Raising the Roof...well, the Ceiling

We took Labor Day weekend literally and worked our tails off all weekend long! I'm really excited to share this update though. The work we did was well worth it once we could sit back and take in the finished product.

Our focus was on Nolan's room, and specifically on his ceiling. You'll remember from my last post that we had planned to expose the shiplap on his ceiling, but once we tore down the sheetrock, there was too much coal dust for us to leave that wood exposed. So we moved to Plan B, which consisted of sealing the ceiling using some insulation, then adding our own shiplap on top.

This has been our view for the past few weeks - the insulation that we placed to seal the ceiling.

As I mentioned in my last post, we found some old wood at our local lumberyard, and David stained the large planks. He then ripped them on the table saw to get them as close to the width of the shiplap we have throughout the house while minimizing waste of the boards. Once he had ripped them down, he used a dado blade on his table saw to cut the 1/4-inch lap so that the boards would fit snuggly together. (We decided to cut lap instead of tongue and groove to help make the install much easier - and I'm glad we did!) We then stained the lap on either side of the board so you wouldn't see raw wood once the boards were on the ceiling.

We attached the boards using a pneumatic nailer. We figured out a pretty good system for getting them up there, which involved the use of two ladders and some scaffolding that David would walk across to get from one side of the room to the other so he could nail the boards in place.

We started the install on Friday night and were very excited at how easily the boards went up!

I can't believe how easy it was to install the boards. Install took us probably 6 hours total. We had no idea going into it how hard it would be. Probably the hardest part was getting all the boards from the garage up to Nolan's room!

David nailing the final piece in place.

We only had to make a couple of cuts: one for the center of the room where the wiring is for the light; and the other to rip the last board so it would fit.

Once we took a quick break from the install, we started working on the crown molding. If only it had been as easy to hang...

This is a 100+ year old house. It's not square (even if it was a year old it probably wouldn't be square!). So we knew installing crown wasn't going to be easy. But we did it, and with a little caulk here and there, it looks amazing!

The finished product, with crown installed.

I didn't let David rest much after installing the crown. We installed a ceiling fan, hung the curtains (beautifully made by David's mom), and moved a couple pieces of furniture into the room. It is starting to feel like a little boy's room, and is making us more and more ready to have Baby Nolan here!

I need to steam the curtains now that they're hung and do a million other things, but here's a little sneak peek of Nolan's nursery decor.

More photos to come once we finish his room, but for now you can find me rocking in his chair, enjoying his room and being so grateful that the ceiling and crown install is complete!

Starting on the Nursery

We have three bedrooms upstairs, and one of them has been used as the guest room thus far. Now we are transforming it into Nolan's nursery.

We had two major projects in the room: exposing the shiplap ceiling and closing in the door that exists between the room and the sleeping porch.

Exposing the Shiplap Ceiling

From our experience with the ceiling in the sleeping porch/playroom, we knew that exposing the shiplap in Nolan's room could prove to be a big undertaking. But never ones to shy away from extra work (ugh), we thought we'd give it a shot anyway. Our biggest concern, again from our previous ceiling experience, was the potential for coal dust to seep through the shiplap. That concern was very valid, as evidenced by my soot-covered husband and dad as they worked to tear down the sheetrock. The sheetrock came down easily, as did the cheesecloth and wallpaper that was over the shiplap. As did the coal dust.

A little bit of cheesecloth, a little bit of paper, a little bit of sheetrock, a lot of coal dust

This was a very messy job!

We immediately knew we would need to cover that ceiling and install our own shiplap. We installed a foil insulation to provide a barrier between the attic and the room, and to seal the coal dust so it wouldn't filter through the new boards.

We knew we wanted to stain some wood to match the shiplap throughout the house, so headed to our local lumberyard. We had no idea that they had some old wood on hand, but when we found these old floorboards, we knew we had just what we needed!

The planks on the left are the raw wood we got from our local lumberyard.

David has stained and polyurethaned the boards. We're letting them air out in the garage, and plan to rip the planks down into three boards, mill a lap onto either side of the board, then install on Nolan's ceiling this weekend!

