Shadows of the past

The front porch ceiling was once a vivid blue, as well as a more muted green. This is what I learned from spending the day stripping the original beadboard with the infrared paint remover.

Sky blue on porch ceilings is traditional, but this is a richer hue. And the green—well, someone who owned this house adored green; it pops up everywhere. The worst thing about stripping this stuff is all the staples from the installation of the aluminum that covered it for decades. I’m just really glad we decided to take this down. Stripping the roof base, which for obvious reasons needs to stay in place, is plenty of performance art for the neighbors. It’s a relief to be able to retreat to the backyard with a pair of sawhorses and a stack of beadboard and scrape away the day.

Rebuilding blocks

Those of you who have been following along know that certain parts of our front porch were scrapped or chopped down. Well, after trying and failing to find a local woodworking shop that would make reproductions for us, we tried a Michigan outfit, J.J Wohlfert’s. They were, somewhat sadly, faster and easier to work with than the locals. And they made us our 2 missing blocks for only $30 each and in only a few weeks. Here are front and side shots of our savaged old trim and the new reproductions.

I’m pretty pleased. The bottom portions are not as long as the originals, and I’m a little concerned about that. But we sent drawings of the original dimensions, and I didn’t double-check them, so there could be many reasons why the repros are not completely exact. And frankly, evolution is a respectable part of old-house renovation. If these end up looking appropriate in their new home, then everything is good even if they are not perfect to millimeters.

Current conundrum

As summer sinks below the horizon and the cold times begin their sneaky but inescapable creep, I’ve really got to figure out what to do about the front door surround. Figuring out how to replace the missing door itself is simply too much, so I’m putting that off for some distant future. But I’ve been moving ever so slowly through trying to restore what the front door region once looked like. This is what’s been facing the street for many years now:

Obviously, that’s a replacement door, and the right side is a cover-up.

Looking at the inside, I had a naive hope that the cover-up hid a narrow door that could be opened sometimes and latched other times. Though really, that’s not what the inside suggests. I guess I hoped that middle piece of wood was added later. But the alligatoring of the shellac is consistent with the rest of the wood trim.

When we started removing the aluminum cover-up outside, here’s what we found, which indicates it was not two doors but a door and a stationary light—and also something chopped off above:

After removing all the aluminum, we have this:

So some detail was chopped off at the top and the bottom of the wood divider.

Having worked on an old house with old paint and old problems for 8 years now, I understand the urge to cover it up and have everything seem nice. But why oh why couldn’t they have simply covered up? Wasn’t it more difficult to chop off than to cover up? I mean, was it ornate and huge in profile? I really doubt it, considering the rest of the house. Now I need to figure out what’s appropriate for the area and determine how I can add it. Any ideas? I need to dig through my 1910 Sears catalog.

So I’ve stripped off all the old paint and found oak underneath:

It took a few weeks to strip all the paint. It was kind of easy because the bottom coat seems to have been shellac. But also kind of hard because the finish was very weathered and had been painted over with brown paint and several coats of other colors, some of them very resistant to removal. Now I am working on how to showcase and preserve the oak for Chicago weather.

And I still have to pry off all the old caulk. But wow it’s going to look so much better when I’m done—in 7 years or so …

Crowded at the table

As if we needed any more excuses to eat out or order in, this is the state of my kitchen these days.

It’s been sacrificed to support the shellac work on the living room baseboards. Yum, old pine.

We can barely walk through the living room itself because the 12-foot sections are set up in there, along with the closet door. I’m very excited to finally be at this stage of the project, with all the paint removal just a sticky, smoldering memory.