Summertime Update

So I'm realllllly falling behind on posts. Things have just been really busy lately. I'm sort of back to work, but off again this week.

I picked up a complete DISASTER longcase clock to repair for a client (which will bring in some much needed cash). The clock is so badly damaged that it's almost as bad as if it had fallen face forward on concrete. It's now all fixed and ready to go. I'll be posting about it on the clock blog later. Here's one of the before photos:



So what else has been eating-up my time...

The farmhouse is still coming along nicely but slowly (I'm about 4 or 5 posts behind on it).

There was Canada Day on the 1st, and that same weekend was my friends' annual family & friends BBQ. Good food with good company.

I finished-up working on the shop hutch, but I'm not ready to post about it until I can dig-up all the photos of the build from the past... 4-5 years? I need to take better "finished" photos, and I want to recap the entire project within one post. Here's a teaser of the hutch:



I found some awesome antique light fixtures as a gift for my Dad's birthday, which was last week. One part was missing so I spent some time running around and assembling a makeshift replacement. These are "chain" light fixtures from the 30s or 40s. One of the socket bases that holds the shade was missing (new ones are 75$). Both shades, the one base, and all the chains were only 6.99$! Check out eBay and see how expensive these sell for normally. This was one heck of a great deal!



Dad was thrilled with them, and I had time to hang one of them for him right away. The second one needed a special adapter plate, so I couldn't install it yet.





I started a painting last night. I've been planning to start it for several months.



The painting is a cropped section of the painting "Selene and Endymion" by Ubaldo Gandolfi ca. 1770. I assume that the cherub is meant to portray cupid. In the full sized painting, Endymion can be seen below Selene, lying asleep in a cave. In Greek mythology Selene is the goddess of the moon, who fell in love with the mortal shepherd Endymion. There are several paintings and depictions of her, but I came across this photo a few years ago and really loved it. I have no particular interest in Greek mythology or moon goddess worship, I just liked the picture and I have several antique frames that need paintings in them, haha.

The painting will be 16" x 20" and painted in acrylics.

As soon as I have more time, I'll be posting several more farmhouse posts. I may condense some, and eliminate a lot of boring photos. You don't need to see drywall patching, or more electrical.

I also have a Westminster clock to finish repairing for another client (since Nov-Dec), a Victrola top to repair and refinish for a US client (from over a year ago), a client who needs me to order new gut lines (and install them) for an antique longcase clock, a possible cable replacement on another more modern longcase (I haven't seen this clock or even met the client yet), and I need to revisit (check) my friend's parents' longcase which stopped a while back. That same friend's father has an antique (scrap 1850s) piano that he's donating to me for parts.

So if all that wasn't enough to keep me busy, I thought I'd also include the facts that I have a queue of about 46 hours worth of audio podcasts to listen to, 64 TV show episodes to watch on top of my daily YouTube videos, and there are also 4 or 5 movies I want to watch, and I obviously haven't found the time to watch any of them.

Victorian Farmhouse - Days 8 & 9

This post covers some of the work done on days 8 and 9 (April 10th and April 15th). Before I start, however, a few words:

I actually haven't been to the farmhouse since the 18th (around 2 weeks ago). This is due to Angie and Pierre taking a weekend off, and then Pierre being sick this past week. We're hoping to head back to the farmhouse soon, since not much has been done in the interim. It's possible that the new roof is now done, which will be exciting to see (new black tin), and apparently Pierre has also sanded some of the freshly skim-coated walls, and the old textured walls in the hallway and staircase while I was working (at the upholstery shop).

In the meantime, I have a current backlog of around 60 photos which will be made into two or three additional posts covering days 10 to 12.

***

After another trip to the 'big orange box' to exchange some electrical boxes and pick up a few other supplies, work continued on the electrical. Pierre was really excited to see what the fixture would look like in the office, so he shortened the chain, and we hung it temporarily. The light hangs low, but there will be a desk under it. Otherwise, it looks pretty good! A quick side note: the ceilings at the farmhouse are around 100-102" which means they are about the same height as mine.



Pierre wasn't able to help me too much while I was just tacking wires (in the basement), so he tackled the 1970s paneling in the upstairs hallway/staircase. He called me up to show what he had discovered:



Apparently the other half of the triangular roof had been covered-over. We're not too sure why, but it was likely done simply to make it easier, as the far corner and ceiling are very far up and hard to reach. Pierre loves the more open look and feel, so we'll just be removing the framing, loose wallpaper, and installing new drywall over the ceiling.



Parts of the paneling went under the framing, so it's not very clear what order this was done in, or if/when it was modified.



There are at least 8 layers of wallpaper here (in the entire upstairs hallway all the way into the bathroom). It must have been really fun to do up into that corner.



The stairway wall has plaster up to the sloped roof (and ending at the window). You can see some other old wallpaper patterns here. This one is light blue and purple on an off-white background. The light grey with water stains (in the centre-right of the photo) is raw plaster, while the white in the lower right is a painted and textured drywall over the plaster (which we are painstakingly sanding down smooth).







