House Tour

After last weekend's open house, I thought it might be fun to do a house tour here on the blog as well.  These are candid shots, taken just after church on Sunday.  My apologies in advance for the glare in some of these.  The sunny weather was perfect for the open house, but not so perfect for taking indoor pictures.

First up - the kitchen.

Pictured below is the north end of the kitchen, where we had to lower the cathedral ceiling.  That warbrobe pictured in the last post is going to go in the corner of this room to corral the toys currently overwhelming those MDF shelves that I abhor. 

And the 'kitchen-y' end of the kitchen: 

Most people disagree with my plans to paint these cupboards.  But so far that hasn't convinced me to give up my plans - namely, adding crown molding, painting all cupboards (except the island) off white, and replacing the door hardware, counters (again except the island) and sink.

Moving on to the dining room:

That cupboard in the corner of the room was a jelly cupboard from my grandparents' basement.  In 1997 I stripped the old paint off as a 4-H project.  Last month I sanded down glossy poly finish and put it back under paint.  I love the punch of color it adds to the room.

Next up - the office:

The white chest of drawers between the bookcases was left by the previous owners.  Eventually I want to clean it up, repaint it and change the hardware. 

Yes, we have two computer monitors.  (Charles only consents to living in an old house so long as I consent to allowing his modern toys in said old house.) 

The stacked cabinet on the right side of the above picture is easily the most commented on piece of furniture in our house.  It's also the first piece of furniture I ever bought.  I was 15 years old when I stumbled across it at an antique store in Marietta, Ohio. My parents and I were killing time before I could sign in for the week long archeology camp I was registered for at Marietta College. A "lawyer’s cabinet" was what the shop owner called it, but the price tag hanging from one of the drawers ($750) was too steep for my parents.  We left to check out other shops, but I was too smitten by the lawyer's cabinet to let it go that easily.  Just as we headed back to the van so I could check in at the archealogy camp the solution occurred to me.  I could buy the cabinet.  Myself.  With my own money.  (At 15 this was a novel idea.)

But by the time this solution occurred to me there was not enough time left for me to return to the antique store.  So once I was settled in at Marietta College for the week my parents returned to the shop.  My dad had promised to do his best for me bargaining with the shop owner.  If he could get the price down to six hundred dollars they would buy the cabinet for me.  Cell phones were still a novelty in 1995, so it was a few days before I was able to call home.  Of course, the first thing I asked about was the lawyer's cabinet.  My mom was apologetic, but she told me the shop's owner would not budge at all on his price.  When they picked me up at the end of the week, she promised, I could go back to the shop and try bargaining with him myself.

So I spent the week playing in the dirt and traipsing around Indian mounds.  And at the end of the week my mom made the drive back down to Marietta to pick me up.  When I got in the van I noticed the signature cardboard envelope of a 24 hour photo development place sitting - perhaps too conspicuously - on the console between the front seats.  As mom had to know I would, I immediately opened the envelope and began flipping through the pictures inside.  Somehow she coaxed me out of the van as I looked through the stack of pictures.  She had her camera ready at her side.  And as soon as I got to the picture of the lawyer's cabinet that they told me they hadn't bought sitting in our living room, right between the computer and rocking chair, mom took this picture:

The receipt for the lawyer's cabinet is still tucked in the back of one of the index card drawers. 

Dad had talked the shop owner down to $575.

 

But, jumping back to the present, we're up to the Einsel living room:

(Sorry about the glare in those.) 

And yes, I realize that a clock needs to go on that shelf instead of a picture - an ogee clock to be precise - but I'll talk about that more in another post.

Heading on upstairs:

This circa 1860's child's bed was a perfect fit for the little nook at the top of the stairs.  It originally belonged to my great great grandmother's sister, who left it one of my grandmother's cousins, who left it to me.  The quilt on it is an heirloom from Charles' side of the family.  His paternal grandmother began the quilt in 1953, when she was expecting her fourth child.  Sadly, the pregnancy ended in toxemia (eclampsia).  Baby Joseph Allen lived only one day.  His mother held on for 13 days.  Later, Charles' great grandmother finished the quilt that her daughter-in-law had begun. 