Removing the Door

There was a door that connected Nolan's room to the sleeping porch/playroom that we just didn't need. The hall right outside our bedrooms leads straight to that room. We've never used it; in fact, the guest bed and nightstand sat directly in front of it. So we closed it in. David removed the door and frame, attached new studs, and sheetrocked over the space, then mudded and sanded and mudded and sanded and mudded and sanded. As for the playroom, right now it's just open studs where the door used to be. When we tackle that room, we will add shiplap there to match the rest of that room. That's another project for another day!

Nolan's nursery as our guest bedroom, with the door to the sleeping porch on the left.

Studs in place and ready for the sheetrock

The doorway patched up and ready to paint

Painting
Nothing makes a room feel better than a fresh coat of paint. It's an instant facelift and room brightener. I've mentioned before that Bri Moysa with Emerson Grey Designs designed Sagan's nursery, then several spaces in our old house, and now several in our new (old) house. I struggle to make decisions on decor without her help! So as soon as we knew that baby #2 was a boy, we requested Bri's help with designing Nolan's nursery. More details on that to come, but for his walls she chose Benjamin Moore's Seattle Mist. It's the perfect neutral for his room, and makes it feel so much lighter and airier.

I've sung its praises before, but Sherwin William's Pro Classic trim paint is amazing. Painting the trim is the first thing we do in a room, and it's amazing what an instant and dramatic impact it has. When I know we will be priming and painting the walls, I paint the trim and even up onto the wall to make sure any stray wall color is completely hidden.

I love the bright white (left) we have chosen for the trim throughout the house

The lighting in this picture is terrible (while the ceiling is down, we are using a couple of shadeless lamps to light the room) but the paint in Nolan's room is finished!

We have a few more projects to tackle in Nolan's room, then we can finally start placing furniture and art. This mama is ready to start nesting in there. We can't wait to see the room start to come together!

Slowly but Surely

I think I've alluded to my impatience before...so I am a HAPPY girl at how much progress we have made in the past couple weeks in the living room.

When we first moved in, we set the living room up, then very shortly after moved all of our furniture into a room downstairs that we hadn't set up yet so we could get to work in the living room.

A few of the things we want to address:

• There are no overhead lights
• The weight/pulley system on all of the windows is broken - at least a weight or two has come off on each window
• The fireplace, which I explained here
• Add crown molding
• Update the trim (I mentioned in a previous post that the sheetrock butts up to the trim instead of the trim sticking out from the wall like it normally would)
• Insulate
• Paint
• And probably 100 other things I've forgotten

We've started and stopped working on the room countless times, but have felt over the past few weeks that we have more of a game plan and can really start making progress.

So, for a status report of sorts:

The shiplap. I previously posted about finding shiplap behind the walls, and how we exposed the wall next to the fireplace, but had to figure out how to get the millions of tacks out of it. That's right: millions. Might be a slight exaggeration. Regardless, I took a small pry bar and a hammer and went after every. single. one. of those tacks and removed them. Some warm water and a rag helped me get rid of the rest of the felt, with the help of a scraper in hard-to-remove places. I am happy to report that what used to look like this...

Felt. Tacks. Yuck.

A close-up for dramatic effect

...now looks like this, and we couldn't be happier!

It's so pretty now that we can see it as a blank slate instead of with all those tacks in it

As soon as we saw how beautiful the wood was once it was cleaned off, we decided we couldn't bring ourselves to paint it. Assuming we don't run into any snags, our plan is now to polyurethane it to preserve the gorgeous patina it has developed over the past 100 years. Our plan is to add cabinets at the bottom and shelves. (Added to the growing list of things David needs to build.)

Next, we've tossed back and forth the idea of adding transoms to the two doorways in the living room. Both front entry doors have transoms, which we absolutely love. We hope to keep much of the house's original character, but also want to add some of our own in a few ways. We have decided that adding transoms is one of those ways. 

David tore out the sheetrock and shiplap above the doorway between the living and dining rooms, and found the bracing is a little strange, though not uncommon for older homes. We will have to add some temporary support, reframe the doorway where the transom will go, and then add the transom. And of course tear out the sheetrock and shiplap on the other side of the wall, but we aren't in a huge rush to do that yet. 

Getting above the door prepped for a transom

As I mentioned, there are no overhead lights in the living room. We have decided to add can lights and a pendant, and are leaving that work to an electrician. But, being obsessive over detail, we decided to measure and mark exactly where we want the can lights and pendant placed. So we measured (and maybe remeasured), added chalk lines, decided to change the measurements, added another set of chalk lines, and are ready for the electrician to come on Tuesday and run the wiring for the lights.

