Our 1913 House: Living Room Remodel - The Big Reveal

I forgot I was posting pictures of the remodel project on this blog. :) Just updated Facebook. Anyway, yesterday our cabinet maker, John Pitts, in a final burst of energy, completed installing all the beautiful woodwork and then last night I moved our furniture back in and the living room is complete (except for some paint touch-ups and Barry is finishing restoring some of the old trim on the far side of the room). Here are photos from last night, of the main part of the room with the new woodwork.

The room is all I had hoped it would be: Warm, inviting, comfy, beautiful. The wood is quarter-sawn oak. All the boards are local from our area forests. The wood panels are not local, but are furniture-grade quartersawn oak plywood. John did a masterful job of designing the room, with great suggestions from period photos and drawings of Arts & Crafts living spaces, and executing his ideas beautifully. John said he has spent so much time in this house in the past few weeks that we should probably have him in our Christmas pictures. :)

You'll note there's no TV in this room. That was an edict I made when we moved into this house in October of 2002: No TV in the living room ever again. The living room is a place for conversation, for reading, for doing a puzzle, for sipping something delicious while enjoying the faces of those you care about. There are other places for staring at an electronic screen.

Another antique floor lamp redone and ready for use

Fresh from my success with that last lamp, I tackled another. This one is a little unusual in that the center reflector fixture is not a mogul fixture and apparently never was one. Still three lights in a cluster around it, and then also there is a nightlight in the base of the lamp, on a foot switch.

The whole lamp has always been frustratingly wobbly, never standing straight. So I hoped to fix that while I was at it. We have never used it. I bought it at a sale sometime and never did the work necessary to make it useful.

Before pictures:







I took the whole thing apart and cleaned it. Boy, was it in need of cleaning. Rusty on the insides of the iron pieces, corrosion on the other metals, and a horror of rotten wires inside. Plus a dead mouse. Not really. But you could have hidden lots of things in the cobwebs up inside the base, amongst bare wires. Scary.

After I scrubbed, derusted, and decorroded the metal parts, I sprayed all the parts except for the center rod and tube with a clear matte acrylic spray to protect them from the next round of moisture damage. Once they were dry, I began rewiring.

This lamp had key switches on each of the 3 cluster lights, and a key switch on the reflector light, and a foot push button switch on the nightlight - BUT there was also a push-button switch underneath the cluster that was a master switch for all the top lights. Okay for what it was, but not what I wanted, and that many key lights seemed weird to me.

I replaced all sockets on the top portion with new keyless sockets to simplify things. I kept the nightlight socket which was in great shape once cleaned up. I then rewired with a new 3-way rotary switch in the place where the push-button switch had been under the cluster body. I wired it a little differently than traditional, putting the cluster of 3 on the primary switch, the center reflector light on the secondary, and then the tertiary position was all three on at once.

The reason for the wobbliness I'm embarrassed to say I never really solved. The center rod is not long enough for the way the lamp is set up. The last person to work on the lamp had decided to move it up higher so that it held the reflector socket in place, but this meant it did not go all the way down to the base and that's where the wobble was. Basically it was a plastic piece holding the whole lamp upright, and not very well. I elected to use the rod with the threading making good contact at the base, for stability. But this meant it only connected at the top where the cluster body connected, and the reflector lamp was left hanging by its cord. I "solved" this by using plumber's putty to first settle the porcelain reflector socket inside its holder, then fasten the holder to the cluster body, pulling up the slack on the cord inside the cluster body. I held my breath to see how this worked, and it was successful: The center reflector light is solid and firm and doesn't seem like it's anything less than attached the way it's supposed to be. This morning after the putty was dry I used a gold metallic oil-based Sharpie pen to color the putty this morning and everything looks really good (to me).

Again, we used Edison-style LED bulbs, this time with an amber tint. And this lamp already had an opal glass shade for the reflector light so I went ahead and used it.

