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

The Foyer

Original foyer from the dining room

Even though the foyer is one of the smaller and simpler rooms of our home it still required a fair amount of work. Like the downstairs bathroom the tile floor had been laid by what I can only call "laid-back amateurs."  From a distance it looked okay and even appropriate to the period but any kind of closer examination revealed uneven surfaces and seam spacing that varied from 1/16 of an inch to over quarter of an inch.
The foyer has two light fixtures, a hanging ceiling reproduction and one mounted on the newel post.  That one appears to be a genuine antique but it's not original to the house as it's clear the oak base doesn't match the other oak that makes up the stair railing.  The oak railing and balusters were painted white at one time but thankfully had been stripped before we purchased the home.  It still needs some final cleanup and staining and sealing but the stripping would have been a real headache.

Narrow stairwell on 3 walls and antique fixture

View from second floor

Reproduction light fixture - we replaced these globes

Antique fixture

Some basic demolition had to happen before restoration could begin.  First there was a sheetrock box that hid copper heating pipes that had to be removed once we replaced the heating system.  They had also boarded over the transom above the front door and shingled it with cedar on the outside. Next there were several places in the house where they ran external wiring through metal channels.  One was in the foyer and controlled the light in the upstairs hallway.  We removed that and ran wire through the opposite wall and created a three-way switch to control the light from either floor.  That meant drilling through brick, fishing wire and cutting holes for new electrical boxes.  Fortunately its adobe brick so fairly easy to work with.  We also had to move a switch from the living room side of the wall to the foyer side and create a three gang box.  In the photo below you can see the electrical channel on the wall by the stairs and sheetrock box on the right side of the door that fed the baseboard radiator.

Once those small projects were completed we tackled the floor which was one of the bigger pains of our remodel.  Initially it appeared we might be able to pop the tiles loose but that proved to be a fantasy as they generally shattered.  After we chipped through a section about 4 feet by 6 I realized it might be possible to pry up the plywood sheets they had been laid on and that proved to be true but it was dirty, back breaking, bleeding knuckle work.

After 8 hours of work

Figuring out I can pry up whole sections

One of those times you wonder if its worth it

Looks like the 70's linoleum we put down in another house

Finally! the tile is gone

Original floor with access hole for new ductwork

Ready for subfloor, lath and tile

In the next post we'll share the remodeling that gives us a warm and inviting entry to our home.

Critters in the City

West Bountiful started out as a farming community in 1847 and still has a rural feel to it even though it's split in half by Interstate 15.  Our home, once on a fifty acre farm, now sits on a quarter acre about half a mile from the Interstate.  From our upstairs windows we can watch to see how the commute is going.  Nevertheless there is still a "slightly" country feel as we have a controlled creek running in our front yard and lots of critters.  The creek was once an honest-to-goodness creek in its own right but years ago became part of the irrigation system in the area so it usually only flows from April to November which is fine with us.  More on creek improvements later.

This post won't be about the remodel but some of the joys of an old house.  When we first moved in the home had been empty for almost 8 months and abandoned for about 6 of those before the ex-husband got it out of foreclosure.  By the time we moved in at the first of August the house was full of spiders and bugs.  And there was plenty of evidence of mice as well.  It took well over a year to get the bug problem under control and we haven't had a bug or mouse problem in years.

The following photos will give you a sense of why we feel out in the country despite our actual physical location.

Our latest visitors - somehow they safely cross the freeway

One of the original occupants - one of many

Mom and Dad

Mom and Dad again

One of the kids

The first autumn we came home one evening to discover a large barn owl flapping weakly by our back door with a damaged wing.  A friend who works with wildlife took the bird to a raptor center in Ogden where we discovered it was a female and too badly injured to save.  The raptor folk came to look for a nest and chicks but with no luck.  A few days later our son-in-law saw the mate and discovered quite a large hollow in the large tree in our backyard.  The bird people came back and discovered three cold eggs.  But it wasn't too long and we saw our male had found a new partner.  The hollow has probably been used 4 out of the 6 years we've lived here.  During April and May we can hear the chicks screeching every night for food and see the father circling through the trees.  And of course there are the occasional small rodent body parts and pellets they hack up.  The photos were taken out of a second floor bedroom window since the tree is only about five feet off the back part of the house.  Normally we only see them flying at night or occasionally on a limb but if there are several babies there's no room in the hollow and by June mom and dad are forced outside during the day.

