Bamboo floors

Finally, after lots of messing around with wiring, John was able to get back to the new floors in the bedrooms. I haven't taken many pictures yet. These are from October. This is the master bedroom; the same flooring is in the other two bedrooms and will eventually be in the hallway as well. We're really happy with it. The color is great, and it works better in this old house than we thought. I had been slightly concerned that bamboo flooring might seem too modern for a victorian house, but then I decided that really, it's my house and I'll have bamboo floors if I want them, and if the next owner of this house doesn't like them, let them tear them out!

Unexpected wiring

These pictures are actually from August. All of our plans got completely screwed up when John tried installing the new flooring. He plugged in the air compressor and it blew a fuse. Further investigation revealed that the entire second floor, the attic, half of the basement, the ceiling light in the dining room, and one or two outlets on the first floor were all on the same breaker. Not good.

So here's a somewhat unflattering picture of me swinging a hammer like a girl. That's where we pulled the new wiring up from the basement. The new flooring was on hold while John and his dad rewired the entire second floor.





We ended up with a lot of holes in our walls, running from outlets, to switch plates, to ceiling fixtures. It messed up the whole house. In fact, I'm still cleaning up from this "project," which is still on-going -- the attic still has no electricity, and the outlets on the first floor that were tied into this circuit are still non-functioning. The second floor is mostly done, but there's still some detail plaster work and then paint.

The Attic

My great uncle asked about the attic, and I realized that I so far haven't even mentioned it. It's probably not what you'd expect. The previous owner did a lot of work to the attic, and the carpeting was installed right before we looked at the house.

The attic is very fresh, clean, lots of light. There are two rooms; the picture is of the large room and then there is a very narrow room on the other side of the house which is being used as "art storage." The big room is going to be my office/studio once the electicity has been updated.

When we looked at the house, we were feeling pretty good about it as we looked through the rooms. When we got to the attic, I knew it was my house. Not just because it's a great space, but for the views. The house is situated on top of a hill in the Lawrenceville section of Pittsburgh. There are two windows in the attic, one facing north towards Troy Hill and the Allegheny River, the other looks south at the Hill district, but if you look to the right you get a tiny glimpse of the top of some of the skyscrapers downtown. If you didn't already know this about me, I am obsessed with weather, and from my new vantage point I have fantastic views of approaching storms.

These two images are from the north window, taken last night as a terrific storm came through. That's my chimney. The rooftops are mostly residences in Lawrenceville; the large building on the right is a retirement home.

Here's the south view. Not as impressive. But if you look carefully above the large roof you can see two little gray rectangles - one is the Mellon building, the other is the US Steel building.

So, to answer my uncle's questions, there were no old treasures in the attic. However, in the front bedroom we found the old fireplace hearth under the carpet, with some newspaper glued to it from 1934. This headline was particularly amusing.

The Floors

So here are the long-awaited photos of the completed floor. These were taken right after we finished the polyurethane but before we cleaned, so there's still some dusty footprints and such, but you get the idea.


This one is looking from the living room to the dining room.
That's the living room. Here's some of the hallway. I suck at this stupid blog website so if this page looks dumb it's because I don't care enough to learn how to do HTML good and proper.



The photos don't quite do the floors justice. For pine, they came out very dark with a hint of red in them. They look more like cherry than pine. They're a little uneven and distressed-looking, but we like them that way. Kind of unusual and a little funky.

Upstairs

A few images of the upstairs. Nothing too exciting. Here's the "master bedroom," which we chose for our room because it is at the back of the house and has the biggest closet. Drawbacks - this is the only room in the house that doesn't have the original woodwork, and is very far away from the one and only bathroom. It is, however, very private.




Here's a few looking from the front bedroom (future guest room), into the middle bedroom (future music room), with our bedroom through that last doorway.





This is the long, long hallway that runs from the top of the stairs to the very small, ugly bathroom. It might not be apparent from these photos, but the floors in the upstairs aren't worth refinishing, unfortunately. The master bedroom has a bunch of bad boards and boards that have been replaced with what appears to be pieces cut from furniture, the music room has linoleum and roofing felt glued down so thick it could survive an atomic bomb, and the hallway would be lovely refinished but sanding around the railing would be a bigger pain in the ass then we're willing to deal with. So it's new floors for the upstairs. These pictures are from about 6 weeks ago. We've moved in since then, but haven't really unpacked anything for the 2nd floor that we didn't have to. You pretty much need to wear shoes at all times (I keep flip flops by the bed for middle-of-the-night bathroom trips) unless you're John, in which case you bitch about the occassional splinter. We've already ordered the flooring - bamboo from Artemis, which should arrive any day now.

Another flooring challenge awaits in the two stair wells.

