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Living Room Restoration

18K views 34 replies 13 participants last post by  Angel241 
#1 · (Edited)
Living Room/House Restoration

Unfortunately for us, our prior room mate took off with any photos of our house we had when we first started demolition on it.

The living room of my 1918 schoolhouse was in the worst state of disrepair in the house when we started on everything. The entire room was covered in this awful brown panel board and had 8' dropped ceilings that were, literally, falling down.

On one day, while taking a break from pulling the panel board off, we were standing in the kitchen when suddenly we heard a large crash. Some of the drywall that was part of the ceiling fell down.

Out of curiosity, we thought we'd look and see what was above the dropped ceilings. We quickly found out that the whole (school)house had 12' ceilings and was covered in old tin tiles.

At that point was when we got the bright idea that we would restore the living room back to it's 12ft ceilings and restore some of the tin.
 
#2 ·
We quickly cut down the dropped ceiling so that we had beautiful 12ft ceilings. In the process, we decided we would build a bar between the living room and kitchen. The first problem came when we cut a board out and the kitchen ceiling began to sink. That problem was quickly fixed with a large supporting beam at the top of the bar.

Several of the other problems included the fact that the ceiling was in no way, shape, or form level and that the hardwood floors were covered in linoleum and tar paper.

The first part of the process was taking all the tin down so we could run a wire brush over each one of them to loosen any junk and then to prime them.

While doing that, we tried EVERYTHING known to man to get the tar off of the floor. This included heat, gasoline, kerosene, stripper, mineral spirits, paint thinner, etc... In the end it came down to good ol' elbow grease.
 

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#3 ·
The ceiling posed another huge challenge for us. After we had gotten the tin down and primed, we ran into a snag when we tried to hang it again. It turned out that we weren't going to be able to just tack it back up on the ceiling because NONE of it was level. The ceiling waved in every direction possible. We also had to replace a couple of sections of ceiling using plywood because they were rotted out.

We came up with the idea of using old lath board to shim each piece so that it was level on the ceiling. Since we had such a huge excess of lath lying around from tearing out plaster, it turned into the perfect stuff to use.
 

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#5 ·
Even after we had gotten all of that done, we still hadn't really come up with a way for us to get the tar paper off the hardwood floors. We had been under the impression that it was oak because after some scraping that's what was revealed. It later turned out that the floor is Douglas Fir with a few oak boards that were replaced where a wall had been originally.

We had talked about just covering over them, but that would be accepting defeat and we couldn't have that. We finally decided that we would waste some money (and sandpaper) and just sand all of the garbage off.

Several hundred dollars later, we had a nicely sanded floor, but it definitely took a while. By the end of it all, it took 20grit paper and basically burning the stuff off the floor to get it to come up.

We decided to go with Bona's Oil-based Polyurethane and sealer. We decided against staining the floor as it had some character to it we didn't want to cover up.
 

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#6 ·
Since we still needed the scaffolding in the living room to get the ceiling trim up as well as the lighting, we decided to do that after we got the floors rough sanded. It also gave us a chance to put the boards up on the front of the bar.

Any marks from the scaffolding was then sanded off using the big orbital for our final sanding.
 

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#7 ·
Here's the floor with the final coat of finish on and drying. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to get a photo of the room with all the trim before we moved furniture in. It's large trim to match what we put on the ceiling.

The worst room in the house was finally done!
 

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#11 · (Edited)
I honestly do not know of anyone that would be willing to tackle that project, Truly a huge amount of elbow grease and sweat equity on that room. Very nice for sure.

Gives me some encouragement to do more with my home project.

Again, very nicely done and well worth the effort.

A question about the chimney. How far does it extend beyond the ceiling? I've seen a few that took a turn because of changes in the structure over the years, Just wondering if that was original work or a change at some point in time. I'm guessing, from what I am looking at in the picture, that it's a change.
 
#12 ·
Thanks everyone. It has certainly been a lot of work, and actually took us 3 years to even get around to doing it because of how much work was going to be involved.

The chimney is original and extends from the basement all the way to the attic. It was taken off the roof years ago by the original owner of the house. Our 2nd chimney will have to come down as well as it is degrading terribly.

There's only one reason we've been able to come up with as to why the chimney turns like that. There are no inner supporting walls in the house. The supporting walls are all the outer walls, and because of that, in the attic are two HUGE beams that basically hold the entire house up. From what we can tell, they forgot about the beam in the attic when they began to put the chimney in because that's what it curves around.
 
