How's It Hanging?

Behold! You are looking at something no human has seen for 50 years!

"The doors are closing."

Stunning, isn't it? Two closed doors. I've rarely seen a more beautiful sight.

Perhaps some explanation is in order. These two sliding doors separate two of our ground-floor rooms. They're normally open, so that you can walk between the front room and the "middle" room downstairs. Nobody pays much attention to them because, well, they're open all the time.

The reason they're open all the time is because they're stuck. They've been stuck in place since before we bought the house, and probably long before that. But no more! Today, we got them working again.

Both doors are solid wood. They're more than eight feet tall, four feet wide, two inches thick, and extremely heavy. In short, they're massive, even by Dr. Hart's standards. And they were stuck in place.

Close up of the door-suspension hardware.

They're supposed to travel on a hidden track up above the lintel (door frame). There's a hidden trolley track up there, and each door has two big metal trolley wheels that ride on the track. The doors just hang from those two wheels; there's nothing at the bottom or the sides to hold them in place or guide them. They're simply suspended, with about one-quarter inch of clearance above the floor. Or at least, there's supposed to be.

Some time ago, some bozo must have tried to force the doors open and knocked them off their tracks. And there they sat. Fortunately, the track mechanism is such that the doors didn't fall down -- someone would have been killed if they had -- so they just kind of stayed stuck in place. And since they were stuck open, nobody apparently bothered to try to fix them.

Now I understand why. That track mechanism was not designed for easy maintenance. It's hidden up in the wall, out of reach of even the smallest fingers. It's clear now that the trolley track was constructed and installed first, and then the walls were framed and plastered around it. There's no way to get at the workings without busting through the original plaster and lath, and we weren't prepared to do that.

Trolley wheel off its track, leaning against a stud.

We could shine a flashlight into the gap between the door and the wall and get a glimpse -- just -- of the misguided trolley wheels. But how to fix them? There's no room to reach a hand in, and they're too far away to reach with tools. We tried a crowbar. Too thick. We tried a skinny screwdriver. Too short. We tried forcing the doors to move with a pry bar, thinking that maybe we'd get the wheels to skid along the track even if they are misaligned. No dice. Both doors were hitting a hard stop somewhere and refused to budge.

Not only were the wheels off the track, they were also trapped against the wall studs, which kept the doors from sliding no matter how hard we pushed. When the wheels jumped the tracks they came to rest at a crooked angle. There's not enough room in that tight space for the mechanism to roll, skid, or slide without catching on something, so the whole works was jammed up behind a wall stud (on the left-hand door) and an iron gas pipe (on the right-hand door). We were well and truly stuck.



Mechanical door catch and wooden bumper.

Meanwhile, these massive doors are still hanging from the wheels. There's nothing else holding them up. So we can't just gently massage the hardware back into place. There's hundreds of pounds of redwood weighing the whole thing down.

In the end, the fix was a two-person operation. Dad would call it "main strength and awkwardness." Kathy got on a ladder and pushed on the door, trying to take some of the weight off of the rear wheel. I stood on the ground and used a galvanized pipe (in one hand) and a flashlight (in the other) to reach up into the dark recess and push against the wheel -- hard. If Kathy and I timed our efforts just right, we could knock the rear wheel back onto the track just far enough that it would clear the adjoining stud and allow the door to skid/slide/roll partway along the track. Hooray!

Repeat for the other door, and we're good. Double hooray!

The offending gas pipe.

Now that the doors move again, we could slide them completely along the track and out of their pockets. That allowed us to clear decades of debris from the track and shoot a little WD-40 onto the wheels. There's also a clever little iron gadget on each door that prevents it from accidentally moving too far. It catches a hidden latch inside the wall unless you know where to reach in and flip the lever over. We cleaned that, too.

I can't think of a way to prevent the wheels from someday jumping the track again. There are lots of ideas, but no practical way to implement them when you can't even reach up into the track. I guess we'll just have to be careful about how we push on the doors. In the meantime, I'm parking them fully closed. Just because we can.

Let's Play a Game

I have a fun game for you. It's a guessing game. Any number can play. Let's begin.

Here is a picture of a wood floor. How many staples do you see in the floor? Take your time...

Do you see five staples? Ten? Fifty? More than that?

The answer is: We don't know! See? It really is a guessing game! You get to find them all without seeing them first. Kathy and I play this game for hours.

