Victorian Farmhouse - Part 13

Continuing on, with our farmhouse restoration adventure, we spent some time redoing the HVAC drywall corners. The one in the living room was completely redone (since we moved the pipe over), and the one in the office was just terrible. Badly cut 2x4s and painted plywood, hardly elegant or durable.

Unfortunately I was in a hurry to get sh*t done, so I have no photos of the actual wood framing, but it was similar to how I did mine (basically a ladder layout all screwed together and very solid). For the living room side, the bottom 3 feet had to have a relief notch cut to accept the space taken up by the tongue and groove paneling.

Before:





After:







Oh yeah, I also started installing the mouldings, too. The bottom part is still open, because I didn't patch the floor yet, and I'll need to screw it to the bottom brace of the framing, since I have nowhere else to anchor the floor.



The first few mouldings to go in were the tops of the arches, and the living room side of the arch. I had wanted to wait until the floors were sanded, but there are no baseboards to remove on this side, so the floor refinishers will need to sand up to the wood paneling anyways.

So these were NOT 45 degrees. I knew they wouldn't be 45 degrees. I installed them perfectly without any screw-ups, by using an old woodworking trick. Any time you need to install tricky angles, all you need to do is trace a line, and then mark the angle. To do this, you place your moulding where it needs to go, passing the intersecting point, and draw a pencil line. Do the same with the opposite moulding, then you will end up with 2 "x"s. If you need to, you can draw a line between these, but all you need to do is mark both ends, and cut whatever that angle is. This trick works really well for tight interior triangle corners, but also for any other tricky angles. The best part is that there's no math or angles involved. Just lay the pieces where they need to go, trace, and mark. I believe these were off by half a degree. That doesn't SOUND like much, but it would equal to a good sized gap.

AND FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, leave a reveal. DO NOT install mouldings flush with the edge of the door jamb. In old houses, the reveal can be almost 1/4", 3 /16", or more rarely 1/8", I would never use anything less than 1/8". The wider the better (and it makes your trim look larger).



Here's a quick graphic I made to explain the moulding trick.



One of the next things I worked on was to fix the bottom edges of the walls in the office and hallway (the only place in the house that uses the large 9 inch baseboards. Originally, they only plastered right up to the edge of the baseboards. The baseboards themselves were only held in place over a few small spacer blocks. These were not very accurate, and in many places the baseboards were now crooked, or partially buried behind the bottom edge of plaster. I really didn't like this, so for the "filler" blocks, I installed a pait of strips. The gap between the top strip and plaster can then be filled in for a nicer, stronger, and more durable job. Here's one section of it.



On this one wall, I was able to just install a piece of half inch drywall, but in the other spots, this wasn't going to work (much deeper gap).



I wanted to install more of the casings, so Pierre and I sanded the edges of the floor where the casings would land.



First layer of compound in the gap.





I started caulking the gaps, but there's LOTS AND LOTS left to do. This shows a before and after of one of the really awful gaps along a door casing in the hallway.





We bought a CASE of Dap. We're puttying and caulking everything. This is one of my favourite parts.



Before...



After...



More filler strips.



More caulking. Doesn't that already look so much better?



More mud to fill the gaps.



Back at my home workshop (which is still a mess, but getting better), I had offered to make the missing rosettes. There were only 6 missing, so it wasn't a big deal. I salvaged some nice thick old pine from the old door jamb of my front door. The original rosettes are 1 1/4" thick, with 7/8" thick casings. The new reproduction casings, however, are only 3/4" thick, so I made the rosettes 1/8" thinner to match.

This was the first one, and the other 5 blanks.



Unfortunately this one is blurry, but it shows one of the blanks mounted in the lathe, with 2 reference lines on it, the first rosette off to the side as a visual reference, and a cardboard template (pizza menu). The pattern was simply made from the line drawings I made a while back (image below).



They're #5.



The completed rosettes. There are slight variances since they were all eyeballed, but they're pretty near identical to the originals.



I also made new bullnose mouldings for the missing pieces of the tongue and groove paneling in the living room. Nothing fancy for these, I used an old 2x4 ripped in half, roundover bits, and the notch was cut on the table saw.







They'll look even better painted. I love this pattern, and how they catch the light. They weren't difficult to make, either. Less than 10 minutes a piece. I'm sure I had all 6 done within an hour.