#14 ·
I do have more photos. There's some in my gallery. Unfortunately, our ex-room mate took off with all of our pre-demolition photos of the house and photos of some of the things we had to do.

The people that owned the house before us never fixed anything properly. In the kitchen, whenever they got sick of the linoleum they put down, they would nail 3/4" plywood to the floor and lay some new stuff. There was about 8 layers of plywood we had to cut through in the kitchen just to find out we had to cut original floor out due to rot.

All the walls had at least 5 layers of wall paper and then they put this awful panel board over that. We tore almost every wall out due to the poor condition the plaster was in. Actually, one dividing wall in the house was actually cardboard.

None of the dropped ceilings are done properly, so it's probably a good thing that none of them are truly weight bearing.

I'm going to try and get those photos back from our old room mate in the next couple weeks so I can get them scanned in.
 
#16 ·
The latest portion of the house that we've been working on is the hallways, which just like the living room, were covered in this awful brown panel board that we couldn't stand. In the process, we also redid the front stairwell - restaining the wood work and refinishing the steps.

Please don't mind the clutter/mess - things have been very disorganized as we've had to shift things from room to room as we've worked.

Front Stairwell


Front Hallway - first bit of panelling removed


Side Hallway
 
#17 ·
We started off by pulling out any of the old panel board in which there was 3-4 layers on each wall ALL different colours. After that, we knocked out any remaining drywall and plaster/lath board that we came across.

Front Hall


Side Hallway - You can see the insulation that we had put in when we built the second bathroom 2 years ago
 
#18 ·
The drywalling of these hallways was a tad bit tricky because the NONE of the existing framework matched up to where it was level. Half the wall would be level, while the other half wouldn't be. We did our best to try and correct it, but it isn't perfect by any means.

Front hallway


Side Hallway
 
#19 ·
After that, we figured out what colour we were going to paint everything, and cleaned up the hardwood so we could figure out what we needed to do in repair before we sanded it.

The floors in each hallway had some considerable water damage unfortunately. We believe the front hallway had originally had a water fountain in it because there's a hole for plumbing in the floor as well as water damage around it. We had to replace a few boards there due to rot.
The side hallway had some rot from where the chimney was leaking at one point. We also replaced a couple boards there.

Front Hallway


Side hallway
 
#20 ·
The last several weeks has been an effort in getting the floors sanded and ready to be finished. The hardest part has been the front stairs. They are 100yr old Oak, 10' across in length, and are as solid as a rock. It's taken me every evening for the last 2.5 weeks to get the 8 stairs sanded enough to where we could finish them without it looking like garbage. We decided the risers were in too poor of shape to even refinish, so we partially sanded them, and will be painting them this next weekend.



This past weekend was spent getting the finish put down on the hallway floors as well as the treads of the front stairs. Everything seemed to turn out ok. We were worried about the stairs because there were a lot of marks left in them from the belt sander I had used that the orbital couldn't get knocked down. Surprisingly, it doesn't show too badly, and they turned out looking pretty nice.

Front Hallway


Side Hallway - this was a pain due to the direction the wood grain runs.


Side Hallway - kitchen view


Front Stairs - looking down
 
#22 ·
In the meantime - here's yet another project that we've almost finished lately.

The previous owners, for whatever reason, pulled the original doors off the front of the house and built this awful wall that you could practically knock down by pushing on it. It looked awful (and by no means provided any security), so we decided that we would do what we could to try and replicate what had been on the house originally. We also decided that we would fix up the front stoop with some nice stone on top and brick in the sides of it, but we havn't come close to finishing it yet.

Here's the front of the house as of last summer - it needs a lot of work too. Next summer, we'll probably scrap all the old siding and put new stuff up, since the paint on the aluminum is chalking terribly.


You can see in this photo what was originally on the house. The doors were on casters and would slide sideways, opening up the front stairwell. For practicality purposes, we didn't go with the casters.


Here's what we replaced the whole front wall with. I still need to get in there and refinish the window above to match.


Here's some of the stone that we got laid down on the inside of the doorway before we knocked the old wall out.


Now that the front doors are finished, we'll be getting the whole front porch done hopefully in the next few weeks before the cold sets in so we can get it all sealed up.
 
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