Watch That First Step... It's a Doozy

One of the things we discovered after pulling the carpeting off the front stairs was that the bottom step was rotted though. We'd suspected as much. When the wood gives way under your feet, you kind of know something's wrong.

Sure enough, when we ripped off the last piece of carpeting, some chunks of wood came with it. Now we had fist-sized holes in our front stairs. Only the bottom-most step seemed to be affected; the others were all fine.

As it turns out, the bottom step is (a) directly underneath the third-floor gutter, and (b) resting directly on a cement base. Because it's under the gutter, it got hit directly by overflowing water whenever that gutter backed up, which it used to do reliably every winter until I cleaned it out. But it probably overflowed a lot over the years and dumped water directly onto the same spot for decades.

Secondly, because the lowest step was built on a cement base instead of wooden risers, it couldn't drain. The water had nowhere to go, so the redwood just sat and soaked until it could eventually dry out. But because it's on the north side of the house, it rarely got any direct sun and probably took a looong time to dry. Taken all together, it's remarkable the bottom step lasted as long as it did.

For about a week we had a nasty piece of scrap wood lying across the hole so that nobody would twist an ankle. Eventually, Scott the carpenter (go ahead and make your astronaut jokes now) dug into the step and declared it a total loss. Enough of the wood had rotted through that it needed to be replaced, not patched. Fortunately, all the other steps were just fine. They'd been out of the water and lifted up enough to drain, so the problem was confined to just one level.

Here is Scott's replacement, made out of redwood just like the original. He also had to replace the square base of the newel post, seen in the background. Since the bottom step was acting like a sponge, the bottom of the post was constantly saturated, too, and slowly rotted away. We didn't know that because the hand rail was holding the post in place! But once the stair came away, it was clear that the post was dangling in midair.

New post base, new steps, and newly stripped remainder of the stairs. We're almost there.

As a side note, someone from the Pacific Grove Heritage Society wandered by while this was going on and asked if they could keep the original base of the newel post. They wanted it in their collection because the wood showed no pest damage at all, despite its age. You can still see the growth rings after 125 years. It had kept its shape and would have served for many more years if only it had been drained a bit better.

One Step at a Time

It seemed so straightforward at the time. Kathy and I wanted to remove the indoor/outdoor carpeting from the front stairs before the painting started. The carpet was getting a bit old, it was gray, and it just didn't look very nice. Better to paint the steps, right?

That's  how it always starts. In reality, the carpet was really hard to pull off. We must have spent more than two hours just pulling little strips of carpet off, piece by piece. It was glued down very thoroughly, and there was no way to get a good grip on it. We'd peel back one corner and try to pull, but it just wouldn't come up. We tried grabbing it with pliers, shoving pry bars under it, and using a knife to cut it into little strips. In the end, we just brute-forced it, pulling the stuff up in rough, irregular pieces. Yuck.

And after all that, what do we get? A really ugly set of stairs. Even after getting all the carpet up, it still had glue all over it, which just wasn't coming off.

We noticed that the painters were in no hurry to strip it, either. They'd find almost anything to work on before getting to those stairs. Now that we're more than four weeks into the project, they're almost out of excuses and the guy who drew the short straw has started stripping off the gunk. As of this morning, he's been through five 1-gallon cans of Jasco stripper, and he's still not done. I predict two more gallons to go.

After saturating the glue with Jasco, he scrapes it off, waits for it to dry, and then sands it down to the wood. Not the most fun he's ever had, I'll bet. But at least the wood underneath is solid (with some exceptions) and should paint up nicely -- in about six months, when he's finished.

Don't Fear the Painter

You know the old saying: Be careful what you wish for because you might get it.

Well, we've always wanted to add some color to the house, but now that we've got it, we're both having a tiny bit of panic. OMG, what have we done?

At first, they painted the entire house from top to bottom in Wedding Dress white, which was very close to the white color that was on it before. Apart from being fresher and cleaner, the house looked just about the same. So no drama there.

Then, the off-white/beige color went on some of the lower trim. At first, it seemed very dark brown (i.e., not glaring white), so that took a bit of getting used to. But we learned that it only looks dark up close. If you stand on the sidewalk or, better yet, across the street, it looks just fine. Our scheme was starting to come together. Hey, we actually know what we're doing!

