Better times and make-overs from the past

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The days have turned into weeks and now months as I sit here waiting for any labor help with good references to catch up on their backlogs. It's hard to believe that there is a severe recession upon us but perhaps those people with a good work ethic, skill and pride in their work will never run out of work, no matter what.

Terry and I had accomplished some wonderful make-overs together in the past and although he would say "You are the mechanic, the visionary, the carpenter - I am just the brawn so hand me that wrecking bar and tell me when to stop", he had developed so many skills and a laudable finesse over the years we were together. He was truly a man who could have mastered anything he set his mind to, an impossible act to follow when I look for hired help now. It doesn't help that the few times when we contracted out a task, we often ended up doing it over again ourselves after paying shamelessly high amounts for very shoddy work.

So we'll look back at brighter times; I will take you for a tour of our last project in the home we sold to move to NM. It's a warm and quiet Sunday here and I'm in the mood to wander back into very satisfying memories.

Below is the dining room of the old place as it was when we first moved in. It was a lifeless room done in the long-faded pop culture flavors of the 70s. Neither of us spent much time in there, just threw in some antiques to get them out of the unheated barn really.
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The four soul-less Anderson windows had always bothered me. I was inclined to more interesting fenestration, especially in a 100 year old house as this one was. With this modern arrangement, all I saw was four lash-less glaring eyeballs staring back at me. And while pricey barn board may still have its comfortable place, I prefer it where it belongs ... outside, on an old barn.

Oddly enough though, it was that plastic-bumpered metal spiral staircase on the left of this photo that initiated a make-over after an unsettling incident which could have claimed my life except for the help of strong unseen hands. Then, after hearing stories from the original owner about greasing the heads of small children who had become lodged in the iron balusters, it seemed a good idea to eliminate this ugly hazard once and for all.
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Since we both had a great fondness for Medieval, Gothic and Renaissance styles, we decided that our last room make-over would be a fun and whimsical exercise ... but done on a shoestring budget as usual. Oddly enough, as soon as we decided to do it, suitable furniture, lighting and accessories started to show up at yard sales and on serious retail clearance so I was already having a blast before it had even begun.
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Above: Here is the same room view as the first but after we finished the project.

The project started with Terry carefully removing the fake box beams from the ceiling and the barn board from the walls. Then he cut and hung drywall over the exposed stud walls and I taped and mudded the seams. I chose a Ralph Lauren crackle finish in claret over gold, broken up by rectangular panels of solid gold metallic latex paint. There are much better quality metallic latex paints available now but I was stuck with Lauren's product at the time. It had so little pigment for coverage that I had to resort to scanning a sample of that gold and have them mix up a flat, solid color to use as a base first. That saved many, many applications of the thin and expensive metallic paint later.

Once the entirety of walls had been coated in the opaque base and then with the metallic gold, I marked off sections to be left as gold panels and applied the crackle-effect medium to the rest. Drying time and thickness on the crackle base coat was critical before applying the top coat of claret paint - OMG, I had never been so pressed and stressed with a paint job in my life - the one armed paper-hanger was blessed by comparison!

We decided to go with a textured wallpaper on the ceiling. As someone with that experience under his belt once said "Hanging wallpaper on a ceiling is the ultimate test of team work and ANY relationship!" As with many challenges, amazingly, we survived it in our own odd way and went on to paint it in a flat grocery bag beige but Terry came into his own with the final touches. With his six and a half feet of height, he was able to apply metallic gold to the raised highlights with a hard roller without the aid of any ladder or milk crate. The same task would have taken me three times as long by having to move around height aids, interrupted by frequent trips to the chiropractor for stirring up old whiplash injuries.

It's a shame that these textured wall coverings have all but disappeared now. They were the poor man's substitutes for the traditional Anaglypta and Lincrusta papers from eighty to one hundred years ago. These modern papers were also so much easier to work with since any traditional embossed papers could easily flatten out and stretch if you were not quick in setting them in place once they were wet. This new style was ingeniously made by applying a layer of thermally expanding foam on a flat sheet and very, very hard to mess up while applying. And all you needed was patience, imagination and a hard roller to create some incredible color effects. You could even paint the wall rolls and borders as they lay on a table before hanging them. I truly lament their decline.

Next, we installed full thickness solid oak flooring. Rather than hammer slam it in with nails as is the standard, we carefully pre-drilled each piece and used small-headed Roberts (square drive) screws to secure each piece to the floor. There wouldn't be any loosening and squeaking in OUR wood floors! I finished off the floor with a light golden oak oil stain and let it dry and harden a long time before the final urethane finish.
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Then I started on the wood work. I was determined to break up the look of the old windows into something that looked more like two smaller windows side by side. I made grills (faux muntin bars) for each glass panel and devised a larger frame separating the halves of each window. I band-sawed out Gothic ornaments for the corners of each and a friend sawed out opaque cathedral glass for each quatrefoil cut-out. All the woodwork would be made with off-the-rack pine lumber to keep the price down. I had picked up a set of molding cutters for my table saw at a yard sale (dirt cheap!) and that supplied the incised cuts to take the lumber beyond the mundane.
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Later on, I added material window coverings for more softness and privacy. Walmart's reasonably priced crushed velvet stock at Christmas supplied the swags and I bought an airy gold metallic material to sew up into sheers.
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And, finally, the lethal spiral staircase was tamed! The now solid surrounding walls were nearly a foot taller (to preclude any absent-minded perching of posteriors) and the corners were cut-off to regain some floor space at this upper level. These solid walls were also a great place to hang more theme decor to ponder as you descended into 'the well'.

As I noted previously, between the oddities I had already amassed and was able to rework along with the items which showed up at yard sales, auctions and retail sales as we went, we were able to redo and furnish this room on the relative cheap. There really is something to be said for your own determination, patience and faith in your own abilities; if you don't count the labor of our own hands, we had less than $1,200 in the make-over of this room, from the materials in the room itself to all the fun furnishings and trappings.

Well, I guess the whole point of this tour was really to explain why I am so plagued by angst with the prospect of hiring outside labor to help me now. Oh, if only I had the strength and stamina I had thirty years ago, I would do it all by myself rather than tempt the unknown for disappointments.
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