I wish we could recycle staples for a penny apiece. We'd be rich! Instead, we just dump 'em in the trash along with the broken tack strips, the dust, and the shredded padding.

Here's another guessing game. What were the previous owners doing in this picture? My guess is that they were spray-painting a piece of furniture. See where the two round legs and two rectangular legs were standing? It must be fun to spray paint things in the middle of your own bedroom. Later, they must have set a paint can down on the floor, in two separate places. It sure left a nice ring for posterity.

Underneath all the unintentional paint is a solid layer of dark brown. And under that is another layer of brown paint in a slightly lighter color. As far as we can tell, the floor in all these upstairs rooms was painted brown, twice, before giving up on it and laying carpet -- also twice.

When we removed all the carpet staples, we found that some of them had little pieces of green padding trapped under them. But we've never seen any green padding, so our guess is these were left over from an earlier carpet job. So between the two coats of brown paint and the two layers of carpet, this floor has been refinished at least four times in its 120+ years. Not surprising, I guess.

The wood itself is inch-thick redwood tongue-and-groove. No knots anywhere. The boards are 5-1/4 inches wide and have a rough finish underneath but a fairly smooth finish on top. Or at least, they did. Years of abuse have gouged the top surface pretty badly, so now it's dented in places, as if they were juggling bowling balls up here. A few of the boards have been cut away to expose something underneath, but it's not always obvious what they were trying to get to. One opening exposes the ceiling fixture in the room below, but a couple don't have any obvious purpose. We'll keep thinking on that.

The floorboards also change direction in odd places. They'll run north/south for a while, then change to east/west orientation in the middle of the hallway, for example, or partway through a room. Our assumption is that the current walls weren't here in 1893, and that the walls have been moved since -- perhaps multiple times. It doesn't make sense to change the orientation of the floorboards arbitrarily unless the underlying joists change there, too. Hmmm... something else to explore.

Dept. of the Interior, Floor-istry Divison

If defenestration means throwing stuff out a window, what do you call it when you pull up an entire floor? De-floor-estation?

This week we got a bug in our bonnets and finally removed the last remnants (hah! See what I did there?) of carpeting in the house. The entire third floor had wall-to-wall carpet of indeterminate vintage. Probably from the 1960s; possibly as new as the 1980s. Definitely not staying, either way.

We'd pulled up the carpet in Kathy's upstairs office four years ago almost to the day, and found a fairly ratty wooden subfloor underneath. It had paint splatters, cuts, gouges, and various indignities that made it not worth trying to resurface. We'd left the carpet in Jim's office, the guest room, and the adjoining hallways... until now. They also had paint-splattered subfloor underneath, often with chunks cut out and patched. Clearly, the previous owners had given up on this flooring. They'd cleaned paint rollers, dripped paint, and spray-painted furniture right on the floor. This area was never meant to be exposed.

Our plan is to resurface the entire third floor with hardwood, like the 1st and 2nd floors already have. But to do that, we've got to pull up all the carpeting. Piece of cake. The demolition is always the easy and fun part.

Pulling up carpet is sort of like moving: You have to pack up all of your belongings and put them somewhere else. There's no magician's trick of yanking the carpet out from under the table, so we played musical chairs with all the beds, desks, file cabinets, forgotten boxes, and whatnot. First, you shove everything to the left, then tear up half of the carpet, then shove everything to the right and pull up the other half. A good sharp knife allows you to rip the carpet down the middle and roll it up in halves, like a gigantic fuzzy burrito.

Old carpets aren't particularly sanitary, either. Kathy and I both got new respirator masks and wore them the whole time. They're hot and uncomfortable, but the alternative was... ick.

Under the carpet, of course, is the padding. In some ways, it's more trouble to remove than the carpet because it doesn't cut neatly. Instead, it tears into irregular pieces, so you have to chase around the room and get all the bits from everywhere. We went through an entire roll of masking tape just binding this stuff together. There's a trip to the dump in our future!

Then comes the tedious job of removing all the nails, staples, and tack strips. Tack strips are vicious, nasty things with hundreds of sharp nails pointing straight up, ready to catch your fingers, clothes, and tools. They're designed specifically to be painful. (They may also have some incidental use as carpet fasteners; I wouldn't know.) We got to make a lap around each room prying up the tack strips and trying to toss them into a garbage can without hemorrhaging.

Next come the staples. Lots and lots of staples. The padding is stapled down -- quite thoroughly -- all over each room. That's why the old padding shreds and rips when you pull it up. It's held down with several hundred staples (no exaggeration). But before we can put down hardwood, we have to remove all the staples and make the subfloor smooth.

