Farewell

 Yesterday the closing finalized.

Our stewardship journey has ended and the baton has been passed.

Life

Over the past couple of years, the kids have gone off to college. As a result, most of the time it's just the two of us and the Guardians of the Garden bumping around in the house. We've had the "cocoa puff" for a while. We rescued the "cream puff" in the fall. I guess you could say he is our pandemic "pup", even though he's over two years old..

We'd been thinking for a while about downsizing. We had a particular new development in mind and the timeline seemed to fit what we had in mind, but it turned out to not be the right fit for a number of reasons.

So we switched gears and started thinking abut other options. In the process of exploring the new idea, some interesting properties popped up and we looked at them to get a feel for things. They sold quickly which was OK, because we still had the longer timeline in mind. And we learned enough to confirm the new direction as a possibility when the time came.

Then, out of the blue, we heard about a place that would soon be coming up for sale. We went and saw it and bought it before it even went public.

As of today, Farrington is on the market.

The Southern Wall

 Over the past couple of years, we've slowly been tackling the brick work.

Mostly that's just been tuckpointing. The plan was to do on side of the house at a time to manage costs.

This year was the south-facing wall.

It required more than just tuckpointing though. The brick columns between the original kitchen windows in the basement supported the entire south wall at the back of the house. It was time to give them some help.

The help came in the form of some steel support columns which are installed behind the brick columns.

They hold up the new steel support beam which holds up the rest of the wall. The window headers are now purely decorative because the steel is doing all the work.

The Front Door

 The back door was practice for the front door.

I didn't have time last fall to refinish the front door before it got cold. Once it got warm enough this spring I started the prep work.

Scope included the outside of the door, both sides of the screen door, the side lights, and the sunburst/transom.

It took quite a bit of time to strip the old gummy varnish and gently sand things down by hand to good wood without damaging any of the detail.

Then multiple coats of varnish until I achieved the desired result. Many days passed between coats waiting for the right weather conditions, but it's finally done.

As with the back door, the front door got new bronze screen.

Study Bath Update

The study bath was another one of those projects that didn't quite get completed. (Previous post about this room)

This room was mostly done except that I didn't paint the woodwork and I didn't strip and repaint the radiator. Because I didn't want to deal with it at the time, I allowed myself to get distracted with other projects. Now I have no excuses.

There isn't much woodwork to be painted in this room. A single small window, the rolling door to the storage area under the stairs, and the back side of the entry door.

The woodwork preparation exposed quite a history of color in the the various layers of paint. The oldest is cream, followed by tan, federal blue, red, green, and then a couple of variations on off-white/cream. I used Ivory Tusk, since I still have some of that and it's not far off the oldest of the colors...

I tented the radiator to catch most of the dust and debris during both prep and painting. The bulk of the old paint just flaked off the radiator when I ran a 7-in-one tool's blade across the surface. 

After a very short debate, we decided to go with a pewter metallic in this room because so many of the fixtures are in the pewter/nickel/silver family.

New Attic Bath - Part 6

There's been a long delay between this post and the previous one for the attic bathroom. That's because I never really finished the work. I got 95% done and got distracted with other things.

The remaining work was installing the door latch and then painting the window frame and door.

The latch came with a nice template, but the template was for a 1-1/2 inch thick door. This door is 1-3/4 so I had to cut the template apart and line up the pieces with a laser level. One piece for the edge of the door, another for the face, and the third for the jamb.

I lined up the template with the existing mortise for the old latch to minimize the amount of material I had to remove, as well as minimizing the amount of filling. There were some areas that needed to be filled because it looked like a previous owner's dog had chewed significantly into the edge of the door. I used Abatron WoodEpox and am happy with the results.

It took a little while to remove the material and dry fit the latch. Then I did all the surface prep and primed the places where there was bare wood.

Then came the Impervo as the topcoat in the usual color, Ivory Tusk, to match the rest of this part of the attic.