Kevin and Heather came over when we first moved in to help get organized.. and they brought beer (cheers!) -- essential to the day's tasks. The kitchen will be a future project; we're learning to live with the faux brick and dark brown 70s cabinets -- though we did demo the exterior wood shingles that were over the stove and cabinets, and painted the cabinets in the work area white and blue.

Here it is, all cleaned up!

Here is the second floor landing and banister, before the floors were done. Carl hand-sanded around each post to create a completely smooth finish.

We just had new storm windows installed behind the stained glass windows on the staircase landing. They make a huge difference in preventing heat loss, and don't impact the way the glass looks from the inside (before this was done, we were getting frost on the interior of the stained glass!) Fortunately, almost all of the original windows in the house were replaced with new double-glazed windows before we bought it, and the few windows that haven't been replaced have decent storm windows. Our contractors also found that the entire house has blown-in insulation already -- excellent! The heating bill is still substantial, but (amazingly) it's no more than we were paying in our old apartment on Prospect Street, which was a much smaller flat on the second floor of a three-family house. There is definitely more we can do to tighten it up; we'll start with a (free!) Bay State Gas energy audit next month.

For the record, here are the paint colors we used... everything is Pittsburgh "Pure Performance" Paint (their zero-VOC line).

First and third floors: Mesa Beige (walls), Mother of Pearl (ceilings)
Second floor: Mesa Beige (hallway), Mother of Peral (ceilings and trim), Pickling Spice, Sand Fossil, Shiny Silk, and Shell Flower (bedroom walls).

A close-up shot of the sconce in the hallway.

Here is the front hall and staircase after renovations-- the Chinese deco sconce light on the wall came from an old house just outside of Philipsburg, New Jersey (as with all of the first floor lights, we bought it from the Old Light Warehouse). The oak stair treads were refinished as well as all of the floors, and all of the radiators were painted silver. The mirror was a gift from my parents, and came from an antique store in Putnam, Connecticut.

This sconce light (there are two of them over the fireplace) was purchased from the Old Light Warehouse, and originally came from an uptown Manhattan apartment around 78th and Broadway.

Here is a close-up shot of the dining room wallpaper- it is a lovely pale green/yellow, perfect for the room. We bought it from Graham & Brown (www.grahambrown.com), a fantastic British company that makes beautiful papers in all kinds of patterns. This one is called Summer - Apple from their Eco line-- all of the Eco wallpapers are printed on paper from managed timber sources (100% FSC), using purely water based inks with no VOC's or solvents, and each roll is packaged in compostable materials made from corn. Love it. Joanne Barker was our wallpaper installer - we found her on Angie's List, and she did a really nice job.

Here is the dining room with new wallpaper, refinished floors, a new ceiling, and a new (old) light fixture. The light was purchased from the Old Light Warehouse-- they had acquired it from a woman in Plymouth, Pennsylvania, who bought it in France (date unknown) but never installed it in her home. it was re-wired for the U.S., and here it is!

Here is the dining room after the wallpaper was stripped-- it had a relatively new burgundy paper above the plate rail and an off-white paper below, but both were in bad shape and the room was pretty dark. We stripped all of the walls down to the horsehair plaster and repainted the wall above the plate rail to match the rest of the first floor walls, and re-papered the area below the plate rail with a much softer, lighter paper. As with the other rooms, all of the built-in cabinets were in great shape- and we love the plate door to the kitchen!

...and while we're on the subject of lights: Amelia spent an entire afternoon playing in a box of styrofoam peanuts that was used to ship the lights. The clean-up afterwards was a nightmare but she had a blast.

...and here is the front hall after renovations, with the floors refinished, ceiling plastered and painted, and a new (old) chandelier, also purchased from the Old Light Warehouse. The chandelier was salvaged from an estate in Kingstown, Pennsylvania.

This is a shot of the front hall and the door to the front foyer before the floors were refinished.

Here is one of the column details.

Here is a close-up of the living room light-- the colonial revival details are a perfect match with the decorative oak columns that flank the living room and music room.

Here is the same shot of the living room after all of the improvements (and with our furniture in it)-- the pendant light in the foreground was purchased online from a place called the Old Light Warehouse (http://www.rubylane.com/shops/theoldlightwarehouse). The light was salvaged from an old pharmacy in Quakertown, Pennsylvania. The original set included three identical lights; we purchased two of them for the formal rooms at the front of the house (the living room and the music room). We also had the chimney cleaned and the fireplace works beautifully-- which we appreciate in this cold weather!

Here is the living room after the wallpaper was stripped-- the fireplace and all of the original woodwork and built-in bookshelves were in great shape when we bought the house, so we focused our restoration work on the ceilings (new blueboard and skim coat plaster-- there were a lot of cracks and water damage), walls (stripping the wallpaper and painting), floors (refinishing the original oak) and lighting (we replaced the existing, non-historic lights with historic/ salvage lights from the same period).

Here is the control wire than will connect the thermostat on the roof and the thermostat in the basement tank.

And it's a wrap! The new shingles were laid on top of these pipes, and the system is essentially invisible from the outside of the house.

More progress.... almost there!

Here are the supply and return pipes running through the master bedroom closet on the second floor of the house.

Here is Fred laying in the pipes, with yellow foam spacers between each line.

Here is a detail of the pipes entering the house by the chimney (we also had a mason re-point and re-flash the chimney after the roof was done).

Here is the first line of copper piping to be installed, with the supply and return pipes entering the house just below the chimney.

One of the most exciting parts of our house renovation is the solar thermal roof, designed and built by my uncle and our general contractor, Fred Harkness (Harkness Built Construction). Fred tested several different versions of this system in his shop and monitored the results, which showed that copper pipe with a metal flange laid in a serpentine pattern under the roof shingles yielded the most consistently high temperatures (100-plus degrees, even on days when the outside temperature is below freezing). We installed this system on the south roof of our house, which has unobstructed sun exposure. The system is far less expensive than solar thermal panels mounted on the rooftop (though solar panels will pull more heat into the system) and it is nice on a historic house where the rooflines are very visible. The material cost for our system was approximately $1800-- of course there are labor costs as well, but if you are already planning to install a new roof it is a very cost-effective system. We haven't yet decided what size of tank to install, but we expect that this system will provide much of our domestic hot water heating through the spring, summer, and fall, and perhaps give us a boost in the winter. The way it essentially works is that a mix of water and anti-freeze circulates through the pipes on the roof and then down through a central loop in the middle of the house to the basement, where the tank will be located. In the basement, the pipes will tie into a copper coil inside a hot water tank, heating the water as it passes through and back up to the roof to be heated again. We will have thermometers on the rooftop pipes and in the basement tank so we can monitor the system under different conditions. The photo above shows the first phase of construction-- a new layer of ice and water shield was laid over the old roof (which was left in place for an added layer of protection between the pipes and the interior of the house).

Here is the new door to the alcove, trimmed out to match the existing door frames on the second floor (the paper will be removed from the glass after it's painted, letting in more light).

...and here is the guest room on the second floor.

And here is the master bedroom....it faces south and gets wonderful sun.

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Here is the yellow bedroom, also ready to move in. We are so happy with the floors and the painting! The rooms just glow.

Here is Amelia's "green room" all ready to move in!

Here is one of the two rooms on the third floor (which will be Maggie's study... what a luxury!) after the floors were refinished and the new painting completed.

The refinished floors came out beautifully! Here is a picture of the third floor hallway. Carl, our flooring guy, told us that the second and third floors are made of fir and the first floor is oak.