I love this old house. That's impolite... the house isn't really that old, it's just been abused. Sorry house. House was built in 1960 by a local doctor whose last name was Glass, and my grandmother's last husband did the electrical work in it. That last statement was just a fact, not a brag... the work he did was so-so at best. There are plenty of dead circuits in the house, a couple that need repair, and a couple need replacement.
All of that is okay, I don't mind a few projects, and I got the house for a really good price. This particular remodel is one that I had to do twice, though, due to the vindictive and negligent nature of an ex-wife. Long story short, about 6 months after we split (her idea), she took a day to go through local judges, telling increasingly horrible lies at each one until she convinced one to issue a restraining order that would remove me from the house. Due to an unfortunate death in the judge's family, it took me over three weeks (instead of three days) to get all that sorted out. During that time, a lot of work I had already done became undone.
If you've never seen it, you'd be surprised how much mess a few alcoholics can make in just a couple days.
But we didn't gather here to hear about the history of this house, or my unfortunate experiences with alcoholism. We're here to talk about the future, which is now the present because this project was finished a couple years in the past.
The red paint that you see in the picture above is what I put on after repairing this hallway the first time. While the damage that you see repaired here was being done, the ex and her party buddies were also stealing all my hard drives with copies of the photos from the original work, so I don't have any of those anymore. It was similar to what you see here, only pained in the white and green that you can see through the open door to the stairwell.
The large sheetrock patch in this picture is where her dog kept chewing the wall. The patches in the previous picture were over holes from someone large hitting (or just falling into) the wall. I used almost a whole 5 gallon pail of joint compound patching the house up after I got back into, nearly a gallon of that went into this hallway. The floor was stripped down like that before I got thrown out, left unfinished from the first remodel.
It's amazing what a little spackle and paint will do for a room! Hedge Witch and her daughter did most of the painting, while I worked on cutting in the trim you see here. I actually made this trim for another room where I repurposed the hardwood floor, which you'll get a glimpse of, but that's another project I lost most of the pictures to.
This trim was a bit tricky, and I had to estimate a height for the baseboard trim, because I wanted to leave room for my flooring to fit underneath it. I should have waited and done the trim after the flooring, but we were all very excited to see how it would look.
Because a lot of doorways come into this hallway, some of the trim was a little tricky to get looking just right. A few of these took many fine adjustments to get them just right. The head you see in this picture is Hedge Witch's daughter, looking over things with an eye that may be even more critical that mine!
With stain on and pictures hung, it definitely looked a bit more hospitable. We all enjoyed a nice relaxing drink and smoke at this point, and took some time to admire the handiwork.
It's all very beautiful, but at this point, something was missing. We kept getting the nagging feeling that we were leaving something out. We wondered about that for a few moment until one of us sobered up enough to realize the answer was right under our feet...
I still had to finish the floor!
We went shopping and found a good deal on these 1' x 2' slates tiles at a local bargain store. We were looking for something that would go well with our hardwood and stone theme, and these were perfect at under $1.50/ftᒾ. I've always like the herringbone pattern, and was able to lay it out well so that I didn't have too many serious cuts to make.
This was a good project to tackle during a low-budget winter, because as you can see it's a fairly small area that doesn't take a lot of materials to cover. It didn't take much time, either, and I had all these big flat bits rough laid in under an hour.
Of course, it's the cuts that determine whether the job looks good or not, and there were some fussy ones where this floor meets the downstairs bathroom, which has a door at a funny angle.
The slate is fairly soft, which makes it nice and easy to cut, but thin pieces can break easily just from the vibration of the saw. A wet saw for tile would have helped a lot with this, but I don't have one of those, so I cut all these with a masonry blade on my circular saw.
These all fit on the first try, which surprised me a bit.I actually only broke one piece in all my cuts, and only had one that I had to re-cut. I did mess up the pattern just a touch by the basement door, but I'm the only one who can see it, even when I point it out to people.
The hardwood parquet style floor you see in the picture above is the one that I repurposed. I hope to someday do this to all the hardwood flooring in the living and dining room area, with two different patterns separated by a walkway of this same stone that goes to the front door. That project is still a few years out though, it's three times as big as this one that I've already done, and this first one took nearly a year from start to finish.
I still have yet to grout this floor, but I plan to extend this to both the front and back door, and would like to be able to grout it all at the same time to make sure the grout will be uniform. When that happens, I'll be sure to make a post about it. Hope to see you all still then!