Since things are still slow on our house, I thought I'd show a little something I've been working on at the Big House. This is some of the fascia board on the front eaves of the house. These are about a full 2" x 14" oak. As you can see, parts of it are split pretty bad and in alot of areas those little rounded pieces in the middle of the flowers has fallen off. I am having to fill all of the splits and holes with a wood epoxy stuff and recarve the missing details. I love it but its pretty slow going.
This is a close up of one of the better preserved areas. I cleaned this spot up and filled the cracks and then made a mold of the flowers to use to reproduce the missing parts for other areas. That took a couple of days but was pretty cool. I used this rubber mold stuff that will stay in place on a vertical surface when you paint it on. After you put enough layers to have the mold about 1/4" thick, you back it up with plaster and then peel everything off and bang! there you go! Now I can make bunches of these flowers or section off certain parts of the mold if I just need part of a flower or whatever.
As for our house, the structural engineer changed a couple of little things about the truss but it is still basically the same and Allen priced and ordered the steel today for it. It was not as bad as I feared, cost wise. So, we should be working on that this weekend and I will have lots of photos of that. As soon as we have that thing fabricated, things should pick up once again. It has finally quit raining here, which is great for work, but now everything is about to burn up.
Since things are still slow on our house, I thought I'd show a little something I've been working on at the Big House. This is some of the fascia board on the front eaves of the house. These are about a full 2" x 14" oak. As you can see, parts of it are split pretty bad and in alot of areas those little rounded pieces in the middle of the flowers has fallen off. I am having to fill all of the splits and holes with a wood epoxy stuff and recarve the missing details. I love it but its pretty slow going.
This is a close up of one of the better preserved areas. I cleaned this spot up and filled the cracks and then made a mold of the flowers to use to reproduce the missing parts for other areas. That took a couple of days but was pretty cool. I used this rubber mold stuff that will stay in place on a vertical surface when you paint it on. After you put enough layers to have the mold about 1/4" thick, you back it up with plaster and then peel everything off and bang! there you go! Now I can make bunches of these flowers or section off certain parts of the mold if I just need part of a flower or whatever.
As for our house, the structural engineer changed a couple of little things about the truss but it is still basically the same and Allen priced and ordered the steel today for it. It was not as bad as I feared, cost wise. So, we should be working on that this weekend and I will have lots of photos of that. As soon as we have that thing fabricated, things should pick up once again. It has finally quit raining here, which is great for work, but now everything is about to burn up.
2 comments:
I can only imagine the amount of work going into restoring that place! As a former woodworker, I do know the work involved in repairing weather damaged wood. If you get to it soon enough, it's not that hard, but you said that piece was one of the least damaged. I hate to think of what the others look like.
I know you'd rather be sharing stuff about your own house, but I do appreciate these updates on the restoration.
Hey Gin! Thanks for continuing to check in. We should have some more about our house soon but the big house is so interesting everyone seems to like to hear about it too. I really enjoy the restoration work on it also. Some of it is pretty rough but I love to see things fixed up and brought back to life. The original craftsmen put so much time and care into it I feel like I'm doing it for them too.
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