Our First Christmas

I love everything about Christmas in an old house.  The real, old fireplace where we can hang our stockings or start a fire.  Lighting up the big front porch with old-school Christmas lights, and seeing people drive down the old brick street looking at them.  Nine-foot ceilings and actual space to put the tree. Winding garland on the staircase.

Figuring out the tree stand.  And our old boy, Relay, who was 12 in this photo. We miss him all the time!

Everybody helps!

Sillies.

Love!

Just needs some snow.

Not bad for our first try, and using only the decorations that came with us.

Playing outside instead of going to bed.

Christmas morning!

Christmas mess.

Playing football.

Next up....Alaina's room

I couldn't find a true "before" picture of Alaina's bedroom.  But, like most of the rooms, it was completely wallpapered in a country Americana theme.  Not very appealing to a 9-year-old girl.  She shared a bedroom with her brother in our former house, so she was really excited to have her own room done the way she wanted it.  So I promised her we would work on hers first.  Having some experience now after working on the dining room and bathroom, I did most of the wallpaper removal in my spare time.  My Dad still did all of the plaster repair, though, for this room too.  He spent 3 or 4 days mudding and sanding, with about a day in between the three or so applications to let it dry.  Then, Mom and I painted the whole room in a day while Alaina was in school.  We cleaned up everything and hung her cute new curtains before she got home.  She was so excited :)  Of course, now two years later it's pretty much a cluttered pre-teen mess unless I make her clean, but it was super cute while it lasted!

I had snapped these quick photos before we closed on the house.  Alaina chose the room on the right.  You can kind of see the old wallpaper pattern.  The upstairs floors are all beautifully refinished.  Alaina's room and the foyer both need the quarter round replaced, which is probably stored in the shed out back from the days when they most likely had carpet in the rooms.

After photo.

Our first project....The Dining Room

One of the things I had wished I had in our old house was a dining room.  So almost immediately after moving in, I volunteered to host Thanksgiving dinner for my family.  Which was to be my incentive to get some work done on it in the next 3 months.  Here's a couple pictures from the week we moved in:

You can see the damaged wallpaper under the window and above the air vent.  The built-in china cabinet also had a broken piece of leaded glass, which my mom had repaired for me for my birthday :)

Seven windows on the first floor have those beautiful leaded glass windows.

Breakfast in Box Land the morning after we moved in!

My goals for this room were to remove the wallpaper, repair the plaster as needed, and then to paint the walls below the plate rail and re-wallpaper the top portion above the plate rail.  Buy new curtains.  Someday when the carpets wear out I will take them out and refinish the hardwood floors underneath.

So, with a LOT of help from my mom, we started by peeling/scraping off the plaid, country-style wallpaper from the top portion of the room.  As you can see in the following photos, we found some interesting wallpaper underneath!  If it's not original to the house, I doubt it's newer than the 20s or 30s.  There was some aqua-green paint behind it -- I've since found the same color behind paper in the downstairs bathroom (former closet, I believe).  Anyways, this gold and white scenery wallpaper wasn't going anywhere.  It's super thin and completely adhered to the wall, so we left it and papered over it.  Which made me kind of happy knowing it was re-buried for someone else to find someday!

Next we had to tackle the bottom portion of the room.  My dad was going to be doing all the plaster repair for this room, and my mom and I were going to be trying to get the old wallpaper off.  I'm not sure I can even describe this wallpaper properly.  It was several layers thick -- the back was like thick cardboard, and the textured top layer was almost plastic-like.  We tried using just spray bottles with water and scrapers, but found we were having to scrape an area 2 or 3 times to get all the layers off.  We ended up renting a wallpaper steamer, and it was still a lot of work, but made the job go a lot faster.

This was my  mom before we gave up and rented a steamer.

It appears the wallpaper has been painted at least 3 times -- gold, dark burgundy, and then white.

Found at least one section of the room with this paper underneath.

Larger view.

What a mess!  This was the only section of wall that had the sparkly flower wallpaper underneath, though.

Found another style of wallpaper underneath in a different section of the room.

