It's Starting to Look Like a House Again

After months and months of ugly stud walls, old lath boards and bulging insulation, it's starting to look like a house again!  We passed all our rough-in and insulation inspections and started buttoning things up.

The drywall always unifies the spaces and brings the house to life.  And it allows us to get a good look at the Before and after Aspects of the house.  Honestly, I'm loving how it's coming together!

A big thing for me are 'lines of sight'.  The lines of sight were limited when we first bought the house, but by opening it up a bit, suddenly you can see from one end of the house to the other.  Case in point- as you stand at the entrance to the living room, now you can see through the dining room and out through the sunporch to the backyard.  That makes a huge difference in how the house looks and feels.  (BTW - the kitchen cabinets have been delivered, that's the huge pile of boxes that you see!).

You can see all the way to the backyard! 

Limited Line of Sight - Before

The dining room is a great place to see how much has changed.  This was the room with 3 different ceilings.  By tearing them all out, we've gained almost 18" of ceiling height.  And we got rid of the odd glider window and are replacing it was an antique one which will look so much better.

Look at the difference in the kitchen.  We opened up the wall between the kitchen and dining room, to enable a big, open living space.  The result is pretty amazing - oh, and we moved the awkward refrigerator to the other side of the kitchen.

Upstairs there are similar changes.  This hallway is so light and bright now!

 The new windows and bright white walls are making a huge difference in this front bedroom.

Front bedroom is light and bright, thanks to south and west windows

And the primary suite is looking so much bigger with all the walls patched and painted!

With this big milestone complete, we're ready to move forward with flooring.  After that comes the fun stuff - all the beautiful trim work we have planned.  Stay tuned!

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Creating a Primary Suite in a 150 Year Old House

 We rarely get to create a 'modern' Primary Suite in an old house.  Bedrooms are typically small and cramped and if we manage to squeeze in an additional half bath, we congratulate ourselves. 😂

That's why this house is so unusual.  We started with a 4 bedroom, 1 bath home.  But the way the rooms were arranged, it was a perfect setup to swap one small bedroom to become a bathroom and closet.  

Before Floor Plan

To-Be Floor Plan

Plus, we had this funky little 8x8 foot room that will become a unique little sitting area (plus some nice storage).  It appears to have originally been a walk in closet from the hallway - but when we opened up the wall, we loved how it brought additional light into the bedroom and we decided it had to be part of the Primary Suite.

Look at how much it's changed!

It seems so much bigger, even though it's still a very small space.

It's so much fun to see it all coming together!  

But we had some nasty surprises.  The second floor bedrooms all have pine floors.  That's pretty typical - the first floor has the fancy woodwork and the second floor is much more basic.

However, when we tore up the carpets in the newly opened spaces, we discovered the pine floors were in bad shape - and because we were incorporating multiple rooms, it presented a lot of challenges to try and piecemeal the flooring.

So we made the difficult decision to install new flooring in the hallway and primary suite.  It will certainly be nice to unify the spaces, but I'm still sad to say goodbye to the 150 year old floors.

The space is coming together!  Can you start to see how it will look?

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Paint Colors for the Maison Mansard

There have been so many questions about the paint colors for the Maison Mansard, so I thought I’d share a bit about the process I used to choose them.

 

Photo: Restoring Your Historic House, Scott Hanson

Victorians liked color for their exteriors.  The early victorian period typically had custom mixed colors, but towards the end of the 19^th century pre-mixed colors started to become available.  Scott Hanson of Restoring Your Historic House has shared this color swatch from an early paint company in Portland, Maine.  And I used it as inspiration for our Second Empire Home.

 

But it was a little tricky because I wanted to use pre-painted siding.  I choose LP’s Smartside smooth finish for two reasons - 1) smooth siding is a more historically accurate look and 2) it won’t need painting for 5-10 years.  That makes it much easier for the future homeowner.

 

But that meant I had to do the body of the house in one of their predefined colors.  That was a bit limiting, since many of these colors were very ‘modern’ looking and didn’t really work with an old house.  I also wanted to pick a lighter shade, because I’ve learned that mansards typically had siding a darker shade than the main house.  And finally, the houses on either side are gold/buff/yellow shades and I didn’t want 3 houses in a row to be similar colors.

 

So, I choose the lightest blue color – called Summit Blue.  There aren’t a lot of blue houses on the street, and it will allow us to use a darker blue for the trim.  

But then I needed to find a couple of accent colors, to highlight all the trim work we installed.  After lots and lots and lots of experimentation, I choose a dark green and a bold gold.  They’re also on the Portland Paint company’s paint chips (although why would anyone call a paint color Drab???  This was obviously before marketing departments got involved with paint color names!)  Is it historically accurate?  Who knows? Because the house was moved in 1960 and we couldn’t find any good photos, figuring out the original color wasn't possible.  But I’m really pleased with the combo and it seems to compliment all the woodwork trim that we included.

So here are a few photos with the color combinations.

There isn't a lot of the contrasting accent color on the house - but those little details really make the trim we've added stand out!  And we've gotten lots of compliments from folks as they've walked by and seen the color scheme come to life.  

It's hard to see in the photo, but all the soffits are painted the green accent color

 

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Some Days I Question My Sanity

When I stumbled across these antique balusters at Portland Architectural Salvage, I should have just kept going.  But no, I stopped and marveled at how fabulous these would look on the little front porch of the Maison Mansard.  And in a weak moment, I decided I was up to the challenge of stripping that old paint and restoring them.

I need my head examined.

This is our little front entry porch.  The existing railing isn't the right style for this home - these balusters will be so much better.

I spent the next 3 weeks painstakingly removing the paint.  I tried all the usual methods - chemicals, infrared heat, scraping, cursing.....😂. Cursing doesn't help with the paint, but makes me feel better. 

At last they were cleaned up enough to repaint and it was time to do some repair of the splits and chunks that were missing. 

Finally, I could start the repainting step.  The guys created a painting jig for me, that let me spin the balusters around as they got painted.  

I primed each one with a high quality oil based exterior primer

And then I faced the paint color challenge.  I've been to the paint store so many times, they chuckle when I walk through the door.  Picking paint colors for a Second Empire home has been a challenge for me.  But I appreciate that the Victorian aesthetic uses color to highlight architectural details.  

So I started trying different colors on different parts of the balusters.  We'll also use the color scheme on other details of the house, so getting it right is important.  I hated some of them....and started over.  

Why am I smiling?  I have so many balusters to paint!!!

At last, I came up with a combination I'm happy with.  I love that they don't look brand new.  They reflect the history of the past, which will be perfect on our 1880 house.  Now I just need to paint the next 15 of them!  Like I said, I need my head examined! 

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