The initial inspection for the electrical went fairly well, but there were a few things to change. With that out of the way, we put up the drywall in the hallway. We had to add a few shims to level the drywall near the staircase opening, but nothing too complicated.



All my pics of this are blurry, but it's just drywall. Nothing too interesting.



I started to reinstall the bullnose caps.



This is one of the pieces that were missing for some odd reason. Looks good though!



Fixing the floor, and getting this messy corner done will be next on my list.



With that, we're now all caught-up. I'm heading back to the farmhouse this Saturday.

Salvaged Front Door Project Part 7 (Finale) - Interior Casings

I had decided a few weeks ago that it was getting too cold outside, and that I had no money to buy the wood to finish the interior casings, so I was going to wait until spring.

This past week, however (especially Wed, Thu, and Fri), the weather was very mild. I decided that instead of buying a full sheet of MDF and having it specially cut + delivered (which is what I'll eventually need to do for the rest of the casings I need), I could simply make them from 6" pine tongue and groove (which sell locally for under 4$ for a 6 foot length).

I had the time off from work, so I took most of Thursday to build and install the trim. The old plinth blocks were reused, new side columns were made (using the t-g pine with the groove on the back), and I had to build the parting bead from scratch as usual. I actually used a variety of scrap wood (anything that was on hand). The parting bead is actually Fir, and the header block is a rather nice piece of Poplar that I had hoped to use for something nicer.







Now, the reason I needed mild weather, is because with the hinges installed (and the door hung) it's impossible to caulk the edges of the casing, or paint. There is a tiny gap between the casing and the hinge, but it's not enough to paint in between there properly. I don't like to do anything half-assed, so the easiest solution was to completely remove the door, and all the hardware.



With everything off, I had complete access to caulk and paint everything.



I had only partially installed the bronze weatherstripping, so I removed the strike plate and lock, and the weatherstripping was masked-off with painter's tape.



Since I was using pine, as well as a mix of other woods, I decided to seal everything with some of the leftover BIN shellac primer (while it's still good). I don't have much else to paint, so more than likely the rest of it will have to be tossed. All the caulking, and multiple coats of paint were done on Friday, and by Friday the weather was starting to dip again (I think it was around 10C?) so I installed a sheet of plastic on the exterior to try to keep the heat inside.



I ended up doing 2 coats of BIN, followed by 2 coats of white semi-gloss trim paint. The door was off from around 11am to 7:30pm. Here's a nighttime photo just after I had hung the door back in the opening. Not the best photo, but as you'll see later, the lighting situation makes this door difficult to photograph in any lighting situation (too bright during the day, and poorly lit with yellow light at night).



I decided to take a nice photo of one of the salvaged hinges. This particular one is the centre hinge, which was graciously donated by a blogger friend Tracy from Bennington Colonial! Without the hinge, this project might still be on hold! Thanks again Tracy!

I also wanted to show how I made the best of a tricky situation with these large hinges. These are the 4" hinges (most old doors tend to use just 3 1/2" hinges, and often only two of them). Since they are larger the screws that I had on hand did not fit. Most hinges are set up with #8 size screws (your average deck or wood screw), but these were drilled and counter-sunk for #10 screws, which are the next largest size. I originally really wanted slot head screws, but I decided that I would just use Robertson screws (square drive), and I was able to find some in bright shiny steel. Obviously steel with antique flashed copper would look terrible, so the screw heads were spray painted with a flat brown spray paint, and I think they match pretty well!

As a side note, the cheap modern screws off my old door were only about 5/8" long, and some of the antique ones I have (from other hinges) were around 1", but these babies are 1 1/2". This might be a bit overkill, but the door is VERY heavy (75 Lbs), and I wanted to make sure it wasn't going anywhere! 3 hinges with 8 screws means a total of 24 screws.



Here's the finished door, with the hardware and doorbell reinstalled.



The side casing was carefully cut to fit tightly around the lock strike.





View from the living room:





This door is much taller than all the other interior doors, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that the height lines up perfectly with the window casings (accurate to less than 1/4" difference).



View from the office:



The rest of the door casings photographed fairly poorly due to the strong light, and the fact that everything is currently white-on-white.





Finally the last thing to install to finish the door was the last strip of bronze weatherstripping, and you can read all about this in my previous post: Bronze Weatherstripping For Antique Doors.