Chalk lines for the electrician to place the can lights and pendant

While we have the electrician here, we want to have all the outlets grounded in this room, and add a couple of outlets. We also have found that there's no rhyme or reason to what circuit each room is on. To get the living room outlets off also turns off part of the kitchen and part of upstairs. We'd rather have the whole living room running to one breaker, so we're having the electrician work on that as well.

Our prep for the electrician has also required us to pull down some more of some walls. When we first met with electricians about adding the lights, they were afraid we'd have to pull the entire ceiling down. We were determined to not have to do that, so have gotten creative. We pulled out two rows of shiplap around the bottom of most of the room to allow them access to the basement to run the new outlets and to re-run the existing ones. 

This also gives us the opportunity to seal this space. Bryan alluded to the cold winters living in this house, and we completely understand what he means. It's natural for cold air to enter around windows and such, but what we feel are drafts. As we pulled the baseboards out, we found different temporary things stuck under them to try to combat the draft. Our plan is to use caulk and spray foam to seal the open spaces so we can hopefully put an end to the draft.

So maybe we accidentally butchered the sheetrock there. That baseboard was AWFUL to get up. It will be repaired though!

We also opened up around the ceiling in places we knew wire would need to run between joists for the can lights and pendant. Most of that will be easily covered up by the crown molding we will eventually add (and all is on interior walls). For the exterior walls, we will add the sheetrock back at the bottom and then the new baseboards. 

Hopefully we have made things easier (and therefore cheaper) for our electrician to do. He is set to come on Tuesday, so hopefully I'll have an update then showing our lovely new lights, three-way switches, and grounded outlets!

Tear Down the Walls...er, Ceiling

While we did tear down some sheetrock as I explained in my previous post, I've actually gotten a little out of order. The first "project" we started (notice I said started and not completed) in the house was upstairs in what has become Sagan's playroom: the former sleeping porch. The attic stairs were in terrible, terrible shape. When we were looking through the house before purchasing, my dad braved them, but we knew they would need to be replaced before any more use.

So, eager to do a project in the house, I harassed David until he bought replacement attic stairs so we could get started. The ceiling in that room was in horrible shape. I'm not sure if someone had tried to texturize it or if it had bubbled up years ago in the heat of summer, or really what was going on, but we knew it had to go. Eventually. 

Back to the project at-hand. David pulled down the old stairs, and as he did, he pulled a little bit of ceiling sheetrock down. And voila...wainscoting!! And not just any wainscoting - it was painted haint blue. Be still my heart.

So much for the one-room-at-a-time approach to fixing up our house.

Actually - speed up my heart. Once we saw what was under the ceiling, we chunked away more ceiling. And more. And then stopped. There was black dust all over the back of the sheetrock, and it worried us that it could be black mold. Sagan was in the house, so we stopped for the night, took her to Granna and Granddaddy's the next morning, and started back in on our project, armed with plastic over the doors, eye protection, and masks. 

After pulling down a few more large pieces of sheetrock, we realized that the black was either old ash or dust from the attic. Crisis averted.

We pulled down the rest of the ceiling. It's now a month or more later, and it's still exactly as it was when we finished pulling the sheetrock down, but we are excited about the much cleaner slate we have for that room upstairs once we work on it.

 

It was dark out, and the room was filthy, but you get the idea!

Let there be wainscoting...and haint blue!

Oh, and we have functioning, safe attic stairs. Hello, tons of floored storage in the attic!

Haint blue...years ago, people in the south painted the ceilings of their porches a light blue color to mimic the color of the sky. There are said to be several reasons for this one of which was that it kept wasps away. They wouldn't build nests on the ceiling because they thought it was sky. Key West is one of our favorite places ever, and the majority of the porches of the homes there have haint blue ceilings. While on a ghost tour for fun, the tour leader explained that the haint blue was thought to keep spirits away also, because they would be confused and think the blue was the sky. 

While we don't subscribe to the theory of keeping spirits away, we do love the idea of having haint blue on our porch ceilings, so expect that once we tackle the exterior of the house. But finding it here, in what used to be a sleeping porch, was very exciting for us!