My New Old Plaster Walls

I've been plastering the walls downstairs and it's turned out really well. The walls were paneling, the kind that comes in 4 x 8 sheets and has grooves that supposedly simulate planks, not real paneling. I taped all the joints because cracks will form if you don't then used sheetrock mud, the kind that comes in a huge bucket, to fill the grooves. I troweled over this with more mud stippling it with a rag as I went to get the effect I wanted. Very time consuming but a cheap way to change an ugly wall.

I've hated this ceiling since the day I saw it and I finally took the plunge and took it down. I knew it wasn't a drop ceiling attached to a flimsy metal frame so it was a huge undertaking to get it down. The tiles were nailed to 1 x 3 pine boards that were nailed across the rafters. I spent days and days on top of a ladder with a crowbar.

Here's the huge beam I uncovered that runs the length of the house.

Everyone should have flourescent lights in the ceiling. Energy efficient.

The rafters turned out to be dirty so I spent more days on a ladder with a scrub brush. This picture is before they were cleaned. I wanted them exposed but now I can't decide if I want to clear coat them or paint them white.

No after picture yet because it's not in order yet, but soon. This is only about a third of the space I have to do anyway. At least I got started!

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No Minimalist Here Open House Party
Show and Tell Friday at My Romantic Home

Boss Says Let 'em Go

We're having a yard sale Friday and Saturday. I haven't had one in ten years so it's kind of a big deal to me. I've always had a hard time letting go of stuff. One thing I learned from my Mom & Dad is never throw anything away, you might need it some day. The other thing I learned is Food is Love, but that's another story.

Anyway, the time has come that I realize I will never need a green & orange quilt or a cow cookie jar or a box of crocheted doilies so time to clean house.

We used to be in the antique business. By antique business I mean we rented booths in different antique malls. We made pretty good money at it. Let me tell you being an antique dealer is the best job in the world. The mall handles the business, you spend all your time going to garage sales and estate sales and auctions. It's so much fun, like a treasure hunt all the time. It's addictive, like gambling, and bidding at an auction is such a rush. Little country auctions are the best because the regulars get to know each other and it's like a party with your friends every Saturday night. Anywhere you travel you look for out of the way shops and flea markets and this is your work. When we first started twenty years ago it was so easy to find things you could make a profit on but more and more people started doing it and competition drove wholesale prices up and then China started copying any kind of antique or collectible you could think of and it got hard to make enough to pay the rent. I miss it terribly.

So we don't do it anymore but we still have a lot of stuff, good and bad. The bad is the result of a lot of box lots bought at auction, like the green and orange quilt. I didn't want you to think I deliberatly picked that out. Unless you like green and orange in which case come and get it. $2.00. Third Street by the Railroad Tracks.

The Joys of Remodeling

The big news around here is that we did have the electrical work done and now we have outlets and a switch for the bathroom light in the bathroom! I keep showing this switch and the outlets in the living room to people but oddly enough no one seems as impressed as we are. The electrical work was done by Geno's Electrical in Oneonta and they were great, very conscientious and so nice, and I would highly recommend them if you need anything in that area.

We painted the walls in the bedroom last weekend. Of course the paint we so carefully picked out was wrong, wrong, wrong. I cried. It was supposed to be khaki but it was more like dark white. Luckily I had some other paint that I mixed with it and it turned out just right and as soon as I put another coat on the woodwork we can start moving stuff back in, probably tonight. I can't believe it might finally be done. I can't believe it took so long to do one room.

I've been feeling a little blue lately so I haven't been writing much. I think Winter has just gone on a little too long. Anyway, I haven't posted in a month so here's a picture to illustrate the posts I was gonna do but didn't. The daffodils bloomed and Spring is here. Yea! We got snow. Yea!

Let There Be Light!

I'm so excited. We finally got an actual electrician to come out to give us a price on adding some of that new-fangled e-lectricity upstairs! Not only did he come out, he showed up 10 minutes early! He said he would call back tonight with a price AND HE JUST DID! He could be the one!

About our electrical situation-here's what we have upstairs now: 4 outlets, all on the same circuit, and 4 overhead lights including the one in the bathroom, all controlled by one wall switch which is by the back door. That's it. We don't have any outlets in the living room which means if we entertain it's strictly by candlelight which has actually worked out pretty well so that's not all that bad. The refrigerator is downstairs which means I have a work triangle of approximately 74 feet. You know, you move in an old building and you just kinda get used to it's little quirks and hardly notice them anymore until, say, a guest asks where the bathroom light switch is and you reply it's down the hall by the back door.

We bought this place on an "as is" basis and didn't realize there was no electricity in the living room, which is about half the upstairs. There were plugs, turned out they been disconnected or something. They are in the ceiling so maybe that didn't work out as well as whoever put them in thought it would. I'm not sure how you would keep a plug in the socket - duct tape?

About the picture- I love these old kitschy plaster lamps and just thought I'd throw this picture in.

Faking It

Our house was originally just two big rooms, one upstairs and one down. When it was divided into rooms later they just used paneling, the kind that is one 4 x 8 sheet with grooves. Nothing could look less like real wood. But here's what we doing with it. We're taking the paneling down and sawing it into 6" strips and putting it back up going across the wall, with the back side out, and painting it. It looks just like old board walls that you see in farmhouses.Any nail holes or imperfections just make it look authentic. Here's a picture of the stairwell - you can not tell that it's not old boards.

I just wanted to share this in case there is anyone else out there faced with a lot of ugly paneled walls they'd like to do something with.