Finally decided to rent a steamer for a day.  Much faster and less frustrating.  My awesome mom!

We used blue painter's tape on the woodwork just to keep a lot of the steamy water off of it.  You can see some of the damaged plaster next to the vent, which is where the wallpaper was also crumbling.

Coming along.  Several applications of drywall mud later, the walls are much smoother.

Ready to paint and wallpaper!

Done!

While we were at it, I went ahead and painted the living room too, since I was using the same color and they are adjoining rooms.  The ceiling in the living room has several cracks in the plaster and will need extra work at some point, so I only painted the walls for now. 

And then, about a week before Thanksgiving, I started picking at the wallpaper in the downstairs bathroom, and I couldn't help myself and ended up peeling the whole room.  Matt came home from school and found me on a ladder; not that he was at all surprised.  So now I HAD to do the bathroom before Thanksgiving too!

I don't think I have a before picture of the bathroom.  It had cows on the wallpaper, and it smelled musty and was peeling around the edges.  And it stared at me while I was trying to use the bathroom.

Two of the four walls had drywall underneath instead of plaster, but no one had ever primed them, so it was a disaster trying to take wallpaper off without damaging the drywall.  My dad ended up skimming the whole wall, basically, before we could paint it.

Here's that aqua-green paint again, on the 2 plaster walls.

With a little luck, we made it to Thanksgiving, although I was painting the bathroom 2 days beforehand.  The warmer paint color really brings out the woodgrains all around the rooms.

My first Thanksgiving table.

My 93-year-old Grandpa Petersen even made it to our dinner.  What an honor!  This was our last 4-generation photo with him, my dad, me, and my youngest daughter, as he passed away the following spring :(  Miss you, Grandpa.

A Little History on Our House

In August 2013, we moved into this awesome 1915 Foursquare.  Until then, I had only lived in 1970s ranches, and I've always secretly wanted to own a really old house.  I instantly fell in love with all the original, UNPAINTED woodwork, the squeaky hardwood floors, the big front porch with hooks for a porch swing, the leaded glass windows, the four-story laundry chute, and the fact that I'd have a real dining room, and both front and back entryways.  The fourth bedroom didn't hurt, either.  Here is a photo from the day we closed on the house, with 2 of my kids in the attic windows:

The brick columns on the corners and adjacent to the stairs are original, but I was told the concrete columns are not.  The originals were probably wooden.  The front door is original and awesome.  The garage is obviously not original, but there is a little one-car garage out back that you can see in the left side of the picture.  I believe there is wood siding hiding under the vinyl siding, but for now I'm not hating the low-maintenance exterior.  My last house was cedar siding, and with small children it was a lot to keep up with.  All the windows appear to be original, with the exception of a kitchen window that was probably replaced some time in the 80s.  I spent several weeks this fall watching YouTube videos and learning how to rehab old windows.  I worked on one, and plan to do several more this summer, but more on that later.

Here's a little bit of history that I've dug up in the last couple years on the history of the house.

The original owners were George O. and Zella Cox.  George was the manager of grain and coal sales at the local elevator.  I located all the previous owners by doing deed research at the county clerk's office.  Next, I found George's photo in a biography book at the library:

And a picture of Zella on Ancestry.com!  I believe she is standing in front of our porch, though the owner of the photo on Ancestry couldn't tell me for sure.

Found the following photo at the Gilman Historical Society.  Taken in 1873 from the cupola of the Mann mansion a couple blocks away.  Our house would eventually be built just behind and to the right of the white farmhouse in the photo.  The farmhouse still stands across the street, though the farm is long gone.

I'm still here!

My first post in 3+ years!  Yes, I had pretty much stopped using my blog for family photos after I started using Facebook more often.  I thought about deleting my blog, but I have been thinking of starting a blog/website for documenting my home improvement projects and historical research on this house we bought in 2013 (without annoying all my Facebook friends who don't find it interesting) so I think I'm going to try converting it for that use.  I'm still considering starting a whole new blog for my genealogical finds, but I think that needs more of a stationary (static?) website format to keep all the ancestors/surnames straightened out.  So we'll how this goes.  Stay tuned.