I'm Board!

The molding work continues. I've been ripping, stripping, and shaping reclaimed redwood to make molding for the third floor. So far, it's coming along reasonably well. No major injuries to report, in other words.

This is a representative sample of what I've been making. It's five inches wide, and this particular piece is about eight feet long. Each length is different, since I'm reusing the basic baseboard trim that was already installed upstairs, and they were all different sizes.

I'll eventually have to piece these together, but so far I've been able to do the first five doorways using just single pieces of trim with no seams. I'll have to stitch together shorter pieces before long, but I'm saving those for less conspicuous locations.

I'll also need to go out and buy some more lumber, since we weren't able to reclaim enough wood to do the whole job. So the first doorways will use original wood, while the later ones will have new wood. Sadly, I don't think I can buy redwood at any price that will be as good as this old stuff.

Each piece required three or four passes through the molding machine. You can't carve out that much detail all in one go. The first pass allows me to make sure everything's lined up properly. Then the later passes take out more material, until it's all done. For example, this piece here still has leftover paint -- several different coats, in fact -- from its days as baseboard trim. One more pass through the machine should take that off.

Once these pieces were all cut, it was time to move on to the baseboard molding. That's a whole different profile, so it meant taking apart the machine and retooling with different knives.

The good news is, I could reuse different pieces of reclaimed redwood that were too narrow to use for the door trim. Somehow, the DPO used a mixture of thick and thin baseboard trim. The thick pieces are more than 5 inches wide, but the thin pieces are just under 5 inches, so I can't use them for door molding. But they make dandy baseboard trim!

This profile rests on top of a basic slab molding, so that the whole stack is 9 inches high and looks pretty similar to the original stuff that's downstairs. Unlike the door trim, the baseboard trim is not an exact replica of the original. Just a close facsimile.

Last of all come the plinth blocks: the thick base piece at the bottom of each side of door trim. It's the same profile as the baseboard molding, but thicker. The door trim is supposed to look like it's resting on top of the plinth block, like a Roman column. Whatever.

Naturally, we had to make these from scratch, too, but they're pretty easy. We start by cutting 5-inch sections of baseboard molding (both pieces) and then nailing/gluing a 3/8-inch piece of wood to the back. This gives us the profile we want, but thicker. Then you just nail that to the wall and you're done!

Here's a batch of them sitting out to dry. After the glue has set up I sand the bejabbers out of them to remove any seams and to hide my nail holes. I can do the edges with the belt sander, but sanding the contours requires hand-sanding and a lot of patience. It gets old after a while.

Speaking of getting old, I started hand-sanding every single piece of molding after it came out of the machine. The knives make nice sharp cuts, which is good. But the molding looks too "new." So I knock down the edges and the corners with some hand sanding, just to soften it up so it doesn't look like it came right out of a machine. I probably don't need to bother -- it'll get nicked up soon enough. But even so, I'd like it to start out looking like it's been here for 100 years.

Got Wood?

A very old project is finally taking shape.

Our third floor has never looked quite as nice as the other two. We suspect that it was originally unfinished, with just a basic floor and walls, minus the nice carved trim that was used elsewhere. The baseboard trim and door trim were/are just basic flat boards. We removed that basic trim several months ago when the oak flooring was installed, and we've stored it all in the garage ever since.

Our plan had always been to replicate the nice trim from the lower floors. But of course, that molding isn't available anymore. It was either carved onsite when the house was built, or ordered from a molding-supply company. Either way, it's been out of stock for... oh... about a hundred years.

No problem. We'll just make our own. Seriously.

One of our first heavy-equipment purchases was a Jet JPM-15 planer/molder machine. This is a noisy, vicious, and ludicrously dangerous woodworking machine that turns flat boards into custom-made molding and trim pieces.

The planer/molder works by spinning one, two, or three sharp knives at high speed while the wood passes underneath. Depending on the shape of the knife(s), you can cut any pattern you want. You can buy ready-made knives in all sorts of pretty patterns from molding-supply places, but none of them had knives that matched our existing trim.

So we bought a length of blank knife steel with the intention of cutting and grinding our own knives. It's very heavy and (duh) very sharp. You cut off a length of the knife blank and then grind it into the pattern that you want.

I spent a few days grinding my first knife and got pretty close to matching our molding pattern. Unfortunately, there are some small curlicues in our molding that I wasn't able to duplicate. I could get close, but my grinding wheels were too wide to duplicate the smaller details. So off I go to find narrower grinding wheels.

No luck. None of the building-supply stores or woodworking shops had what I needed. Dead end.

So I took the knife blank to a local cabinetmaker, along with a section of our old trim, and he agreed to cut a custom knife to exactly match the trim. It took him a few days and a few hundred dollars, but it's a perfect match.

Or at least, I thought it was. At first, I matched up his knife against the sample piece of molding I'd given him, and it was very, very close but not quite exact. No problem -- he got a lot closer than I did, so I can't complain about his workmanship. Then I flipped the knife around and held it up against the trim again, and it was an absolutely perfect fit. Guess what? Our trim is not actually symmetrical. It's slightly different on the left and right sides. More evidence that the original molding was probably not machine-made.

Now that I've got a perfectly-matched knife blade, I'm out of excuses. Time to fire up the beast and make some sawdust.

The planer/molder spins very fast, so you have to be careful about balancing it. I bought some scrap pieces of hardened steel from a local metal shop and cut and ground them to make counterweights. We have a hyper-accurate scale in the kitchen (for weighing food), so I weighed the knife and then weighed the two counterweights so they'd all match. It took a few trips back and forth between the bench grinder in the garage and the scale in the kitchen, but they're all within 0.5 grams of each other now. That's about the weight of a pinch of salt. That'll do.

The next step was to take the old redwood molding we'd reclaimed and rip it down to size. The molding we're matching is exactly 5 inches wide, but the plain baseboard trim we removed from the third floor is about 5-1/2 inches, so we had to trim off the excess. The edges were pretty ragged anyway, so ripping it all on the table saw helped smooth out the edges anyway.

I admit I stood back a bit and covered my face the first time I started up the machine with the new knife and counterweights in it. It's like starting a helicopter in your garage, but one with with heavy steel knives on the rotors. It makes a lot of noise -- and even more sawdust -- and if it's not balanced correctly it bounces menacingly. But everything worked okay. So far, so good.

I practiced on a few scrap pieces of pine first, just to see if it worked. And it does! Kind of. My first practice pieces had some high and low spots in them, as if the knife had dug too deeply in places.

That's because it had. I had to adjust a set of metal and rubber rollers that hold the work piece down so that it doesn't bounce on its way through the machine. Once that tweaking was done, the next practice pieces came out much better. Time to try the real thing.

