More Photos From the Weekend

Kenny has started reinstalling and repairing the beadboard wainscotting in the main hall. That ugly, white return air vent should be coming out this week. It is all that is left of the aborted chip-board beast that was in our living room.

This is a picture of our mystery beam in between the living room and the dining room. At some point in the 1920's this beam was part of the Devil Queen's rear, exterior wall. They tore the wall out and built on the dining room and kitchen. Until last week, this beam was clad in a veneer of 1/4 inch drywall. We were scared to find out what was under this veneer, but it wasn't as bad as we feared.

The side facing the living room is clad with the original wall boards. It is a little rough, but not too bad. The side facing the dining room is all new wood (10-25 years old would be my guess). It looks solid, but it's ugly. The picture makes it look better than it really is. We're going to clad the beam in beadboard to make it look uniform and neat.

In case you're wondering, taking it out is not an option. If we took it out, the best we could hope for is that the ceilings would collapse. The worst case is a portion of the roof would come with it.

This is the wall between the dining room and the kitchen. We stripped off all the wall boards last sumer to move the doorway from the far left to the center of the wall. I put the kitchen side up months ago, and Kenney finally started on the dining room side. Unfortunately, we're running short on wood.

First, a couple of the original wall boards were used to patch the hall ceiling when I wasn't looking. Second, once you account for triming the boards to new lengths to accomodate the doorway, you end up with a lot of 1 foot long boards with no where to go. We have some old, painted beadboard that matches the wall so we'll probably use it to finish. We'd planned to Danish Oil the wall since it had never been painted. If we would still like to do this, we'll have to strip the last 1 1/2 to2 feet of the wall. Or, we have to stripe these boards and then paint the whole thing. We're not sure which we'll do. It depends on how bad the stripped wood looks I guess. If we decide to paint it, we'll either use a green or the same red as the living room. Yet another accent wall?

He is the back porch's recently enclosed eve. Just a little something to give it that finished look and to keep the birds and wasps out.