These were taken before I Sharpied the plumber's putty. The next one shows it with the color corrected.

And the base, lit and unlit:





Finally the lamp base, which is made of cast iron, has 6 little bare metal feet that can scratch a nice floor, so this morning I used 2 packages of black Sugru modeling compound to form 6 little "socks" for the feet. The weight of the lamp now rests on this and it's drying.

By tomorrow morning this lamp should be ready for use.

Our 1913 House: Remodel, Continued

Frog and his son DJ, with help from other contractors, have made great progress on the front rooms remodel. They have removed all the lathe and plaster from walls and ceilings, removed the center wall (while bracing up the second floor), put in a lam beam to hold the weight, framed in the outer walls, replaced a window, added lots of good wood bracing and framing both to reinforce the weight of the second floor and to provide space for spray insulation, and have replaced/moved some ductwork. There's just a little bit more framing to do, I believe, then electrical, then insulation, then drywall.

Some pictures:

Our 1913 House: Living Room(s) Remodel Begins

I'm excited to share that the last part of our first floor that is not insulated is up for its turn for remodel! Our house (built in 1913) has two front rooms. We call them "the living room" and "the other living room." They are divided by a wall with a doorway that once closed with pocket doors. There's stained glass in one window of each room.

Today the demolition started and this video shows you what it looks like:

I'll post more as we go.

Christening gown from wedding dress

We are expecting a new grandson in June, our youngest's child. A few months ago she asked me how I felt about making a christening gown for him from my own wedding gown, since she had not one of her own. (I had made a gown from her sister’s wedding dress.)

My wedding dress, though I loved it at the time, is very dated to the mid-1980s, for good reason. Lots of fluff and lace and froufrou. Not my daughter’s size or style. As no one will likely ever wear it again as a wedding gown, I was thrilled to be asked to repurpose it. I used Butterick 6045, the same pattern I had used for her sister’s. The thing about using a repurposed wedding gown for a christening dress is, you can reuse so much of the fancy work simply by careful cutting of the skirt to incorporate the existing hem. Some of the bias lines are going to be off a little bit, but it still works. So while this looks like a lot of work on this dress, honestly it wasn’t as much as it appears. 

The only things that are not original to the dress are the thread and some interfacing. Everything else came from the dress: fabric, lining, lace, ribbons, beadwork. Oh, and buttons! 

If anyone has a wedding gown to reuse and would like to give it a try, I would be happy to consult.

Goodwill find: Printed cotton yardage from Cameroon

I realized I had this post in draft from last summer and never posted it. No time like the present!

While thrifting at Goodwill, I found two 5-yard pieces of printed cotton yardage from Cameroon, West Africa. Of course I bought them. They had paper labels reading CICAM, which, on researching, I found means they were the product of an initiative to help Cameroonian people to market their skills and traditional produce during the 1970s.

I made two kaftans out of them and wore them a few times before it got too cold for cotton last autumn. Looking forward to being able to wear loose, lightweight, breezy clothes again someday!

Non-plastic beeswax blend food wraps project

A few months ago I ordered my first set of waxed fabric food wraps from etee.com (etee stands for Everything Touches Everything Else). I had never tried wax wraps before. Once I had the family trained on how to use them (no, you don't throw them away, no, you don't use hot soapy water to wash them, no, you can't leave them in the bottom of the sink in a pool of sludge), we were sold. Except for one thing: Plastic wrap and plastic bags are transparent, and these aren't. Barry complains frequently about all the mysterious blobs wrapped up in canvas in the fridge and gets tired of opening them to see what's in there over and over again.

This morning I took half a day off work for a dental appointment which, due to miscommunication, was only an hour long instead of three (I thought I was getting a crown, but I have to go back another day for that), so I had some time on my hands. I had collected the supplies to try the wraps explained on the blog at Mountain Rose Herbs. I had plenty of beeswax already, and had previously ordered jojoba oil (actually it's a wax, but a liquid wax) and copal resin (from pine trees, basically dried sap). I collected pure cotton quilting fabrics with prints of fruits and veggies and cut them into roughly 12-inch squares with pinking shears. Then I got to work.

