The Kitchen

I believe I have now found six different layers of wall paper.  All these are in various stages of being stripped and who ever was doing the work got tired or bored and never took every piece off which gives us a great history of the renovations in the kitchen.  If I add the chimney stack I think we will have the complete picture.

The first paint colour was a blue/grey/turquoise colour, which I think I will repaint the kitchen that colour.  Then there is the yellow, I believe before the yellow the wood stove was removed from the kitchen, there isn't any yellow on the piece that fills the chimney exhaust hole.  Then the walls were covered with canvas to cover the cracks and imperfections of the plaster, that was painted with the grey emulsion.  The next action was for the grey to be covered with a wood panel wall paper.  There are snatches, which does not show in these pictures, of a beige paper with a light sketched flower, a very delicate paper.  Next there is a heavier paper with that awful green and beige pattern, that I would have found far too much.  The next one is just a mottled beige and cream, we move on from here to the very busy typical kitchen paper of cans and jars and fruit and vegetables.  Finally the hated lime green painted embossed paper which was where I began.

As I've stripped the wall paper off I've had to decide whether to remove the canvas product.  There are areas where it has already been removed, areas that have come away because it is not to the wall or the plaster is so broken up that I have had to remove the canvas.  I have decided that I will leave the canvas that is adhered to the wall rather than take the chance of pulling off anymore plaster, but remove loose areas or small pieces that come off as I scrape the wall paper off.  This is what the wall  will look like when I have finished removing all those layers of paper.

  
I plan to use an 80 grit sandpaper to take the shine off this grey paint and any remaining pieces of paper that have not been removed.

While doing this I have confirmed that the doorway down to the basement is definitely not the original location.  I believe this was the pantry, in the following pictures I am pointing to where the height of the door used to be, you can also see where they added height to the doorway.  I'm not sure that they have added a header to this door so may have to consider taking out the framework to correct this problem.

This will be just another problem that I have to deal with.

This is what the original tile looked like and I have a feeling it was put in when the house was first built as there is no paint or paper under neath.  This is attached directly to either the finishing plaster, as we see on the picture of the wall or to the rough plaster that I found when I removed this last piece of faux tile.

So this is a portion of the wall  that I am dealing with this actually was covered in faux tile.

On the other side of this wall is the parsons bench and there is no way I want to damage this by removing the original plaster wall.

This is what the pantry looks like now and it winds under the main stairs.  It means that I expect the floor may have been compromised by this alteration, I won't know until I take a closer look.  I do know those stairs are a little on the creaky side.  Also this where the back door is today.

This is where the back door used to be, how do I know this.  Take a look at this picture.

If you look at the outside wall you can see the outline of where a door used to be... maybe I should have drawn where the crack is in the stucco, it is obvious by looking at this picture that someone tried to spray paint the wall to clean it.  The landing would have been over the old cistern and the stairs would have run straight down against the outside wall.   A doorway was cut into the cistern to make a storage room, they used the pantry door and cut original moldings from upstairs up into pieces to surround this doorway.  I don't have a picture sorry.

So I've just added a picture of our stairs, I love the custom made banister and rails, the heart is a lovely detail and the dark coloured wood is wonderful so hoping to replicate the original door trim and this dark stain in the kitchen trim.

Ice Dams and The Damage

Living in a 100 year old home when you have a lot of snow can be problematic, especially in a cottage style house where the roof line comes down to the level of the ceiling on the main floor.

This was taken in March 2011 there wasn't very much snow that year.  The roof ends below the ceiling, these the dinning room windows.  At the lower level of the centre peak is where we get the build up of ice.  In that slope upstairs there is built in draws.

These are the drawers,  there is no way to get into that area to place extra insulation.  Each of those drawers goes back towards the roof line hence heat loss.  This heat loss causes the snow to melt and it then freezes as the outside temperature drops well below freezing causing the ice dam.  I first realized we would have a problem when I noticed the crack in the dinning room ceiling.

After phoning and talking to a roofer we plugged in the heating wire that is on the roof outside.  This saved the dinning room ceiling, melting the snow and ice so the water would run off on the outside.  There has obviously been water problems in the past when you look closely at the crown molding in the dinning room.

You can tell that past damage has been covered over, unless you look closely you do not notice the water damage.  What we did not do was plug in the heating wire on the other side of that peak roof, we came home one day and I could hear dripping water.  The first place I checked was the dinning room, that was fine, so went into the living room only to find a very large pool of water in front of the couch and underneath the couch once I moved it out.  In the corner of the living room there was steady fast dripping of water.

It was dripping through the wood molding, but had spread out towards where the plant hanger is.  The hanger had absorbed some of the water, the majority had come through the moldings as you see from the water marks on the wood.  If we had drilled a small hole in the corner near the wood we may have saved this corner from a lot of this damage, hind sight is always 20/20.

We had some lovely icicles once we had the ice dams melting on the outside.

  

Just a few pictures of the icicles that we had once the heating coils were working.  Better to have the water outside like this than dripping in the house.  Now we did think this was the end of the water in the house but yesterday afternoon as Richard went upstairs he noticed a pool of water on the step in front of the door part way up the stairs.

This door is not original to the house and the dormer window, for the small bathroom also not original to the house, added to the ice dams in the back, the water came off the roof down between the door trim and frame.  If you look closely at the top of the door framing you can see where the water came in.  Richard went outside, got up onto the landing for this door, (there are steps for it anymore), and began the arduous task of removing ice from off the porch and pulling snow off the roof to limit the amount of snow to melt.  We do not have heating wires on this side of the house.  Richard did what he could to remove the ice by putting salt chunks on the roof where the ice was building up.  Today we have to water dripping.

So there you are, the joys of owning a 100 year old home when you have a larger amount of snow than you have had for several years.