Victorian Farmhouse - Days 10 & 11

This post covers days 10 and 11, which was April 16th and 17th.

A few major projects were started on these days, and some exciting things are starting to happen around the house. These include ripping-up the office floor (in order to re-lay it) and skim coating the raw plaster walls.

Upon our arrival, something that caught my eye were a whole bunch of randomly dispersed crocus across the front lawn. They were so pretty that I had to snap a few photos.



I've only ever seen purple crocuses so I didn't know they came in yellow. Apparently there are also white ones.







Since I was already across the lawn, and I knew that the roof would be replaced, I took some photos of the house from a distance. Angie really REALLY hates having the propane tanks visible, so they are going to be relocated to the other side of the house, and closer to the road (apparently they can be placed pretty much anywhere, even 100 feet from the house).



Note all the trees crowded near the barn (these are now cut down). None of the healthy trees in "good" spots were cut, but there were many trees growing right up against the buildings (house, attached barn, and barn).



This is around the other side of the house, facing towards the separate barn (not visible). All the stuff on the right are piles of branches from the removed trees.





This was a large (and nice) tree that came down recently in a storm, so the rest of it was cut down.



Looking back towards the road. Angie's father in the foreground, and the tree cutters in the back at their truck.



Some of the trees around the detached barn.



The barn door. I may make this into a watercolour.



On the inside, the decisions were made to replace all the non-matching mouldings in the old part of the house, so since we were also going to rip-up the floor, we decided to take off the casings from the archway into the living room. I found some really beautiful antique wallpaper under them. This is VERY old hand-printed (wood block printed) wallpaper. This would have been done with multiple patterns for each different colour, and printed by hand. The metallic paint was gold on the lower paper, and copper on the top border paper. I took quite a few photos of the wallpaper.









Here you can see that there is a second paper with a different print at the top. This might have been a large 2 foot high ceiling border paper, or just a contrasting band roughly at the height of the casings. Only part of it is left, so it's impossible to sell.





You can kind of make out the copper vs gold effect here (not much of the gold is visible).





Some of the floor boards around this vent in the living room were very damaged (insect-eaten and partially rotted). This whole area will need to be patched.



The original floor in this room is ONE AND A QUARTER INCH thick solid hardwood (I believe it's maple). This is a full half inch thicker than the "good" hardwood floors on the market today. This floor could literally be sanded down and refinished about a dozen times and still be good. It's just slightly thinner than "2x4" material if that helps you visualize it better.



So now this floor. This floor is more of a rough barn wood floor, HOWEVER, it's still gorgeous antique wood, and we wanted to see if we could save it. As discussed earlier, some of the gaps were crazy (like half an inch), so the plan was to pull it up carefully and then reinstall it. The wall luckily passes over a pair of boards with an acceptable 1/8" or less gap. Everything beyond this would need to come up.



Last "before" shots...



All the boards were carefully numbered so we could lay it all back exactly the same (in case of any buckles, floor thickness variations, and to maintain the patterns for vents and openings).



Pulling up these boards was a lot harder than expected. We tried getting into the spots with the largest gaps, but in the end, we had to be a little bit more rough than I'd have liked in order to pry out the first board. Once we had one out, it was SLIGHTLY easier after that.







The edge of the foundation and beams were in slightly rough shape.



The few photos I took of the process represent HOURS of work. Even though the floor is only nailed across 5 beams, those damned square nails (which I love, BTW) grip VERY tightly. In addition to this, we also had a very hard time due to huge 4" framing nails that had been driven down through the top of the boards along the right hand beam and randomly in a few other places.



During a break... Trees around the barn are finally gone.



I discovered this problem spot, and a likely area where mice are getting into the house. This is a whole section of the outer beam (about a 7" square beam) that has rotted due to a leak in the base of the window frame of the front window. Years of water has rotted the wood.



Some areas were a complete nightmare, like this spot with THREE large square nails.



The north-facing wall. Note that the outer beam has drifted down slightly and away from the other beams. It's all perfectly solid, but it's a shame the foundation hadn't been maintained better. This could have been avoided.



Finally all done.





This will need to be patched and filled-in.





With the floor gone (read: set aside) we can now see the problem spots (like that one rock on the upper right, which was causing a HUGE bump), and we can start installing the additional floor joists.



Another thing to do will be to square-up this transition.



Braces installed. These were just across two of the spans. One across the third span would have been nice, but there were too many heating ducts in the way.





All the short cross beams had to be shaped to contour the beams. Cardboard templates were cut out very quickly with scissors to get the patterns. The one in the upper left also had to be notched for duct work.





This is the sample of the new (nearly identical) mouldings to replace the missing ones. The excess width will be trimmed, so the outer edge won't be 100% match. Luckily this trim is an existing one in the company's collection of knives, so it will only cost around 2$/foot plus a small setup fee. If not, it would have been several hundred dollars extra for a custom set of knives to be made.



More trees around the barn gone. You can see the chicken coop in this shot.



Next day. We were SO SORE from tearing out the floor that we decided to do a few easy jobs. I decided to start the skim coat on the walls. This might seem like it will be time consuming, messy, difficult, and not worth it (just rip everything out and install drywall), but it was surprisingly quick and easy. We had tackled all the deep holes and gouges (all the patch areas visible in prior photos), and this just went on with a big 12" trowel. I did the entire room (with a bit of help) in about 2 hours?





It does take a certain amount of practice to get the hang of it, but once you do it's quick, easy, and quite relaxing.



Since it's a pretty thin coat, it starts to dry pretty fast.



The room already looks so much more amazing with this simple change.





Another quick job I did was to install the new door jamb in the office/front hall.





The last shot shows a dry area after a very quick sanding to knock off the bumps and high spots. It looks SO GOOD! Pierre and Angie were very impressed with the results. So much easier (and cheaper) than ripping everything down and installing new drywall.



It's very late, so I haven't proof-read this, so hopefully there aren't too many mistakes.

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!