At first, I started with short (2-foot) pieces of reclaimed trim. Then I moved on to the larger pieces, until we finished with two huge (10-foot) strips that used to live upstairs in Kathy's office. It's a slow process, and you can't really see it working until the wood starts to come out the other end (by which time it's too late to fix anything), but overall I'm pretty happy with it.

We've now got nearly 100 feet of newly made reproduction trim. That's barely half of what we need, so we'll have to buy some stock lumber and cut a lot more. But now that we've got the hang of it, that shouldn't take more than a day or two.

We're especially happy that we were able to reuse the exact same pieces of redwood trim that came out of these rooms initially. It's just being turned into something a little bit nicer.

A Game of Yards, Not Inches

Restoring the inside of an old house is all very nice, but you've got to maintain the outside, too.

We've neglected the outside yard for longer than we'd like, a failing that our neighbors have been kind enough to avoid mentioning. But over the last few months we've made a lot of progress. It's the greening of the Hart house.

This house had a lot of different landscape plants over its 120-plus years. Early on, it didn't have much at all. This photo is from around 1890, when the house was just a few years old and the first Dr. A.J. Hart still lived here (along with his two small children, pictured here on the front steps). As you can see, there's nothing much but some grass(?) and a few bushes along one side. Notice that the corner of the lot (right side of the photo) is nearly flat, with none of the terracing that would come later.

(By the way, this photo also shows the iron railing around the "widow's walk" along the roof line. We'd like to restore that one day. I also like the jaunty stripes circling the top of the "witch's cap.")

The young tree on the left looks like the beginnings of our present-day oak tree, but I don't think it's the same one. The one in this photo seems to be in the wrong place; our tree is a few feet closer to the house. It's unlikely that the tree moved itself, so this one is probably a different tree that eventually died (or was cut down) and was replaced.

This shows the house several years later -- the kids are grown now, and their dog Pedro is on the front steps  -- and the front yard has gained a few bushes. Apart from these, it's still mostly flat grass.

Fast-forward about 100 years, and the landscape has changed quite a bit. This 1970s-era image (below) shows three street plantings belonging to the city, and behind them some big, bushy trees and shrubs. There's a definite tree in the corner of the lot (right side of the photo), but it didn't last much longer. We've found its stump, but there are no other photos of the tree/shrub itself.

It's a bit hard to see in this photo, but the front yard now has its two-tiered terrace divided with bricks. Most of the grass is gone, replaced with low shrubs and flowers. And the house itself is painted almost solid white, with just a bit of dark brown trim. That would later change. It's clearly been re-roofed (probably several times), and the widow's walk is gone, as is the weather vane. Down by the sidewalk, an iron hand railing has been installed on the first set of steps. It's still here.

When we bought the house in early 2010, it had been vacant for more than two years. Before that, the owners had filled the yard with box hedges and agapanthus, neither of which we particularly liked. They're both low-maintenance (good) and green (good), but also overgrown (bad) and deer-bait (very bad). The deer love to eat the purple flowers off of the agapanthus, in particular.

Over the past five years, we've dug out all of the box hedges and most of the agapanthus. The former went all at once, in one big purge that involved a chainsaw, two shovels, and lots of swearing. The latter have been slowly reduced in number as we find time on the weekends and space in the yard-waste bin. Unfortunately, agapanthus have really big root systems that spread far and wide. Fortunately, we have very loose and sandy soil, so digging them out isn't all that hard. What you get is a big ball of thick, juicy roots, like a 10-pound clump of Chinese noodles.

Over in the backyard, things weren't much better. The restaurant used to serve customers out back, so they'd created a small brick patio to make it customer-friendly. Sadly, all that had deteriorated and was pretty ratty and rundown. The bricks were coming loose, the trees and shrubs were overgrown, and the wooden structures were falling over. This photo from move-in day shows a section of wooden fence tipping over. It was intended as a privacy screen between diners and the adjoining bed-and-breakfast inn (yellow building, left side of photo).

We eventually removed all of the bricks and reused them, one by one, to build a new patio. I think we had exactly six left over. The skinny little tree got removed entirely, and the rotting fence/screen disappeared into the back of the truck as well. The ivy growing on the back fence was running wild and pulling it down, so we cut all of that away and bolstered the fence a bit. Now we're training trumpet vines to grow on the fence in its place.

Little by little, we've dug out the old and planted the new. We've got an assortment of flowering bushes in the very front now, with some foxglove (digitalis) behind them. Alyssum fill in the small spaces. Some of the flowering bulbs that we found randomly scattered around the front yard have been left in place. We're not sure if they were planted on purpose or just found their way into the yard somehow, but we like them so we're keeping them.

Not everything has been a success. We keep looking for deer-resistant plants, but none of them really are. The young deer will eat absolutely anything. Even if they spit it out afterwards (which they often do), it still kills the plant or ruins the flowers. We've started spraying the yard with nasty-smelling deer repellent, and that seems to work. The downside is that it's, well, nasty smelling. Kind of a Pyrrhic victory.

So how does it look now? It's not finished, but we're getting there. Most of the plants are still new/young, so the front yard is looking a bit sparse, but at least everything there is there on purpose. It's the basis of the yard we want, not just what we inherited or what grew randomly when nobody was looking. And it's got some color, instead of just green leaves.

Wall-Ease

Okay, so the wall is done. It ain't pretty, but it's done.

When last we left our intrepid stonemason, he'd poured concrete up to halfway, then filled in some of the rest with concrete paving stones. That still left an ugly and hard-to-fill gap at the top. How to finish the job?

Taking the advice of everyone but myself, I finally finished it off by tediously cutting and fitting small bits of pavers to fill the remaining gaps. First I'd cut the existing concrete to make the edge more or less straight, then I'd cut a paver to fit. Move over 8 inches, lather, rinse, repeat.

Cutting concrete is remarkably dirty work. The dust it creates is really fine, and gets into everything. It's also abrasive and hard to sweep away, and if you get it wet it just sticks, like, well, concrete. So you have a dusty, gritty mess that doesn't want to go away. Now imagine getting it in your eyes and up your nose. For two days.

It also burned out my angle grinder. I guess the stress of cutting so much concrete and stone finally got to it. Either that, or the gritty dust got into one of the bearings and burned it out. I got to buy myself a new angle grinder. So there's that bright spot.

Here you can see the finished wall, with two coats of white paint. Before you malign my masonry skills, I should say that the blocks are supposed to be crooked and uneven, because the original wall itself is crooked and uneven. The top isn't flat, the edges aren't straight, and the sides aren't plumb. Whoever poured this wall originally wasn't getting graded for style points. Back when it was half-buried beneath our dirt steps, nobody noticed. But now that it's exposed, you can see how quick-and-dirty it was.

