The Petch House

Petchhouse Forum

2012-01-14T14:07:00.000-08:00

I'm looking for your torrid, sexy stories about stripping. I want stories with lurid details and climactic endings.

I'm talking about paint stripping, of course. When I strip the paint in the parlors I'm going to try a different approach to stripping than I normally do. Kelly made a comment on my last post about methyl chloride paint strippers, which is what I normally use. Actually, what I normally use is a heat gun. Here was my response to Kelly.

If the original finish was shellac, then it is a no-brainer for me: heat gun.

If it was originally painted and a flat surface then I will also use a heat gun. I go this route in this case mainly because it quick. I don't have to apply stripper, wait for it to work, test it, wait some more, etc, etc.

If the piece of wood is flat and has no detail then a heat gun and sharp edged scrapper goes pretty fast.

In the parlors I have wood that was originally painted and has a lot of detail. The heat gun a scrapper routine would be very tedious and time consuming.

In this situation I normally use the methyl chloride based strippers because they do work reasonably fast, compared to some of the "green" strippers. I like the semi-paste variety (think slime) because they cling to vertical surfaces.

The downside to methyl chloride based strippers is the caustic odors and potentially flammable fumes. It is not a big downside in my opinion, but it is something to consider.

In the parlors, since I'm only working on the weekends I may try one of the "green" strippers. These usually work much slower and can stay on for days. The idea is that I will apply the stripper Wednesday evening and then spend the weekend taking it off. Methyl chloride based stripper generally dry out quickly and don't like to be left in place after they have done their job.

I would be interested to hear about "green" strippers from others.

So let me hear it, people. I want to hear your "green" stripping stories. I want your stories with product names, devices, and methods used.

(Go Niners!)

Shout Out

2012-01-12T17:25:00.000-08:00

I'll be the first to admit that I can be tough on local business people who I don't feel try hard enough to get my business. Maybe too tough at times. Regardless, I want take a moment to praise a local business person who did a good job, on time, for a competitive price. In short, he did his job and did it well.

I've had this on-going saga with a tree in my side yard. It has had some dead and dying limbs on it that I've wanted to cut off for the past three years. Three of them hang over my phone lines and every winter I think it is just a matter of time before I lose phone and internet service.

I've considered trimming the tree myself, but it is a good 25-feet tall, and like I said, it hangs over the phone line. I just had this feeling I would end up taking out the phone line and maybe end up in the ER in the process. The scenario that played in my head was me falling off a ladder as the vibration from cutting cracked the dead limb and then I would take out the phone line as me, the limb and the ladder crashed to the ground.

The tree has a main trunk that goes up about 4 feet and then 6 or 8 main branches branch off of that. Each main branch is 6 to 8 inches in diameter and goes up another 10 to 20 feet. Two of these branches were denuded and another was close to rubbing against the house when it blew in the wind. All three of these hung over the phone line.

About five years ago, when two of them started to lose leaves, I took some aircraft cable and tied all of the branches together. I'm not sure if this helped to keep the branches from breaking off, but it helped me sleep at night when we had one of our big winter storms. About 3 years ago I started to call people to see about having the tree trimmed. This usually started in October when the weather started to change and I realized another year had passed with out me dealing with this.

I was amazed out how difficult it was to get someone to do the work. It was usually one of 3 scenarios. They would show up to give an estimate, but then not return calls to do the work. They would show up to give an estimate and say my only choice was to cut the whole tree down. The worst, was when they wouldn't show up at all. After three years I was running out of people to call.

This year I started at it again. I had a promising tree trimmer who came out and looked at the tree, but that only started a 6 week odyssey of phone tag. No matter how many times I gave him my cell phone number he would call my home phone while I was at work. The last time I called I did nothing by repeat my cell phone number several times and he never called back at either number after that.

On Tuesday I called Steve at Eager Beaver and left a message. He called me back a few hours later on my cell as he was standing in my front yard. We talked about what I wanted and he made a few suggestions. I said sounds great, how much. He gave me quote. I asked if he wanted a deposit. He said no, he would just leave an invoice in my mail box. I asked when he could do it and he said Thursday.

I came home today for lunch and there was Steve parked out front with a wood chipper on the back of his truck grinding up the last of it. The limbs had already been cut off and the tree looked great. We chatted for a minute and I went in for lunch. Twenty minutes later I heard the chipper shut off so I went out and confirmed the price. The yard looked great. The tree was trimmed. I handed him a check.

He even took in the slack on the aircraft cable so it is still in place holding everything together, just in case. If the tree does need to come down at some point, I know who I'll call.

Steve
Eager Beaver Tree Service
707-444-7333

The Horror

2012-01-08T14:03:00.000-08:00

It's never too early to begin to stress about design choices like paint colors, window treatments, and woodwork finishes. This is really the part of the process I dread. Over the next few months I can look forward to countless sleepless nights and hours spent looking at paint chips. And if history repeats itself I will spend $75 on paint only to decide I don't like it after it is on the wall.

Oh, what joy.

One of the things I have thought about doing with several rooms, and then later chickened out, is to paint the frieze and ceiling sky blue and then sponge on big, fluffy white clouds. Then hire a local artist to come in a paint on a few blue birds streaking across the sky. I'm thinking about it again with the parlors, but it probably won't happen.

If I don't go that over-the-top route I do need to start thinking of a more realistic pallet. The parlors can be considered 2 rooms, but from design standpoint I will treat them as one room. While not huge, together they create a room that measures 14X28 feet. I'm not sure that I can get away with really bold colors in a room this size. Or maybe I could, but they would definitely need to be the right colors. Also, unlike the other major rooms on the first floor there will be no dado in the parlors, so it will basically be 3 colors: Field, frieze/ceiling, and woodwork.

The woodwork is really the starting point. I need to strip off the layers and layers of poorly applied paint before I do anything. If the woodwork in these rooms was originally shellacked, like it was in the foyer, stair hall, and dining room, it would be a no-brainer. I would strip back to bare wood and re-shellack. For years now I have had a very strong suspicion that the woodwork in these rooms was originally painted.

During the 1920s, when the home was converted in to apartments, the two parlors became a living room and bedroom for one of the first floor apartments. To separate the space more they added more framing to make the opening between the 2 rooms smaller and added a pair of French doors. They reused the original casing, plinth blocks and head blocks to trim out the new French doors.

They did a nice job, and you really couldn't tell at first, except that the French door hardware was definitely 1920s and not 1895. It became even more apparent when I started to strip off wallpaper and found that the area around the French doors was sheetrock while the rest of the room is plaster. Then of course, once the sheetrock was removed, it was obvious the framing was not original.

Later, when I was working in the kitchen I reused some of the casing from around the French doors for the dumb waiter style door and when I stripped back the paint I found that the original color was a creamy pale yellow. One thing I have found repeatedly when working with redwood is that if the original finish was paint, getting back to bare wood clean enough for a new shellack finish is almost impossible. I'm not saying it is completely impossible and unheard of, but it is so much work on high Victorian woodwork with all of its detail, and the results are so poor, that it is simply not worth the effort.

On the other hand, if the woodwork was originally shellacked stripping back to bare wood becomes very doable and in fact I did it with great success in the dining room. I mean, it took me 3 months and was a hell of a lot of work, but the results speak for themselves. If I tried that same thing on redwood that was originally painted I would not have nearly the same results.

So the question I've been asking myself all of this time is, was the casing I used in the kitchen really original to the parlors from 1895. There was a possibility that when they framed in the opening and added the French doors they milled a few short runs of new casing and the creamy, pale yellow paint was originally applied in the 1920s. If that were the case then the rest of the woodwork could have a nice, protective layer of shellack underneath all of the thick, goopy layers of paint that look as if they were applied by Jackson Pollock.

So yesterday I got out the trusty heat gun and did a little exploratory surgery. Sure enough, just as I expected, I found that same creamy, pale yellow pant. That means that the woodwork in the parlors was originally painted in 1895. That also means that I will be repainting.

I will most likely go with chemical strippers, as opposed to the heat gun. Not sure which product I will use at this point. To be honest, I'm a little relieved. Stripping all of the woodwork in these 2 rooms back to bare wood good enough for a shellack finish would be a lot work, even if it was originally shellacked. There are 6 windows that would take forever, especially that large front stained glass window. After nearly 10 years of restoration I just don't have that kind of stamina anymore.

Bump & Grind

2012-01-07T14:05:00.000-08:00

Now that the kitchen range hood is nothing more than an unpleasant memory it is time to get back to the even more unpleasant task of dealing with the plaster in the parlor. There are no two ways about it, working with plaster, whether you are talking off or putting on, is a mess.

For those of you who are not long time readers of the blog, the plaster in this house was put on in unique fashion for the time. The walls on the entire inside of the house are sheathed with 1X8, T&G “plaster boards”. Plaster boards were milled locally in the Carson Mill at the turn of the century. The boards have dovetail grooves running the length of the boards, spaced 2-inches apart. As the plaster is pressed on to the walls, it fills the dovetail grooves, which is what keeps the plaster on the walls.

An 1893 article in The Humboldt Standard refers to them as “patent grooved lath” and says before the plaster goes on “it makes the walls look as if covered with matched and grooved flooring”. The article also claims that this method saves mortar and makes the home more sturdy and better insulated than traditional lath. While all of that may be true, this method also makes it a pain in the ass to remove the old plaster and get the walls ready for new plaster.

I only strip off the plaster that is failing so most of it comes off effortlessly. What remains though, is the plaster that was forced in to the grooves back in 1895. I must get that old plaster out of the grooves before the new plaster goes on and it does not come out willingly. In the past I used a Rotozip tool with a plaster bit to grind out the plaster. This really makes an incredible mess. As the burred plaster bit hits the plaster in the grooves it sends out a 3-foot rooster tail of ground plaster. Even working with the Rotozip in one hand and a shop-vac hose in the other, the room quickly becomes choked with dust. I must wear what amounts to a home-made haz-mat suit when doing this.

Well, after years of hard work, the Rotozip finally bit the dust – no pun intended. When I was working in the dining room using the Rotozip to remove the remaining hearth tile the front bearing started to make a little noise. By the time I was half way through the foyer and stair hall that little noise became a high pitched scream and now it was both the front and back bearings that were going. Towards the end of the foyer, just to get it to run I would have to flip the switch and the smack the housing with a hammer to get the bearings to move. Needless to say, the plastic housing did not like being smacked with a hammer and eventually I broke the on/off switch.

On Thursday I went to Sears to buy a new Rotozip, but came home with a Multitool. The Multitool comes with a number of different attachments, but the one I use is a flat blade with teeth on the end. The blade moves back and forth at high speed and does a pretty good job of breaking the plaster apart in the grooves. It doesn't remove it from the grooves quit as effectively as the Rotozip, but doesn't make nearly the mess as the Rotozip, either. What remains in the grooves gets shop-vaced out. Initially this process makes much less of a mess, but once the shop-vac comes on the dust starts to get thick. I now run the shop-vac just before I'm ready to finish up for the day, then close up the room for a few hours until the dust settles.

One down and six to go.

Thar She Blows!

2011-12-27T18:58:00.000-08:00

I think this entire house could be considered to be my white whale, but in this instance I'm referring only to the newly built and installed range hood. The installation was somewhat uneventful, in that I didn't drop any tools and damage anything, I didn't spill any paint, and I didn't knock any unintended holes in anything. I'm especially nervous and cautious when working in a room that is essentially finished and used every day, like the kitchen. When working in a room like this, my mantra is, “Above all else, do no harm”.

Building the housing for the Broan PM390 Custom Hood Power Pack Module was pretty straight forward. Fabricating boxes from old redwood T&G bevel board is the same type of construction I used in the cabinets for several rooms, so there is really nothing to figure out. It is pretty much just scrape paint, sand, measure, cut, glue, and assemble. Deciding on the right size was the only real challenge. I toyed around with a larger cabinet that had doors or shelves on either side of the Broan PM390 Custom Hood Power Pack Module, but for a number of reasons decided against it.

In the end I decided on a simple box whose soul purpose was to hold the Broan PM390 Custom Hood Power Pack Module. The dimensions of the box were decided largely by the location of the existing chimney vent I needed to connect the Broan PM390 Custom Hood Power Pack Module to. The Broan PM390 Custom Hood Power Pack Module needs to be 24 to 30 inches above the stove and then tall enough to hide all of the exhaust ducts. It needed to be wide enough to hide the chimney opening and still be centered over the area where the stove sits.

After constructing the box I needed to get electrical up on the wall. Again, this was pretty straight forward. After re-wiring the entire house myself this sort of thing is fairly routine. The outlet for the refrigerator is on the wall just to the left of the stove. The only real challenges were 1) getting through the horizontal framing member that the beadboard is nailed to, and 2) getting through the wall stud. As I pointed out in my last post, the reason I'm doing this project now is because I don't want to knock a lot of holes in the kitchen walls. Because I'm going to start work in the parlors next, I have no problem knocking holes in the those walls. The whole process took about an hour.

The red lines show where the studs are and the blue line shows where the wire runs. You can see I also made a repair to the plaster from damage left over from the 2009 earthquake. This was the very first wall I every plastered. This was done in my pre-blogging days and if I could I would do it over. I really learned a lot. What is most frustrating about that damage is that the original plaster from 1895 came through the earthquake fine. It was my skim-coat that popped off. Grrrr!

On the other side of that wall is the parlor side. By measuring carefully I could cut out one section of the Carson Mill Plaster Board and then drill 2 small holes to fish the wire from the existing outlet to the spot on the wall over the stove where the new outlet needed to be for the Broan PM390 Custom Hood Power Pack Module.

With the electrical in place I could mount the box on the wall and install the Broan PM390 Custom Hood Power Pack Module. Again, this went pretty smooth. I used a lot of duct tape and strapping to make sure everything would stay secure when the next 6.0 or greater strikes. I don't want to have to open the box back up once it is complete.

And here are a few shots of the almost finished product. There is one more small piece of trim detail that needs to go on, but for all intent and purpose, this is the finished look. While not even close to the over-the-top custom range hoods seen in most design magazines, I think it has a certain understated elegance that works well with the rest of my kitchen.

The Parlor Pre-Project

2011-12-17T16:33:00.000-08:00

Working on a house is like working on a puzzle. You may be holding the piece of the puzzle with the smiling girls face on it and you know exactly where it goes, but you need to finish the edges first and work your way towards that part of the puzzle. That is what is happening with the parlor project. Believe it or not, the parlor project starts with work in the kitchen.

Ahh, the kitchen. The never ending project that is The Kitchen. The first time I “finished” the kitchen I had a round kitchen table in the center of the room. That didn't work out too well, so I got rid of the table and built an island, complete with marble top and copper prep sink. Best thing I ever did.

The second time I “finished” the kitchen I removed the free standing cabinet in the alcove so I could put the refrigerator there. That cabinet ended up in the butler's pantry. That worked for a little while, but the refrigerator was awkward to get to in the alcove. To remedy that problem, I yanked out the 1890s cast iron stove, moved the gas stove over, and moved the refrigerator out of the alcove and put it where the gas stove was.

The last time I “finished” the kitchen was just two years ago when I built the marble desk in the alcove. I'm now sitting at that desk, as I write. This was another great idea and I now really had a finished kitchen except for one little thing. When I first started the kitchen back in 2005 I shopped for a range hood. The local home center has a selection of range hoods that are all totally inadequate. They are designed to go with modern cabinets and modern appliances in a modern kitchen. There is nothing the wrong with a modern design, but that is not what I was doing. Having one of those range hoods stuck on the wall over a vintage stove would have looked completely out of place.

At the time I shopped around for custom designed range hoods, but could not really justify $3,500 for a copper, over-the-top, McMansionesq range hood. I had only spent about $10,000 on what was pretty much a gut-remodel of the kitchen and there was no way I was going spend $3,500 on something that looked like it belonged in a Roman temple. It would have looked just as out of place as the much smaller modern range hood would have.

I really couldn't find any middle ground in a range hood. I thought about finding someone to fabricate something to my design - that is, if I had a design - but the idea became very back-burner in what was a huge kitchen project at the time and eventually sort of just fell off the back of the stove. No pun intended.

The reason this has come back to the front-burner now (to extend the metaphor) is because I never gave up on the idea of a range hood. In fact, the stove has always needed more lighting. It is one of those things that I always intended to do, but sort of gave up on it because I couldn't come up with a good solution. If I'm going to install one though, I need electricity on the wall over the stove.

The thought of cutting in to the wall up high above the stove is not something I really want to do. It would be a mess, of course, but more than that the kitchen has beadboard on the lower third of all of the walls. I can't simply drill a hole and drop a wire down in the wall. There is a horizontal framing member 3.5 feet up that I would need to get through. On top of that, the fireplace for the parlors is right behind this wall. It is hard to say how far the brick extends in the wall, but the fireplace in the parlor is set at an angle and the chimney has 2 flues, one for the parlor fireplace and one to vent the original wood or coal burning kitchen stove.

What I can do though, is work from the parlor side. That wall opposite the kitchen is in very rough shape and will need to be stripped down to lath and re-plastered. Cutting holes to run wire will not be an issue at all. On the kitchen side I will just need cut a hole large enough for a single gang electrical box. It will make a small mess, but nothing compared to trying to do all of the work from the kitchen side.

In short, now is the time to do this if I'm every going to do it at all.

I'm still left with the problem of the range hood itself. I found a site on line for Vent-a-Hood that has a “Build a Hood” applet on their web site. There is one style listed as JCH/C2 that is not really over-the-top and definitely not a run-of-the-mill hood either. Also, it is not made of copper, so it could be in my price range. Unfortunately, I never found out what one would cost. Several times, from several different computers and different web browsers, I tried to use the applet to get a quote. Each time it crashed on me when I clicked the “Submit Quote” button.

I contacted customer service. They wrote back a very nice email saying they were unaware of the problem and suggested I use the “Find a Dealer” applet on their site to find a dealer in my area. I could contact the dealer and get a quote. I had similar problems finding a dealer and another email to customer service was met with silence, so I gave up.

I was at Sears the next week and I had the idea that I can buy a garden variety range hood and wrap in wood or trim it out in some fashion so it looks like it belongs. I pimped out the fridge in oak and it came out ok, so why not the range hood. The trouble with that idea is that they all have the controls on the front. It just wouldn't work. I then went to the home center to see if they had something that would work, but they had pretty much the same selection as Sears.

What the home center did have though, was a catalog from the Broan company, which makes a dizzying array of range hoods. Inside I found the Broan PM390 Custom Hood Power Pack Module. This is basically the guts of a range hood without the hood. This is what is used in making those over-the-top, McMansionesp range hoods that cost $3,500. The PM390 was $325 at the home center, but I found it on-line for $189 and free shipping.

One, please!

So now I'm in the process of making the box to house the Broan PM390 Custom Hood Power Pack Module. I'm using more of my seemingly endless supply of redwood bevel board that came out of the 2 story addition I dismantled. This is the same bevel board I used to make the kitchen island and the cabinets in the kitchen, bathroom, and butler's pantry. I will trim it out with a 3 part cornice, just as I did the kitchen cabinets I made. It should (fingers crossed) look like it belongs.

Fresh from the woodshed

Cut, stripped, and sanded

The hope is that I can have some assembly done by next weekend so I can get a sense of where the outlet needs to be. With that information I can start to open the wall to find out how much brick I need to cut through. Hopefully, not much.

I've Got It Covered

2011-12-10T11:37:00.000-08:00

An alternate name for this post could be 'Hoarders' because I've been hoarding cardboard for the past year just for this weekend. This is my form of drop cloth. I first put down plastic and then on top of that a layer of cardboard with the edges taped together. Preferably I'm working with large pieces of cardboard or the process can be quite tedious. This is the reason for the hoarding. Anytime a box from a dishwasher or piece of office furniture came along I jumped on it.

And now all of my bizarre behavior over the past year is finally paying off.

The big opening between the 2 parlors was reduced down to a pair of french doors during the apartment days, so that will all need to be trimmed out again. I imagine there was a nice spandrel or some fret work there at one time. The verdict is still out as to whether I will attempt to redo that. In a picture below you can see where there was once a door that lead to the kitchen. This was also during the apartment period. It has already be closed off and plastered over on the kitchen side.

The drop-cloth will stay down until after the plaster work is finished. Then I just slice it in to sections, roll it up, and off to the dump it goes. The walls in this room are par for the house. Not the best, but definitely not the worst. The rolling scaffold I made when I did the dining room and then I used it again in the foyer. It has been dismantled and tucked away in the garage since last year. Best $75 I ever spent.

This wall, while it doesn't look too bad, is really little more than a sheet of plaster leaning up against the wall. Most of the keys are broken. How it survived the 2009 earthquake, I'll never know.

These are the other 2 really bad walls that will need to be completely redone. The rest will need patch work and then a skim-coat for the everything. Fortunately, the ceilings are in very good to near perfect condition. There is one spot in the front parlor that has issues, but other than that they are in good shape. This is good because even with the scaffold I hate doing ceilings.

Parlor Pieces

2011-11-27T19:23:00.001-08:00

Although the front and back parlor collectively make up more than 25% of the first floor of the house, I'm hoping that the cash outlay over the next 6 months will not be a lot when compared to other rooms. This is mainly because I've already made most of the major purchases for the 2 rooms.

One of the first purchases I made for the house was a collection of 4 light fixtures which came out of an 1890s Victorian in Main. The guy was doing a gut-remodel and getting rid of all of the “old stuff”. I bought 3 chandeliers and a smaller, 2-light ceiling fixture. One of the chandeliers was installed in the dining room. The smaller fixture is in the upstairs bathroom.

The last 2 will be going in the 2 parlors. They are very similar, but one is little larger than the other. This works well in the parlors because the front parlor is little larger than the back parlor. Both fixtures have been rewired and are ready to go.

Years ago I also purchased two new plaster medallions to replace the originals which were ripped out when they put sheetrock up over the plaster. Again, the lager medallion will go in the larger front parlor and the smaller one in the back parlor.

The sheetrock over the plaster was possibly the worst thing that happened to the parlors. This is not so much because I think there is anything wrong with sheetrock. It's because of what the installers did to make their job easier. Not only did that pry off the plaster medallions, but they sawed off the tops of the head blocks.

Head blocks are like corner blocks except they have a crown detail that extends the block a few inches above the top piece of casing that goes over doors and windows. So they wouldn't have to fit the sheetrock around the detail, they sawed off the blocks so they were level with the top casing. Years ago I went down to Blue Ox Mill and had replacements milled.

Also at that time I had new casing milled. I needed casing for a few spots in 3 rooms to fix areas that were modified when the house was cut up in to apartments back in the 1920s. I also had replacement plinth blocks milled at that time, so all of that is just waiting to be installed. I may need to get some baseboard milled, but I am way ahead of the game when it comes to millwork for the two parlors.

Years ago I also purchased replacement hearth tiles. Just as with the dining room, the hearth tiles were beat to crap from heat, tenants, and carpet installers. I would say 40% of the original hearth tiles were just gone, and 20% were damaged beyond use. The original surround tiles are there and in very good shape, but the cast iron fireplace cover is missing, so I've already purchased an antique replacement.

Then of course there is also the pair of pocket doors and pocket door hardware I purchased, restored, and installed. That was a huge job all by itself. Stripping those doors was a lot of work and it took me nearly 3 years to find a set of antique Ives pocket door rollers.

In addition to those expenses that I don't need to worry about now, I have also already rewired both rooms for electricity and ran new cable for phone, internet, and cable TV. I also don't need to worry about dump runs for old flooring and sheetrock, because that was done years ago as well. All told, this amounts to thousands of dollars in material and months worth of work.

Expenses that remain are things like new plaster, which is relatively inexpensive. I need strip paint off woodwork and sand down and refinish the floor. These are also relatively inexpensive things to do. Then there are things like primer, paint, and new rugs. All of these things can add up, but those purchases will be spread out over time, so won't really have a major impact on the monthly budget. The big expense will be be for window treatments. There are 5 large windows, so that could set me back if I do something nice. Then of course there is new furniture. I'm not replacing everything, but it is enough that I will notice the hit on the wallet.

So really what all of this means is that if I were starting from scratch I probably wouldn't be starting at all. I would probably just let out a big sigh as I turned off the lights, closed the doors, and walked away from the rooms.

Let's Try This Again, Shall We

2011-11-26T13:26:00.000-08:00

I actually had a rather large summer project that I didn't blog about at all. I painted the 2 story garage out back. It is really a pretty big structure. There are 2 apartments upstairs and 6 garages downstairs, so it is the size of a medium sized house.

I also put two new garage doors on the 2 garages that faced the street and did some siding repair here and there. I had to do a lot of cosmetic repair to the porch columns and I replaced door trim and corner boards. It was another one of those projects that just dragged on for months and months. It is nice to have it done, though. And now, with the push of a button, I can park my car in the garage.

Also, in October there was another blog-worthy event that got no mention here. I was wrangled in to doing the home tour for the Eureka Heritage Society. They've been after me for years to do it, ever since I won the Society's Residential Preservation of the Year award. It really was a honor, and I felt obligated to do it. Still, it was a lot of work getting ready for it. Just the thought of having who knows how many people come in to your home can be a little intimidating.

I was going to do the tour last year, but I didn't think I would have the foyer finished in time and I didn't want to commit myself and then have to rush to finish. This year, since the project was the apartment building out back there was no excuse not to do it. Trust me, I tried to come up with excuses not to do it.

I made the first floor available for the tour and it was an absolute mob scene. It lasted from 12-5 and I'm not sure how many people showed up. They estimate they sell from 300 to 500 tickets a year and it felt like everyone of them came to my house twice that day. At one point I counted more than 50 people in my house. It really was fun, though. I had some friends act as docents and I had a lot of displays set up that went over the restoration and talked about the original owners, The Petch's.

Every room on the first floor is finished now, except for the 2 parlors, which brings me to my winter-time project - my rare winter-time project. I'm going to attempt to get some things done in the parlors this winter and I'm going to attempt to blog about it. I'm not sure how much of either will actually get done, but I'm going to make an attempt.

Even though the parlors have been in a state of disrepair for the past 8 years, they have acted as my living room for most of that time. So this weekend the goal was to move my living room to an upstairs bedroom so that I can work on the parlors. Fortunately, a few years back I ran cable, phone, and internet to all rooms of the house, so it will just be a matter of moving furniture and electronics.

The goal for the parlors over the next few months will not be too ambitious. If I really went at it, I could probably finish these rooms in 6 months, but I won't be doing that. I have done quite a bit already. The sheetrock that was put over the plaster was removed 6 years ago, along with layers of flooring and wall paper. The rooms had also been modified during the apartment days of the 1920s, and that has all been undone.

