Letting the light in

We are always impressed by what our little one picks up on. We came into the room to find her chiseling off the cement from the fire place. This is a sign that we spend way too much time doing renovation projects. 

 We've been wanting to take down the wall of the dining room to let some light into the room and get some heat moving upstairs. It was quite a project getting all that old plaster down. We hope that all those beams are not load bearing so that we can take some of them down.

 We spent some time over the weekend painting. It feels like a never ending project but we are starting to see the progress...

The stair well is now white

This is what it looked like before. 

 And the primer is up on the walls upstairs

 Before...

A shot looking back the other way with the primer on the walls...

Our special assistant painted her room...

 We found a pretty bad termite ridden piece of wood that will have to be replaced. Looking up into the ceiling we can see that there is at least 5 more inches of ceiling space with original beams. Next project will definitely be taking down the dining room ceiling and exposing those beams! This discovery is almost as good as the original hard wood floors!

Termite invested wood...

Dining Room Table

It might not sound like much, but for us this is a huge milestone. This past weekend I sanded and applied a layer of Ship-N-Shore to the dining room table that Cory and my Dad built. Once the sealant was applied I felt much better about actually having a meal on it. Our friend recommended the product and I'm really happy that we went with it, especially with little kids we didn't want to run the risk of kids eating off of or by an old door with lead paint.

My hunt for deals and enlisting grunt labor support has really paid off for this project! I bought the chairs at a flee market for 20 dollars and with the sealer and bolts that rounds out this set to just under 50 for the table and 4 chairs!

 Close up shot of the legs. We found all this wood in the basement.

 To top it all off, we had some friends out and they helped toast to the first use our table!

Floors, an idea and a light fixture

Last weekend we spent a significant amount of time attempting to sand the floors. I say attempt as even after 10 or so hours of sanding we still have paint on the floors. This is a bummer as we rented one of those heavy duty sanders and we thought it was going to fix all our floor problems. It looks like we may need to strip off the paint and re-sand the sections and hopefully get these floors in better shape.

While on vacation to visit family we had a brainstorm. Maybe we could bump out the kitchen and create an eating area in the area off the kitchen. I've included some pictures so that folks can get a sense of what I'm talking about.

Several years ago at a garage sale I purchased this light fixture. I just knew some day it would have a home and feel so good that it has found one in the dining room (just don't look at the ceiling)

Here is a picture of the light fixture that the electrician hung for us.

 Here is the room that we are thinking of using as an eating area off the kitchen.

 It currently holds a lot of cleaning supplies, but the hope is to have an island join these two rooms..

 We want to reuse all this amazing wood in the house. So our ideas is to tear down this back old kitchen and re-purpose the wood.

 This would be gone...

 Back to the floors. After we were done sanding I washed them to remove any excess dust. Here is how our bedroom turned out.

 The hallway still needs a lot of attention

 The grey room still has some spots that need some attention. It looks worse as it started to dry before I got to taking some pictures.

 We also removed the wood that was holding up the drop ceiling...

 Here is a view of the outside of the house that we hope to remove and expand.

 We would keep the small room but not the larger one.

 We love these windows and would keep them in the eating area.

What lies beneath

The house keeps on giving. We removed the ceiling tiles from the parlor/living room and found original wood on both the walls and ceiling. We seem to be continuing to make more work for ourselves, but are loving the discovery of all the original wood.

We painted  the wood paneling leading upstairs and our special assistant did a great job helping us!

 This is what the parlor ceiling looks like

 wondering if this is a good idea or bad idea to be taking down the drop ceiling?

 after pic

 Once the ceilings were down we could see behind the wood paneling was original wood. We had to investigate...

 Here is what the wood looks like that is behind the wood paneling. We assume that it's lead paint and so we now need to get someone to help sand down/remove the paint/wall paper.

 We were on a roll and so curious about what was above the mantle?

 We were not expecting this...

 Here are some better pictures of the floors in this room

 Cory also managed to take off the door that was permanently shut from the parlor to the bathroom.

Seeking hardwood floor advice

As I've mentioned on previous posts we were told that the house was originally built in 1750, we decided to  on Sunday  to peal back the carpet and see what the hearth and wood around it looked like in the parlor. To our pleasant discovery it appears to be original hardwoods. We were literally jumping up and down with this discovery. Now the question is what to do with them? From first glance it doesn't look like they need to be refinished, so how do we keep them clean and prevent dirt and gunk from filling the wear in the planks? Are there any hardwood experts out there that can help us?

Unfortunately, I didn't have my good camera out there this weekend. Here are some pictures of what the floor looks like:

 The hearth, this might need some work :)

 As you can see there is wear and tear, but we would like to keep this as close to original as possible

Drop ceilings be gone!

Dear Dawson Family, 

Why oh why did you put so many drop ceilings in your house? Bigger question to you family is why did you think it was okay to wall paper the ceiling at least 4 times over? 

Dining room drop ceiling down, now the bigger question is what to do with it? Do we replace it or try and peal the layers off? 

This is what it looked like before the demo: 

 Here is what it looked like right after we got the ceiling down. Attractive huh?

 Team Carlyle (minus a midget who is completely freaked when we wear masks. She makes us promise that we won't wear them when we are out there. I think we could be causing some serious mask anxiety...

 This what a few layers of wall paper looks like on a ceiling. Attractive huh?