Hair of the house that bit me....

Well, its been a little while since we made a post about the actual house.

We won our hearing to be considered a duplex.   We're just so relieved.  We're still a bit bitter about the fact that it's delayed our plans for 2 months, which means that we're doing the bulk of our work in the cold weather.  But it could have been worse, we could have been doing the bulk of this work in the cold after having LOST our status.  So there's always a bright side.

We've been doing some random things.

• We repaired a few concrete bits while the weather was still ok.  
• We worked on our fancy doorway.
• We fixed the large holes in the walls and spackled most of cracks and imperfections.  This takes a lot longer than you might think.
• We cut out the window between the bathroom and laundryroom and bought some wood to frame it out.
• We replaced the broken window on the back of the 'princess' room.(below).

The window that we replaced was a gas filled window where the outer panes had been broken - so it looked ok, but didnt have any insulating properties.  A replacement window would have been about $200, but we found this brand-new one at ReStore for $30.  Its woodgrain unlike the rest of the house, but there are no other windows in that room, so its looks just fine. 




We got cracking on the ceiling in the bathroom.  The ceiling had a large hole in it from a water leak which has since been fixed.   We thought about just doing a patch, but because the ceiling is plaster and our patch would be greenboard, the seams would be odd and the textures would be different.   So with Ryan's help we put in a crude patch to make the surfaces level and then re-drywalled the entire ceiling.

We then took some 1/4" drywall and re-walled the back wall you see in the photo with the big chunk missing.   1/4" drywall is our new friend.  There are quite a few spots in this house where the walls are damaged, and using the 1/4" goes over and makes a nice smooth resurfacing of even the worst wall. 

Taking apart some parts of the house, we found some cool things.  In fixing the door we found the original lock still inside the door, with a stamp on it from 1862.  Also, in doing our wall repairs, we had to take out some more of the plaster from the walls to make a good shape for the patch, and found a some human hair.   It was quite common back in the 1800s to mix hair with the plaster to make it stronger, so people would go to the barber and take the old hair and mix it in.   I found a website of a guy who was able to find about 12 different colors of hair while restoring his house from 1875.