The Side Effect

These stairs have been painted, carpeted, painted again, and carpeted again many times over the decades (centuries). That kind of treatment leaves its mark.

It's clear that there used to be full-width carpeting on the stairs, which was later replaced with a somewhat narrower carpet runner. In between those two eras, the stairs were painted. We can tell, because the paint doesn't cover everything. It was obviously painted while the wide carpet was still in place. Then when someone later removed that carpet, it left behind an unpainted stripe along the walls. That's how we found it in 2010.

The net effect is that there's a funny-colored band along the whole length of the staircase. It's just a couple of inches wide, but it's noticeable and there's no good way to cover it up or fix it. And since we were about to install brand new carpeting, it forced us to find a solution.

Once again, Kathy's talent came to the rescue. Rather than touch up the unfinished strip and try to make it blend in with everything else, she painted the whole trim piece from top to bottom so it looks like it's always been that way. The colors and finish are compatible with everything else in that area, so it looks just as old -- but fresh -- as everything else. She even got a nice wood grain effect so that it looks stained instead of simply painted. Nice.

Moving Up In the World

You remember back in April when we stripped the old carpeting off the 2nd-floor stairs? Well, we just now got it replaced.

After six months, we'd gotten used to walking up and down the bare wooden stairs, with no carpet runner. But we knew we wanted to re-carpet them eventually, and we finally found someone to do it. There were some fits and starts and hiccups, but it's finished now and we're very happy with the results.

The first trick is picking out the carpet, which seems easy enough, but whatever we picked would have to be compatible with the, uh, "bold" wallpaper that's alongside the staircase. Finding a color and pattern that didn't clash wasn't easy. We picked a nice dark red color with some gold design in it.

Fortunately for us, the carpet store had just recently installed that very same carpet in someone else's house and had big scraps of it leftover. If we were really lucky, they promised us, we might be able to cover the stairs with the remaining pieces. That would shave several hundred dollars off the price of materials. Bonus!

So Installer #1 came out and took detailed measurements of all the stairs, including making paper templates of some of the oddly shaped ones. Then he goes back to the shop to see if the patterns will fit on the carpet remnants he has. After a few days of noodling on this, he gives up. The carpet store can't say whether the carpet pieces will work or not; it's just too complicated to know for sure. They'll have to get a second opinion from Installer #2.

Installer #2 comes out, takes some new measurements, and declares that yes, it will work. Installation can begin... soon. But on the appointed day, nobody shows up.

Mix-ups and finger-pointing ensue. After a series of delays, installation begins with Installer #2, who turns out to be a great guy. He sings and talks to himself as he works, but he's very thorough and detail-oriented. The first day is spent measuring everything yet again, then installing tack strips and carpet padding. Then he installs the straight run on the bottom stairs - the easy part -- and sews a nice red binding along the edges.

Day Two is spent on the hard stuff: the curved pieces at the top of the stairs. Somehow he figures out how each piece fits together, and how to hide all the seams. On a straight run of stairs (like at the bottom) the carpet is all one piece. But once the stairs curve, each step is a separate piece of carpet, with the pattern turned at a different angle after each step. His job is to make the carpet look like one continuous piece when it's not. Based on the final results, I'd say the man is very good at what he does. Like all experts, he makes it look really easy.

The carpet is held in place with a combination of tack strips, glue, staples, and brass stair rods. The stair rods are mostly decorative, but not entirely. They do actually help hold the pieces in place, and they eliminate the need for additional glue.

Now we're getting reacquainted with walking on carpeted stairs. Give us another six months and we should be used to it.

Blood and Tin

The 2nd-floor dining room is almost finished. We've resurfaced the dropped ceiling, we've cleaned up the parlor stove, and we've cleaned and painted the metal tiles behind it. Now it's time for the big project: the tin ceiling.

We experimented with tin tiles about three years ago when we renovated the 1st-floor (commercial) kitchen. There, we used copper tiles as a backsplash, and they worked really well. So we decided to continue that theme upstairs by adding a tin ceiling to the dining room.

