Rip My Heart Out!

Our house was built in the 1930's.  It has a lot of the cool elements of old houses; taller ceilings, cool wood work, and a beautiful walkway like this.

Actually, really similar to that.

Here is a picture I found online from when our house was sold years ago before we bought it.  It's blurry but you can see the cool glass bookcases with columns on top.  The window you see straight ahead is where the sliding glass door to the deck was put in and the wall to the right was knocked down to open up to the kitchen.  Isn't the difference crazy?

But then the previous owners had the gall to RIP. THEM. OUT!  They claimed the columns were cracked or something.  I couldn't really hear them explaining it over the sound of my heart crying.

Anyway, we also had to rip the header out of the walkway because when the previous owner replaced it, he didn't use a big enough one and the second floor was sinking.  You can read about that horror here. 

We framed out the walkway ourselves and put some rosettes in the corners and called it good.  The seams between the boards always REALLY bugged Joe because since our walls are old and no where near straight, some of the gaps were pretty big.

Then one day, Joe being the Pinterest loving teacher that he is (don't deny it babe, I love ya for it) he came across this idea to use lattice strips to create a neat dimensional casing all while covering up the cracks.

The seams still need to be caulked (as does everything else in the house) but it looks one million times better than it did before!  We love it.  For the step-by-step, check out this blog.  We didn't do the crown on the top because when we put the crown molding on our ceilings, there wouldn't be a enough room between the top of the walkway and the ceiling.  We have tall ceilings but we also have tall openings.

Doesn't it look awesome!?  That man never ceases to amazes me!