Oliver’s Bungalow Blog

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House Tour: Dining Room Before

Christine

The Dining Room, as it looked in September 2003…

Really, no too bad. Bland wall color. Really poor treatment of that beautiful bank of windows. The glass shelves across the windows were really special, too. These people really had a thing for wall mounted shelves. They were all over the place. The plate rail around the top wasn’t bad, but it had to be removed when we moved the wall, and we discovered that it was definitely not original, and was very cheaply made. Also the chair rail was added at a later date.
It took me a little while to figure out what was wrong with this room. The proportions were wrong, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. In the picture below, to the left of the French doors, you’ll notice a strange lumpy line running down the wall, right above the radiator. It is hard to tell from these pictures, but that is the edge of the bump out. You see, sometime in the past, probably in the 1950s or 60s, someone enclosed the back porch to make a bedroom. And they moved the dining room wall to make the bedroom slightly larger. Once I figured out what threw this room off, I knew it would bug me until I would be able to move it back to its original location. I just didn’t know it would be so soon…
Note the fabulous press-board entertainment unit the previous owners left for me, mostly because they couldn’t fit it on their moving van.

There are two radiators in this room. They should be about the same size, and they flank the window bump out. As some point, probably when they moved the wall, someone swapped the second small radiator from the dining room and put it in the living room. They took one that was almost twice as big and made it the second one in the dining room. I can only assume this was done to provide extra heat to this tiny, make-shift bedroom. Even now, it is cold back there, and before we rearranged walls there was no heat source in that space, which is also over an un-insulated part of the basement. Burr.

The doorway to the kitchen was also no longer in its original location. It should have been about 32″ wide with a swinging door. The door is still here, and it is in beautiful condition. I was very lucky. Many of the original doors were still tucked here and there around the house. Also, don’t you just love the 60s-70s “chandelier”? Brass AND wood.
Although I like the plate rail, we never put it back up after we moved the wall. We would have had to replicate the brackets (which I have hung on to), and by the time we were even at the stage to even think about it, almost all of the shelf board had been re-purposed.

For such a simple room, it really looks different today.

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House Tour: Living Room After

Christine

And now, in the autumn of 2007…
We swapped radiators. This one, which is a more suitable size for the room, was one of two in the dining room. The small one that used to be in the living room was the exact same size as the second one in the dining room. This falls under the category of: what were they thinking?

The curtains are down in these pictures. I can assure you the red thermal drapes are long gone. I did have golden sheers up- they matched the color of the wall, but they made the whole room just a bit too yellow. So, I’m in the process of choosing something new. Whatever I go with, they are hung inside the windows on tension rods, so that all the wood trim is still exposed.

Don’t you just love that orange plaid recliner? It was my grandmother’s and it is very comfy, but it doesn’t really go with the carpet. Some day we’ll have a nice recliner and loveseat in this room.
As you can see, Oli believes that all chairs in the house are there for his comfort.
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House Tour: Living Room Before

Christine
In September of 2003…

Notice the one tiny radiator for this big room.
Don’t you just love the thermal drapes- too short on the big tripple window, way too long on the itty-bitty square windows. Classy.
And the disproportionately small gas fireplace.
But, overall, not bad, right? At the time, I thought we would just paint, clean, and I would move in. Boy, was I wrong.

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window hardware

Christine

I’m not sure what exactly to call this kind of window lock, maybe a loop-style casement latch? I think they look original, and are probably brass under all that age. These are photos of the nicest one.

These locks are on each of the seven small square windows: two in the living room, one on the landing to the second floor, one in the upstairs bathroom, and one in each of the bedroom’s closets. Some of theses windows hinge to the right, some to the left, and the two in the living room have hinges at the top.

The windows are supposed to stay propped open with casement stays, but I only have one casement stay that is left fully intact. Several are only missing the nut used to tighten the rod. And one or two of them are long gone, only the screw holes left in the wood as evidence that they ever existed.

I wanted to take a photo of the casement stay that is still intact, but I can’t find it. In the back of my mind I am beginning to remember a complete casement stay in a zippered gallon size freezer baggie. That must be the one I carried with me to the salvage places, to show them.

For a while, I was carrying a whole tote bag of stuff to show anyone who would listen. Do you know what this is called? Have you ever seen one? Do you have any like this? No? Can you recommend anyone else who might? Me schlepping around my bag of hinges and locks and knobs and escutcheons and screws, oh my.

So, does anyone out there know what this window lock is called and/or where I can get more?
And where I can get replacement tightening nuts for the casement stays?

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favourite product: floor cleaner from Ecover

Christine

Oliver’s bungalow is about 80% wood floors. Oak and pine floors as far as the eye can see, nearly all original. So finding a good cleaning product for all this wood was pretty important.

After Oli arrived on the scene I began to worry about what kind of floor cleaner I was using.

Let’s be honest here. Up to this point I really hadn’t thought too much about cleaning the floors, other than with the vacuum. The house was still somewhat under construction, and the real, livable rooms of the house were on the second floor.
But now with a 2 month old golden retriever puppy, who eats everything off the floor, walks on the floor with his sweet, still soft puppy pads, then licks them… I started reading labels.

All the floor cleaners I was accustomed to, or could find on the shelves of the local grocery store, had directions like this: squirt some cleaner on the floor, push it around with a mop, let it dry. What? No rinse? You just let the chemicals there on the floor? But the puppy licks this floor. He would be ingesting these chemicals. No way. There has got to be something better.

At first, I was just using Simple Green diluted with warm water. And cleaning up puppy puddles and other puppy messes with Nature’s Miracle.

Eventually I found myself in the cleaning products section of our local natural/organic grocery store. What’s this? Natural ingredients, nothing toxic, pretty inexpensive, just use a little… We’ll give it a try.

Well, it worked great. The wood floors have never felt cleaner. One of my mom’s friends cleans houses for a living, and she told me that was the best wood floor cleaner she had ever used. She kept sliding her bare feet over the floor, going on about how clean it felt. That just made me laugh, because she is one to reach for the chemical cleaners, and she usually thinks I’m a bit crazy.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m through with harsh toxic chemical cleaners. I’m reformed. I’ll slowly work through the bottles of things that are here from before, but I won’t buy any more. Already, I don’t automatically reach for the old stuff. But there it sits, in my cleaning bucket. I’d kind of like to de-clutter and just get rid of them, but somehow that seems wrong. I hate to be wasteful, and they are already here…

What’s a girl to do?