I had to somehow match that wavy, uneven wall using flat paving stones. So no, they're not perfectly aligned with neat symmetrical mortar joints. They're just as uneven as the wall they're repairing. It doesn't look too bad, does it?

A Left-Handed Compliment

Kathy overheard someone talking on the sidewalk:

"Oh, that's not a real Victorian house. It's one of those modern reproduction, faux Victorians. It looks too nice to be the real thing."

Uh... thanks?

My Little Yellow Friend

This week we replaced our light bulbs. Yippee!

We have a lot of ceiling-mounted chandeliers, both upstairs and downstairs, and they take a lot of little bulbs. There's always one burned out somewhere. It's like painting the Golden Gate Bridge: as soon as you replace one, another burns out, and so on. We keep a big stock of spare light bulbs in a closet, but it's getting expensive. And it's a nuisance, since replacing a bulb always means getting up on a ladder.

So we finally joined the modern age and replaced most of the little chandelier bulbs with LEDs. You can get LED bulbs in all shapes and sizes now, as well as in different "color temperatures." Early LEDs, like early fluorescent lights, used to give off a funny harsh white light. They weren't as warm and natural-looking as traditional incandescent bulbs. But now you can get LEDs any way you like.

We love 'em. They use only a tiny fraction of the energy of incandescent bulbs: about 4 watts, compared to 40W or 60W for old-style bulbs. So that cuts our lighting bill by 90%. And the LEDs don't get warm, so they don't heat up the room anymore. That's a big deal when you've got a chandelier in every room and six or more bulbs per chandelier. It's especially noticeable downstairs when we have guests in the house. The LED lights keep the room from getting too warm. Best of all, they last forever, so we won't have to climb a ladder every week to replace them.

They're not even very expensive. About $8 to $10 apiece when you buy them in bulk. So we took an inventory of our various light fixtures and bought new LED bulbs for just about all of them at once. We even changed some of the outside lights.

We made a special case for the big chandelier that hangs in our entryway. We wanted particularly "warm" bulbs there, so we picked an LED light that came in warmer color temperature (2100K, if you're keeping track at home), versus the more neutral 2600K color. They're great, but they're noticeably yellow/orange compared to everything else. It was a bit of a surprise when we first flipped the switch, but we kind of like it. You might say we've warmed up to it.

Joining the Masons

"I'm not a stonemason, but I play one on TV."

One side effect of converting our mud steps into a mud ramp is that it exposed a previously buried part of our neighbor's construction. As you can see in the photo, our neighbor on the right has a set of concrete steps running alongside our homemade ramp. The property line runs between the two, basically on the left side of the low concrete wall. No, there is no easement.

By digging out our steps and smoothing it into a continuous ramp, we lowered the soil so much that it exposed the unfinished side of that low concrete wall. In fact, we almost undermined it. When their wall was poured, the wooden forms only went down to then-ground level. Now we've lowered that by a foot or so, exposing the bare dirt under their wall. What to do?

We can't leave it as-is, because rain and weather would eventually erode the soil under their stairs. We need a way to shore it up. But spreading concrete vertically is... well, it's impossible.

Back in 2013, I made my own wooden forms and started pouring ready-mix concrete to fill in the spaces under their wall. That worked okay for a while, but I could only pour it about three-quarters of the way up. After that, there wasn't enough room to squeeze new concrete in underneath their existing wall. So I left a gap, albeit a much smaller gap than before.

This week, we made a big push toward a final fix. If I can't pour concrete up the side of their wall, maybe I can brick it in. So we took some unused pavers and started stacking them up and fixing them in place with mortar. With some cutting and fitting, we were able to fill in most of the big remaining areas. We've still got some small gaps to fill, but that's a project for another day.

Anyone have any ideas?

Ramping Up

It's an uphill battle. We started making a ramp from the sidewalk to our backyard five years ago, and today we're still working on it.

Back in 2010 when we moved in, there was a set of rough steps from the backyard down to the street. They were just packed mud held together with some rotting wooden boards. It wasn't pretty, or very safe, and I'm sure the person who created the steps didn't expect them to last more than a few months. But years later, here we are.

Kathy and I decided back in 2013 to dig out the mud steps and smooth it into a ramp. How hard can it be, right? So we dug and we filled and we measured, and we re-dug, and so on until we got more or less the ramp we wanted. Nice! Now it was much easier to roll the garbage cans out to the curb instead of bumping them down the steps. It was also a lot easier to bring stuff up, like when we bought a new refrigerator. The ramp was especially useful once we started outfitting the downstairs commercial kitchen. No way that giant range would have come up those old muddy steps!

As an added bonus, the house is now wheelchair-accessible. It's not strictly ADA-approved, but it definitely works, and it's much better than anything that was here before.

But a mud ramp is still a mud ramp, so we "paved" it with rubber tiles. Home Depot had some outdoor tiles made from recycled rubber, and they were exactly half the width of our ramp, so two of them side by side fit perfectly. So we bought a couple dozen and flopped them down into the dirt. Much better.

Except that when it rained, the mud washed over the brand new tiles. And when it rained hard, it would make channels under the tiles and undermine the whole thing. By the middle of winter, the ramp was a muddy mess again. So what's Plan B?

We decided to pour a layer of concrete under the tiles to harden the surface and prevent rainwater from washing everything away. That meant lifting up all the tiles, digging out a few inches of dirt, putting down chicken wire to reinforce the concrete, and then mixing and pouring the concrete -- on a slope. Be sure to mix it thick or it will all run downhill.

Once that was done, we flopped all the rubber tiles back in place. Ta-da!

Now we've got a new problem. The tiles slip and skid on the new concrete surface, so we need a way to hold them in place. After experimenting with a few different adhesives, we settled on one that seems to work bonding rubber to concrete, doesn't wash away in the rain, and doesn't smell too terrible. (Well, two out of three.)

Yes, Deer

We get deer. They eat our flowers. We don't like deer.

Deer are cute from a distance. Or the first few times you find them in your yard. After that, they're just another nuisance, like big raccoons. Right now it's deer-and-baby season, so they're especially cute -- and especially destructive.

All the flower shops and nurseries around here sell "deer-resistant" plants. That is, plants that the deer aren't supposed to eat. Local lore has it that deer don't like purple flowers, so everyone plants purple plants. Doesn't help. The deer eat them anyway and besides, aren't deer colorblind like most animals?

We've been through all the "deer-resistant" plants in the nursery and the deer have eaten every one. We've even caught the culprits on camera, strolling through our yard at 2:00 AM when nobody's looking. Stupid deer.

