That’s a wrap, people!

And with that, the last of the sheetrock has been unceremoniously ripped out of The Petch House. The house is now sheetrock, laminate, and pressboard free. Can I say its 100% organic? I wonder if I can get certification?



Anyway, that white area around the big opening had the last of the sheetrock. I went and picked up plaster yesterday and I hope to bang out this wall next weekend. The rest of the plaster in this room is in excellent shape. I toyed with the idea of just going ahead and skim coating the whole room now, but I really don’t feel like it. It is hard on the shoulder, so breaking it up in to smaller chunks is probably better anyway.



Here is where it sits now. That big gaping hole is 8’3” wide by 8’9” tall. I had the 7 year old neighbor girl come over and do the drawings. I would never do something that crappy {Cough!}. The door on the right leads to the kitchen. That is the 80s Porn Closet door you see closed in the kitchen. The red line represents where the Murphy’s Bed was installed in the 1920s. Notice how it slices right through the dado panels. It sliced through a pair on the other side as well. I refuse to admit how much I spent to have those burl redwood panels reproduced. It’s a dollar amount I’m taking to my grave.

The green lines that the stupid little girl made {Cough!} represent the cabinets I want to rebuild. There will be 3 uppers and 3 lowers with a counter between to display some fine china or a nice tea set. The small square at the back will be a pass-through door. This is the dining room, so the idea is that you would pass dirty dishes to the servants slaving away in the butler’s pantry.

If servants didn’t work fast enough, the butler’s pantry is also a good place to beat them. The woman of the house could loosen the old corset and just go back there and wale away on them for hours. They were servants, so what else are they going to do? It was either wash the dishes and put up with the beatings, or become a prostitute for the loggers in what is now Old Town. Ahhh, it truly was The Golden Age.

Back to reality….

The goal of the cabinets is two fold. First, to make really nice cabinets. Beyond that though, I also want to use as much lumber as is possible. I cleaned out the shop today and I still have piles of lumber. This all salvaged old-growth redwood from the two story addition that I seem to work in to almost every other post. What’s left is, shall we say, less than perfect. The idea is to do more detail with smaller pieces of wood and use up as much as I can. If I’m forced to buy one stick of wood I’ll consider the project a complete failure. I’ll talk about my plans more in the weeks ahead.