The goal this winter is to just do some work on the plaster and woodwork. For the walls, I just want to remove the loose plaster and get the walls ready for new plaster. For the woodwork I want to strip off the paint. I'm still not sure if these rooms were originally painted or shellacked. Regardless, I need to get off the thick layers of dripping, gooey paint. There is also a lot of goop along with edges from when the sheetrock was put up.

If the woodwork was originally shellacked I will go back to that. If not, I will be repainting. There is circumstantial evidence that it was originally painted, but I won't know for sure for a few more weeks.

I’m Still Here….Barely

2011-06-12T15:47:00.000-07:00

I am so burned out on the house, blogging, work, and just about everything else right now. So, since I can’t ignore the house, work, or most of everything else, the blog takes a back seat waaaaaaaay to the back of the bus.

I did get one project complete this year. Some might call it a pergola, while others may call it an arbor, but I’m calling it a neighbor hiding apparatus. There are potato vines growing up either side, and there are also the 2 mayten trees in the shot, which I planted last fall. All of this is for curb appeal when I go to sell the place in a year or two.

I also have six to seven hundred salvaged bricks from the old Daly’s department store that I will use to make a brick patio. The original plan was to use the bricks to rebuild the chimneys, but I don’t see that happening now.

The other project I have planned for the summer is to reside one short side (25 feet wide?) of the garage building, and then paint that building. This is the 2 story, 1926 building with 2 apartments upstairs and 6 garages downstairs. The second story shingles on this one short side need to be ripped off and replaced, and then 3 rows of horizontal siding needs replacing on the first floor. I had planned to hire someone to do the siding, but after getting 2 bids, with the low one being $9,800, I’ve decided to do it myself.

Oh, joy!

I may farm out the painting, but I won't know until I start getting bids. Something tells me I'll be doing that myself, as well.

Vote Early and Often

2011-02-16T17:14:00.000-08:00

Eureka, CA – Home of The Petch House – is on the 2011 Dozen Distinctive Destinations list put out by the Nation Trust for Historic Preservation. I would like to think that The Petch House played a part in the nomination, but it really didn't. Or if it did, it was a very small part. The reality is, The Humboldt County Convention and Visitors Bureau sent in an application to be nominated, which makes it sort of a vanity nomination.

There is a contest going on where people can vote for their favorite destination. Click here to see the full list of all 12 of the distinctive cities on the list. On that page there is a link that will take you to the voting page.

Everyone will be voting for Eureka, right? Right?

The Night Time is the Right Time

2011-02-13T18:17:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I showed the new front door windows from the inside with the light coming in. Here is what the house looks like in the evening now.

What I should have gotten a picture of was the light show that was put on this morning with the direct eastern, morning sun hitting the doors. It was almost psychedelic.

And They're In!

2011-02-12T15:21:00.000-08:00

First, a little B&A action....

One went in without a hitch and the other one went in with a slight struggle. I need to paint the outside where the glazing putty is, but after that, these are done!

The foyer is a little darker with the new windows, but it's not too bad. They really improve the room. This is another one of those projects where after it is done I have to ask myself, "What the hell was I thinking when I decided to make these windows". It was really a lot of work, but I had to do something.

Still Wood With Glass

2011-02-04T17:19:00.000-08:00

Here is a first look of the assembled windows. I finished the corners and oiled the wood today and then went and picked up the glass. Boy, colored glass is not cheap, but does look nice. The glass is just sitting in there right now being held in place with glazier's points. There is no glazing compound.

The glass is red, glue chip, and midnight blue English Muffle. The red glass is smooth, but has flaws and a few bubbles. The English Muffle is a textured glass. It looks much nicer when it is back lit with sunlight. It also should look nice from the outside when the lights are on in the foyer.

When I installed the colored glass in the butler's pantry doors a few years back they did not go in willingly. My solution at that time was to use a utility knife to widen the rabbet just a hair. It was not easy. In anticipation of problems this time, I asked the owner of The Glass Works in Arcata, where I bought the glass, if he could shave some of the pieces down a little if I needed it. He said, “No problem”, but as it turned out everything fit. It was a nice surprise.

Tonight I will remove the glass and primer the exterior side. Then tomorrow I will paint. Sunday is a day of rest, of course. It is The Super Bowel, after all. A friend used to say something along the lines of, “I don't go to church, but football is my religion and I practice my faith on Sundays”.

If the paint dries nicely on Sunday I may try and get on a few coats of shellac on the interior side before The Big Game starts. I don't think it is blasphimous if I only listen to the pre-game shows, but don't actually watch them.

I decided to try and do the glazing myself. As I said in an earlier post, I've glazed more than a few windows myself over the years, but I was going to take these to a glass shop because I wanted the glazing to be crisp and sharp. I can do it, but it does not really come out crisp and sharp. I've always used a putty knife and a tub of glazing compound, but this time I'm trying the stuff in the caulking tube with the special applicator tip. Fortunately, this stuff takes for ever to set up, so if it comes out looking bad, I can always dig it out and take it some place.

Installation may happen next weekend.

Go Egypt!

2011-02-01T18:00:00.000-08:00

A new symbol of freedom

This Never Happens

2011-01-28T18:21:00.000-08:00

I can't figure out what happened this time. Everything was going along so well with the front windows and then suddenly the whole thing went sideways on me. Chiseling out the corners is taking a lot longer than I anticipated. The glass was held up being shipped because of the odd size I ordered. Work has been ka-raze-ee this past week, so I've been in no mood to work on it in the evenings. It has just been one thing after another. This never happens!

Oh, wait, this always happens. Never mind, it's business as usual.

In a way it was an odd coincidence that things came together the way they did. If I hadn't slacked off on finishing the frames and the glass did show up on time I would have been frustrated that I couldn't install them this weekend. If I had finished the frames and the glass was late I would have been frustrated as well. As it turned out there was a harmonious synergy of laziness and incompetence that means no one is really to blame.

It's a beautiful thing.

So now the plan is to finish the frames this weekend. Get the glass midweek. Install the glass and get the glazing done. Then I will do nothing the on the windows next week because it is Super Bowl Sunday and I don't want to only finish the install half way on Saturday.

See you in two weeks!

It Just Might Work

2011-01-21T18:19:00.000-08:00

As the old saying goes, there is more than one way to skin a cat. The method I'm using to build these windows is probably the least complicated way to do it. That also means that this method probably makes the weakest joints. I don't write this to point out that I'm making inferior windows, but rather I don't want someone to read this and think that this is the best or only way to make windows like this.

Now, I don't think these windows are going to fail any time soon, but I will be the first to admit there are better ways to do this. I chose this method because it is a nice balance between the time I can put in to the project and the skill sets I have. I get compliments on this blog regarding my carpentry skills, but really, I am no master craftsman. I accept that.

On my windows the only muntins that are solid pieces of wood are the 2 long stiles running vertically in the center. All of the rails are coped in to the stiles, and then all muntins are coped in to the rails and stiles of the frame. Rials are members that run horizontally and stiles run vertically.

There are ways to make these where the 4 main rial and stile muntins are all single pieces of wood. You could also do it where the rails and stiles of both the frame and the muntins are joined by mortise and tenons. All of my joinery is done with coping, and then secured with glue and brads. Not the strongest, but it will have to do.

Changing the bearing on the bottom gives you a different dept of cut

I used a rabbeting bit on a router to cut the rabbets where the glass will sit. It is a 1/4X1/4 inch rabbet, which I think is about as small as I could get it. You could also cut the rabbets before assembly, but that is more of a challenge. The problem with cutting them with the router after assembly is that the router leaves round corners that must be chiseled out to square.

There is a tool called a corner chisel, which I own, that will do this in one pass, but the radius left by the rabbeting bit I used is too large to work with the corner chisel I own. This means I need to work with a hammer and chisel to square up the rabbets where the glass sits. It is a lot of tedious work. On the plus side, if the coped joints I did with brads and glue hold up to the hammer and chisel I can be pretty sure that they won't fail from the door opening and closing several times a day for the years or decades to come.

After the chiseling is done I can paint the side that will face outside and oil and shellac the side that will face inside. Then it is just a matter of waiting for the glass to come in, which I ordered today. I went with the blue textured glass in the center and then red and glue chip around the edges. The guy at the glass shop told me he would have it ready by Wednesday.

If I can get the glass installed Wednesday evening then I can take it to the glass shop on Thursday to have the glazing done. I've done a lot of glazing myself, but I'm not really good enough to do it on these windows. There are 26 pieces of glass and when people knock on my front door they will be inches from it. I want the glazing to be crisp and sharp and I know my limitations.

If - and that's a big if – If I can get the windows back by Friday I can install the windows in the front doors next Saturday.

Characteristic Change

2011-01-17T11:15:00.000-08:00

This one took only a matter of hours, but believe it or not I have changed the design one last time. Well, ok, maybe it's not the last time, but I feel good about this one.

Here is a better shot of the frames. If I had to do this over, there are a few things I would have done differently. The rails and stiles are 1-inch by 7/8ths. The 7/8ths is the width and I should have made them one and and 8th or maybe even inch and a quarter. I need to cut rabbets in them to accept the glass and it will be very tight. In fact, There is a real chance I might have to start over. I'm mentally preparing myself for that.

As for the final color, I think this is the way to go. The small clear squares will be glue chip glass. As of yesterday, the large panels in the center were going to be glue chip, and then red and blue around the perimeter. I remember now though, when I was looking at glue chip samples last week at the glass shop the owner admitted that new glue chip is not quite the same as old glue chip glass. The pattern is different enough that it is noticeable.

There is glue chip and there is also double glue chip. Both are nice, but there is something different in the way it is made now. The shop owner pulled out a large sheet and we found sections here and there that would be a good match. These isolated sections are better suited to smaller squares than a large center panel.

Another option, which I'm considering, is to put the smooth red glass in the center and the blue textured glass alternating around the perimeter with the glue chip. I like both for different reasons. Having the large red panels in the center more closely matches the big front window with its large 32-inch diameter circle of red flash glass. However, the blue glass is more obscure and so leads to better privacy.

What it may come down to is what is in stock when I go to order. I would hate to postpone the installation because I'm waiting on glass to come in. I'm hoping to be able to order glass this week. That is, if I don't completely screw these up when I cut the rabbets today.

Chiseled In Wood

2011-01-16T15:04:00.000-08:00

Well, there's no turning back now. The design has been finalized and the frames are made.

There is still some work to be done before I can think about getting glass cut, but I think the worst is over.

I've decided to simplify the colors a bit. Yellow is gone and the final colors wil more closely match the other original cottage windows in the house.

Next up I will router the rabbet to accept the glass. Then I can order the glass. While I'm waiting for the glass I can sand and finish the frames. If all goes well I might install them in 2 weeks.

Locked & Loaded

2011-01-10T17:24:00.000-08:00

My Scranton, PA supplier delivered the goods today so I finally have all of the hardware parts in place to finish the doors. I purchased this in “as is” condition, so they need a little restoration work before I can install them. The post for the lower bolt needs to be shortened, as well.

This project will take precedence over the windows. Once I get the locks installed I can finish the weatherization of the doors. Given the current climate (it was 31 degrees when I woke up this morning. Brrrr!), I'm sure everyone will understand.

I encourage others take a look at what Penn Antique Restoration has to offer. This is not any kind of paid endorsement. I really did get good product at a good price from someone who was easy to deal with and very accomodating. Shocking, I know.

Texture Shopping

2011-01-06T18:35:00.000-08:00

I went and poked around a glass shop today to look at samples for the new front windows. I wish I could remember the name of the place I go to. It is on South G Street in Arcata. The gentleman who owns the place is a pleasure to deal with. I took in my netbook with pictures from the blog and in seconds he is pulling out samples flipping through catelogs.

I looked at dozens of samples and it was agreed that the texture of the glass is the important factor. The shade of color can be off a few degrees but if you put in a texture of glass that was not used in the period it will be immediately obvious. When the time comes to pull the trigger and chose the color he said I could bring some chips home so I could view them in the light of the room.

Over the weekend I cut and planed all of the wood I will need and yesterday I ordered some router bits to make the muntins. Wood selection was important because these will be relatively thin pieces of wood holding glass that is in a door. It needs to be nice, straight, tight grained redwood to do the job.

I'm hoping I can start to make the muntins next weekend and do some assembly. Once that is done, I can order the glass. If everything is in stock, that should only take a day or two. If all goes well I can have these done in 3 weeks. All never goes well, so maybe more like 4 weeks.

In the mean time, Diane from Pandora's Parlor sent me some wonderful photos of cottage windows she has added to her house. She makes them herself in many cases by replacing the glass in the top sash with colored leaded glass. I encourage you to go over and have a look. It is amazing what the effect of the colored glass has on a room. Below are photos of two of her doors. Yet more inspiration for me.

Oh no, your house would have had...

2011-01-05T17:29:00.000-08:00

Good friends whom I genuinely like and respect start many sentences with the words above. It goes something like this.

Me: I stripped my house back to bare wood and found that the original color was white.

Them: Oh no, your house would have had an earth toned color scheme made up of at least five colors.

Me: It looks like these redwood floors are the original floors and maybe they were just shellacked and then had large rugs over them.

Them: Oh no, your house would have had wall-to-wall carpeting.

Me: I don't see any evidence that there was picture rail on the second floor of my house.

Them: Oh no, your house would have had picture rail in every room and hallway in the house.

Most of these statements are based on the fact that my house is a cut above a lot of the homes in Eureka from the period. Don't get me wrong, The Petch House is no mansion. What it is is a very nice, upper middle class Queen Anne home built in 1895. From an architectural stand point it has a lot of bells and whistles. That doesn't mean that it had every little detail that was available, though. Few, if any homes did

Because I have crawled all over this house like a monkey for the last 8 years no one living or dead but the builder knows this house better then I. When I say there is no evidence that there was picture rail on the second floor it is a qualified statement. I don't care if every single house built in Eureka in 1895 had picture rail on the second floor, mine did not.

How this relates to the front door window I'm working on now is that I have been assured by these same friends that my front door windows would have had leaded stained glass or acid etched glass in the windows. In this case there is really no way of knowing what was there because glass leaves no witness mark, nail hole, or residue with which to observe and base a theory on.

In the end I must make an assumption that their assertion is based on something. My friends are very knowledgeable about what could have been, so there is always the possibility they are right. Maybe many houses of the period had these varied accoutrements or maybe only those that were photographed had them. Maybe my house was the only house ever built that had no picture rail on the second floor. Maybe my house is the only house painted white. Maybe all of the other homes did have wall-to-wall carpet. Maybe all of the other homes did have something more than just cottage windows in the front windows on their homes.

Now though, a few people have posted comments indicating that cottage windows are very common on Victorian homes in their area or that they don't see a lot of leaded stained glass on the homes of the period. So, maybe I was wrong when in my last post I indicated leaded stained glass was very common in Victorian homes. I mean really, what the hell do I know about homes in Cincinnati, or for that matter, any other city a 100 years ago. I can only speak authoritatively on The Petch House. Beyond that I'm spouting rhetoric, conjecture, and hearsay.

In the end, what does it really matter. Anybody can do what ever the hell they want. There is no rule book to home restoration and renovation. Last I checked I still lived in a free country and if I want to gut my house, build a giant pyramid inside, sit under it and eat dog poop I can. I don't think I'll be doing that anytime soon, but you never know. If I want to put cottage windows instead of leaded or etched glass I can do that was well. In the end they are both period appropriate and neither could be considered a hack job.

I like my friends, I really do. The only reason I get uptight about it is because these comments are made while they are standing in my house. If you are going to say I'm wrong and insist that my house had picture rail on the second floor then at least take 2 minutes to inspect the bare plaster walls for nail holes or inspect the corner blocks for witness marks.

I think part of this comes from looking at books with pretty pictures and assuming they were the norm. It is like thinking that every home in America today looks like the homes in Better Homes & Gardens. Those places are the exception and not the rule. A photographer in 1895 probably would not have gone in to Joe Buggy Whip's home and taken photos of uninspired interior details. What would be the point of that.

Now, what is really bothering me about this is that I am now falling in to the trap of thinking that my house was unique because it did not have every detail known to 19th century man. I now am under the impression that every house East of the Mississippi had every imaginable detail known to the period. My mind has become coerced and corrupted by my well intentioned friends. It's like the peer pressure of high school all over again. That is, if I had gone to high school. I guess I can feel fortunate that my friends are only obsessed about Victorian homes and not heroin or bank robbery.

The debates are lively and a lot of fun. I now can't wait to finish the windows so I can have them over for dinner to argue about the front doors.

More on “Cottage Widows”

2011-01-03T18:09:00.000-08:00

If you read yesterday's post you know I got the term “Cottage Widow” from Historic House Parts, a salvage yard in New York. I'm curious if anyone else has heard this term used to describe the Victorian era wooden windows made with colored glass. Is it a vernacular term used mainly on the East Coast or is it just used by Historic House Parts? Maybe it is a common term and I've just never heard it before. Regardless, I like it

Here in Humboldt County most of the stained glass windows you see on Victorian homes can be described as Cottage Windows. My own house has 3 and I plan to make two more for the two front doors.

A common design of this style of colored glass in the front door window around here employs a uniform series of glass squares around the perimeter with a large pane of clear glass in the center. I'll see if I can get some pictures soon. Although my front door was not originally done in the cottage window style, other cottage windows on my house have a similar design (See yesterday's post).

The big difference between mine and a lot of others you see around here is that on mine the panes of colored glass are not uniformly sized all the way around. There are squares at the corners and rectangles on the sides and top. This is what drove the original design for my front doors. See below.

Original Design

Then after looking at some of the samples at Historic House Parts I changed the design of my windows. My main concern with trying to do the uniform squares all the way around is that it does not leave much room for error. If I limit the design to one size of square I could end up with a window too big or too small. For example, if I had 7 panes going up the side and each square is off by a quarter of an inch that adds up to an inch a three quarters too tall or too short.

Examples of Cottage Windows from Historic House Parts

Design Round Two – Inspired by Historic House Parts

With this design I can play with the length of the center panes to make sure the window fits the existing opening on the door. The pinkish glass was added as well, and is taken from the big front window that is original to my house (See yesterday's post). The real trick may be matching the texture of the 1895 glass.

The New Frontdoor Window

2011-01-02T17:01:00.000-08:00

So, I've decided to venture in to the mysterious and intimidating world of stained glass. {Deep Breath} I'm going to attempt to make my own stained glass windows for my front doors {Exhale}.

Now, a lot of you probably have one or two ideas of what it takes to make stained glass or what are the requisite parts of a stained glass window. From what I can tell, stained glass falls largely in to three broad categories of construction. Old school stained glass uses lead came. These are the 'H' shaped pieces of lead (sometimes zinc) that are soldered together around the pieces of glass. The more modern method, which is a late 19th or early 20th method, uses copper foil that is wrapped around the edges of the glass and then soldered together. The last method uses wood instead of copper, zinc, or lead to separate and secure the pieces of colored glass. I believe these would be called muntins.

If you lived Back East 100+ years ago the leaded stained glass windows could be easily ordered from suppliers in almost every size and shape imaginable. There were huge catalogs of designs to chose from and even modest homes might have a front window with a leaded stained glass sash. It was quite popular.

A very eclectic design from The Carson Mansion (1887)

There are some fine examples of Victorian era leaded glass in Eureka, but really it is limited to the mansions. If you walk around Eureka, almost every home you see from the turn of the century has at least one stained glass window on it. What you don't see though, are a lot of the leaded stained glass. Most here are made with wood.

Two in the parlor

Better view of the large parlor window

Upstairs hallway

Close up of glue chip pane in hallway

Close up of blue glass

With lead came the designs can be as intricate and elaborate as you want. With wood, the designs are limited to using mainly squares, rectangles, diamonds, and the occasional circle. Historic House Parts of New York refers to these simple wood and colored glass windows as “Cottage Windows”. The Petch House came with 3 of them originally, as seen above.

In keeping with the original windows, above is my first design for the front door windows I want to make. The muntins will be redwood, of course. These are roughly 38X22. The corner squares are roughly 5X5. I added yellow to the mix because I have yellow glass left over from the butler's pantry cabinets. Next week I'm going to visit a local shop to see if they have anything that matches the purple glass that is in the big front window. I would like to match the color, but also that texture.

To see some eye-popping original Victorian windows from the 19th century visit the links below. I will not be held responsible for damage to any computer equipment while viewing these sites. Cover the keyboard with a towel and have your drool buckets handy. You have been forewarned.

Easy Boo (UK)

Historic House Parts (US)

New Supplier

2010-12-30T17:59:00.000-08:00

Believe it or not the front door still is not finished. Of course, I haven't worked on it a whole lot since October, but still, this project is really dragging, even by winter standards.

I finally found a lockset I liked and was willing to buy. Sure, I could spend $500+ of the finest restored 1890s lockset, but I think we all know that is not going to happen. It's not that I can't afford it, its that I don't want to. If the last thing I had to do on this house was to buy a lockset and install it, then the sky would be the limit.

As it is, I do more major projects in 1 year than most people do in a decade. For me, thinking about funding for future projects means thinking about what I will be doing next month, not next year or next decade. I must always broaden my tunnel vision and keep the big picture in mind.

So I searched and I waited. I found a few promising items over the past few months and made some low-ball bids on eBay that didn't pan out. No biggie. I've lost a lot more auctions than I've won. Then a few weeks back the set below showed. Fully restored and ready to install. Really, very nice. Installation was a breeze and for the first time in decades the front door does not rattle when the wind blows. I don't have to giggle the knob to get the lock to engage. Simply close gently and listen for the click. It's a beautiful thing.

Not a great price, but a good price. Very fair. Both the buyer and seller knew what they had and what it was worth and a peaceful and prosperous transaction ensued. You gotta love commerce when everyone ends up happy.

Of course, I needed other locks for this door. There are the two slide bolts that keep the stationary door in place. These have been a challenge to find. Really, the top one has been the challenge. I need a 24X1.25 inch mortised slide bolt. I beginning to think that the original bolt was custom made for my house. OK, not really, but I have found that that size bolt just does not exist in the salvage hardware world. If I needed a 20-inch long bolt or shorter I would have 100s to chose from.

I eventually found and bought one that was listed at 18X1.25 inches only to find out it was mislabled on the web site. Very frustrating, but it was returned for a full refund. The 1.25 inch is the really important measurement. I can fill in at the bottom with wood or even a piece of the original bolt. It must be 1.25 inches wide though, or I can't mount it.

So after I bought the lock From Filip at Penn Antique Restoration in Scranton, PA I asked if he had any locks that would fill my needs. In no time at all a few pictures arrived with a very nice selection to chose from. Two were 20X1.25 inches and in the same pattern as the original lock!

Sold!

After a few more emails to confirm size and condition, and before I was given a price, I was asked if I wanted them as-is or cleaned and restored. I love this. I love being given the option and I also love dealing with people who understand that time is money. Some people think they yank something out of their attic, slap it on eBay, and get top dollar for it.

As many of you have already guessed, I'm buying these in original, as-is condition. After some grunt work to get them in shape I can mount them and then finish the weather stripping. After that I can replace the glass and finish these front doors once and for all!

One Box To Rule Them All

2010-11-19T18:19:00.000-08:00

For years I have wanted and worked towards a wired home. I want to have music, video, photos, internet, and other types of data available in all rooms at all times, but I didn't want a computer in every room, nor do I want to - nor can I - spend thousands on some high-tech, off-the-shelf system that is operated by sleek, wireless touch pads like something out of a James Bond movie.

So I pulled wires for cable TV, internet, and phone in to 7 rooms of the house. The confluence of all of the cables is in a cabinet in the butler's pantry where it all meets in a Steren home networking box. This was a good start. The router in there is wireless N, but I've found that connection rates drop by as much as 50% just 2 rooms away, so all of the wires are worth it in my opinion.

Next, for $199 I plugged an HP Media Vault in to the router. This is an NAS with Media Server, for the techno-savey out there. For others, think tiny computer with no keyboard, monitor, or mouse and just one button on the front. The HP Media Vault works as a file server, media streamer, and as a print server for the printer that is plugged in to it. This is all located in the same cabinet as the Steren box. It is pretty much idiot proof and works great. There is little or no configuration. Just plug everything in and turn it on. Anything I put on the Media Vault is available to any computer in the house and any computer in the house can print to the printer plugged in to it Media Vault.

Next, I installed a $50 TV card in to my PC. This allowed me to record TV in the same way Tivo or a DVR would. The software downloads program guides from the cable company and it is just a matter of clicking on a show to record it. You can set it up to record the same show every night or week. The shows are recorded to the Media Vault. Along with all of my photos, and CDs I ripped, the Media Vault now has all of my media and documents. I hate Suddenlink cable and shudder at the thought of giving them more than the $23 I pay for their service now, so I don't get a DVR from them. I'm half tempted to get an HD antenna and dump Suddenlink altogether.

Now I needed something to bring it all together. I don't mind laying in bed with the netbook propped on my chest to watch a TV show, but that would never cut it for the parlor.

I briefly looked at Google TV, but it kind of seems like it is Not Ready For Prime Time. Even if I went that way, I'm not sure it would have accomplished everything I wanted. What I ended up buying was a Sony Playstation 3 for $299. Who would have thought a game console would have been the key to bringing everything together in the parlor.

Here is a list of what the PS3 will do:

Play music CDs
Play DVDs
Play Blue Ray discs
Built in web browser
Stream TV and movies off Netflix
Stream TV off Hulu
Stream recorded movies off the Media Vault
Stream recorded TV off the Media Vault
Stream music ripped from CDs off the Media Vault
View photos off the Media Vault

All of that and it is actually smaller than the DVD player it replaced! If that weren't enough, the remote is wireless, not infrared, so you don't need to point at the TV, and it recharges when it is plugged in to the console, so you never need to replace batteries!

Oh, and apparently the PS3 will also play video games, but I haven't gotten that far yet. Don't own any video games, not a problem. You can download them from the PS3 store that is accessed through the console. There are free demos of a lot of the games, too. This is probably starting to read like a paid endorsement for the Sony® PlayStation® 3. I wish it was, because I could use the money, but it isn't. The PS3 really does all of that and it does it well. I think what impressed me the most was how fast the system comes up. It is minor, but this is something that has always bothered me about my DVD player. After pushing the On button I had to wait close to 20 seconds for the tray to slide open. What the hell is it doing in all of that time?!?!

The Netflix app is really impressive. I'm amazed at the quality of the picture. For $9.99 a month I can stream what I want and get DVDs in the mail, which are ordered through the PS3! When streaming TV there is a momentary laps in quality in the first 10 seconds and then after that the quality is as good or better than live TV. I have low-end DSL from At&T for $19.99 a month. If I upped the service from AT&T, that first 10 seconds would probably improve, but that's probably not going to happen.