The top photo is the front staircase, which will probably be painted and have a carpet runner installed. John has a pretty wild idea for the paint job on the external wall; he's calling it "deconstructed victorian." I'll let that remain a mystery for now. The bottom photo is the back staircase, leading into the kitchen. There's a door to the outside directly at the bottom of the stairs. That crap on the walls is sheets of styrofoam that the previous owner was using as insulation. There's some gorgeous (read that sarcastically) linoleum on the top landing. Our bedroom is through the doorway on the right. This staircase is pretty low-priority, but it needs some basic clean up for now, and a light might be nice.

Work in progess

So here's the hallway after the carpet was removed. There's something on the floor here that we thought was linoleum, but someone on the Old House Web suggested it could be oil cloth, and I think they may be right.

At first we thought we'd have to refloor over this stuff, but it turns out it was held down with a water-soluable adhesive. So after much scrubbing, and some really foul-smelling adhesive and old paper, we unearthed the pine floors. We'll keep that scrap of the old flooring though. Just for fun.

All of the floors have been a lot of work. They weren't in the greatest of condition when we got the carpet out. There was an old paint border around the rooms that proved to be rather stubborn. But about a dozen trips to Home Depot and an incalculable amount of sandpaper and beer later, the floors are looking good. Here's before sanding:

Tonight we'll start polyurethane.

You can see here that John's demolished the hearth, and we found the original hearth stone underneath. Yes, the wood bricks are still there. They'll have to wait.

How about the inside?

Here's a few interior shots.

This is the downstairs hallway. Lots of work to be done here. Bad carpet, bad panelling, bad drop ceiling, bad stupid light fixture. Lovely radiator, though, and great curved wall. The detail work below the stairs is pretty nice, but we're not sure what we'll do with it. Probably strip it, but not sure how we'd refinish or paint it.

Here's the living room. Those bricks are very shiny wood. They'll eventually go away, as will the inappropriate black tile hearth. And whatever the hell that thing is above the windows.

These posts are all kind of out of order. Below I tell you about work we've already done, now I'm giving you images of what it looked like before. Give me a break, it's been a busy month. I've got work in progress photos to post but I think I need to go back and resize all of my images because they take 80 days to upload.

This is what the outside of the house looks like. Thought I'd finally post a pic of it.

Phase 1 - the floors

Working on a house is pretty time consuming. I had really intended to keep a really updated log of everything we're doing, but time has been short these days.

All of the horrible carpet was removed, and we decided to refinish the original pine floors in the living room and dining room. We encountered some resistant linoleum in the hallway, and contemplated just putting new flooring over it, but good taste has prevailed and we're going to do our best to strip the linoleum this weekend.

John has also demolished the highly inappropriate hearth that was constructed by the previous owner. She had built up a wood frame and put black ceramic tile on it. She did a decent job, but it just looked stupid next to the old mantle. Someday when I get around to posting pictures on here this will all make more sense.

The stairs are going to need some real work. We've got old adhesive to remove, and a small repair on a sinking step. We think we'll probably end up repainting the stairs themselves and getting a carpet runner for them, even though that's not my favorite look, but it would be easier for walking on and less noisy. And less paint stripping. The woodwork below the stairs, as well as the banister and the spindles, may be getting stripped, but we're not really thinking too much about that until we get these floors done.

The living room also has these stupid wood "brick" tiles on two walls that we'd like to remove. If I have my way, they'll be gone and the room painted before we move in, but we're down to 3 weeks so I bet that I'll be disappointed. We also have to repaint the original hearth stones on the first floor because they look pretty bad right now. And replace pretty much every exterior door on the house. And get a mailbox.

It's ours

So we had our closing and are now the proud owners of a c.1880 Pittsburgh rowhouse. The carpet has been ripped out and we're almost ready to refinish the pine floors, but the downstairs hallway and one of the bedrooms won't be able to be refinished. Thinking about cork in the bedroom, which will be the music room, and considering tile for the hallway.

I don't have a picture of the front of the house! And I have tried and tried to pull it from the tax assessment website and haven't had any luck. This link may or may not work:
http://images.county.allegheny.pa.us/CLTcgi2/webimage.dbw?

In the beginning, there was paperwork

I've never signed my name so many times in my life. I'm sure everyone who buys a house says that. About half-way through the process of signing, I started getting confused - after 6 years of marriage I slipped and started writing my maiden name, something that hasn't happened since year one. But I was a good mortgage applicant; I really did attempt to read almost everything that was put in front of me to ensure I wasn't about to make some egregious error.

We did the home inspection yesterday. The report from the inspector has already arrived, and we've passed it along to our Realtor. Let the negotiations begin!