Silk Stocking Avenue Antiques & Oddities

01/25/2025

01/11/2025

Big News at Silk Stocking Avenue!

We’re thrilled to share the first steps of restoring and renovating the Turret Room—the first guest room in our home as we prepare for our future bed and breakfast! This project is all about blending the charm of our historic home with thoughtful updates to create a warm, wholesome, and cozy space for our future guests.

Here’s what’s on the agenda for this room:
✨ Adding a stunning custom chair rail and picture moulding that we’ll machine ourselves with our Delta shaper, ensuring a one-of-a-kind profile.
🎨 Painting the walls, ceiling, and trim with fresh new colors to give the space a fresh, vibrant feel.
💡 Installing a beautiful ceiling medallion to highlight the room’s historic character.
🔌 Upgrading electrical receptacles and switches for safety and functionality.
🛠️ Replacing the missing baseboards where the new wall was put up and cleaning up the original door and transom window hardware to showcase their timeless beauty.

We’ve started with the layout, using painter’s tape to map out the chair rail and picture moulding design. Check out the photos of our preliminary plans and let us know what you think!

We’re so excited to take these first steps toward creating a space where history, craftsmanship, and comfort meet. Stay tuned for updates as this project progresses!

01/07/2025

🚨 We’re Back with a BIG Update!

We’ve been working tirelessly to meet our deadlines and, wow, do we have a lot to share! Here’s what we’ve been up to:

✨ Beadboard Ceiling
We’ve completed building, staining, and shellacking the beadboard ceiling in the main part of the kitchen. It’s a showstopper, and we couldn’t be happier with how it turned out!

⚠️ Unexpected Mold in the Kitchen
While tackling the kitchen, we discovered mold in two separate areas. This led to a complete tear-down of the walls (we’re talking drywall, plaster, sheathing, and insulation—it was a messy job).

🔨 Making the Most of It
This surprise gave us an opportunity to make some much-needed updates:
• New Electrical: The kitchen is now completely rewired with all-new, up-to-code electrical.
• New Openings: With the help of our good friend Dan Garnatz, we cut out and framed a brand-new window and door opening. Both feature stunning salvaged pieces!
• Improved Insulation: We sistered new 2x6 studs to build the wall back out to its original depth, which allowed us to install thicker, more efficient mineral wool insulation.
• Fresh Walls: We hung mold- and moisture-resistant drywall, mudded and taped the joints, and just applied the first coat of sealer last night!
• We finally removed all the old commercial restaurant equipment that was in the space. It feels so good to have a clean slate to work with!
• New Subfloor Prep: We ripped up the old kitchen flooring—all the way down to the original subfloor. (There were 5 layers of flooring held down by what felt like 2.7 million nails and staples!) Once it was all up, we laid a layer of red rosin paper followed by 3/4-inch OSB tongue-and-groove plywood. This gives us a flat, clean, and sturdy base for the beautiful new kitchen flooring we’ll be installing soon.

🎨 Custom Trim Work
We’ve also been hard at work milling custom trim for the kitchen, recreating the intricate beauty of the original trim from the downstairs. Using different cutters and profiles has been a fun challenge, and we’re thrilled with how close we’ve come to matching the originals!

🔜 What’s Next?
Here’s what’s coming up:
• Building custom kitchen cabinets
• Installing the gorgeous kitchen flooring we can’t wait to show you
• Bringing the electrician back to install devices and lighting
• Moving in our stunning vintage appliances
• Adding those all-important finishing touches!

We appreciate your patience while we’ve been busy making progress, and we can’t wait to share more updates soon. Stay tuned—there’s so much more to come!

11/13/2024

We might have missed our Sunday finish line, but the beadboard ceiling progress is too good not to share! With two out of eight sections complete, it’s already everything we hoped for. Every piece is hand-crafted with extra care, and it’s totally worth the extra time to get it just right. And can we talk about the handmade crown molding/brackets? They look absolutely amazing with the beadboard! We still have six more sections to go, then it’s on to stain and light fixtures – and finally, the big reveal. Thanks for sticking around – we can’t wait for you to see the finished look!

11/07/2024

🎉 Beadboard Ceiling Progress Update! 🎉

The beadboard moulding operations on the shaper are DONE—finally! Next up, we’ll be sanding and staining the crown moulding/brackets, then sealing everything with a coat of shellac. After that, we’ll move on to building eight beadboard panels for the ceiling! Once the panels are built, it’s sanding, staining, and shellac sealing again before we start the install and light up this space! 💡✨

By Sunday night, we’re hoping to have a brand new kitchen ceiling. Stick with us as we bring this beauty to life, one step at a time!

11/05/2024

🚧 Workshop Update 🚧

We’ve been hard at work crafting our tongue-and-groove beadboard! We’ve got all the tongue and grooves cut, and now we’re onto the next phase: adding those classic beads. Ran our first 12-inch board as a test, and we couldn’t be happier with how it turned out! 👌

Now, we’re ready to take on the rest – all 114 boards (yes, that’s a solid 920 linear feet of beading ahead)! Wish us luck as we bring this vision to life, one groove at a time! 💪✨

Stay tuned for more updates from the shop, and thanks for following along! Stay groovy…😉

11/04/2024

🚪✨ Weekend Project Update ✨🚪

We are THRILLED to share that our beautiful garage doors are finally installed! These carriage-style doors were the perfect choice, and seeing them on our Victorian home has blown us away. They’ve added so much character and truly capture that vintage charm we’ve been aiming for.

But the projects didn’t stop there this weekend! We loaded up on 115 1x4x8 pine boards and 25 2x2x8s for our next big task: creating a custom beadboard ceiling for the kitchen. The plan? To turn raw, dimensional lumber into a beautiful, handcrafted ceiling. The 1x4s will become tongue-and-groove beadboard, and the 2x2s will serve as part of a decorative crown moulding/bracket system to secure the beadboard. We’re shaping every inch ourselves!

We designed our own moulding profile for the brackets using vintage Delta Milwaukee shaper cutters and shaped the tongue-and-groove joints with a modern Amana cutter. Every detail is handled with care and precision, using both modern and vintage tools, including a 1940s Delta Milwaukee shaper that’s been working like a charm.

This project is more than just a ceiling for us; it captures everything we love—historic preservation, DIY craftsmanship, and our commitment to quality. It’s about restoring the beauty of yesterday, making our home truly ours, and doing it all on a budget through skill and dedication.

After a year of construction, things are finally starting to come together, and we’re beyond grateful to have you all along for the journey. We couldn’t do this without your support, and we promise more amazing projects, content, and passion for keeping history alive. Thank you for sticking with us through every step, and stay tuned—it’s only getting better! 🌟

10/31/2024

🚨 Big News from the Workshop! 🚨

We just gave our 83-year-old Frigidaire fridge a fresh start! The original wiring was so brittle that it crumbled at a touch, so we swapped it all out with fresh, durable wiring. 💪 We even upgraded it with a heavy-duty, grounded power cord for safety. And guess what? The original inside light still works! Now, this vintage beauty is back in action, keeping its cool like it’s 1941! 🧊 Ready to join our home as our new “daily driver” – can’t wait to see what it’s got! 😄

10/22/2024

❤️A Piece of Family History Comes Home❤️

Last night, we embarked on a journey—six hours round trip from Rushford, MN, to Algona, IA, to bring home a very special piece of history: a cast iron clawfoot tub from 1897. But this isn’t just any tub—it’s from a home built by Katie’s great-great-grandfather, Mr. S.E. McMahon. For nearly three generations, that home was a part of Katie’s family, and this tub was there through it all.

The home left the family in the late 1960s, but we were lucky enough to connect with the current owners. When they decided to part with this tub, they reached out to us—and without a second thought, we said yes! While we’ve built our brand around saving forgotten pieces of the past, this one holds a different weight.

Every piece we restore is special, but this tub is more than just a relic—it’s a tangible connection to Katie’s family. Generations back, her relatives used this very tub. Now, we have the incredible opportunity to bring it back to life and give it a place in our own home.

It may not look like much right now, but when it’s restored, it will be more than just a beautiful piece—it’ll be a piece of Katie’s past that we can cherish every day. We couldn’t be more grateful for the chance to save this irreplaceable piece of family history. Stay tuned—this one’s going to be truly special.

10/21/2024

Hey everyone, we’re so sorry for the long silence! We’ve been in full crunch mode, tackling project deadlines, but we’ve got some exciting updates to share!

First, the porch is almost finished, and we absolutely love how it’s turning out! It looks like it’s always been here, blending perfectly with the period of the home. We’ve also got electricity running to the garage, and both inside and outside lights are now installed.

We’re making great headway with our remodel plans too. The kitchen and bathrooms are in the works, and we’re designing the bathrooms to look like a 1920s-1930s remodel, which is the period we’re drawing inspiration from. We scored an incredible deal on subway, mosaic, and real marble flooring, which we’ll be using in the kitchen, the downstairs bathroom, and the shower.

On top of that, we just picked up some fantastic vintage appliances! We now have a 1940s-era Roper stove and a 1940s-era Frigidaire refrigerator for our kitchen. The fridge just needs a new power cord, and the stove is getting a deep cleaning and slight restoration, but both are fully functional and will be our “daily drivers” once the kitchen is finished!

We’ll do our best to post updates and upload videos on YouTube regularly, but if you don’t hear from us, don’t worry—we’re documenting everything and will share all the exciting details once we’re out of crunch time.

Thank you so much for your continued support and love!

STAY TUNED….

09/15/2024

✨ **Sneak Peek Alert!** ✨

We’ve been hard at work on the custom trim for our garage, and it’s finally installed! 🎉 Here’s a quick 30-second look at the finished product, crafted to perfectly match the original moulding in our 130-year-old home. 🏡🔨

From the detailed beading to the Roman ogee plinth blocks, every piece was milled from scratch with care. This trim brings a seamless blend of old-world charm and new craftsmanship to the space!

Stay tuned for more content coming soon! 🔥