New Hardware for Sideboard

My mom got me a gift certificate to Rejuvenation for my birthday. (Thanks Mom!) Today I finally figured out what to spend it on. I got some new knobs for the sideboard to replace the Queen Anne teardrops that were on it. I went with the Mission Pyramid knob in oil-rubbed bronze. The shape echoes the knobs in the kitchen without being to "matchy-matchy". I like the way the black is offset against the white. I still need to replace the hinges with some original style ball tip hinges, but that will be quite a bit of work so I'll save it until I refinish the whole sideboard

100% Done with 50% of the Dining Room

I put the finishing touches on the paneling on the North wall of the dining room this weekend. Overall, I'm very happy with the results. One thing I will do differently in the future is to not use a roller to put on the primer if I'll be using a brush for the final coat. It took a few thick coats on the recessed parts of the wall to get good even results.


I need to either get a better camera or learn how to use mine better, because these pictures are way too grainy and the red color doesn't look anything like it does in person.

If I Ever Write a Book...

...It will be titled "How to Remodel Your House 10 Minutes at a Time". It's been a long, slow, steady process but I finally got all the trim up on the second corner of the dining room. I literally didn't spend more than 30 minutes in any one day on this. Now all that's left is some priming, the finish coats, and touch-up. Oh yeah, and then the other two corners of the dining room, and restoring all of the windows in the dining room. Now that we've hit 90 degrees I'll be highly motivated to get those windows un-stuck.

A Taste of Things to Come

Here's a shot of the first corner of the dining room with the finished plate rail and wainscotting. I must say I'm really pleased with the results.

Dining Room Trim Profiles

Those of us lucky enough to live in Portland have two excellent local suppliers of traditional millwork. I used McCoy Millwork for all of my kitchen trim and Rejuvenation for all of the dining room trim. Sorry to say Rejuvenation can't ship any of its millwork, but McCoy will gladly ship anything anywhere.

This is a mockup of the plate rail I am installing in the dining room.

I kept the original baseboards (5/8" x 7-1/2") and ran the panel battens vertically between the bottom of the built-up plate rail and the baseboards. I removed the original base cap and used the #1723 panel stops to frame each panel section.

The sizes and item numbers (per the Rejuvenation catalog) are as follows:

1-1/2" x 3" Plate Rail - 4497
3/4" x 5-1/2" Flat Casing- 7721
5/8" x 2-1/2" Panel Batten - 9871
3/8" x 1/2" Panel Stop - 1723

Plate Rail Installed

Most of the wood is up in the first corner. The only thing left is the beading on the right panel and then finish priming and painting.

A little more detail.

I love it when the pieces line up with the layout marks!

No Heat = Motivation

I decided to start putting up the new moulding in the corner of the dining room that has the thermostat. Since the thermostat will be mounted on the new board, I had to unhook it in order to mount the trim. That was last night. Laziness got the better of me and I left the thermostat unhooked because I didn't want to go through the hassle of connecting all the wires only to unhook them again the next day. When I got home from work today it was 61 degrees in the house! I quickly set to work to get the trim mounted in that part of the room so I could get the heat going again. I learned the hard way that you should cut the power to your furnace when you unhook the thermostat. Some of the bare wires shorted and blew the fuse on my furnace control board. Luckily the auto parts store 2 blocks away had the replacement 3A fuse.

Anyway, here's what the trim looks like so far. I still need to mount the plate rail on top and the beading around each "panel".

I couldn't really get a good picture of this, but I wanted to show how I handled the junction of the new moulding with the old. The door casing is the same thickness as the new board, but the casing has rounded edges so the two do not meet flush. Filling the gap with wood filler would probably crack fairly soon, so I decided to go the opposite route and accentuate the joint instead of trying to hide it. I simply put a 45 degree chamfer on the end of the new board. Once everything is caulked and painted it will look nice.

Message to the Future

I left a note for the future.

I have the Devine "Blush" on the walls. I like the color, but I love the Devine paint. With a properly primed wall it gives complete coverage in one coat. I need to touch-up the picture rail around the top of the room because the painter's tape pulled off some of the paint. Then it's on to getting the moulding primed and installed.

Click on the pictures below to see the bigger ones.

Dining Room Progress

I did my best to keep the dust contained in the dining room while we sanded the topcoat. Let me just say... sanding joint compound in a living area is NOT a good idea. Unfortunately we didn't have much choice.

Done sanding and ready to be thoroughly cleaned and primed.

The dried joint compound is amazingly close in color to the beige on two of the already finished dining room walls.

Dining Room: The Inspiration

The inspiration for our dining room is this picture of the dining room from the Eddie Bauer Bungalow Collection at Lowes. We're going with red-ish wall color on top of white-ish plate rail and wainscotting.

Getting the Hang of Skimcoating

As I posted earlier, the first coat to go on top of the rough plaster was hot setting mud which was mainly to level things out as much as possible. The next coat is the topcoat, which is a thin layer of regular lite all-purpose joint compound. I get the 3.5 gal box of Beadex from the HD and dump it into a clean bucket. Then I add some water and mix thoroughly with my drill mixer until it is an even, light mixture, about the consistency of cake frosting. You'll have to experiment with this process, but when you get it right it really feels like you're frosting a cake when it goes on the wall.

