First room done . Sort of . And it's not really a full room. But still.

First room complete-ish.

Off the kitchen was a 'closet'.  Clearly it had previously been the back staircase, not the grand front staircase. Pervious owners had vacated the stairway, and turned the bottom half into some sort of storage, complete with six steps going up to a paneled wall.  We haven't found the upstairs part of the stairway yet, but there's plenty of time for that.  We thought about opening it up to its previous back stairway glory, and we might at some point. But for now, we decided we needed the storage more than a second stairway. 

It's conversion included:

Working on the door

I  removed the door to take off years of yellowing, caked on paint and planing the bottom because it stuck.  I almost got the planing right, but I'll still need to take it off for some additional reduction to let the door glide open and close without it hitting on the buckling floor. 

To get the paint off, I first used a heat gun and scraped off lots of paint. That's really rewarding, and I think I get sort of trance like doing it. Slowly heating the paint with a turbo hair dryer, and coming behind with a scraper and it all comes off.  Below the paint was a thick layer of varnish, which doesn't come off with the heat gun. So after scraping, I put some chemical paint dissolvent on the door, and covered it with Saran Wrap to give it time to do its thing without drying out.  This step requires heavy duty gloves, because the paint stripper is pretty nasty stuff.  

Door without paint. It's better than it looks. 

The next step will be to sand the whole thing down, and refinish with some thing to bring out its beauty.  We haven't decided how much of the kitchen wood will be painted versus natural wood color. There is so much wood in the house that I'd be loathe to paint. And the dark wood makes things dark. There's a possibility that much of what's painted and stained and caked on in the kitchen will be painted again, to give the kitchen some needed light.  We haven't decided, so there was no urgency to finish the door. So it's back on, paint-free and mostly stain-free.  

Remove the stained wallpaper from the wall

There was a good amount of ripped, stained wall paper on the sides of the former staircase. In order to paint, that needed to come off. I used a wallpaper remover kit that had a handy device you rubbed over the wallpaper to lightly score it so the solvent would reach the glue.  Then I sprayed the solvent on the wallpaper and waited a while. Back to it with my handy scraper, and all the wallpaper came off.  A quick clean with Dawn and water, got the remaining glue and debris off the plaster walls and ceiling. 

Tape the parts I didn't want painted

I purchased a simple paint spray gun and planned to spray the paint in the closet. This meant I had to tape off everything we didn't want painted. the space is tall, and there are built in steps to reach some of the higher areas, and I didn't want to paint the rungs of the steps because the first few sets of footprints would ruin my beautiful paint job. Instead, I taped them and planned to leave them their scuffed up, dinged up, original but clean beautiful self.  

Get out the spray gun

Oooh.  Pulling out a new hardware toy.  How exciting.  It wasn't that hard, but I'm glad I'd planned to start in a closet.  I put down a layer of odor and stain hiding Kilz first, and using the spray gun made it pretty easy. There were a few drips caused by me getting too close, or going to slow, but it got better as time went on. After that dried, I put on a coat of a white that's barely barely blue.  I also put shelf liners on the steps that would be used as shelves. 

Lighting

There is single bulb light in the closet, but it doesn't work. While we plan to fix that at some point, we needed to use the closet, and have lighting in there long before that closet light would make it to the top of our 'pay someone else to fix' list.  So I purchased a set of remote control battery operated small round lights.  With the bright paint, I've only put in 4 of the 6 that were in the package, and it looks great.  

Fill 'er Up

I used my lovely family company to help fill it up with supplies that had been squirreled away in random cabinets, and to open up boxes we'd yet open.  The first few steps will be left empty-ish so we can get to the stuff upon on the shelves, but the the upper steps can be organized and everything can be seen.  It will still take us time to reorganize, but I'm so grateful that the space is not gross, and we can start organizing things enough to have a nearly-functioning kitchen.  

Next on the docket? We have an electrician coming next week to turn our underpowered 150 amp panel into a 400 am panel, to better support three kitchens (that have hobbled along for years), and to allow capacity to add a washer and dryer.  That will allow us to start picking off electrical issues upstairs, like our bedroom ceiling light. We'd intended to take off the old ceiling light and install ceiling fan. Although not always the most attractive, they're super helpful in summer and winter with the 10' ceilings, and no AC.  When we took off the light, there were two unlabeled black wires and no junction box.  We'll have someone else sort out that nob and tube mess. Oh, and the outlet that stopped working in the kitchen. Oh. .  

After electrical, we have someone coming to give us a bid on 13 new single hung windows on the first floor. That will allow us to ditch the storm windows, which are filthy, and to better open and close the windows.  

While others are doing electrical and windows, we'll continue to work on bathroom and kitchen plans so we can get those two rooms better functioning, hopefully by the end of the calendar year.  And it's all really good.