Finally dealing with the ancient dog damage
The owners who lived here before us had dogs. And they didn’t take care of the dogs.
Many of the doors, door trim, and jambs have damage from dogs repeatedly scratching, trying to get out of the room. In many cases, the dogs’ toenails wore through the paint, and created gouges that exposed the grain of the wood, with gouges along the softer parts of the wood, following the growth rings.
It is actually sad to consider how much apparently, the women who lived here were not able to take care of the dogs. The extent of animal damage to the house was pretty incredible. Much worse than the scratches is the urine damage. The dogs instinctively marked their territory using the virtual fire hydrants of the house: outside corners such as door jambs, and especially the colonnade that is part of what we now call the mudroom. The colonnade suffered some of the worst of the damage, and that is what I decided needed to be addressed.
Here you can see the results of having dogs locked in the house and ignored. I can’t imagine how bad life was for they poor dogs, never getting out of the house to play or exercise. I suppose it is better than tying them up and the yard and forgetting about them and leaving them to freeze, which some people do.
This is a closeup of the damage that is seen on the outside corners of the colonnade.
Lovely, huh?
It is a bit difficult to see here, but the finish nails holding the trim in place are actually rusted through from the acidity of the urine. Also, the wood was greatly cupped, and in some places quite punky. The short pieces of trim on either side were so far gone that they needed to be rebuild, since they would no longer fit into the space correctly.
This image shows the rusted nails:
Here is a piece of trim that I made to replace one of the damaged ones. It was pretty easy to do using the existing one as a template, and we have lots of boards of the same type of wood left over from the butler’s pantry that we disassembled when renovating the kitchen.
I took off the side pieces of baseboard to make it easier to fix them, and (no surprise) found an ancient mouse nest. Actually, I’d be surprised if we didn’t find something like this… our house is like a giant Habitrail.
sSo, after getting all the trim off, and prepared for replacement, we needed to address the floor, which is strip maple. It was incredibly cupped and had huge gaps near the damaged trim. Other places it was like this in the house, we managed to just sand the floor and finish it, if it was not too discolored, and ignore the gaps. However, this particular area still becomes very fragrant come July and August, so we had to do something.