Greetings! I've been browsing the net for tips on just this subject and your thread has answered a lot of questions - thank you! I just have one more inquiry - do you know of a way to make the end product of one-part self curing silicones (after curing) softer and stretchier (lets say more like human skin, goal hardness is 10-30 shore A)? The reason I'm asking: I am a resident in heart surgery and I'm trying to make practice models of parts of the human heart and tissue to use for training outside the operating room. As you said the platinum cure silicones are used for this purpose but the price difference is tenfold and they're a bit too expensive for us.

you should really start a new thread as you'll get more input Donna. first understand that for mold to grow it needs two things, moisture & a food source. eliminate the moisture source, once you find out what it is. I'd start at the roof. open the ceiling, remediate..maybe as simple as letting things dry out once moisture is stopped, maybe materials need to be replaced. you won't know until you can see it. it takes time for mold to grow, it doesn't happen overnight, so maybe hoa will have to cover it if it predates your repair of roof. inside the home it can take 5 years...but in a garage? don't know. you'll want someone experienced in mold remediation to handle materials properly & safely as they are removed. and be able to prove it if necessary to hoa. that may be expensive. I do a some of mold remediation, respirators, sealing off room, double bagging materials etc. reason for doing the work is that too many people treat mold like a gold mine & scare homeowners with toxic mold stories. realistically, only 2 types are toxic, and every house has mold...somewhere. so try to steer clear of those folks. so, if you were to diy, fix leak, open ceiling. once you open a spot up...you can look to see how far the damage extends. cut out sheetrock to that point & look again, cut so that you can easily replace it with new sheet/piece. remove insulation, if any & look at 2x's to see if mold has grown on them. I use tsp (tri sodium phosphate or something like that) & scrub with a brush. let dry, rinse, scrub again. let it all dry for a few days. put a fan on it. check moisture level of wood & at 30% you can close it up again. tape & float sheetrock. sometimes I'll kiltz or bullseye/zinner the framing members when the area is opened. hope your hoa will do what is right here for you. best of luck

Here's another idea: Your foyer is the right size to be a half bath. And since it's across from the stairs, it's also naturally positioned off what will feel like a little hallway. You mentioned that the stack for the upstairs bathroom is somewhere over the dining room (I think on the wall between the dining room and the front porch)? If so, then the plumbing/sewer lines aren't far from the current foyer. The front door could move to where the front-facing living window is. This is one of the few fenestration changes you could make to the front of an old brick house that would look right because it involves only removing the few bricks below the window. This doesn't require reframing (so it's not expensive structural work), and you don't need to add any bricks (which is good because new brick work never matches quite right -- good enough for the less-visible sides of the house, but not something you'd want on the front). You said earlier that your living room is so long that you don't use part of it, so it shouldn't be any issue to define a small section at the end of the living room to be your foyer. There's also a couple handy walls there for hooks or a bench or a wardrobe or whatever foyer-like amenities you might want. I suspect it'd be an overall upgrade from your current foyer, which is pretty cramped. Meanwhile, moving the bathroom frees you up to devote the current half bath space to the kitchen. The result is a MUCH more functional galley kitchen. Since all the working areas of the kitchen are in one line and the walkway is a generous width, you could easily have three people working in this new kitchen. You'll also be flooding both the kitchen and living room with light and creating a great cross-breeze by having a direct, uninterrupted line from the new kitchen door to that living room window that is closest to the library. The kitchen is where you'd be doing your only structural work -- removing the current bathroom walls (if those are even structural) and creating a new window over the new sink location. The kitchen sink in the galley hasn't moved very far from the sink's current location, so hopefully that'll be more of a plumbing tweak than a situation where you have to pay to completely re-pipe. You'd also be turning the current kitchen window into your new kitchen door (which, like the living room window conversion, shouldn't require reframing and therefore wouldn't be structural) and bricking up over where the old kitchen door was. You could leave the bathroom window as-is if it is above counter height and you're willing to forgo a storage cabinet to the right of the stove. There's also a possibility that the bricks removed during the living-room-window-turned-door process and the kitchen-window-turned-door process and the new-kitchen-window-creation process could be salvaged and used to feather in the patching for the old front door and/or the old kitchen door. As for the mudroom, I'd suggest you make the library a mudroom/library. There are two great walls for mudroom stuff right next to the library's backdoor. Even with whatever furniture you have in there for the library purposes, that room generally has space for the whole family to pile in and take off their winter things at once. And you'd no longer have people with mudroom business traipsing through your kitchen. In general, the above is a WAY better kitchen and a WAY better mudroom situation without an addition.

Some more thoughts on making lemonade from lemons . . . check out the Barn Room (ceiling), Barn Room Loft (walls and ceilings) and Kitchen (ceilings) at the blog: fortheloveofahouse.blogspot.com This blog meticulously details the renovation and restoration of an old New England farmhouse in New Hampshire. I know it's not your style but the ceilings are worth checking out. The kitchen ceiling is painted but the Barn Room and Barn Room Lofts are white washed. They also stained the walls for the Barn Room Loft. The author of the blog, Joan Ross provides of the staining, white washing process which I copied and pasted below. I know overall the decorating style isn't what you're after but at the very least it's a starting point for experimenting with color options and techniques. Barn Room Ceiling: Pine boards were stained using Minwax Water based Wood Stain in White Wash Pickling stain. Use a staining pad to apply two coats (both full strength). These coats were not wiped off. Barn Board Stain: Stains are: Sherwin Williams Woodscapes in Semi-transparent (an exterior stain with low voc's that can be used inside.) This is a two-step process. The first coat is Charwood #3542 applied full strength with a staining pad (much easier than using a brush) and the product is not wiped off (as many stains are.) The second coat applied after the first has fully dried is Blue Shadow #3531 in a 75/25 mixture. 75% is water and 25% is the stain. This coat is also applied with a staining pad and is not wiped off. That's it! It's that easy. Here's the Barn Room ceiling: Here's a the Barn Room Loft Ceiling and Walls Here's the kitchen ceiling painted