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?

Furlough Days 1 and 2

So as I'm a federal employee who has not officially been working since noon on Tuesday (October 1st) I took it upon myself to get cracking on some DIY projects that needed some finishing. Cory and Chris (Cory's brother) made a linen closet several months ago when Chris was visiting by adding doors to a bookshelf and they also added some legs to make it stand out a little more. We eventually are going to put this in the bathroom.

Here is what it looked like with the doors attached. We found these doors at a resale hardware store, for $15 dollars. Cory bought the hinges and the little feet, so in total using the paint we already had the project was around $20 dollars.

I made some chalkboard paint by adding 1 tablespoon of grout (that we happened to have around) to 1 cup of latex paint. I had some extra so I made this sign for the bathroom.

 Here is the finished product