Several weeks back I posted the photo above as part of my BNW Photo Challenge Series and I got a lot of nice comments on it. I like the photo quite a bit myself.
At least when I'm able to forget that's my daughter's supposed "bedroom."
As detailed at length in my post here, we live in a restoration project. Our home is 150 years old, was abandoned entirely for sixty years before we bought it, and after we worked our asses off to run new plumbing, restore the old radiator system, and run new wiring (in other words, just when we were on the cusp of being able to do cosmetic improvements) we were called away to work in Boise for two years, and our scumbag contractor gutted the place in our absence. We returned home to a house worse off than when we'd first purchased it.
And we had nowhere else to live.
So poor, darling baby girl (my eleven-year-old, Lily Rose 
The wall to the right has already received a finish coat of plaster and the trenches in the ceiling were patched, so technically this was an "improvement."
The "closet" to the right is the only one in the house so armoires are on the shopping list
The window has a temporary sash set in place while I reglaze the originals.
The sill in the previous pic is already painted because when we took the sashes out this was the condition of the sills, so darling hubby cut new ones which I installed, caulked and painted to prevent any new damage. You can see a glob of ancient caulk where the "remuddlers" who owned it in the fifties tried to fill a rotted piece of the brick molding.
Thank god for glazing points, because without them the glass would have fallen out of these long ago.
The sashes I removed were in pretty bad shape. You can see the lower stile fell right off of this one when I took it down. Most people would tell me to buy replacements, but I love the old glass with its green tint, waves, and imperfections.
Each sash is three feet tall and the glass is heavy as hell to remove.
I'm a sucker for the old hardware too, though I did have to purchase some new sash stays, which are little pressure clamps on the side that allow you to set the sash at any height.
Considering the condition of the old, brittle glazing, you'd think it would be easy to remove, but I learned by fracturing my first ever pane, that I need to heat it up to soften it before removal. It's tedious but eventually, I got both panes removed intact this time!
Once I've scraped the stiles clean I set a new glaze bed. I don't do DAP like you find at the Lowe's. For this I use Sarco, which is an oil-based glaze. It will literally never dry, allowing for expansion and contraction seasonally. The pane is pressed oh-so carefully down into the glaze and excess is scraped off to be reused. Glazing points are replaced, a bead of glaze goes over them, and the sash can be rehabbed and repainted.
For these ones it took a lot. I used "Liquid Wood" epoxy liquid to seal all of the wood fibers, then filled the really checked grain with a slurry I made of the liquid epoxy and the putty of the same brand. Then they sanded smooth in the areas that were really badly damaged, and they're as hard as petrified wood! I used this same method to save all of the original brick molding, cutting out rot, and refilling with Liquid Wood putty where needed.
Luckily these two windows are facing the non-weathered side of the house and aren't in nearly as bad shape. I've saved them for last to get the worst out of the way. You can see here the plaster finish coat was going on exactly like you aren't supposed to do it, but I'm a rebel and work from the floor up, using a take-down blade sort of like a rubber squeegee to maintain a smooth blend.
It was easy enough to paint the walls, but oh! The trim! What a huge pain it is when you have to do things like remove the transom window and operator to paint it!
Every princess who waits so patiently deserves a lovely chandelier, and so we installed one. And look at that one window that's done! Can't wait for the other two, which will go a lot faster since they're in much better condition!
With the paint done, it's time to uncover the floor...
And sand it down!
Well this is as far as we've gotten, but I think we'll be done by next week, so maybe I'll post some final pics after we've decorated and all. It feels really good to go from so broke down to the pretty room we're closing in on. Lily Rose is excited and so am I. And if you haven't seen me around, now you know why!
art and flair courtesy of @PegasusPhysics