So we got a deer sprinkler. This is a $60 sprinkler you put in your yard that's motion-activated. You point it at the suspected deer approach path, connect up a garden hose (and turn on the water), and stand back. When a deer-sized object walks in front of the sprinkler -- bam! Water spray.

Kathy and I tested it by soaking ourselves. It seems to work.

Now we lie in wait and listen for the psst-psst-psst sound of the sprinkler at night. So far, it hasn't gone off. But we also haven't caught any deer in the yard or seen any new flowers bitten off. So maybe it's working. Or maybe it's just coincidence and the deer haven't been this way in the last few days. Or maybe they're really crafty and recognize the sprinkler and know to avoid it.

Deer. Can't live with 'em. Can't shoot 'em.

Buy the Book

We're in a real book! Well, us and a few dozen of our neighbors.

The bookstore next door to us collaborated with a local writer/photographer couple to write, photograph, and publish a book all about Pacific Grove architecture. And we made the cut! It focuses mostly on Victorian and Craftsman styles, but also includes some interesting modern examples, a few churches, and a couple of notable commercial buildings. Overall, it's a nice look at the variety of architectural styles that our small town enjoys.

Every building gets a two-page spread, with a full-color photo on one side and a few paragraphs of history, lore, or funny stories on the facing page. Rebecca Riddell wrote all of the text and her husband Craig took all the photos.

There was a nice launch party last week, and everyone whose house was mentioned got invited to attend. We got to meet some new neighbors and swap old-house stories.

In a nod to privacy, the book doesn't include any interior shots, nor does it give out specific street addresses or mention the the names of current owners. Kathy and I have decided to turn this into a game. We recognize virtually all of the buildings in the book, but we can't always place the address. So our goal now is to make it into a kind of architectural scavenger hunt, locating each house on our walks and writing down its address on the relevant page of the book. Let's see how long it takes us to collect the whole set!

The first printing of Pacific Grove Architecture & Anecdotes was 1000 copies, and the publishers were kind enough to give an autographed copy to each homeowner included in the book. We got ours at the launch party, and we bought a few additional copies for family. If you're interested in buying your own, you can get it directly from the bookstore/publisher at www.BookWorksPG.com or by calling 831-372-2242.

Now if we see other people out on the sidewalk holding the book and writing in the margins, we'll know what they're doing.

Auf der Mauer

Speaking of Tom Sawyer, we decided to whitewash our fence. But unlike Tom, we didn't manage to talk our friends into doing the work for us.

We're on a hill -- the whole town is on a hill -- so our lot slopes. It's higher in the back than the front, and Dr. Hart decided to build a waist-high retaining wall around the front of the house. That allows the house to sit at ground level without putting the entire back of the house underground. It also means that if you're standing on the sidewalk in front of the house, it appears to sit up on a mound, because it is.

At any rate, the paint on this masonry wall had been steadily flaking off since forever. It finally got bad enough that we decided we needed to repaint it. A simple job, and one we could do in our spare time when the weather was nice. Like right now.

Like any painting job, the painting is the easy part. All the real effort goes into preparation. So Kathy and I started by scraping off some of the loose paint. While that was satisfying, it wasn't getting all the old paint off. So we kicked it up a notch and used a wire brush on a power drill. That was better... but still not quite enough. So we took a break, rented a pressure washer, and really went to town on the wall. Pressure washers are fun if you're careful not to cut off your foot with the high-speed stream.

The wall also has some serious cracks in it. They don't go all the way though, so there's no risk to the integrity of the wall itself, but they're ugly and needed to be patched. We used a combination of ready-mix concrete patching compound (hard) and concrete filler (soft) to fill the cracks and holes. The patching compound dries up really hard (duh), so don't use any more than you absolutely need, because it's hard to remove afterwards. It took a few hours with the angle grinder to smooth it out.

Once all that was done, we wiped TSP all over the wall to remove any traces of mold, grease, adhesive, or whatever. That was followed by some elastomeric masonry primer, which looks watery and useless, like nonfat milk. Time for a lunch break while the primer dries.

Monday afternoon we finally got to the painting part! Kathy and I split the chores, she with the brush and me with the roller. We managed to keep pace with each other and finished the first coat of the entire wall in maybe six hours. Not too bad.

The next morning we put on a second coat, and now it looks pretty good. With any luck, this should last another 20 years or so.

A lot of people stopped by to give words of encouragement or to wish us well. "You kids are doing great!" someone said.

Kids?

Can I Paint Your House?

Sometimes I feel like Tom Sawyer (or is it Huckleberry Finn?). If we're clever, we can finagle other people into painting our house for us.

And by "paint" I mean "paint a picture of it." Not quite the same thing. But we've had a handful of people over the years either offer to draw/paint a picture of the house, or actually make a painting and then show it to us.

Sometimes we even get them for free. A few years ago, a professional photographer took a picture of the house around Christmastime and then gave us a great big print of it for free. Other times, strangers have showed up at the door and handed us framed prints, paintings, or photos and said, "Here. Better it should sit in your attic than mine." A couple of these are hanging on the walls downstairs. Others sit in a closet.

Today was another day like that. A nice lady showed up at the door and offered to sell us her sister's original painting of the house. You can see it here, if you're interested. She was pleasant enough, but we really weren't in the market for a painting, so we took her information and left it at that.

Now, if she wanted to paint the outside, or redo the roof, or fix some shingles, we might be interested...

One Step at a Time

This was a small project that had been nagging at us for a while. When you open the back door from the downstairs kitchen, it's a big step down to ground level. It startled us when we first moved in, and it's startled a lot of other people since then. We've been wanting to put in a proper set of steps for a long time, and this weekend we finally did it.

In case you're wondering, stairs and steps are usually about 6" or 7" high. That feels normal, comfortable, and safe. If you have to step up or down much more than 7 inches, it starts to feel funny. Especially if it's a big step down. Ours? It was 13" down to the ground. People would go "ugh!" and get that momentary look of panic on their faces, thinking they'd somehow accidentally missed the step and were about to face-plant in our backyard. No more.

You can see here that there's a brick step right underneath the door, but it's not the right size. It's old, but we don't think it's original to the house. My best guess is that it was added in the 1930s when the house was remodeled (for the lavish sum of $2000, according to a local newspaper account). It's clear that the brick was done after the wooden skirting, because the ship lap siding goes behind the brick. It's not doing the job, but on the other hand, we don't want to demolish it if we don't have to. And it turns out, we don't have to.

