Like most things in the house, this room was completed in stages. Some of it was due to money issues. In general, if we didn’t have the spondulicks to finish something, we didn’t start it, but since so many projects in the house relied on other projects in the house, stuff remained in half-demolished limbo for long periods.

We installed central heating in the house after getting along without it for many years. We burned firewood, and then wood pellets, and somehow managed to avoid a Jack London ending, if not exactly achieve comfort or anything. Some of the ducts would go through the dining room. This wall in the dining room was covered with paneling, which had been painted a few dozen times. I figured it would be less trouble to take if off now, than after a soffit was in place, so off it came. Like most every wall in the house, the wall was a lasagna of layers. Painted paneling led to painted wallpaper led to more wallpaper led to some pretty old wallpaper, which you can see in the picture. I estimate that layer was from the 1940s or so. There was another layer under that one, which might have been original equipment.

Now our evil plan of heating the house comes somewhat into view. We hacked a hole through the wall to allow a duct boot to serve the living room on the other side of the wall. The duct would come off a larger, vertical duct that ran up through the closet in our bedroom, and branched off hither and yon to six rooms. That’s a doorbell wire hanging out of the wall next to the doorframe. We didn’t have a working doorbell for about a year, I think. I was expecting to find six Jehovah’s Witnesses, ten trick-or-treaters, and at least one candidate for town tax assessor on my porch when I left the house for the first time in the spring. The cool winter temperatures keep them from spoiling, but you have to bring them to the landfill as the temperatures climb or they start to smell.

We ran some ducts and boxed them in. The ceilings are pretty tall on the first floor of our house, so you barely notice it’s there. It was a lot easier than running everything through the walls, and the straight shots for the ducts make the heat get to where it’s going more efficiently. The big black thing in the picture is the pellet stove. We still use it in the dead of winter to supplement the heat pump we installed. More about that another time.

The dining room stayed that way for many months while we finished the kitchen. Then we got around to this room, and really let it have it with both barrels. Here’s the heir (he’s the second barrel) tearing down the cardboard ceiling tiles. It took about five minutes to pull them down, and the rest of the day for two men to pull out the umpty-million staples they left behind. The ceiling must have started raining plaster after the former denizens removed the kitchen/dining room wall to achieve the coveted “open plan,” so they hid the problem with the cardboard ceiling. We left the firring strips in place. We can use them.  They’re nailed to the joists above, so they’re sturdy. You can see the old light fixture electrical box hanging down. We’ll intercept that and use it to feed four LED light discs for general illumination. Victorian house like ours struggle with lighting. LED canless lights are a great way to banish dreariness, and they’re way cheaper than buying a bunch of light fixtures and lamps.

Back in the day, when we built very expensive houses, we’d make sure that the ceilings in them were dead flat and level. We’d pull strings across the joists above, and painstakingly shim the connection between each joist and furring strip before nailing. I’m not about to do that in here, but the ceiling was way too misshapen to leave it the way we found it. Like most of our ceilings, it sagged in two directions, so the center was substantially lower than all four walls. We got a quick and dirty fix for the problem by adding some firring strips perpendicular to the existing firring strips. They run along the edges to fill in the parts where the ceiling sloped up precipitously. We pared down the rows of firring strips as they got closer to the center, from 3/4″ thick, to 5/8″, to 1/2″. The ceiling ended up being the only remotely flat ceiling in the house. As you can see, we installed the LED lighting discs as we went. We popped them out when it was time to paint. They have a whip wire, like a little disconnectable leash. They’re low voltage, and easy to wire.

My poor wife’s quiet corner got very noisy again. She set up shop at the kitchen table, which was hardly a step down, because the kitchen was already finished. We hung thin plastic sheets over the doorways in the room, and kept the mess contained. We’d take them down every night after sweeping up, to allow the cat to get to the catbox, my wife to get to the catbox to empty the tootsie rolls, and me to get to the beer.

[To be continued. Thanks for reading and commenting. Please tell a friend about Sippican Cottage!]