The Rain, It's Plain, Strays Mainly from the Drain

Ah, winter! The days get shorter, the holidays are approaching. There's a special nip in the air. And it starts raining. That means it's time to clean the gutters.

When the serious rain started last week, we saw that the water was pouring out over the edges of the gutters, not down the drainpipes like it's supposed to. One especially annoying drip was right over the front door. When it's raining heavily you know to avoid the waterfall, but if it's just sprinkling a bit, the drip can catch you out. Splat! Hah, tricked another one!

Every one of the gutters seemed to be overflowing instead of draining properly. It was almost perfectly inverted: The downspouts were all empty, and the gutters were all overflowing from the edges instead. It's like the water was avoiding the downspouts. Time to clean 'em all out.

The gutters on our house are wood, not metal or fiberglass or extruded plastic. They're carved, often lined with lead, and built-in to the structure of the house. Meaning they don't come off and can't easily be replaced. They're also a nuisance to clean.

For starters, the gutters are up high (duh), but they ring the house on the second floor only. That means they're more than 30 feet up from the ground, and I can't reach them with any ladder that I have. (Full disclosure: I'd frankly be uncomfortable standing atop a 30-foot ladder even if I had one.) So the only way to reach the gutters is by climbing out on the roof—not happening—or by leaning out the 3rd-floor windows with a long pole. We went the pole route.

Our cunning scheme was to attach a garden trowel to the end of a long pole and lean through the windows, digging away at the leaves and crud in the gutters. Soon the dam would break and the water would flow happily down the drainpipes and back to the sea! Flow, little water! Run home!

That was all hilarious fun, but it didn't work as well as expected. I collected lots of nutrient-rich crud from the gutters, but managed only to smear it all over the side of the house. It looked like we were patching a wattle-and-daub cottage. There's also no good way to get the trowel/stick arrangement down into the drainpipes, which is where the real problem was. And, since this all happened in the pouring rain, the gutters filled up again just as fast as I could empty them all over the outside of our formerly white house.

Plan B was to wait for the rain to stop and climb outside. There are a couple of flat spots on the roof that are fairly accessible (read: no helicopter required), so taking my now-patented stick with me, I managed to ream out a few of the drains. The obscene glorp, slurggle, slurggle! sound the water makes as it finally breaks through the blockage and starts draining made it all worthwhile.

So the gutters are mostly clear now, but it's stopped raining so I can't even enjoy my victory. I'm tempted to take a garden hose and actually pour water on the roof just so I can see those suckers drain like they're supposed to. But I'll wait. It's supposed to start raining again in a few days. Good thing, too, because that mud is still all over the outside of the house and I'm really hoping the rain will wash it off.

Boo-Ho-Ho!

This entry is a little out of order. Halloween was two weeks ago, of course, and we had a good one.

We've been decorating the house a little bit more each year. Nothing too major, but we enjoy hanging fake cobwebs from the front porch and putting scary stickers on the windows. Last year we made ghost heads using Styrofoam wig stands with cheesecloth draped over them. This year we updated them with shoulders, which looks better. We also made a big cutout zombie and taped him to an upstairs window to make a scary shadow. Little by little, we're scaring away the local kids.

It's not working. This year we counted 130 kids, which is more than last year. In fact, we ran out of candy. With about an hour to go, I had to dash to the gas station mini-mart to get more. Not the most economical way to stock up on candy, I can tell you. I got a bunch of jellybeans and gummi bears and whatnot, and Kathy put then into little Dixie cups and wrapped them in cellophane. It all worked out okay, but for the first time ever we had no leftover candy for ourselves. :-(

This year we put red and green bulbs in some of the outdoor lights (Kathy's idea), and it looked pretty good. Er, I mean, bad. Some of the local downtown businesses were passing out candy, too. One of the shopkeepers later told us that a lot of the kids that visited her said, "Have you seen that white house at the end of the block? It's really scary!" So I guess our little scheme is working. Bwaaa-haa-haa!!!

Water, Water, Everywhere...

"...nor any drop to drink." So goes Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere. And right now, it also applies to our front yard.

It all started with a surprise in the mail: A $500 water bill. Yikes! We normally use less than $100/month in water, so this was way out of line. Okay, sure, we'd been watering the plants a bit more than usual (i.e., at all) in preparation for the Historic Home Tour, but still! A 5x jump is surely evidence of a leak or a problem somewhere. Thinking quickly, we called the local water monopoly to ask for forgiveness, and they gave us a ray of hope. If we can find a leak and document the fix, they'll refund most of the exorbitant fee. So there's your incentive: Fix the leak for under $500 and you're money ahead.

