Despite the fact that we will be heading out the door for vacation in a little under 8 hours, what are we doing tonight?  Not packing. Not cleaning house.  Noooo.  We're working on a post for all you housebloggers!  Hee hee! 

Here are the semi-final before & after photos that we have waited oh so long to post.  I say semi-final, because as we all know, there is no such thing as finishing a house like this.  Plus, we still have basically no window treatments.  And there are paint touchups to be done.  And so on.  You get the idea!  At any rate, here's how everything looks at the moment.

Here's Brian's office.  This room is so charming in person, with the hand-hewn beams (locust?), and the very wide planks on the floor.  Some of the floorboards are 20" wide!  This isn't actually a before & after shot since we didn't have a very good quality shot of what it looked like previously.  Oddly enough, even though this is obviously one of the oldest rooms in the house, it required far less work than many of the 1830s-1950s parts.  I guess they knew how to build 'em way back in the 18th century.

This shot is really a dramatic difference.  This is our dining room, much of which as you can see was previously painted in a truly vile shade of green.  Complementing that bilious trim color was a blue (!) wallpaper, which I industriously removed all by myself one night in a frenzy of scraping and tearing.  The walls underneath were in terrible shape, we changed all the crown molding for a lower profile, and all of the woodwork was heavily restored, though not taken down to bare wood.  Also, obviously we removed the radiators when we installed our Unico system, and that opened up the room beautifully.  This room is awaiting custom window treatments in a gold-based silk stripe, which will be gorgeous when they arrive.  We're doing a classic swag treatment with long jabots (cascades) for any of you who are into that sort of thing and might have an inkling of what I mean.

Ahhh.  The front door & transom saga.  Will any of us ever hear the end of it??  I doubt it   Never mind, it looks wonderful now.  It was really worth all the work Brian put into restoring that lovely transom (twice).   It's hard to tell, but that transom is actually held together with wood pegs, which leads us to believe that it's likely original to the 1740 portion of the house.  Naturally that meant the wood was about as hard as butter, so it took a very gentle touch.  The door, however, not so much.  We scraped and Peel-Awayed the daylights out of that thing!  We are very pleased with the result.

Also in the "this took a ton of work" category is the staircase.  The "before before" photo isn't in this post, though it's visible here.  As you can see, the stairs were totally glopped over with multiple thick coats of nasty oil paint, and covered with a decidedly more nasty runner that dated from roughly the Mesozoic Age.  God, was that thing filthy when we finally ripped it up!  It was nailed and stapled to the actual stair treads, which made for plenty of repair work, too.  This entire staircase was stripped twice (three times?  who can remember now) with Peel Away, and then hand-sanded with a Black & Decker Mouse sander and a palm sander for days and days and days.  Then we filled the holes where we could, and Brian repaired a lot of loose pieces and shimmed some of the newel posts as well.  The treads were then stained & polyurethaned and finally the kickplates and newel posts were painted.  Finally, we had a runner installed to help protect those soft pine treads from dog claws and human shoes.  We haven't quite decided what to do with the banister, if anything, because we hate to lose the patina of it, but it's really worn down to the bare wood in some places.  Still thinking about this. 

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the "stair curve" as well.  This was a truly gorgeous detail that had been utterly ruined by a previous owner.  Not sure WHY someone would cut off a beautiful carved wooden molding right in the middle of it, but they did.  Brian did one of the more impressive woodworking-type repairs I have ever seen, and hand-built a piece to help the curve "fade" back into the wall.  I think it came out beautifully and I was proud of him!

Another nominee for "that doesn't look all that different at first glance, but it is!" category...this is our living room.  There were bookcases there when we bought the house, but to call them cheesy is greatly overstating their value.  They were crappy, at best.  we had them ripped out, we tore out the radiators (three in that room!), and did a huge amount of restoration work to the living room.  Some more of the details are found in our March 12 post.  Here's the current state of our new bookcases, complete with a really beautiful set of leather-bound first editions that were a much-appreciated gift from Brian's Dad.  We love them!

(just noticed that we're still missing outlet covers along the floorboards. Heh)

And last but not least, this isn't a before & after shot, but it does nicely demonstrate many of our projects at once, and we think it's just a nice picture, so here it is....this was taken standing in the doorway of our living room, looking through the entry hall into the dining room.  It also nicely shows one of Brian's favorite recent acquisitions, a ca.1850 English barometer.