Women of Patience

"Women of Patience" is the nickname for Ermela and Carol's "crew" (we still need to get the shirts made). Over the winter break the crew made significant progress in the very careful deconstruction of a door frame/molding in the TV room and the de-fenestration of many many old windows (can you de-fenestrate a window?...taking the glass out, let's keep it simple here). The future TV room is graced with not one nor two, but three different entrances. The largest of which had a temporary cover of drywall and leads to the central living room, the second goes to what will be the downstairs full bath, and the third comes off the front entry hall. After tinkering with imaginary couches and TV's on floor plans we decided that door number one makes the most sense for furniture layout and flow. The problem with door number one is that it lacks trim, shocking because trim is not something this house generally lacks, but there you have it, we were at a trim deficit. To make matters more problematic, the trim in the future TV room is perhaps some of the most beautiful and hard to replicate in the house. We noodled on it for a while and finally decided to remove the trim from around the closet which will be re-worked as a media niche and move it door number one. Easier said than done. Our predecessors on this house going as far back as the beginning had no concept of task appropriate nails. Every bit of that beautiful trim is held together with big hand cut framing nails. The only solution was for the Women of Patience to spend hours with thin chisels, hammers and scrapers carefully cutting the paint at joints and opening small gaps to allow the chisels in to cut the nails. It is important to cut the paint first as it prevents splintering of the delicate edges. It really was amazing to see how these massive moldings were put together, true skill and artistry from another era.
 

With the individual pieces out the next step was to repair any damage, and clamp the pieces back together to prepare them to re-installation and finishing.
 

The next trick will be mounting the trim we just removed to the inside of the door to the living room, the inside trim is for a slightly smaller door so we will have to create some sort of step down that looks appropriate to the trim style visible on the living room side of the door which is completely different. It is the little differences and clues like this that help us piece the story of the house together.