Game on. I crawled under the house looking for damp spots. Nothing there. Toilets running? Nope. Teenagers showering? Not anymore. Sprinklers leaking? Hmmmm....

We never liked the drip system the previous homeowners had installed, so here was our chance to remove it. And it did appear to be leaking. The wet spots on the ground weren't always near the sprinkler heads, so that water had to be coming from somewhere. Unfortunately, our soil contains a lot of sand (okay, it is sand) so leaks can disappear very quickly. You could be pouring, say, $500 worth of water into the ground and not know it. So out comes the old sprinkler pipe.

And in with the new. We jumped into the pickup truck and headed to Home Depot, where they're painting a reserved parking spot for us. Loaded up with PVC pipe, valves, elbows, and tees, we're all set to play underground Tinker Toys.

Here's my spiffy six-valve manifold. A thing of beauty, innit? At least I was smart enough to connect it directly to the city water and not downstream from the water softener. ("Hey, how come we're out of salt again?!")

The sandy soil is easy to dig up, but as any prison escapee will tell you, it also collapses in on itself really easily. You wind up digging each trench twice, once to mark the path and again to empty out all the dirt/sand that just fell back into it. So far, I've excavated one coffee mug, half of a broken clay pot, plenty of roots, and a whole lot of old sprinkler pipe.

The hardest part so far has been routing the new pipes to the far side of the house. There's a cement walkway around our front yard, so my best route was to tunnel under it. And then to tunnel under it again to get past the front steps. So far, I've dug three tunnels, but it's quick and therapeutic work. Somehow I wind up with bigger piles of dirt than when I started, though. I can't figure out where the extra dirt is coming from. Maybe someone is sneaking dirt into our front yard in the middle of the night. Or I've disturbed some really big gophers.

Five Hundred of Our Closest Friends

October 7th was Pacific Grove's annual Historic Homes Tour, and for the first time, we were on it. The premise is simple: you clean house for a month, leave your front door open for six hours, and let 500-600 total strangers walk through your house. Easy, right?

The event is put on by the Heritage Society of Pacific Grove, the same people who make the little green wooden plaques that go by the front door of local homes with historic significance. They charge $20/person for a ticket, so it's quite a good fundraiser for the Society. In return, Kathy and I got brunch.

We're not complaining. After all, we volunteered. We'd considered being on the tour last year, but the house just wasn't ready. There were too many holes in the floors (figuratively speaking) for it to be safe for visitors. Amazing how quickly another year came around, though, and suddenly we're up against a deadline.

Which was partly the point. We knew that if we were going to open the house to visitors on October 7, we'd better be done with our remodeling chores sometime on October 6. We got close.

The bathroom was almost done. It still needs trim around the door, and I can see a lot of small details that didn't get finished properly. It also forced us to clean up the backyard and hide the biggest piles of junk. A little paint here; a little spackle there; a lot of dusting and vacuuming everywhere, and everything's ready to go.

Each house on the tour (there are about a dozen) gets its own set of volunteer docents who guide visitors through the house, make sure nobody gets lost, and generally act polite and answer questions. That means Kathy and I had to "train" our docents a week beforehand, in that we led them through the house and told them stories that they could later relay to their guests. In all, we had 12 docents, who worked in two shifts of six, with two on each floor. That seemed like a lot of docents to us, but that's the way the Heritage Society likes to do it.

They also hinted that they'd prefer it if we weren't at home during the tour itself. That suited us fine; we didn't want to be hanging about while strangers whispered about the hideous wallpaper, odd paint colors, etc. In order to gently nudge us to a safe distance from home, the Heritage Society puts on a nice brunch for all the affected homeowners. And, ironically, provides us tickets so that we can visit everyone else's house.

Fortunately, it was a beautiful day out, and Kathy and I had fun walking all over town spying on houses or just enjoying the day out. When 4:00 PM rolled around and we were finally able to return home, we didn't notice anything out of place. Remarkably, there was almost no evidence that anyone had been there. Had it not been for the balloons out front and the article in the newspaper, I wouldn't have suspected a thing. Even so, we think we'll take the next few years off. Too much pressure getting everything ready by October 7.

