Remember those lovely interior shots?
Take a look at the interior now:
This is the living room, with the plaster stripped away. All of the lath you see also is coming down, as is the trim. We thought of saving it, but it's too damaged. We'll have similar but slightly narrower trim put in, probably with similar rosettes.
Take a last look at the stairway, because it's going. It will be replaced with a slightly wider pine staircase that will flare at the bottom. I'm going to have them put in a wooden railing, pine stained to match the floor and treads, with metal balusters in a wavy pattern.
Here's the bathroom now. Actually, all of this is coming out, too. The walls in a typical rowhouse are not loadbearing, and they're installed on top of the floor. So, moving walls is relatively easy. The new bathroom will be wider, and will have Bisazza Italian glass tile ('crepe' mix), a jacuzzi, a separate glassed-in shower, and a Toto UltraMax one piece toilet (you have to work extremely hard to stop one of those babies up).
Here's a shot of the living room ceiling, showing the original wire and insulators (not currently used, but left in place). This house was originally had dual gas and electric fixtures . . . once the walls were stripped away, we found gas piping. This was common in the early part of the 20th century, when electric service was (presumably) more unreliable than it is today. Or, perhaps folks just liked gaslight.
Partial demolition of the second floor. When I visited yesterday, this was all gone, and the debris was being carted out. Do you have any idea how dusty it was in there? My hair was actually gummy with plaster dust after a couple of hours.
Old linoleum, underneath the current floor (and now both consigned to history).
Gosh. The wallpaper folks used to put in their kitchen. Actually, this was throughout the entire first floor at one point, apparently.
And that wallpaper wasn't even the original . . . there was a different pattern underneath.
Carl and Sharon were here! We bought the house from them. When they remodeled the bathroom, they signed their work.
We found a pocket door inside a living room wall (as our contractor had predicted). However . . .
It was badly damaged. Out it goes.
The original kitchen window was much larger and lower, too low for modern kitchen cabinetry and countertops. Somewhere along the way, a replacement window was put in, and the extra space bricked in. We are planning to put in new replacement windows . . . this IS a replacement window, but it's kinda flimsy.
Another upstairs shot. All of this is history, as is the ceiling. I hope to get shots of the empty upstairs before rebuild starts.
Next . . . the walls start going up; more ugly wallpaper.