Since I typically work in small increments, I save the extra joint compound by cleaning the walls of the bucket with a wet sponge and then adding about 1/2" of water to the top of the surface. That will keep it from drying out. The next time you're ready to use it, either scoop out the water with a dixie cup, or just mix it into the mud with your drill mixer again.

This time around I spend a lot of time prepping the walls before I broke out the mud. I paid special attention to all of the corners where little bits of paint and wallpaper hide out just waiting for you to come along and snag them with a knife full of mud, which leads to streaks in the finished surface. I also decided to do a small portion of the wall and really take my time. I think it paid off.

There's not much to see in this picture, which is exactly what I was after. A light sanding should be all that's needed before it's ready for primer.

New "Before" Pictures Unearthed

I have a shortage of pics of the house in it's pristine "before" state, but I did find a couple hidden away in an obscure folder on my laptop. This is the dining room after the new light fixture was installed, but nothing else had been done at this point.

Here's a view of the original "wet wall". As in the dining room, I had already installed new overhead lights before I took the picture. Those wall cabinets were the only two original cabinets. I tried saving them so I could donate them to The Rebuilding Center, but they were built into the house and had to be destroyed in order to get them out. The blue paint in the back of the cabinet is actually the plaster wall; there was no back to the cabinets.

Here's a view in the opposite direction. The Big Chill refrigerator was the first thing we bought when we moved into the house. It set the tone for the remodel we knew was on the way. I can't believe I actually considered keeping that awful beadboard.

Skimcoat Dining Room Walls

Before I put on the first coat of drywall compound, I used some fiberglass mesh tape to cover any cracks in the plaster. The tape combined with the strong setting-type drywall compound will help prevent the cracks from reappearing in the future.

After taping the cracks I put up the first thin coat of "hot mud". It's a plaster-of-paris based mixture that sets chemically into a relatively hard layer. Tomorrow I will do the first topcoat using a regular light topping compound, to be followed by one last topcoat later this week. If all goes well I'll be putting up moulding within a week or two.

Lesson Learned: Clean the walls first!!! I usually go over the walls with the edge of a 6" drywall knife to knock off any cling-ons leftover from the wallpaper. I obviously forgot. Don't make the same mistake! It's very frustrating to be putting on a beautifully flat, thin coat of mud, only to have a gouge running down the middle. Argh!

Turning the Corner in the Dining Room

I'm done taking things off the walls and ready to start putting stuff on the walls of the dining room. The plaster is in very good condition overall but I do have to patch just a few holes and hairline cracks. As in the rest of this house, the builder never put a topcoat of plaster on the walls so they all have the rough texture of the brown coat. I'll go over the walls with a thin layer of hot-setting drywall mud and then a topcoat or two of topping compound. This will give me the smooth texture I'm after.

Mystery Wallpaper Revealed!

If you read the Wallpaper Detective post, you know that I speculated about the existence of a long-lost layer of wallpaper that must have been put up in the 40's or 50's. Well, as I was scraping the last remnants of wallpaper out of the 1" wide gap between the door and sideboard moulding, I found a piece of the missing wallpaper.

Does This Arch Have a Name?

I have seen archways similar to this on the exteriors and interiors of a lot of bungalows in Portland. Does anyone know if there is a name for this particular style of archway? I want to put some in my basement and I'm trying to get more information on their correct proportions.

Making Good Progress

I managed to spend a few hours this weekend scraping 3 decades worth of old wallpaper off the dining room walls. You can clearly see where the original moulding used to be. The more I uncover, the more motivated I get to put new moulding back up.

Now I need to decide if I should paint the walls below the plate rail the same color (red) as will be on the upper part of the wall, or if I should put in paneling and paint it the same color as the trim (white). What do you think?

Dining Room Light

I thought I'd do a little "retro-blogging" and post a picture of the dining room light we bought a couple years ago. It's made by Robert Abbey, and we got it on clearance from Restoration Hardware (or was it Pottery Barn??). I don't think they make it anymore, but I sure do love it. In fact, I think it's my favorite lighting fixture in the whole house.

Let's Play Wallpaper Detective

I've got a challenge for you all! Here's a picture of my dining room wall taken in the middle of the wallpaper scraping phase. I've studied it closely, and I think I can piece together all of the various incarnations it has taken on over the years. I'll list them out below, and I'll even throw in the first and last ones for you. Your job is to fill in the missing slots, using only this picture (click on it to see a bigger image).

Note: I went ahead and filled in the rest.

• 1. Walls: Rusty Red Paint; Trim: Dark Stain (not shown, but deduced from other trim in the room.)


• 2. Walls: Mint Green ; Trim: Dark Stain


• 3. Walls: Mystery Wallpaper* ; Trim: Off-white


• 4. Walls: Gold floral wallpaper ; Trim: Gone!


• 5. Walls: Blue Floral Stripe wallpaper ; Trim: N/A


• 6. Walls: 80's Floral Wallpaper (not shown in this picture); Trim: N/A


• 7. Walls: Devine Blush red; Trim: Devine Icing white (coming soon!)

* #3 was tricky. If you look around the edges of the bare plaster (where the trim used to be) you can see where someone had painted the trim an off-white color. They obviously didn't care about keeping a sharp edge as they painted. That was my clue that there must have been a "mystery wallpaper" that was put up around the trimwork. That layer had to be removed along with the trim before they could put up the gold layer. UPDATE: Read here for the mystery wallpaper Revealed!