As you can see, the ceiling is currently covered with textured wallpaper, painted pink. It's mostly in good shape, but a water leak at some point in the past must have dripped through and damaged the wallpaper here. The ceiling itself is fine; there's no structural damage. But the textured wallpaper was ruined in one area and we had no way to fix or replace it. (You can see a bit of a damaged area at the far right side of this photo.)

The wallpaper continues from the ceiling down the upper part of the walls (the "frieze" area, if you're into that kind of thing) and we've left that part intact, although Kathy has painted it a lighter yellow color to cover the pink.

Since the ceiling itself is in good condition, we can mount the tin tiles directly to the plaster without having to nail up any plywood or furring strips. The tiles themselves are 24" square, which is pretty big if you think about it. They're embossed metal and finished in whatever color you want. They fit together like tongue-and-groove flooring, but square. Two sides have male flanges and the other two sides have female flanges. The tiles interlock and help support each other when they're screwed into the ceiling.

The interlocking flanges mean that you have to turn each tile the right direction, and you have to install them in a particular order, or they won't fit together. Specifically, you have to start in one corner of the room and work in a particular sequence toward the diametrically opposite corner. That sounds easy, but there are some complications.

For starters, the room isn't exactly a multiple of 24" wide or long, so some of the ceiling tiles -- about half of them, in fact -- will have to be cut down to size. Rather than start with a full tile in one corner of the room and end with the cut-off tiles on the opposite side, we decided to center all of the whole tiles in the middle of the room and distribute the partial ones around the perimeter. That way, the finished ceiling would look symmetrical instead of off-center. Kind of like we planned it.

The trouble with that strategy is that you have to install the cut tiles first, in the corner, before any of the whole tiles can go in. You also have to be careful not to cut off all the flanges that help hold the whole thing up.

After a little bit of grade-school arithmetic, we figured out how many tiles we'd have to cut, how wide/long they'd need to be, and where they'd all go. Not too difficult. Just start cutting and go. Let's do this thing!

Yeah, about that. Cutting through a two-foot-square decorative metal tile is harder than it looks. Especially when you have to keep a straight line. I measured twice, marked with a Sharpie, grabbed my tin snips, and started bleeding.

Those suckers are sharp! It's a good thing that tin tiles are completely sanitary and covered with antiseptic coating, and that the inside of the UPS van is filled with antibacterial gas when they make deliveries. Otherwise I'd be worried.

I was averaging two Band-Aids per tile, but after a while they got slippery and stopped sticking. I finally got smart and wrapped my thumb and forefinger in a whole bunch of fresh Band-Aids. They may not stick to me, but they stick to each other pretty good, and they made a nice padded mitt that slides off the raw metal edges precisely the way my hand doesn't. Who says I'm not a fast learner?

Kathy helped me snap a new chalk line on the ceiling every few hours so that everything stayed straight. The tiles themselves aren't always perfectly square, and they're meant to have a little gap between them. You're not supposed to snug them up against each other or else they might bend or creak when they get warm. So maintaining a constant spacing was important, and just eyeballing the gap wasn't going to work. Not when I'm up on a ladder with ceiling tiles in my face.

The first row went pretty well, and then it got easier. The whole, uncut tiles are definitely less work than measuring and cutting partial tiles (and peeling open Band-Aid wrappers with one hand), and it's nice to see the progress. We did about three-quarters of the room on the first day, and finished it the day after.

We're pretty happy with the result, and it definitely brightens up the room. The new ceiling tiles are also a near-match for Kathy's painted metal tiles behind the parlor stove, which was all part of the plan. There's still a bit of metal trim work to do around the edges, but it feels like 90% of the job is done.

Turning Coal Into Gold

Alchemy is not a myth. You really can turn base metals into gold. With a lot of gold paint, that is.

We gently disassembled our Moore's Air Tight Heater parlor stove to clean it and disconnect it from the gas line. That gave Kathy easier access to the metal tiles behind the stove, so she could finally inspect, clean, and paint them.

The metal tiles cover the curved wall directly behind the stove from floor to ceiling. Presumably they're there to reflect heat, but the stove hasn't been lit in years, probably decades, so there's no heat to reflect. The tiles have also been painted flat black, which suggests that a previous owner also felt the tiles weren't functional anymore. But black? They just look dirty and sooty.

In fact, we thought they were sooty until we took a closer look and realized that they'd been painted. There were little telltale splashes of stray black paint here and there, so we know the tiles had been painted after being installed. No problem to paint them over again, then.

Kathy chose a shiny gold color to complement the other (upcoming) colors in the room. We scrubbed all the tiles with TSP to get off any remaining dirt or grease, and then painted over the flat black with a base coat of a lighter color we had lying around. Once that was dry, the first coat of gold went on. That covered pretty well, but a second coat made it look even better. Now the black, sooty wall glows in the sunlight. The stove itself is still old and black and dirty, but at least it's got a nice backdrop now.

Medallion But Not Metal

The three main ground-floor rooms all have plaster ceiling medallions on them. These would have once graced the gaslight fixtures in the rooms, but now they dress up the electric chandeliers.

All three are different, but you wouldn't know it at first glance. They all appear more or less the same, but differ in the details. They're painted solid white, but almost everything downstairs was at one point. I wonder if they were once brightly colored. It's tempting to scrape off a bit of the paint to see what's underneath. Or just jump in and start repainting them.

The medallions appear to be quite old, and are probably original to the house. If you look closely, this one says "PATD NOV 15 1870" That would have been 23 years before this house was built.

A Light From Above

This photo won't impress too many people, but we're happy with it. This is Kathy's 3rd-floor closet, the one we created a few years back when we realigned the wall that divides this room from the adjoining hallway. The closet used to be on the other side of the wall, which didn't make any sense to us, so we basically moved the closet opening from the short side to the long side, effectively "moving" the closet into another room. It was easier than it sounds.

We've had these bi-fold closet doors hung for quite a while, and I'd even added an electrical outlet to the back of the closet because, why not? The closet is quite tall, because we have high ceilings, and that makes it dark inside. We'd always intended to add a light of some kind inside the closet, but how?

The solution presented itself on Amazon.com, as it so often does. We bought a 120V AC relay connected to a proximity switch. The switch consists of two magnets, and when the magnets are close together, the relay opens. If you move the magnets apart, the relay closes. That means you can connect a light (or any other AC-powered device) to the relay, and mount one magnet on the door frame and other magnet on the door. Open the door, and the light goes on! Voila! 

There's even some hysteresis in the magnetic switch, so the light doesn't flicker on and off if you leave the door partway open. I've adjusted it so that the light comes on when you open the door about six inches, but it won't go off until the door is almost completely shut. That prevents weird and annoying effects if you leave the door in just the wrong position.

Hope Springs Eternal

I finally found the missing rim lock for the upstairs closet door. It was outside rusting, naturally. I'd disassembled it months ago and had started cleaning it, but then got interrupted and left it in pieces inside a plastic bucket, along with all the caustic chemicals. Said bucket then got moved to the backyard, where it sat for a few months. I found it purely by accident, when I needed an empty bucket to haul some dirt. Surprise! There's the door lock, all in pieces in the bottom of the bucket!

The additional neglect meant I had to re-clean it all over again before reassembling it. The other problem with this lock is that it's missing its spring mechanism. You can turn the doorknob to open the latch, but when you release the knob it doesn't spring back. You have to manually turn the doorknob both ways, for opening and closing, and that's awkward and unnatural. It's just plain broken, in other words.

Springs for a 120-year-old rim lock are hard to come by. Remarkably, Home Depot doesn't keep them in stock. I could probably source some spring steel from a local metal shop, but they'd make me buy 100 pounds of it. So I improvised.

We had some galvanized flashing in the garage left over from some project or other. It's pretty stiff... and it won't rust... and I can cut it with tin snips... and what's the harm if it doesn't work? It was scrap anyway.

So I cut a little piece of metal and bent it and trimmed it to fit inside the lock. It worked! Once. The latch would snap back after releasing the doorknob, but only the first time I tried it. My little makeshift spring lost its spring and stayed bent after one use.

So I doubled up and made a second piece, alongside the first one. That was better, but...

So I added a third piece to keep the other two company. Between the three of them, they seem to work. They're collectively stiff enough to act as a spring, and they don't seem to come un-sprung with repeated use. And even if they do, I have a lot of that flashing still left.

A little white grease on all the moving parts, and we're as good as new!