Beadboard, Barking and Blooms

What do you do when you have 100 plus year old plaster walls? 

Most of them are pretty nice shape in our house. For their age. The South wall in the kitchen was good enough. And we normally have a large refurbished old cabinet used as pantry pushed up against the wall. The rest of uneven old plaster has been covered with a woven wall hanging and plaque talking about being a grandmother. So you really didn't see the wall too much. 

But since Steve had gotten a large amount of beadboard planking from a guy off Facebook Marketplace, we have enough to do the bathroom wainscotting as well as this South and East wall of the kitchen. I figure the beadboard will kind of pull together the bead board trim we put on the pantry cabinet and tie it in with the rest of the kitchen which also has bead board trims here and there on the cabinetry. I like "matchy matchy".

We pulled out the big pantry cabinet by carefully sliding it away from the wall. Fortunately we had put on those little felt pads when we first brought it into the house, so it was easy to slide across the hardwood floor. We didn't even have to take out any of the canned goods or cooking appliances out of it. Easy peasy!  

Steve started tearing off the little pieces of quarter round trim along the baseboard. The register opening there is actually defunct and has been disonnected from the heating system. It had been rerouted to a different spot and this register was just kind of sitting there unused. Now was a good time to cover it up.

Steve started with the first piece of beadboard, making the most difficult cut around the lip edge of the window sill. Then he could work to the right or the left attaching the rest of the beadboard strips. Each strip is 3 1/2 in wide. This is so much nicer than working with 4 by 8 sheets of imitation beadboard paneling. As most of you know, old houses are not square. Big sheets of anything don't lay square or true in old houses.This way he could work with this type of beadboard a strip at a time along the wall and work along the uneven surfaces.

Besides using his little finishing nail gun, he is slathering behind each piece this type of adhesive made for this very product. He needs to trowel it on the wall, and then get the boards nailed into place a section at a time.

Yesterday he started working from the first board going out to the right. It really was going very well. The beadboard is 4 ft high and the bottom baseboard is about 9 or 10 inches tall.

Along the top edge we are going to put a piece of plate rail trim. I looked online at Home Depot and there are two different types that I like. The upper one is only an inch and a half tall but has a little lip edge for a plate rail. Plus it already has a notch cut out to set along the top edge of the beadboard planks. The bottom one looks a little more chintzy or pressed into the wood with the egg and dart motif, but is 2 in tall. No notch, so we would have to router one on each piece. 

I guess we will reserve our choice until we get down to Home Depot and see which one we like better?  I haven't been feeling too good and have to make sure it's not Covid before I venture out in public.

Steve worked his way down the wall and got all the way to the corner. Now it was my turn. Having experience with knotty pine, (we lived in a home for 13 years that was ALL knotty pine), we knew we had to cover the knots with two coats of clear shellac ---  otherwise they bleed through the paint. I bought low older clear shellac and gave every single knot two coats before I started painting.

Last night I started the first coat of primer / paint. This morning I gave it a second coat. And this afternoon a third. Now all we need is the top trim cap! But that necessitates a trip to Green Bay and we might not do that for a couple days yet. In the meantime I think it looks pretty nice.

While we are working on the wall, this big pantry cabinet is setting right in the open doorway. We don't want to push it anywhere else in the house and will soon be able to slide it back into place. Fortunately, the kitchen is wide enough that we can walk around it. 

This afternoon Steve started working on the wall underneath the cuckoo clock and across underneath the windows. That takes a little bit more work down on the hands and knees. He had his kneeling cushion to take the brunt of it.  I have the feeling that I will be rubbing some aspercreme or ben gay on his knees tonight anyhow.

Working a section at a time, he came across from that original starting strip and worked to the left, up to the corner underneath the window.

Before supper this evening, I put two more coats of shellac on all of the knots of the newest section. I took some AlkaSeltzer Plus and felt pretty good....  so after supper I got around to starting the first coat of primter/paint. It doesn't take long and I have a small roller with long nap that gets into the grooves pretty well. 

In between watching the end of PBS Finding Your Roots and then the starting of HGTV Fixer to Fabulous, I was able to get this portion painted!  The episode of Fixer to Fabulous was a couple from a town about 25 miles north of here who were having a winter retreat home redone down in Arkansas.  They wanted to get in before winter struck up here, and it looks like they did.  We like that show. 

Anyhow, this is OUR Fixer to Fabulous!  Tomorrow I will get the 2nd and 3rd coats done....  Then it only needs the top plate rail trim. Steve said let's push the pantry cabinet back for the few days until we can get to Home Depot.  We will also add a small piece of trim along the bottom edge to meet and cover the edges at the baseboard, maybe flat stock or maybe a tiny quarter round.

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On to the second word of my title: "barking". Our backyard has become a pit stop on the raceway of all of the deer in the neighborhood. Every night there's usually between 5 to 10 wandering past on their cruise through, looking to see if there's anything good underneath our bird feeders.

Their appearance is much to the delight of little Binney. She considers them her "friends" and she barks like a crazy dog when she sees them out there. She dances from the window, over to our chairs to tell us that her "friends" are here. Then she dashes back to the window to bark at them. Then over to our chairs again, and then back to the window. This can go on for 15 or 20 minutes. But we figure it's her entertainment. 

If we can watch a good TV show,

 she can watch a good deer show.

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The third word of my title was "blooms". Even though it's the dead of winter, our house is feeling very spring-like. When the sun shines in, it really makes us feel warm all over. When we were at Aldi last week, they had these beautiful hyacinth bulbs in little glass vases. They grow completely out of the water itself and no soil. This one is blooming beautifully in gorgeous shades of pinks. I smell it every time I walk past and I have it in the middle of the sun shiny windows at our kitchen table. Every day it needs to be rotated a quarter-turn to keep it from growing too much in one direction.

The other exciting "bloom" subject is in our office. 

Last summer, when we had picked up a loom, a woman insisted I take this strange flower pot with me of dilapidated old green leaves laying down in all directions. It look like it was almost dead. She said she wouldn't be able to grow it anymore because she's going away for the winter and her brother could no longer take care of it for her. She insisted I take it. So much so, that she physically put it into my car and made me take it. I didn't even know what kind of a plant it was for sure. She said something about it being an amaryllis. But I had never grown one before so I had no idea what to expect. 

I took it home and started giving it little bits of water and it perked right up. That was last September. The leaves were growing while I had it an East window. But then Steve moved it to a South window and suddenly we started getting little stalks coming up in the middle of each clump. It turns out there are eight amaryllis bulbs in this one pot. I guess they like to be crowded. We now have eight stalks growing up and reaching two feet high!

I am trying to keep them from bending over too far by supporting them with some little wire devices and loops. I keep rotating the pot. I have no idea if they are different colors or all the same. I was very excited to see the first one spread wide open and start exposing the beautiful petals of the blooms,

It looks like this first one is going to be a peachy orange color!. I don't know if all the rest will be the same, or if they will all be different. I looked them up online and they come in many many different colors. So it will be a surprise. I'm anxious to see them open up because I have never grown this type of a bulb before.

So as the sunshine streams in, we are embarking on February 1st. There's still a lot of winter left. But I guess I don't really mind as long as we can sit here and look out the windows. We are cozy warm inside and we can let the winter pass by outside. Today was pretty nice and sunshiny and up into the high 30s. 

But there's a big storm coming across just south of us. We aren't going to get much from it, other than the cold temps. Temperatures will be diving the back down below zero again in the next day or so. So we got to enjoy the sunshine while we can.