A number of things have been going on recently… The windows should all be installed by the end of the week. The electrician is fixing things up in preparation for closing up the walls, etc. But the new and interesting thing is that work on restoring the old doors we bought from Demolition Depot is starting – and the process of stripping off 130 years of paint was surprisingly easy.
Yesterday the guy put on a thick paste (Peel Away brand) and then covered it with plastic…
Today he took off the plastic and was able to remove all the old paint in one fell swoop. It was basically just a mush that came right off without much of a problem…
I think they look great for just one pass at getting rid of paint. Looks like they’re probably mahogany, which is cool. They’ll need a bunch of patchwork, so a simple stain is out of the question. Looks like we’ll use a “solid stain” – whatever that means. Dan’s picking the color – we’ll probably make them a dark dark brown – almost black. Though we’re also contemplating having them be black.
If you look at the bottom of each panel you’ll see the protective metal strip that Gaulhofer puts on its wood windows. That was another thing we had to get past historic preservation, but they liked the fact that the metal strip will make the windows and doors last longer, so with the proviso that we’d color match the metal as best we could, they said “OK” to it.
What’s cool about Gaulhofer windows is that they’re tilt-n-turn windows. What that means is that they open like a regular casement window (see pic to the right). That was really important to me. Just before we left our coop we had the windows in our apartment replaced. We had a couple of those 1920s/1930s corner windows and I still remember how stunning the view was with the windows removed. The view with the window in paled in comparison. There was just this expansiveness when there were no windows in.
The tilt part of tilt-n-turn can be seen in the pic to the right. For practical reasons you often want ventilation, but you don’t want a huge gaping open window. To that end tilt-n-turns tilt in at the top to give you fresh air – even when it’s raining outside.
That color is in stark contrast to the orangey-yellow color in the back. The chocolate is sort of a sexy and sophisticated color where those terms would never be used for the orangey-yellow color. Given that the rooms in the front of the house are darker and more somber while the rooms in the back are south facing and bright – the colors sorta match the moods of the rooms. The only room where you see both simultaneously is the parlor floor.
Gaulhofer also makes what they call a “vault door” which is a glass door that’sĀ about as completely impenetrable as you can get… Bullet proof glass, steel reinforcing throughout the door, etc. Our roof deck doors just have “smash proof” glass. You can take a baseball bat to them (please don’t) – they’ll crack, but you won’t get through – security without bars…
The mason has taken a mould of one of the good ones and is using the mould to restore the ones that aren’t in good shape… Here’s one around the parlor window that’s in progress…
There’s also a detail over the front of the big parlor window that was missing on our place and is missing on many of our sister townhouses, but is still there on one of them – it’s a subtle crown moulding-like detail in a corner just above the window. The foreman noticed the detail on the neighboring house and is having the mason reinstate it on our place. They seem to be having fun with the restoration… Which is good…
And below you see they’re restoring a detail around the door and creating a template of it to recreate the same detail on the other side of the door where it’s completely deteriorated…
With all the netting up it’s been hard to see the progress. It will be cool when they take down the netting – we’ll finally get to see a fresh “new” faƧade.
…while many others in Harlem are Renaissance Revival…
Notice how structured the Neo-Grec doors are and also notice how the Renaissance Revival doors have what I’ll call “storm doors”. If you go into enough Harlem townhouses you’ll notice some have two sets of doors on the exterior – one set that opens out, and another an inch or so inside that open inwards. Then after those two there is another interior set.
Compare that to the doors we’re restoring…
And here’s the stoop of one of the houses on 127th…
The balusters are slightly different, the railings are the same. The newel posts on 127th have more ornamentation, but they’re same general shape. The one to the right is the more complete newel post. It seems the post on the one to the left lost it’s finial (top) so they took the bottom of the finial and turned it upside down. Ours had finials but lost them before 1940. In the tax photo of the house next door we can see the house two doors down from us still had its newel post finials in 1940 and they’re much like the ones that still exist on 127th Street…
So there you have it… We see that apparently the same builder and/or architect built a set of six houses on 127th Street near 8th Avenue (FDB) in 1880/1881 and then tweaked the plans and built the set of seven slightly narrower and taller ones on 123rd near 7th Avenue (ACP) three to four years later in 1884. And as fate would have it we seem to have gotten one of the doors from the earlier set of houses to use as the front door for our house.
But the really big news is that 243 West 120th Street closed yesterday – just in the nick of time – it was the last day before 