Here's the view of the stairway from inside the back bedroom:

And Cecilia's view from her bed:

Neil's view is through the windows pictured here:

 

And Charles and my room last:

The place has come a long way in just one year.  Still, it feels a bit sparse.  I'm constantly plotting what to hang on the walls and what other pieces of furniture would be a good fit.  Based on my experience with our last house, I expect the finishing details will take me years.  I'd rather live with a blank wall indefinately, waiting for something that feels perfect, than to put up a picture that feels mehhhh just because I have it on hand. 

That's the tour - although it's much better in person.  : )

Bat Exclusion, et al.

Thursday night I took the last formal count for our bat exclusion.  The results:

Bats leaving the attics - 0
Bats leaving the south chimney - 0
Bats leaving the bat boxes - 62

I think we've accomplished our goal and can remove the one-way door and close that last access hole to the attic.  But (as the comments to my last post so clearly show!) there's one last step we must take before we can consider our bat issue completely resolved.  Namely, we have to clean up the mess in the attic.  There's bad news and good (or at least less bad) news here.

The bad news is obvious.  Our attic has to be full of guano.  And because handling guano can cause serious illness in humans, cleaning our attic is not a job we want to or should attmept to do ourselves.  I've called a few places who handle this type of cleanup to get quotes and it appears this will be a very expensive job.

Kathy left a comment after my last post asking, "Do you have access to the attic from inside the house?".  The answer to this question is no.  In fact, we don't have access to the attic period.  There are no windows to the attic, no vents, and no opening through a bedroom ceiling beneath.  This is both bad news and good news when it comes to cleaning up our bat mess. Bad news because it means accessing the mess to clean it up will require some type of structural change to the house.  However, it is also good news because this complete lack of access means that the bat mess is currently entirely contained within the attic.  I'll freely admit to looking at our bedroom ceilings and wondering what lies above, but from inside the house there is absolutely no evidence of our former attic residents.  The ceilings are not discolored or sagging.  The only time we found bat droppings inside the house was while working on the exposed stone wall at the top of the stairs (this was also the only time a bat entered the house from the attic).  The top edge of the exposed wall has since been finished, and just to be sure, before we began our exlcusion I ran a bead of clear caulk along the seam where the exposed wall meets the ceiling.

For now, we plan to simply plug the last exterior access to the attic and let whatever is up there stay up there.  Quotes for having the guano removed are quite high, so this is a project we will need to plan ahead for.  We will keep a close eye on our bedroom ceilings for any sign of strain or staining.  And we will keep our eyes open for "bat bugs", who often enter homes after a bat exclusion in search of a new food source.  The thought of these bugs getting into our house is quite disturbing, but I'm hoping that the lack of access to the bedrooms from the attic will keep these tiny blood suckers up in their current home.  The isolation of our attic from the rest of the house is complete - no ductwork enters the attic, nor are there any electric lines or ceiling light fixtures in any of the bedroom bedrooms to provide access.  But we will definately be watching for any signs of infestation.

Ugh.  After typing all that out I'm feeling rather squicky.  So let's move on to some cleaner topics.  So - I mentioned a few posts ago finishing up the back bedroom.  Here's the semi-finished room:

Cecilia is quite happy with it, and the dresser from the Leaning House is a perfect fit:

With Celia moved into her new room I've been able to focus on the hallway, getting the wood floor painted and the handrail and other woodwork finished:

The color and tight grain of the old walnut wood in this house really is amazing.  : )

When You Got It, Flaunt It

As alluded to a few post ago, I've left a certain project unmentioned here on the blog. Until today. Let's start with a picture showing what the stairway looked like last November:

And

(drumroll please............)

What the stairway looks like now:

Isn't that simply delicious!?

As this blog chronicled, last fall we (temporarily) uncovered several interior stone walls here at the Einsel House. As time passed, we became increasingly determined to find an interior stone wall somewhere in the house that we could leave permanently exposed. I mean, the stone construction is one of this home's most unique features, so why not embrace it? The difficulty was in choosing which wall to expose. It was my mom who first suggested the wall at the top of the stairs. And from the moment we decided that the top of the stairs would be it, mom was champing at the bit to bust into the cracked plaster. When she finally began attacking the old plaster (in early February of this year) she practically giddy with excitement.