But then the blue went on, and we both got nervous. Again, the first area painted was just outside the front door, so it stared you in the face as you walked in/out. It seemed like way too much color. But again, we decided that from a safe distance it looks just fine. And then more blue went on, and more blue, and more... Gulp.

Add to that the brick-red trim, and also a bit of gold. Up close, we were afraid it was turning into a circus tent. It's just so... different than before. But taken as a whole, it looks pretty darned good. All the neighbors have complimented the painters and said how nice it looks now, and I don't think they're just being polite. And when it's all done, the house will still be 90% white, so the purists can't really complain.

Best of all, some of the architectural detail is finally starting to appear. This was the main reason for painting the house in the first place. We wanted to highlight the gingerbread, so much of which was lost or hidden when it was all one color. Now that the painters are picking out some of the little details, stripes, knobs, and fiddly bits, it's really starting to show off the design that was there all along. So it's full speed ahead. Keep on painting!

Enter, Sandman

Here's a little still life at Chez Turley. It's dusty. It's always dusty here. Between my drywall dust, Kathy's plaster work, and the painters' dust from sanding the house with the windows open, there's just no way to keep clean. We polish little paths with our socks as we walk, but outside of these well-marked trails, there is dust.

Degree of Difficulty: 5.4

The first weekend after the scaffolding went up, Kathy and I tried climbing on it. After all, how often do you get to climb on someone else's scaffolding? Besides, there were some little bits of hardware we wanted to remove before they got in the painters' way, and the weekend was the ideal time to get up there and get it done.

There are four levels to the scaffolding; it doesn't quite match the floors on the house. The first level is only about 3 feet above ground level, which is even with the "grade level" of the first floor. (The house stands on a low pedestal, because it's on a hill.) The second level is about 8 feet above the first, and so on. The uppermost level of scaffolding is about even with the top-floor ceiling so they can reach the gables and roof. From inside the house, the top level looks like a roof or shelter. Nope -- they guys walk on that. Yikes.

Anyway, we wanted to give it a try.

We got as far as the second level and said, "Yeah, okay, that was fun. Let's go back down now."

Scaffolding bounces. A lot. It's like standing on a diving board, minus the water. The ironwork that holds the scaffolding together seems solid enough, but the 2x6 boards that you walk on are just, well, 2x6 boards. They lie flat across the gaps with nothing really to hold them together or keep them in place. You want to be careful not to dislodge a board with your toe because it'll just fall straight down. It's a life-sized game of Jenga.

Above you can see Kathy rounding the corner over the front door. She's almost two stories straight up, with her hand resting on the shingles below the balcony. Arrrgh! Walk the plank, me beauty!

The purpose of this exercise was to take down the house numbers and also to reconnoiter a little mystery. One of the painters said he'd found a secret Masonic symbol painted on the front of the house, so we climbed up to go find it. Sadly, it was just a little fleur-de-lis for decoration, not a secret symbol, so we were a bit disappointed. But hey, I can see my house from here!

A Bad Case of Measles

As they say in the painting business, "that looks like crap."

Good painters know that painting is really only 10% painting. The other 90% is preparation. Washing, sanding, scraping, patching, and filling holes take up way more time than spreading the paint. This job has been no exception. The scaffolding alone took two days to set up before the painters could even start. And it's been noisy around here ever since.

First came the power-washing. For two days, the painters had two gas-powered power washers going full time, hosing down the house. First it just washed off the dirt, but later it started peeling away the loose paint. And there was plenty of loose paint. They work in teams: one guy aims the power washer at the house while another guy runs around inside the house with an armload of towels, ready to soak up any water that leaks in. Smart move: old houses leak pretty fiercely when you hit them with 4500-psi water nozzles. It can do more than strip paint; it can take off fingers.

Next came the lead-abatement program. Old paint usually contains lead, and none more so than old white paint. (Lead is the pigment that turns the paint white.) Our painting crew is lead-certified, meaning they know how not to poison themselves when removing lead paint. Part of the secret is to use a special lead-binding goop that they spread on like primer, then scrape off. The goop binds molecularly to the lead, rendering it harmless. It doesn't exactly turn lead into gold -- not for us, anyway -- but it sure costs like it does. Without it, the State of California would make us wrap the house in plastic, cover the soil to a distance of 10 feet, turn off the water, and dispose of all the paint flakes in a toxic-waste facility. And the workers would all have to wear hazmat suits. No, we'll go with the goop, thanks.