The bad news is, speckled paint splatter makes almost perfect camouflage. You can't see half the staples. You have to feel for them, then pry them up with a screwdriver or pull 'em out with pliers. So you run your hand over the floor, go "ouch!," pull out the offending staple, and repeat.

The good news is... well, there is no good news. It's just plain tedious work, down on your hands and knees pulling out hundreds and hundreds of perfectly camouflaged staples. At least Cinderella got a clean floor when she was done. We just have a paint-splattered floor that looks exactly as it did when we started. But with fewer hazards for bare feet. Stay in school, kids, and get a nice quiet office job somewhere. Otherwise, you may wind up like us.

Parade... Right!

We call this the Parade Deck, which makes it sound like the aft end of a cruise ship. We could just call it "the deck," but even that's too grand, since its average elevation is zero inches. It's not so much a deck as it is flat landscaping. A wooden dirt cover, I guess.

We have a lot of parades and street fairs here in town, and most of them pass conveniently in front of our house. Free entertainment! Kathy and I have taken to putting lawn chairs on the front porch to watch, but the porch is so small that the chairs block the front door from opening. We can either sit or enter/exit the house, but not both. It's awkward.

So we decided to build ourselves a little outdoor observation platform for street entertainment (OOPSE) that would give us a place to sit while also covering up some of the loose dirt in the front yard. We can't decide what to plant in the front, and the current drought means we couldn't water anything anyway, so why not just cover it up?

Hence, the zero-height deck. It's completely over-engineered, with eight concrete piers sunk into the dirt, galvanized anchors everywhere, and pressure-treated 2x6 lumber holding it up. And by "up" I mean down. Our lot slopes from back to front, so the deck necessarily is higher in the front than in the back. Or to put it another way, the deck itself is level, but the ground rises up to meet it in the back. And since we wanted the front to be an easy step up from ground level, that forced the back end below grade. So we didn't so much raise a deck as excavate it. This is obvious from the big pile of leftover dirt.

The top is planked with redwood 2x6 alternating with 2x2. It looks nice and should wear well. Of course, we painted it to match the rest of the house. I did my best to match the curve of the front porch steps nearby, but I'm not as talented as those builders. I did get to buy a new router bit, though. So there's that.

You'd think that building a tiny deck at ground level on a warm summer day would be a piece of cake -- it's Home Depot 101 stuff -- but of course Murphy had to stick a finger in our eye. Sinking the concrete piers was easy enough because the soil is very loose and easy to dig out. Even getting them all level with each other wasn't too bad, again because of the sandy soil. But wouldn't you know it, there was a steel rod buried under the ground exactly where we needed a pier to go. At first, I thought it was just a piece of scrap metal and that I could dig it out with my hands and throw it away. Nope. The more I dug, the more it didn't want to move. Hmmm... It was old, rusty, and about a thick as my thumb. And very solid. It must go really deep. That's a lot of metal. No problem, I'll just hit it with this sledgehammer...

Even with my biggest 16-lb. sledgehammer, the thing barely moved. It didn't even wobble in the dirt. But it did make a funny sound... kind of like... a water main pipe. Stop! Evidently this was the original electrical grounding stake that was clamped and/or soldered to the main cold water pipe coming in from the street to the house. That means it's buried deep and I really don't want to try to disconnect it. Instead, I got out the angle grinder (more power tools!) and just cut it off. Ooh, sparks! Pretty.

So apart from that, the project was pretty straightforward. And the weather has cooperated, because Kathy and I have been able to sit outside on our new "deck" almost every evening, enjoying the warm weather. All we need now is a parade.

Hot Dipped Galvanized!

Redwood and zinc just go together, don't you think?

The back steps from our kitchen down to the sidewalk had started to rot and needed to be replaced. We knew they were getting old and starting to give way. The wood was getting spongy and the steps had more of a bouncy spring to them than is strictly necessary. It was just a matter of time before someone put a foot through one of the boards. Our hope was that one of us would be the first victim, and not a guest or lawyered-up visitor.

Anyway, the steps aren't very complicated, and there are only two of them, so how hard can it be, right? Well... Nothing was level, plumb, or parallel, so the geometry was a bit tricky. The porch itself slopes slightly from left to right to shed water. It also slopes from back to front so that water doesn't puddle next to the door. So that's the first challenge.

The concrete sidewalk also slopes, again in both directions. It's a bit closer to the house on one side than the other, in addition to the obvious right-to-left slope. But the steps themselves have to be level or it'll feel funny to walk on. No problem. That's what circular saws are for.

Demolishing the old stuff is always fun, and this time it came with one of those $^&@#!! moments when you wonder how the thing ever held together in the first place. There was no apparent support under the steps. No wonder they bounced; they were floating in midair. Foundation consisted of dry-stacked bricks lying in the dirt. Mortar? Nah, we don't need that. I think the 27 coats of paint is mostly what held it all together.

The good news was, the porch itself was in pretty good shape. The surface is 3" tongue-and-groove that we really wanted to preserve if we could, and it looked sound so we left it alone. The porch is covered, so the weather damage was limited to just the stairs, which had to be rebuilt anyway. So there's that.

They say the five most expensive words in remodeling are, "as long as we're here..." but that wasn't the case this time. The deck was solid and even the supports underneath were in good shape. I don't know how old the support structure is, but the 2x6 lumber had square shoulders and really did measure exactly 2" by 6", so it's probably older than me. Another win.

But as long as we're here... I took the opportunity to shore up some of the structure anyway and added three new concrete piers, including one right in the middle of the stairs. That should keep the new stairs from sagging for another 50 years or so.

All the new lumber is heart redwood, because that's what the entire house is built from. It's kind of a shame, because we're going to paint over all of this and nobody will see the nice redwood. Still, it would seem like cheating to use Douglas fir or pine on something like this. So gimme the good stuff.

If you've never built stairs, it's surprisingly tricky. Or maybe I'm just an idiot. Seems easy, right? Nice right angles. No curves. Everything regular. But I must've spent hours staring at the open gap, scribbling in my notebook and taking the same measurements four or five times. C'mon, it's only two steps! There's a 7/11 rule of thumb for stairs: 7" vertical rise and 11" horizontal tread is considered comfortable and safe. You can stray from that a little bit, but whatever you do, make all the steps the same. I adhered very close to that standard while also making sure that the finished project fit into the existing deck and sidewalk. The folks who built this place in 1893 certainly weren't working to the same code specifications.

After the new concrete set up and the support posts went in, it was time to frame up the new stairs with new stringers. I imagine you get good at this with practice, but I spent an embarrassing amount of time checking and rechecking to make sure everything was plumb, level, and evenly spaced. Once you make a few critical cuts you can't go back. Remarkably, everything lined up just as expected.

So here are the new steps in all their raw redwood glory. I routed the front edges of the steps to give them a bit of a rounded profile, and so they don't look like they just came from the lumberyard. There's also a bit of cove molding underneath the nose of each step to copy the old steps that came out. It's all held together with galvanized nails, which should postpone rusting for at least a few weeks until Kathy has time to paint it all over.

Take the Dirt Road Home

We stumbled across this old photo in the City Hall office the other day. It shows some schoolchildren crossing the main street through town, as the partial caption shows. The interesting part is that the street is still unpaved dirt, and that our house is in the background.

The light-colored building on the far left is the Gosby House Inn, a B&B that's our next-door neighbor. It's been a boarding house or inn since the very beginning, and currently has 22 rooms, I think.

But right next to it is our house, which is darker and partially hidden behind a telegraph pole and a tree (neither is there anymore).

Since our place was built in 1893, that means that Lighthouse Avenue, the main street though town (and the only route to the Point Pinos Lighthouse, hence the name), was still unpaved at least that far back. We know that a horse-drawn trolley service used to run up and down this street, and that may or may not have come later than this. I almost think I see a trolley track under someone's foot, and it wouldn't be unusual for trolley cars to have run on dirt streets in the 1890s or early 1900s.

The other interesting detail is the wrought-iron railing on top of the roof for the "widow's walk." At first, I thought both buildings had one, but it actually looks like only ours had it. It's certainly not there now, but we've been itching to replace it... someday.

By the way, the dark house color in this photo (and a few others) was a big help to us when we started painting the house a few years ago. Remember, it was solid white before we started, and a few of the townspeople grumbled and complained that we shouldn't be adding any new colors because "it's always been solid white." Uh, no. Not even close. Victorian-era houses were very rarely white, partly because that just wasn't the style, but also because white (i.e., lead-based) paint was very difficult and expensive to make. Most houses, like ours, were dark-colored. Apparently the Gosby family was more affluent than the Harts.

1951 - 2015