The Historic District

Yeah, from what I've seen there wasn't much of a standard on floors way back when, depended on the class and local building styles I suppose. The house I grew up in (1910 craftsman) has single layer T+G fir upstairs and downstairs. You can feel that the floors are thin but it doesn't necessarily fee...

Funny story, I was a big fan of his blog years ago when I had no idea where Eureka even was. I moved here in 2011 for the preservation program and stumbled on the blog again, a few months after settling in. Though this time the pictures, house style, and all the talk of redwood suddenly sounded fami...

I can actually see the tower of the Carson from my bedroom window! I'm a 15 minute walk from it. An amazing house. Shows what lumber barons did with their fortunes back in 1890. I've been lucky enough to have a few fancy holiday lunches there, and to crawl all over the mansion, including the basemen...

The room is my parents' bedroom, and it just ended up at the end of the priority list I suppose. There were 10 years or so while my brother and I were young and the house didn't get much work done to it at all. There's only two bedrooms (well 2 1/2 now), and was hard logistically to take a room out ...

Thought I would update this as a continuing thread of work on the house. Just finished a month of work on the house this summer, the master bedroom being the bulk of the work. This was the last major room that hadn't been touched during our two decade tenancy here, and it was long overdue. How it wa...

Thanks for posting about the copper foil repair method! I've thought about doing this to a few wavy glass panes in my house, but figured I would be the only one who would be crazy/artistic enough to appreciate such an obvious but intentional repair lol. Any idea on how common such a mending was/is? ...

A picture would be worth a thousand words in this case. Based on how I'm picturing it, a returned piece that is coped to meet the casing still seems the cleanest option. That method you mentioned about returning before the casing which leaves a gap seems to be a typical solution based on some google...

Point well taken. I just meant the construction/assembly phase would have been done with hand tools. Yeah, this was the prime time for millwork, especially here in the heart of redwood country. There were tons of shops around here cranking out millwork, many driven by steam from the heaps of lumber ...

If you used chemical stripper, it can strip out the color in the wood, leaving that dead gray look. You could maybe try a gold toned stain of some sort to bring back the color. The color could have also come from the finish too. If it was a pretty old finish, it was probably shellac. The common ambe...

Luckily it's mostly in great shape. The only change was a new asphalt shingle roof, and the gutters were replaced with aluminum. You can hardly tell though because the house is so tall!