Present Joys

I haven’t posted about my stairs for a while here. It’s not because nothing is happening; it’s just that the progress I’m making is not terribly impressive. I’m waiting on the next phase of this project, where the spindles and remaining newel posts will be installed, and I can finally finish the platform floor. That will all happen in October, once the spindles are done and the built-in bookshelves in the foyer are in place.

In the mean time, I’ve spent a lot of time staining all the pieces (most of them in place, plus the stray newel posts and pieces of baseboard that aren’t in yet) to simultaneously match each other, to match the q/s white oak mantelpiece that will be installed nearby, and to match the stained fir trim that is present in the rest of the foyer. Basically, I’m trying to bring out the best qualities of the new quarter-sawn white oak pieces while making them feel old, to harmonize everything going on in the room. It’s been an infuriating process, in part due to the sheer amount of material that needs finished.

Everything needs to match—except the treads, that is: those need a different finishing schedule since they need to match the rest of my floor. Although the century-old white oak floor boards were recently refinished with a clear oil-based polyurethane, the old boards are so oxidized that new boards need a lot of toning to match. In the end, the colors aren’t that different from each other, but the difference is important, I think. It makes this whole thing look like it’s been here forever.

I also recently added panel molding underneath each stair tread. It’s such a small detail but it really goes a long way to making the whole project feel more ornamented.

We’re getting ready to leave for about two weeks of vacation, and we have a lot of progress to look forward to soon after we return!

Previously.

Just in time to go on vacation, we got the rest of our fence painted with linseed oil.

The first 5-gallon pail of linseed oil I bought was slightly fancy and slightly expensive, but it only got me about a third of the way. Once I confirmed how much more I’d need to finish the job, I opted to get 10 more gallons of commodity stuff in 5-gallon pails from Menard’s. The difference is very notable: the cheap stuff is darker, thicker in texture, and doesn’t smell nearly as nice. But it answers well for this application.

We probably applied the oil too thick. It’s very difficult to maintain a light coat when the wood is both so rough and porous. Thankfully, I’m not in any hurry to get to painting it, so I can leave this all sit for weeks or months and let all the oil cure.

Our first-floor bathroom is an absolute wreck. To make a long story short: in the 1880s, there was no bathroom at all on this floor of the house. I can only assume this area was either part of the back parlor or some sort of butler’s pantry (hard to tell without doing more archaeology). It was converted to a roughly 13′ × 6′ bathroom when Bonebrake became a duplex in circa 1920, complete with unglazed hex tile floor. In the 1980s, when Bonebrake turned back into a single-family home, the original passageway–bathroom footprint was modified to turn the passageway into a wet bar and the bathroom into a tiny windowless closet. One giveaway was the unglazed hex tile floor, awkwardly present under half of the wet bar. In these photos our home inspector took, I’m helpfully reminded that the sink here was completely loose:

Above are photos of the bathroom before we did anything, but depending on how you look at it, the room has gotten worse. It’s possibly the ugliest room of the house. We opted to undo the 1980s remodel and move the wall back to its 1920 position, which meant we ended up with a new wall and door opening to finish out. We demolished some of the tile, 1980s vinyl flooring, and a few other fixtures when we first moved in—because the dumpster was handy—which has left it in a particularly ugly state of partial completion. To make matters worse, the ridiculous black toilet gave up the ghost after several months, so I swapped it out for a Ming green toilet I had waiting in the wings. Now we have a green toilet next to a black pedestal sink that isn’t attached very well, so it wobbles. The century-old hex tile floor is missing in places. To top it off, this room has had some form of a temporary door for the last year and a half. After the new doorway was framed in, I repurposed an old unsalvageable door jamb, cutting hacky new mortises into it and hanging the shabby circa 1920s door I planned to eventually refurbish. A few months ago, I removed this temporary doorway so I could repair and repaint the door, so we’ve had a makeshift curtain covering the opening since then. It’s been really classy. I don’t have any immediate plans to complete the bathroom restoration, but I do want to get the doorway completely finished so I can get the outside trim installed. Plus, it’s nice to have a door on your bathroom.

I decided to treat the small passageway outside the bathroom with the same paint colors as the dining room, since they are adjacent, and I ordered casings and baseboards to trim it out accordingly when I got everything for the dining room (more on that some other time, I guess?). But I couldn’t get the casings on this bathroom door until the jamb was installed. And I couldn’t get the jamb in until I got the door hinges planned out. And the chrome hinges I wanted to use had been backordered for four months.

I finally got the hinges a few weeks ago, so I got to work getting the jamb (made from new material I had produced) assembled and installed, and getting the old door ready to hang. As part of the changed wall configuration, I had to change the door’s handedness, which entailed putting a new bevel on the latch side. The door’s hinge-side stile was over 1/2″ wider at the top than the bottom, so I simply ripped down the whole door on the table saw and added a piece of new material to make it a consistent width. (I don’t remember how well it worked in its previous incarnation, but it can’t have been great.) New mortises in the new material on the door, new mortises in the new door jamb, and we’re back in business. I do not recommend hanging a door this old and messed up from scratch, because it took far longer than any reasonable person should spend on such a project. I still need to take the hinges off to finish painting, but otherwise, I think it looks pretty good:

Next time I will talk about the rest of the hardware I am using in this opening, because there are a few cool things to call out.

Crews were out pretty quick to replace downed and broken streetlight poles in our neighborhood. We are not looking forward to when the hideous new LED lamps are energized. These linemen were some of the friendliest and coolest tradespeople I’ve ever encountered. And there were a lot of them.

We lost an old silver maple planted in our tree lawn in yesterday’s terrible storm. They say the winds were over 80 mph. Mercifully, there was very little damage to our vehicles the rest of our property. Many trees in the neighborhood were utterly destroyed, as well as several east-facing chimneys.

Our provided very pleasant screening from the street light which was right next to it. To add insult to injury, the street light itself was damaged and will certainly be replaced by a peacefulness-destroying LED lamp.