Gift That Keeps On Giving

It is still months from our big flooring projects — redoing the original wood flooring is a spring or summer project — but in the meantime the house continues to reveal its original self.  When I took out an old, built in kitchen cabinet I found the quarry tiling that came with the house.  When we get around to redoing the kitchen (the bathroom is ahead of it in the queue), we’ll knock out the modern tiles and clean up the self levelling screed between new and old.

For now, we’ve moved the fridge from the dining room into this spot to live like modern people as much as possible.

When I pulled up the fireplace in the dining room (on skip day), I was keen to see the condition of the wood floors beneath the cheap looking laminates.  Lifting an edge of these I am now convinced that they, too, like the kitchen and the entrance are Edwardian quarry tiles.  We have to see their condition when we start on the wood floor project, but may pull these up and trade them for credit at the reclamation yard toward some encaustic tiling from the same period (keeping out enough of these for repairs to the kitchen ones).

I used this photo of the stairwell to decorate a running post earlier this month.  We went ahead and started sanding these as they are in good condition and the paint was making us feel like we were still living in a tip.

In the meantime, Jackie started removing the wallpaper from our entrance alcove — the only thing left to strip.  Unwrapping this Christmas present is an endless surprise and the odd, 60’s wallpaper was yet another treat.  However …

… an arch shaped crack in the plaster piqued our interest and we started dismantling it to discover the original plaster of Paris archway.

Full removal did minor damage to the walls, but we packed it with fresh undercoating plaster and will get around to sanding and painting soon.