Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Restoration Archaeology

I always say that restoration is the opposite of remodeling. When you remodel a room, it takes 1 day to rip the existing structure apart and the rest of the time to build it back up. When you restore a room, you spend 80% of the time meticulously removing decades of previous "upgrades" and 20% of the time actually building the room back to a useable state. This time discrepancy is one of the reasons restoring anything can be so frustrating. It seems like you're never at the point where you're actually creating anything. Still, restoration can be fun for other reasons - like the thrill of Restoration Archaeology.

What is Restoration Archaeology, you ask? Why, it's the act of meticulously peeling away layers of previous, ill-advised remodels to reveal the original house underneath, of course. For example, our master bathroom had a bathtub/shower and a closet recessed into the eaves of the roof:


The first thing you should notice about this picture, fellow Restoration Archaeologists, is the doorknob. It's not original to the house. You can't see it from the picture, but the hinges also weren't original ball-tip hinges. Hmmm...were the built-in tub and closet added at a later date, perhaps? Curious, I crawled into the closet one day, removed the plumbing access panel to the bathtub, and shown a flashlight into the surrounding space. Immediately, I could see that the walls surrounding the tub were "fake" walls that had been built out, away from the true wall connecting the bathroom to the adjacent bedroom. Along those walls, amazingly, were perfectly preserved "faux" subway tiles, exactly matching the tiles that extended around the visible part of the room. According to Jane Powell's book, Bungalow Bathrooms, faux subway tiles were quite popular in the 20's and 30's. People would score their plaster to look like subway tile and then paint the plaster in a gloss finish to mimic the real thing. It was a way to get the tile "look" without the expense!

Of course, we had to keep this nod to history in our "new" bathroom, so Jasun took extreme pains to restore the plaster tile. The fake wall built-outs and the plastic 70's wall-board, on the other hand, had to go:

Wow! Look at that blue! Original 1930s? 40s? 50s? It was an even more vibrant color up close! Incidentally, Jasun's heart sank when we he saw all of the damage that the wall-board glue had left on the plaster. He spent endless hours sanding glue residue, plastering, sanding, replastering, and sanding again until he was happy with the finished product - smooth, beautiful walls.

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