La Fortuna, Main Floor

The new house was built in 2000, by introverted people who clearly had a lot of books and knick-knacks.  I conclude this from the evidence:  introversion -- the house is mostly closed off to the neighborhood (a typical snout-house with a two car garage more accessible than the front door, and small windows facing the driveway) and bookish (built-in bookshelves in every room).

The driveway/garages are on the north side of the house -- the south side, facing the wonderful View, is mostly floor-to-ceiling windows.  The front door opens onto a large open room with a stained glass image of a tree and falling leaves; along one interior wall is a floor-to-ceiling, 10 foot wide bookcase.  This room instantly became known as The Tree Room, and it is, for the moment, HomoDommus's study/personal space. The Tree shades the view of the loggia, a large concrete patio inner courtyard with an awning of wisteria.

The Tree Room.  Estimated 10 feet x 10 feet (to the end of the wall).
The great room is beyond the opening.

The bookshelves, actually, are a little odd. They are deep and tall -- 12" at least both ways.  Great for tchotchkes and coffee table books; not so great for paperbacks.  HomoDommus was planning to either take them out and rebuild them, or add sub-shelving -- I'm not sure.  I think they add a lot to the room architecturally, and should be left as is, although I admit I don't know what they'll fill them with.

HomoDommus and The Texan look at the big shelves.

Immediately behind your right elbow as you walk into the house, facing back north, is the dining room.  This is a narrow room and feels more closed in than the Tree Room (which shares the same walls).  It has a little arched doorway into the kitchen, which in the plans was a pocket door (but looks and functions better as just an arch).

The Dining Room

If one walks straight ahead from the front door (walking west-southwest) through the wide archway, one enters the Great Room.  This is really three living spaces, separated by floor and massive bar-height counter.  One space is for casual dining -- under the tiffany lamp on the left (next to big windows looking out at the loggia).  One space is the kitchen (more tomorrow on the kitchen). And the last is the living room.  The windows here look out at the view -- the house is built on so steep a hillside that the yard is about 15 feet below these windows (many steps down from the loggia).

The Great Room.  Note the stairs up, on the right, lined with more of the tall, deep bookshelves.

The Master Suite runs the length of the house on the east side.  Mentally return to the Tree Room (or look back at the pictures above).  Behind the large bookcase is a short hallway to a bare little guest bathroom -- a posh white ceramic basin sink with a faucet and a single tap, all coming directly out of the wall, and a toilet.   (I forgot to photograph -- perhaps the Family will provide one.)  A long blank wall -- probably there was a chest or case there for holding towels and soap.

Girl-Child remembered that when they toured the house a couple weeks ago, the sink had been an artistic one of blue and green turtles. They must have been attached to it; the room is painted dark blue to match -- at least they replaced the artistic sink with a simple, but sophisticated white basin.

If you turn south (right) from the bookcase in the Tree Room, away from the guest bathroom, you will enter the Master Suite.  Here again, large windows overlook the loggia, on two angles. FemmeDommi's Library is south of the bedroom, with a door directly onto the patio.  HomoDommus will be taking out half the bookcase in that room, so there will be room for a chaise under the south window.

The Master Bedroom with Library beyond.

On the north side of the Master Bedroom is an extended bathroom (shower stall separate from soaking tub, toilet behind the door, his and hers sinks).  And beyond that, a huge walk-in closet with miles of shelving and coat rails, and one small window facing north.   This is the same window on the left of the photo of the house from the street behind it.  There is no fan in the closet (and I didn't see one in the bathroom) -- my guess is that Boise is so dry, they don't need to worry about moisture and mildew.

Master Bath, and closet beyond.

The tub may or may not be a whirlpool.  The Teenager volunteered to take two baths a week without complaint, if they could be in the tub. His offer was accepted with more alacrity than he expected.

Masking functional curtain rods

When this house was built, the dining room had a neat bow window with a window seat, looking south to the lawn and garden of the church next door. (The church building itself was on the far corner of an extra large lot.) Sometime mid-century (we believe at the time the ceiling of the dining room was dropped to cover the box beams, and when the kitchen was remodeled to something workable), the bow window was removed. In an early example of re-use, re-cycle, a set of four sash windows, taken from another house of the same period, were installed. The "new" windows don't quite fit the space -- they are huge (169", 429 cm), taking up the whole wall. The woodwork had to be cut narrower on one side, where the frame abuts an interior corner.

In the 1960's, when attendance was at a peak (from what we can tell, a steep and lonely peak), the charming small Victorian church was torn down, and the entire lot filled with an ugly cement slab church. The nave runs parallel to our house, 16 feet (4.8m) across a not-to-code driveway, three-stories tall. So, the large block of windows, which must have been such a wonderful change in 1948, now looks out onto a looming gray expanse. Sunlight peeks over the steepled roof only in high summer, bathing the dining room in hot light from dawn until near dusk. In winter, the east winds howl down the colorless canyon.