A surprise for the heating guy - an old hornet's nest

An abandoned vent taken over by a new tenant.

A drop-in guest

Every spring except for this one birds built a nest in the chimney of the den fireplace.  And every year a big storm would knock the nest loose and we would have two or three baby birds behind our fireplace shell.  Fortunately the shell is still disconnected so while our dogs got all excited by the chirps I would pull it out, catch the birds and release them outside.  It was amazing that it almost always happened about the same week each year - perhaps it had to do with the weight of the babies reaching a certain point.

A baby finally comes down

One of three 

One day two years ago we found a baby raccoon in our backyard.  We didn't know what to think and it died within hours.  Shortly after that a second and then a third showed up.  By then we assumed something had happened to the mother.  The third one we actually saw coming down out of the tree.  We hoped to save the last one and even had someone coming to claim it when it too died despite our best efforts to keep it warm and feed it.  We believe the problem was they waited until they were close to death until they were willing to leave their shelter.

They liked our stream

They only spent the afternoon but it was fun watching them

So that's how critters in the city make us feel like we're in the country.  Another nice fact is that all the residential part of our town is west of the Interstate and all the commercial on the east side.  I'm a mile from Lowe's on one street and Home Depot on another but they're in another world.

Main Floor Bathroom - II

Once we had gutted the bathroom to studs and floor joists the reconstruction began with framing around the sewer and water lines from the upstairs bathroom.  We moved part of one wall about 30 inches to create a space in the kitchen for the refrigerator.  When we raised the ceiling I decided to make a coffered ceiling and we constructed a built-in cabinet above the toilet.  The window sill had been chopped back level with the wall so that had to be built back out.  We found marble tile at Home Depot for $1 a piece and had a friend's son lay it for us.

Next we installed bead board and a cap trim.

Cheap marble floor tile

View from back wall

Poplar cabinet

Cap, beadboard and cabinet

Coffered ceiling and dark primer

Basic cabinet shell

To balance the cap trim I started by centering under the mirror and then cutting the trim so I was able to get a mirror miter on each corner and worked outward from there.  This was one of those projects I delayed and delayed until I felt comfortable that I had come up with the correct solution.  I built the cabinet doors and ended up just painting the inside of the glass panels white to get the effect I wanted.  The tub came with the house and we splurged by having the feet chromed for $160 and the interior refinished (a polyurethane coating) that turned out very nice.  We were able to reuse the sink faucet but did replace the pedestal sink as the former one was a modern design.

As for the rest of the features:

We sanded and painted the exterior of the tub.

The tub fixture was ordered from a company on the internet.

The wall sconces came from ebay and are antiques.

The mirror frame came from a great aunt in Michigan and we had a beveled mirror cut to fit it.

The chandelier we found on clearance at Fred Meyer for about $50.

The stained glass hangs inside the regular window and came from ebay.  We won the auction and paid about $300 for it - we would have paid probably twice as much locally if we could have found one in this good a condition.  We stripped and stained the frame and then built a secondary frame to tie it together.

Aunt Justina's frame

Lot's of advance planning to get it right

Built-in cabinet with painted glass

Finally ready for tub and sink

Close fit 

Coffered ceiling

Stained glass from ebay

Morning sun

Since we had no choice about the placement of the bathroom off the dining room I'm pleased with the overall appearance as it almost looks like a powder room more than a full bathroom.  I thought if we had to we would have located the door further down the wall and had a two foot hallway leading to the bathroom!

Once again, we found the internet and ebay a huge help in the whole remodeling process as we were able to get much better choice and quality for the money than we would have been able to locally.  I'm all in favor of supporting local businesses but there are times when they don't have what you want or it's out of the price range.