Brownstoner Reno: Monthly Archives: June 2005

When we realized that we had failed to give the rental unit enough closet space, we scrambled to build some. We think it works fine in the space–plenty of room in the bedroom still.

It’s triage time for doors.

Here’s a sample of the new wallpaper that’s going in the front hall.

Here’s a detail of the existing wallpaper in the front hall. It’s in pretty bad shape and several portions are destroyed, but we still feel a little regretful about removing it, especially because there is lincrusta under much of it. In fact, not restoring the lincrusta is arguably the biggest crime against preservation that we’re committing in the whole renovation. We are preserving a well-preserved section of the lincrusta in the staircase from the basement to the parlor floor.

The floor tiles in the rental bathroom were put in last week–as were the wall tiles.

We’re getting down to the wire on finding doors. There are a bunch of beautiful six-panel doors in the house, but there are also 8 or 9 crappy doors that need to be replaced. We found a batch that would work at Demolition Depot, but they want $350 a pop, way too much for us. So we were quite pleased to find of these doors at Moon River Chattel (62 Grand Street, 718-388-1121) on Saturday. Granted, they are 5 panel not 6, but the style of the raised moldings is an exact match and at $75 apiece, we felt like we were paying a reasonable price.

Here’s a picture we dug up of the closets in the front room of the second floor as they were when we bought the house. As you can see from the bottom photo, these have since been cleared to open the floor up, though the moldings were retained and repurposed around the archway that now leads into the “music room”.

A shot of a fan getting roughed into one of the bathroom ceilings. Incidentally, we picked the cheapo model from Home Depot. Hope we won’t regret it.

More fireplance details…this time on the second floor.