Getting the Lead Out

We went mining for metal in the front yard the other day. Not deliberately, of course. But these things happen.

Kathy and I were enjoying the nice weather all last week by gardening in the front yard. And by "gardening" I mean "pulling weeds." Almost nothing growing in the yard is there by choice. We just maintain the random flora as best we can, and try to eliminate the least-desirable ones.

I get bored easily, and so after dedicating a few strenuous minutes to weed-pulling, I found another project to occupy my attention. One that involves tools, electricity, and an element of danger. There used to be a big restaurant sign hanging out in the yard (and there soon will be again) that was illuminated at night. There are two lights atop the posts that hold up the sign, and two more lights down in the ground that shine up onto it. The wiring was getting old and ratty and really needed to be redone. Since Kathy had so conveniently removed all the weeds from that area, this seemed like a good time to redo it all.

The DPO* seems to have had a strange attitude toward electrical safety and code compliance. In some places, the 110V wiring was encased in conduit (metal in some places, plastic in others) and buried about a foot underground. No problem there. But in other places, the high-voltage wires were just sitting in the dirt inches under the soil. We've hit this wire with a shovel more than once, and the weed cover was about the only thing protecting it. With the weeds gone, the wire was often exposed, just lying on the ground. Not ideal.

So out it comes. I dug up all the 110V wiring, whether in conduit or not, traced it back to its source, and laid new conduit with fresh new Romex. And it only took me four trips to the hardware store! You know how it is: Once you get started on a fix-it project you think, "as long as I'm here, I might as well..." So the scope of the project keeps changing. And you never seem to have the right combination of elbows and unions in your junk box, do you?

Anyway, when it came time to cut off the old, dirty wires under the weeds, I was having a hard time. My cutters didn't want to nip through the wire as easily as usual. Hunh? That's strange. I know the wire's dirty and kind of stiff, but that's just encrusted mud, right?

Nope. Turns out it was encased in lead! Cleaning off the outside of the wires revealed a lead casing wrapped around it, like metallic Romex. I'd never seen that before. It had the usual 18AWG solid-core copper wires inside, but the outside was a thick jacket of this soft metal. Well, that explains how it held up to all those shovel strikes for so long.


*Damned Previous Owner.

A Bit of a Foot Fetish

This house requires a lot of woodworking. Good thing we've got a lot of wood. And sandpaper. And power tools!

Down in the kitchen, there's a doorway that needed some trim. It had been removed at some point in the past and replaced with simple, flat boards. We wanted to restore the original fancy redwood trim. Luckily for us, there was another door that had had its trim removed, and we could reuse that. Unluckily for us, only some of that old trim remained. The rest we had to fabricate.

We put up the reclaimed trim back in October, but it was heavily damaged, so we had to add onto it with some homemade prosthetics. Once that was all stripped, sanded, and painted, it looked pretty good.

Abraham Lincoln reportedly said, "a man's legs should be long enough to reach the ground." But our trim did not. The original doorway and the new doorway were different sizes. The reclaimed-and-patched trim was a bit too short. And the little footer pieces that sit at the base of the trim were lost, so we'd have to fabricate those from scratch.

I started with some leftover redwood molding that we'd used to repair windowsills when the house was painted last year, added some redwood stock to the bottom of it to get the right height, and put a pine backer on the whole thing to get the right thickness.

It's not an exact match for the original footer, but it's close enough. I wish now that I'd turned the redwood stock 90 degrees so that the grain ran horizontally to match the molding, but since it's getting covered with paint it won't matter. Still, it bugs me.

Here's a finished footer installed next to an original (and badly banged up) doorway. The new footers are a bit taller because the doorway is taller than its neighbor. After the first coats of primer and paint, I could see that the new pieces looked too "new," so I sanded off all the square corners and nicked and scratched it in a few places. On top of the footer, the left one-third of that vertical door trim is all new, too. I figure in about 20 years and another 15 coats of paint it will all look just like the original.

All Your Base Are Belong To Us

Sing it with me: "It's beginning to look a lot like... a restaurant."

We got our chairs a few months ago, and now we're getting tables. It turns out, restaurant-supply places all have ugly tables. It's easy to find your basic Formica countertops with steel table legs, but a lot harder to find something that doesn't belong in a diner.

So we approached the problem piecemeal. Let's find good table bases we like, and then find separate tabletops to put on them. Only half of that plan worked.

We did finally find some nice table bases. They're heavy, which means they're awkward (read: expensive) to ship. We got eight of those: four for smaller tables and four larger ones. The smaller ones will accommodate two-person tables, while the larger ones should seat four.

Then we went hunting for tabletops, and that was a complete bust. Discouraged and disappointed, we suddenly had the aha! moment. If we're going to cover them with tablecloths anyway, who's going to see the tabletops? Let's make our own. How hard can it be?

Right now we're about halfway through the process. We've assembled all of the table bases and bought the wood for the tops. Yesterday I built the first four tabletops; the next four are today's project. They're 3/4-inch pine with 1x1 pine molding around the edges. Once they're sanded we'll stain them a nice dark color and finish with a few coats of clear varnish. That should give the tabletops a nice smooth finish that repels water and won't snag tablecloths.

I'll let you know how it goes.