So, I'm not a gamer, I own no video games, but I own a PS3 and I love it! Go figure.

Front Door Very Close

2010-11-05T17:55:00.000-07:00

I need a lockset, some weather stripping, a new threshold, and a slide bolt, but the worst is behind me.

This is what it looked like when I started. It is hard to tell, but the paint is terrible. That is plywood nailed to the bottom. There is a crusty plate with the original doorknob. The biggest insult is the modern, crappy, brass plated mail slot. The slot cover is bad enough, but the worst thing is, I think this was added just a few years before I bought the house. Meaning, someone took a saw to the door very recently and added the slot.

Here it is with most of the paint stripped off. What you are seeing are remnants of the original 1895 black/gray/white paint job.

Here it is primed and with a new mail slot. Well, different mail slot. That is a cast bronze slot from the 19th century,

And here it sits today. The colors are the same as on the rest of the house: Clarey Sage, Basil, and Livable Green. With any luck I can finish this up this weekend.

The Good Door of the North

2010-10-31T13:10:00.000-07:00

For weeks the front doors have had a thin coat of ragged black paint left over from 1895. This was what was left after I stripped off a few layers of old and new paint paint. The new paint was the worst. It was a thick, gooey layer of latex paint that was slopped on by a Starving Student painting company about 10 years ago.

But now, just in time for Halloween, I give you Galinda, The Good Door of the North. It's like these doors are just begging to be hit with eggs tonight.

Dotting Is and Crossing Ts

2010-10-25T18:14:00.000-07:00

Six months later I can say I am officially done with the foyer. Whew! Never thought I'd write that! I was waiting for the little table to arrive via FedEx and it arrived today. While it is true I still need to work on the front doors and the pocket doors leading in to the parlor, those are big enough projects that I can consider them projects in and of themselves, so they don’t really count. It is all about compartmentalizing, people. That is how I keep from going insane.

The "before" pictures are really a retrospective of before and during the project. Anyone interested in the entire project, start to finish can select the “foyer” label from the drop down list on the left. The “after” photos at the end are all new shots taken today. I think they come closer than a lot I’ve taken at capturing the real color of walls, wood, carpet and rugs. You can thank the late evening, overcast sky for that. Between the front doors and the window in the stairs, a lot of my shots tend to get washed out.

After, finished, done, ready to move on!

Ready for Halloween

2010-10-24T16:13:00.000-07:00

How's that for a scary looking pair of front doors. Depending on how much I get done this week, they may still look like that a week from now.

I stripped off the paint and what you are seeing are the remnants of the original paint job from 1895. I think it was black with gray or maybe black, gray and red. There is some red on the trim around the panels that is very early. There was also the brown paint from the 20s and then finally the green from a decade ago. Once again the green paint that was applied over the other, failing paint jobs was what caused much of the work. Sometimes doing nothing really is better.

I did the panel on the interior to finish off the mail slow. This hides the wood I had to add when I went from the wider, modern mail slot to the narrower, antique slot.

This is the other side. Next up sand and paint, which would be easy except I need to decide on the color scheme. It will most likely end up being the 3 shades of green I used on most of the rest of the house. That would be Basil, Clarey Sage, and Livable Green. The question is, do I highlight with the fired brick that I used on the water table, crown molding, and window sash.

The Front Door

2010-10-20T19:22:00.000-07:00

I decided to try and get in one more project before I succumb to a long winter of football, red wine, and bad Saturday afternoon movies. I've put off the front door long enough and now that the foyer is 99% finished, it might as well have a revitalized front door to go along with it.

The foyer is waiting on the delivery of a small table to go just inside the front door and then I can stick a fork in this bad boy and call it a day. I shied away from the Ethan Allen table for a few reasons. First, it was the hand painting on it. I loved the design of the table, but the painted flowers just didn't sit well with me. If I'm going to get something with hand painted detail on it I need to see it in person.

Even with that, I came close to purchasing it, mainly because I really couldn't find anything else I liked. I looked at so many tables, I got the point where I just didn't care anymore. I just wanted to be finished with the foyer and this purchase was the one thing holding me up. When I got to the last page of the order form on the Ethan Allen web site the shipping and taxes nearly doubled the price of the table. It felt like the old bait and switch, so I backed out.

I then found another table on another site. It was almost the same price of the Ethan Allen table, but shipping was free. I ordered it and then got and email saying I could expect delivery on 2/11/2011. I'm not joking. I went back to the site, canceled the order, and bought a nearly identical table – honestly, other than this one being in stock and costing $10 more, there is no difference – that should arrive on Friday. If it does, there will be a nice selection of before and after pictures of the long, drawn-out foyer project. I estimate I have 120 hours of labor in the stairs alone.

Anyway, this post was supposed to be about my pour front doors. You can read the back story about the interior here, but this is about in the outside. The 2 big issues about the outside are 1, the plywood nailed to the bottom of each door, and 2, the modern mail slot.

It turns out the plywood was hiding something. These are double doors and the one on the left is stationary and held in place with 2 slide bolts, one at the top and one at the bottom. The bottom one had a blow out at some point. Somebody either ran in to the door or something and ripped out the wood around the bolt. This is right where the bottom mortise and tenon is, so it was good they did something, but that ratty old plywood had to go.

I stripped the paint off and then glued and tacked in some pieces of wood to sort of hold things together. I can't fill with epoxy because I want to replace the mortised slide bolt.

After that I put a beveled panel over the hole and added a bottom rail. After I did this, I came up with a better idea. I could apply a brass kick-plate to the bottom. I'm not sure if I'll undo what I've done.

The mail slot that was there was a modern brass plated steel number that looked pretty crappy. The plating was already flaking off even though it had not been there that long. I put on this nice antique cast bronze number. The main issue was that the new one I took off was wider than the vintage one I put on, so I had to add wood to the slot that was cut in the door.

Not an issue on the outside because I will be painting. The inside is another story. More on that later.

Benjamin Franklin Parkway

2010-10-13T19:27:00.000-07:00

This is the last of my Philadelphia posts. This actually represents the part of the trip I regret the most because I didn't spend near enough time here. It is a reason to go back. Not all of these photos are taken on Benjamin Franklin Parkway, but about 90% are.

{Sigh} I want to go back now.

Benjamin Franklin Parkway runs from City Hall to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It slices diagonally across the grid pattern of the city and runs through the cities museum district. The parkway is roughly a mile long and is lined with great art, buildings, museums, and fountains. It is the reason I will go back.

Some may "Heart" other cities, but I love Philadelphia...

Rittenhouse Square

2010-10-12T19:28:00.000-07:00

I just loved walking around Rittenhouse Square. Classic Row houses from the mid to late 19th century. I'm pretty sure many of these were built around the same time as my own house, but I get the feeling many are much earlier. This was City Living for middle class Victorians, where as my house was more small town living for the same group. These homes are mostly brick, but some are granite, while others even have marble facades.

If I could afford it, I would move there tomorrow. Sadly, the smallest apartment in this neighborhood is way out of my price range. I found one of these homes on a realtor's web site. It was 5,000 sq ft and listed for 5.2 million. Many have been cut up in to condos and apartments. The one I saw on the realtor site had the charm of the era on the outside, but was gutted and butchered on the inside. Other than the staircase, there was nothing left.

Freemasons Should Rule The World

2010-10-11T18:05:00.000-07:00

It is hard to top the Philadelphia City Hall, but the Masonic Temple right across the street comes pretty damn close. Construction started in 1868, with the castle like structure being finished in about 10 years. After that the interior design started and lasted another 30 years. What they accomplished is nothing short of amazing.

The 7 main lodges were each designed in a different style and by a different architect: Renaissance, Ionic, Morrish, Corinthian, Gothic, Egyptian, and Norman. With very few exceptions, everything is rendered in plaster and then painted and grained. Even though many of these styles are most closely associated with religious buildings, and many of the rooms resemble the insides of temples, all religious symbols are conspicuously absent. Masons are a nondenominational organization and so left them out on purpose.

The pictures that follow are eye-popping, but don't come close to giving you the experience of being in the building. Not only is it all plaster but there has never been any interior restoration. In some places you can see the paint chipping from the plaster – it is very minor. The tour guide told me this started when they installed a modern air conditioning system. Prior to that, cooling was done by fans blowing over large blocks of ice. The exterior is granite, I think, and went through a major restoration about a decade ago.

In the Gothic Room, the furniture pre-dates the building. This is all from the original Masonic Hall in Philadelphia, which burned to the ground. The 2 portraits are that of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, noted Masonic brothers. Several of the stained glass windows and ceilings are back-lit because they don't really have access to natural light. Once inside the building you quickly become disoriented as to where you are in the building.

The balusters and newel posts are cast iron. Stairs and floors are marble.

It doesn't show in the picture, but this ceiling is high relief, carved and painted plaster, as is everything, of course. The amount of labor that went in to these rooms is astounding.

Old City

2010-10-10T11:17:00.000-07:00

It is difficult to say just what was the most spectacular thing I saw in Philadelphia. Form a purely visceral standpoint the city is just so nice it is hard to pick out one thing. From an emotional standpoint, the Old City, Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell and the National Constitution Center can not be beat. Sadly, Independence Hall was under going some major restoration when I was there, but the site of it alone was enough to stir up emotions without going in. The Liberty Bell was amazing to see in person.

The security around the Liberty Bell was very tight. As you enter the long, narrow building you are greeted by numerous security guards. I was so eager to get started with sight seeing that I actually arrived there hours before it opened and there were guards at post even in the wee hours of the morning. I get the feeling it is under 24-hour guard.

When you first arrive there you pass through a metal detector and must open your coat for a visual inspection. Anyone carrying a bag or purse is moved to the side where more guards do a more thorough search. Once through, there are some displays of historical items, history of the bell and even a short movie. I passed by all of this to get to the bell. It is just a bell, but it really stirred some emotions seeing it in person. It is maybe the most iconic thing I can think of about the history of this country. The image and story of The Liberty Bell go all the back to my childhood. I mean, it's The Liberty Bell. It is THE Liberty Bell and there I was standing a few feet from it. I was back in third grade, but now I understood the importance of it.

The Liberty Bell sits between Independence Hall and the National Constitution Center. The National Constitution Center is a modern building, as is the building that houses the Liberty Bell. The National Constitution Center consists of 2 floors. The first floor is really nothing more than a large entry area, a gift shop, and an exhibit space for different exhibits that change over time. When I was there the current exhibit was titled “Art of the Solider”. I did not see this exhibit.

The permanent exhibit starts with a multimedia presentation in a small amphitheater in the building. I wasn't expecting much, but it was really very good. It really was like a history lesson on steroids. The woman who narrated the presentation really did a good job. It is difficult to explain what I saw, so I won't go in to any more detail, other than to say it is not always “look at how great our country is”. It does not shy away from unfortunate parts of our history and problems with The Constitution. I highly recommend it

After that presentation you exit at the top of the theater to the second floor. This is a museum in the round. As you walk around you see a history of the major events in the US on the outer wall, and more creative and interactive displays at the center. This exhibit is constantly being updated. At the end, the last displays are about Barrak Obama's election, gay marriage, immigration, and the Tea Party. (The current political movement, not the Boston Tea Party). Along with these displays there are small writing shelves and post it notes for you to give your own opinion and post it to the exhibit. Remember, democracy is not a spectator sport.

After that you move in to a room where they have recreated a scene of the Founding Fathers debating the Constitution. Thirty or so members of the Constitutional convention have been recreated in life-sized bronze sculptures and placed in a room. It is powerful. You can stand next to George Washington and put you hand on Benjamin Franklin's shoulder. At the table where George Washington stands is a large book where the pairs of opposing pages are either a copy of the Constitution or a blank page where you can sign your name. The sign asks, “Would you sign the Constitution?”. I'm sure it sounds hokey, but it is really powerful. It really was a moment.

After several minutes of rubbing shoulders with the Founding Fathers I looked for the exit. It was a little confusing as to how to get back to the first floor. When I walked out of the room with the life sized sculptors I saw a small, semi circular hallway that had an entrance and exit on the same wall just 10 or 15 feet apart. As I walked by it the first time I saw a young woman in the hallway leaning against the wall. She was wearing the same Polo shirt and khaki pants that all of the other attendants wore. It seemed like the entire facility was run by young men and woman fresh out of high school. I didn't pay her much attention and kept looking for the exit. My internal clock which determines how much time I can spend in one place had run out and I needed fresh air.

I found a door that said “Exit”, which lead to an empty room with another door right next to it was also labeled exit. I walked in one door and out the other and ended up where I started. I headed back to the way I came, once more passing the semicircular hallway with the young woman in it. As I passed by I looked in and she smiled as we made eye contact. I decided to go in, if for no other reason than to find out how to get out. The hallway was dimly lit. As I rounded the corner I saw that the inside wall was glass. Hanging as if suspended in mid air was a copy of the Constitution that was originally printed in the newspaper just after it was signed by the Founding Fathers. I got goose bumps just looking at it. I started reading it and before I could get to the end of the first sentence I lost it. I just started crying. Not balling like a baby, but there were tears. I stood there for a few moments trying to compose myself. With my eyes filled with tears I couldn't read any more so I just stared at it, soaking it in. The woman behind me said nothing and fortunately no one else came in the whole time I was in there.

The whole experience was really wonderful. It was really done well. In reflecting on the the way the center was laid out it felt like I was taken through the steps of seeing how the Constitution came to be, seeing what it has wrought, meeting the men who framed it, and then seeing a copy of the document from the time that it was written. I highly recommend the whole experience.

All of this came after spending a day walking around Old City. There is Christ Church, Christ Church Cemetery, along with numerous other Colonial era and pre-Civil War era buildings. Christ Church Cemetery is where Benjamin Franklin and other famous people of the time are buried. Honestly, and without exaggeration, I think I walked down every street and alley in that part of the city. Half the time I was thinking to myself, Did George Washington stand here? Did James Madison and Thomas Jefferson stand in this alley to debate a point. Perhaps Benjamin Franklin leaned against this wall to stand in the shade for a moment and thought to himself, “I really must speak with Thomas about this declaration he is writing. My God, that man is wordy! Just say that King George is an idiot and get on with it!”

I love this building. They really made the most out of a small lot.

MDCCXCV = 1795

Christ Church 1695

Benjamin Franklin's grave at Christ Church Cemetery. Not the original marker. It is my understanding that many of the markers in this cemetery were damaged by acid rain. Remember that Philadelphia was the manufacturing power house in the region, going all the way back to the birth of the industrial revolution.

Stairs + Carpet = Sigh of Relief

2010-10-09T18:40:00.000-07:00

I got the carpet runner installed on the stairs today. While not perfect, I am happy with the way it came out. I've carpeted a few rooms in my day, but never stairs. The big concern was the mitered corners on the landings. This was a wool stair runner that I paid $32 a lineal foot for, so I ordered the bare minimum and there was no room for error.

I originally was going to go with the traditional installation of tackless strips and seam tape. After reading on-line I found a few entries that said for wool carpet you should not use seam tape. Instead, you should seal the ends with latex and stitch the seams together with needle and thread. Instead of the tackless strip, you should use a crown stapler.

Well, I used fabric glue instead of latex and the stitching proved to be very difficult. Mainly because of the fabric glue. I bought both straight and hooked upholstery needles and broke 2 of them before I gave up. Getting the needles through the set fabric glue was not easy. Instead of stitching I made my own seam tape with green bedsheets and fabric glue. That and a few staples made for a very strong seam. The crown stapler was very nice to work with, and the staples are nearly invisible.

The first corner is a little off. The pattern meets at the inside corner, but is a little off at the outside corner. Really, I was just over-thinking it. I was so worried I would really screw up, I looked past the obvious and made it much more difficult that it needed to be. Other than those reading this blog, I doubt many will notice.

The next one I got dead-on and it took a fraction of the time.

In the end, I had exactly 1-foot of extra carpet. For now, it will sit like this at the top of the stairs. Eventually, I will have the same runner in the upstairs hallway.

City Hall

2010-10-08T19:00:00.001-07:00

Chose your superlatives and apply them all to the Philadelphia City Hall - biggest, best, most, tallest - they all apply. It is the largest municipal building in the US. It was the first non-religious building to be called the tallest in the world. It is the tallest un-reinforced masonry building in the US and second tallest in the world. It has more statues on it than any other building in the US. At 37-feet tall and weighing 26 tons it has the largest statue ever placed on the top of a building. The bronze statue of William Penn at the top is so big it sat on the ground for more than a year because no one could figure out how to get it up there.

With its groupings of paired columns and mansard roof it is built in the Second Empire style. It took so long to build (started in 1870 and completed in 1901) that by the time it was finished that style was no longer in style. The exterior is granite, marble, and sandstone. The supports under the main tower are blocks of granite 22-feet thick and set close to 50-feet underground to reach bedrock. Nearly 90,000,000 hand made bricks were used in the construction. The interior is equally as impressive. At times they used aluminum instead of gold because at that time aluminum was more valuable.

For more than 8 decades a “gentleman's agreement” kept it the tallest building in Philadelphia. By the 1980s the building had fallen on hard times. Much of the cast iron was orange with rust. When it was built, Philadelphia was the heart of the industrial revolution and all of those factories that fueled the city's progress and fortune covered the building with soot and grime. The city planned to demolish it until they got the bill for demolition. As it turned out, it would cost less to restore it than it would to demolish it. Thank God for fiscal responsibility.

My hotel was only a block away from City Hall and so on day 2 I went over to see about taking a tour. I got there 20 minutes before the tour started and at that point I was the only person who had signed up. Most just sign up for the 15 minute trip up to the observation deck at the top of the tower. I almost backed out. I thought it would be odd to be lead around the building with my own personal tour guide. As I was standing there talking to the guide about getting my money back for my already paid ticket a woman walked up and asked about the tour. For the next 2 and a half hours the 3 of us crawled all over the building. It was spectacular.

Just ignore that building on the left for now.

There are 4 entrances to the building. Each one is a portal which leads to an inner chamber filled with columns and carvings. Each entrance was either for a branch of the government or for a ceremonial entrance. There are four, free standing granite spiral stair cases at each corner of the building.

The carved figure you see is the architect. He obviously thought very highly of himself.

The first stop was the Mayor's reception room. They were getting ready for a press conference so we had very little time in this room. On the walls are portraits of past mayors.

The honorable Mayor Nutter and Congressman Chaka Fattah showed and we had to leave.

The next two rooms were originally supposed to be one tall room with a soaring 95-foot high ceiling. This was the ceremonial entrance for visiting dignitaries and the like. This room was a part of the tower. As the tower got taller though, the weight of it began to crack the walls. They added a floor in the middle to give the tower more structure. They were left with 2 rooms that have paltry 45-foot ceilings. The room with the domed ceiling was the original ceiling.

The statue of George Washington used to sit in front of Independence Hall

Because this is a working city hall many of the grand old rooms have now been cut up in to cube farms. Still, there is no way to hide the old grandeur. When I got back to work I asked that my work area be redecorated with gilded, hand carved mahogany just like in Philadelphia. I was immediately escorted from the building by security. I assume they wanted me out so the work could begin as soon as possible. I'll just hang out at home and wait for the call that the work has been completed.

The City Council Chambers. What can I say. For the first time in my life I wanted to be a politician. It is all white Alabama marble, Mexican onyx, mosaic tile, and carved wood.

This is the finest cast iron I have ever seen in my life. The detail is amazing.

The wooden box at the back is the press box

The ceilings and walls of the upper halls were covered with murals above a marble dado. The murals were painted over. There has been some restoration (go up to the shot of Mayor Nutter walking in to the press conference), and in some places you can see parts of the murals behind chipping paint. Lower halls got majolica tile or pink granite dado and tiled barrel vaulted ceilings. The tiled barrel vaulted ceilings (not shown) are still there, but mostly hidden behind modern drop ceilings.

The view from the top could have been better. It rained only one morning that I was in Philadelphia and that was the morning I went up in the tower. Still a great experience.

That is the Delaware river with Camden, New Jersey in the distance. The PSFS Building, now Loews Hotel, was the first building in the US designed in the International Style. It looks like 1960s, but it was built in 1932. It is on the National Register of Historic Places.

The observation deck is just below the statue of William Penn

Freedom

2010-10-07T18:11:00.000-07:00

I was finally able to escape Eureka and fly to Philadelphia and it was soooo worth the wait. What a spectacular city. My only regret is that I didn’t stay longer. It is difficult to decide what to write about first, so here is an overview.

From an emotional standpoint, the trifecta of Independence Hall, The Liberty Bell, and The National Constitution Center were by far the most moving parts of the trip. I honestly didn’t think that it would have the impact that it did. It was amazing.

Beyond that, the city itself, or at least the parts I saw of it, are over-the-top when it comes to art and architecture. I hope to write about it more over the next week or so, and to show some of the 385 photos I took (Me, go overboard?) First though, let’s look at something like the mundane, everyday chore of going to the store to buy pants in Philadelphia. Below are pictures of the Macey’s that was 1 block from my hotel.

It is in a massive building (2,000,000 sq. ft – not all Macey’s) Built in 1911. It is the 10 story building in the center of the picture, on the corner. Just ignore the sliver of the building on the right for now.

The entry: That is majolica tile on the bottom and a tile mosaic on the top. There is another one just like it on the other side. The floors are marble, of course.

Oh, that’s right, this Macey’s has the largest pipe organ in world. Does your mall have that?

I’ve seen it listed as “the largest pipe organ in the world” and “the largest playable pipe organ in the world”. Either way it is ginormous.

There are pipes stacked on the 3rd, 4th and 5th floors and they also run through out the building. The word "Stunning" does not do it justice. Hell, even without the organ the space is amazing.

And they play it every day at 12:30 and 5:30. Just another day of pants buying in Philadelphia.

Sneak Peek

2010-10-01T17:24:00.000-07:00

If I din't already have commitments this weekend I could install the new carpet runner. It arrived on time as promised by rugsale.com. What this means is, I could have made it for the home tour this year.

Just as in most cities, the home tour is an annual event here in Eureka. Two years ago I won the residential preservation award and so I was asked to be on the home tour. The problem was, I wasn't sure if I could finish the foyer in time and I didn't want to be rushed. As it turns out though, I could have finished.

While it's true that I didn't finish everything on the list I wanted to get done in preparation for the tour, I did finish enough that I would have been comfortable inviting people in.

There's always next year.

Not an Artists Rendering

2010-09-27T20:13:00.000-07:00

It specifically is not an artists rendering because I am not an artist. Photoshop is one software program that has always been difficult for me to get. I once sat with a book that had step-by-step instructions on how to merge two images with one masked and I still couldn't get it. I understand the theory. I'm reasonably intelligent. I often pick up these sorts of things quickly. It frustrates me to this day that I could not get this. So much so that I've wasted the first paragraph of this blog entry on the fact that I can not mask out the background of one image and superimpose it on to another in Photoshop. How's that for neurotic?

Annnnywho, I got an email from rugsale.com today informing me that my stair runner carpet should be here this Friday. If that is true, then I can install it this weekend. That will be huge. After that, I just need a few small pieces of furniture and some pictures on the wall and I can stick a fork in the foyer and move on to the front door.

The mirror is real, but I'm sure you will be shocked to know that the small demi-lune table is not really in that photo. It looks so real! I've been Googling my fingers to the bone for the past few days looking for tables for the foyer. A hall tree would be the proper Victorian piece for this spot, but I've decided not to go that route. I found the piece above at Ethan Allen.

When I started looking I first went to Ballard Design and found a nice little table right off the bat and it was on-sale. The only problem was the sale table only came in white and the one in the picture with the mahogany finish was not even available at full price. I get the feeling they had zillions of the white ones left over and they were desperate to dump them.

I then went to Overstock.com and found nothing that appealed to me. After that I let Google tell me where to go. This is where it got interesting. If you Google 'console table' you get a number of sites that all seem to have the same exact inventory, and they all offer dozens, if not hundreds of different tables.

After looking at 3 or 4 of these sites I began to think they were all the same site only different domain names. It doesn't matter what link you click on you get the same selection at the same price. After looking at page after page after page of small tables I gave up at those sites because nothing really jumped out at me. I then just typed in ethanallen.com and found the table above.

One thing you'll notice about the table above compared to similar tables at all of the other sites is that the table above has no lower shelf. Almost all of the others have a lower shelf 6-inches or so off the ground. I do know this style of table, when it was in fashion, would not have had the lower shelf. I think the real reason for the lower shelf is to make up for poor craftsmanship. Oddly enough, the table from Ethan Allen is less expensive than many similar tables at other sites I looked at.

Decisions Must Be Made

2010-09-22T18:06:00.000-07:00

So, today I purchased the last piece of the puzzle for the foyer project. I bought the runner carpet for the stairs. It was not an easy decision for a number of reasons. First, it is a design element choice, and those are always agonizing for me. Paint colors, drapes, rugs, furniture and the like are always difficult for me. More often than not I change my mind after I've made the purchase. Not good.

In this case, it is really not good because the runner carpet is expensive and non-refundable. Like it or not, I bought it and it is going in. The other difficult aspect of this decision was the width of the runner. Unless I have something custom made my choices are 27-inch or 40-inch. The plan all along was to do 27-inch. That is what was there originally and it is a nice fit for the width of the stairs. That was until I refinished the stairs. The treads are really beat up and the more I cover them the better, so I went with a 40-inch wide wool runner. The stairs are 46-inches wide, which means it is basically carpeting on the stairs, with 3 inches of wood showing on either side.. I'm hoping it will not look odd.

I looked locally first and found no wool runners available. I could buy some unpatterned wool carpet and have it cut to be a runner, but that is not really what I wanted. I wanted pattern with boarders. I purchased this on-line and the company is adamant about no returns on runners once it has been cut from the roll. Even though I found it on-line I purchased it over the phone.

The salesman made it very clear that I could not return this runner. After the transaction was complete on the phone I had to confirm by email and type “Yes” in to a little box, indicating that I knew there were no returns. After I sent that back they sent another email with the final bill and shipping information. I didn't get that email until I got home from work and my first panicked instinct was to call someone and beg them to change my order to the 27-inch runner. I ran to the stairs and measured one last time and convinced myself I must call to change it....then I convinced myself it would be ok....then change it...then ok...change...ok....change....ok

Then I poured myself a glass of wine and convinced myself that I didn't care. It will get here in 2 weeks. I will install it. It will bug the crap out of me for a few weeks and then I won't notice it anymore.

Warts and All

2010-09-19T17:19:00.001-07:00

I think I would have made the annual Home Tour being held on October 3rd this year. The front door and pocket doors won’t be done for lack of hardware, but the rest of the foyer and stair hall will be. The only things remaining are the base shoe molding and the stair runner carpet. I also need to redo one piece of the picture rail, and of course do a lot of cleaning.