Before and After

December, 2011

So here's our third-floor bathroom a year ago...













...and here it is from the same angle today.

October, 2012

Just about everything has changed. The floor, walls, ceiling, electrical, plumbing, vanity, toilet, and bathtub are all new. Well, the tub isn't new but it's been relocated to the other side of the room.

Every little bit of the old sub-floor, carpet (ick), drywall, and  plumbing has come out and been replaced, as chronicled elsewhere. (None of it was historic.) By removing the old knee walls, the floor space has gotten somewhat larger, and built-in cupboards replace the blank walls. The new inset ceiling also raises the effective height of the room by about 2 inches.

Ceiling light before...

The vanity swapped places with the tub, and the toilet has moved a bit closer to the door. The dangly little light that used to be over the door is now a small chandelier that actually uses less energy but puts out more light. The transom window is completely new.

The old made-from-cereal-boxes vanity has been replaced by a real one near the door. We reckon that improves the traffic pattern in the room and reduces the necessity of standing under the lowest part of the ceiling.

...and ceiling light after

Vanity before...

...vanity after

The Perception of Doors

You may remember we wanted to make use of the awkward space in the "knee walls" in the corners of the bathroom. Because this room is directly under the roof, the ceiling slopes at 45 degrees all the way down to the floor. That leaves you with very short triangular spaces on the sides of the room, and I didn't want to waste that space. So I made storage cabinets.

They're framed in just below the rafters and above the floor joists, as you can see here. I used oak laminate for the "floor" and "walls" of the cabinets, and pine for the face. (Forgive me, Dr. Hart, for not using redwood.) There's also some stranded board visible in the picture, but that's just backing for the bead board to come.

Of course, nothing was at right angles (or even a solid 45 degrees), so there was a lot of guessing, fitting, tweaking, and swearing involved. This was made all the more awkward because the bathroom is on the 3rd floor and my table saw is on the ground floor. And the lumber is in the garage, one floor down from that. So the process works like this: Down three flights of stairs, cut, up three flights with cut wood in hand, test fit, back down three flights, cut again, upstairs again, swear, repeat.

Eventually, I got everything to fit well enough to nail it all in place and insulate around the back sides. There's one cabinet on the right side of the room (shown) and a matching one on the left.

Then come the doors. They're also pine, with bead board inserts to match the walls. They're a stile-and-rail design using pocket-hole joinery, with trapped panels. If you do much woodworking, that's no big deal, but I'm pretty proud of them.

I started with select pine (no knots) and ripped it down to the size I wanted, then cut rails and stiles to length. I cut them each in pairs so they'd match exactly. Then I routed a groove along the inside length of each piece to "trap" the bead board insert. The insert isn't glued, so it can expand and contract slightly with changes in temperature or humidity. Since I don't have a dado blade, I just made multiple passes over the table saw with a standard rip blade. The trick here was to remember which side of each piece will face outward so that the grooves will all line up when the door is assembled.

Before assembling the doors, I routed a stopped chamfer on the inside edges of the doors with a simple 1/4" cove bit. After some experimentation I decided it looked best stopped 2" from the ends of the stiles and about a half-inch from the ends of the rails.

That done, I drilled pocket holes in the backs of the rails using a $19 jig (new tool!), inserted the bead board pieces, and screwed everything together. There is no glue. After the doors were all assembled, I went around the outside of each one with a Roman ogee bit to make the little edge detail you see in the photo above. 

Remarkably, each of the doors is square and true. I'm getting better at this. This photo shows one of the doors taped into place. Now I just need to source some hinges, paint it all, and we should be all set.

Plants vs. Turleys

We've never been much for gardening. We've never had the time. So the neighbor's vegetation has, by default, become ours as well. And the neighbors are big on ivy. Very, very big fans of ivy. I've got nothing against ivy, but we'd always imagined something different for our yard.

Starting about six months ago, Kathy began the task of removing some of said ivy from the back fence. To be honest, we didn't know we had a back fence. Turns out it's about 8 feet high, painted white, and runs the whole length of the lot line, but it was so completely covered in ivy it was invisible. It took Kathy several weeks (and several more garbage cans) to uncover it all.

I think of ivy as a thin, spindly little vine, but this stuff had trunks. They were thick and stout and hard to chop down. When the hand trimmer failed we got the tree saw. When that failed, we swung an axe at it. And when that failed, I got out my angle grinder and ground its little fibrous legs off. It made a funny smell but by golly we killed the thing. "Take that! And stay down!"

Kathy is becoming the Rambo of the lower phyla. Have trimmers, will eradicate with extreme prejudice. Plants fear her.

Having denuded the back fence -- which promptly fell over, having lost all its biological support -- she turned her attention to the side yard. Again, we didn't know anything about a "fence," per se, just another wall of ivy separating us from the house next door. This time the ivy was only about waist high, so we could chop it back without resorting to power tools. As before, removing the ivy revealed a white fence we didn't know we had, although this one was a cute white lattice design. It must have been nice, oh, 40 years ago before the jungle absorbed it. Now it's rotten and unable to support itself. I've driven a few rusty lengths of rebar into the ground to hold it up.

See this four-foot stump here? We didn't know that was there. It was completely obscured by all the ivy, too. In fact, we found a total of three old stumps that had been lurking in our yard, unseen by mortals all these years.

Our plan -- and we do have one -- is to replace all the ivy with flowers or flowering plants. Right now, the whole yard is green, as in no color. It's healthy and all (or it was before we killed it), but also kind of boring. We'd like a bit more color and the first step before planting was to remove the invasive ivy to make room. Naturally, this all comes just a few weeks before the Historic Homes Tour, so we may have to apologize to our visitors for the condition of the yard. Maybe it'll be dark that day.

Safety Tip

Listen up, kids. Here's an important safety tip from your friend Jim:

Tip: Don't stick your fingers in the spinning 12,000-RPM blade of a router. It'll mess you up quick. And it hurts.

Actually, it didn't hurt at all. Not at first.

It was the sound that tipped me off.

There I was, minding my own business, routing some pine boards to make half-lap joints. These will eventually become the in-wall cabinets in the 3rd-floor bathroom (more on that later). Routers have a remarkable capacity to generate enormous piles of wood chips and sawdust. Honestly, it's like working on a British car: you wind up with more pieces left over than you started with. And since I'd neglected to hook up the shop vacuum to the router ("how much sawdust can this possibly make?"), the wood shavings really piled up. So much that I couldn't see the blade or the piece I was working on.

So naturally, I brushed the wood chips away.

Actually, first I blew on it. I leaned in and put my face right up close to the whirring blade and puffed. It was at this point that a little alarm bell went off in my head. "Hey," I thought. "This is really dangerous. I shouldn't put my face so close to the router. I might, y'know, get hurt."

Apparently that feeling lasted for all of 1.5 seconds because I then brushed away the sawdust with my finger. I was careful. Honest. I moved slowly and kept my finger (singular) away from the blade. Trouble was, the other four fingers weren't paying attention. And one apparently strayed into the router's killzone.

Router blades are sharp. And they spin really fast. So sharp and fast, in fact, that you don't even feel it as it chips away at your soft fleshy parts. Like a surgeon's scalpel, but with more sawdust.

The good news is, routers don't have a lot of torque, so when they're chipping away at wood (or whatever) they slow down. And you can hear the difference in pitch as it contacts the "work surface." So I heard, rather than felt, the router dig into my finger. And 6 million years of evolution trained me to yank my hand back. Lucky thing, that.

Oh, there was blood. Way too much considering how shallow the damage was. The only uncomfortable part was cutting away the loose pieces the router hadn't finished. Yuck. And the gouge was remarkably straight and well-defined. Hey, nice router.

So now I've got a new Band-Aid and a new appreciation for all the brightly colored safety stickers they print on power tools. Too bad they weren't bigger.

1928-2012

The 80/20 Rule

We're this close to having the bathroom finished. The tub got refinished yesterday. The vanity got hauled up the final flight of stairs last week (thanks, Scott and Bob!). The transom window went in a few days ago. And everything got plumbed in today. We've almost got a working bathroom again! Apart from some cosmetic work with the trim, paint, and molding we're just about done.

Which really means we've got about four more weeks of work ahead of us.

The transom was waiting on special brass hinges that we special ordered from a salvage place in New Orleans. Once the hinges arrived, I could finally mount the window in place above the bathroom door. When you open it, it rotates around its center axis so that it doesn't bang open or shut. We'll probably leave it open most of the time.

Once that was in place, we could mount the ceiling fixture, as you can see above. This will be the main light for the room, and the switch you'll naturally reach for as you walk in. Above the light is a ceiling medallion to give it a finished look.