Covering the brick with some wooden steps would be easy enough... but it's never that easy. We also need to accommodate a temporary wheelchair ramp up to the door. We get a fair number of wheelchair-bound visitors here, and we've gone to a lot of trouble to build a ramp all the way from the sidewalk to our backyard. The metal temporary ramp is the final step (as it were), into the house. Without the ramp, the whole project is pointless. So we've got to build steps that go over the brick but stay under the ramp. Piece of cake.

Remember when your 3rd grade teacher said math was important because you'd use it later in life? She was right. We fiddled with the numbers and came up with a design that could do everything we wanted. Rather than use stringers alongside the steps (like we did on the back porch), we just built a kind of box that sits on top of the brick platform. It effectively raises the step to a perfect 6" height below the door and -- ta-da! -- it's also 6" up from ground level! So stepping out of the back door feels less like cliff diving and more like a stroll in the park.

Nothing around here is level, of course, so some shims and sanding were involved. Then the framework got screwed into the skirting underneath the door, plus an expansion bolt down into the brick. That should hold everything in place. The whole thing is designed to shed water so it doesn't get trapped anywhere and start to rot the wood.

Most of the pieces on top are redwood strips about 1 inch wide, except for the very front piece, which is a 2x4. Since it's a lot thicker than all the other pieces, I notched it out so that when it rests on the framework it's the same height as everything else. I also did a quick roundover on the router to put a bullnose on the front. A few extra strips across the front hide the underlying brick but leave just enough of a gap to let water out and avoid resting on the damp ground.

Now my biggest concern is getting used to walking on it. We've made that long step down for so many years that I'll probably trip the first dozen times I come out the door.

It's All In the Wrist

We've been doing electrical work, and I've got the scars to prove it.

Kathy and I are refinishing the 3rd floor, adding new baseboard moldings and door trim. All of the old trim has come off, so we've had ugly exposed plaster and framing for a few weeks. That's not very pretty, so this week we started the long, slow process of making and installing the new trim.

We want to duplicate the trimwork on the lower floors as closely as possible, so that means making everything from scratch. To start with, we're making our own baseboard molding. We're doing it in two pieces that will be about 9 inches high when they're put together. The lower half of the trim is pretty plain, so we can do that with simple 1x6 dimensional lumber. It's the upper half that will be tricky, but that's a post for another day.

Ick. And no floor. 

But even the simple stuff is never simple. Before we put in the trim, we have to reorganize every single electrical outlet. Every room upstairs on the 3rd floor is different. Some have a lot of electrical outlets and some have almost none. Some are fed from the old knob-and-tube wiring and some have brand new modern (and grounded) Romex on a 15A or 20A breaker. It's a real mix. So we wanted to rationalize all of that. And since the downstairs rooms all have their outlets mounted within the baseboard trim, we wanted to do the same upstairs. So that means moving what outlets we have from their random locations scattered around the walls down to the same height, about 1.5 inches off the floor.

"As long as we're here..." Think Domino Effect.

The 3rd floor of this house has never had heat of any kind. No furnace, no fireplace, no nothing. So this seemed like a good time (meaning, the one and only time) to remedy that situation. We shopped around for awhile before finding some nice electric baseboard heaters that we liked. Each room upstairs will get one or two permanent heaters, and they'll all be fed by the new electrical wiring that we added a few years ago. Advance planning finally pays off!

Like threading a needle. Blindfolded. 

So the project now involves moving every single outlet on the entire floor, adding a bunch of new outlets where there weren't any, and routing power to a new set of baseboard heaters. All before the baseboards themselves can go in. So this "trim project" is really an electrical project.

But how do you run new electrical wiring in an old house? Where does it go? You can't just poke holes in the drywall and then patch it later like a modern home. So my plan was to bury the wiring behind the new baseboards. It would be out of sight, and semi-safe. We'll call this Plan A.

Technically, the wiring really should be protected by metal conduit so that someone doesn't accidentally drive a nail through it later. That would make it safer. It'll be a huge nuisance to bend all that conduit around the odd corners and angles upstairs, but it's doable. And I'll have to notch out the back of the baseboard to make a channel for the conduit. Call that Plan B.

But then Victorian architecture unexpectedly came to the rescue. The third floor has big exaggerated eaves on the outside, and this means there's a triangular-shaped space behind each wall. A space big enough to hide wires in. A-ha! Let's just route the wires in the hidden space behind each wall! It'll be safe and out of sight, and it leaves the original construction completely undamaged. Plus, I don't have to bend conduit or route a channel behind the molding. Let's go with Plan C.

At least the new wire is bright yellow. 

Piece of cake, right? Everyone knows how easy it is to just toss a coil of stiff electrical wire from one outlet to another one on the opposite side of the room. And hey, the holes for the outlets must be at least four inches wide. How can you miss? Never mind that you're doing it blind, behind a wall. And that your arms don't fit through the holes. And that 12/3 Romex is stiff and uncooperative. And that you have to magically "toss" this wire around corners. How hard can that be?

Pretty hard, as it turns out. I spent two solid days just teasing the %#@& wire from one outlet to the next. If both outlets were on the same wall, it was pretty straightforward. The eaves leave a big triangular space with no obstructions (okay, few obstructions) to get in the way. But coaxing the wire around corners was a real challenge.

After much experimentation, my preferred method was to use a long pole. First, I'd poke the wire through one hole in the wall, aim it toward the corner of the room, and just start pushing. Because 12-AWG wire is pretty stiff, it goes more or less where you point it -- for about two feet. After that, it droops and coils and goes wherever it wants to. But it's a start.

Bottles. Always with the bottles. 

Then, I try to fish the wire out from the opposite hole using a pole. At first, this was pretty easy. I caught the wire on the first try, so I figured I'd get all the rest of them done that afternoon. No, that was just beginner's luck. The gods were toying with me, because all the ones after that were exponentially more difficult.

(You'll notice in the photos above that there is no floor. The space in the eaves behind the walls just drops away, so if the wire starts pointing downwards, it's likely to go down a very long ways. Just adds to the challenge.) 

I taped a paperclip to a collapsible pole to make a hook to catch the wire. But how do you get a 10-foot pole through a 4-inch hole? Very carefully. I can collapse the pole so that it's only about 3 feet long, and then carefully poke that through the hole. Then I let it rest behind the wall, totally out of sight, and reach one hand through the hole and, little by little, expand the pole using my fingers. It takes a while, and really cramps up your hand after the tenth time, but it works. Now that I've got a long pole, I can wave it around behind the wall and try to catch the wire. And then try again. And again. Keep going... Almost got it... Maybe this time... C'mon, where is that %@#$ wire? You get the idea.

There's no way to see behind the wall (it's really dark) and putting my eye up to the hole doesn't tell me anything except that there's cobwebs and dust back there. (Don't inhale too deeply.) But you know what does fit? My phone. So after every dozen or so failed attempts to catch the wire I'd stick my phone through the hole, snap a flash photo, pull the phone back in, and examine the situation. I now have about a hundred photos of the insides of my walls. Can you say that?

