The Historic District

Don't trim the lilac ! If you do that now you will be cutting off the growth that makes flowers. Lilacs should only be trimmed after they have bloomed.

Thank you for the warning I'm not trimming it as in shaping it-I just need to get a couple branches off that stick into the driveway. One already managed to scratch the paint on the mirror on someone's truck, but he was warned to watch for it, so...I just don't want it to "get" my car (or worse, someone coming to look at the house-nothing makes an impression like a big scratch in the side of the car lol).

Weeding in winter in a garden you've never seen in bloom is an experience as well. Luckily the gardens seem to be composed of mostly (common) older plants so I could tell what was supposed to be there-like the grape hyacinth which looks a LOT like grass.

Here are a couple pics of the plaster below the wallpaper in the stairwell and hall. Note the paint right by the trim-I guess they figured since it would be papered they didn't need to take care not to get the paint on the plaster when painting the trim! This confirms that at least here, the trim was painted-since the plaster itself was not, it was papered over.

eclecticcottage wrote:Here are a couple pics of the plaster below the wallpaper in the stairwell and hall. Note the paint right by the trim-I guess they figured since it would be papered they didn't need to take care not to get the paint on the plaster when painting the trim! This confirms that at least here, the trim was painted-since the plaster itself was not, it was papered over.

Looks like - as far as I can tell with all that yellowing - that the original colour was a nice off-white or very light cream. In my experience, hitting yellowed paint like that with some paint stripper but scraping it off after just a minute or so is likely to reveal something close to the original hue.

I might try that when I get some stripper to try to get the paint off of the brick.

Did this yesterday

That turned out well!

Thanks! Not done yet, but getting there. Still needs trim on the outside, beadboard in the cabinets and open "cubbies" on each side and shelves...since most of them were osb when I got it. Oh, and paint too. And some door repair since one is cracked...

The shelves above the fridge part are made from shelving that was in a cabinet in the upstairs kitchen that I saved aside. They don't fit tightly, but I am leaving the gaps for air circulation for the fridge since it will probably just be a standard fridge someone puts in there. I will paint the tops but leave the bottoms, because one had this stamp-I put it on the bottom so someone else can find it in the future. By dating the sink it's probably from the 60's.

More bead board has gone up in the downstairs bath (just one little wall left) and almost all of the wallpaper is off of the stairs/hallway. I randomly saw someone working on a house we looked at many years ago a couple days ago. It's an older greek revival (true) brick that had SERIOUS issues with the ell. In fact, the new owner took the ell off (one corner had literally crumbled to the point of seeing inside). Stopped to chat and it turns out he does drywall and plaster work (which is what he was doing there-he is not the owner, who I also met-she tried to find someone to save the ell but it was a lost cause). He confirmed that the hall and stairs should easily be savable as well as one ceiling I thought would be (the old kitchen bedroom). I hopefully now I have mud and tape help, as well as help with the plaster repair. I do still want to learn, but there's a laundry list of to-do's still hanging over my head and this will help move my time line along-especially since I have yet to hear back on the not-dead-yet-arts-and-craftsman mutt. Not knowing if I will be getting into (what appears to be) a truly epic project there makes me more interested in getting things done at the Bungalow! I might have found trim to replace the missing pieces too. Which is because I wasn't really sure what I was going to do unless I robbed peter to pay paul by taking it of the insides of the closets upstairs and piecing it together. Which still might be the answer since I haven't heard back on the trim I found and I can't completely tell by what I could see if it's a close enough match or not.

Hooray for finding craftsfolk. Hopefully now you can watch his progress and that will give you more confidence to use him in future projects.

Nice find on the trim! That will be a huge relief when get the call back.

Is the Greek Revival the farm you showed pictures of earlier? The one with the scary settling?