I am much more of a "curtain" person than the other members of the household, and one of the main changes that has occurred since I moved here is that gradually, all the windows are getting covered. This is the first winter we've had curtains in the dining room. We've been using tension rods for the last couple of months, which just looks weird with floor-length sort-of lined curtains (shown here), but finally last week we installed a proper rod, so now the whole set of windows can become a dark red fabric wall, holding back the frigid winds.

The delay was caused by the mural. HomoDommi is illustrating every square inch of wall space. Coincidentally, he had painted a steep bluff overhanging an inlet of the Pacific, to represent the south coast Oregon, right where the window frame met the wall. Right where a standard curtain rod would block the view.

The shallowest "rod" I could find proved to be an Ikea Digitet -- that is, a wire, slung about 2.5 inches (6.3cm) from the wall. Curtains are hung via little clips that slide onto the wire. Very practical, opens and closes well, but far more functional than attractive.

What we did was "pull" out the woodwork to in front of the curtain rod. That is, get some more wood, and hang a sort of box over the top of the window. Sort of like a wooden valance, but less intrusive or decorative than a true valance. As we hoped, it just fades into the woodwork -- which it should, because it is, ahem, woodwork. I got the idea from an article about someone updating their own turn-of-the-last-century house, where they covered insufficient windows with these woodwork-like valances. In that case, they hung the valance at the very top of the wall, so the woodwork blended in with the crown molding. The floor-to-ceiling curtains made a dramatic statement in that household. We had a different goal.

And it works to not-entirely cover HomoDommi's wonderful seacoast.

Dining Room Project: Removing the Ceiling

A couple of months ago, I wrote about tearing down the chimney in the kitchen. Let me tell you what happened next -- the next day, actually. We rented a trash container and pulled down the dining room ceiling.

Please note, for future reference, the plain ceiling, the plain cove-moulding (it might even be quarter-round, I can't remember), and the dark blue walls.

First, having just finished the dusty chimney demolition, we taped off the archway to the living room and covered the stained glass windows and the mullioned bookcase doors on the east end of the room. The ceiling removal was nowhere near as messy; it took us about 3 hours from start to finish.

The people who hung the false ceiling in the 1950's did it simply. They nailed 13' lengths of 2x4s across the ceiling, and then applied drywall to it. All we had to do was crack the drywall and pull it down, and then pry off the 2x4s without destroying the beams. The Man, being taller, did the standing-on-the-ladder pulling, and I threw the bits out the window into the container in the driveway alongside. Almost as efficient as the people who put the thing up. Not as messy as chimney demolition, the dust we kicked up is visible in this photo.

Here you see the room from the opposite angle from the preceding photos, showing the protected windows to the east. He is holding an average size piece of drywall, ready to be thrown out the open window. The cross-hatch work above him shows the dark wood box beams with the unfinished 2x4s at more frequent intervals across it.



The boards came down with little fuss, leaving relatively unharmed, lovely original old-growth fir box beams, and an original plaster over lathe ceiling. The box beams form a central open rectangle in the room. My camera can't quite pick up the beauty of the wood -- I will try to photograph them again with controlled light.



Details: If you blow-up the close-up on the right (click on it), you can see:

1) The long hole down the middle of the room in the lathe-and-plaster where the people in the 50's ripped through to install the one additional support for their crossbeams;

2) Some damage here and there to the beams, during the installation of the dropped ceiling (on the beam below the hole, for instance). Generally, however, there was little damage, and the beams didn't need more than a wipe to remove a thin coat of dust. They've spent 50 years sealed away from sunlight.

3) The imprint in the plaster of the original light fixture in the center of the room, half-obscured by our fixture. The original was round. We have a Rejuvenation House square-based fixture, a modern version of one from the same period.

4) One of the casualties to the beams that we discovered -- two missing boards from the box beams nearest the window. I wonder if they first tried to remove the beams and then decided to just install over them? Unplastered lathe is hidden under the beams.

5) If you look carefully, you can see curious striations on the walls, too: moving upwards, you see blue up to a point, a line of pink, irregular spots of brown plaster-paper, and then a wide line of gray, unpainted original plaster. From this we have worked out that the original crown molding in the room was quite deep -- about 5 inches. From books about the period, we can recreate that it was a somewhat textured cove molding with a picture rail underneath that. At some point between 1915 and 1950, the picture rail was removed and the plaster-paper painted pink (popular off and on from the 1920's through the 1950's). The crown moulding was removed only when they dropped the ceiling. We can't get anything exactly like the original (nothing that deep is available at Rejuvenation House) but we'll put in something more interesting than quarter-round.

6) If you look very carefully, you can see the hole in the wood at the intersection of the two beams shown behind the light fixture. Each intersection had the hole, and the faint imprint in the varnish of a round fixture. Peering into the narrow hole with a flashlight, you could see the original wiring (still hot, according to the electrical discharge monitor thingy) awaiting a bulb to illuminate. This is also typical of the style of the time.

Coming soon: Next steps in the Dining Room.