We're doing the same in the bedroom. Every year we say we are going to get the house finished by Christmas but so far the living room and bathroom are the only rooms that come close to being finished. But it's a new year so we're trying again. This time for sure. So in January we moved everything out of our bedroom, thinking it would only take about a week, two at the most, to varnish the floor (they've been stripped for about two years now), fix the walls and paint. So we painted the ceiling (painting beadboard is a project), varnished the floors, took the paneling down - and then we both got whatever bug is going around. The mattress is in the living room, the bed and other furniture is scattered around the house and it looks like it will stay that way for a while. I never get sick, why now?

When You're Wrong, You're Wrong; Or There's An Elephant In The Room

Let me begin by saying that we don't have a comfortable chair in the house and there's nothing in the budget for new furniture. So I saw this chair sitting in the driveway at a yard sale this weekend and it was really fat and comfy and the upholstery wasn't terrible and I thought I could slipcover it for that easy care rumpled look (I am not going to say shabby chic because that phrase is so overworked and makes me want to barf) so I bought it. JD went back with me to load it in the truck and I should have known I'd made a mistake when it filled up the truck bed. And he hated it. Then we had to open the double doors to get it in the house. No, I'm not going to leave it in front of the doors. Yes, that is a 50 pound pail of spackling sitting behind it. I need a photo stylist. That green sofa it's next to? that's a huge sofa. We can't even get it up the staircase. But this monster chair dwarfs it. I cannot imagine anything this chair would look right with. It's like a prop from Honey I Shrunk the Kids. It just didn't look that big sitting all by itself in the driveway. Now what do I do? Give it away and cut my losses or throw more money at it and buy material, possibly camouflage, for a slipcover? Can I find a place where it will be all by itself so it doesn't look quite so ridiculous? I do so need a comfortable chair.

Wild Roses

This is one of my few gardening successes. I think they've tapped into the septic tank. The first year we were here I dug up a couple of wild roses from the edge of a road and it's a good thing I did because they were sprayed with herbicide the next year and killed. These bloomed the second year but then the next three years they were struck with some kind of killer mildew that caused the buds to fall off, even with diligent spraying. Almost lost the flowers this year but then I tried Neem Oil, which is an organic product but still apparently deadly as it requires a hazmat suit, gloves and goggles to use, and managed to save them. Why is everything so hard? For Pete's Sake they're WILD roses.

Walking the Line

No, that's not me. I would never walk on the tracks. In fact, until I was about 8 years old I was scared to death of trains. If the car had to stop for a train I would lie down in the back seat and cover my head until it passed. JD took this picture of a photographer friend of his while they were waiting in the tunnel to get a shot of the train coming in. I don't think I would do that either.
Our little town grew up around the train station, which is long gone. But until the late 1960's you could still take the train to Birmingham. People around here could easily get to the city to shop, or visit friends, or go to school at one of the colleges. I think about that a lot because it sure would be nice to have that option now.
The passenger train stopped running and the interstate missed here by five miles and one by one the businesses closed. Most of the old buildings and the cotton gin and the gristmill were torn down. Now there's only one actual business in the city limits. But nobody moved away. Like in a lot of rural areas their families had been here since the area was settled, before Alabama was a state. Since the time Andrew Jackson was fighting the Indians.
So here we are today in this little town that isn't really a town anymore. But in a way it's like Mayberry (without any stores) because everybody knows everybody, or at least knows who they are. And who they're related to (everyone in some way). But people here are kind and friendly and we've never felt like outsiders. So we like it here a lot but I wish it looked more like a town.

The Old Rock Church

We had always said, "Wouldn't it be great to find an old church or something like that we could make into our house? Something in good condition that just needed mainly painting and decorating? A place where we could have lots of light and open space?" We forgot to add, "and not anywhere near a railroad track."

So, five years ago we saw this place for sale. It was perfect. Except for one thing - across the road is the railroad track. There's an open space there where the train station once stood. The train wouldn't be so bad but there's an intersection and they blow the horn repeatedly and let me tell you up close that horn is LOUD. So we thought about it for about a month then decided we would learn to live with it. Nothing is ever really perfect so since I'm an artist and needed studio space, JD builds custom furniture and needed shop space and the old post office next door came with it, and the price was really right, we bought it.

It was built in the 1920's as the Masonic Lodge. More recently it had been used as a church. Originally it was two big rooms, one upstairs and one downstairs. The Masons met downstairs and the Eastern Star met upstairs.There was no interior staircase, the ladies came in by the back stairs outside. The church added an interior staircase and divided the upstairs into three rooms, and added a bathroom and kitchen area, also upstairs. So we decided the upstairs would be our living area, our downtown loft so to speak, and I would have my studio downstairs, with lots of room left over for - well, just for room. Unfortunately, all my before pictures of the inside were lost in a tragic computer accident but here's the living room today.

All the pine floors were covered with commercial carpet which was glued down, all over. The glue couldn't be sanded off because it was too gummy and we didn't want to sand them with a floor sander anyway and lose all the patina. We wanted them to look old. We experimented with different solvents and found that plain old household ammonia would take the glue off with lots of patient scraping and scrubbing with hot water and a scrub brush. I think it took the better part of a year to clean the floors, working on a small area at a time. Of course all that hot water caused the wood to feel fuzzy so I sanded them by hand. With a sanding block. It really didn't take that long. I think I did it in a day. And afterwards we polyurethaned them and they didn't need stain, and we kept all the flaws and they look great. And OLD

I think that's enough for my first post. I wish I could have started this blog when we first moved here but we could only get dial-up plus I didn't know anything about blogs. I've enjoyed other people's so much I wanted to do one of my own about my life. I've had one about my painting for a few years but I wanted one where I could write about anything. So thanks for finding me and thank you AT&T for finally bringing DSL to our corner of the world.