Little by little, outlet by outlet, wall by wall, room by room, I got them all done. We now have shiny new wiring pulled all the way around the upstairs rooms, all fed by a total of six circuit breakers. That should be enough for all the new outlets as well as the new heaters. And if not, I can tell you just where you can put the extras.

Drip Rail

Some woodworking is decorative. Other times, it's just functional.

I made three drip rails the other day to try to stop some invasive water problems. The back of the house faces south, so it gets most of the sun and a lot of the wind. In wet weather, the rain often beats against the doors and windows on that side of the house. And in a couple of cases it's sneaking its way in.

I've caulked and sealed around the doors and windows, but water is crafty stuff. Like ants, but more persistent. So I finally got a clue from other parts of the house and installed drip rails over the affected openings.

They're not super fancy or anything, but they do the job. I modeled these after the drip rails on other parts of the house, particularly the second-floor roof overhang. It's just redwood 2x4 with the edges rounded over and then angled at about 40 degrees -- same as the rest of the house. I put a small kerf cut into the bottom surface to stop the water from wicking up the underside.

A few screws, some caulk, a little paint, and voila! Rain stopper.

The project was not without its complications, though. I almost goofed up and nailed a door shut. One of the doors opens outward, and I was about to install the drip rail so low that it would have blocked the door. Oops. Better raise that one up a few inches, boss.

The Hunt Begins

Now that the third floor has, well, a floor it's time to start on the next phase of the project: new molding.

The upstairs never had the same nice molding as the two lower floors. Instead, it's all just 1x6 painted in a variety of 1960s colors. We want the third floor to be as nice as the other two, so we need to duplicate some of the same trim work. Trouble is, the stuff downstairs is 120+ years old and they aren't making it anymore.

But we foresaw this problem. That's why we planned ahead and bought a secondhand Jet JPM-15 planer/molder, a massively heavy machine that turns ordinary wood into beautiful custom molding. Just push the button and whoosh! instant molding pops out. That's how it works, right?

Well, almost. There might be just a wee bit of prep work involved, but we'll talk about that later. For now, I need to find a way to replicate these rosette corner blocks. They're exactly 5 inches square and made of redwood, but I'd be happy with pine or just about anything else. It's easy to find similar corner blocks at a lumber yard -- heck, even Home Depot has something close -- but they're all too small and missing the octagon around the central rosette.

I don't have a lathe, so I can't make my own. And I don't know how I'd make the eight straight sides anyway, except maybe with the router. It would be tedious, but it might work.

I'd much rather find something ready-made, but I can't find any equivalents online. If anyone out there knows where we can get some, let us know! We'll even offer a bounty of... uh... some sacks of redwood sawdust.

The Postman Always Rings

Our big excitement last month was moving the doorbell. The fun just never stops.

For as long as we've been here, the doorbell chime has been mounted more or less in the midpoint of the house. It's down low on a wall in one of the 2nd-floor rooms. You can hear it from just about anywhere, so no problems there. It wasn't very nice to look at, though, and the doorbell wires had to follow a remarkably twisted route to get there. Let me explain.

From the doorbell button by the front door, the wires go through a little hole in the wood trim, down the length of the door frame until they reach the crawlspace under the house, then 30' over to a transformer that dangles in midair, supported only by its wires. From there, the wires went up through a hole in the floor, appeared along the 1st-floor molding, ran up a door frame to the ceiling, through a hole, reappeared in a 2nd-floor closet, through the closet wall, along a bedroom wall, through another door frame, and along some more floor molding before finally reaching the doorbell chime itself.

I can't imagine how (or why) someone worked so hard to place the doorbell in exactly that location. It's just nuts.

I wanted to move the doorbell to a less-conspicuous place, and, incidentally, clean up the circuitous wiring. We found a good spot just 10' away near the stairs. Since the space under the stairs is hollow, it provides plenty of room to mount the doorbell and run the wires. And, since the stairs are also right next to the old dumbwaiter shaft, I've got a big vertical runway all the way down to the crawlspace. Voila! Instant wiring chase.

Dropping the new wires (as in, literally dropping them down the shaft until they hit the dirt under the house) was super easy. The only tricky part was disconnecting the old doorbell wires and replacing most of that old rat's nest. Oh, and I replaced the little DC transformer and screwed it down to a floor joist instead of just letting it just hang there in midair. Sheesh.

We tested the doorbell and it's louder! I think all that old wire was putting up some serious resistance, so the new wire provides noticeably more current. An added bonus. But mostly I just like tidying up the old wires. We could probably recycle the copper for some real money.

The Doors, Vol. 2

It's like painting the Golden Gate Bridge: As soon as we finish some task it's time to do it all over again.

Case in point this week is the back door to the upstairs kitchen. I "fixed" this a few years ago (March 2011) but now it was time to fix it for real. When we moved in (exactly six years ago today!), this door had one panel cut out, probably for a cat door. The DPO had replaced the empty hole with a cheap piece of plywood. We, in turn, replaced that with a finely crafted replacement panel that lasted about five years.

My mistake was in making the replacement out of MDF, which doesn't stand up to weather very well. After five years of getting rained on, it was coming apart. So I un-hung the door, put it up on saw horses, and removed all my old work. What a mess. Now we're back to the way it was five years ago, with a hole in it.

This time, the replacement panel is made out of solid pine, which should withstand the weather much better. It's also got several coats of primer and caulk around all the edges so that it won't trap water anywhere.

The real trick, though, is getting the panel into place. The door was originally assembled in pieces with tongue-and-groove panels, rails, and stiles. The panels are "trapped" inside grooves cut into the rails and stiles, so you can't just casually pop in a replacement without disassembling the entire door. Cutting out the old panel was easy. Putting in a new one is a whole different problem.

What I wound up doing was building up the replacement panel in three pieces, like a kindergartner's jigsaw puzzle. One piece fits into the top and right-hand grooves. A twin piece fits into the bottom and left-side grooves. And a third piece goes in between the other two, forcing them apart to create a snug fit. Once they were all assembled, I glued and sanded the whole assembly to hide the seams.

Once that was done, I recreated the raised panel in the middle using another piece of solid pine. (There are two of those; one on each side of the door.) That was fairly straightforward: Bevel off the edges using a table saw at about 35 degrees, and then add the eight vertical grooves with the router. I sanded off all the sharp edges and even nicked it in a few places to make it look old and worn.

One problem I didn't anticipate was curling. I splashed some primer onto the raised panel, and the moisture in all those parallel grooves caused it to roll up like a cylinder. I had to spray some water onto it and weight it down with my toolbox to get it to lie flat again. After a few days it was fine and I could attach the two raised panels onto the door panel, one inside and one outside. Then a few more coats of primer and some more caulk made sure it wouldn't trap rainwater.

Here's the replacement panel next to an original one. Can you tell which is which? With any luck, these should last another five years or so!

Itty Bitty Tiles

Now that the floor is done upstairs, we could finally finish the bathroom tile project we started almost four years ago.

When we tiled the 3rd-floor bathroom initially, we stopped a few inches short of the door threshold because we didn't quite know where the new floor would end. Consequently, there's been an ugly four-inch gap at the doorway that everyone had to step over. Hah! No more!

We cleverly stored some leftover hexagonal tiles in the garage, waiting for this day. The only trick was duplicating the correct black/white pattern. And the other trick is cutting tiles in half where they meet the wood floor. Fortunately, we also stored the tile nipper in the garage, and it makes short work of snapping these little ceramic coins in half.

Now we've got tiles right up to the edge of the doorway, with no gaps. The final step will be to grout around the new tiles so that the gaps aren't all white (like in the picture). That's probably just a one-hour project... which means it will take us six months to finish it.

Bernadette's Pony

We killed two birds with one stone last week. We divided off a part of the downstairs kitchen, and we finally found a use for the "Bernadette doors."

The big cooktop and range downstairs backs up to the swinging door into the kitchen. It's an ugly thing to see when you enter the kitchen, but it's functional and it keeps idle foot traffic out of the cooking area. It's been this way since we got the range about a year ago.

Last week, we built a little half-high pony wall behind the range to shield it from view and make the entry into the kitchen a bit nicer. It's nothing substantial: just some 2x4 framing covered with 1/4-inch drywall. I even turned the 2x4 sideways so the wall is thinner than standard. The whole thing is anchored to the floor and the kitchen wall, and has a cutout near the bottom to accommodate the big gas shutoff valve.

That part was all pretty straightforward, but to dress it up we re-hung the old kitchen cabinet doors we'd saved from our upstairs kitchen remodel back in 2010. If you recall, that kitchen had a bunch of old, falling-down cabinets with hand-painted doors signed "Bernadette." We saved the doors and they've been sitting in the garage all this time. We knew we wanted to keep them, but we never had a good use for them -- until now.

Turns out, our little pony wall is exactly the right size for five of the Bernadette doors. Four of them are a matched set, so we mounted them with their hinged sides outward, and even bought new knobs for them, as if this was a kitchen cupboard. The fifth one is the same height as the others but a different width, so it lives off to one side. There are still two or three oddly shaped doors left in the garage. We may mount them up on the walls as decoration. No reason to leave them behind.

One of the doors was badly weathered when we took it down. Maybe it got more direct sunlight than the others, or maybe it got splashed by the sink over decades of use; we're not sure what happened. Kathy's done a good job of matching the green paint that Bernadette used and she's touching up some of the damaged areas. It won't be a perfect match, but it already looks a lot better than before. And now people coming into the downstairs kitchen can look at Bernadette's hand-painted doors instead of the steely backside of our range. Much better.

So Clean You Can Eat Off It

Floor's done!

It took exactly three days, just like they said, and our new floor is entirely finished. Done and dusted, you might say.

We're thrilled. The third floor has gone from stained wall-to-wall carpet, to grubby subfloor, to new oak hardwood. It took us about four years in total, but the important part was over in three days. Why didn't we do this sooner?

The tricky parts were around the balusters holding up the stair rail. Normally (i.e., in a modern house) you can twist those to remove them and then lay the floor underneath and reinstall the railing. No such luck. Our balusters are permanently fixed. That didn't stop one of the installers from testing them every few hours, though, as if something might have changed since the last time he tried it.

We told them it was okay to floor right up to the base of the railing, since that's what was done on the second floor. It looks fine and avoids the nasty work of having to cut off the railing and somehow reinstall it.

Kathy and I spent most of the evening putting our furniture back. Next, we'll rescue our belongings from where we've piled them downstairs. I figure we'll remember where to find about half of it. The rest may be lost forever. Something for the next owners to wonder about.

Four on the Floor

It's Day Two of flooring installation, and it's going very well. The four installers finished Kathy's room and worked partway into my room and the hallway that connects the two. The boards are pre-finished, so the parts they've completed really are done. There won't be any messy sanding or sealing afterwards.

The toughest part -- for us, at least -- is playing Musical Chairs with all the furniture. When you put down a new floor, everything has to come out of the room. It's like moving to a new house, minus the moving boxes. We had to move almost an entire floor's worth of beds, bookcases, chairs, and other furniture to somewhere.

Fortunately, the installers allowed us to push some things to the  back of the guest room if we promised to move it all again to the other end when they needed to get in there. Deal. It's better than moving bed frames and bookcases down a flight of stairs (and back up again when they're done).

Then there's the dust. Nailing down a floor is pretty clean work, but a lot of the boards need to be cut first, and that makes sawdust. Kathy's room, in particular, needed a lot of cut work because she's located under the "witch's cap" tower of the house, so that part needed a lot of angled cuts.

By the end of the day, the installers estimated they'd need only one more day to finish -- maybe one day and a bit. We'll find out tomorrow how far they get.

Floor Show, Act I

Woo-hoo! Our new hardwood is going in on the third floor!

Kathy and I drained a lot of wine bottles discussing how and when we'd install new flooring upstairs. At first, we figured we'd do it ourselves. How hard can it be, right? But as the year wore on and we found ourselves juggling quite enough other projects, thank you, the sensible alternative of hiring pros started to sound a lot better.

So a week after the materials were delivered, the four-man team of installers showed up bright and early on Monday morning. We'd already cleared out the furniture and removed all the offending trim and baseboards to make everything ready for them. Surprisingly, they agreed. Everything was ready to go and they wasted no time before hammering away.

Kathy and I had also spent a lot of hours wondering whether we'd prefer to run the floorboards this way or that way. Should they run left-to-right or front-to-back? Should they align down the hallway or across the room? What would look better? What do other people do? What do the experts say?

We needn't have bothered. The boards have to run perpendicular to the underlying subfloor. You don't get a choice. Okay, problem solved, then. Nailing the floorboards athwart the subfloor also makes everything stronger and helps eliminate squeaks, so that's a bonus.

The installers started in the middle and worked outwards, nailing the very first board in Kathy's doorway. That way, if the rooms aren't square (if?), the uneven boards will be against the outside walls and partially hidden by new baseboards.

