It has finally sunk in that we don’t have the stamina to have house projects going all the time, one after another, lets hurry up and get everything done so our house is restored all ready. Our what seemed realistic at the time plan, the one where we complete all the work on our house within five years? It’s now the 10 year plan or the hopefully we get the house done before we die plan. Considering this is our fourth year in the house and we are barely halfway done, I think the new plan is a good call.

We have decided that completing one project a year is a more realistic pace for us. Although, it would have been nice to have restored the kitchen and our main bathroom before we hit upon the one-project-a-year-for-a-more-balanced-life approach. I think it is going to be a while before I have the ever changing kitchen of my dreams.

January
My dad came to visit and finished some plumbing work he had started the year before. This culminated with hooking up the sink in our downstairs half bath. It only took us 3 years to actually have water running out of a faucet in one of our bathrooms. Yeah!

February

The episode of “Restoration Realities” featuring us aired on the DIY television network. Along with the show’s host and carpenter we built a period appropriate screen door and weather stripped our windows and front door.

Heather + Dave on Restoration Realities Part 1
Restoration Realities Part 2
Restoration Realities Part 3
Restoration Realities Part 4

March
Did absolutely NO work on the house.

April
Did absolutely NO work on the house, but may have scared a very nice sounding family away from the idea of restoring a rundown Craftsman home of their own.

May
Did absolutely NO work on the house. Starting to see a theme here?

June
Did absolutely NO work on the house.

July
Did absolutely NO work on the house, but I finally resolved the ownership issue of the oil and mineral rights to our property.

August
Finally, some work on the house! Stripped the woodwork and doors of the stairwell, landing and upstairs back hallway. I purchased leaded glass French doors from the early 1900′s off of eBay for the upstairs back hallway.

September
I publicly confess that I have resentful feelings towards the house for the first time. I think I used the word “hate.” And, in certain moments I do hate the house. There, I said it again. We are at an odd point in our restoration experience. The honeymoon period with the house is definitely over.

Maybe this is normal? Maybe around year 4 of an extensive restoration project everyone starts hating their house a little bit, or at least all the time, money and energy that goes into it? After all the work on our house year, after year, after year, we are barely at the halfway point of having our home fully restored.

It’s not like I hate the house all the time. It comes and goes. There are moments when I also love our house. Most of those loving moments are spent in the completed portion of the house.

October
We discovered that the upstairs sleeping porch, a 1918 addition, was inadequately framed. I’m not sure if inadequate is a strong enough word to describe opening up a wall and discovering two 2×2′s as the sole support for a load bearing wall. Shocking comes to mind, so does what the hell were they thinking, quickly followed by I wonder how poorly the rest of the sleeping porch is built?

Pablo rebuilt the wall and installed the leaded glass French doors.

November
Ah, November…November was a month chock full of resentful, or maybe even hateful feelings. There was a lot to hate.

Getting right to it, we both hated the color I selected to paint the stairwell and hallway. I was going for silvery sage but ended up with baby nursery mint green. We received alot of wonderful paint color suggestions, but in the end decided to go with a blue green color that matches the original 1912 wall color of our bedroom.

This leads us to the most mysterious occurrence that has happened during our entire restoration process. Two weeks after the woodwork was stained and sealed with several coats of varnish the woodwork faded. Drastically. Overnight. We have no idea how or why this happened. It’s so unbelievable. I didn’t even know that such a thing was possible? We are hoping that someone out there might be able to provide an answer.

December
Our stairwell and back hallway project is completed. One more down, seven major projects left to go…

Lulu and Winston underneath the Christmas tree

David and I spent a quiet Christmas in our little bungalow, just the two of us.

Looking forward to 2007!

Related posts:

1. 2005 Year In Review Taking a look back at our bungalow restoration project
2. Hallway & Stairwell (almost) Finito! Walls patched and painted, wood stripped and stained
3. Wide Open Spaces We try to decide if we should enclose our hallway?