I’m going to start shopping for stair runner next week. There are huge selections on-line, but I will first see if I can find something local. I dread going in to local businesses to shop for this sort of thing. It is like if I don’t walk in wearing a suit and tie I practically need to jump up and down to get someone’s attention. It is very frustrating.

The first place I went to when I shopped for carpet for my last house, I told the salesman I wanted to install carpet in 3 bedrooms, a hallway and the stairs and the first thing he showed me was the indoor/outdoor carpeting. I looked at him with an irritated glare and said, “No, inside my house”. His response was, “Well, I just assumed….” And then he trailed off. The rest of the time we spent together he acted like he had someplace else to be. Honestly, must I be forcd to shave a put on cologne just to shop for carpet? I ended up spending close to $3,000 on carpet at a different store. That place screwed up the installtion schedule, though. From the time I purchased the carpet it took more than 6 weeks to get it installed.

The plan is to do a 27-inch runner all the way up the stairs. The treads are a little beat up, so I might go a little wider. I knew they would be far from perfect, but there has never been a plan to replace them. It goes against my philosophy of ripping out and replacing something just because it isn’t perfect. I realize that needs to be done at times, but it will always be a last resort for me. I try and adhere to the 3 Rs of environmentalism: Reduce, Recyle, and Resuse.

I told myself I was going to hire a pro to sand the floor this time. This is my 5th time sanding and refinishing a floor and the process still somewhat eludes me. This one came out better than some and worse than others. I think part of my problem has to do with the crappy equipment I must rent from Don’s Rent-All.

I swear the sander I got on Saturday was from the 1950s. It did not even have the lever to lift the drum off the floor. They are really the only game in town, though. It is either Don’s or a 30 mile round trip to Mckinleyville. Unfortunately, without more competition there is no reason for them to upgrade the equipment. Most of the rest of the developed world uses the U Sand instead of the drum sander, which is a technology that is 100 years old or more. Come on Don’s! It is 2010. Get with the times.

The main reason I did the floor myself this time was because I woke up Saturday morning and thought, “Ok, what’s next”. The answer was the floor. At that point I could have started calling people to get estimates and set up a work time or just go and rent a sander. It seems easier and quicker just to rent the sander. Maybe the reason I am such a DIYer is because I have such poor planning skills. Had I planned better I would have started calling for estimates 2 weeks ago. I have a feeling I will be installing the stair runner myself.

The following pictures are titled, "What I did for my summer vacation", because thanks to the airport fiasco I didn't go to Philadelphia. It still hurts.

Last of the Lino

2010-09-15T17:18:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while you just have to marvel at the magic of the Blogosphere. Back in June of 2007 I posted a picture of the linoleum that was under the carpet on the stair landings in my house. Within a week someone saw the post and sent me pictures of my linoleum in a Omaha, NE catalog dated June of 1929. Pretty amazing.

Needless to say, that pretty much nails down the date of when the linoleum was installed. This was not too surprising. It was during the 1920s that the house went through the major cut-up in to apartments. When they did this, they covered all of the common floor areas in the house with linoleum. This included the foyer, 2 stair landings, and the upstairs hall.

Then in the 1970s the linoleum was pulled up in all of those areas except for the landings. The reason they pulled it up was because they were putting down a 3/8th inch under-lament (particle board) and then the floors were covered with a 12X12 fake wood tile. This under-lament and tile was put down in all rooms and the linoleum in the common areas made the floors uneven and caused problems when transitioning from the common area floor to an apartment floor. There was no transition necessary for the landings, so the linoleum was left and covered.

So now you may be asking yourself, “Well, if it was pulled up then how do you know it was there”. The answer to that is, because when they pulled up the linoleum they left behind the under-lament that was used for it. In this case it was a paper product. You can either think of it as really thin cardboard or really thick newspaper. This product was glued down to the wood to get a really smooth surface and then the linoleum was glued down to it. When the linoleum is pulled up half of the paper under-lament comes up with it and the other half stays glued to the floor. What remained was not really thick enough to cause problems for the 1970s particle board under-lament, so it was left.

It did, however, cause me problems. I had to pull it all up to get back to the original 1X6 T&G redwood floors. I tried all kinds of things from different scrapers, heat guns, chemicals. In the end what worked best was water. Lots and lots of water. I mean really, really a lot of water. The adhesive that was used to glue down the paper product is a water based adhesive. It becomes active again when you get it wet. The challenge was to get the water down under the under-lament to where the glue was.

If you just pour water on to the paper product the water beads up on top and just sits there. What I found works best is towels or sheets. You lay the towels and sheets down first and then soak them in water. Now the water sits on top evenly and penetrates over time down through the paper product. Once the glue gets wet the stuff comes up in big sheets. For small areas you can also use boiling water. It penetrates even faster.

As I said, it takes a lot of water. When I did the upstairs hallway I must have had every sheet and towel I own down on the floor covered in water. There may have 20 or 30 gallons of water on the floor. It was quite surreal to have that much standing water on the floor of an upstairs hallway that is 30 feet long and 4 feet wide.

Once the paper stuff comes up the floors must be washed down immediately before the remaining residue hardens up again. I did the upstairs hallway first and it was a huge mess. I would not attempt to do such a larger area like that again all at once. When I did the foyer I did it in several 4X4 foot sections. This is about the size of one of the landings.

Believe it or not, that is linoleum on the landings

It comes up easy

Except on the leading edge where people walk

They used tacks and a stronger adheseive that is not water based

The paper product covers the landings completely

Add water and let simmer for 60 minutes

They did not skimp on the paste. This is what it looks like once the paper comes off.

It goes pretty fast. It is really only about 20 minutes worth of work per landing, but it must sit for an hour with the water on it. At this point the wood is still very wet and damages easily. I won't even walk on it until tomorrow.

Once it dries, any remaining paste turns white.

Worst Vacation Ever

2010-09-14T20:04:00.000-07:00

It is the worst vacation ever because it never happened!

Since I bought the house 8 years ago I haven't done a lot of traveling. Both time and money are always tied up in the old Petch House, but this year I planned on going someplace outside of western states. So this week I planned a quick trip to Philadelphia. I've always wanted to go because of the history - First US Capitol, The Constitution, Liberty Bell, Ben Franklin - I mean, forgetaboutit, the place is oozing with history, not to mention a spectacular City Hall and all of the Philly Cheese Steaks I can eat. Also, a friend of mine spent 6 months there at a training center for a new job and she came back gushing about how much she loved the city.

So I was all set to go. I had a reservation for 3 nights in a hotel built in 1830. It is a small place with 12 rooms right in the heart of The Olde City, just a few blocks from Independence Hall. The plan was to not rent a car and just walk or take mass transit. I would only be in town for 2 full days and 2 half days. In fact, I should be there right now. Grrrr!

I had an A List of sites I wanted to see and things I wanted to do and then some additional things I would do, if there was enough time. The latter included some architectural salvage shops. I still need slide bolts for the front door.

Because this is Eureka, CA there are hardly no direct flights to anywhere. Every flight I've ever taken out of this city has first gone to San Francisco (6 hours drive south) and then on to where ever you want to go. The Eureka/Arcata airport is billed as the foggiest airport in the US. In fact, it was built during WWII specifically so the air force could come up with a way to land planes in low or no visibility, and the first “blind landing” was made at this airport back in 1947.

Until Monday, I knew nothing about this history of our little airport. I only know that now because of the front page article in Monday's Times Standard about how they are replacing the Instrument Landing System at the airport (ILS). The ILS is the system that allows pilots to land when they can't see the runway. If you go to the airport's web site it mentions nothing of this construction.

Did I mention that this is the foggiest airport in the country? Yes, I think I did. So take foggiest airport in the country and remove the ILS and what do you get? You get an airport that has no planes landing or taking off. There are two carriers that service the airport: Horizon and United Express. I don't know about Horizon, but United has landed 1 plane in the last 3 days because we are socked in by fog and there is no ILS. It is insane.

I rebooked my flight 3 times and each one was canceled. I could try and book a flight out of Redding (3 hours away), but the zillions of people whose planes were canceled before mine have taken every available seat. The fog is not going to lift and in fact, the weather is only going to get worse. It is supposed to rain Thursday and Friday.

The other option is to drive to San Francisco and pick up my already scheduled flight. Well, it is too late for that unless I book another flight. The next one I can get on would put me in Philadelphia at 3:00 AM and cost an extra $200. The small hotel I'm booked at has no late night check-in service, so that means my first night would be spent sleeping in a chair at the airport.

It is also too late to try and redo the trip from scratch because at this late of date I would be staying at the Ramada Airport Express or if I'm lucky, some absurdly expensive hotel, which would mean renting car, and most likely taking a more expensive seat on an airplane. In short, I would double the cost of the trip and it wouldn't be the trip I wanted. I wanted to be in the heart of the old part of the city and just live there for 2 or 3 days. I'm sure the rest of the city is very nice, but I don't need to see commuter traffic and a Pennsylvania Applebee's or Subway sandwich shop. I'm sure they look exactly like the ones in California, Kentucky, Florida, and Montana.

What really irritates me about all of this is that anyone who has lived on the north coast of California for more than 2 years knows that July, August, and September are the foggiest months of the year. According to the article in the paper they started work on the ILS last month and it will be another 2 weeks before it is back on-line. Why the hell did they pick the foggiest time of the year to do this??!?! Next Month the skies will be clear as a bell. Everybody knows that. Well, apparently, not everybody.

Hello?!?!? Airport managemnt? Did you just move here?

It's a Toss Up

2010-09-12T17:12:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure which is more tedious, taking the old shellac off or putting the new shellac on. I do know that putting the new shellac on will take a lot less time than stripping the old off. I also don't have to wear gloves and a respirator for putting on the shellac, so that is a huge plus.

I actually like the smell of shellac. It is sort of sweet smelling. It amazes me that anyone would use a polyurethane instead of shellac for woodwork that will not be anywhere near water. Even in areas that will see some splashing I would still consider shellac.

As much as I love shellac it is time consuming to put on. It took me 3 or 4 hours today to get one coat on all of the woodwork in the foyer and stairwell. The first coat takes the longest, so later coats will go faster, but I will be putting on a minimum of 3 coats and most likely 5 on the new woodwork.

Hopefully I can finish up by next weekend and then it will be on to the floors. I already ordered rugs and they are in transit as I write.

It Glistens

1000th Post

2010-09-06T19:25:00.000-07:00

According to Blogger, on September 2nd I made my 1,000th post to the blog! That is a milestone, of sorts...I guess. Really, it is kind of meaningless. Other than the fact that 1000 is a nice round number and it could be considered large by some measurements, it came and went without me noticing it, so never mind.

As for the foyer, it feels like I've made a thousand posts just on this project. I'm at the "it is a never ending project" phase of the project. According to the blog I started this project back on May 13th, so that means next week it will be 4 months. I guess that's not too bad. Of course, I'm not finished, but these 3 day weekends are great. I wish every week had a 3 day weekend. Or better yet, what if I only worked 3 days a week. I did that for years. I was so productive on this house back then - sigh!

1) ~~Finish stripping the shellac off the stairs.~~
2) ~~Strip the shellac off the baseboards in the stairwell and foyer.~~
3) ~~Strip the shellac off 3 doors and the casing around 4 doorways~~
4) ~~Paint the walls in the foyer~~
5) ~~Hang picture rail in the foyer~~
6) ~~Trim out the pocket doors~~
7) ~~Install the mill work I had made for the missing stair parts~~
8) ~~Oil and shellac all of the woodwork – stairs, doors, baseboards, picture rail~~
9) Sand, oil, and shellac the stair treads and foyer floor
10) Install a carpet runner on the stairs and buy rugs for the foyer
11) ~~Hang the light fixture in the foyer~~
12) Install the antique, cast bronze mail slot in the front door
13) Paint the outside of the front door
14) Buy and install a new old lockset for the front door.
15) Clean, clean, clean, clean, clean
16) I would also want to re-upohlster the chair seat of the desk chair in the kitchen

Above is the list I made a few weeks back when I was considering being on this years Home Tour sponsored by The Eureka Heritage Society. I've made a pretty good dent in the list. Honestly, except for the front doors and the chair in the kitchen, everything on this list will be finished by October 3rd, which is when the home tour will be.

Really, the two big jobs left are the floor, including stair treads, and shellacking all of the woodwork. I'm having a little trouble deciding which to do first. Good arguments can be made for doing either of them first. Aside from those two items, there are still many little things that can easily eat up a weekend. Still, I think I could have made the home tour. Unfortunately, they needed an answer by last weekend and at that time I did not feel comfortable committing myself to a deadline. Oh well, there is always next year.

Here is where it stands now. We'll start with the obligatory before shorts.

As it stands

The Front Door Blog Entry

2010-09-02T18:12:00.000-07:00

I suppose I should be thankful that the front doors are still there at all. All too often you see these original double doors removed and replaced with a modern single door and side lights. My doors have really been through a lot though, and it shows. In the picture above, one door and part of the other still need to be stripped of shellac.

I can find no less than 5 places where there was some sort of automatic door closer attached. What remains are the screw holes, which can be dealt with with putty and “micro faux graining”, as I like to call it.

At some point there were dogs with long, sharp claws that lived here. They liked to scratch at the door to get out. The grooves are deep in some places. If I sand them out I risk thinning the door where the bottom mortise is, so they will stay.

The original lockset is long gone and there is a much smaller one in its place. The original doorknobs are there, but the plates and escutcheons are gone. I will need to get a whole new vintage lockset, plates, knobs and escutcheon to replace what is there. There is quite a selection to choose from on-line, and prices are reasonable. It also looks like people have jimmied the door a few times over the years, so I will need to build areas back up around the lockset.

Because they are double doors, one door is stationary and held in place with a bottom and top slide bolt. Parts of the original bolts were still there, but they were both missing pieces – not parts, but pieces – and are broken beyond repair. Mine are both mortised in to the door so I must find replacements that are of the exact same size. They were cast iron with a nice Eastlake design, like the other hardware in the house.

The real issue here is that the top one is 24 inches long. I have found every size from 4 inches to 22 inches in a similar style (cast iron, Eastlakeish design), but the only 24-inch one I've found is brass. I'm going to buy it just so I can get something in there that works, and then keep looking for a more suitable replacement. It took 3 years to find the right pocket door rollers, so I'm not holding my breath.

Someone cut out a slot in one of the panels for a modern mail slot. I think this was done very recently. I've purchased a really nice period one, but it is not as wide as the modern one, so I will need to fill in at either end. On the outside, this will not be an issue. I can fill any seams with putty, sand smooth and paint. You will never know the difference. The inside is a different story because the wood will be a clear finish. I'm thinking of making a very thin redwood backing that mimics the design of the mail slot. I'll add the wood to the door and then mount the mail slot on the wood.

The glass is not original, but that doesn't really bother me. What does bother me is that someone broke some of the wooden stays that hold the glass in and did just about the worst repair you could possibly imagine. I will need to make new ones on the router. It might be easier to just replace all 8 instead of trying to make 3 to match the remaining 5.

I think the 3-light transom has been replaced. It always looked a little odd to me. It does not seem to fit the space as well as you would think. There is an extra half-inch piece of wood along the top to fill a gap. Also, it is not really behind the trim like it should be. Rather, it is placed in the opening and then toe nailed in. When I stripped the shellac it was actually painted white originally and then had a deep maroon tinted shellac over it. The white paint was very thin and seemed to have been sanded down first. Nothing else in the foyer had this sort of finish to it. It is redwood though, and it has old wavy glass in it. My guess is that it was broken early one and replaced with something the builder had laying around in the shop.

The outside of the door has rusty staples in it around one of the windows where it looks like the glass broke and someone covered it with plastic. This is the same window that had the crappy repair on the wooden stays that keep the glass in. For some reason there is plywood along the bottom of both doors. I'm afraid what I'll find when I take that off. I never stripped paint or repainted the front doors when I painted the house 3 years ago. Even then they seemed like too much work and I just needed to keep going with the house painting. I'm kind of thinking like that now.

I can't stop work on the inside of the foyer to deal with all of this right now. Even if I had all of the parts I need these doors easily represent 4 weeks worth of work. For now they will get stripped with shellac and oiled and then I'll just leave them be for awhile. I'm going to shop for locksets and door bolts and when I have all of that I will revisit them. Sooner rather than later this time. When I painted 3 years ago I had every intention of getting back to the doors as soon as I was done with the house painting. Obviously, that never happened.

Some neighbors a few blocks away told me that for years before I bought the house the front doors were propped open 24/7. This was the apartment days, obviously. That is probably the best thing that ever happened to the doors. Prop them open and leave them alone.

This old front door is just a long time of waiting and forgetting, remembering the coming back, not crying about the leaving. And remembering the falling down and the laughter of the curse of luck from all those son's of bitches who said we'd never get back up.

I Might Have Screwed Up

2010-08-28T17:25:00.000-07:00

If you ever watch Antiques Roadshow, you know about some of the astronomical prices antique American furniture can bring if it is in original condition. That last part being very important, especially for 18th century furniture. An 1875 Philadelphia made Highboy Dresser, with all of the bells and whistles and with the makers label still attached can be worth in excess of $250,000 - if it still has the original finish and brasses. If you take that same dresser, strip the shellac off and refinish it, the value plunges to around $25,000. People who buy that sort of thing love the deep, rich patina and grunge that comes with 200+ years of use.

So if my foyer were an 18th century Philadelphia Highboy, I would have screwed up.

This rule does not apply to woodwork in The Petch House, though. I suppose if the place had not been a rental unit for 80 years, and had not had interesting things carved in to the woodwork, an argument could be made for just wiping everything down with a damp cloth and calling it a day. Sadly, the woodwork needs much, much, much, much, much, much, much more work than that. If I’m wrong, then in another 100 years, future owners will shake their heads and lament, “If only Greg had known that in another 40 years highly advanced aliens would come to Earth and give us the technology to restore this woodwork without resorting to caustic chemicals”.

What’s done is done. I’m in the home stretch. Today I did the door and casing above and the casing around the entryway to the dining room. Tomorrow I will need to do the jamb to the dining room and the front doors and casing. The front doors are tall and they are a pair of double doors. There is also a 3 light transom above them. I was able to do the door and casing above in 2 hours, start to finish.

I think I can do the front doors and casing in less than 4 hours. Both doors have a large piece of glass, so even though they are larger than the door above, there is less wood. It is the raised panels with the reed detail that really takes a lot of time. The casing goes fast.

If I finish that tomorrow I will be officially done with the shellac stripping. Whew! A quick check of the blog shows I started stripping the stairs on August 2nd. If I finish tomorrow that means it will have taken me 28 days to strip the stairs, all of the baseboard, and doors and door casing. Not bad. Four weeks to do all of that? I thought it was going to be closer to eight.

After this I will mark the walls for the picture rail and then paint. Woo! Hoo!

Insurance Talk

2010-08-24T18:19:00.000-07:00

So, I have 4 different insurance companies insuring 2 cars, and house, and a rental unit. It is a pain. The problem has always been that I can't get one company to insure everything, When I bought the 03 VW GTI it was on a weekend, so I signed up with Geico on line. It was easy, but Geico is a pain to deal with. I pay the insurance every 6 months and I get the bill in the mail usually about 5 days before it is due. Five Days! I mean, how incompetent can a company be that they can't get out a biannual bill sooner that a week before it is due.

This is not an isolated instance with them. This time it was issued on the 19th, I got it on the 24th, and it is due on the first of September. Every time this has happened I say I'm going to drop them and this time I did. Allstate insures my home and they have all of the ads now saying how I can save money if I switch from Geico. Plus I get a discount on my homeowner's insurance if I also insure my car.

I called my agent and faxed her over the paper work from Geico. She called me back a few minutes later and said that even if I went with the bare legal limits on my car insurance, they still wouldn't come close to Geico. WTF! I didn't bother to ask her about the ads on TV. Even with the discount I would get on homeowner's insurance because I added my car, it still wasn't worth it. They were easily 40% higher than Geico.

I then called AAA (CSAA around here). They insure the 71 Ford pickup. I told them I wanted to insure 2 cars, home and rental property, but I wanted to make sure they insured post and pier foundation. For a while they said they definitely did not, but that story has been changing in the last few years, depending on who you talk to at CSAA. The guy I was talking to only handled car insurance, but told me the policy had changed about 2 years ago. Their auto insurance rates were very good. I increased my coverage on the 03 GTI and lowered my premium by about $175 a year compared to Geico. For my truck CSAA sends a bill every month and I can pay all of it or make 12 monthly payments.

He then transferred me over to homeowner's insurance. I got a young woman with a charming southern accent. Even though it is CSAA (California State Automobile Association) she was in Arizona. The conversation went like this.

Judy: Hello, this is Judy, how can I help you today?

Me: I want to see about insuring my home and a rental property. I currently have 2 cars with CSAA.

Judy: Ok, let's start with the home. Is your primary residence?

Me: Yes, but before we go any further, do you insure homes on a post and pier foundation.

Judy: Oh no, I'm sorry we don't.

Me: Are you sure? The people at my local office and the guy in auto insurance told me the policy has changed.

Judy: Well, let me find out. Hold on.

Me: {listening to hold music}

Judy: How far off the ground is your house?

Me: Umm, 2 feet, maybe

Judy: Oh, only 2 feet. Then that is no problem. I thought you meant it was like built in to the side of a mountain or something. You know, like on stilts.

Me: Nope, just 2 feet off the ground.

Judy: Ok, well let me get some information and then I can get you a quote.

Judy: How many square feet.

Me: About 3000, maybe a little more.

Judy: How old is the roof, plumbing, and electrical.

Me: Everything has been replaced in the last 10 years. It is all new, and brought up to modern code.

Judy: Great. And what year was it built.

Me: 1895

Judy: Oh, it must be beautiful. I love those old home.

Me: Well,I like it

Judy: Oh, hold on a minute. I need to check the manual.

Me: {Listening to hold music}

Judy: Well, because it was built before 1900 you would need to gut the home to the studs and put it on a cement foundation before we could insure it. Is that something you are willing to do.

Me: No, I really don't think so, but thank you anyway.

Judy: Ok, well thank you for call CSAA!

{Click}

Tomorrow I call State Farm

Like an Itch I Can't Scratch

2010-08-22T16:58:00.000-07:00

That is what it is like sometimes when I'm in the middle of a project and I don't work on it. In this case though, I am well past the mid-point, so the desire to work on the project is even greater. There is an actual punch list and the end is in site. Besides, it's only pre-season football. Most of the guys playing after the half today won't be seen after August.

I really wanted to work on something other than shellac stripping, but really, there is nothing else. I need to get this out of the way before I move on to other things. I can't trim out the pocket door until after I paint. I can't paint until I finish the stripping. I can't install the antique, cast bronze mail slot until after I strip and re-finish the front door. I can't shellac or finish the stairs until I finish the shellac stripping. About the only thing I could do is mark the walls where the picture rail will go. This needs to be done before I paint, but that is like maybe an hours worth of work. As soon as it is done I would be staring at a pail of paint stripper, so what's the point.

What is left to strip is 3 doors, door casing around four doorways, the baseboards in the foyer and the baseboards in the stairwell. I decided to do the baseboards first because they are the easiest. I was curious how long it would take me to strip all of the baseboard, so I timed myself on the first run. It is 5.5 feet with one inside corner. I did it in 12 minutes.

This brings up an interesting point. Last week, after I blogged about my method of stripping shellac off wood, someone left a comment saying I was using the product incorrectly. He mentioned that he once knew the daughter of the man who invented methyl chloride and said both her and the instructions say I should brush it on, don't disturb it, and leave it on for 15 minutes. Of course, I stood by my assertion that my method was the correct way to do it regardless of what the instructions said, and here is proof.

The white specs are wood putty. I'll hit this with steel wool, oil, and shellac.

Start to finish I did this 5.5-foot run of baseboard in less time than the instructions indicate I should have left the product on. If I followed the instructions this would have taken me twice the time. The reason is, shellac is not a petroleum based or synthetic product. Shellac is 100% organic and is layered on in very thin layers. If this were 5 coats of paint or polyurethane then I would be doing this very differently. This is why I have said repeatedly that there is no one way to strip something off of something else. It all depends on what you are stripping, what you are stripping it off of, and what was the original finish.

In this case, the use of a methyl chloride based stripper to take shellac off wood is sort of like using a Indy race car to drive to the corner market. It is over-kill, but it works very, very fast. Yes, it is not as safe as other strippers, but when used correctly and with moderate precaution, it is safe to use. If I were using anything else I would still be weeks away from finishing the stairs, and the baseboards would be nothing more than a distant, far off project that was still waiting to happen. As it is, today I finished the baseboards in the foyer and I'm working on the stairs. With any luck, by next weekend I will only have the doors and door casing left to do, and then it will be on to painting.

Victorian Dingle Balls

2010-08-21T18:04:00.000-07:00

So much for slacking on the couch. I was so close to finishing the stripping of the stairs I decided to just do it. There were 2 small boards that needed to have the shellac stripped off and then I needed to oil the wood. After that came parts replacement.

The methyl chloride based strippers work so well on shellac you are basically left with bare wood. Today I went over everything with #1 steel wool first. By this time, a week or more after the last of the majority of the stripping, any residue of the stripper is crunchy and comes off easily with steel wool. This is really only the occasional thin streak. After that I essentially wash the wood with boiled linseed oil and turpentine. I wipe down the wood with a rung out sponge and then quickly wipe it down with a paper towel.

Next came putting on what are really just the Victorian version of dingle balls. I still can't figure out why so many are missing. I had to pry one off to take it to the mill when I had the missing ones reproduced. They were each put on with 4, two and a half inch finish nails. It took effort to get it off without breaking it. My working theory is that they were all removed by the same person who had some sort of necrotic obsession with them. I was left with 3 originals.

Once on, the stairs look so much better.

Mag What?

2010-08-16T18:31:00.000-07:00

Oh, that’s right, “Mag Nasty”. Or maybe it should be “Mag Nasty No More”.

Tonight I popped open a can of Mag Nasty Begone and before you know it, it was just a nasty memory.

Here it is before I stripped the shellac

This is it after I stripped the shellac.

Not a good picture. The carving was actually more noticeable after the old shellac came off because there was shellac down in the grooves, which remained darker. Perhaps it was only more noticeable to me. It certainly wasn't less noticeable.

I sanded down the entire board. It is the light board just below the balusters on the second flight. The carving was about a 3rd of the way up. The structure made out of the fir 2X4s is scaffolding. As soon as I get these nasty carvings out of the way, that will come down for good. Anything else I can do with a ladder.

After I sanded I applied more oil and Mag Nasty is nasty no more.

