Swinging a Hammer Into the New Year

 Transitioning a second story kitchen into a bedroom is harder than you might imagine. Here's a shot of the cabinets mostly demolished. The uppers have already been moved to the garage to make storage space (imagine the white area on the wall as the "backsplash"). In this picture you can see a number of potentially deadly DIY projects:

The rest of the demo work reveals missing baseboard and miserable water  damage to the flooring.

W. M. Rutter- apparently a now defunct WV lumber  company.
Difficult to obtain 1 1/2 x 5/16 red oak strip flooring.

My pathetic first attempts at soldering copper pipes in the wall between the room and a closet. You can see that the first try didn't work (water sprayed on  lathe).  On a second try, I forgot to empty the active water line down to the valve in the basement and nearly lost an eye when steam in the pipe built up and shot off the end cap like a bullet!

Plaster patching finished (I was forced to cap the waste water line and leave it protruding slightly from the wall). It connects to an air vent directly on the other side of this wall in the corner of the closet. Since we didn't want to remove the whole thing, which would have also involved roof work, we settled for a small oddity. It will likely be behind a bed or some other piece of furniture anyway!

You can see the electrical outlet now moved to the baseboard just to the right of the ladder.

Well, it's still a work in progress. I was able to reuse baseboard from the kitchen in this room, except for one stretch. I also found trim work I had saved to match the existing wood around the closet door. I would not have been able to match it otherwise, short of custom millwork (hah!). What remains? SERIOUS flooring work (2 inch x 5/16 straight edge is on order- I will have to rip each piece), then refinishing the entire floor and lots of painting. Stay tuned!

Mortise Lock Repair 101

Now the the big renovation is complete, I've been able to find some time to get to the finer details of owning a 92 year old home. A few weeks ago we installed a rice paper window film to the bathroom door off our kitchen. The previous owners had used a curtain to provide the necessary privacy but we wanted something a bit more modern. It looks great! One problem: the heavy solid wood and glass door naturally hangs about halfway open. Since it took about an hour of shimming, adjusting, and cursing to get the door to close at all, I wasn't about to try anything fancy. Another problem: the latch on the door was not working and I haven't yet been able to find the correct Corbin key for the mortise lock. If you haven't seen an antique mortise lock up close, see below. They are truly amazing little gadgets:

They just don't make stuff like this anymore. The lock that I am holding is close to 5 lbs. of probably brass. But something is missing... Can you find it?

The spring, which causes the latch to rebound after the door knob is released had broken. In the picture, you can see most of the spring attached to the stationary peg while a small part is still attached to the hook and lever controlling the  lock. Where could I find a replacement? Lowes had a few springs, the smallest of which was the correct diameter but more than twice the needed length.

The picture is fuzzy, but what you're looking at is the spring from Lowes, snipped in half and re-bent on the end to make a loop.

I slid the mortise lock back into the door, re-installed the door knobs and face plates, and...

Voila! The Bathroom door stays shut! You can see the privacy film clearly in this picture, although not really the rice paper pattern.