Removing the Center Cabinet

Today while Ryan cut the grass I attempted to get rid of some more "brick". I didn't get very far. I've been using a crowbar, and Ryan bought me something at Lowe's that he thought would have been perfect, but frankly, the crowbar works better. Not by much though.

When Ryan was done outside, we removed the center cabinet. It was nasty underneath there! Worse than the top of the cabinet, which we thought was really bad. We did find some cool stuff though, including an old Bayer aspirin tin... complete with 2 aspirins! It must be really old because my mom doesn't remember it.. so it must be from at least the early 50's. We also found a million dead bugs, rat poison, dust, garbage, pennies...

Tearing up the Kitchen Floor

When we first met with the seller, he told us that the only thing he had ever done in the house (in the 45 years he lived there) was the Kitchen floor. The Kitchen floor was a linoleum floor with a brick patten. It matched so nicely with the brick hearth. (insert sarcasm) The floor was so incredibly disgusting. I refused to walk on it without shoes on, and even then I didn't like to spend too much time standing on it. It looked like the last time it was vacuumed or swept was in 1976. Any little bit of work we did in the Kitchen only managed to make it look worse. See that gray area? That's the dirt that had accumulated underneath the rug. Gross gross gross!

The Kitchen floor is raised up from the Hall/Living Room floor, which lead me to believe that the "brick" was actually installed on plywood, on top of the wood floor. I've always wanted a wood floor in my Kitchen. I tore up the metal threshold between the Hall and Kitchen only to find out that there was indeed wood flooring beneath the plywood. And it was level with the Hall floor. Which meant that at least one piece of plywood was coming up so we could investigate. But first I had to remove the linoleum. Which did not want to come up! Scraping, pulling, more scraping... This is the best I could do, after a whole day's work.

Luckily I was able to uncover almost an entire sheet of plywood, which made removing it about 1% easier. It took 2 guys a half hour to lift that thing, which was nailed into the wood floor every 6 inches or so! Unfortunately this story does not have a happy ending.

The floor underneath is indeed wide plank wood flooring that is identical to the Hall and Living Room floors. But it's pretty badly damaged. It's very soft... like it was wet, but it isn't. I could stand on it, but I didn't feel safe enough to have it as a floor. Plus it was very wavy (think wet paper that has dried).

I don't think I can fully express my disappointment. We have 2 options. 1: Put the plywood back and install a new floor on top of it. 2: Tear up all of the plywood and wood flooring, install a new plywood subfloor and new floor on top of that. Well, in case you can't guess, I was outnumbered. So the plywood is going back down and when we install a new floor, it'll be on top of that. That'll make the Kitchen floor about 1/4" higher than the Dining Room floor, but we'll make it work. It's not like anything else in the house is level!

Painting the Dining Room

It was too hot to do anything today. The house has been relatively cool on warmer days so far this summer, but today broke a bunch of heat and humidity records, and even the house couldn't account for that.. But I just couldn't let a day go by without any work getting done! So I decided to paint the Dining Room.

The Dining Room is probably the one room in the house that could have waited until the very end to be refinished. While in the future it will be a room we will use a lot for family dinners, holidays and get togethers, for now, we can eat in the Kitchen or Living Room. And we aren't planning on hosting holidays until we have kids. Yet it's the one room that is almost complete. Ironic. Also ironic is that it is the only paint color I've been able to choose so far. Every other room I flip through my color books, unable to find anything that would maybe work. But this room, I opened the book to a random page, and said "wow.. that's it!". The color is Benjamin Moore Pewter. Because we're newlywed first time homeowners, we don't have money to buy Benjamin Moore paint, as much as we'd like to. We have to buy whatever Lowe's or Home Depot has on sale that week. And this week it was Behr, so we had them color match it. It came out pretty close, but not exact. It's a little bluer than the BM color, but that's ok because I think it looks great! We decided to not paint the trim. There's so much of it, and it was in pretty good condition. Nothing peeling, no spots that needed touching up. 

Luckily there wasn't a lot to be painted. I say lucky because I stepped into the other room to make a phone call, only to hear Ryan yelling a couple minutes later. Turns out he was trying to help and do some second coat touch-ups, and accidentally bumped the paint can (which had the cover on, but wasn't closed) and it spilled EVERYWHERE. I mean everywhere! About 3/4 of a gallon of paint was now not in the paint can anymore. Luckily we had left the carpet in there while we were painting and it all spilled on the carpet. It missed the wood floor by about an inch. We were very very lucky!

Many people say that the Dining Room is their favorite room in our house. Due to the size of the fireplace, I originally thought it might have been the original Kitchen. And it was very common for this room, in this floor plan, to be a Kitchen. But in the style of the Wilcoxes, it is very intricately detailed. Too much so for a Kitchen, even in a Wilcox house. I think it may have been the original Sitting/Receiving Room (Living Room). It has crown molding and wood paneling that run around the room, and a fireplace with a very interesting mantle detail. Oh, and a funeral door.

