The Papered House Project List: January - May Update

Back in January, I posted a list of projects we wanted to accomplish by the end of March. And now that it’s May (May!), I’m finally providing a long-overdue update on the progress we’ve made thus far. Summer is just around the corner, and we’re not yet finished with the things we wanted to complete by March. With each project, we're coming to the realization that everything takes much longer than expected. I suppose that delays are just a fact of life with renovation projects, particularly when working on an older home.  

Once I started to update this list, I realized that we actually have accomplished quite a bit. Obviously, we’re not nearly as far along as we wanted to be, but we’ve still made some good progress. Here’s where we stand as of today:

 

Exterior:

*Repair missing tiles on slate roof (hire professional): Done! There was a bona-fide hole in our roof when we bought this house. As soon as we moved in, we started searching for a contractor to repair our roof. It turns out that most roofers aren’t interested in working on slate roofs, so finding a contractor was more difficult than we had anticipated.  Every time it rained or snowed, I felt like crying. But we eventually found a roofer, and as of January, the hole is gone. This fact alone is worth celebrating.

*Repoint side chimney. Repair/install liner if needed (hire professional): In progress. The mason hasn't started repointing yet, but is evaluating the condition of the side chimney. He initially thought that it would just require repointing, but is now thinking that a full rebuild might be needed. He's going to examine it more this week and give us details. If a full rebuild is required, it will change the cost of this project considerably and we might need to go back to the city for another set of approvals. I'm hoping a full rebuild won't be necessary, but it might be. At this point, we’re not certain what work will be required on the liner, either.

*Rebuild rear chimney.  Repair/install liner if needed (hire professional): Also in progress, at this very moment. As I type this, the mason and his apprentice are chipping away at our rear chimney and preparing to rebuild it. We also have this awesome piece of construction equipment in our yard for the duration of the project:

*Install flashing on chimneys (hire professional). Outstanding; will happen once other chimney repairs are complete.  

One of our first realizations about exterior work is that it’s (of course!) highly dependent on the weather. We’ve had the permits and town approvals for the chimney repairs since late February. However, our mason wanted to wait for a stretch of warm, relatively dry days before starting repairs on our chimney. This is especially important since he’s using a lime-based mortar similar to what would have been used when our house was built in the 1880s. Apparently, this type of historic mortar takes much longer to cure than modern mortar, so one should avoid masonry work when there is the threat of inclement weather. I'm not sure what I was thinking when I thought we could have all this exterior work done by the end of March; my expectation wasn't realistic given that we were still getting considerable amounts of snow in late March.

The Harsh Reality of Winter in an Old Home

According to the calendar, spring has officially sprung. I’m still a bit skeptical that winter is really, truly, finally over, particularly since my evening commute on the first day of “spring” looked like a scene from Narnia.

 

Nonetheless, now that the cooler days are apparently behind us I’ve been reflecting on our first winter in our new home. We moved into The Papered House in late fall, so we just had a brief period of time to adjust to our new home before the seasons changed.

All things considered, we survived the winter very well. There’s honestly not much that we can complain about, especially in comparison to what so many others experienced. We didn’t have five feet of snow weighing down our roof. Our house is well insulated and the ancient heating system kept cranking all winter. We had a frozen pipe, but it didn’t burst. In other words, we consider ourselves pretty darn lucky.

 But even though we didn’t have any weather-related catastrophes, we still felt the full force of winter. Here are a few things we’ll be glad to leave behind.

Guest Room Ceiling

Just a quick post for today -- we finally finished the guest room ceiling! In my first post on the guest room, you could see that that there were quite a few cracks in the plaster, which we (ie, my husband) repaired. But then it took me ages to sand the ceiling after the plaster repairs were completed. Sanding is easy, but it turns out that standing on a ladder and craning one's head/neck upwards while a fine mist of plaster/spackle dust descends on one's face is not the most enjoyable way to spend a weekend.

But the end result was worth the trouble. There are still some imperfections and I wasn't able to sand the ceiling completely smooth for fear of reopening some of the cracks. Still, it's an improvement. Here is what the ceiling looks like now:

The paint color looks white in this photo, but it's actually a light greenish-gray that's reminiscent of sea glass. The color is Amelia from California Paints and it works nicely with the Cottage Green that we used for the walls. 

And here is what the ceiling looked like after the repairs, but before it had been sanded, primed, and painted.



That's all for now. This week, I'm planning to repair and preserve the wallpaper in our family room. If all goes according to plan, the preserved wallpaper should look exactly the same as it does now (sounds like that will be a boring set of "before" and "after" photos, right?).