I melted the copal resin in a double boiler (and it took nearly an hour, so allow time for that), then added grated beeswax and jojoba oil in double the proportions directed as I figured since I was going to the effort I might as well do a bunch. The copal resin did not want to incorporate into the waxes, but with patient stirring, eventually it did. When all the waxes were finally melted and blended, I spread my fabric squares on baking sheets (I didn't have any parchment paper), and used a 3-inch foam brush to spread the liquid wax quickly over the fabric. I'd recommend a foam brush for you, also. Very easy and no bristles to come off!

I followed the directions to warm the squares in a medium hot oven and spread the liquid around until the squares were completely saturated, then cooled and washed them.

And here's the result. I probably used too much wax on each one as they are pretty stiff, but having worn out a couple of the etee wraps already, I would rather err on too much than not enough wax, as you lose a little bit every time you use and wash one of these. You can see some excess on the tomato wrap.

And here's the onion wrap with half an onion in it.

Now we'll know which fabric-wrapped blob in the fridge is part of an onion, which is a leftover half of a sweet pepper, which is a half lemon, and which is a tomato half to slice for a sandwich.

I'll be watching for fabric depicting other fruits and veggies in time to come.

Antique reflector type floor lamp rewire project

I have had this old floor lamp which needed rewiring for a long time. Finally decided to check that task off my project list. Last week I bought the lamp wire and a new switch, and rewired it using the instructions at Antique Lamp Supply.

With these lamps, the three smaller bulbs are on one switch, and they can be lit with one, two or all three depending on where the switch is. The large center bulb is on its own circuit, and in most cases is a mogul size bulb base, which Antique Lamp Supply refers to as “useful for landing personal aircraft or signaling vessels lost at sea”, which really isn’t too much of an exaggeration.

Once the lamp was rewired and working again, I replaced the three smaller bulbs with visible-element vintage style LED bulbs purchased from Menards. I wanted to replace the mogul bulb with LED also. Mogul base LED bulbs are very industrial looking. I could not find any that were even remotely related to “pretty”. I could have bought or scrounged an opal glass shade for the center light ($40-50 if I could not thrift one), which would have made the looks of the bulb immaterial, or I could have given up on LED and just used an incandescent mogul base bulb (expensive on power, and a heat producer), but then I learned that there is another choice, an adapter to allow a “normal” (or E26, to be more exact) bulb to work in a mogul (E39) socket. And I could find many choices of large visible-element E26 LED bulbs that are attractive and reasonably priced. So that’s what I decided to do. The UPS truck just dropped off the adapter and a large globe bulb, and here is my lamp.

I really like the look.

1950 "Golden Anniversary" Columbus Blenback Oil Cloth Sample Book

Okay, so it was a shorter one and didn't take long. Figured while I was at it...

• 1950 Columbus Blenback Oil Cloth Sample Book

Bigger pieces of fabric for each sample, but fewer fabrics represented. Also this was in worse shape. The samples are cracking and sticking together. Glad I got it scanned before it up and died.

Here's a pretty:

1940s Columbus Coated Fabrics "Blenback" Oilcloth Samples

I have three oilcloth sample books in my possession. I finally scanned the 1940 book to share because it is cool and because they don't last forever, and I'm amazed this one is still in as good shape as it is (oilcloth sticks to itself with time and temperature changes and eventually the pages all clump together in a block and the sample books are useless). The only thing is I cannot offer smell-o-vision because the smell of oilcloth is so distinctive, and all those of you out there whose grandmas had oilcloth tablecovers in their kitchens would be instantly transported back if you caught a whiff.

• Oilcloth Sample Book from 1940

Here are some selected pages for your instant enjoyment: