Laying The Foundations for Our New Shop and RBVA's future

After months of working with builders to design a shop and city officials to get our brand new shop permitted, last week, we finally began grading the site on P Street and our building gets delivered this week. It's an exciting time in RBVa!

Pryor Hauling is doing all of the site work for us (and good job of it too).

2015 is shaping up to be quite the year for RBVA.

Finishing Up Round Monument Avenue Porch

For the past couple of months, we have been posting pictures of our progress in building a rounded porch on Monument Avenue in the historic Museum District. We have completed the balcony on the second story of the porch. It required a lot of measuring to get the curvature of the railing just right.

Construction is completed... all that remains is to paint! We just need to wait for it to warm up a bit....

Thank you to our crew for doing such a great job. Credit for the main design goes to Joseph F Yates, Architect. One of the best in the biz.

Replacing Stile and 2 Panels on a door from the White House of the Confederacy.

The door on the east deck of the White House is not protected by a porch roof. It has taken on some moisture, most notably in the lower section of the door.  We began by removing the rotted stile and panels to make new ones. Van Jester Woodworks fabricated the panels out of heart pine. 

Voila!

The door is primed and ready for paint and re installation.

White House of The Confederacy Porch Restoration: Meanwhile.. back in the shop....

If you go by the White House of The Confederacy you may notice something.. a lot of the porch is missing! That's because we took them back to the shop and are working on them there. (Note: This is not wood original to the structure, rather wood used to repair the porch in either in the 1980s or 90s)

Jerrett is cleaning the oil and grease build up off some of the boards. They were milled out of joists from a factory, so any boards that were cut from the outside edge have one original (and dirty) plane.

The lumber is sorted by usable length/quality

 

Before epoxy work to reuse them...

After epoxy... 

Floorboards stacked, clean, and ready for priming! 

On the right, primed boards. Jerrett works on more epoxy on the center stack.

Door restoration at Centre Hill Mansion in Petersburg

The delicate plaster ceiling could not take the pressure of our plastic wall poles, so we had to rig an elaborate tent to contain lead paint dust.

 The building as it looked 10 years ago, with shutters. We will restore the shutters this winter and reinstall them in the early spring.

 Inside our cozy tent, we did dutchmen repairs to the door.

Petersburg history and charm

We are working for the Centre Hill Mansion in Petersburg, restoring their shutters. We've just begun the project by first surveying the existing conditions. The shutters were stored in the Southside Depot, a beautiful train station. Luckily the city of Petersburg aims to put some energy into this building, but unfortunately, we're not to be the contractor.

This doesn't look like a lot, but there are hundreds of shutters to be restored. Some are over 10 ft tall, and the original shutters were constructed very well. They have 1/4" thick paint on them, some mold, and some bug damage, but we are excited to have the opportunity to get these back on the house. The Centre Hill museum agrees; our contract is to replace a few shutters as possible.

We also had to survey the mansion to guage the conditions of the openings and hardware left on the frame. We were lucky enough to get to check out some of the more amazing details inside this house, like this shower from 1901. The fixture to the right on the jamb is a gas lamp.

The item of furniture that looks like sawhorses is a quilting frame, best we can tell.

A curved door leads from the servants' hall to a storage area. We can only imagine the master carpenter that built this thoroughly enjoyed the challenge.

Rounding Out The Monument Avenue Porch

A round, built-in gutter for our Queen Anne Porch in the Museum District

The Rounded Porch Roof.

Some shots of the internal framing that holds all of this together.

A custom-made curved-cornice will cover up all of these modern hangers and other metal elements.

Copper "roofs" top the capitals of the columns.

 Chris doing some quality work on getting this framing together! 

We're getting close to completion..... stay tuned for the final product! You won't want to miss it.

Restoring the Deck On a Porch With Wrought Iron Columns and Railings

We continue to get porch repair work and we're happy to have it. The latest case is some rot that has overtaken an Italianate Style house on East Grace Street up in Church Hill. We are replacing the decking, the framing, and the lattice.... restored with historical accuracy of course!

Normally, with wood columns, we would jack up a porch roof in order to suspend it while we replace the decking, but with wrought iron columns that's not option so we built a bracing system.

Our Carpenters used two 2x8's to be the point where the jacks hold up the roof. 

We then end up with the issue that the entire porch would collapse if we simply jacked it up from the bottom, so we braced the structure to the North Side wall using 2x4s.

 

 Our Carpenter Ben, and Apprentice Chad are hard at work putting together the deck frame.

When completed, the clients will have a fantastic new deck to compliment the beautiful wrought iron railing and columns.