Well… we’ve been back at work on the house again. We started
by getting back to our bedroom restoration project. That has included, stripping
the floor, starting to research colors of paint for the original door, stripping
the door, and figuring out how to reframe the doorway to put the original door
back. However, there will be a future blog post about all of that. Instead we
are going to talk about how I convinced Jeremy to remove more carpet in the
house, even after he said absolutely not before.
This past weekend’s conversation went something like this:
Felicia: hmmm I wonder what the stairs look like under the
carpet.
Jeremy: I’ve wondered that too.
Felicia: We could find out you know…..
Jeremy: ummm…..
Felicia: Don’t you want to know?
Jeremy: I guess I do.
Felicia: Let’s do it….
Jeremy: OK I suppose we can.
Felicia: Hey lets also take the landing carpet out too. Then
we can see what the floor looks like and we have to do some work in that area
with reframing the door anyways.
Jeremy: You said the stairs…..
Felicia: But we could have that little area of the house be
historic again and just renovate that whole corner at once.
Jeremy: Ok that’ll work.
Felicia Well it’ll look dumb if we only do that part of the
hallway… we should do the whole hallway.
Jeremy: ummm…..
Felicia: *stares at him*
Jeremy: ummm… ok, but we are NOT doing the spare bedroom or my office.
Felicia: ok J
So, this conversation is how we ended up ripping out the carpet
on our stairs and our landing. We haven’t finished the hallway yet, but that’s
on the docket for the weekend.
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| Stairs Before |
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| Starting to remove the carpet! |
The stairs took us around 2.5 hours to remove the carpet and
pull out what must have been hundreds of staples. The stairs are currently red.
They are also the first time that we found the obvious use of cut nails in our
house.
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| Stairs without carpet |
However, after looking past the previous owner’s sloppy
painting, where he used the floor as a drop cloth… we realized that the stairs
were actually cream on the sides and raw wood in the middle originally. This made
us think that there may have been a runner on our stairs when the house was
first lived in. Then, we found several carpet tacks along the path the carpet runner
would have been laid. The carpet tacks are square tacks, another mid 19th
century feature.
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| 19th Century Carpet Tacks |
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| Line of carpet tack marks |
We do have 3 stairs that are cracked in half from 150 years
of wear and tear. We will do some research and then repair those. We are still
discussing what we will do with the stairs as far as painting vs runners.
Last night, we decided to tackle the landing floor. We pulled
the carpet up and discovered a few more carpet tacks. Looking close to where
those were found, we can see the lines of tiny holes where the carpet tacks
once went. It appears the stairway runner ran up the stairs and to the wall. We
also found a board that needs to be repaired and more paint from previous owner
thrown all over the floor.
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| Landing floor. This was originally a room, but a bathroom has been sectioned off. |
We were able to pull the red paint up to see the original brown color of the floor. The floor has only been painted twice, both during the 19th century we believe. Originally it was brown and then it was painted the red you see in the photos.
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| Brown and red paint |
We have decided to stay as true as possible to the original
color of the floor, so it will be painted brown. We are going to try to get the
original brown paint color matched and return it to the color it was originally,
but first we have to get rid of the globs of white paint and make some repairs
to the floor.
Friday or this weekend we will wrap up tearing out the rest
of the carpet in the hallway and get ready to move on to the next restoration
step for our bedroom/hallway.
What an adventure!
