In preparation for baby Thomas's arrival, we recently renovated one of the bedrooms for our older son, Matthew, to move into. We were fortunate to be able to hire a contractor to do most of the work, but I made sure to stay involved.
I need to be better about taking pictures during future projects - I don't have many before/during pictures. Here's one of how it looked when we took possession of the house last year:
The floor color is not a trick of the light - if anything, it was greener than it appears in this photo. That was the only room to have that color. We had all of the floors refinished before we moved in, and they were able to sand off the stain (apparently they gummed up quite a few sanding pads/belts in the process). The radiator was powder-coated with the rest of the visible radiators in the house.
The POs of this house should have never been allowed near a paintbrush. When the crown molding, which also functions as picture rail, was last painted, they painted right over a picture hook instead of removing it. A can of exterior trim paint in the basement was watered down to the point of being unusable (which is scary - if the whole house was painted using paint thinned that much, I'm going to have to move up my timeline for repainting the exterior).
We decided to have the wallpaper stripped, as well as stripping the paint off of all of the trim. The trim was stained to match the doors, which have never been painted. The picture rail was removed to be stripped at the contractor's shop (it was the only trim to have lead paint, according to an earlier lead inspection we had done), and it was reinstalled slightly further from the ceiling to allow picture hooks to hook on more easily.
The windows were also fully restored, and I made sure to be more involved in this part of the project. I built a steambox to soften the putty for deglazing. This worked quite well, though this caused a problem with one sash, where the meeting rail warped. This sash has not been protected by a storm window (the storm must have been lost/damaged some time in the past 97 years), so the wood was more weathered both from more exterior exposure and higher interior condensation; therefore, it absorbed more water than the other sashes. The contractor fixed the problem by replacing the meeting rail with new wood.
Two panes of glass were broken: One of the smaller upper panes was broken during deglazing, and the contractor used a spare piece of wavy glass he had laying around to replace it. A lower pane was also broken during reglazing - it was thinner than the rest of the panes (it must have been an early repair, as it was still wavy), and therefore more fragile. The contractor found decaying donor sashes at a local salvage yard to harvest the glass - the first attempt at replacement resulted in another broken pane, while the second was thicker glass and worked well.
The wood was treated with 50/50 boiled linseed oil & turpentine. The glass was reglazed using Sarco putty. The exterior received oil primer and acrylic latex topcoat, while the interior received the same stain and finish that was used on the trim.
We also installed interlocking metal weatherstripping to weatherize the windows. The contractor rigged up router jigs to make the necessary cuts; he left the jigs and bits for me at the end of the project, so I can use them when I do future restorations on my own (I've left strong hints with my family that I'd greatly appreciate receiving a Porter Cable router for my upcoming birthday
). We re-roped the windows using Samson Red Spot cord.
Other miscellaneous changes included brown outlets with brass cover plates to blend in with the wood trim, and a light fixture we bought from an antique store to replace the bare-bulb fixture that was there previously.
Here are some after shots:
I'm very pleased with how it turned out. While I didn't have the time to do all of the work, I made sure to be involved with at least some of each step of the window restoration, in order to have a chance to try it while being supervised by someone with experience.
Thanks especially to Jade for all of her advice - I bounced quite a few questions off of her during the past few months - as well as for sending me a tub of Sarco.
and long, long ago: