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.