A Medieval Knight, a Horse, and a Dragon -- Our Latest Sconce Stripping Project

The last pair of original sconces that needed to be stripped and refinished at The Box House came from my mom's room. We think, because they sort of match the medieval theme of the living room electric fireplace, they originally came from there. Our guess is that they migrated to the bedroom when a previous owner removed the sconces and plastered over the electric boxes. But we'll never know for sure. What we do know is that it was a crime to have painted over them. Seriously, how ugly is this?

When we removed them from the wall, we revealed evidence of  half a dozen layers of paint, from mint green, tan, and chocolate brown to plain-old white. It's hard to imagine this room was painted dark brown, as it's at the back of the house, and quite dark to begin with, as the windows face north and there is only a five-foot gap between buildings. Talk about living in a cave. (Mom says she's come full circle—her childhood bedroom was mint green and chocolate brown.)

This was my most difficult paint stripping project to date. There were some absolutely beastly layers on here, including some kind of thick enamel paint that laughed at my attempts to remove it with the heavy-duty nasty stuff. Five strip-and-rinse cycles overall.

Here it is partway through the process; you can see traces of the red and blue polychrome and the emerging detail. And lots of horrible mint green.

Here's a side-by-side comparison of the finished sconce and the one that still needs to be stripped. Can you believe the difference? We decided not to re-polychrome them, at least for now. Mom's room is being painted lilac, and she wanted solid-colored light fixtures. I am, however, using two different shades of gold. It's kinda hard to tell from this picture, but there is a more coppery color in the background behind the knight, which makes him pop out. (Update: Ted just informed me that these were the pictures I took before I finished with the two-tone gold treatment, so don't strain your eyes trying to see the difference. The coppery gold is only on the crown in these pictures.)

The sconce even looks smaller without all the extra paint.

The (most-recent) previous owners' granddaughter told me the sconces had been covered in paint for as long as she could remember. The family had bought The Box House in the early sixties, so the rich detail of the metalwork has been hidden away for longer than I've been alive.

I absolutely love the dragon, and the little knight at the bottom supporting it all. I can't wait to finish painting Mom's room and get these back up on the wall.

Ripping Out the Ugly, Toxic Carpet

We tackled our first real project at the Box House yesterday: removing the carpet in all of the Floor 2 bedrooms. (There was no carpeting on floor one, thank goodness.) We narrowed down our search for floor finishing experts and have a team coming out later in the week to completely sand and refinish the floors upstairs and down, with the exception of the kitchens and bathrooms. To save money we decided to tear out the carpet ourselves.

We had visions of the entire project taking only a few hours for the three rooms. I had picked up The Black and Decker Complete Photo Guide to Home Improvement and it looked straightforward enough. Step 1) Rip up carpet and padding, Step 2) Throw said carpet and padding away.

Uh-uh. It was a lot tougher than those photos made it look. Our carpets were glued down in some rooms and in others we had to remove literally hundreds of staples because some previous contractor had gone staple happy.

Here's what we started with. (Click to view larger images.)

Bedroom one is off the living room. The quarter round piece of trim that you see was an unfinished piece just sitting in the gaping crack where settlement had pulled the wall out slightly. We'll have to fill that in later...with something...when we redo that trim.

Bedroom two is off entryway and next to the bathroom.

Bedroom three, the smallest of the bedrooms, is off the kitchen. It's so small that I had to stand in the kitchen to take a picture.

My job was to pull up the carpet, cutting it into thin strips that we could then roll up and stuff into construction garbage bags. I used a carpet cutter for the task. We both wore face masks rated for dust and mold, as there was clouds of nasty stuff coming out of the carpets as we moved them. Underneath each one, there were piles and piles of dirt and grit. Whoever invented wall-to-wall carpeting was evil. I don't think your standard household vacuum cleaner can ever get them clean enough and when people have carpets installed, they tend to stay there for decades. Unless you never use a room, carpets tend to look shabby within a few years, in my opinion. Give me hardwood floors and easy-to-swap-out oriental rugs any day.

While I was doing that, Ted pulled up the tackless strip--a stupid name, considering there are thousands of pin-sharp tacks along its length. I guess it's tackless because you're not supposed to need additional carpet tacks to keep your carpet in place. Each tackless strip was nailed down to the floor about every two inches or so with way more nails than needed to keep it in place. He used a molding pry bar to pull it up, but the wood strips were old and weak and kept splitting, making for a rather grueling task.

