The Cross House

During the summer and fall, a lot of windows were removed from the Cross House to undergo restoration. The house, amazingly, retains all its original sashes. Of course, after 120-years some are not in great shape.       As the above image testifies to, with a great deal of faith (I just know these…

    I have another column adventure on the south side of the house, to be completed later in the year. The restoration of the long-missing porch railings? Underway! Next is the recreation of the missing lattice, as well as repairing the damaged porch flooring. I have not gotten used to all the west-facing columns…

I am trying to get the finial column on the west front porch painted. But not today! It is 23-degrees right now, but with 45-mile-an-hour winds! So it feels like 4-degrees! But…look at Tuesday…and the upcoming weekend! Kansas is like this. Just crazy!  

The Cross House has a whopping forty stained-glass windows. The conditions ranges from good, poor, to terrifying. Even the good windows will need to be taken apart to have all the lead caming replaced. Caming has a life-span of a century so the caming is already past its due date. I have a grant application…

          I really really really wanted the Great Sweep back and uninterrupted. So, today, we removed the 6×6 post (you can see it sitting on the porch floor, above). Lest we be thought of as damn fools, here is why we did what we did…   FOR THE STRUCTURAL GEEK Some…

NEWS FLASH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I cannot be at the Cross House today. Poo. But Justin just sent me an image. Whoee!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  

Today’s post is not much of an adventure. But it is an update!     You see the four limestone plinths? If the left is ONE, and the right is FOUR: ONE The paired columns were installed this week. The columns were badly rotted and required significant restoration. The capitals are new, and made from…

Ok. Yes. I know. And agree. I am a bit obsessed (small voice in my head: a bit?) with restoring all the missing pieces (columns, balustrades, and lattice) to the 1894 Cross House main porch. As stated previously, it is quite rare to have an 1894 porch last into 2015. Even with all the damage…

        In the next few days, two more columns are being re-installed after also being AWOL. These columns are over to the right (out of the images). When this work is completed, ALL the west-facing columns will be back in place for the first time in a very very very long time….

        And now — drum roll, please — may I present all four center columns being returned to the front porch after many decades absence (scroll way down):                                                  

Porches have a short shelf life For two reasons: 1) Wood does not respond well to being left out in the elements. Its rots. So, a porch built in the 1890s was normally in poor condition by, say, 1920. 2) As with clothes, cars, and hairstyles, houses are either fashionable…or not. A house built in the…

It was a mystery. I felt compelled to solve it.   CLUE ONE There were some old boards hidden inside a wall adjacent to the kitchen. Why were these boards there? Why were they inside a wall? Why had they obviously been cut? Why had they been stained? I mean, this indicated that they were…

Welcome to Part 6 of the Great Refinishing Saga! In Part 2, I posited an idea. What if, if, I had actually uncovered the 1894 finish on my trim? And what if, if, the finish was not varnish or shellac on stained wood, but rather…a faux wood finish?     In Part 2, I wrote…

In Kansas, they say if you do like the the current weather, wait an hour. This has some truth to it. One December, we has a blizzard in mid-December. Then the day after Christmas, until January 3rd, a 70-degree forecast was predicted. Whoee! So, the day after that Christmas, I (being a sensible person) demolished…

Soooooooooooo…all along I thought I was dealing with a 120-year-old finish on my woodwork. And I was fretting, big time, that maybe my refinishing was not, you know, right. Yet in plain sight all along was proof that I was dead wrong about my finish assumptions.   ABOVE: What you are looking at was behind…