdown on the owner of the house, the other neighbors, who or what you should watch out for, and probably some history about your future house.

4. I will not live next door to an apartment complex. We saw some really great houses but didn’t make an offer because they were next to 2-3 story apartments. I like to live next to people who own their houses and have more invested in their upkeep. Plus, I don’t want people to be able to look out their windows and have a bird’s eye view of my backyard.

5. Look for homes that still have intact original features such as moldings, beamed ceilings, hardware, original wood doors, light fixtures, wood framed windows with wavy glass, etc. The more original features the better. Yes, all these things can be added back if they are missing but it is costly – especially to put back wood framed windows.

6. Make sure you get a thorough home inspection, but be prepared for surprises. The home inspection won’t turn up all the problems in your house. Until you take a room apart and put it back together again, there are things you just won’t find.

7. Spend time in the area. Drive around and get out and walk. Is this somewhere where you want to live? Do you feel safe? Make sure you like the block before you buy a house on it.

8. Be patient. It takes a long time to fix up an old house and a good amount of money. Try to be realistic, although, if you have never fixed up a house before it is hard to even know what is realistic. Here is a hint, most of what you have seen on tv about fixing up a house is not reality. It occured to me the other day that it took our house almost 100 years to get so run down, so why did I think it would be completely restored in a few months or even a few years?

9. After you buy the house, invest in an alarm system and take the burglar bars off the windows. Alarm window screens are completely worth the money.

10. Nothing will change the look of your house like a good paint job!

If I could have one “do over” with our bathroom it would be to have gone with a light gray grout color on the marble floors instead of bright white. I am finding it very challenging to keep the grout clean! My mom has light gray grout on her bathroom floor and it is holding up beautifully. Live and learn.

How can my beautiful floors looks so gross, disgusting, and yucky!?

So, I was super excited when I saw a tip for cleaning grout lines on Pinterest. It is so easy. Here it is: You take a Clorox bleach pen and run it over the grout lines, let it set for at least 4 hours (I left it over night) and then wipe it up with warm water and a sponge or old wash cloth. That’s it!

Using the Clorox pen makes it really easy to follow the grout lines. You just kind-of get into a groove. I did the whole floor in 10 minutes…one of the benefits of having a small bathroom. I put the bleach on pretty thick and used a whole pen on our floor.

The next morning my floors looked new again. The bottom line…

This is one tip that really works!

Living without doors.

Stripping paint is not a fun process. Stripping paint from woodwork that was originally painted is agony. I thought I knew all about paint stripping, but what I learned is that there is hell and then there is real H-E-L-L, all caps, please stop sticking bamboo shoots underneath my fingernails hell.

The paint has soaked into the grain of the wood and filled every tiny crevice.

If you desire hours of wretched torture and are crazy enough to attempt this at home, the Silent Paint Remover and/or a heat gun are the way to go. Chemical strippers, of which I am actually a big fan, took so much product to get down to the wood that it wasn’t cost effective.

All the different colors the upstairs bathroom was painted.

All of the woodwork upstairs was painted from day one with the exception of the window frames and trim. I have not seen the combination of painted wood and varnished wood in the same room before. The original paint color on the wood trim was a muted gold. I often see this color referred to as “wheat” in modern paint samples.

Getting down to the wood…finally.

The little back hallway should be hours of fun.

Taken from the second bedroom/office looking into the bathroom. The door on the opposite side of the room leads to the back hallway. The smaller door is for a built-in linen closet.

The floor was covered in vinyl tiles and old linoleum. The linoleum appeared to date around 1920-1930s and must have been glued down with some old fashioned version of superglue because it was horrible to get up. The floor was black around the toilet and tub due to some serious water damage, so I stained the floor a dark walnut color for now.

Closer view of the linen closet door. It might be difficult to tell but the plaster wall to the right of the linen closet is scored to resemble subway tile. Notice the big crack in the ceiling above the linen closet. There are huge cracks all along the ceiling.

The walls were painted none too carefully before we purchased the house. The paint has peeled off in the past few years. It appears that the plaster color was originally left natural, the woodwork was painted a muted gold color (I often see it referred to as ‘wheat’ in modern paint samples), and the ceiling was a vibrant green color. The second bedroom/office walls were painted the same green color as the bathroom ceiling.

The bathtub and wall tiles appear to date from the late 1940s – early 1950s. We assume there was originally a clawfoot tub. The daughter of our home’s second owner told us that the house did not originally have a shower. Her family added a shower downstairs off the back porch. That area had been gutted when we bought the house. We now use it for our washer and dryer.

Our idea was to add a clawfoot tub with a shower attachement, but It has been pointed out that it might be difficult to get a clawfoot tub shower enclosure/curtain rod to fit into the available space because of the slanted ceiling. I’m not sure what we will end up doing?

Our duplex apartment from the 1930′s had a bath tub and a seperate shower stall which I loved, but no room for something like that in our 6ft x 12ft space.

We are fairly certain the bathroom originally had a high-tank toilet based on the holes in the floor. I found the outline of a wall hung sink. The pedestal sink in the photo is from our old duplex apartment and dates from the 1930s. The property manager was throwing the sink out so we grabbed it.

The strange thing is how high the medicine cabinet is placed. When I look in the mirror I can only see my eyes and I’m average height. I wonder how tall the original owners were?

Photo taken looking into the second bedroom/office.

One of my favorite things about the bathroom is the woodwork. The mint green register grate matches the others in the house, and was salvaged from Liz’s Antique Hardware located on Le Brea Ave. It needs to be stripped.

Our house has never had a shower and now we don’t have a tub. Oh, the dreaded phase of our project! I have not been looking forward to it. This is one way to get me to the gym…if not to work out, at least to shower.

The old tub is solid cast iron so we expected it to be heavy, just not 500 lbs heavy! Actually, we have no way of knowing how much the tub really weighs. But, it took 4 big, strong guys to move the tub. They claimed it felt like 500-600 lbs.

The closet doors are now installed.

All the woodwork has been primed {sorry!}. We received some encouragement to go the next step, leave the wood natural and stain it. I hate to disappoint anyone, but we learned our lesson about staining woodwork that was originally painted when we restored the hallway.

It took 4-5 guys to carry the tub down a very narrow stairway. It was slow going with lots of stops and false starts. I looked on and just hoped that the steps were strong enough to hold. They were. The tub made it down without incident.

The cat, who we call the project supervisor because he likes to oversee all the work, wanted no part of moving the tub and for once was nowhere to be found. Smart cat.

The tub, old sink and toilet were given to a friend of a friend who used them in their own bathroom remodel project.

And I thought our kitchen couldn’t get any worse! The ceiling had to be opened to update the bathroom plumbing. We are adding additional support and reinforcing the ceiling beams underneath the tub. Although, our new tub will weigh less than half of what the old tub weighed, better to be safe then sorry.

Take a moment to look at all the great entries we have received and vote for your favorite. There is still time to enter your house! Winners announced December 24th.

Submitted by Keeley House. Currently in 1st place with 125 votes {at the time of this writing}

Submitted by Donelle. Currently in 2nd place with 60 votes {at the time of this writing}

Submitted by Bungalowgirl. Currently in 3rd place with 40 votes {at the time of this writing}

Contest generously sponsored by Schoolhouse Electric Co. First prize is a Schoolhouse Electric Co. Otis light fixture in satin nickel with a Modern Aqua shade. Second prize is a $75 Home Depot gift card. Third prize is a $50 Home Depot gift card.