Phase 3 involves good old-fashioned scraping. Day after day, we had four guys with paint scrapers climbing on, over, and around the house scraping away loose paint. It sounds funny from the inside. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. And you never know where they'll be, so the sound moves around unpredictably. It can be a little creepy if you let it get to you, like a bunch of small animals scratching to get in.

The final preparation involved sanding, both power sanders and just hand sanding. Again, the noise from inside was pretty strange and monotonous. Four buzzing power sanders on the outside walls for eight hours a day will drive you nuts. It must have been worse for them. Or maybe that's the effect of the lead.

Writing on the Bathroom Wall

Meanwhile... in the midst of painting the outside of the house and remodeling the downstairs kitchen, Kathy's also preparing to hang wallpaper in the two downstairs bathrooms. Good things come in threes, right?

The project started with stripping away the old wallpaper in the ladies room, just off the kitchen. The old wallpaper was a blue duck pattern that you can see here. Then things got weird.

There was another layer of wallpaper behind the duck wallpaper. It looks like an old Sears & Roebuck catalog, and at first we thought it was one of those fake olde tyme reproductions. You know, the kind with the black-and-white advertisements for stiff men's collars, lace-up ladies' shoes, and so forth. But something didn't seem right about it.

For starters, it's backwards. All the text and images are facing the wall. Okay, so maybe the fake old-fashioned wallpaper was designed to look backwards for "style" or so that you wouldn't be tempted to read the bogus ad copy.

But then we noticed that this old "wallpaper" has edges around each page of the faux catalog. It's not wallpaper at all. It's not wide strips. It really is a bunch of individual sheets of paper. Each page measures about 5" x 7" and no two are alike. If it was wallpaper you'd expect the pattern to repeat, but there are no repeats here. Also, the pages are nice and straight near the edges of the walls, as you'd expect, and then they get increasingly crooked as you move into the room. We can also see where the pages overlap each other. I'm starting to think this really is an old catalog with the pages torn out and pasted to the wall.

But if so, why is it backwards? Even catalog pages are (were) printed double-sided, so if you tore out a page and flipped it over, one side would still be facing you, not reversed. These pages all seem to be printed single-sided, and without exception every one is pasted face-down. Very strange.

The top of each page says, "SEARS, ROEBUCK, & CO. Cheapest Supply House on Earth, Chicago, CATALOG No. III." So far Kathy's uncovered pages advertising children's dresses, bicycles, medals/charms, fur coats, furniture, the "book department," men's suits, silverware, and (regrettably) accordions. Every page has a different page number; the highest-numbered one I can find is page #1082. Big book.

We're not sure whether the mystery catalog pages are worth preserving, but the question may be moot. The paper's stuck on really well and we can't scrape it off. So regardless of what it's made of, it's staying on. It seals the plaster and provides a smooth surface for Kathy's new wallpaper. Just another buried mystery for the next generation to solve.

True Colors

Here are our new colors!

After much deliberation, we (mostly Kathy) picked the final colors for our house. There are four: white, white, blue, and red.

If you've ever tried to pick out paint colors, you know how hard it can be. We tried all kinds of tricks: crayons, colored pencils, Photoshop, and finally the Kelly-Moore paint schemer. We tried photocopying a black/white picture of the house and coloring it, we looked at other houses, we checked out library books on Victorian décor and/or house painting (our local library has a surprisingly complete collection of both), and just plain ol' asking people.

Overwhelmingly, people seemed to want the house to stay white. A lot of them huffed and said, "it's always been white" which isn't true. Real 1880s-era Victorian people almost never painted houses white. Partly that's because it just wasn't the fashion, but also because white paint was difficult and expensive to make. (Ironic note on that in a moment.)

Victorian houses of the period were typically painted in dark earth tones, often with reds, browns, and beiges. Kind of boring, actually. The "painted ladies" of San Francisco fame are artificial; actual Victorians were never that garish.

We have a period photo of the house with Doctor Hart himself standing near the front door, and the house color is quite dark. In fact, it looks unpainted, like natural wood. Our paint-scraping crew just confirmed this: the shingles were originally oiled, not painted, which protected them from the elements but also made them a %!#@$ to strip.