The only thing left to do is sand and refinish the little back hallway floor. I’ll start on that after the holidays.

Photo taken from the dining room. We selected a blue green color from Benjamin Moore’s Historical collection called Wythe Blue HC-143. It’s a darker version of our first paint color attempt. Our bedroom plaster was originally tinted a similiar color to Wythe Blue and served as inspiration.

Top of the stairwell. Light fixture is from Rejuvenation.

Taken at the top of the stairway landing, looking down.

Taken at the top of the stairway landing, looking towards the sleeping porch.

Photo of the antique leaded glass doors, taken from the upstairs bathroom. It is difficult to adequately photograph these beautiful doors due to the narrowness of the back hallway.

Photo of the back hallway taken from our bedroom.

This project somehow doesn’t seem as exciting as some of our past projects but it was just as much work!

Related posts:

1. Before: Landing and Stairwell Our next bungalow restoration project
2. Letting In Light Next steps in our hallway restoration project
3. The Work Goes On Restoring a bungalow hallway

Juan, for whom we have great affection and hold in the highest esteem, has gotten really busy. We are still waiting for him to come back and repair a minor detail on some work he did for us over 2 years ago. We are now working with Juan’s nephew, Pablo, and he is awesome! Pablo, his brother and their friend have been coming on the weekends to do work on our house.

Pablo and his team have patched and skim coated the plaster walls.

The paint stripping is almost complete – just little touch ups needed here and there.

We have doors again!

Related posts:

1. Den’s Paint Stripped All the paint has been stripped off our Douglas fir woodwork
2. Living Room Update My plaster walls make me want to cry
3. Living Room Plaster Walls Update Proof that even badly damaged plaster walls can be saved

Taken from the second bedroom/office looking into the bathroom. The door on the opposite side of the room leads to the back hallway. The smaller door is for a built-in linen closet.

The floor was covered in vinyl tiles and old linoleum. The linoleum appeared to date around 1920-1930s and must have been glued down with some old fashioned version of superglue because it was horrible to get up. The floor was black around the toilet and tub due to some serious water damage, so I stained the floor a dark walnut color for now.

Closer view of the linen closet door. It might be difficult to tell but the plaster wall to the right of the linen closet is scored to resemble subway tile. Notice the big crack in the ceiling above the linen closet. There are huge cracks all along the ceiling.

The walls were painted none too carefully before we purchased the house. The paint has peeled off in the past few years. It appears that the plaster color was originally left natural, the woodwork was painted a muted gold color (I often see it referred to as ‘wheat’ in modern paint samples), and the ceiling was a vibrant green color. The second bedroom/office walls were painted the same green color as the bathroom ceiling.

The bathtub and wall tiles appear to date from the late 1940s – early 1950s. We assume there was originally a clawfoot tub. The daughter of our home’s second owner told us that the house did not originally have a shower. Her family added a shower downstairs off the back porch. That area had been gutted when we bought the house. We now use it for our washer and dryer.

Our idea was to add a clawfoot tub with a shower attachement, but It has been pointed out that it might be difficult to get a clawfoot tub shower enclosure/curtain rod to fit into the available space because of the slanted ceiling. I’m not sure what we will end up doing?

Our duplex apartment from the 1930′s had a bath tub and a seperate shower stall which I loved, but no room for something like that in our 6ft x 12ft space.

We are fairly certain the bathroom originally had a high-tank toilet based on the holes in the floor. I found the outline of a wall hung sink. The pedestal sink in the photo is from our old duplex apartment and dates from the 1930s. The property manager was throwing the sink out so we grabbed it.

The strange thing is how high the medicine cabinet is placed. When I look in the mirror I can only see my eyes and I’m average height. I wonder how tall the original owners were?

Photo taken looking into the second bedroom/office.

One of my favorite things about the bathroom is the woodwork. The mint green register grate matches the others in the house, and was salvaged from Liz’s Antique Hardware located on Le Brea Ave. It needs to be stripped.

