Updates

I realize that lately I have done a terrible job of updating, so it's definitely time to get back into gear with the posts. Daniel and I really didn't tackle a lot during the entire month of January, so the house pretty much stayed the same (and the projects that were unfinished before the holidays) remained in the same state after the holidays. With the recent good weather on the weekends, however, we've actually managed to accomplish quite a bit (and, as usual, we've learned a lot in the process).

Last weekend, we attempted three projects: putting the final coats of shellac on the listening room wall, sanding and painting the window ledges in the kitchen that overlook the den, and stripping and staining the front door.

Applying the shellac in the listening room was extremely easy, and we are thrilled with the result. It is a near perfect match with the rest of the walls (the only difference is due to the age of the wood). Once furniture is in and a bookshelf in place, I don't think anyone will even notice that those five panels weren't part of the original wall.

The left-hand side is the original panel, and the right-hand side is the new panel:

The two windows in the kitchen that overlook the den (and overlooked the backyard before the addition was added in the 1970s) had really ugly spindles dividing the space. Daniel karate chopped these spindles out on the day we moved in, and we never got around to sanding and painting were the spindles once were.
Wood filler to fill the holes:

It is a definite improvement:

After months of envying one of our neighbors' front doors (which looks just like ours except it's unpainted), Daniel suggested that we should try stripping the layers of white paint from our door to see if we could return it to its original condition. I wholeheartedly agreed, as a "new" door could definitely liven up the front of the house, and I also assumed stripping the paint would be much easier than when we attempted it with the trim because everything was flat.

So again we armed ourselves with paint stripper (two enormous containers!) and went to work. The first layer came off with relative ease, which was encouraging. We even felt that we would be able to have the door finished in that same day. The second layer of paint stripper didn't seem to eat through that next layer of paint as easily though, and we ended up scraping until our arms felt they might fall off. We did manage to scrape down through one last layer of old paint and were able to see the original wood of the door, which was enough to keep us going.

It became obvious that this last layer of paint wasn't going to budge.

So we called up our friend Brian to borrow his sander, then we bought a respirator mask (just in case there might be lead-based paint) and went back to work.

Unfortunately despite all of the sanding, we still weren't really making any good progress. In fact, we discovered that the condition of the door wasn't in as good of shape as we had initially thought (the wood was peeling and chipping and the bottom, and it wasn't too terribly solid for a front door). Not to mention, the paint was not budging from the grain of the wood, and we didn't have a lot of room to sand down.

With the night looming, we rehung the door like this:

Yes, it looked really, really bad:

And I did a quick paint job.

We now needed to find a new door.

The Paneling Is Up (We Finally Have A Complete Wall)

Granted, it did take a bit more time than we anticipated to get the paneling up (but, hey, December is a busy month after all, and we were out of town for two of those weekends). However, Daniel did get the paneling up with one coat of varnish today. While the color doesn't match exactly yet, I think the additional coat will even things up nicely.

Hurray. It's nice not to have a gaping hole in the wall anymore!

With the paneling in place:

Ready to add the varnish:

Applying the varnish:

Voila!

The Paneling Has Arrived

Good news! The paneling Daniel and I ordered to fix the gaping hole in the listening room has arrived. I just picked it up over my lunch break from Southern Lumber and Millwork. We had to special order it, and, of course, we could only order in packs of four (and we need five panels to fix the room), so we have three extra pieces. However, at least we have room to store the extras. They should be easy to install (Daniel told me he would be tackling it this weekend while I'm in North Carolina) and finish. The Southern Lumber people told Daniel that the current wood wasn't even stained only varnished, which means we should be able to match the rest of the room with relative ease (although we will have to consider how the aging process has affected the old paneling).

Daniel also got a quote on refinishing the hardwoods (sanding and matching the finish of our current floors), so I'm hoping we'll be able to get those taken care of soon. While he was getting the quote on the listening room floors, Daniel also asked about the kitchen floors (which we had intended on replacing with matching hardwood); however, the flooring guy suggested that we explore other options aside from just hardwood (in terms of upkeep and maintenance to one of the more traveled and heavily used rooms of the house that, not to mention, also uses water extensively).

Everything seems to be on a roll though, and I'm anxious to see the results (and get the room finished).