Know a Good Stripper?

Yesterday we got down on the floor and got dirty. (Cue Mike Rowe...)

In our quest to clean all the paint splatter off the bedroom floor, we smeared on some eco-friendly paint stripper. It's gooey orange stuff, like spreading a smoothie all over the floor. You let it sit for a few hours, then scrape off the cruddy residue. The stuff works surprisingly well, but it's still a lot of manual labor. Kneeling on a hardwood floor scraping off goo gets old after about... four minutes.


Still, we've got to admit that the floor looks a whole lot better than when we started. It's not there yet -- we've still got the sanding, staining, and polishing ahead -- but it's beginning to look like a real hardwood floor again. I will forever associate the smell of orange peels with remodeling.


Initial evidence suggests the other floors in the house aren't paint-splattered like this one. Let's hope.

Kitchen, circa 1962

This kitchen is as old as me.

I guess that's still relatively modern, for a house built in 1894. The Sixties was only fifty years ago, less than half this house's age. Somehow it doesn't look quite as quaint, however.

This is the upstairs (the "normal") kitchen on moving day. It looks better than this now, I promise. And it'll look better still after we gut and remodel it.

The green cabinet doors are hand painted and signed by "Bernadette." We don't know who Bernadette is/was, but one theory is that she was part of the Leitzinger family that lived here in the 1980s, several years after the kitchen cabinets and counters were put in. Maybe she was freshening up the place after several years. Whatever happens to the cabinets, we'll be saving the doors.

What Is This Stuff?

What came before Sheetrock?

Behind one of the closets is what appears to be drywall (Sheetrock, plasterboard, gypsum, etc...) but isn't. Instead, it looks and feels like some sort of painted paper layer glued over a fine fabric mesh. Some of it has flaked away, as shown here.

What is this stuff, and do I need to preserve it?

Still Floored

We never adequately embarrassed Cari for her help in stripping the carpet from the bedroom floor. So here goes.

Doorbell Mystery Solved

I'm so ashamed.

I solved the mystery of the amazing thermostat-controlled doorbell. It's mundane and not nearly as exciting as it was when it was still mysterious.

If you recall, we had an old thermostat and an old doorbell mounted a few feet apart on the same wall. A pair of twisted wires ran directly from one to the other, along the wooden molding, held down with insulated staples. No other wires in sight. And the doorbell worked. Huh? How's that supposed to happen?

I finally pulled both units completely off the wall, peeling up the wires as I went. Turns out the wires from the thermostat ran along the wall about half the distance and then disappeared through a tiny hole in the molding directly under one of the staples. And the doorbell wires came up through the same hole. The crossover was totally invisible under a tiny little staple. Impressive.

The doorbell still works (and the thermostat doesn't). But at least now I know why.

Art For Art's Sake

A local artist set up his easel in front of our house this afternoon.

And here's his subject: The Red House Cafe across the street.