Related posts:

1. 
   Bungalow Bathroom Remodel Here We Go Now...
2. 
   Making Progress, Slowly but Surely Repurposing a Salvaged Door
3. Our Back Porch Rebuild Bead board porch ceiling

When other people see our home do they see lots of potential or do they see a disaster? I get very protective of our house and try to point out all of its positive attributes but I’m not sure if everyone else is convinced? It takes some imagination to appreciate our house.

The day we took possession of the house our friend Jeff came over to see it. As I proudly walked him through our new home, he turned to me in disbelief and said, “You are going to live here?”

“Oh, boy!” I thought to myself, “Not quite the reaction I was hoping for.”

I later questioned why he said that and he explained that he couldn’t imagine someone like me, who likes everything pristine and perfect, living in a house that was, to put it nicely, in such bad shape – polite code for a complete dump. I struck him as too prissy to be a do-it-yourselfer. But, Jeff didn’t know the farm girl inside me clamoring to grab a sledgehammer and start knocking out ugly circa 1970′s cabinets. I don’t think David, my husband, was prepared for her either.

It was a shock for him to come home every day to see something else demolished, taken apart or gutted. David, being much more practical, decided that I needed to be contained. He begged me to focus my energies on one room at a time because he feared the whole house would be completely torn apart. He wondered when we’d get out of the destruction phase and start the restoration phase? All of my “improvements” seemed to be making things worse. When listening to reason didn’t work he began hiding the sledgehammer.

Although we’ve made progress on the house, I still see all the things that we need to fix or all the things I’d like to change. So, I think now is a good time to take a look back and focus on just how far we’ve come in the past year and three months.

Before we moved into the house:
• Replaced the foundation. Bolted for earthquake safety.

• Connected to the city sewer line. Our sewer line was illegally tapping into our neighbor’s sewer line.

• Had the wood floors refinished.

• The kitchen floor: Pulled up press on vinyl tiles that covered plywood which was nailed and screwed into the floor. The floor is uneven so the previous owner had poured plaster into the lower areas to even the floor. All the plaster had to be carefully hammered out. We decided to have the heart of pine floor refinished.

• Upstairs bathroom floor: Pulled up layers of old linoleum. This was a horrible job. Removed the black tar-like backing that was stuck to the floor after the linoleum was taken out by covering the tar paper with paper towels and wetting them with warm water. We discovered the black tar paper backing was water soluble because in areas where it had gotten wet, around the tub and toilet, the tar paper come right up from the wood.

• Removed various cabinets from the upstairs bath and kitchen.

• Painted the two upstairs bedrooms.

After we moved in:
• Installed central heat.

• Added some more electrical outlets to the upstairs bedroom which we plan on using as an office.

• Had a carpenter replace the old plywood stairs leading to the top floor with nice steps made from cherry wood that was generously donated by my dad.

• Began landscaping.

• Began the restoration of our front porch. We hired someone to rebuild the brick piers that support the wood columns holding up the roof. We removed a roof covering the pergola on the north end of the porch. We plan to grow vines over this. The failing cement steps were replaced with steps made from redwood. The 4″ thick layer of cement covering the porch floor was removed. Low walls built around the porch were removed and the original porch railing was restored.

• The dining room was completely restored. See pictures.

• We had a new roof put on. The dormers were stripped of their asbestos shingles. The original wood shingles couldn’t be saved so we had the dormers re-shingled.

• Began restoration of our living room.

• Still trying to select a paint color for the exterior. Any suggestions?

I guess we have accomplished a lot but we still have such a long way to go…

Related posts:

1. Removing Mold This morning I noticed something strange on the upstairs bedroom...
2. 
   Removing Linoleum Adhesive Just add hot water and soak to dissolve linoleum\'s adhesive backing
3. Rebuilding Front Porch, Summer 2003 Hopefully, our bungalow porch will last another 90 years