So we know the house wasn't "always white," despite the protestations of our neighbors. It may have been white in their lifetime, but certainly not the lifetime of the house. The baker across the street says he knows the previous housepainter, who told him that the owner at the time wanted the house one solid color, as though dipped in white paint, but that he (the painter) talked him into the two-tone white-on-white scheme it has today. The two white colors are pretty similar; most people don't notice it. I couldn't even tell it was two colors until we'd lived here for a few weeks.

We wanted something a little bolder but without being garish. We weren't trying for a painted lady; just a bit of trim color to highlight all the "gingerbread" trim that's almost invisible now. After a lot of experiments and false starts, we finally settled on a combination of four colors.

With help from my sister, we Photoshop'd various color combinations, most of which we didn't like (not her fault). It's one thing to say, "I like green and blue and gold," and another to actually see those colors on the house. Our first (and second, and third...) impulses were all false starts, but at least we eliminated some options. Eventually we talked to Kelly Moore Paints, which offers a free Photoshop-like service using their own special software and paint colors. We told them what colors we were thinking of, and they scurried off and prepared eight alternative color schemes for us.

They were all terrible. "Unattractive" would be generous. They must farm the work out to colorblind felons on a work-release program or something. Their options were all bright, solid colors, like this Orange Julius stand on the left.

Fortunately, when they gave us back the eight renderings, they also gave us the software. That allowed us to experiment further and try some more reasonable options. Eventually we came up with the color scheme shown below. It's not exactly what we're planning, but it's as close as the software allows.

The base ("field") color is called Wedding Dress, which is serendipitous, as our daughter just got married. And no, we didn't choose it for that reason. (Kathy will tell you that I avoid reading the silly color names because I don't want them swaying my opinion.) The slightly tan off-white color will go on some of the larger trim areas, the blue goes on the scrollwork details, and the red will be used sparingly on some of the smaller details -- plus the front door.

But before we can paint, the scraping and sanding have to be finished, and it looks like we're still a few days away from that. The crew is outside from 8:00 AM every morning, with dust masks on, removing all the old white paint, which is probably lead-based. Ironically, Jon Stuefloten started his painting apprenticeship by mixing lead paint for his boss. Every morning, he said, he unwrapped a big brick of lead, scraped off shavings into a bucket using his penknife, added turpentine, and mixed it all together. His boss would then mix in the tints, judging the color by eye until it looked right. Now, 50+ years later, Jon's crew is painstakingly removing that same kind of lead paint.

Acrophobia 101

It's been instructional watching the guys put up the scaffolding.

These things are apparently a lot sturdier than they look. Because they sure don't look all that safe to me.

Here's the delivery truck parked outside the house. That's one day's worth of scaffolding. They had to come back the next day to deliver more. This load about covered the ground floor and part of the second floor.

It seems obvious now, but I'd never really thought about it before. Every scaffolding job is different. It's like real-time architecture. The guys have to decide on the spot how they're going to arrange everything, where the footings go, how to connect the platforms together so you can walk around the house, how to climb up or down from one level to the next, and so on. Watching them do it, you'd think they had it all planned out and just have to haul the materials in place. But really, they're making it up as they go along, dealing with uneven ground (and my ditches), irregular building shape, varying roof heights, wind direction, and everything else. It's pretty impressive, really.

They're also really good at not dropping things. Here, the guy on the bottom has just tossed a steel rod to the guy up top -- 35 feet straight up. Just try pitching a softball directly over your head; it's not easy. Now try it with something heavy without killing yourself.

By Day 2 they'd finished most of the house, including the top floor, as you can see here. It was a bit strange being inside the house and watching this stuff slowly creep upwards past your window. It's not a noisy process, so I couldn't always tell where they were or what part they were working on. Scaffolding would just appear out the window.

People, too. Here's one of the guys blithely standing outside my window -- on the third floor. He's three stories up, unattached to anything, building the very platform he's standing on. With no safety rail (yet). No hard hat, either, but really, what good would that do?