Office Wallpaper

Today the Office wallpaper came down. Pretty easily. But not cleanly. I'm just happy it's gone. Maybe that wallpaper was stylish and cool in the 60's, but not today. Even though the walls underneath are pretty gross looking, I'm still happy the wallpaper is gone. The room is already slightly brighter. I can't wait to start painting! Tonight I randomly chose a paint color while waiting for my mom at Lowe's. It's Lowe's brand paint, Valspar, color La Fonda Mirage. It's a blueish-green color, but very bright and cheerful. It's labeled as a National Trust Historic color, which made me feel like it was a good choice for this house. This picture below is sorta kinda close to the color. I love it!

The trim, beams, ceiling, fireplace, casing, doors, etc. will all be painted using a semi-gloss white paint.

Kitchen Demo Day 1

Our Kitchen extends for about 3/4 of the back half of the house. That's a pretty large Kitchen. But it doesn't feel big. In fact it feels small, dark and cramped. Today, we took the first step toward fixing that.

To give you a better idea of what we're working with here, this is what we have. We have half of the Kitchen as an eat-in breakfast area. I love this part of the Kitchen. I've always wanted to have a Kitchen table. This half of the Kitchen has two large windows, a HUGE fireplace, plenty of room for a large Kitchen table, a built-in cabinet with shelves and cabinet doors below, plus the door to the back stairs and an opening into the hall. The other half of the Kitchen has all of the appliances and cabinets, two more smaller windows, an opening to the Dining Room and a Dutch door that leads to the backyard.


Separating the two areas is this:

The bane of my existence. I hate this thing! It ruins my big Kitchen! And it's so old and gross. The cabinets don't have any shelves in them, and open on both sides. Half of the drawers open on one side, and the other half open on the other side. All are filled with garbage, papers, phone books, tools, bowls, plastic silverware.. And it's right next to the door, so after struggling to open that pain of a door, you feel squished and cramped as you enter the house. And this is the door we will be using on a daily basis. It (the cabinet, well, the door too) had to go. Sure, someone back in the 50's thought it was a great idea. It's a tough Kitchen for cabinetry because there are so many windows and doors, and the only long wall is taken up by the cooking fireplace.

Goodbye. Good riddance. It was pretty easy to take down.. the only problem was a stray crowbar making a hole in the ceiling, but that's easy to fix. It was the top of the cabinet that was the most disgusting.. it was covered in about 60 years of dust, dirt and mouse poop. No wonder the Kitchen smells so bad!

Since they were on such a roll, the guys decided to also take down some of the other upper cabinets and cabinet doors off of the lower cabinets to make Demo Day Part 2 easier. We also learned how the mice had been getting into the Kitchen (though lucky we haven't been graced by their presence (knock on wood), they left plenty of evidence that they had been there in the past). The corner pantry cabinet had a hole in the floor beneath it that had been cut to run wiring up from the basement to an outlet on the corner post. A mouse (mice) had been squeezing through the hole next to the wire, and in doing so had frayed the wire. So unsafe! Good thing we saw this before we ever used this outlet! This wiring also went to the stove, which was plugged in so we could use the clock on it. That also got unplugged.

Painting the Master Bedroom

Originally we weren't going to paint the Master Bedroom right away. There are so many other things that need to get done in the house that seemed to take priority over it. The room was pretty clean, and appeared to have been painted in at least the last 30 years (whereas there are some rooms in the house that haven't been touched in over 60 years). And I didn't hate the paint color. It was a greenish-brownish color, which doesn't match our black furniture and blue comforter and pillows, but hey, priorities. 

A fresh coat of paint never hurt anyone. Since there aren't any other repairs or any other work that needs to get done in the room, Ryan suggested freshening up the room with one coat of paint, just to give it that finished look. So this afternoon my dad and I painted the walls. We really should have gone and gotten white paint for the ceiling and trim first, but it was one of those "let's do it now" moments and we just got right to work and regretted it after. The white trim in the above pictures didn't look so white when we were done. We painted the walls blue, the only reason being that we had free paint. When we painted our apartment when we moved in we used an online paint calculator that was way way off. So we bought 2 gallons of paint and only used half of one. It didn't photograph well though.. it looks really bright and obnoxious in these pictures. I swear it really isn't!

So now all we have left is to paint the ceiling and trim, paint the PINK radiator, repair some holes/cracks in the closets and clean the floor. And we have a bedroom ready to move into!

Doing Some Exterior Work

This weekend Ryan's parents came down to help out. My job was to tackle the bushes that were taking over the front of the house.

What's the point of having a beautiful house with tons of windows if no one can see it and you can't see out of it?


Those bushes were not easy to cut down. They had been allowed to grow without any maintenance for so long that their trunks (is that what it's called on a bush?) were as wide as a small tree. We had to go buy a new saw! The thickest of the trunks was 4 or 5 inches wide! We even found a small maple tree growing in between the ones on the right of the house... I felt bad cutting that down, so in the spring we'll attempt to relocate it to the backyard somewhere. 

While it looks a lot better than it did, I'm not 100% pleased. We can see out our windows and the house doesn't look unloved, but the bushes were so tall, that cutting them back resulted in revealing what is basically the insides of the plant. If you look out our Living Room or Dining Room windows at them, all you see is a mess of branches. Yuck. We've gotten mixed responses on whether or not they will grow in, and cover this up, but I'm not sold. I have a feeling that come spring (which is when we'll be moving outdoors and doing some landscaping), I'll be digging these up and planting something much smaller.

