Floors, as written from the airport floor

The sewing room (aka the small bedroom upstairs) is getting closer and closer to done.

My most recent project? Pulling out the carpet!

Normally, I wouldn’t pull the carpets before I finished the construction in the room – which isn't done yet due in large part to contractor scheduling difficulties. Considering it isn't complete yet, you might be wondering why I’d pull up carpets that were also acting as a drop cloth for my wall ministrations…

We got the ducts cleaned!

It didn’t take long at all (maybe 45 minutes) and even though I think it’s a little on the expensive side considering how little time it takes, I’m definitely glad I did it!

Isthmus House wasn’t originally heated as it is now, it had coal, complete with a coal room (don’t worry, you’ll hear more about the coal room later). The ducts were added after the fact and are in funny places like inside an added archway between the living room and dining room and inside the upstairs shower.

See? Sadly, I really wasn't kidding about the vent in the shower.

 It also looks like they might not have been cleaned since they were originally installed.

From the grate we found under the floors in the upstairs hallway, to the one that’s shared between the upstairs kitchen/eventual master bedroom and The Other Roommate’s bedroom/kid’s-room-to-be, the ducts were dirty. We found some old kids building blocks, old construction scraps, a plastic tile of the letter O, and a really cool hologram - any guesses what era it's from?

It reads, "JET PROPELLED MISSILE DESTROYER: This pilotless jet propelled missile has a nuclear warhead and is radar controlled. It can track down and destroy another missile traveling at very high speed."

There was one return almost directly over the furnace that took almost 20 minutes alone to clean. There are only two in the entire house - these returns feed air to the furnace for it to heat and push back out to the rest of the house. The filter the crew used had to be cleaned three times - more than the rest of Isthmus House combined - before the one downstairs return (and only about six feet of ducting) was actually clean.  

Pretty, no? It makes me glad I change the furnace filters regularly.

This all leads up to why the carpet in the sewing room had to go.

Carpet is dirty. It holds dirt and grime and germs and it’s generally pretty gross. Consider that these carpets definitely hadn’t had much cleaning since their installation and that they were old and you can see why I’d want to get rid of them before cleaning out the dust and dirt from the house’s ventilation.

So, before the cleaners came, I got to work ripping up the carpets.

If you remember the sneak peek from our post about the sewing room walls, I had some pretty good reason to think the floors were in pretty good shape upstairs. I didn't think I’d get as lucky as I did with The Other Roommate’s bedroom floors, but it doesn't hurt to hope!

Cutting it with a utility knife because I couldn't find my carpet cutter (my workshop is currently a bit of a disaster), it took a little longer but in a smaller room, that wasn't a big deal.

Once it was in strips, I rolled them up and taped them up for easy disposal.  

After getting them pulled up, even I was a little surprised by just how much dirt was under them (that’s all the tan).

Once it was vacuumed up though, the floors look pretty! They’re a little torn up because there was no carpet pad under the carpet to protect them from the carpet binding (the scratchy backing) but they’ll look beautiful once they’re refinished.

The funny thing? The duct cleaners missed one vent – the one in the sewing room – but it’s clean now.

So, for those who want to know what’s coming up next with the sewing room, we’re getting a door! Once that’s done, I’ll be able to finish skim coating the last wall so I can be done with the room and eventually even paint. I guess with the carpet gone I’ll need a new drop cloth… but I think it’s worth it.

*If you're wondering about the name of this post. I'm literally posting as I sit on the floor of the Denver airport. Can't wait to see Isthmus House tonight!

Chipping away to get to the character

One of the first things I wanted to do when we moved into Isthmus House was see some brick. It's not like it was hard to figure out where it was and, when we first moved in, I was still considering keeping it as two units for a while longer and brick adds interesting character to old homes. 

When we'd lived there just a few weeks, I got to work one afternoon when The Roommate wasn't home. As always, if you're working with nice floors (I wasn't) protect them from dents and scratches. You should be wearing protective clothing, gloves and safety glasses at a minimum. Earplugs and a mask for dust never hurt either!