I still need to do the other small one, but it is very faint. I did Mag Nasty with the random orbital sander. I’m going to need to make a sanding block for the other one to get in-between the fluted millwork. You can barely see the other carving in the center of the picture, just below Mag Nasty.

If this had not worked I was mentally preparing myself to replace the board. I am soooo glad I won't need to do that!

Home Tour Wannabe

2010-08-15T16:48:00.000-07:00

In 2008 I won the Eureka Heritage Society's Residential Preservation award. This was mostly for the preservation of the outside, because the inside could have hardly been considered to be in any state of preservation. As is the tradition, the people who win the different preservation awards for the year are asked to be on the home tour for that year.

Home tours are popular in many cities. People with fabulous homes open there homes to strangers so they can show off all of the work they've done. At the time I won the award The Petch House still had a strong feculent quality to it. I was in the midst of the butler's pantry project and the place was in no condition to have people traipse through what was at that time little more than a construction zone. Really, the only rooms that would have been available for the tour would have been the kitchen, downstairs bath and mudroom.

The tour this year will be in about 6 weeks and I've been asked again to be on it. I think it would be a lot of fun. Who doesn't like showing off their home when they've put so much in to it? I've said that if I can get the foyer finished in time I will do it this year. If I finish the foyer, the only downstairs rooms not finished will be the 2 parlors. The upstairs would be off limits, but I could show off the foyer, dining room, kitchen, bathroom, mudroom, butler's pantry, and laundry room. All but two rooms.

That is, IF I can finish the foyer.

At this point in the project that is a very big “If”. I do have 6 weeks, but I would need to commit to the tour in two weeks. The project is stressful enough and I'm not sure I need the added weight of an official dead-line.

Here is what is left to do:

1) Finish stripping the shellac off the stairs.
2) Strip the shellac off the baseboards in the stairwell and foyer.
3) Strip the shellac off 3 doors and the casing around 4 doorways
4) Paint the walls in the foyer
5) Hang picture rail in the foyer
6) Trim out the pocket doors
7) Install the mill work I had made for the missing stair parts
8) Oil and shellac all of the woodwork – stairs, doors, baseboards, picture rail
9) Sand, oil, and shellac the stair treads and foyer floor
10) Install a carpet runner on the stairs and buy rugs for the foyer
11) Hang the light fixture in the foyer
12) Install the antique, cast bronze mail slot in the front door
13) Paint the outside of the front door
14) Buy and install a new old lockset for the front door.
15) Clean, clean, clean, clean, clean
16) I would also want to re-upohlster the chair seat of the desk chair in the kitchen

Just looking at that list that seems like I could maybe do that in 6 weeks if I really hustle. If it weren't for items 2 and 3 I would say it would be no problem finishing in 6 weeks. Is it worth it though, to rush and kill myself just for the home tour? There will be other home tours. If I were working on the parlors right now, I could rope them off like a crime scene and show off the rest of the house. That would be hard to do with the foyer unless I had everyone enter through the window off the porch.

So we'll see. I said I would give a thumbs up or down by August 29th. That is 2 weeks from today. Odds are it will be a thumbs down on the 29th.

As for the stairs, I have finished stripping the shellac. A gallon and a half of stripper, 3 pairs of gloves, 5 packages of steel wool and 18 rolls of paper towels later, the stairs are officially stripped. Whew! I do need to go over them again to get the little spots here and there where there is some gummy residue. I also need to deal with the carvings on the second flight. After that, I'm not sure what to do next. I should begin stripping the shellac off the baseboards, but I'm a little burned-out on shellac stripping right now.

Maybe I'll take next weekend off. Is there any football on?

Tips For Strippers

2010-08-14T19:11:00.000-07:00

Let’s face it, for strippers, tips are very important. The job is not pleasant, so good tips are really what makes the difference for strippers.

I gave some stripping tips last week, but I’ll go over them again here, plus add a few more. First off, there is no universal way to strip paint or shellac off wood, metal, or masonry. The tools I use differ depending on what I’m stripping off of what, and just as important is what was originally on what ever it is I am stripping.

Specifically here I’m talking about stripping old shellac off woodwork. For that I use a semi-paste methyl chloride stripper. The semi-paste variety is important because it will stick to vertical surfaces. I’m no chemist, but I read once that the power of methyl chloride is the small size of the molecules and the speed at which it evaporates. The methyl chloride molecules are smaller than paint and shellac molecules. When you apply it to the shellac the methyl chloride falls below the surface of the shellac and then as it evaporates it pushes the shellac off the surface of the wood.

While this is interesting, it is also important because you don’t want to let it dry on what ever it is you are trying to strip. Once it dries the shellac has now hardened back on to the wood. Also, because it evaporates quickly, you must be ready to wipe it off as soon as it has done it’s job. This is why before I start I tare every sheet off a roll of paper towels before I apply any stripper to the wood.

Use both stripper and paper towels liberally. Apply the stripper in generous amounts to a small area. About 1 square foot for flat surfaces and a quarter of that for detailed areas. Apply it with a brush and go over it again and again, keeping it wet until the shellac begins to move around under the brush. This usually only takes from 10 to 30 seconds.

When you see the shellac moving, quickly begin to take it off. For flat surfaces scrape it off with a small, flexible scraper. For detailed surfaces, wipe it off with paper towels. Use a lot of paper towels. There is nothing worse then getting the shellac off only to then put it back on because you are trying to make good use of a paper towel. Wipe once or twice with a single towel and then grab a new one.

This will take the majority of the shellac off and it goes quickly. Now go over the same area again with more stripper. This time use #2 steel wool to scrub small areas at a time and then quickly wipe it off. You should have steel wool in one had and a clean paper towel in the other. This gets better than 95% of the shellac off. The trick is to stop wiping before that last bit of shellac residue hardens again.

For me that is as good as I get it. Removing better than 95% of the shellac is enough that the wood looks good and still has some patina.

I used to use these rubber stripping gloves you find in the same isle as the strippers and finishes. Notice how the shellac clings to them. After a while it becomes very hard to work fast because you can’t grab a clean paper towel until you’ve gotten rid of the old one. The trouble is, the old one sticks to this mess on your gloves. Very frustrating.

I then found these Atlas vinyl gloves. I have used this pair of vinyl gloves twice as long as the rubber gloves in the previous picture and you’ll notice there is almost no residue on them. The down side is, the methyl chloride can get through the vinyl. Remember the small molecules? It is not really noticeable at first. It‘s not like my hands are dripping with methyl chloride inside the gloves. After about 2 hours though, my fingers start to tingle.

If you get methyl chloride stripper on bare skin it is very noticeable, very fast. It suddenly feels like a large ant is biting you. Using these gloves is not like that at all, but it is noticeable that something is getting through. I now where latex gloves like you find in a hospital under the vinyl gloves and I no longer have a problem.

Finally, and this really is the most important tip for would-be strippers. I don’t care what professional strippers tell you, do not do this job in a G-string and pasties. I found this tip on several professional stripper sites. Let me tell you, I tried it and it is not good. However, after seeing many of the woman who do wear this sort of attire while doing this job, the next time I will be hiring this work out.

The scaffolding is in place for the last part of the stairs. With any luck, I’ll finish up tomorrow.

This is the area above the first flight of stairs that I can’t get to unless I use the scaffolding. After this it is on to baseboard.

And all of this time I thought it was ebonized.

Pièce de résistance

2010-08-12T18:53:00.000-07:00

I think I'm maturing with age. You should all be very proud of me for not using the blog title, “I got wood today!”. Proud or not, I really did get wood today! Mad River Woodworks finished making the missing parts for the stairs so I zoomed out to Blue Lake on lunch today and picked up my booty. We'll call it a Blue Lake Booty Call.

Damn! It just dawned on me that I have missed several opportunities for sexually implied stripping metaphors over the past few weeks while I've been stripping shellack off stairs. Oh well, it's not too late. I think I'll strip as soon as I'm finished with this blog entry. By that, of course, I'm mean I will be taking my clothes off instead of stripping shellack off the stairs.

Aaaaanyway, back to the story of how I got wood....

I had the 2 lower newel post caps reproduced and 20 of the missing finials that go in the circular cut-outs on the balusters. The post caps where badly damaged and the finials were missing. People must have thought they were souvenirs, or something. Fortunately they did leave a few, so I knew what was supposed to be there.

I raced home after work with plans to oil them up and nail them in place, but there are issues. After applying oil to some of the pieces I found that the color does not quite match between new and old wood. Only the two post caps and 3 of the finials in the picture below have had oil applied.

The post caps are the worst. I will need to stain them. I have more of the exact wood that those were made from, so I can do some testing. The finials are actually a closer match, but they are still a little dark. I was planning on applying another lite coat of oil after I'm finished stripping the shellac and I think the color will even out then. You can see that I applied a light coat of oil to the lower, right-hand circular cut-out and it looks better.

Next up, more of the strip show.

It was love at first sight

2010-08-08T16:42:00.000-07:00

And as we all know, love is blind. You can read the story of my first impression of the house here, but basically it was a dump that had a lot going for it. I had been looking for a house to buy for more than 6 months and it was really demoralizing. I wanted an old Craftsman or Victorian and it must have at least some of the original charm left to it.

I wasn’t concerned with heating, plumbing, or electrical. I specifically didn’t want remolded kitchens and baths. I wanted a house that had nothing structurally wrong with it and had a good amount of the original elements left to it. I also didn’t want to pay a lot of money. Naturally, my choices were limited. For months I had looked at one crappy gut-remodel after another and it looked like I would never find “my house”.

When the realtor and I first went to The Petch House I saw the asbestos siding and thought, “Here’s another one”. When we walked inside I saw the front stairs and knew this was the one. I turned to my realtor and said, “Let’s see the upstairs first”. I got more excited as I climbed each step. When we got the to top I turned to my realtor and silently mouthed, “I want it”.

The rest is history, of course. Now 8 or 9 years and an insane amount of work later I’m still far from finished. I just have to ask myself all the time now, “What the hell was I thinking”. Then of course, there are weeks like this one when it does all seem worth it.

I’ve walked up and down those stairs and back and forth in front of them thousands of times over the last 8 or 9 years and I’ve always admired them. Even with the missing pieces and swastikas carved in to them, I just love them. They are just so unique and interesting. To me they are the epitome of middle class Victorian architecture. Little did I know how nice they could be.

The stairs have been coming to life as I strip off the old finish. The room seems brighter now. The stairs have a glow to them and they seem lighter and more elegant. By comparison, the parts that still have the old finish now look to me like they are covered in chocolate frosting. It is like I am seeing the stairs for the first time.

What I have left to do is both sides of the shortest run of baluster and one side of the longest run. The one side of the longest run has the carvings in it, so I’m not sure how long that will take. I also need to put the scaffolding back in place to do that section, so I will save that for last. Even so, I think I can finish the stairs next week. I’m hoping to get the replacement parts from the mill before then.

Be still my heart

Compare & Contrast

2010-08-07T16:19:00.000-07:00

Work on the stairs is moving at a faster pace than I anticipated. I only worked two nights during the week. Not as much as I wanted to, but it is better than nothing at all. I’m finding that the newel posts take longer than expected. There is a lot of flat wood, so I would expect that that would go faster than the baluster, but I think the flat surface only made it easier to apply the shellac. The shellac seems to have been applied more generously on the newel posts than on other parts of the stairs.

The hand rails were also more time consuming than I thought they would be. They have a lot of detail to them, so there are many surfaces to get to. Also, it seems that decades of hands rubbing up and down them has added an extra thick layer of grime. So really, it is looking like the intricate balusters are the least time consuming. Who would have thought.

A little Before & After eye candy

I would say I’m about 30% through the stairs. What I’m realizing though, is that I’m going to need to strip all of the woodwork in the foyer. Otherwise, the stairs will stick out like a beautifully refinished thumb. That means there is the double front doors, the door under the stairs, casing around those doors plus the entrance to the dining room, and all of the base board.

It’s going to take a while.

Stair Progress Report

2010-08-02T19:46:00.000-07:00

Yes, there is actual progress to report on the stairs. Shocking, I know. When I should have been slouched on the couching watching a rerun of Friends, I was instead stripping shellac and grunge off the intricate balusters of the front stairs. My goal was to try and spend an hour a night on them every night this week, but goals often go unmet around this house these days. Because of all of this, I am right now typing with one hand while I pat myself on my back with the other.

Late yesterday I tried to work on one of the newel post with denatured alcohol. While denatured alcohol will strip shellac off of shellacked woodwork, it is the hardest and slowest method there is. For flat surfaces I will use a heat-gun first and then maybe go at it with the alcohol and steel-wool. Unfortunately, there is nothing flat about these stairs at all.

For this project I turned to my old friend methyl chloride. It’s been a while old friend and if I wasn’t forced to wear a respirator while working with you I would say that it is good to smell you once again. Methyl chloride is the active ingredient in the most caustic of paint and varnish strippers. I prefer Jasco Professional Semi-paste, but there are others. The “semi-paste” distinction is importing because it means it will stick to vertical surfaces. Think snot and sulfuric acid mixed together.

This stuff works so fast on shellac I can only work on very small sections at a time because as soon as you put it on it is ready to take off, and if you leave it on more than 10 or 15 seconds it starts to dry out. If it does dry out, no problem, just apply more and wipe.

I didn’t get a before shot, so this is more of a comparison between a section that has been stripped and one that hasn’t. The flash of the camera lessens the contrast. To me, in real life, it is dramatic. The wood is really coming to life.

This is one that has not been stripped. It is also missing the center finial.

Here is one after stripping, and it has one of the last remaining finials.

I did the top 4 plus the stringer in about 45 minutes. I still need to strip the banister.

My method is to tare off every sheet on an entire roll of paper towels before I even begin. As I said, it works fast and my gloves get messy, so the last thing I want to do is waste time reaching for a roll of towels and then have to rip one off.

I have a 1 quart plastic bucket with less than a half a cup of the stripper in it. It evaporates quickly, so have as little exposed to the air as possible. I use one of those really inexpensive chip brushes that you can get for a dollar or less at the hardware store.

I apply the stripper to one element of the baluster section at a time. That is, one of the reeded posts or one turned columns at a time. I then scrub briefly with steel-wool and immediately wipe everything off. If it feels sticky in the least when I am wiping that means I waited too long and too much of the stripper has evaporated. At that point I apply more stripper and just wipe off without scrubbing again with the steel-wool.

I’m feeling a lot better about this project now.

Done and done

2010-08-01T14:11:00.000-07:00

The plastering is officially done! I never thought I'd write that, but yesterday I put a coat of primer on and I've moved on to the stairs.

The stairs.

The stairs have the potential to be a lot of work. It all depends on how far I want to go. I will be stripping off the shellac and re-shellacking. That will be a lot of work, but that is not really the issue. I've found that if I only strip off the top layer and then reapply the shellac, I don't have issues with differences in the finish. In other words, If I take everything back to a uniform point and then bring it back up, there won't be differences in the color.

In this case though, there are places where I need take it back to bare wood, and of course some pieces are being reproduced. The original wood with the 100 year old patina will look different than new wood, unless I revert to stains, which I'm hoping to avoid.

Today I started with a good cleaning of the stairs. Really getting in to the nooks and crannies with warm soapy water. Boy, are there a lot of nooks and crannies in these stairs. Below are some shots of some of the trouble spots that I need to deal with.

Another reason to hate Nazis. This is actually minor. I never even noticed this until I was cleaning today. It is really just in the shellac.

Typical of a banister. This will need to be sanded to bare wood.

Grunge, splotches, and alligatoring. Just strip and re-apply and it should be fine.

“Mag Nasty” Is that from Shakespeare? The worst of the worst. This is on the stringer trim on the second run of stairs. This will need to be sanded out which means the whole piece of wood needs to go back to bare wood.

“LH+JM 4-ever” Forever rotting in hell, I hope. This is just below Mag Nasty. Fortunately this trend of carving in to the stairs ended here. Regardless, the damage is done. Basically, this whole run needs to be sanded down.

Typical of a newel post. It actually looks better in this picture than it does in real life. Still, it is all superficial. Most of those marks will disappear once I strip and reapply the shellac.

It looks like a dog chain or something rubbed against here. This could go either way. It may mostly disappear with a fresh coat of shellac. This is also a good shot of the over-all dingyness of a lot of the finish. You can see the gray tone to the wood above the scratches and below the baluster. This will really come to life with new shellac.

Once the stairs are out of the way the only real big issue with the woodwork in the foyer is the double-front doors. They have their own issues, which I'll save for another post.

Post-Op

2010-07-24T22:09:00.001-07:00

I had no intention of blogging from the exam room at the ER, it just sort of happened. I had never been to an ER before, but have heard about 4 and 5 hour waits to get in, so I took my netbook with me. The plan was to just use it to play cards and other games while I waited, but when I got there I found that there was a WiFi hot-spot active, so I logged on.

As it turns out, I was in and out of the building in 50 minutes. Possibly a new land speed record for an ER visit. The ER I went to was at St. Joseph hospital, here in Eureka, and I must say, despite the fact that my leg was swollen and my knee filled with puss, it was a very positive experience.

Of course, I haven't gotten the bill yet.

This thing started on Tuesday with a small pimple on my knee that was surprisingly painful for its size. By Thursday it was the size of a silver dollar, but there was no real head on it. It was all under the skin and painful when I walked. On Friday my knee-cap looked like it had a half an orange shoved under it and my lower leg swelled by about 30%. Oddly though, it wasn't as painful as it looked. I mean it was sore, but looking at it I thought maybe I was going to loose my leg or something.

I iced it Friday night and the swelling on my leg went down some. On Saturday the swelling was back. I put more ice on the leg and I put a warm compress on the knee cap. I kept this up all day Saturday for hours on end hoping I could get the abscess to pop. I squeezed so hard my knee was now all kinds of weird shades of purple, red, and blue. I couldn't keep the swelling down and the whole the was looking really nasty. That is when I decided to go to the ER.

The RN who did the triage was a nice enough fellow, but seemed like he as at the end of a long day. He had an Asus netbook similar to mine, but a different model. I think he was jealous when I told him I have a 14 hour battery life. The doc was Dr. Cordova, I think. He was personable with a good bed side manor. To the point and professional, but I never felt like cattle. The RN who wrapped my knee and gave my discharge papers was Sarah, I think. She was very pretty, which was pleasant, given what I was going through. I just wished I hadn't almost passed out on front of her. It's a guy thing.

For those of you still guessing, this was a staph infection on my knee. I did fine when the doc put the needle in my knee cap to give me the local anesthetic. I did fine when he sliced open my knee and the blood started to pour. Unfortunately, He could not slice deep enough with the tool he had. The abscess was deeper than expected. He left the room to get something to pry it open more so he could slice deeper.

It was in-between all of these little steps when he would leave the room that I decided to blog about it. That is the reason the entry is so choppy. It was kind of interesting. Each time he or the RN walked in the room I would stop writing and shove the netbook behind me. No one ever asked what I was writing.

The doc came back with what ever he needed to slice deeper in to my knee and as he started in, that is when everything got tingly and I fell back on the bed. It wasn't the pain, because after the initial injection there really was no pain. It wasn't the site of my own blood either. I've seen my own blood lots of times. I think it was just the idea of something going deeply in to my body where it doesn't belong. I looked away as he was finishing the last step, but was too late. I couldn't keep the image out of my mind of that knife going in to my knee. It was a bit much.

Of course, as I'm lying there, white as a ghost, panting, and covered in sweat, all I can think is, “I wonder if the cute RN thinks I'm less of a man for almost passing out”. It's a guy thing.

When I regained composer, I reached for the netbook, clicked “Publish”, and headed for the door. The knee is already feeling better.

ER Bound

2010-07-24T17:37:00.000-07:00

Well, the knee ended worse that I thought. Or I sh...doc just came in. He poked and proded and is going to see if he can drain the infection. My ...He just slkiced it open...Ouch! Didn't g....He sliced me good I almost passed out, but not quite.

Visit from the Blogosphere

2010-07-24T09:17:00.000-07:00

On Thursday I got a surprise visit from some fellow house bloggers. Sadly, I was not home at the time. I won't say who it was, because I don't want to let the world know they are not home, or at least that part of the world that reads this blog. Well, OK, that is a very small part of the world, so there probably wouldn't be any harm.

Still, it is obvious they are traveling and away from home, because their home is no where near mine. There is a good chance they have been blogging longer than I have. Along with me, they were part of that first wave of brave souls who started posting on HouseBlogs.net. Even though I wasn't home at the time, it was still a nice surprise to find the note they left. I spent the next hour cleaning up just in case they made another surprise visit.

In other news, work on the foyer has ground to a halt. I have been side-lined with a nasty knee injury. For what it is worth, the injury is not house related. I was able to make it to the mill on Friday to order the missing parts for the stairwell. I should have the parts in week and a half, which would be great timing if I could get off the couch and work on the stairs.

Myth Busters

2010-07-20T18:50:00.000-07:00

I have a little sanding to do around the plaster medallion and over the closet door in the foyer and then I’ll slap on a coat of primer before I move on to the stairs. The stairs are really going to be a lot of work.

Mostly it is a lot of stripping of old shellac so I can get back to a uniform surface. As you can see, there is a lot of surface to strip. Lots of cut outs and little reeded posts. In addition to that, I am missing a few pieces.

Above is a close up of one of the baluster sections from the upper part of the stairs. You’ll notice in the first picture the little finials in the circular cut outs are missing. Of the 21 originals only 5 remain. Who knows what happened to the others. At first I thought old tenants took them as souvenirs or something. Today I pried one off myself and it did not come off easy, so now I’m not so sure.

The reason I pried one off was so I could take it to the mill to get new ones made to replace the missing ones. They are inch and 7/8ths square and are 3.5 inches tall. I used a few scraps of 2X8 left over from the 2 story addition to make some blanks for the mill. I’m sure they can get wood, but I know this wood is really, really nice. Plus I get to use up more of my scrap wood and pay less for the new finals.

The other thing I’m going to have the mill do is either repair or replace the caps of the two newel posts at the bottom of the stairs. There are a total of 5 newel posts, and while they all have a certain amount of character to them (e.g. the occasional knick or scratch), the caps at the base are especially dinged up.

"Dinged up" is putting it mildly. There are deep gouges, initials carved in to them, and even a little swastika. My hope is that they can put them back on the lathe and just remove the top eighth of an inch or so. They don’t need to be perfect, because none of the others are, and the rest of the stairs has some character here and there. If they can’t fix these, then new ones wouldn’t be the end of the world. I would just need to make sure the quality of the wood meets the standard of the rest of the stairs. Second and 3rd growth redwood can some times seem like balsa wood compared to the old growth stuff.

For a long time after I bought this house, and even before I bought this one, with my last house, I spent a lot of time on several old house related on-line forums. There is just a great bunch of kindred spirits out there that could share knowledge and empathize with my plight. One of the stories that crops up from time to time is that the tradition at the end of the last century was that the builder would store the blue prints to the house in the newel post.

It was sort of a topping off event. As the story went, the placing of the newel post cap would be the last thing that would happen before all of the crews left the house. Before they put the cap on they would roll up the blue prints and shove them in the post. Of course, few are willing to pry off the cap to see in the blue prints are in the post.

Well, today I pried off the caps and guess what, nothing, zip, zilch, nada. My guess is that maybe one builder some place did this and the story grew. Or perhaps this was a real tradition and this is just one more Petch House mystery. Regardless, no blue prints for me.

Sigh!

The Plaster & I Are Both Finished!

2010-07-18T15:34:00.000-07:00

The plaster is finished and I am beat. I said it the other day, and I'll say it again: Skim-coating plaster is the hardest job I do in this house. It is both physically demanding and technically challenging at the same time.

I have found that it is not too difficult to do a half way descent job at it, but to really be good and proficient takes a lot of practice. On an episode of This Old House years ago they were talking with a plasterer who does skim-coat over blue board. Blue board is like sheet rock, but made to accept finish plaster. He said that a new-hire will apprentice for 2 years before they will be good enough to earn a living at it. Collectively, all of the time I've spent doing plaster would probably add up to about 6 months. I have a ways to go.

So now the big challenge is the mess. Every room adjacent to the foyer has a fine coating of dust and the foyer itself has a very thick coating if dust. I put down a layer of cardboard and plastic on the floor in foyer, so that won't be too difficult to clean. The other floors, especially the stairs need to be wet mopped before I take up the cardboard and plastic. Then of course, there is just all of the tools and other crap that needs to be put away.

I may be finished with the plaster but it is far from over. Still, it is so nice to be done with that. I can start to think about the stairs.

E Unum Pluribus

2010-07-15T18:33:00.000-07:00

I am primed, ready, willing, able, bound and determined to finish the plaster in the foyer this weekend. As The Universe as my witness, I will put my trowel away on Sunday!

I hope….

This really has dragged on long enough, wouldn’t you say. It was probably 6 weeks ago that I said I would be finished in 2 weeks. I swear, you would think I was a licensed contractor with the way I’m estimating this job.

Two weeks ago I tore down the scaffolding in the stairwell. I threw the small stuff and ratty plywood in the truck, ready for the next dump run. I then listed the longer 2X4s on Craig’s List and offered them up for $20. I got 2 calls early that morning. As I was about to call the first person back it dawned on me that I was far from finished. I still had to do the foyer and work on the woodwork.

The ceiling in the foyer could be done on a ladder, but when I have an ample supply of 2X4s and ratty plywood laying around, what’s the point. The woodwork is mostly low enough that I can work on it standing or sitting, but of course stairs always present unique challenges. So I de-listed the wood and built some more scaffolding.

This will help me get to those odd places on the stairs that I could normally only get to if I had 8-foot long arms. Boy, 8-foot long arms would really come in handy from time to time.

This will help me get the ceiling and high places on the wall, as well as the trim around the 2 sets of big double doors.

Blast From The Past, Part 3

2010-07-12T20:56:00.000-07:00

Psych! It is not another old, old photo. I was browsing my old photos the other day, looking for something, and I stumbled on this photo from a few years ago when I was painting the house. I blogged about house painting everyday for about 7 months straight. Never has a house painting job been documented so completely. Anyway, of all of the photos I posted on the blog, this was my favorite. And it is not completely out of context to the current project. That second story window in the photo is the window in the stairwell that I'm working on now.

Of course, we must have the before and after, or this case after and in-between because the shot with the brown paint is post asbestos siding...

Practical Psychology

2010-07-11T18:12:00.000-07:00

Doing the practical thing is not always good for the psyche. I suppose the inverse of that is true as well, but I'm not concerned with that at the moment. After weeks of work I desperately need a psychological victory. Something that looks done even if it isn't.

The practical thing would have been to finish the woodwork before I painted the walls, but that is weeks away. It is only the baseboards that are up against these walls, and either way, whether I painted now or later, I would have masked the first few feet of wall up from the baseboard.

Yesterday I skim-coated the lower part of the 3 walls in the stairwell. I did the upper walls a week or so ago when I had the scaffolding up. As I predicted then, making the transition from where I left off a few weeks back, to where I started today, was not as easy as if I had done one wall top to bottom.

The other issue was that I was also making the transition from the old plaster to the new plaster. I had to replace all of the plaster on the lower half of the walls before I skim-coat everything. The finish plaster used for skim-coating has about 15 to 20 minute working time on the old plaster, but only a 2 or 3 minute working time on the new plaster. I don't care how much water I spray on the new plaster, as soon as the finish plaster hits it it begins to set up. Working on parts of both types of plaster at once adds another level of difficulty for someone with my level of skill.

Given all of that, the results are good. Not great, but good. I need to work on my corners and edges and I should take more breaks in between walls, as well. For me, skim-coating plaster is the most physically demanding job I do on the house. Especially the new plaster. Twenty minutes in and sweat is just pouring off of me, but I can't stop. It is not like painting or wood work where I can stop at anytime and come back to it. The end results is that the first wall looks better than the last wall.

So next weekend I will skim-coat the foyer. It is a larger space, but really has a lot less plaster than the stairwell. There are 4 doors, including two sets of double doors, so I should have no problem getting it all done next weekend. I'm going to try and get to the mill this week to see about having a few pieces of the stairs reproduced. Some parts are damaged and others are missing. You never know how long that will take, so it is best to start now. If all goes well, in two weeks I will start working on woodwork.

Before

Not quite after, but as it sits

This shot probably best reflects the true color

Blast From The Past, Part 2

2010-07-07T18:12:00.000-07:00

I got another old picture from the Great Granddaughter of Thomas and Phillias Petch. This is an earlier shot than the last. Sadly, it is a very low resolution scan, so there is only this one view. It becomes pixelated when I try to enlarge or zoom in. This was a post card created by a local photographer, so we get a back and front.

1895?

That is Phillias on the front porch. The back says, “This is Phil's home and his mother. She sent me this a few days ago with one of his love letters to her when he was 7 years old and it sure is a dear”

The Phil they are writing about is Phillip H. Petch, the youngest son of Thomas and Phillias. Phillip was born in 1887 so straight math says he would have written the letter in 1894, which was a year before this house was built. Really though, he could have written the letter in the house because he was born in November of 1887.

Items of note:

The house on the right in the photo is still there and looks pretty much as it did. They added some modern windows in the downstairs and an addition on the right, but other than that it is not too bad. I made an offer on that house 6 months before I bought the Petch House, but someone made an offer a few hours earlier and it was accepted. This is amazing because that house was on the market for almost 2 years. I'm glad I didn't get it.

When you compare this photo to the first photo it looks like one of the out buildings is still under construction on the left. This leads me to believe this is a very early shot of the house. Most likely the year it was built.

The paint is white with black (?) trim. I always suspected this. One of the first projects I ever did on the exterior was to repair the window sills that were damaged when the asbestos siding was put on in the 50s. Each time I stripped the paint off a sill I found black paint as a base. It could have been a very dark green. I also found this same color on the screen door I stripped. I found white paint any where else I stripped, and I found white octagon shingles inside the house used as shims for a 1920s Murphy Beds that were added. Of course, I was assured by some knowledgeable locals that the house would never have been painted white. "White!?!? Oh please!" Well, here's proof.

The gable decorations really make the house. Compare this photo to the one below of the house pretty much as it looks today. I really need to put those back. I wish this photo was scanned at a higher resolution so I could see them better. The railing over the porch doesn't do much for me. The cresting on the top would be nice to put back, but I wouldn't do it without completely stripping off the roof and putting on a new one. This house still has the original redwood shingles under the one layer of asphalt shingles.

A white - or at least non-black - dress for Mrs. Petch? Not very Victorian of her. Perhaps Thomas and Phillias were radical iconoclasts shunning the social norms of the day. Maybe it was just Phillias, and that is what lead to the divorce. Inquiring minds what to know!

I came close to getting the porch restored to original. It is hard to believe that I did more railing and trim than was originally there. Queen Annes of the 1890s were known for excess trim and over-the-top detail. I would have expected to see rails and newel posts down the steps.

This is one more piece of evidence that leads me to believe that this house was an economic stretch for the Petch Family. There is no evidence that there was carpet installed in the house. No fine wood floors, either. No picture rail upstairs. No stained glass window in the stairwell. No fence around the front. Don't get me wrong, this was and is a beautiful house with many fine amenities, but it did not come with all of the bells and whistles.

2006 - 111 years later

How I Spent The Forth

2010-07-05T18:13:00.000-07:00

I received another generous offer from a friend to spend The Forth at a Bar B-Q on Indian Island. That is where I went last year and I really had a wonderful time. Indian Island is a mostly undeveloped island in Humboldt Bay. You are only a 2 minute boat ride from the shore, but it feels like you are miles away.

I bought a 6 pack and a bag of chips and had every intention of going out around 5:00. The priority this weekend was always the stairwell, though. I am bound and determined to get the scaffolding down. In order to do that I needed to finish a few large tasks and a lot of little tasks. Ultimately, it was the little tasks that ate up a lot of time. Because I won’t really be able to work on this area once the scaffolding is down, I had to do a lot of little things one would normally do at the end of a project. Sadly, I am far from the end of this project.

I needed to paint the walls and trim. I needed to make some minor repairs and finish painting the medallion. I needed to prep and paint the window. I needed to put on a sash lock and lift. I needed to mark the walls for picture rail. I needed to sand, oil, and shellac the picture rail. I needed to install the picture rail and hang the fixture. Finally, I needed to do touch up painting after the picture rail went on, put on a few more coats of shellac, and hang the fixture. Then I could take down the scaffolding. Oh, and I even washed the window. Eeeew!

The window proved to be interesting. Once I cleaned the thick layer of cob webs off of it I noticed that it looked like the sash were replacements. They were the correct style, but they were in too good of shape, considering they were facing south, and they lacked any hardware. This started to make sense because I always thought this should have been a stained glass window. A stained glass window in the stairwell was a staple of Queen Anne architecture of the day. There were 3 other stained glass windows in the house, why not one here. Then I remembered I had the old photo sent to me by relatives of the original owners.

Exterior shot of stairwell window circa 1915. Nothing stained about that.

Nope, no stained glass window. Another Petch House mystery.

For the medallion I needed to repair a broken corner and touch up the cherubs and foliage and maybe even hang some crystals. There are 8 little hooks on it that something once hung from. Two were missing and one had been hastily replaced with a cut off bobby pin. I fashioned some new ones out of wire, plastered them in, and headed to the craft store. I bought bronze and green paint for the touch-ups and was hoping to find some faceted crystals. I found them, but even though the selection was good there were not enough of any one type or even two types. They had two of this and one that. I then searched on-line and found what I needed, but over night shipping would have meant spending 50% more for crystals than I did for the medallion. Ain’t gunna happen.

The picture rail was pretty straight forward. I had milled it all on the router on Saturday and I just needed to do a little sanding and slap on some shellac. Then get the painting out of the way so I can install it.

Ah, the painting. My patented grab-n-go method of color selection failed me again. Oh, when will I learn! I hate choosing colors. I knew I wanted light colors and nothing too contrasting. There would be one color for the walls and then another color for the frieze and ceiling. This color scheme would be in the foyer and stairwell, and then eventually be continued in the upstairs hall.

I decided to go with Sherwin Williams Banana Cream for the walls. I had used it in the butler’s pantry and really liked it. It was not too garish, but still had some snap to it. At the last second I chose Cachet Cream for the frieze and ceiling. This decision was made solely because that is what I used to repaint the white parts of the plaster medallion.

Well, it didn’t work out. The Cachet Cream looks like an off-white in the small quantities used on the medallion, but once it was on the walls in larger quantities it took on an unpleasant orange tint. It was almost kind of a peach color. I really didn’t like it. All I needed was dusty rose trim and it would look like the inside of a cheap motel circa 1995.

Not only did I dislike the Cachet Cream on its own, but in contrast to the Banana Cream it was really unpleasant. The orange and yellow tints of the two colors did not work. Oddly enough, I was going to stick with it any way. I am that eager to keep this project moving forward and it was late Sunday and I wanted to go to Indian Island. I’m not vomiting at the site of it, so it is good enough. It successfully passed the no-vomit test. I also thought maybe once the walls were finished in the Banana Cream it would take the edge off the Cachet Cream. Any way, if I still didn’t like it I could use a different color in the foyer and when I do the upstairs hallway come up with some way to repaint the 20-foot high ceilings in the stairwell.

In the end I decided to sleep on it. By the time I finished every thing it was well after 6 o’clock. I was filthy and hungry. I’m sure what remained of the Bar B-Q by this time was crusty potato salad, gristly tri-tip remnants and stale potato chips. I took a bath and ate some dinner and made the fatal mistake of having 2 beers with dinner. By this time it is almost 7:30 and I am toast. There is no way I’m going any where. By quarter till 10 I was in bed. I vaguely remember hearing the fireworks go off.

Another holiday in The Petch House.

This morning I woke up and raced to the stairs hoping I would be seeing the Cachet Cream in a whole new light. No such luck. In fact, I think I disliked it even more and I had a few dry heaves. I decided it had to go. Fortunately, Sherwin Williams does not keep banker’s hours so within the hour I was standing in front of the wall of paint chips. I wanted something that leaned yellow and had a fair amount of white in it. I wanted color, but not too much. I settled on Lemon Chiffon and headed to the counter with my paint chip. The gal walked up to me and asked, “Can I help you”. I paused for a second or two and then in a monotone voice I replied slowly, “I’m still deciding”. I’m sure she was thinking, “Well, if you’re still deciding then why are you standing at my counter holding a paint chip”.

Something didn’t feel right, so I headed back to the color wall. I stared at the wall and mulled over a few more choices, eventually settling on Lemon Meringue. I don’t think I ever choose a color because I like it, so much as I pick the one that is the least objectionable. Picking colors for me is sort of like voting for Congress.

The picture rail will hit the 6 doors in the upstairs hall at the corner blocks.

Tomorrow the rest of the scaffolding comes down! Note that the Cachet Cream on the medallion is passing the no-vomit test. It has something to do with small quantities.

I Say Punt

2010-07-03T19:51:00.000-07:00

The skim-coating is done on the upper stairwell. The walls came out beautifully. Just as smooth as glass. I think I finally really understand how to plaster. Unfortunately, this understanding came just after I did the ceiling.

Since I don't do this sort of thing everyday, I must re-learn the process each time. Ceilings have the added difficultly of being over head. I just didn't get it as smooth I should have. I'm not sure whether to try and go over it again or to try and sand it smooth. I'm leaning towards sanding because I want to put on primer tomorrow.

If I can prime tomorrow then I can paint and put on picture rail mid week. That means I can dismantle the scaffolding next weekend. That would be really nice. Today after skim coating I made a lumber run to Almquist Lumber. They have a wonderful selection of wood. Many species I've never even heard of. Of course, I'm there for the redwood.

Towards the back of the second shed they always have a selection of salvage and new cut salvage redwood. The salvage stuff is just that. It has the occasional nail and comes in all kinds of odd sizes. The new cut salvage is where someone salvages an old log that was felled in the last century and saws it up. It is sold as rough-sawn lumber in full dimension. Just as in the olden days.

They had a good selection of 1X4 so I grabbed roughly 50-feet of it and headed to the register. When I got there I told the young guy behind the counter I had 3 8-footers, 2 6-footers, 1 7-footer, and a 5-footer. He tried to bring it up on the computer and couldn't find it. I said once again that it is was rough-sawn redwood from the back shed. He still couldn't find it in the system. A guy from the back office called out a few things to search on and none of it matched. I told him it wasn't marked, but he eventually hoofed it back to the shed to try and find a price.

After he came back up another guy tried to help. He has a air of management about him. That is a relative term at this lumber yard because everyone that works there looks more like they should be standing behind a saw instead of a cash register.

The 3 of us went back and forth measuring and remeasuring to try and figure out what this might be listed under in the computer. Everything here is sold by board-foot. It turns out that even though all of the boards were in the same stack I had actually grabbed two different things. The 8-footers where nicer and a little thicker than the other boards. This only complicated matters.

Finally, the manager guy said, “I say punt”. He is talking to the younger guy and he means just make something up. He points to me and says, “This guy's got better things to do than to stand around while we try and figure out what to charge him for lumber”. With that I chimed in, “Just give me a fair price and I'll pay it”.

The manager guy walked away and the younger guy typed something in to the computer. Eventually he looked up at me, and as if almost asking me he said, “$87.59”. I said, “Sold!”.

After lunch I milled it all in to 1X2 picture rail.

Finally! It is up!

2010-06-29T18:44:00.000-07:00

Why can’t I just go down to the home center and buy a light fixture like everyone else? There must be some genetic abnormality that prevents me from doing this. I can picture the obstetricians office 100 years from now…

“Mr. and Mrs. Smith I afraid your unborn child has the dreaded old house gene, also known as “The Petch House Gene”. We can treat it now in the uterus with gene therapy. If we don’t he will be forced to live a complicated life sweating over details that others could care less about. What is your decision?”

The nervous parents-to-be look at each other, not knowing what to do.

Would that then mean that the world would be deprived of this in the future? Only time will tell.

Of course, if it were simply a matter of hanging the fixture it wouldn’t be that big of a deal. But no, it is not that simple. It never is. With other fixtures and plaster medallions I was able to do test runs with making sure that the pipe the fixture hangs from does not stick out of the medallion too far. Because I couldn’t hang this one myself, and because of the whole scaffolding thing, I had to measure as best I could and hope for the best.

Well, “The Best” is not what happened this time. Long story long, the pipe stuck out an inch too far and the ceiling cup on the fixture wouldn’t cover it. If I unscrewed the pipe and tried to get a shorter pipe screwed in, the nut up in the ceiling might slip out of place and I’m screwed.

At lunch I went to the hardware store to get a new pipe cut that was 1-inch shorter than the one I bought on Saturday. The whole time I’m trying to come up with contingency plans if I can’t get the new pipe in. No plans came to mind, but plenty of excuses did.

“No, no! This is how they did it some times. They would just have a medallion with no fixture”

“The bulbs were too hard to change so I just took the fixture down”

“A light fixture up there!?! Of course, why didn’t I think of that!”

“No, I was planning on selling the house now anyway. The screw up on the medallion had nothing to do with it”

And wouldn’t you know I’m still not done screwing with it. The lower electrical box is 3.5 inches in diameter and the cup slides over it perfectly. The cross bar that the fixture screws in to is 4-inches wide and the cup won’t go completely over it. So I need to grind down a quarter inch on either side of the cross bar so it will completely hide the shims that sit in-between the metal box and the medallion. In the picture above the shims are covered in electrical tape to ensure they don't move. Trust me, it is noticeable the way it is now.

It never ends.

Blast From The Past

2010-06-28T18:58:00.000-07:00

I’ve been meaning to post this picture for the longest time. The great granddaughter of Mr. & Mrs. Petch sent it to me last winter while I was deeply rooted in my non-blogging phase. I had also grown a goatee, smoked a pipe, wore a beret and read a lot of poetry during this phase, but that is another story.

Anyway, by the time I wanted to post it I couldn’t find it. I had a hard copy that I printed out, but the image file was lost on one of my hard drives and I could not find it until yesterday.

Click to enlarge

One can assume that the Petch family still lived here, otherwise why would an ancestor have the photo. It is definitely pre-1920s because that is when the house was cut up in to apartments and the 2-story addition is not there in this photo. It is also definitely pre-1926 because that is when the carriage house and other out-buildings were torn down to make way for the 2-story garage/apartment building.

I think it may even be before 1915 when Mrs. Petch started running a boarding house. That is when I think the second to last window towards the back was converted to a door to give access to a deck and bathroom addition.

The house to the right in the photo is still there, and looks pretty much as it does in the photo, but there is now a 1920s stucco bungalow on the corner between the 2 houses. I could probably narrow the date down further if I found out when the bungalow was built. The house on the left, behind the carriage house, is still there, but has been heavily butchered. If I could see it in this photo, I'm sure the current structure would not resemble it in the least.

Things of note:

1) The cresting is not the high Victorian metal work, but the more plain wooden (?) variety.

2) The chimney is not high Victorian either.

3) The gable decorations are not the fan, or sunburst type like I always suspected. It is more of an open fret work or lattice design.

4) The back window on the far left I assumed was a door in the pre-apartment days.

5) Also, that back wall has already been pushed out a foot. I assumed that was an apartment era modification.

6) The fire hydrant and electric pole on the corner and still there in the same place.

7) There doesn’t seem to be much of a fence. There is something there, but I’m not sure what it is.

8) The house has the brown and tan paint job. I know the house was white when built and I assumed this color scheme came along after the apartment conversion.

9) The window is open in the dining room and it looks like there are two different types of roller shades. The roller shades I installed look a lot like the type on the right side of the bay. No roller shades upstairs.

10) The book Eureka: An Architectural Review claims the large window on the front bay is a later addition. Well, In Your Face, Eureka: An Architectural Review! The window has been there from the beginning!

A short while after I received this photo I got another email saying that another photo had surfaced and she was going to send me a copy once it was scanned. I would kill for that other photo because some questions still remain. I would really like to know what the railing looked like on the front porch and the wrap around porch on the other side of the house.

Except for the cresting and gable decorations I have gotten this house back to looking pretty much as it did the day it was built. Well, the outside anyway. There is still a ways to go on the inside.

Hmmm, any interior photos lurking around, great granddaughter of Mr. & Mrs. Petch?

Ok, on 3, ready….

2010-06-27T18:21:00.000-07:00

The medallion is up! I had to call a friend over to help get it on the ceiling. I got it upstairs and on to the scaffolding alright, but man-handling it on to the ceiling while I tried to secure it proved to be a bit much.

I started this morning by cleaning up the rest of the wallpaper. There were still a few remnants at one edge. These were painted remnants and did not come off with out a fight. It always seems to be the case with these things that 90% of it comes off in an hour and then the last 10% takes another hour. It is very frustrating.

I then rolled on a coat of the Weld-Crete. It is a kind of masonry adhesive that helps the skim-coat stick to the original plaster. This is made by the same company that makes Plasterweld. I then broke for lunch while the Weld-Crete dried. After lunch I skim-coated the ceiling. The skim-coating went well, but I always feel like it isn’t going well while I’m doing it.

When the plaster is wet it is hard to get smooth. Then as it sets up you go over it once or twice more to get it smooth as glass. It is really an issue of timing. You can’t wait too long for the last pass, but if you go too early it is frustrating because you can’t get it smooth. It is really is an art form. Electrical, plumbing, and framing can all be learned in a matter of hours. Plaster takes a lot of practice and patience.

After I got the medallion up stairs and on to the ceiling I made a few attempts to get it on myself. It is just too big for one person. I called my friend Chuck and got his wife. I explained that I had bought this salvage plaster medallion on Craig’s List and needed Chuck’s help getting it up. He wasn’t home but called back 10 minutes later. When I answered the phone the first words out of his mouth were, “You Son of a Bitch”. It turns out Chuck saw the medallion on Craig’s List and called just after I did. He also told me another friend of ours, Phil, was the 3rd person to call.

Oops!

Despite me snagging the treasure first, Chuck was over in a matter of minutes to help put it up. It was not without a few problems, but it is up and it ain’t going no where. I need to fill in around the edges and fix a broken corner, but for the most part the deed is done. It is hard to believe I just bought this thing 4 days ago. Even with my confidence that it is securely fashioned to the ceiling I’m walking around the house very gingerly tonight.

Next I will prep the walls for skim-coating, then there is a decision to make. Do I put picture rail in the stairwell. I’m leaning towards yes, but that would mean more delay until I can take the scaffolding down.

{Siiiiigh!}

Double Boxed For Your Protection

2010-06-26T18:19:00.000-07:00

I have green-lighted the salvaged medallion. In fact, it may even go up tomorrow. Today I got the new box mounted for it.

This is now the 3rd time I’ve done this and it works very well. The standard 4-inch square electrical boxes have a center knock-out on the base. I mount one to the framing in the ceiling and then take a piece of ½-inch steel galvanized pipe and mount it in the hole with lock nut on both sides. I then mount a round fixture box on the other end of the pipe in the same manor. The length of pipe is determined by the depth of the medallion.

Tomorrow, fingers crossed, I will remove the lower box and then fit the medallion over the pipe. Once the medallion is in place I will put the lower box back on and shim in between the base of the box and the medallion. The ceiling fixture will be mounted to the lower box and the medallion will be sandwiched between the two boxes. The medallion will be essentially mounted to the framing, meaning, it ain’t goin’ no where.

I also got both fixtures reconfigured and rewired. The one that goes in the stairwell comes in at an impressive 58-inches tall. If it were hung in a modern home it would hang more than half way to the floor. I will still need a ladder to change light bulbs in the stairwell, but at least I won’t need scaffolding or some fancy light bulb changing gizmo.

Finally, I gussied up the medallion a bit. I was going to go with the basic white like I did in the dining room, but I felt the contrast with the cherubs and foliage would be too much. I went with a creamy off-white instead. I also want to touch up the cherubs, but I will wait until after it is hung. I noticed today that it is actually a 3 piece medallion. In the picture above, if you look at about 3:15 and 9:45 you can see the seams where the 2 part outer ring is attached to the center piece.

The Flip Side

2010-06-25T19:42:00.000-07:00

The photos of the new old plaster medallion I showed yesterday were taken with the medallion sitting just 1-foot inside the front door. After carrying it from the car that is about as far as I could get. I’m referring to the antique plaster medallion I bought on Craig’s List yesterday.

It is hard to say how much it really weighs. It is not like a 50 pound sack of potatoes that you can really get your arms around and sling it over your shoulder. It may only weigh 50 or 60 pounds, but it is very hard to hold and move. You can only grab it with your hands and you must keep it away from your body, so getting the excess plaster off was a must. Fortunately, 1-foot inside the front door is already a bit of a disaster zone, so working on it there wasn’t an issue.

This is the back side of it. You can see it is filthy and you can also see the impressions of the lath from the ceiling it once hung from. If you look closely you can also see that there are 4 white sections of plaster near the center that have the same lath impressions as the surrounding lime and sand plaster. The white plaster is Plaster of Paris. This is what the medallion itself is made out of. Seeing this was an “Ah Ha” moment for me.

The picture above is from my front parlor. Ignore the brown dots. They are from circa 1970s ceiling tile adhesive from when they stuck ugly ceiling tiles up. You will notice though, that there are 4 circles of white plaster surrounded by lime and sand plaster. This is where a now missing medallion once was. I always assumed that they put 4 dollops of plaster on the back of the medallion and then stuck it on the ceiling, sticking it to the finished plaster ceiling. I now know this is wrong.

What they did was cut out 4 holes in the finished ceiling to expose the lath. They smeared the entire back of the medallion with plaster and put 4 large dollops of plaster on the back to match up with the holes where they exposed the lath. As the medallion was pressed on to the ceiling it formed it’s own keys on the lath. Also, what you can’t see in this picture is that they scored the surrounding lime and sand plaster to give it a better surface to adhere to. Remember the term “scratch coat of plaster”. They really did scratch the surface of the plaster to give the next layer something better to grab a hold of.

The excess plaster on the back was thick. Not only did the medallion have the extra coat of Plaster of Paris with its 4 dollops, it also had 3/8ths of an inch of lime/sand plaster. This easily doubled the weight of it. It is hard to tell from this picture, but that is the exposed surface of the original medallion, then the new coat of Plaster of Paris, and finally the lime plaster.

I first tried just a hand scraper and it worked alright with the remaining ridges of the keys. It had no effect on the Plaster of Paris, and was slow going on the main body of the lime plaster. I would have been there for weeks with the scrapper, so I went back to my trusty friend the Rotozip with the ¼-inch bur bit. I furrowed grooves in the plaster about and inch apart and then chiseled off the rest.

Yes, I said chiseled! Chiseled with a hammer and with butt cheeks tightly clinched through the whole process. I had the feeling the thing was going to crack in two with every swing of the hammer. In the end it came through in one piece, but it was a nail biter. Most of the white you see is the original surface of the medallion and you’ll notice on the right you see more scratch marks where they exposed fresh surface for better adhesion.

It is still heavy, but the weight is manageable now. I’ve also decided that this will go up sooner rather than later. I think it will be better to stick it to the original plaster in the stairwell now rather than wait until after I skim coat. It will make skim coating the ceiling a little more difficult, but there is no sense in having the 1/16th of an inch skim coat sit between the medallion and the original plaster that is structurally sound. Of course, I’m going to remove some of the original plaster to expose the lath so the medallion will have its own keys. It is the right way to do it.

Craig’s List Score! I think.

2010-06-23T18:32:00.000-07:00

Well, it was either a score or a major headache. I haven’t decided yet. What I do know is that it is pretty damn cool and I love it and maybe a little prophetic.

Sean posted a comment a few weeks back asking if I was going to put a plaster medallion up in the stairwell where I installed the new box for the light fixture. At the time I thought it was a great idea, but really I knew it would never happen. I could never bring myself to put up a foam one and the reproductions, like the ones I bought at Ohmega Salvage a few years ago can not be shipped because of weight and size. If I wanted one I would need to make a pilgrimage to Oakland, CA, and I knew I didn’t want to do that in the next month or two.

Of course, the odds of a real, period plaster medallion being available here anytime soon was out of the question, or so I thought.

Yeah, I thought wrong

This bad boy came up on Craig’s List yesterday and I snagged it for $40. It is the real thing and has an inch of plaster with lath impressions on the back to prove it. It is 3.5 feet in diameter and weighs a freakin’ ton. The people I bought it from just bought the house and found it in the attic.

Some interesting things about it: One, that is the original paint on it. It is flaking in places and it is only one layer of paint. This re-confirms my belief that these were not always painted in a multitude of colors. From pictures I’ve seen, the painting a lot times was determined by the over-all style of the room. If you had a Rococo Revival room your plaster medallion would have been dolled up to match the rest of the room. This one is basically white (albeit a very dirty white now) with gold cherubs and green foliage. The gold cherubs might even be gold leaf. They have that look.

The other interesting thing is if you look at the close up of the cherub you can see a little button with something sticking out. There is one above all of the cherubs and above all of the offsetting fan/flower designs. Most still have a little wire hoop sticking out. Perhaps there were strands of cut glass crystals that looped around the medallion.

The potential major headache comes in to play because I can not put this up in the foyer as-is. The old plaster needs to come off the back so it will sit flush on the ceiling. Flaking paint needs to come off and it needs to be repainted. Both together are no small task.