Trivia: When you rent scaffolding, you get it for 57 days. They won't rent it for shorter periods than that, even if you only need it for a few days. Most customers are plasterers, not painters, and plaster takes several weeks to set, hence the two-month minimum. In our case, that means we can keep the scaffolding longer than we need to, getting a "free" month. We plan to use that time to fix the wooden gutters and hang Christmas lights. Why not? We're not likely to do this again anytime soon.

Miss Sparkles

Newton's Third Law states that for every action there's a reaction equal in intensity but opposite in direction. Kathy has been upholding that law for a couple of weeks now.

As the guys work outside building scaffolding, sanding, and stripping the house in preparation for painting, Kathy has been toiling inside fixing our chandelier. It's a big thing hanging in the entryway but upon close inspection it's missing some pieces. Some of the crystals are gone, and others are just hung in the wrong place. The more she looked at it, the more work it seemed to need.

Friends would sometimes bring us spare parts or pieces they thought might fit, and that helped. But the thing really needed thorough cleaning and reassembly. So Kathy painstakingly removed all the crystals one by one and laid them out on the dining room table. Not least among her problems was how to reach over the second-floor banister and carefully unscrew all the fiddly little bits.

Our dining room table looked like an exploded diagram of a chandelier. It's a bit like repairing a British sports car: the more you work on it, the more parts you have left over, and there seem to be a lot more than when you started. ("Where does this piece go? Oh, well, it probably wasn't important...")

Kathy found a source for replacement chandelier crystals, and after those arrived in the mail she could start reassembling the thing in earnest, washing each piece, drying them, making the little wire loops, and putting them all back where they belonged (and not necessarily where they were before). It took a couple of weeks, but she finished yesterday afternoon and the thing is much nicer, cleaner, and more sparkly than before. I haven't done all the math, but if 5,000 pieces all get 10% more sparkly, that makes the chandelier 500 times sparklier, right? It sure looks that way.

A Certain European Charm

So this is what our house looks like now. A house with an exoskeleton.

We finally decided to paint the house. Okay, we decided to paint it a long time ago, but now we're doing something about it. As in, hiring someone else to do it.

Kathy and I have always painted our own houses. We painted the previous house twice in the space of a few months because we didn't like the first color we picked. The point is, we're not afraid to climb ladders and get dirty. (Well, Kathy isn't. She climbed up on the roof and painted the chimney last time while I, uh, carried the paint cans and steadied the ladder.) But this house is different. There's just no way we can reach the top floor and there's just too much old paint to scrape away. So it was time to call in the professionals.

We talked to three different painters and all three gave us roughly equal estimates. I took that as a good sign: at least agree it's going to be hard work. In the end, we chose Jon Stuefloten Restoration Painting because old buildings are his specialty. Coincidentally, we met Jon through the Point Sur Lighthouse. Like us, he's a volunteer there and he got the job of removing the 19th-century lead-based paint and restoring the lighthouse. We figured if he can do that job, he can do anything. He also painted the Carmel Mission last year, so the man knows his stuff. Plus he's a nice guy.

Reaching all the nooks and crannies of the house became his problem. At first, he was leaning toward using a bucket lift (a "cherry picker") to reach the top floor, but then how do you drive it into the backyard? We've got steps up from the sidewalk just to get into the yard, and very narrow passages around the side of the house. Jon had a carpenter plan out a big wooden ramp up from the street that the painters would use to drive the cherry picker up into the yard. That looked doable, if awkward. But then the painters tried using the cherry picker on another job and pronounced it unstable. They didn't like the way it swayed, so that whole idea was canned.

Scaffolding was Plan B. It took a crew of four people two days to erect the scaffolding you see here. Fortunately (and not entirely coincidentally), Kathy and I had already removed all the plants from around the house, so there was plenty of clear footing for the scaffolds. (Not so fortunately, I'd also left a lot of deep open trenches for sprinkler pipe. Sorry guys -- watch your ankles!)

When we lived in Munich, we used to drive around a lot and play tourist, visiting old towns, cathedrals, museums, castles, and whatnot. Inevitably, the buildings were always covered in scaffolding. It got to be a running joke with us. "Have you seen the scaffolds of Berlin? I hear the scaffolding in Paris is lovely this time of year!" Everywhere we went: scaffolds and restoration. We should have bought stock.

Now our place looks like one of those old buildings, hidden beneath pipes, boards, and braces. We get a lot of curious looks from the people on the street. But they take fewer pictures, I notice.