Unrelated to anything going on in the house, I wanted some more photos of the loft area over the kitchen addition (in the barn). This photo shows the staircase opening, leading up 2 large steps into the area over the kitchen.



This spot has the one single window (over the kitchen door), and you can see that the arrow points to the farmhouse's roof which projects into this addition.



This section of the roof is fascinating for several reasons. One of the first things you'll notice is that the original roof had cedar shingles! This is probably not what I would have guessed. Cedar roofs are not that common in this area, and I would have thought it would be metal.



The second interesting thing is that the entire thing is completely unfinished. No paint, no stain, no varnish. It is just raw pine or cedar.



Another detail I noticed is that the loft area over the kitchen area has squared timber trusses while the other half of the barn (the portion not on the foundation) has round log trusses. This proves that while the roof has been stitched together into a continuous piece, the addition was two different buildings.



Back inside, work continued on the electrical in the office. To make things easier (and because the floors will be sanded, all the original baseboards were carefully removed. This exposed a lot of mouse nests and debris. The majority of the walls, crawl spaces, and attic are all full of similar traces of mice. The house has been far from weather tight for a long time, so this isn't too surprising. We vacuumed and cleaned everything as we went. There are unfortunately a lot of places we'll simply never be able to get into.

Something interesting is that the plasterers were quite lazy with the interior walls. No laths were installed behind the baseboards, so the plaster only goes as far as the very edge of the baseboards. There are simply small spacer blocks behind the baseboard to make up the difference where there's no plaster.



This one spot in the office floor was by far the worst area in the entire main floor. There is currently a very large stone under this board which seems to be causing the problem. It's possible that the exterior wall has sunk, which has curved the boards over the edge of the stone foundation.



This gives a bit of an idea of how bad this hump in the floor really is. At the very least, the problem stone will need to come out.



As I was cleaning, I randomly decided to start chipping out and loosening the old chunks of filler that had been added into the floor gaps. I'm 99% sure that what they used here was window glazing. I could smell the old traces of the linseed oil as chunks were removed. Pierre joined in, and in maybe an hour or two, it was all out.





With all the old filler removed, we got a better look at the actual condition of this floor. Blue arrow is the bad hump.



Now, I don't MIND some floor gaps, but some of these were RIDICULOUS. This one here is about 1/2" wide. The gaps in a lot of places were so wide that you could see straight down into the basement, and many of the tongues no longer fitted into their corresponding grooves. This made for a very flexy and bouncy floor. Especially given the fact that the log beams are on 3 foot centres (1m).





We like the original floor, and the plan was to sand it and refinish it, but in this condition it seems like a bad idea. Our new plan is to rip-up the floor (carefully) and re-lay it to tighten-up the gaps as much as possible.



Here's one of the spots where you can see through. The arrow shows the basement window peeking through the floor boards.



Later in the day, Pierre had finished removing all the framing and plywood. This is looking up the staircase. You can see where the plaster wall finishes part of the way in the window, with the rest of the wall being the barn boards (originally covered with wallpaper.



Back to electrical, this was some of the completed work in the office and front hall:





The two plugs on these two exterior walls were run behind the baseboard due to the stone foundation (near-impossible to pass the wires).



This is the new circuit for the front hallway light (2-way). The first switch is the new circuit (front hall), the middle is the porch light, and the third is the staircase (upstairs) light.



This is the other 2-way switch for the front hall, as well as a new outlet for the hallway.



So far, I think this will be one of the only holes we'll need to do in the wall to pass wires (because we had to drill through the top plate in the wall). This will be patched and blended-in. The blue arrow points to one of the original casings removed so that Angie could bring it to get a match from a moulding company.



More soon!

Victorian Farmhouse - Days 5 & 6

With the following post, I'm now all caught-up with what's happened so far at the Farmhouse. For those who are curious about the "proper timeline" I'll just post that here (mostly for my own documentation):
Day 1 - March 20th
Day 2 - March 26th
Day 3 - March 27th
Day 4 - March 28th
Day 5 - April 1st
Day 6 - April 3rd

I think I'm headed to the house again this Saturday, but I haven't confirmed this yet.

***

On day 5, we really didn't get much accomplished. We went shopping for some electrical supplies, and did a bit of planning, but no actual physical work on the house. I think we actually only got to the house around 4pm. On the 6th day, we demolished the ceiling in the front hall (where the staircase is), and we started working on some of the electrical. Angie & Pierre also picked up a plain white vanity top for the bathroom, and a toilet.

For the most part, we're still waiting for the electrician to show up, as well as seek advice for a few plumbing issues (mostly to do with the kitchen, I believe).

As usual, before I continue, some more mixed photos.

I'm pretty obsessed with old houses, so I'm constantly documenting as many of the little details as I can. Original hardware, construction details, and millwork are the things I really focus on. Since I'm used to working in fine cabinetry, I have just about every woodworking hand tool you can imagine, and this includes one called a profile gauge. You might have seen one of these at some point before, and not really known what it was used for. It's nothing more than a series of wires held in a tightly tensioned frame. The wires are pushed against a shape, and this gives you both a positive and a negative on each side:



Using the tool, I took tracings of all the historic mouldings in the farmhouse (with the exception of the plain rectangular ones upstairs).