These are the 2 reproductions I bought at Ohmega salvage for the front and back parlor. These are “shovel ready”, so the initial thought, as I was driving home, was that I could use one of these for the stairwell and use the new one in one of the parlors. The problem with that plan is that I think it would be obvious that I have one old and one new in the two parlors. The parlors are basically one large room and the two ceiling fixtures are only 15-feet apart.

No, this one is either going in the stairwell or will not be hung. I should finish the wallpaper stripping tonight. Next I was going to wash the walls in preparation for plastering this weekend. I think I may start working on this, though. This will push the whole project back a week, easy.

Sliced Bread Then Scaffolding

2010-06-22T07:27:00.000-07:00

I would say I spent 4 to 6 hours building the scaffolding in the stair well. The cost of the material was about $50. As I wrote the other day, as I was building it I couldn't help but feel that it was a bit much. It just seemed to be overkill.

Now I'm convinced that this scaffolding really is the best thing since sliced bread. The first scaffolding I built was when I did the dining room. That was a 4X8 foot sheet of plywood mounted on a rolling 3.5 foot high frame. It was much easier to put together than the stair scaffolding and proved to be indispensable. The other large room I did was the kitchen and I spent weeks on a ladder. I got it done but it was no fun.

I am firmly in the scaffolding camp now for large rooms with high ceilings that need extensive work. Last night after work I was on the scaffolding in a matter of minutes after walking in the door. After diner I spent a little more time on it stripping wallpaper. It is just too easy and too safe to work on not to do it. Over the life of this project I will save a lot more time than the 4 to 6 hours it took to build the scaffolding. The same can be said for the dining room.

All for the love of Glorificus

2010-06-20T15:01:00.000-07:00

Remember Glory on the 5th season Buffy the Vampire Slayer? She was the god from a hell dimension who was banished to Earth and was trying to get back to her dimension. She would suck the life force out of the brains of humans, which would turn them insane. Once they were insane they became pawns for her to use as she pleased.

Most effervescent one

She used them to build a crazy tower on which she would drain the blood of Dawn, Buffy’s little sister, who was really a key, in order to open all of the portals between the dimensions so that she could return to rule over hell once again.

Ahhh, good times.

Any way, the insane people built a crazy tower at a construction site, which ended up being the death of Buffy for the 2nd time on the show. All this weekend as I was working on my stair scaffolding I couldn’t help but be reminded of that tower. I’m not sure if I was reminded of the tower because mine ended up kind of crazy looking or if it was because I felt kind of insane for building it. It really did turn out to be a much bigger production than I had planned. If I get visited by a Queller Demon tonight I'll know there is something wrong with the scaffolding.

The Under Belly

When I ran out of new, store bought 2X4s I made many trips to the wood shed to get salvaged redwood lumber to finish up. So there is this mix of modern fir 2X4s and old full dimensional redwood boards. I also became less interested in the cosmetic appeal of the construction as the project grew, so boards are cut longer than they should be. It looks haphazard in places, but it is very stable.

The deck ended up being two layers of quarter inch plywood. It is a little springy in places, but very safe. This is the last of the plywood that came off the walls in the kitchen many years ago. The hole you see to the left is where the water heater vent fed in to the chimney. I have used and reused these pieces of plywood for so many things over the years. I think this may be their last tour of duty in the house, though. I’m pretty sure they will end up in the dump after this.

Here is that same space from a few weeks ago. The stairs make a U turn and end up in the foyer.

The height worked out very well. You can see the ceiling in the picture above. When I’m standing on the scaffolding The ceiling is about 6-inches over my head.

At it’s height, the deck is about 14-feet off the floor of the foyer. As I was building it I had the feeling like I should have waited to mount the box for the ceiling fixture after I built the scaffolding. Really though, it was partly due to being on the articulated ladder last week that made me want to do more scaffolding than I originally intended. I no longer feel like I might break my neck doing the stairwell.

An incentive to work faster

2010-06-19T18:12:00.000-07:00

After tomorrow the front stairs will be out of commission for the foreseeable future. Today I built the framing of the scaffolding and tomorrow I will finish it up. This means I will no longer be able to traverse the stars until the scaffolding comes down.

I'm standing in the upstairs hall here. The scaffolding is 28-inches high at this end and about 11-feet high to the left where the stairs turn and go down in to the foyer. The deck will be 7-feet below the ceiling

This tuned out to be a more complete covering of the space than I had originally planned. Originally I was going to have an L shaped scaffold along the right side and under the window. It was going to be narrow enough that I could still get up and down the stairs. The idea was that I would first move it up against the right wall and plaster that, then the back wall, and then left wall. I would also be able to move it away from the walls so I could plaster a wall floor to ceiling at one time. For me, keeping the “wet edge” is important for a smooth skim-coat.

As I started building though, I realized it was better to just build scaffolding for the entire space. The issue that changed my mind was the section to the left. In that area the scaffolding is nearly 11-feet off the stairs. By having only the narrow part of the L over there I would not have been able to skim-coat the entire wall from right to left or top to bottom. I would have had to do something funky with a ladder. Doing something funky with a ladder will end you up either on America's Funniest Home Videos or in the hospital.

Then there was also the issue of the ceiling. I still need to strip some wallpaper up there before I start to skim-coat, so I really need to be able to work on the entire space at one time. Of course, it is also much safer. If I trip or loose my footing there is no where to fall except on to the deck of the scaffolding.

The bad part of this arrangement is that I will need to stop skim-coating all of the walls half way down. It doesn't sound like a big deal, but it is. When skim-coating I have always done an entire wall at one time. By stopping half way down I run the risk of having a noticeable transition where I stop while on the scaffolding, remove the scaffolding and then restart plastering. It should be interesting.

So tomorrow I will add some more cross-bracing and add a deck of quarter-inch plywood and old 1X6 redwood flooring. Then I will skim-coat everything above the scaffolding, paint the ceiling, and hang the light-fixture. Then I will dismantle the scaffolding and finish skim-coating the walls in the stairwell. Then move on to the foyer.

Building An Addition

2010-06-16T07:40:00.000-07:00

I know, it seems odd that I would be thinking about building an addition on to the house given the fact that I haven't even finished the downstairs and I'm in the middle of a big project right now. It is even more odd considering I tore down a 600 sq ft 2 story addition just 5 years ago. I really have no choice, though.

Right now I'm working on the foyer and stairwell and last night as I was sitting in the parlor staring at the pile of tools and crap piled up in there I started to think about what I would do when it came time to work on the parlors. The parlors are the last two rooms on the first floor. When I work on them, where will I pile all of the tools and construction crap? In the new addition, naturally.

Before I owned a broken down old 1895 Victorian this sort of logic never would have dawned on me, but now it makes perfect sense. I'll start with a small addition on the north side of the house to hold all of the construction crap while I'm working on the parlors. Then, when it comes to time to finish off the addition I will build another small addition to hold all of the construction crap for when I working on that addition.

An even better idea would be a stairwell that leads to no where. Stacking tools in stairwells is great because it spreads things out in a tier system that makes things easy to see. Hey, has any one ever been to the Winchester Mystery House. I love that place. I think I'll make trip down there to get some ideas on adding on to the house. Of course, I'll need a new addition on the house to store all of the great plans I'm sure I'll have once I get back. Then I'll need another addition for when I start to work on that addition. You know, some place to store all of the construction crap.

Frankenstein Revisited

2010-06-14T19:32:00.000-07:00

I must get the ceiling fixture for the stairwell re-wired before the scaffolding goes up. I would kick myself if I was finished with everything except for the re-wire and then had to leave the scaffolding up for another day or two while I ran new wire in the chandelier. There is no reason not to do it. This is a good mid-week project.

So tonight I went up to the closet where I've kept all of the lighting over the years. I went on a bit of a spending spree on antique lighting right after buying the house. It really became an obsession. Not just with the style of lighting but also with getting a good deal. I would bid on any 1890s to 1910 fixture that came up on eBay that was in original condition (i.e. original finish and never been re-wired).

This behavior is not normal for me. I really am a less-is-more kind of guy. I don't collect or horde, and I rarely buy things I don't need. For about 2 years I went nuts with antique lighting, though. Rarely did I spend more than $150 on a fixture and often much less. When all was said and done I actually bought more fixtures than I need for the house. I have resold 4, that I can remember.

To date I have rewired and hung 14 fixtures in the house. All of them date from the 1890s to about 1910. I thought I had only 2 left in the closet. One is the tall 3 arm chandelier that I plan on hanging in the stairwell and the other is a some what plain 2 arm chandelier that, if the truth be told, was a bit if a mistake. The style is not quite right. I'm sure it was an impulse buy where my opening bid matched the opening bid of the auction. Who knows what I paid for it, but it was probably less than $50.

This is the one I plan to hang in the stair well. It is 54-inches tall, which is too tall for most of my rooms. Did that stop me from bidding? No!

Ignore the dust. Remember, it has been hanging in an open closet for 6 years in a house undergoing restoration.

However, there was a 3rd chandelier in the closet hiding behind an old shirt and pair of pants I had used to do some plaster work years back. In a house this large that is so underutilized it is easy for something to be hung or dropped some place and then not be touched again for years. It is not something I'm proud of, but it is a fact of life.

Fixture used as hanger. Only in an old house.

So there it has been all of this time, just hanging there. It is very nice. In fact, it is as nice or nicer than any of the other chandeliers I've hung in the house. The main reason I never hung it is because it is so nice. This is the type of fixture that should be in a main room of the house. It would really be out of place hanging in the kitchen or laundry room. The problem was, I already had all of my main rooms taken care of. One of the first purchases I made was a set of 3 chandeliers and an additional ceiling fixture that all came out of the same house in Main. The three chandeliers, while not identical, obviously are from the same manufacture. One went in the dining room and the other 2 went in the front and back parlor.

Fixture in the front parlor.

So there this other fixture has hung in the closet for all of these years, hanging behind some crusty old plastering clothes. When I went up to get the 54-inch chandelier I noticed the other one for the first time in a long time. I do remember purchasing it because I got a great deal on it. It does have one issue and that is that it is more corroded...er...excuse me, it has more patina on it than most of this period that are in “original condition”. I mostly swoon over patina and original condition. Some would polish the brass until they see their reflection, but I actually like the aged look of the brass.

It is hard to tell behind the dust and grime seen in the picture, but this one has an excessive amount of “patina”.Honestly, it looks like it was in a fire. Some parts of it are just black. It would be perfect if it were a little taller. Say, 54-inches.

Ding! {light bulb goes off}

Yes, you've probably figure out the plan by now. In case you haven't, I plan to take them both apart and remake them with the base of one and the top of the other. I'm sure to many this is a big yawn fest, but for me it is a big deal. For some reason, antique lighting has always been somewhat sacred to me. I don't swap around parts or cut them down. I don't polish them up or try and add more patina. With the exception of new wire I want them to look like they were hung in the house in 1895 and never touched again.

So I will be in uncharted territory. Messing with things the Universe never intended for me to mess with. If I'm successful it will no doubt bother for weeks after it is hung. Every time I walk down the stairs I will know there is a freak of nature hanging in the stair hall. I can only hope it doesn't put on an ill-fitting sport coat and wreak havoc on the neighborhood, only to be hunted down by the town folks.

Or perhaps I'me over-reacting once again.

It Started Out Innocently Enough…

2010-06-13T17:20:00.000-07:00

The plan for today was to put down a new layer of cardboard and plastic and then start to assemble the scaffolding in the stairwell. I had a line on a large cache of cardboard from my work. We are getting new network cabling put in this weekend and on Friday I told the guys I would swing by and grab all of the empty boxes. Well, I went by after hitting the lumber yard and they had not even emptied one box yet. They were supposed to be finished today and they hadn’t even emptied one box! Oy!

So now what. I thought about driving around to grocery stores to scavenge cardboard, but that did not seem too appealing. In an effort to keep the project moving forward I started to think about the light fixture in the stairwell. It was going to be a big challenge and I wasn’t even sure if would do it.

So here is the problem. That light with the medallion is in the foyer right in front of the front door. It is controlled by a pair of 3-way switches, with one next to the front door and the other at the top of the stairs. The plan was to add a second light centered over the window you see in the background. Because of the way I wired the foyer light and the pair of 3-ways, I needed to get a new wire from that medallion, up in to the attic, and then bring it down in to a new box in the ceiling of the stairwell.

That ceiling is 20-feet above where I’m standing when taking this picture. That is challenge number one. The other issue is that the medallion in the foyer is the last remaining original medallion in the house. Above all else, do no harm. I don't want to risk damaging the medallion or any of the surrounding plaster

So I started to think about what was the biggest obstacle. That would be getting the wire down through the wall from the attic to the first floor ceiling. The real problem here is that I broke my 4.5-foot long flexible drill bit when I was running telecom a few months back. That is a $60 bit and is essential in being able to drill through the top plate and through any blocking in the walls. I know a lot of people say these old homes are all balloon framed with no fire blocks in the walls, but this house has blocking in all exterior walls.

The front gable in the attic that is over the front door.

I knew I had a hole already drilled from when I did the foyer light originally. If there was enough room for a second wire I would be in good shape. So that was the place to start. I grabbed a long piece of fish tape and tried to thread it down through the top plate and through the hole in the blocking in the wall. This process can sometimes take a half hour, but this time a nailed on the first try.

At this point I was pretty sure I was going to be wiring the light. So now I move down one floor.

This in the second floor hallway just below the attic gable and just above the light in the foyer. The left piece of baseboard is removed and the long middle piece is pulled away from the wall.

Behind it is the fish tape that I fed down from the attic. You can also see the piece of 14-3 romex I ran a few years back when I wired the foyer light originally. I attach the new wire to the fish tape and pull it up in to the attic. I'm half way home. Just below this is the medallion.

The next step is to remove some floor boards so I can get it down through the hole in the medallion and connect it to the wire that is already powering the light. That way, when the foyer light gets turned on the electricity will flow up the new wire and also turn on the new light on the ceiling of the stairwell.

So this is where it gets dicey. Very gently and gingerly I must run another piece of fish tape up through the medallion and in to this hole in the floor. Then, after attaching the other end of the new wire to the fish tape I must even more gently and gingerly pull the new wire down through the medallion. It was a nail biter, but I eventually got it.

Getting the fish tape up in to that floor space took a lot longer then you might think. Once it was down through the medallion though, I now had a new wire running from the first floor all of the way up in to the attic. It was now time for the ladder.

I bought this articulated ladder about 12 years ago. I bought it because I needed a tall ladder that could also fit in a 6-foot high shed. This stairwell is the only time I’ve used it like this and it proved to be invaluable. This allowed me to get high enough in the center of the stairwell to cut the hole for the new box. After spending time on the ladder cutting the hole it made me realize even more the importance of scaffolding in the stairwell. The ladder works, but it is no fun.

I use an angle grinder with a diamond blade on it to cut through the lath and plaster. Unlike the walls in this house, they did use traditional wooden lath for the ceilings. The benefit of the diamond blade is that it does not cause a lot of vibration of the lath when you are cutting it. Once the hole was cut it was a simply a matter of mounting the box and hooking up the socket.

Ta-Da!

Now both this light and the foyer light can be operated as one from a pair of 3-way switches at the top and bottom of the stairs.

The last step is to rewire this fixture, which will hang in the finished stairwell. It is 4.5-feet long, so in the future I should be able to change light bulbs with a normal ladder. Getting that articulated ladder in to place was a bitch. I was sure I was going to take out a window or some plaster. I’ve also decided that I’m going to paint the ceiling and hang the fixture while the scaffolding is in place. Once this space is finished I am not going to want to fool with that ladder in there.

Slowly, very slowly

2010-06-12T18:29:00.000-07:00

These kinds of projects that are really disruptive always seem to take a lot longer than they should. The foyer is just so visible. It is not like a bathroom or some other back room where I can close the door so I don't have to look at the mess. The foyer is just in my face every minute of ever day, mocking me, laughing at me, making me feel so inadequate. Oh, how I hate you foyer.

But I digress in to madness.

In reality, the project is moving along about as fast or slow as any other project. The scratch and brown coats are finished, for the most part. One wall in the stairwell is a little thinner than I would like. There are other small areas where the plaster meets the woodwork that need more attention, but all in all, I am pretty much ready for the skim coat.

Today I finished the last wall in the foyer and then I pulled up all of the cardboard and plastic that I put down a few weeks back when I started the room. It had served it's purpose and is now ready for the dump. Tomorrow I will put down a second layer of cardboard and plastic that will most likely be down for the duration of the project. I work with such small batches of plaster for the skim coat that I don't make as big of mess.

I'm also going to buy lumber tomorrow for the scaffolding in the the stairs. I haven't decided when I'm going to construct the scaffolding yet, though. Needless to say, scaffolding in the stairs is really going to be an inconvenience. I won't begin skim-coating until next weekend, at the earliest. If I build it tomorrow I will forced to walk around it or crawl up and over it all week long. What is the point. I think I will buy the material and start to frame some of the sections and then do the assembly next Friday.

The real question now is, do I install the light fixture in the stairwell. I should do that before I skim-coat. If I'm going to then it would be best if I re-wired the fixture, ran the wire in the wall, cut the hole for the box, and mount a temporary fixture before I skim-coat. Given that I must tie this fixture in to the foyer light, which is run off of a pair of 3-way switches, makes this is an all weekend long job. In order to tie it in to the foyer light I must remove baseboard and pull up some floorboards in the upstairs hallway.

So even if I don't build the scaffolding until next Friday I'm still looking at having it in the stairwell for a minimum of two weeks. Next weekend I'll do the light. Then the weekend after that I'll skim-coat the stairwell. Then the weekend after that I'll skim-coat the foyer. That makes it 3 weeks from today until the plaster is done. This all assumes that I get nothing done during the week.

For the first 6 years I owned this house I only worked part time. Things were so much easier then. {Sigh!} Does anyone want to buy I house? I'll sell it to you real cheap.

The Zone

2010-06-09T19:17:00.000-07:00

I was bound and determined to work on the plaster this evening. After work I walked in the door and within 10 minutes I was mixing up a batch of plaster, and boy, I was in the zone tonight.

Plastering is one of the more difficult things to master. Plumbing, electrical, and carpentry are skills that once you understand the basic concepts you pretty much got it down. I'm not say there isn't any skill involved, but once you know how to sweat copper you really don't forget it.

Plastering is more like welding or surgery. You have your good days and your bad days. Today was a good day for me when it comes to plastering. The mix was perfect. I was able to get it smooth with just a few passes. If all of my plastering days were like today I could earn money at it.

I have one more wall to do for the brown coat and then it will be on to the skim coat. Tomorrow I walk in the door and start plastering. I may not even change my clothes.

Spatial Distortions

2010-06-06T17:11:00.000-07:00

So far with this project I’ve been having a hard time estimating time and materials. I think this is happening for two reasons. First, both the foyer and stair hall are larger than they seem. Second, the wall for the front door is the only wall I’m completely doing from scratch, and most of that wall is door and transom. Everything else is 3-feet here, 5-feet here, a little spot there. Taken individually, they don’t seem like very big spaces, but collectively it’s a lot of wall.

I was able to get the scratch coat on about 75% of the walls by mid-week. I finished that up on Saturday and then started in on the brown coat. For me, the brown coat is where I really earn my money. If I was getting paid, that is. I mixed and moved a lot of plaster this weekend. The brown coat is when I bring it out to level with the remaining walls. This is the last step before the skim coat, so I want it to be level and smooth. The skim coat is pretty much as it sounds. It is not going to hide many imperfections in the previous coats.

The scratch and brown coats are on the stair hall, front door, and old phone wall.

What remains is the parlor and dining room walls. I could have gotten more done today, but I ran out of plaster.

The plan is to buy another 2 bags of plaster on Monday or Tuesday and see if I can finish up the brown coat mid-week. Then next weekend I will do some clean up and build the scaffolding in the stair hall. Although I’ve gotten very good and getting plaster from hawk to trowel to wall without slopping it on the floor, the key to the whole process is the consistency of the plaster. It is a bit of a balancing act. You want the plaster to be thin enough that it affords you a long enough working time, but not so thin that it is hard to work with.

With the brown coat I am making larger batches of plaster than for the scratch coat. If I make it too stiff then it becomes harder to work with as I empty the pail. The trick is to get it thin, but not too thin. I had a bitch of a time getting it to be the right consistency today. We’ve been having some unseasonably rainy weather, so maybe that played a part. I’m not really sure.

What this means is that I made more of a mess today than I have on previous days. Hence the clean-up day next weekend. When plastering in a the corner I find that I must stand like dancer all spread eagle with arms and legs stretched out. The corners can be a bitch and you need your legs stretched out to get the leverage and your arms must be stretched out to the get hawk out of the way.

So what happened a few times today is that I’m plastering in a corner with the hawk full of plaster in my left hand stretched out behind me to get it out of the way. While I’m concentrating on getting the plaster smooshed in to the corner nice and tight I suddenly hear a ka-flump! as the thinly mixed blob of plaster slides off the hawk and on to the floor. In fact, this only happened twice today, but I inevitably stepped in the cow patty sized blob of plaster and tracked it around.

The floor is well covered, but after the grinding of the grooves and now the plaster mess, I just need to clean it up and start over. So if I can get the room cleaned up and the scaffolding built next weekend I should be able to skim coat the weekend after that. With that, the plaster will be done and it will be on to woodwork.

Two sort of down and….

2010-06-01T18:31:00.000-07:00

Two walls sort of finished and an undetermined amount left to do. How is that for vague and ambiguous. That is sort of the nature of plaster work, really. It is difficult to say when you are finished. Can a wall be too smooth? Do a few imperfections add character? How many constitutes “a few imperfections”? It is far from an exact science.

Since I only have the scratch coat on two of the more than a few partial walls I am far from thinking about concepts like “smooth” and “a few imperfections”. Still, it is a start. With the longer days and this stupid thing called Daylight Savings Time, I’m back to getting in some work after work. The goal is to have the scratch coat on all of the walls by Friday so that I can start in on the brown coat on Saturday.

I may or may not achieve that goal.

My Bad

2010-05-29T14:39:00.000-07:00

I made some really good progress on the foyer. I got all of the grooves ground out. I secured any loose plaster with plaster washers and construction adhesive. All of the nails are pulled and the stage is set for plaster. I even made a dump run to get rid of all of the old plaster. I’m going to do a little more clean up and by the end of the day today I will be ready to trowel on some plaster. There is just one little problem….

I forgot to buy plaster – Doh!

Not only did I forget to buy it but I made a trip to Hansel Materials on Wednesday to pick up a gallon of plaster weld. I was within 100 feet of pallets full of plaster and I didn’t even think to buy any. It is really astounding. Sadly, they are not open on weekends, so I’m screwed.

I think it is partly psychosomatic. Some where in side of me I really didn’t want to do any plastering this weekend. Really though, I think it has more to do with how I feel about this project. As I said in another post, it is the smallest interior project I’ve done. I do have almost a full bag of Structo-Lite in the garage, and the last time I ordered finish plaster I bought 5 bags and I still have 3 of those left. I just wasn’t really thinking that I would need more.

Obviously I need more plaster. Even though this is mostly a skim-coat job, the sections that need to be built up from scratch are big enough that one partial bag will never be enough. I need 3 more bags, easy. So I’ll do what I can tomorrow with the partial bag and then get more next week.

In the mean time I’ll enjoy the sun and The Big Race. For the glory!

Goovin’ on a Sunday afternoon

2010-05-23T16:23:00.000-07:00

I would say I was able to get about 80% of the dovetail grooves cleaned out. It was when I absentmindedly Rotozipped my arm that I decided it was time to quit for the day. Fortunately the shirt sleeve took the brunt of the hit, but it did leave a mark on the skin. What remains requires a ladder and I no longer felt as though I should be up on a ladder with an exposed, spinning bit.

Even though there was no real grunting involved, this definitely falls in to the Grunt Work category. It is just very unpleasant work. I must cover myself head to toe with respirator, hat, gloves, ear protection, log sleeve shirt and goggles. I feel like I’m suiting up for sensory deprivation or something.

The worst part of it is the shop vac hose. At first it is not too bad, but after a few hours you feel like you are wrestling an anaconda. In fact, I was readjusting the hose when I Rotozipped my arm. To get above 5-feet I need to add an extension made of dryer exhaust hose. That is even more unpleasant to work with.

All clear

Clear on the bottom, but not on the top

I was able to get all of the stairwell done and everything in the foyer below 5-feet. There is really just a few small areas around the door and two medium sized sections on two other walls. I should finish that next Saturday, no problem. After that I need to go around and pull a few more nails and clean up the areas right against the trim.

If I can do a little work mid-week in the evenings I can start to put on the scratch coat Saturday afternoon. With any luck I can finish the scratch coat on Sunday. I think this is very doable. The scratch coat is the easiest and quickest of the 3 coats.

Shaka, when the walls fell

2010-05-22T18:35:00.000-07:00

The last of the plywood is out of the house! The Petch House is now a Plywood Free Zone.

This last batch of plywood was actually labeled as “Interior Grade Plywood”. I think it would be called “A” grade or cabinet grade in today’s lexicon. Still, the idea that plywood would be considered an acceptable interior finish product for anything other than cabinets strikes me as odd. Sounds like a 50s kind of thing. I suppose in a Mid Century Modern home I could see plywood used on walls, but not in a 1895 Victorian.

They certainly were not afraid to use a lot of nails. There was a nail every 3 to 4 inches along the perimeter and then ever 6 to 12 inches in the center. This stuff did not come down with out a fight. It turned out that most of the damage to the plaster behind the plywood was due to a leaky window and not from 80 years of renters banging couches and dressers up and down the stairs. Don’t get me wrong, the couches and dressers took their toll, but water was the real culprit.

You can see the mess I found. That is 3 layers of wallpaper dating back to 1895. I suspect the top layer is 30s or 40s and then after that the plywood went up.

The plaster under the window was little more than a sheet of plaster leaning up against the wall. It is amazing that it didn’t just fall off as soon as I removed the plywood. I think the wallpaper had something to do with keeping up. Can wallpaper be considered structural?

This was a new pattern of wallpaper I had never seen in the house. This is on the second landing, as you go up. It looks like there was a phone mounted on the wall – perhaps a small payphone for the tenants. I know that in 1902 there was a phone in the foyer at the base of the stairs. That is when the house was stilled owed by the Petch Family. It looks like 40s or 50s wallpaper and the papering job is really poorly done. They tried to paper around the phone and the pattern does not match on the right side.

This is the end of day one and as big a mess as I made today, it will be nothing compared to what I need to do tomorrow. Tomorrow I will grind the remainder of the plaster out of the grooves so the new plaster will have a place to go. I use a Rotozip with a plaster bit and a closely held shop vac. I don’t care how strong the shop vac is this just makes a huge mess.

