Major October Update (Part II)

Alright, so as I was saying last night, I started working on the "L" room* upstairs. The plan is pretty simple: Rebuild the closets (which were too tiny to be useful), redo the floors, redo the ceiling (new drywall), and general stuff like clean-up the mouldings, patch the walls, paint, etc.

* Note: I only call it the "L" room because it's L shaped.

I had started to tear down the closet walls ages ago, but I did a lot more work recently by opening-up the hallway wall. The reason for this is to add a built-in linen closet. The house has very little storage space other than the basement, so I wanted a spot near the bathroom to store bath towels, bedsheets, toiletries and other items.

Here's the spot where the built-in will go. I originally wanted to make it almost up to the ceiling, but I took a look at all sorts of gathered photos of old 1920's built-ins, and none except for very rare exceptions were taller than an average door, so I plan to make this one the same. This means that all 3 openings will be done in one set of continuous casings(mouldings), with the doors to the spare/guest room, and the "L" room on each side.

This is viewed from the bathroom door (the doorway to the right is the main staircase).



Doorway to the "L" room:



From the "L" room looking towards the bathroom:





From guest room (aka Laundry room):



The ceiling in the "L" room will be a fun job. I plan to drywall over this, but some of the plaster/mud that they added is caked-on super thick in places. If it's still fairly easy to scrape off, I might take it all down, otherwise I'll keep going until I'm at a relatively thin spot.



I also started to patch the floor. These are spots left to fix.







Lastly is the porch window. I removed the porch window in spring or early summer so that I could replace the missing muntin in the bottom (see main blog photo for the before).

I don't think I posted about the muntin repair here, so here's a very quick recap.

Match the profile (as close as possible) on some clear pine. In my case, I was able to do it entirely on the table saw (close enough profile that no one will notice a difference).



Carefully cut and notch your pieces to fit (measure carefully, and aim for a snug fit).





Glue, clamp, putty, sand, prime.





So yeah, fast forward to Monday night, when I finally decided to install the glass and do the glazing. I did the top 2 1/2 panes on Mon night, and the large bottom 2 last night. For an idea of size, the window is 3 feet wide by 5 feet high.



The glazing job isn't perfect, but the entire window is in rough shape, with many edges gouged, chipped, puttied, filled and re-filled, etc. But the new centre muntin one looks great!



This is what the porch has looked like pretty much all summer/fall. Notice all the dead leaves starting to drift in by the opening.



I have the window in the MB (since there's lots of room to work), so I'm hoping that the crappy Dap33 will dry in a week or so. I'd like to paint and install the window before winter.