It wasn't exactly the prettiest thing when I got started. Using a chisel, pry bar and hammer, I gradually started pulling the plaster off the brick. Chip. Chip, chip. Chip, chip, chip... Plaster doesn't like coming off of brick but it did - just at a glacial pace!

After a while, I'd gotten the middle chunk pretty clean. 

After a few more days, I got started again and got a little further!

So now we have some beautiful character in the upstairs hallway! Would have been exposed originally? Absolutely not, but I think it's lovely and gives a nice point of interest in a formerly boring area!

Oooooh, pretty!

Old houses have issues but they aren't its fault (I know, I talk about them rather like they're sentient but go with me on this). Old houses also have lots of really great things in them that usually have to be uncovered. I've learned that I’m not fighting the house, I’m fighting for the house to make it a real home. More than anything, I think I’m fighting the people who did all of the crap to kill its homey spirit and trying to prevent it from happening to another one.

As you may recall from our first post about the kitchen here at Isthmus House, it’s a pretty traditional 1910 kitchen. At about 120 sq. ft., it has a door on every wall, a pretty good-sized window, the main stack for the house and some brick that’s covered in plaster jutting into the room.

One of my sorority sisters, Chrissy, is a kitchen designer in metro Detroit and has been helping me figure out exactly how to deal with all of the fun that comes with such a kitchen. Kitchen designers are fantastic resources for kitchen redesigns because they know all of the caveats and considerations. Chrissy is no exception to that rule and came up with a bunch of good ideas for dealing with the odd layout.

While we were discussing and finishing up preliminary plans, I decided that the kitchen was too dark and dreary for me to wait for the full restoration to make some changes. It’s going to be a expensive to do completely and I’m having trouble with opportunity cost (i.e. if I do the kitchen, I can’t do much else around Isthmus House for a bit).

The obvious solution was to repaint the cabinets I already have until I could replace them. A relatively quick project, I got to work this past weekend. With all of my supplies compiled to get the doors down and to get all of the grease and grime off of everything, I got started. Taking off the doors wasn't too challenging even with the hardware painted over. With the first one off, I realized that there might be something interesting underneath.

Underneath all of the grimy paint was what looked a whole lot like decent wood grain. After texting a few pictures around and thinking about it, I took one of the door upstairs to my workshop (aka the former upstairs unit’s kitchen) and got started on stripping the paint off the back so I could get a better idea of what was really underneath the 29340823* layers of paint.

There’s one really important PSA when working with paint stripper: read the directions. You need to wear protective clothing, chemical-resistant gloves and glasses at the very least and sometimes a special mask too. I was using stripper that’s specifically made to be used indoors but stripper contains some really heavy-duty chemicals you don’t want to play with.

After working on the back of the door for a few layers, it occurred to me that the doors might just be replacements and the cabinets (dare I think it?) original.

I came to the conclusion that I couldn't just add another layer of paint to the cabinetry; I needed to know what was underneath all of the layers.

So downstairs I went to start brushing paint stripper on my cabinets.

One layer down, the wood was indeed as pretty as I had hoped.

The end panels, it turned out, have been lots of colors over the past many years including whatever the color is called that they were when I moved in – I’ll go with taupe, a biscuit-y yellow color, bright orange, and white.

Really, they remind me a little of the paper we pulled out of the cabinets when we first moved in. We took a lot of paint off:

Once I got down to pretty clean wood, I sanded them down lightly (fine grit sandpaper, friends – soft woods are easy to gouge!). 

What I found is pretty astounding.

The cabinets are nice quality wood although I’m not sure what kind – maybe multiple kinds. Guesses are welcome!

What I’d like to do eventually is move these cabinets over to the other side of the door out to the foyer. The range is in front of it still (you can see it in the very top picture above), but it won’t be forever! 

This particularly happy find might save me a few thousand dollars (custom cabinetry is a schwee bit expensive but often, as it is in my case, less expensive than stock). Let’s hope it’s the start of a beautiful kitchen!

*numbers are approximate