As Ted was finishing up with the tackless strips, doubling back to pull out all the nails, I began cutting and rolling the carpet pads. This was the worst part of the entire project. In bedroom one, it looked like it had sort of melted to the floor or was glued on in patches. It did not want to come up, and rather than rolling it up in neat strips, I had to tug it up in patches. It was stapled to the floor along the seams, so when I got to those parts I needed to get a hammer and use the nail puller end to pull out each staple, which was held in place with gummy, semi-decayed padding. Ted helped after he finished with the tackless strip. "This is as close to someone else's old carpeting as I think I ever want to be," he said. I agree. We had to work on our hands and knees, peering at the floor from mere inches away as we searched for rogue staples. Thankfully, we had our masks. And the padding in the other two bedrooms came up pretty easily.

Here are a few more intermediary stage picture:

Bedroom One

Wallpaper sample found behind a radiator.

Ted in bedroom two.

Clean-up took a long time as we bagged trash (nine bags in all) and swept out the rooms. Bedroom one with the glued down padding took the longest. I didn't have a floor scraper, as recommended in the Black and Decker book for removing gummy stuff, so I used a putty knife/paint scraper instead, gently running it along each floorboard to pull up as much gunk as possible.

What we ended up with were floorboards of three different colors. I think the original color of the stain was medium-dark, as seen in the next photo. The floors in bedroom two were sanded and not restained before putting the carpet down. Why would they sand first? I have no idea.

Bedroom one--cleaned of all the goo.

Bedroom three--looking good!

Bedroom two--all ready for a light sanding!

By the time we were through -- six hours later -- we were exhausted and starving. With nothing in the refrigerator and unwilling to cook anyway, we headed out in search of fast food. Thank goodness we're only a few blocks from the border with Chicago and all the late night and late late night restaurants that can be found on Clark Street. Although it was two in the morning, we founds a 24-hour place serving burritos as big as our heads. Really, I know we shouldn't be eating this stuff, but it was soooooooooooooooooo good. Heck, I think we earned it.


I can't wait for the sanding guys to get here this week!

Please don't feed the dust bunnies.
—Author Unkown

Floor Sanding Options

Today we had a couple of flooring contractors come to the Box House to give us estimates on what it would cost to sand and refinish the floors in both units, as well as the front entry stairwell.

The floors in the main rooms of the top unit (living room, dining room, entryway) were recently "done," but I'm not sure if it was a "professional" or one of the Previous Owner's family members. In any case, he or she didn't bother going under or behind the radiators. The wood there is quite dark, while the rest of the area appears to have only a thin coat of varnish over bare wood. (The stairs are the same way. They have pools of darker stain in the corners, but the rest of the tread is quite light.) The three bedrooms upstairs are covered in ancient carpet.

Living Room of the Top Floor Unit. Sure, it may look good at a quick glance, but what you don't see is how the floor's only protected with a very thin layer of varnish. We also want to get it back to the original color, which is a little darker.

In the downstairs unit, the floors hadn't been sanded at all. Most of the floor downstairs is in decent shape--certainly better than many of the rental units I lived at in my younger days--but there are several boards that will have to be removed and replaced due to previous damage. Boards near a radiator in the bedroom off the kitchen appear to have water damage, and there are holes in the floor of the dining room. There's also a large dark stain we believe to be cat urine, but from what the contractors told us and what I've read on other house blogs, we may be stuck with that unless we replace those boards, too.

Both contractors who stopped by had been recommended by our buyer's agent. J.E. had previously recommended a mortgage broker and a lawyer who we were very pleased with, so we're willing to start with his recommendations here.

The first guy gave us an excellent price, one we can certainly live with, and even said he'd rip out and haul away the gawd-awful carpeting and replace the damaged boards for free. His quote included two layers of varnish; if we wanted more, it would cost more. But even then, it seemed a good price. However, there is a major language barrier and he was only here about 10 minutes or so. I'm not entirely convinced he really saw the full scope of the project, and I'm not entirely sure what we'd be getting. For example, it was difficult to convey that we wanted the floors to be a color complimentary to the rest of the trim.

The second contractor was here for 45 minutes, and she went over every room in detail, discussing which boards should be replaced, measuring everything with her tape measurer, giving us a bit of history of old floors. (The most interesting thing I learned is that they are no longer able to get wood flooring at the same length as was commonly installed 80 years ago. One of the floorboards that needs to be replaced is over 15 feet long; they'll cut only the bad section out at a length that can blend in easily, but leave the rest in place.) She's to send us a full proposal by Monday. My gut tells me it won't be as good as the other, probably nowhere near as good. She's talking about having two crews out here for upwards of two weeks. I'm sure the floors will look spectacular, but will we be able to afford it?

There's always the option of doing it piecemeal, one unit at a time as we can afford it, but right now we have all of our stuff in the basement, and it would be easy to work on the floors. The other option is to do it ourselves. *Shudder*