The Foyer Returns

One of the first things you see as you approach our front door is the stained glass transom.  This piece  incorporates patterns from the door and was made for us by our oldest daughter who graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting but loves to work with stained glass.  Note the metal spiders she included to remind us of the original inhabitants when we moved in.  Her husband is shown dutifully mounting it in the frame.

The photo doesn't do it justice

We chose to mount it permanently in the frame

We put down an additional layer of subfloor and then lath and thinset mortar to provide a stable and level base.  The son of a long-time friend lays tile and gave us a deal so we got a great job because he is a perfectionist in his work.  While visiting a neighbor who is also remodeling a Victorian my wife saw an octagonal onyx and marble pattern that she loved.  We found a supplier out of Chicago on the internet but this was one of my wife's splurges as she donated money earned from a part-time job to pay for the most expensive floor in our home.

Leveling the floor

Hard at work

Marking the imperfections to redo

All done

 Several of the homes we've visited in our community still have the original lincrusta, an embossed linoleum product used in homes of the Victorian era, and we wanted that look in our foyer as well but the cost of lincrusta is astronomical so that is one area we decided to make some adjustments to our dreams.  We found heavy embossed wallpaper that comes very close to the lincrusta look for the lower half of the walls.  It went on easily and it's next to impossible to see the seams.

Our wallpaper "lincrusta"

Wallpaper, 3-way light switch we added and 3 gang box we enlarged

One of the ongoing problems with the house was that much of the casing, baseboards, plinths and rosettes were missing.  I'll spend a whole post showing how we solved those problems but you'll get some hints here.  There was baseboard missing on both sides of the doorway into the dining room.  The baseboard is 11 inches high and the pattern is unique so I ended up sawing and then hand carving the missing pieces in order to get a match.  As we worked through the problem of replicating patterns we (my son-in-law and I) found it was easier to make them in several pieces and then glue them together.  We've lived in the home almost 7 years now and it was only a few weeks ago that I noticed that two plinths next to each other in the foyer didn't match.  At some point in the past someone had replaced the one plinth with a rosette so that required some alterations as we moved to finish the trim in the foyer.

What saws and hand carving tools can do

Finished product

Mismatch anyone?

A match with a new fabricated top

There, that's better

And here's the 99% finished foyer.

A nice sitting area

View from front door

View from stair

View from dining room