Frankly, I'm not sure which made her more happy - the stones she was uncovering in front of her, or the fact that she found something other than sanding woodwork to do that day. (This was early February, remember.)

Here's the wall at the end of that first day:

And later, looking up the stairs, sans plaster:

And from mid-February to mid-May, that's basically what our stone wall looked like. It looked great even in that rough state, but there were a few issues that the slightly fuzzy picture above doesn't show. First, at the very top of the stone wall are some pieces of fuzzy yellow insulation.

They are there because where the stone stopped at the top of the wall, it revealed about an inch of unfinished lumber with small gap of varying width between it and the plastered ceiling over the upstairs hall. Bat droppings came out of this gap as the plaster came down. So we stuffed in pieces of left over insulation (both to keep the house's heat from escaping into the attic, and to keep the attic's bats from escaping into the house.) That worked until earlier this month, when my uncle went upstairs and found one of our attic friends hanging from a stone near the top of our exposed wall. With that, finishing the stone wall moved up rapidly on our "to-do" list.

We called in our mason who has done such wonderful work on the exterior of the home and springhouse. (Who I realized just last week is "Jason the Mason". At which point my mom interjected to say, "That's probably why he goes by Jay.") But when we asked him if he could finish and point our interior wall, for the first time ever our mason hesitated. Of course he could do it, but he felt the wall was beautiful in its unfinished state and his heart clearly almost broke at the thought of altering it in any way. I could see his point. But I could also see bats squeezing into my house from the attic, and giant spiders making homes out of the many dark cracks and crevices left in the unpointed wall. Thankfully, our mason's enthusiasm rebounded somewhat once he actually began the project. And we are thrilled with the result. Particularly impressive is the work along the edges of the stone wall, where it meets the doors to the north and south bedrooms. When the plaster came down there were gaps between these door frames and the stone wall. These gaps were filled by our mason with small pieces of stone and pointed just like the rest of the exposed wall. You can see the finished result below:

Standing at the bottom of the stairs now is almost surreal. To my right is the new door with transom and sidelights, straight ahead is the living room with windows trimmed out in floor-to-ceiling walnut, and to my left the refinished stairs topped with the exposed stone wall.

There are times when it's hard for me to believe that this is actually my house. : )

Finish the Job

Often during the long weeks spent sanding, I would day dream about what all that woodwork would look like when it was finally refinished. Long before we were ready for any finish work I began researching the options.

I freely admit that I'm no expert at finishing. My pre-Einsel experience consists of refinishing an oak dresser in high school and later building a cherry night stand in college. Neither of those jobs comes anywhere close to the scope the finishing job currently ahead of us. There was only one thing I knew from the start - that I didn't want anything too glossy.

Somewhere in my research I learned about tung oil, and I liked what I read. A warm hand-rubbed matte finish that does better than surface finishes at hiding scratches and dings, and that can be refreshed by simply applying another coat of oil (no sanding required). The downsides I read of included a more involved application process with a long drying time between coats. Still, I was intrigued enough to order an 8 oz. bottle from the Real Milk Paint Company. I applied a few coats to the back of a small scrap of walnut trim and liked what I saw. In December I went ahead and ordered 3 gallons of the 100% Pure Tung Oil.

And all through the long winter we sanded woodwork. As we went, my mom took the time to remove long pieces of trim from each window so we could do a better job sanding them clean. Sometime in February I did a trial run using tung oil on one of these trim pieces from a bedroom. And I thought it looked rather dark. Charles' response when he saw it was, "Didn't we just spend two months working so that the wood wouldn't be that color?" Although I didn't want to admit it, I agreed with him.

The Einsel House has walnut woodwork throughout, but there are various shades of walnut in the different rooms. The lightest wood was clearly saved for the living room (where the trim for my initial tung oil trial was taken from). The darkest wood was used in the bedrooms upstairs. While a tung oil finish would look lovely in the living room, we decided it was simply too dark for the trim in most of the rest of the house.