Here's the list:
1. Secondary original casings
2. Primary original casings
3. Later casings on the living room archway
4. Later casings on the Kitchen addition doorway (as well as around the basement door in the kitchen)
5. Original rosettes
6. Later (non matching) rosettes on living room archway (on the office side)
7. Trim detail on staircase wall
8. Original baseboards on main floor

I think the only other thing that would be fun to have is a tracing of one of the staircase fretwork brackets. They're a fairly standard pattern, but it would be fun to have a life size copy.

Here's the "thumb latch" side of the "under stairs closet" door. Not the best picture I'm afraid (due to the lighting). There's one more of these on another door, but I think it's a bit different. I'll have to have another look. I don't remember which door it was.



Angelina posing with our hoard of crown mouldings for 40$!





As mentioned earlier, all the cement that had been slapped around the exterior of the stone foundation is being chipped off by our historic mason, and it's all getting repointed with lime mortar. It will also look a lot nicer with the stonework showing. This is the area where the small deck was.



The foundation in the basement (when I first saw it) looked a lot like what you see here. You could see that the stones all looked fine, and that the wall was straight, but almost all the mortar was gone.





The trees by the front porch are GONE! I was very happy to see these go. We still need to remove the rest of the dead vines. One of the vines actually grew THROUGH the small section of decking.



Here's another corner of the foundation.



Right, so back to the front hall ceiling. I originally really wanted to save all the original plaster work in the house since it was in pretty good shape, and there's not all that much of it (2 1/2 rooms). The decision to remove this ceiling was not a rash one, but rather a practical one. First, the adhesive was taking an eternity to scrape off. Even if we did scrape off all the glue, the ceiling still had a popcorn texture to sand down, and then re-skim coat and sand. Second, there was a large and poorly patched hole from an old heating grate or stovepipe in the centre (not easy to see). The third issue with this ceiling was the nail in the coffin; we had to run electrical through here, and there isn't easy access from anywhere else. Not just one or two wires, but several wires and boxes. Clearing out this small ceiling means that we can easily pass electrical into the office w/o damaging anything in there (original plaster walls and ceiling).



Pierre and I demolished this ceiling in about 30 minutes, but it took something like 2 hours just to clean up all of the aftermath. In the process we also managed to completely clog the furnace filter. Pierre loves to yank out nails and screws from boards, so I had him save all the lovely old square nails from the lath boards. I can use the nails for repairing clocks or antiques.



With this ceiling open, we now have easy access to run electrical into the office, as well as to a new light fixture and 2-way switch which will hang in this hallway. You will notice a gap in the strapping (which is 1 1/2" thick solid white ash, btw) and that's where a round vent or a stovepipe went through the floor. This corresponds with the patch in the master bedroom floor above.



This is a fixture that may end up going in this hallway. We don't like the newer (and very frilly) shades, but the fixture itself could look quite nice here. We will likely shorten the chains a bit). This is one of 2 fixtures that Angie & Pierre picked up at an auction for 15$. The house never had electrical originally, or even hanging oil lamp fixtures, so it's hard to say what would look best in here. Once the electrical is installed, the fixture can easily be changed later (and as often as we like). It would be fun to find some fairly "period correct" lighting (since there will only be 2 hanging light fixtures on the main floor, and one in the staircase that are very visible in the oldest parts of the house, but for now, money is being allocated to more important projects, so lighting can always wait a few years. This fixture is from around 1910-1920 and cost them nearly nothing.



Unfortunately we didn't get very far with the electrical. I had forgotten that we need 2 lengths of 3-14 wire for the 2-way switches, and we also bought the wrong type of hexagonal light fixture boxes (we got the kind made for conduit cables rather than standard Romex wiring).

I did, however, get several boxes ready.





I had to make a small(ish) hole in the hallway wall to drill through the top plate to pass the wires. I was also not sure if there were horizontal braces in the wall (so far just the standard "fire wall" at 48"). Because old plaster walls have so many lumps and inconsistencies, the stud finder tends to be very unreliable.



Pierre stayed busy by installing plaster buttons where they were needed (near casings and electrical boxes, as well as on each side of any cracks). He also helped me pass wires in the walls and ceilings, and took out around 1000 nails from the old lath.





I didn't love the idea of cutting an outlet box into the original tongue-and-groove wainscoting of the living room, but I also can't stand not having enough outlets in a house. Code also requires a certain number per room, and per wall. Luckily I can cut nice clean holes with my multi-tool. I can't imagine how much of a pain it would have been without it.



That's it for now. Hopefully the next time we're at the house I'll be able to get a lot more of my wiring passed. The electrician still can't tie most of it into the panel until we know if it's being relocated, but there are lots of connections and boxes we can install in the meantime.