It always takes me awhile to get back in the groove of hauling up all the tools and starting the circus of sawing, shaving, cutting, sanding, shimming and nailing that’s necessary to install door and window trim.  At least a couple of times during the last two days I wished that we had torn down the plaster instead of drywalling over the top.  Which is worse?  Tearing down some plaster, which takes just a little physical labor, or creating a trim nightmare by increasing your wall depth?  What made it so bad is that the drywall is not at a uniform depth, so the depth difference varies from 1/2″ to 3/4″, sometimes along the length of a given piece of casing.  That meant I had to try to cut and sand down a  strip of fir at an angle to try to even things out.  Of the four openings in this room, only the closet door cooperated by needing a constant 1/2″ filler strip.

Next?  Finishing the base trim and filling all the old and new nail holes, a little more sanding and then onto staining.  I also need to buy, finish and install the crown and the little cap trim that sits on top of the base.  I never have any idea what that piece is called.  I will be going to McCoy Millwork to get these pieces, since I couldn’t find anything appropriate at the usual suspects, Mr. Plywood and Home Depot.

I went through the site and realized that we didn’t have any “before” pictures of this room.  I created a new post so you can see what it used to look like.  Don’t be fooled by the walls in the picture.  The white paint over the wallpaper over the cracked plaster photographed really well!

Door now has trim

Side window and first piece of base trim

Closet door and window facing patio

A few weeks ago we got our doors and jambs back from Houck’s Stripping.  Actually, he had been bugging me for awhile, but I was trying to defer picking them up until we were ready for them.  As usual with remodeling projects, it became clear that the timing wouldn’t work out, so I just picked them up and jammed them in the garage.  Our garage has looks more like the Rebuilding Center or the basement at Hippo Hardware than a garage, since it is packed full of wood, windows, a pink toilet and other materials that came out of our house.   In fact, since we’ve never actually parked a car into either of its two stalls, I’m afraid that it probably feels very emasculated.

After finishing the floors early today, I started trying to reassemble the jambs that I had so carefully dismantled three months earlier.  Although I had conscientiously scraped identifying numbers into jamb piece and the top of every door, I could only find about 1/2 the marks when I looked today.  And of those, at least a 1/3 of the markings didn’t make sense to me.  I wonder if I was drinking beer when I did it?  If you haven’t seen the doors before, they used to look like this.   Even we have our limits, and stripping paint off a five panel door is not our idea of fun.  For about $80 per door, Houck’s Stripping removed all the paint and old finishes, and they’re able to dispose of the old paint much more ecologically than we can ourselves.  It is great dropping off a door that’s encrusted in paint and then picking up one of these beautiful pieces of wood.  As everyone knows, the Pacific Northwest is timber country, and since our house was built in 1911, every single piece of it was constructed of old-growth Douglas Fir that is some of the most gorgeous wood I’ve ever seen.  Seriously, even the studs and joists should be furniture, not structural support.  So, we try hard to keep every piece of it in the house as we do our remodel.  While it will take a lot more labor to reintegrate and refinish these doors, the entire upstairs will get a sense of being original to the house.  I need to weigh these doors, because even the short closet doors (5′) weigh a ton.

I got the door to the baby’s room and one of Chloe’s closet doors hung today.  The baby’s door was actually quite a project, because the jamb was too wide for the door and had been shimmed several times over the years.  I decided to take it apart and cut down the jamb header to make it fit the door better.  Anyway, I really just posted the pictures because I love how these doors look…

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.