Hanging's Too Good For 'Em!

It was bound to happen eventually. Kathy stripped all the old wallpaper from the ground-floor dining room almost two years ago. Since that time, the walls have been bare. Last weekend, we finally got around to hanging the new wallpaper. 'Bout time.

Here you can see some before-and-after work. The new wallpaper is on the right, with the still-bare wall on the left. The funny-looking horizontal stripe above the door is where the picture rail used to go. We took those down before painting and papering. They'll go back up this week, after a little touch-up.

The little wooden panel halfway up the wall in the corner is the door to the dumbwaiter. If you open that up, you'll be looking into the dumbwaiter shaft and the back of the brick chimney. The shaft now has a modern heating duct in it, bringing blessed heat to the second floor.

The job took most of two days, which is about average for us. Hanging wallpaper isn't really all that hard, but if you've never done it, it's trickier than it looks. For one, you've got to match the pattern, so each sheet has to be aligned with its neighbor and then trimmed at the top and bottom. That wastes a lot of paper and doubles the amount of cutting you have to do.

Then you've got to work around obstacles, like doors and window frames. Again, simple in concept but tricky in practice. What do you do when one sheet of wallpaper comes really close to the door but doesn't quite reach? Cut a really thin strip? The walls are never flat and the corners aren't 90 degrees. Plus, with 10-foot ceilings, wet strips of wallpaper are long, heavy, and awkward. Keeping them straight and plumb when they keep trying to stick to the walls is another nuisance. Whine, whine, whine.

Now that we're done, though, we're quite happy with it. That should be the last of our wallpaper projects, too. No more after this. Time to start on outside chores.

Here's Lunch

This place just pays for itself, I swear.

Every few weeks we take a load of stuff to the dump. Sometimes it's broken-up concrete; sometimes it's plaster or drywall; sometimes it's metal pieces that we can recycle. This was a recycling trip.

As part of the old furnace removal-and-demolition project, we found ourselves with a big ol' pile of rusty furnace just waiting to be turned in for cash. After we heaved it into the back of the truck, we looked around for any loose pieces we might have accumulated over the weeks that also need to go out. This time, that included all the goodies you see here. We've got some galvanized water pipe... the manifold from the old furnace... some heavy cast-iron vent pipe... and this old drain pipe with the bell fitting on one end.

You can see how this pipe is all cracked and broken, held together by its own rust. We got about $24 for this load, which was enough to buy ourselves lunch. I even ordered the large fries with mine. Life is good.

Mommy... I Stained the Bathroom Floor!

We're about done with the ladies' room downstairs, so it was time to start on the gents'.

It's quite a bit smaller -- about the size of a generous phone booth -- but even more work. We're not sure what this room was originally, but it wasn't a bathroom. It appears to have been a "butler's pantry" or some sort of anteroom or pass-through between the dining room and the kitchen. For such a small room, it had two large doors in it, and not much else. At any rate, it's been the men's room for the last several decades.

The work started with the floor. When we stripped away the kitchen's old vinyl flooring and underlayment, we discovered an old oak floor in here, but nowhere else. Rather than tear it out, we saved it. I know, I know... wooden flooring in a public restroom seems like a terrible idea. And it probably is, but we're sticking with it anyway.

The oak was in bad shape, buried under layers of glue and nails. But we stripped off the adhesive residue, patched the holes, and sanded the bejeesus out of it until it was comparatively smooth. Then we rubbed in a coat of stain (left over from the 2010 floor project) and applied several layers of clear polyurethane. My hope is that the clear poly will waterproof the floor enough to keep it relatively sanitary.

The stain soaked in very unevenly, which I attribute to the aged and damaged condition of the wood, not my incompetence. We've agreed that it lends a charming, rustic look to the floor. Hey, it's a bathroom, not a ballroom, and I doubt many visitors to this space will comment on it.

We added a bead board wainscot around the walls, which Kathy painted gloss black. It looks really good, and pretty soon we'll add the floor molding and top molding, and probably a picture rail and some crown molding up high. The room is nearly twice as high as it is wide (10' x 6' x 3'), so we're trying to break up the vertical space to make it seem less like an upended shoebox.

Plumbing fixtures have arrived, and those go in once the floor has completely dried. Probably tomorrow.