Our Living Room

The living room was in pretty good shape except for the floor.  Most of the door casings and baseboards were intact although not always in their original place or condition.  As I shared earlier most of the walls had been sheetrocked over the original brick and plaster.  The ceiling has also been lowered from 11 to 10 feet to accommodate copper pipes and electrical wiring.  This is also the room where we installed the elevator.  However the electrical lines violated code by being laid in channels in the floor and then covered with carpeting.  The lines went to large ugly plug boxes mounted on the walls. 

Original front room condition with hot water baseboards
and sheetrock boxes to hide pipes

Getting some measurements

Fireplace and original trim around doorways
and windows

View into dining room

Showing where the elevator and
furnace will be

Breaking the law and a potential fire hazard

Getting ready to frame the elevator

The big job for me was leveling the floor.  From the edge of where the fireplace is located to the front window  the floor dropped about 3 inches in the space of eight feet.  I really wanted to ignore the problem but since we were putting down hardwood floors that wasn't an option so in the summer of 2007 I started tearing up the floor to discover the problem and then correct it.  I discovered the problem in most cases was sagging and settling floor joists however the joist next to the front wall was completely rotted through from being in close contact with the exterior wall.  I replaced that joist and made it level with the rest of the floor which then allowed me to measure the thickness of each shim I needed to create for each joist in order to level the floor.

Tear up carpet and overlayment to get to the
original floor (poor grade softwood)

Down to the joists

Under the floor

Now the rebuilding starts

Maybe this explains why to floor drops

As I review this post and look at this picture I find myself forced to add an additional comment.  If you've read my post on the elevator installation you know we had untold problems with the company that we purchased the elevator from.  After mid 2005 I thought we were finally free of them but they came back to haunt me in January, 6 years later.  The photo above shows two white wires.  One is the new phone wire I ran into the house.  In January I changed my phone and internet service to Qwest but I couldn't get a buzz out of my phone.  I called Qwest and they promptly sent out a technician who initially thought it was the outside line but he eventually determined that the problem was in the house and asked me about the two white wires leaving the box.  I told him one was the new phone wire I had run but I didn't remember the second one.  He informed me that it was thermostat wire and the cause of the buzzing.  It was then that it hit me that elevators require a phone in case of a breakdown and the company had just run thermostat wire because it was cheaper than phone wire.  So I disconnected the wire, got rid of the buzz and ended up paying Qwest a $100 service fee because the problem was inside the house and not covered.  Sometimes even ghosts can come back to bite you.

My totally rotted joist and an old heat duct

Shimming the floor

Trying to keep it level

Laying a new subfloor

Hopefully this corrects the floor problem for another 100 years.  Once the floor was level we were ready to lay the new hardwood flooring that had been setting in either our front room or garage since the fall of 2004.  That's a case of being overly optimistic about how quickly the remodeling process will progress which is a common error most remodelers make.  The good thing is the flooring had plenty of time to acclimate.  We bought Santos Mahogany from Lumber Liquidators because we liked the grain and color and because it's twice as hard as oak.  Their claim about the 50 year finish appears to be valid as we've seen no wear except for where we've incurred some minor damage.

Originally we were planning to lay the floor ourselves but ran into one of those "burn-out" times where we felt like we couldn't do one more thing at the time but didn't want to wait any longer.  We ended up hiring someone to lay the floor and generally were very happy with the job - the one exception being they face nailed in several places in a way I wish they hadn't.

Getting started

Looking from the dining room into the living room

View from the living room into the dining room

View into the foyer

The copper pipe, baseboard heaters and sheetrock boxes had to be removed and the walls patched in three places before painting could take place.  We installed the electrical outlets back in the floor and removed the wall boxes.

Cutting in the edges

Finally a living room after 3 1/2 years

The elevator wall

I think Chris and I agree the most beautiful feature of the entire house is the oak fireplace in the front room which somehow in spite of everything else done to the house remained in almost perfect condition. Some of the original tiles were loose so the man who did the foyer floor came and removed and then reinstalled each piece.  He covered all the tile with painters tape then outlined each tile and numbered them before removal so each piece went back into its original position.

The mantle is quarter sawn oak much of it in a tiger pattern.  There is also a nicely carved Pan figure and other carved and fine woodworking details.

The clock was my great-grandfather's

We'll install a gas-burning coal basket

And this final picture demonstrates the kind of atmosphere most of us Victorian remodelers dream about.

Our first Victorian Christmas