A shot of our finished dining room.  We need an excuse, like a party, to get the house clean enough to photograph.

By the time we we purchased our bungalow in 2004, it had been abused as a rental house for well over a decade. As you might expect, none of the original lighting remained (with the exception of the brass fitters in the living and dining room box beams.) Sadly, everything else was long gone, but don’t feel too sorry for us - we definitely had fun choosing new lighting!

We selected copper-foiled Tiffany-style stained glass shades from Rejuvenation for our living room sconces, box beam fixtures and dining room chandelier.

In our kitchen, we used five Arts and Crafts style pendant fixtures from Progress Lighting. (To tie the fixtures together with the rest of the room, we installed matching carmel-swirled glass panels in the cabinets flanking our refrigerator.)

For our ground floor bathroom, we chose sconces and overhead lighting from Schoolhouse Electric

In our front entry hall, we used another stained glass fixture from Rejuvenation which incorporated all of our paint colors from the entry hall, living room and dining room, which really helps tie the ground floor together.

We got the floors refinished just before moving in. This is one of about three things that we did hire out. Floor refinishing is an art, and it’s not one that you want to practice on 1,000 square feet of your own wood floors.

The floors in this house are continuous through the entire downstairs, even into the closets. That means that you have to do all of it at once to keep it looking right, as there are no transitions between rooms.

We opted to have them refinished without a stain, because we thought that the lighter color would help offset the dark woodwork. In the end, we feel that we made the right choice.

First coat of stain on the dining room windows.  They already look 1000x better than the plate glass.

Test (and final) paint color.  Having a color consultant/interior designer for a wife means that you usually get it right the first time.

In order to get an authentic look, we bought stainable, wood Marvin windows. The divided lights at the top of the picture window is a look seen on most of the older homes in Portland. We got the kind with the aluminum exterior, because we wanted to minimize exterior painting maintenance. They look quite good, even from outside. Even though they’re pine, we were able to custom mix stains to get them very close to the existing (fir) woodwork color.

Glass sheets removed in preparation for new windows.

Rewiring of the box beams and central fixture in the dining room. Two lessons were learned in this project:

1) Don’t take apart the box beams. When we did this for the living room, we came up with the much better method of drilling all the way up into the joist cavity and just feeding the wires through to the attic spaces upstairs.

2) Don’t permit work like this. This was the first time we ever got a building permit, and we came to regret it. The inspector was unhappy that the wires came through holes in the wood and did not terminate in a box. While I definitely believe that building codes are a good thing, there are times where the letter of the law conflicts with something that would still be safe. Obviously, very little in an old house would meet code, so any remodeling is an exercise in finding the right compromise between codes and aesthetics.

After a lot of effort, we were able to solve the problem by buying the smallest possible “pancake” boxes and painting them to match the beam stain. We were fortunate that the 3 1/2″ size was very close to the diameter of the fixtures bases, so they basically act as spacers between the fixture and the beam. If you didn’t know to look for them, you’d never notice them.

This is how our dining room looked when we bought the house. The intact, unstained woodwork was one of the main factors that drew us to this house. We had looked at so many houses that had painted or, even worse, missing woodwork. We really fell in love with the look of the flat-grained fir wainscotting and box beams. We later replaced the fixture with a more appropriate (Craftsman) one, and we moved this one out onto the back patio.