So I went back to the internet and began researching other options. And when it comes to finishing wood there are a lot of options. I admit it was rather overwhelming.

Shellac was the first option I considered. It would be historically accurate and there seems to be an almost uniform agreement on all the woodworking forums that I visited that shellac does a beautiful job of bringing out the depth and color of walnut. Somewhere I read a post in which walnut and shellac were declared "a match made in heaven". And like tung oil, damange to a shellac finish is apparently easy to repair. However, shellac is naturally glossy, and getting the matte finish I prefer would require the added steps of buffing and waxing the final layer of shellac. I also came across frequent warnings that shellac does not hold up as well as other finishes. It's natural nemisis is denatured alcohol, and it is prone to white marks when exposed to water. Given that we have two young children, and given that we have windowsills over a foot deep (which I know will be tempting to use to place drinks or plants on), I want a finish that isn't known for being easier than others to mar.

One day at work as I was contemplating the tung oil v. shellac v. something else debate, I noticed that the woodwork in the office had a nice flat finish on it. The building that houses the law firm I work for was built in the early 1900's by the local Eagles club and restored in the early 1990's. The next time the owner stopped by I asked what finish he and his dad used on the woodwork. "Satin urethane," he replied with hardly a pause, "two coats, and steel wool it between them." But at the local hardware store I could not find anything labeled "satin urethane". (Admittedly, having a preschooler and kindergardner with just-out-of-school rambunctiousness in the aisle with me didn't help.)

A couple days later my mom brought to the EH a few cans of various finish options from the shop where she works. One was Minwax Helmsman Spar Urethane Clear Satin. It took me a minute to realize that this was perhaps the "satin urethane" I had been unsuccessfully looking for. From what I could find with Google's help, this spar urethane would be a very durable finish. It can hold up to water, doesn't discolor with sunlight, and was even designed for use on wooden boats. So I tried the urethane on our test piece of walnut. It was much lighter than the tung oil and the satin finish was still flat enough to please me, but something was lacking. Next to the tung oil, the urethane just looked sort of dull. It covered the wood with a nice flat finish that didn't darken, but it didn't do anything to highlight the color or grain of the walnut. It was okay, but it just didn't have any "pop".

We kept experimenting, using various stains under the urethane, but nothing really stood out. Eventually we had five boards we had various test finishes on. As usual, I don't have any great pictures, but the one at left will give you some idea.

Then I found this article. Way down in the last paragraph was the part that particularly caught my attention. It mentioned that Zinsser Sealcoat (which is a dewaxed shellac) can be used under a satin topcoat. A little more time with Google and I found several other references to using Sealcoat under another finish. Every reference I found spoke quite highly of this finishing process.

So I went back to my trim pieces of walnut and this time I applied a coat of Zinsser Sealcoat and then over it a coat of the Helmsman spar urethane. The sealcoat's difference was subtle, but there. It evened out the red tone in the walnut and it added some depth to the grain. In short, it gave the walnut some "pop" before it was covered with the protective urethane. I presented that walnut trim piece to several Einsel House visitors, and (without knowing what they were looking at) the sealcoat under urethane section was the unanimous favorite. In the picture above the sealcoat under urethane is at the bottom left.

So - that's what we're using to finish most of the wood we sanded at the Einsel House. Zinsser Sealcoat under 2 coats of satin urethane. I hope time will show it is the right choice.

Below is a (blurry) picture of me applying Sealcoat to the stairs:

I was quite surprised by how nervous I felt while putting on that initial coat. The decision wasn't made lightly, but in the back of my head I kept thinking, "All that work, and you could mess it up real quick now." But uncontrollable excitement kept bubbling up above that anxiety, because dang if those steps don't look amazing. : )

Before closing this post I have to add that spar urethane is not recommended for use on floors. In its place on both the floors and stairs at the EH we are using a product called Zip Guard, also in a satin finish.

With that, here's one last picture for today. It's yours truly sanding the first coat of finish on the dining room floor. (It's still waiting for its second coat as I write.)

We're getting to the fun part now!

Pardon the glare from the shop light.

It was 10 o'clock at night, but I just had to take some pictures.

:^)