Living Room Wallpaper

Today we worked together and tackled the Living Room. The wallpaper in the Living Room didn't come down as easily as the Dining Room wallpaper, but because both of us were working on it, we finished in about 4 hours. The walls underneath were not in good condition.  As I said in my last post, there are a lot of little holes around the room, which have sand pouring out of them if you touch them.  Some (maybe most) of the holes we caused with our putty knives when we were scraping wallpaper off.  The walls aren't cracked though, so we'd hate to tear them down and put up drywall. But plastering the room is something we don't have time for right now... there are more pressing problems that need to get fixed before we can move in. I'm a little upset about that... I had envisioned the Living Room as being the first room done. We'd clean it up and paint it, and then move in a couch and a TV, and have one clean, finished room to relax and eat in. We could close the doors and keep out the dust and construction debris and have a little sanctuary in the mess of a house. But now it looks like that isn't going to happen. Oh well..

The room has such nice woodwork (not as nice as the paneling in the Dining Room, but still very detailed), but it is all glopped up with many many years of paint. And it may be lead paint, but I'm pretty sure it isn't (we really need to get one of those test strip kits). Either way, we've decided to strip all of the paint in the room and repaint the trim, beams and fireplace. Now if only I could come up with paint colors for this room... Nothing looks right...

Wallpaper Removal

Today I mastered the art of removing wallpaper. Luckily for us, about 90% of the rooms in the house are wallpapered. I say lucky because removing the wallpaper exposes the original walls and we can assess their condition, and then paint the walls directly, rather than adding another layer of paint.

The one drawback? Neither of us had ever removed wallpaper before. We made a rookie's mistake and bought expensive wallpaper remover from Home Depot. We also purchased one of those large orange Home Depot buckets (a steal at $2.49), a wallpaper remover and a large pack of putty knives. The wallpaper remover was in a spray bottle, and very watery. I would spray it toward the top of the wall, and it would just drip all the way down. And if I sprayed it on top of the wallpaper, it wouldn't do a thing. I had to rip the wallpaper off, leaving the bottom layer of paper/glue, and then spray that. And I had to really get it soaked before it would scrape off. And did I mention how horrible it smelled?! Halfway through the room I had to go find a mask to wear it was so bad.

I did finish about 3/4 of the Dining Room though. The only spots remaining are in the corner where the sill damage is (I was afraid to stand there for too long.. it didn't look like it could support long term standing weight). It was a good room to start on because most of the room is paneling, windows, doors, fireplace, etc.

Dining Room built-in cabinet

Front Dining Room windows

Toward the end of the day, we ventured into the Living Room to assess those walls. Turns out, those won't be as easy. The Living Room walls (or at least what we uncovered today) are all original horsehair plaster. Taking off the bottom layer of paper/glue often resulted in making holes in the plaster and dry sand pouring out of the wall. The walls also are very textured. Not a nice texture, more rigid and bumpy. Which is to be expected for 239 year old walls. They didn't have the tools back then to make them perfectly smooth. Due to the holes (existing and new) and texture, we'll most likely be putting a skim coat of plaster on these walls. I'd much rather do that than tear it all down and replace it with drywall.

Living Room fireplace

Living Room wall

Day One... of the rest of our lives

Today we closed. Because the closing was right smack in the middle of the day, we took the whole day off from work. We spent the afternoon doing your typical post-closing activities... changing the locks, cleaning out some of the garbage/stuff left behind, and just walking around in awe that it was actually ours.


We met with the seller about a month before closing so that we could discuss what we wanted left in the house. Which was a waste of time. He was suppose to leave everything that was in the attic, as well as some pieces of furniture on the first floor. The main things we were interested in were an antique spinning wheel from the mid-1700's and an army foot locker from World War I. Gone and gone. He was also suppose to leave the kitchen table, which wasn't a nice table by far, but it was at least something to hold us over until we got our own table. Gone.


But in their place he did leave a bathroom full of wet, dirty towels, cabinets full of old food and dishes, and a couple garbage cans full of garbage. Luckily he also left a Dumpster, which we took complete advantage of! We also did a little Dumpster diving, and "rescued" some antique wooden skis, an old wooden sled, some drywall tape, old glass bottles, and books, among other things.

First Post... New Blog

And hence begins another project. I just can't seem to have enough.  Today my husband and I became first time homeowners. And no, we did not buy your typical starter home. Our starter home is a 2,300 square foot 239 year old two and a half story house on 1.14 acres with a garage and two sheds. We like to be different.


We have friends and family spread out all over the country, as well as in other countries, so this blog is our way to spread our progress, setbacks, discoveries and (hopefully) finished results along the way. I also hope that it helps other historic home owners when researching and restoring their own houses.


We are both trained in house design and construction, but of course, there's only so much you can learn in school and in an office... so we are anything but experts. But it does help to have a little bit of a background when tearing down walls.


So here goes everything... Wish us luck!