Invasion of the Vines

Besides the invasive stand of bamboo in the yard that has, to date, gotten the best of us, we've discovered another invader and this one is a little "closer to home".

The house is surrounded by trees and plants that are buried in parasitic ivy. 

Ivy is pretty wily - it looks pretty on the outside...

...but when you aren't looking, it starts sneaking up into the siding.

And then, when an old radiator is removed to expose the original plaster wall that had since been drywalled over,

you discover that the vines have found their way INTO the house.

Notwithstanding the pretty original wallpaper that I'd like to try to replicate somewhere in the house, the invaders have to go!

Cleared for Landing

The clearing of the second floor landing has been a multi-week, multi-phase project, but (except for a lone bathtub) it's now done.  As you may recall, at some point in the house's history, the upstairs staircase was closed in and a bathroom was added at the head of the stairs in the former landing.  This was our starting point:

Once the side walls were down from the balcony, we still had the bathroom at the head of the landing to remove.  This was the far side of the wall at the end of the balcony - lots of blue tile everywhere.

Here's the next shot with the wall (and sink) removed:



Even more blue tile - here's a few shots of the thousands of pounds of tile and its 2 inch morter bed that had to be removed from all of the walls of the bathroom/landing:

Although it looks therapeutic, removing tile and morter and then carting it downstairs and outside to the dumpster, bucket by bucket, is actually darn hard work.

By the end of this project, we were both thanking our lucky stars that this was the only bathroom in the entire house that had been tiled! 

The end result - a cleared landing.  The lighting is spectacular and the open upstairs now feels like it's an integral part of the house instead of a closed-off and separate living quarters.  The remodeled landing will make a nice reading nook (sans the bathtub!).  Our current plan is to relocate this second floor guest bathroom to an existing very small bedroom on the back side of the house.   Whether we tile the new bathroom or not is an open question....