817 Main Floor

The main floor of 817 consists of a back porch, kitchen, dining room, living room, two bedrooms and a very pink bathroom. Here are some before and during pics:
This bedroom will be some office space - it's nice and bright with windows on two walls. There's also a nice size closet. After the flood Charlotte used this as her work space and the walls were entirely covered with ideas for sketches and her nature artwork. In both this and the next room we did a lot of scraping, mudding, and texturing - just look at the ceiling for an example of what a lot of the walls looked like. There's a pic of me working on the floors - from the dust on the camera lens don't you think it's a good idea I have a mask on? I did!

This is the room that I was planning on using as my quilting room, but will now be a sitting room. At one point it held a piano and Eleanor taught piano lessons in it - later, she used it as a bedroom. We moved the chandalier in here out to the living room. There wasn't an overhead light out there so we had one wired up and this will match the dining room light. We also took out all the electric heaters as we had central air put in. At one point, probably in the 1950's, the house served as a model home for electric heat. Unfortunately, these old heaters were slowly going out - one section at a time. The heaters in these back bedrooms had apparently gone out and were then replaced by newer versions of baseboard electric. You can see the old electric ones in the pics from the living room (below).

Here's the living room. As dining room and living room were redone only about five years ago, mostly all we're doing here is painting and redoing the hardwood floors. In the pic of Dave doing the floors you can see a little of the dining room and the living room. What do you think of the color? You'd best be liking it because it's all over the main floor!


I don't have a good picture of the kitchen prior to it being painted the green color - but it, just like the living room and dining room, had been done about five years ago. In this pic you can see the back entryway - it (as well as the kitchen) was sort of a butter yellow color. We found original hardwood floor underneath two layers of linoleum and a layer of plywood so we tore it up last weekend and will get it sanded down sometime next week.


As you can see it was a family affair - the kids helped pull out more than 2,000 staples.


Sophie also helped do some more scraping in the pantry area - don't worry she only did it for about five minutes before calling it quits. Also - notice the mask and the safety eyewear!

Here's the pink bathroom. As we've spent A LOT of money on gutting and renovating the upstairs bath, this one will stay pink for awhile. Michelle came and helped me do some "wallpapering" of sorts - it's done with brown craft paper all crinkled up and then pasted to the wall - but I'm not really happy with it so we stopped. I've decided I'll finish the papering but then leave the staining and/or painting of it until Mom comes home from Arizona and can help me with colors.

There you go - that's it for the main floor of 817. I'll get pictures from the upstairs posted sometime next week.