Saturday, June 21, 2014

Before & After Photos - "L" Room

Here are the finished photos for the "L" Room, which show the room as it looked when I bought the house in 2010, and now, after a ton of work rebuilding the closet walls, repairing the window mouldings, replacing the missing mouldings for the doors, fixing electrical outlets, fixing the duct work, repairing/patching and repainting the original tongue and groove pine floor, fixing the absolutely terrible ceiling (which had been textured with drywall compound and a broom), etc.

The photos rotate counter-clockwise from the left-hand corner as you walk into the room.



The bookcase was removed because this is the only usable wall without any obstructions (windows or doors). This would be the idea spot to have the headboard of a bed. When the house was originally built this was actually a window, but now there's an attached building on this side.



Note: the interior of the closet is still unfinished drywall at the moment.



Here you can see where I rebuilt the new wall to land even with this stupid corner that they had (this doorway was not here originally).



The only drastic change to this corner was the lowering of the outlet, and repairing the sloppily installed baseboards (with 1 missing corner stake).







The floor here needed a lot of repairs. A lot of the pine boards are new, and had to be custom made to fit.



The original closets were only 16" deep, and they had been modified twice in the past. Originally they separated the two east rooms upstairs. At some time in the 40s or 50s they were opened up into a curved archway to make an upstairs kitchen and dining room, with a small broom closet at each end. After this, they were again turned back into one single long closet. I tore everything out and made this back into two closets and a built-in linen closet for the hallway. One closet is larger (the one for this large L shaped room), and the other one (only partially built) will serve the small back room in the north-east corner.



A few additional photos.

This shows the main doorway, the linen closet in the hallway, and the new closet for the "L" Room. The doorway to the right of the hallway built-in leads to the small north-east bedroom mentioned above.



Here is the newly refurbished and rewired (antique) light fixture, with antique glass shades. This fixture was bought in rough shape on eBay over a year ago, and the shades were purchased separately (also on eBay). The fixture (along with all the other ones in the house) was rewired using antique reproduction Rayon covered wire. The painted finish on the fixture also had to be redone from scratch.



Lit:



Note: for those who are curious, the wall paint is Behr's "Olivine" and the floor is "Florence Brown".

7 comments:

  1. I love what you did with your rooms. The lighting is beautiful in these pictures. I keep going back to your blog for inspiration. Keep it…

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  2. It looks outstanding! Love the light fixture and the corner stakes.

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    1. Thanks. The house has been messed with a lot over the years, and I actually wasn't a fan of the corner stakes at first. Since then they've grown on me. I had to make a special jig on my table saw to cut them, but I made a whole batch of them, since I still need a bunch on the main floor.

      I also adore the light fixtures. They are all different, but similar styles all from the same era (1910-1930). The entire house had just bare bulbs in plastic sockets when I bought it a few years ago.

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  3. Como siempre JC, perfecto, ya tienes 2 de 3 habitaciones en la planta superior finalizadas, buen trabajo. Tengo sin embargo que hacerte una pregunta; ¿si quitas la chimenea por donde vas a sacar los humos de la cocina?, pues no se por donde salen los humos/gases de tu cocina.
    Espero ver algo de trabajo del porche de entrada a tú casa también este año, saludos Valentín.

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  4. Very nice! It's amazing the effect of paint and properly installed trim can have on the overall look. I really like that light fixture. Nice job.

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    ReplyDelete