Tying together old & new in entryway woodwork, part 2

Let's move on to the new parts of this tying together of old and new in the entryway.

I've probably mentioned this before, but one aspect of overbuilding that I could do without in our old house are the baseboards literally nailed in beneath the floorboards.  As in, they were laid first, and then the floor was nailed right up against them.  This makes for a nice tight seal, but if you need to repair or remove the wall behind them, you're sunk.  You've got to destroy them to get them out of there - unless you want to remove the whole floor first.  That's not happening here. 

So everywhere we've removed walls, we've had to destroy baseboards, which just about kills me every time.  They're these nice 9" tall southern pine beauties.  The real trouble with tearing them out is that you'll never be able to find some nice old-growth wood to match and replace them....

...unless you're related to Bob Seymour, forester extraordinaire, and he happens to have a stash of old-growth spruce cut from Baxter State Park, leftover from the conference table he's building for the Park headquarters.

Awesome.  The top molding detail was salvaged from the old piece.

Might as well throw in a picture of the outside door...which is now all trimmed out and painted red!

Might have to paint the mullions.  The white plastic sticks out like a sore thumb.

One last detail in the "new" category.  Tearing down the wall between this room and the living room obviously left a huge gap in the floor. We thought about installing another strip of marble mosaic (like we did between the kitchen and dining room), but that was bridging two totally different types of flooring.  Here, we had the same old birch hardwood on both sides of the former wall, but it would be next to impossible to match.  First of all, new flooring isn't as thick as old flooring, and secondly, the bare strip runs perpendicular to the floor.  So we decided to find a contrasting, perhaps a showpiece, slab of wood, which (unlike tile) could just be sanded and refinished at the same time as the rest of the floor at any point in the future.

We dispatched Dad to his garage/lumber emporium to cull the perfect piece for our floor.  As usual, he did not disappoint.  From the pile emerged a slab of cherry cut from my grandfather's Ohio woodlot, which, upon being planed to the perfect thickness, revealed itself to have a curly grain. Tres magnifique!

It will be lovely when we someday get around to finishing it.  It was already almost the perfect width (we only had to shave off 1/8 of an inch or so) and length; it was meant to be ours.

And here's another exciting picture...this is the list that we have slayed since our wedding at the end of August.  Dad gets the pleasure of crossing off all the things he helped us complete.  .  Only the hearth is left to go!