• Hi all and welcome to TheWoodHaven2 brought into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming! We all have Alasdair to thank for the vast bulk of the heavy lifting to get us here, no more so than me because he's taken away a huge burden of responsibility from my shoulders and brought us to this new shiny home, with all your previous content (hopefully) still intact! Please peruse and feed back. There is still plenty to do, like changing the colour scheme, adding the banner graphic, tweaking the odd setting here and there so I have added a new thread in the 'Technical Issues, Bugs and Feature Requests' forum for you to add any issues you find, any missing settings or just anything you'd like to see added/removed from the feature set that Xenforo offers. We will get to everything over the coming weeks so please be patient, but add anything at all to the thread I mention above and we promise to get to them over the next few days/weeks/months. In the meantime, please enjoy!

Victorian Bodge!

S

StevieB

Nordic Pine
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I have been putting this job off for ages, but finally I have to start tackling the hall stairs and landing. The skirting up the stairs in particular has been an issue since we moved in - a huge split/gap all the way up the stairs which has at some point been filled with buckets of caulk, filler and goodness only knows what:

stairs_1_zpsdfgzsahr.jpg


After raking this all out, I ended up with a missing strip 12mm min widening to approx 18mm in places. It looks as if the skirting is in two (or more) pieces and the bottom has dropped while the top piece has stayed attached to the wall. The stairs are solid with no give so it must have happened some time ago.

stairs_2_zpswjql8xfh.jpg


Sadly the paint was compromised in stripping out the filler, so I now need to strip the paint as well, with SWMBO wanting a central stair carpet and stair rods as there would have been originally. So I then spent most of today stripping old paint (anyone know the symptoms of lead poisoning?) to end up with a third of the wall side stripped and the gap filled with timber rather than caulk:

stairs_4_zpsqlc1u3wq.jpg


stairs_5_zps4thv15xs.jpg


And the reason I titled this post 'Victorian Bodge? Most of that gap was filled with newspaper dating from 1897! Who said the Victorians did everything properly?!

stairs_3_zpsipszwegw.jpg


Steve
 
I'm not disagreeing with the date but the skirting, above the stringer, is very plain for the Victorian era - compared to some I've seen?

Stayed in a hotel the other week, once a rich Mill owners house which had several "layers" of ornate skirting about 18" high.

Was it cut on the curve?

Rod
 
No Andy, it is in pieces - you can just see a join in the left hand side of the photo.

Rod - It is much fancier in the front rooms and approx 15" high. Up the stairs and in the hall and landing it is all as shown and much plainer. It appears to be original. I have had to strip some out today due to an ancient leak in a window rendering one section of skirting rotten. That top rail is actually three pieces, 2 pieces form the main part comprising 99% of the rail and a tiny decorative moulding on the very top - almost hidden by successive layers of plastering. There was certainly a lot of work went into making it, even if it does look plain!

Steve
 
That's quite surprising for the Victorians! Good find and cool newspaper clipping. 8-)
 
Great high Victorian skirting boards were always made up in pieces. They are, after all, a contraction from wainscoting (and that in turn from whole-wall paneling). I think you're right that this problem is because of the way they were fixed to your wall. I might have been tempted to put some 21st century filler in alongside the 19th century stuff, and add another layer of paint instead of the awful job of stripping paint !! :D

Glad to see you got rid of that carpet edging strip pronto. It rips great chunks of raw flesh off in an unguarded moment if you don't. That ********* stuff is lethal.

Do you really want a carpet on the stair? It looks great just as it is. Leave the paint, don't clean up anything, and you've got a great stair.
 
Thanks Mike. Unfortunately SWMBO has been after a central stair carpet and stair rods since we bought the house 18 months ago - the stairway is one of the reasons she went for the house. The sides will be painted white again as will the skirting. Something to do with reminding her of her grandmothers house from her childhood or something. As long as she is happy (and it is her who polishes the brass!) I am happy to accede to her wishes in this instance :)

I agree, gripper rods are the invention of the devil when left uncovered :evil:

The paint down the stairs needs stripping anyway, some idiot ran several miles of alarm cable down a Victorian stairway about 10 years ago and then successively painted over it in gloss - stripping it off leaves a nasty nasty mess that can only be solved by stripping the paint. Might as well have both sides the same!

Oh, and the skirting is I think Georgian - house was built in approx 1840. The newspaper is from 1897, but the skirting is older. Might explain the plainess a little better perhaps?

Steve
 
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