After I get done with the grinding part of the job the rest is down hill. If I’m lucky, and I don’t think I will be, I will finish the grinding tomorrow. If I don’t finish tomorrow I will try to tackle it mid-week so I can begin to plaster next weekend. I think I am 2 weeks away from scaffolding in the stairwell.

Oh joy!

The End Game

2010-05-16T14:39:00.000-07:00

I haven’t even started the foyer but that doesn’t mean it isn’t too early to begin to stress about paint colors and finishing touches. My only saving grace at this point is that there are not window treatments to think about. There is a 3-light transom over the front door and a double hung window in the stair hall, but both will remain unadorned.

So it’s the walls I need to worry about. As you would imagine, the room was originally wallpapered. There were two designs in the room. The main field below the picture rail was a fairly simple design. I don’t have a picture of it, but it almost looked hand painted. It was not the perfect, elaborate design that many think of when they think of Victorian wallpaper. It was a red ribbon design that swirled around making very broad, repeating patters. Not the most pleasing design, if the truth be told. I remember that the colors had run badly when a second layer of wallpaper was added later. It seemed to be on a cream colored background, but that could have been from the paste that was used to put on the next layer of wallpaper. There were only two layers of wallpaper in the foyer and then many, many layers of paint.

Above is the design that was on the frieze and ceiling. This I really like. This is one of the more elaborate designs I’ve found in the house. Again, few colors. There is just the red and a silver or gray, and then the background color. It is difficult to say what the color of the background was originally.

And this is the paper that was in the stair hall. A very simple pattern. So simple I could almost make this myself. This is another pattern I like a lot. I’ve written about this in the past, but I think what distinguishes all of the original wallpapers from 1895 that I found in the house is how much they don’t reflect what is found in many of the collections of reproduction Victorian wallpaper found today. Perhaps Mrs. Petch had more eclectic tastes than most of the country at the time.

I’m leaning towards lincrusta for a dado and then a painted field and frieze, with two different colors for the field and frieze. It would be similar to what is in the dining room, only with a lincrusta dado instead of a wood dado. I’m leaning, but I’m not there yet. It may be too formal for my tastes. So far the only lincrusta pattern I found that I like is only sold in the UK, and it is real lincrusta, as opposed to the vinyl stuff I found so far in this country. I’m not sure I can bring myself to putting vinyl on the walls in the foyer.

I’m going to need to be careful about the color choice for paint because the same color for the frieze in the foyer will also be used in the stair hall. I want it to be a light color. This color may also be used in the upstairs hall. As you move from the foyer, up the stairs, and in to the upstairs hall, there is no molding that transitions from one space to the next. All of the outside corners are rounded with inch and a quarter wood. It would be challenging to stop one color and start another with a crisp line.

I was hoping to get more done this weekend but I had to go in to work yesterday for 6 hours because of a software upgrade. The plan is to get the room ready for demolition, which hopefully will start next week.

Careful...Careful!!

This fixture comes down and gets replaced with a simple bulb socket for the duration of the project.

The door from the foyer to the dining room gets hung back where it came from. Note the lovely green paint. That is the dining room side and some of you may remember the photos of all of the woodwork painted that color in there.

I’ve never really been sure what to do about this door. It is 34-inches wide and so finding a salvage replacement in the same style is pretty much out of the question. The other side has a nice shellac finish and would face the foyer. If not for the hole drilled for the deadbolt, it would be an easy restoration. Why the deadbolt on an interior door? Because this was the front door to apartment #2. The door originally swung out in to the foyer, but in the 20s they re-hung it to swing in, like a normal front door. If I was going to use it permanently I would need to put it back to swinging out in to the foyer, because as it is now, the light switch in the dining room will end up behind the door.

The green painted side is another issue. It would be tough to strip it off and have it come out nice. Even with the shellac under the paint, I found that anyplace where the wood gets dinged the paint gets driven in to the grain it is hard to strip it all the way. No doubt this door got dinged and banged a lot by all of the furniture that was moved in and out by renters for 80+ years. This door represents weeks and weeks of work and the end results may not be that good. I think it will end up in the attic.

After the light is down and the door is up I will cover all of the floors with plastic sheeting and then cardboard. This will stay down for the whole project. I can then start to remove the last of the plywood and bad plaster. Yea, that’s right, I said plywood. Several rooms in the house had the walls covered in quarter inch plywood. I removed it from the foyer a long time ago. In the picture above, the lower yellow part of the wall is plywood. {sigh!} I’m sure the plaster behind it is a 100% loss. Again, 80+ years of renters carrying furniture up and down the stairs took its toll. The vertical line you see on the wall is from when they ran electrical conduit throughout the house in the 50s to expand the number of outlets. {sigh!} I ripped out all of the conduit when I rewired, but the scars remain. It will be nice to see that finally go away.

The Next Big Thing

2010-05-13T18:12:00.001-07:00

It’s not just the next big thing, it is revolutionary. Its’ beyond big. It’s bigger than big. The next big thing is my next project. It’s really not that big, relatively speaking. It’s only big because I’m actually starting a new big project. There was a time when I would squeeze out big projects like Octo-Mom squeezed out little kids. Not so much anymore.

It’s hard to say what happened. Things got in the way like winter, work and laziness. The thought of a new big project sort of lost its cachet. The old days are old and the new days are less house oriented. I’m pumped about this one though, and soon I will be psyched. No, wait, is it psyched and then pumped, or does pumped come first. I’m not really clear on the whole hierarchy of enthusiasm, but I can feel something stirring. It could be that foot-long green chili beef burrito I had for lunch or it could be the new project. Either way there is definitely something there.

So what is The Next Big Thing? It is the foyer and stairwell. If judged by cost or square footage it is not one of the bigger interior projects I’ve tackled. There are no cabinets to build, nor is there any plumbing, and maybe no electrical. What it lacks in cost and technical challenges though, it more than makes up for in mess, disruption, and verticality.

First the disruption. The foyer is the entry hall. Either I walk around to the backdoor when I enter and leave or I use the foyer. The real issue there is the alarm system. I must go in to the foyer to set or deactivate the alarm. The foyer also sits between the parlor and kitchen, two of the more popular rooms in the house, and it also sits between the front stairs and everything else. I can avoid the front stairs by using the back stairs, but the front stairs are much more convenient and comfortable to climb than the back stairs.

The verticality. The stairwell is tall. It basically ascends the full height of the house, which is roughly 20 feet on the interior. This means scaffolding. I’m going to need to erect scaffolding on the middle landing and that will make it that much more difficult to traverse the stairs. If I need to strip paint off the plaster before I skim-coat, then the scaffolding could be up for weeks, if not months. I also may hang a light fixture, which will only add to the time the scaffolding is up.

The mess. Plaster work and stripping shellac. There is no way around it, these things make a mess, especially the plaster. Putting the plaster on is not too bad, and the mess can be controlled. It is taking the damaged plaster off that makes the real mess. The dust goes every where. I don’t care how careful you are or how much you mask rooms off, there will be, at a minimum, a fine coat of plaster dust on every surface in the house. Fortunately, the 6.5 quake we had a few months back took care of a lot of the damaged foyer plaster for me.

The stairs are another issue. At least they have never been painted, but they need to be taken back to bare wood. They were shellacked back in 1895 and then nothing happened after that. There is also the issue that some of the woodwork has been marred by renters that just had no appreciation for anything, at all, ever! The place was rental units for 80+ years, so it could be worse, but I see a trip to a mill in my future to have a few pieces reproduced. This will no doubt be the largest expense in the project, but even with that, this will be one of the least expensive projects I’ve done on the interior of the house.

I just need to start. That is why I’m trying to get pumped and then psyched, or psyched and then pumped, which ever it is. It needs to be done. After this, the only rooms on the first floor that are left are the front and back parlors. These are essentially one large room, roughly 15X30. These rooms are basic stuff: plaster, paint and floors. Everything else has been done in there (wiring, telecom, stripping, millwork). Once I get this foyer and stairwell done, the rest of the downstairs will be a cake-walk.

I just need to start.

The Kitchen Desk and Ives Pocket Door Hangers

2010-05-09T16:25:00.000-07:00

Those two things wouldn’t seem to go together, but for the purpose of this blog entry they do. First the desk. There is a small alcove in the kitchen that has caused me constant consternation. It is small and essentially dead space in the kitchen. I had a small cabinet there for a while, but that ended up going in to the butler’s pantry.

Next I put the refrigerator in the alcove. It was a nice fit, but in the end didn’t work well. It was just a very awkward place for the fridge. It was out of the way and inconvenient. Then a few months back I was watching The New Yankee Workshop and Norm was building a built-in kitchen desk. It was a forehead slapping moment for me. Suddenly it was obvious what I needed to do with this space.

A few months back I built the frame. The desk fills the entire space and is fixed to the wall with no real legs. I used cast iron brackets at the front that are of a similar style to the ones I used on the island. When I made the built-in cabinets in the dining room I was forced to buy an entire slab of marble, so there was plenty left to do a marble top for it. It is really the perfect solution for this spot.

Now on to the Ives pocket door hangers. When I opened the wall that separates the parlor from the foyer I found that the house at one time had pocket doors there. The pocket was there and the track, along with a half of one of the rollers. Although it would have been nice to find doors and a complete set of rollers, having the one piece with the manufacture's name on it meant that I could – with luck and time – find the other parts that I needed.

It took about 3 years, but I eventually found the parts. Three years sounds like a long time but it really wasn’t that big of a deal because I didn’t have the doors either. I’ve since gotten doors and hung them on the rollers and once again all is right with the opening between the parlor and foyer. Hmm, actually, it is far from right, because the plaster is thrashed and the trim is still not up, but at least the doors are there and they work.

So why am I going back in to all of this now. Well, last week I got an email from someone in a similar situation. He has a partial set of rollers and is trying to figure out how it all goes together. It is tough enough with a complete set, but with only a partial set it is kind of like pissing in the wind.

So I told him I would post something on the blog with photos to show how it all goes together.

Above is the top half of the roller. This is the part that suspends from the tack. This was the one piece I was left with. More on the little do-hickey later.

This is a complete set of 4 rollers. This is what is needed to hang two doors. If you compare this picture to the one above you’ll notice that there is a second piece added to the bottom of each roller. This is the part that is screwed on to the top of the door. And there is that do-hickey again. You’ll need two of those.

Here is the base mounted to the door. There are keyed slots that the roller assembly slides in to. If you go back to the first picture of the rusty roller you can see the two tabs that fit in to those slots. You can all so see how the set-screw goes through both parts. Once they’re are in you tighten the set-screw to keep them from backing out.

The track is two, 1-inch square pieces of wood screwed on to the framing, with a one inch gap between them. In the middle of the track are two removable pieces. When you are hanging the doors you put the roller part up in the track first. The rollers are put through the hole made when you remove the 2 removable pieces from the track. You then mount the base to the door and then attach the base to the roller.

Here they are fully assembled. In the picture you can see two screws. The bottom screw is the set-screw that holds the two parts of the rollers together. The top screw is the adjusting screw to adjust the height and level of the door once it is hung. The threads for the screws are standard machine threads, but I don’t recall the size. I took my roller to hardware store and just tried screws until I found one that fit.

Finally, the do-hickey. These mount on the floor, just inside the pocket opening. They are each 3.5 inches long and 1-inch high. There is a groove in the bottom of the door that slides along this and keeps the doors centered in the pocket so they don’t bang around while you open and close them.

I hope this helps. Good luck.

Master of My Domain

2010-03-21T15:47:00.000-07:00

Yes, that’s right, I am Master of My Domain. Oh, it wasn’t easy. It took 7 years of hard work, but I am finally Master of My Domain. At long last, the home networking project is complete. You didn’t think I was talking about something else, did you?

It all started back in 2003 when I rewired the house. It took about 3 months, but I replaced every last inch of wire, along with a new mast, main disconnect, and a first floor and second floor sub-panel. All new outlets, switches, and ceiling fixtures. I did a first-rate job and it was all done with a permit and even exceeded what was code at the time because I installed the new arc-fault breakers in the upstairs bedrooms. If it hadn’t been for one faulty GFCI outlet I would have passed inspection on the first try {Damn you GFCI outlet! Damn you to hell!!!!}

The second floor sub-panel is in the attic, so I needed to pull a 3-wire, 2# cable (think Romex on steroids) from first-floor sub-panel, up through the first floor, up through the second floor, and in to the attic. It was no small feat. The butler’s pantry was already thrashed, so I ran the cable up through that wall, and then through the wall of the attic stair-well. At that time, I also pull two networking and two coaxial cables up in to the attic.

So now fast-forward to 2 years ago when I did the butler’s pantry. I built a ventilated cabinet and installed a Steren Home Networking panel with snap-ins for networking, cable TV, and phone. At that time I also ran cable for those items to the kitchen and front parlor. I used face-plates with keystone jacks in the rooms.

All of this time though, the coax and networking cables have been hibernating under the floor in the attic close to where the sub-panel is. The cable has been waiting to be fed down to the four upstairs bedrooms. Two weeks ago I started to finish this last part of the puzzle and as of today I am Master of My Domain. Not only is the home-networking finished, but I can honestly say that I am finished with wire altogether.

If you read back through this blog I am sure you will find about a dozen places where I have proudly exclaimed that I am finished with one project or another, only to find me writing about it again a few months or a few years later. Well not this time. I am DONE with wiring this house. If an outlet stops working then I refuse to fix it. Anything beyond a burned out light bulb and it will just stay that way until I sell the house or die, which ever comes first.

Above is the attic sub-panel. Attached to the old redwood board with a 1901 Eureka newspaper glued to it is, starting from the right, a Cisco 5 port network switch, a 5 port telephone splitter, and 2, 4 port cable TV splitters. The cables, both in and out, are all run under the floorboards (1X12 redwood planks) so this is the extent of the cable you see.

Now, at this point many of you are asking one of two questions, and maybe even both. First off, why 2 cable TV in each room. Well, I don’t really have a good answer for that. Years ago when I bought all of the equipment I bought the face-plates with room for 4 jacks. I knew that one would be telephone, one would be network, and one would be TV. What to do with the forth. I thought about just keeping it empty and covering the hole with a blank, but that would throw off the symmetry. Somehow I made the decision to go with a second coaxial cable, thinking that someday I could find another use for it. Once you have walls open and you are pulling cable, one more doesn’t matter all that much. Trying to do something after the fact, would never happen.

The second question is, why do cable at all. Why not just go wireless. Well, I wouldn’t be doing wireless cable TV, so there is one cable. I don’t own a cell phone {Gasp!}, so I need phone lines. As for wireless networking, in my opinion it is not reliable enough and the protocols change too often. For instance, my new wireless N router works well with my new netbook, but the wireless G card in my older notebook can’t connect to it. The desktop computer does not even have a wireless card. I’ve also noticed that the only place I can get a good connection over the wireless router is in the kitchen. In there I can get up to 90%. In the front parlor, 2 rooms away, I hover between 60% and 70%. So at some point I had to make the management decision to either pull cable or not. If I’m going to do it, now is the time to do it.

Each bedroom gets one of the these lovely little things on the wall. Oh, the white plastic is sooo Victorian, isn’t it? That is phone and network on top and two TV on the bottom. If anybody asks why there are 2 jacks for TV, I won't give them the reason above. Instead, I'll just say that I like to watch two shows at one time and none of my TVs has picture-in-picture.

Earthquake!?! What Earthquake?

2010-02-07T13:08:00.000-08:00

While not the finest or fastest plaster repair work I’ve ever done, at least it is done. And with that, I can now return to my slovenly, winter ways. {I've missed you couch}

And just in time for the Super Bowl!

Negative Space

2010-01-23T13:25:00.000-08:00

Work is progressing slowly on the earthquake repairs. I told myself every night this week that I was going to come home after work and put on the scratch coat, but that never happened. We have been getting a lot of rain lately and it really did not seem appealing to work with cold, wet plaster after work and then have to go outside in the rain to clean up the tools after plastering.

So today I got on the scratch coat. At this point, the plan is to do the skim coat tomorrow and then start to paint next week. I have a feeling though, that I will spend most of tomorrow on the couch watching the NFL play-offs. I think it will be best to let it cure for a week anyway. It will give me more working time with the skim coat.

Secure the edges with plaster washers

This is how it looks now with both the brown and scratch coats on

A newly discovered crack above the mantle

In Perspective

2010-01-17T17:21:00.000-08:00

Given what is going on in Haiti right now, my troubles following the earthquake here last week seem trivial, at best. I encourage everyone to donate to the relief in Haiti. Give what you can. There are a number of reputable agencies, but one place is The Clinton/Bush Haiti Fund. You can also text the word “HAITI” to 90999 to donate $10.00 to the Red Cross.

I had planned not to do much this time of year. This is a good time of year to sit inside and watch football and that is really all I want to do. However, it pains me to see the damaged plaster in the dining room. I just finished that room {Sigh!}

I secured the edges of the big hole with plaster washers and then used the rotozip to grind the old plaster out of the dove-tail grooves. I also found additional damage above each head block on the door that leads to the foyer. And of course, everything is covered with plastic again {Sigh!!!}. I guess I’ll be spending my MLKJ Day troweling on plaster {Sigh!!!}.

Since I was making a mess anyway, I decided to go ahead and strip off the damaged plaster in the foyer, as well. That was going to be the next project anyway, so the earthquake just moved it up the schedule by a few months. I probably won’t do much else with this until March. Hopefully I can have the dining room back in one piece in 2 weeks.

Heave Ho

2010-01-10T15:48:00.000-08:00

There was a woman quoted a few times in various papers saying that the 6.5 earthquake we had yesterday was nothing compared to the 7.1 Loma Prieta earthquake that struck Santa Cruz and The Bay Area in 1989. While it is true that the Loma Prieta was a much larger event, caused more damage, and affected more people, for me personally, the 6.5 yesterday was a much larger event.

At the time of the Loma Prieta I was within a half mile of the epicenter. I was outside though, so I was in no real danger. My home suffered almost no damage, and I didn’t lose a day of work. I’ve spent the morning today cleaning up plaster and right now there are a half dozen PG&E trucks across the street trying to find a broken gas line.

The damage to my house was confined to one corner. It seems like south-east corner of my house heaved up more than the rest. For the most part, the plaster damage is confined to the first floor of this south-east corner of the house. That is the foyer, stairwell, and the front wall of the dining room. Some of the skim coat popped off the walls in the kitchen, but that has more to do with the crappy skim coating job.

The Loma Prieta quake lasted 15 seconds. The one yesterday was more like 25 seconds. The last 10 or 15 seconds were very surreal. For the first 2 or 3 seconds of an earthquake you are coming to terms with the fact that you are in an earthquake. The adrenaline surges and you are acting purely on instinct. It is difficult to be subjective and really be aware of what is going on. You simply try to grab on to something.

Most earthquakes only last a few seconds, so they are over as soon as you realize you are in one. The adrenaline has rushed, the flight response kicks in, and by the time you are at the point of panic it is all over. With an earthquake like the one yesterday, after about 7 or 8 seconds in you realize this is not an average earthquake. That is about the time the major jolt hit and it felt like an airplane dropped on the house.

Yesterday, I was in the kitchen when it happened. When the big jolt hit, I was thrown to the floor and the TV came flying out of the cabinet. I grabbed for it and caught it just as it reached the end of the cable and electrical cord tether. By this time plaster is falling and I hear glass break. I’m in front of the eHutch and even though I know it and the big Frankenstein hutch are bolted to the wall, my instinct is to keep the eHutch from falling over and crashing in to the island. I let go of the TV and let it dangle while I grabbed on to the eHutch.

By this time I’m on my feet and trying to survey the damage and see if anything is about to hit me. Things are still moving a lot. This is when it gets very surreal. Both chandeliers are swaying violently and the walls are torquing and swaying back and forth. Unless you are doing hallucinogenics, large, inanimate objects should not appear to move like this. The walls torquing is what caused the poorly done skim coat to pop off the walls in the kitchen. That went on for what seemed like 10 or 15 seconds, but it could have been shorter.

As soon as everything stopped moving I ran to the garage to get a wrench. If there was a gas leak, I needed to shut off the valves at the meters. There is one shut-off for the house and then 3 for the apartments. After that I checked the water meters to make sure they weren’t spinning wildly. Fortunately, I had no leaks. I then walked around the exterior of the house to try and find out where the glass was that I heard break. I also just wanted to make sure everything was in one piece and still plumb. At least one house slid off its foundation yesterday. The breaking glass sound was faint, so I thought it would be upstairs, but I saw no broken windows. Later I would find that bricks from the dining room chimney had toppled off in the attic and broke a piece of old waving glass that was leaning up against the chimney. I then walked around the apartments to survey for damage there. Fortunately I found nothing there, as well.

Like I said, the real damage is at the front corner of the house. It seems like that part of the house was lifted differently than the rest. The dining room, stairwell and foyer all suffered major damage to the walls, and the chimney in the dining room also took a hit. In the butlers pantry on the outside wall you can see where the paint is cracked at the seams of the beadboard towards the dining room side of the room. It is like the boards slid past each other vertically a little. I also had a piece of trim at the top of that run of beadboard pop off. On the outside, the only odd thing was the garage doors. Of the two that face the street, the one on the left always stuck a bit when you tried to open it. It no longer sticks, but now the door on the right won’t close properly.

When an event like this hits, everyone in the city suddenly has a common bond. Everyone has a story and they want to share it and most want to hear it and share theirs. Today I was outside filling in some dirt along the new sidewalk when a man walks by. I had never seen him before and I’m not even sure if he lives in the neighborhood. Naturally we started to chat about the earthquake. I’m not sure who brought it up first, but we both began to talk about the Loma Prieta earthquake back in 1989. Long story short, not only were we both living in Santa Cruz in 1989, but we were both on the campus of Cabrillo college at the time of that earthquake. He was in the pool playing a game of water polo and I was walking from my car to the main campus. I just looked at a map of the campus and by my estimate, 20 years and 3 months ago, this man and myself were within a hundred yards of each other during the Loma Prieta earthquake and now we are both 400 miles north going through another large earthquake. Now that is surreal.

I wonder if our proximity to each other is what is some how causing the earthquakes.

6.5 Just Now!

2010-01-09T16:44:00.000-08:00

It could have been worse

When is a Change a Foot

2010-01-09T15:26:00.000-08:00

A change is a foot when it is my kitchen. The kitchen was the second room completed in the house and now this is the 3rd change I’ve made to it. The first change was the biggest and done almost immediately. I originally had a round kitchen table in the middle of the kitchen. The design of the kitchen relies on mostly free-standing cabinets and does not have a lot of counter space for its size. The idea was that the table would double as both eating and food prep space.

That didn’t work out. A table at eating height is too low to do food prep on and sitting while doing food prep doesn’t really work either. So the table came out and I built an island. I love the island. One end has a place to sit at, so one can still comfortably eat in the kitchen. It has lots of room for food prep, and it has a small sink with disposal.

A not so elegant shot of the island

The other changes have revolved around a small alcove. The alcove is an area in one corner of the kitchen that is roughly 4.5 feet wide and 3.5 feet deep. It is to the left of the old phone in the photo above. It is really a part of the porch and for a long time I thought they enclosed a small section of the porch. This turned out not to be the case. I won’t go in to the details about how I know it is a part of the original floor-plan, but it is. Originally, there was a narrow window in the alcove that looked out on to the porch. The question has always been, what do I do with this space.

Early on I bought a cabinet at a local salvage place that was the perfect size for the space. It was almost a perfect fit. However, that ended up going in the butler’s pantry, mainly because the place that I chose for the refrigerator was not working out. This was one of those situations where the design worked on paper, but not so much in real life.

In the alcove

In the butler’s pantry

So the cabinet went in to the butler’s pantry and the refrigerator went in to the alcove. That happen last spring and it is not working either. It is just a really awkward spot for the refrigerator, mainly because of where the stove is. It is really because of the location of the second stove. Yes, I have 2 stoves in the kitchen. One is the stove I cook on and the other is an over-the-top 1890s cast iron stove. They sit side-by-side in the kitchen.

The 1890s stove is eye-candy of the Nth degree. The thing is just a work of art. It has been professionally restored and it is in almost “as new” condition. I love the stove but it has got to go. I thought about putting it back in the alcove, but at the end of the day, that really wouldn’t work either. What it comes down to is that the alcove is pretty much dead space for most things. Essentially, I have 3 large things that need to go in this one area and there are only room for 2. I have 2 stoves and a refrigerator, so logic dictates that one of the stoves needs to go. The cast iron beauty is the one that is the most dispensable.

The original cabinet was really the ideal thing for the space, but it is too late to go back to that now. I could build another cabinet, but I honestly don’t need any more storage space. At this point I’m sure there are a half dozen people ready to leave a comment saying that I can never have too much storage. Honestly though, between the kitchen and the butler’s pantry there are 25 cabinet doors and 21 drawers. Six of the doors are more than 4-feet high. There are also more cabinets in the laundry room. I don’t need any more storage in this are of the house.

What I decided to do was build a desk, instead. I got the idea when I was watching The New Yankee Workshop on PBS a few months ago. The project that week was a kitchen desk. As soon as I saw that it became an obvious choice for this area. Why the heck didn’t I think of that. This desk will have a computer and phone. A single wide drawer for pens, paper, phone book, etc. I really don’t need a formal office, so this will be where I pay bills and take care of other things of that nature.

Antique on the right. Reproductions on the left.

Waiting on the marble

The desk occupies the entire width of the alcove and is a little more than 2-feet deep. For the top I will use some of the left over marble from the dining room cabinets. I had to buy an entire slab of marble for the dining room, even though I only needed a piece that was roughly 8X2 feet. The rest has been collecting dust on the fabricators back-lot for the past 6 months. I used salvage redwood for face-frame, drawer, and carcass, and I just happen to have a left over antique drawer pull that matches the other hardware in the kitchen.

The reproduction cast iron brackets are a close enough match for the antique originals on the island, but the quality of the reproduction brackets is not any where close to being a good enough. First off, the reproductions are not a perfect 90 degrees. I also had to grind off casting leftovers off the backs. If I had tried to mount them as-is they would not have been able to be flush to the wall.

The worst part was the screw holes. You’ll notice on the antiques, the holes for the screws are in small, extended areas that stick out on either side. This is so you can get the head of the screw past the design of the bracket. Not so on the reproductions. It was almost impossible to mount a screw on some holes on the reproductions. In two areas I had to grind the head of the screw down to almost nothing to get them to mount. Next time I scour for antique originals.

Now I can call the stone fabricators to come out and create a template for the marble counters. After that, it will most likely be weeks more of silence on the blog.

Two Years of My Life

2009-10-19T19:43:00.000-07:00

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