These guys are fast. One unpacks boxes of oak floorboards and spreads them out on the floor. A second one unrolls black backing paper onto the subfloor, and the third guy nails each board down using a pneumatic flooring gun. The fourth one mans the chop saw, cutting off board ends to fit the space.

Every once in a while they all stop to rearrange the loose boards lying on the floor. There's a real art to this. For starters, you don't want the board ends to line up; they should all be staggered, but in such a way that you don't see a stair step pattern. You also want to mix up the boards between boxes. We got about 23 boxes of flooring in all, and the boards from each box will naturally come from different oak trees. (That would be one big tree otherwise.) So there will be variations in color, grain, and so on. You want to mix those up so that one room isn't all dark, loose-grained wood while another room is lighter, tighter oak. So they stir up the pieces as they go along. When it's all done, your eye shouldn't be able to pick out any patterns, stripes, or light/dark areas.

This is going to be a noisy week.

Hey, Sparky!

I guess we should have seen this one coming.

When the floor installers were here (more on that project soon), they accidentally cut through a wire that we didn't know was there. It sparked and tripped the circuit breaker, in addition to startling the poor guy. The net effect was that it cut off power to Kathy's upstairs office and to my closet, but most other things on the 3rd floor seemed to work okay.

Our job then became finding the cut wire and figuring out where/how it was routed. Again, we didn't even know it was there. We thought we'd uncovered all the hidden wiring when we removed the baseboards. Guess not.

The tricky thing was, we couldn't find any wire where the guy said he'd cut it. He'd sliced something with his Dremel tool and made sparks, but I couldn't see any wire, or even any indication that there was wiring nearby. Had he mistaken the location? Was I looking in the wrong place? What gives?

We pried off some molding, unscrewed some outlets, tugged on some wires, and came to the inescapable conclusion that there must be some invisible wiring right about... here. And sure enough, we dug away at the corner of the room and found it carefully buried underneath layers of plaster. They'd somehow stuck a vertical run of wire in the seam where two walls meet. Crafty. And totally nonstandard and unsafe.

I wound up disassembling two closets, one in Kathy's office and one in mine, to uncover this run and figure out where it started and where it ended. And then it started to get weird.

There wasn't just one wire buried vertically in the wall, there were two. One was live and one wasn't. Huh? How does that work? Turns out, there was a tape splice down near the floor, entirely buried in the wall. The floor installer had apparently cut one leg of the Y, leaving half of the circuit working and half dead. Great. So now we get to deal with an unsafe tape splice inside a wall as well as two sets of buried wire. This just gets better and better.

The live half of the circuit led to another tape splice, also buried. And tracing the wire back to its source revealed a third tape splice, also buried inside a wall. Sheesh. Haven't these people heard of junction boxes? Or was taping up and plastering over your wiring normal back in the day?

Little by little, we managed to dig most of the wiring out of its hiding place. We'll probably leave a few short runs in place, but disconnected from everything, simply because it's too much trouble to dig it out and would damage the walls unnecessarily.

To make up for the missing/damaged wiring, I ran some shiny new Romex -- grounded, this time -- from a nearby outlet, around the top of a door frame, and over to the corner of the room. We're approaching our goal of having zero ungrounded outlets in the house. And we're a bit closer to eliminating or abandoning most of the old wiring.

As long as there are no more surprises, that it.

Wall Flowers

We've gotten used to discovering layers underneath layers, and the upstairs is no exception.

As we pulled off the door trim, we'd sometimes expose the plaster underneath, sometimes a hidden electrical wire or two, and sometimes old wallpaper we'd never seen before. In this case, there appear to be two different layers of wallpaper, one on top of the other.

Peeking out from under the baseboard trim we found this flowered wallpaper. It's glued onto backing paper which is, in turn, glued directly onto the rough redwood paneling that makes up these walls. It's cute, but there's not much of it left. Only the bottom few inches where the baseboards were covering it up and protecting it.

Elsewhere, we discovered an additional layer of wallpaper on top of that. It's a kind of metallic green stuff, very 1960s. It doesn't appear to be glued directly over the flowered stuff, but it's hard to tell for sure. At any rate, that wallpaper was later painted over two or three times.

So at a minimum, we've got:

1. Redwood paneling
2. Backing paper
3. Flowered wallpaper
4. Drywall
5. Green wallpaper
6. Gray paint
7. Green paint
8. Tan paint (ours)

Where's Wally?

They say things often look worst just before they get better.* I sure hope that's true in this case, because this place is looking terrible.

The new flooring got delivered a few days ago, so now it's lying in state, acclimating to our temperature and humidity. The installers will be here first thing Monday morning, so Kathy and I have to get the entire third floor of the house -- almost 1000 square feet -- ready before they arrive.

Mostly, that means removing all the baseboards and door trim so that the new floor can get right up to the edges of each room. Then the new trim will go on top of that.

But removing all that old trim is tough work, and as we discovered, some of it had surprise electrical wiring attached to it. We've found four instances of that so far, where somebody hid the wiring along the edge or the top of the trim, then smoothed a bead of plaster over it and painted it. Our first clue was when we pried off a baseboard and it tried to yank a nearby electrical outlet out of the wall. Interesting...

All the trim is off now, and we've got a better idea of what's original up here and what's been updated over the decades. For example, most of the baseboards are old redwood, but about one-third of them are pine. You can't tell them apart when they're all painted, but once you pull them off it's obvious what's old and what's new(-ish). The exterior walls all had redwood baseboard trim, but so did one or two of the interior walls, which suggests that those walls are original. The walls with pine trim are probably newer.

Taking off the door trim really gives you a good peek into the underlying construction. For example, the doorway at the top of the stairs (near the bathroom) is all properly framed out, but the door into Kathy's office was cut into the wall after the fact. The studs and lath around it all have cut marks and you can see where shims and additions were put in.

There were one or two cases where a single piece of baseboard went through a wall and into the adjoining room, which tells us the baseboard was there before the wall got added.

We also found more square-headed nails. They were all in the old redwood stuff, of course, not in the newer pine. Oddly, the old boards had a combination of square nails and more modern round-headed commercial nails. Why? Did somebody come along and pound in a few extra nails to help hold the baseboards in place? Or did they reuse old-fashioned square nails alongside their modern equivalents? No way to know.

The longest single board we recovered is about 13 feet long, and like everything else, it's straight-grained redwood without a single knot or check in it. That must have been some tree. All the molding is about 6 inches wide, so we've probably got about 100 board-feet of aged redwood here.

Our plan is to keep it for a while and then reuse some of it when we fabricate the new trim for these rooms. It would be nice to return some of this old wood to the place it's been hiding for so long.


*Of course they do. That's a tautology. Things are always at their worst right before they get better because that's the definition of "worst." Duh.