Bathroom Renovation

In keeping with our typical schizophrenic renovation style, we have the front dining room trim and windows all removed and have moved to a complete gut job of a guest bathroom.  The bathroom was in very bad condition and unusable, it was added sometime after the house was originally built, but is still a very old add-on.  We are taking it down to the studs, redoing plumbing, floors, walls and ceiling.  We found rotten wood from some leakage over the years so are glad we went all the way with it.  It is amazing the floor hadn't already caved in from the 150lb cement shower base that was there.    Here are a couple of progress photos.  We didn't find anything cool during the tear out on this one, except an old package of Marlboro Reds...

Coal Burning Fireplace Cover

This is the cast iron surround and summer cover that came with our home.  It is two pieces (the surround and the summer cover which lifts up and also comes off) and likely original to the house. The summer cover was used when the fireplace was not in use.  According to our home inspector and antique resources on the web, the removable summer cover is often missing. Each surround had its own cover made to fit and is not a standard size and are now nearly impossible to find or replace (except for replicas). Th cover is often missing because during WWII the government collected scrap metal for the war effort, and the covers were commonly donated to the cause.  Luckily our original home owner wasn't feeling very patriotic.

Dining Room Demo Begins!

Yesterday we got the idea to start repainting the faded horrendous pink trim work in our dining room.  Our quick repainting project evolved into full blown demolition. We have torn out all of the window frames, the mantle, crown molding, and will be tearing out the baseboards and door frame this week.  We are going to refinish all the original woodwork and likely add some finish trim in places as needed as well.  The original plaster is in poor condition in places and we are going to have 1/4" drywall put up over the plaster at the end of the month.  Hope to have the trim sanded and painted by then.  More pics to come as we progress.  

The second photo is of the items we found under the mantle after tearing it out...it includes Belgium stamps from 1918 time frame (post marked), a fishing hook, and two negative photos. They are in bad condition but we can see one is of two people standing in front of our house, the other is of a young boy.  We may try and do more with the negatives.  We like to think the stamps are from someone away during WWI and somehow ended up in this house later, but we will never know...

Main St Bungalow, Hartselle AL

Welcome to 2011 and our blog documenting the restoration of our 1930's bungalow in Hartselle, AL.  It is primarily a photo log of our progress for us to look back on, but hope we have family and friends drop by from time to time.  Here is the  first photo we took (in the rain) of it back in April of 2010 (bottom), just prior to purchasing it and a more recent one (top) with added planter area and new paint (ignore the dead plants).