The vanity is in place now, and almost ready to use. It's got a black granite top and backsplash (coming soon), and chrome-plated brass fixtures. Later on, we'll hang a mirror on the wall just above it.

The tub got finished yesterday, the toilet has been working for a while, and the heated floor and tile were done last month. So as far as fixtures go, we're pretty much finished. The two built-in cabinets still need to be built from scratch, and I'm sure that will take a few weeks. But they're not strictly necessary, and in the meantime we can accommodate guests.

Sorry, Scott and Bob. You missed the working bathroom by about five days. Better luck next time. But thanks for the help!

Rub-a-Dub-Dub 2

...a man and his tub.

Here's how you refinish an old bathtub: You stand back and let the expert do it. What'cher lookin' at right here is Doug. Doug refinishes bathtubs (and sinks and toilets) for a living. Doug is very good at what he does, as you will see.

It's a two-step, two-day process. On Day 1, he deliberately ruins the old porcelain coating of the bathtub by etching it with acid. It's a water-based acid, so it's rendered harmless by the time it runs down the drain. The acid "opens up the pores" in the porcelain, according to Doug, who looks nothing at all like a hairdresser. Then he patches up the chips, nicks, dings, and imperfections in the porcelain with special putty. When that's done, he sprays the tub with new porcelain coating, sort of like spray painting but way messier and smellier. That explains all the paper and drop cloths in the bathroom and the fan strategically mounted in the window. We left the fan running all day to get the fumes out of the room. Whew!

Day 2 is pretty simple. He cleans up his mess and polishes the new finish with a buffing compound. After that, you're all done! The tub looks as good as new, maybe even better. All clean and shiny, with no chips anywhere. Good stuff.

After Doug was done, I put the hardware (drain, strainer, etc.) back on. Some of the original drain hardware was a bit too old and nasty to preserve, so I replaced it with shiny new hardware. But naturally, the old parts used nonstandard threads, so we had to get creative to make the new hardware mate up with the old. Now it all fits beautifully. We're almost back in business.

Heavy Metal

A bit of trivia: this tub was manufactured by the American Radiator & Standard Sanitary Corporation of Louisville, KY. Says so right here.

A quick search shows that the company was formed in 1899 through a series of mergers with earlier companies, some dating back to 1857. It later formed a partnership with American Radiator Co. in 1929, and the resulting company eventually shortened its name to American-Standard, the name we know today.

The firm's "research facility" and "modern and extensive laboratories" are located in Louisville, where this one was made. Maybe it's an experimental bathtub.

Rub-a-Dub-Dub

...we've blackened a tub.

Getting the bathtub through the bathroom door was a trick in itself. Now we want to refinish the inside and outside before we put it back in. For the inside, we've called in the ceramic-refinishing experts. They'll be here in a few days. But the outside? Bah! We can do that ourselves!

This is a big ol' cast iron clawfoot tub that weighs about a million pounds. It's all we could do to move it a few inches outside the bathroom door, where it's been resting on its side like an animal with its feet in the air. As you can see, the outside of the tub was painted gold at some time in the past, but the paint ran and left streaks. It's also tarnished a bit since those glory days, so there's some cleanup required there, too.

We're faced with a dilemma: we want to clean up and repaint the bathtub, but we can't move it anywhere. It's blocking the small hallway, but there's really nowhere else we can move it. It's certainly not going downstairs, and it doesn't make sense to move it back into the bathroom yet while we're still working on everything. So we're going to paint it in situ.

To that end, I made this little impromptu paint booth. We taped up plastic drop cloths to cover the walls and floor. My shop vac provides air evacuation of a sort, and I've already got a good filter mask. Add in a couple of rattle cans and we're good to go!

The first day was spent scrubbing the outside with steel wool. That took off some of the old paint and loosened up some rust and other crud. Once the tub was nice and smooth I vacuumed up the dust and wiped down the tub. Painter's tape protects the porcelain rim of the tub and the claw feet. (Kathy will refinish these later with silver leaf.)

Of course, I can only paint one side of the tub at a time, so I spray on a few light coats, wait 48 hours for it to dry, then flip the tub over on its other side and repeat the process. The upstairs smells nasty with paint fumes, but the weather is warm and the windows are all open, so the dizziness goes away quickly.

So far, so good. In a few more days we should be able to move the behemoth back into its berth and start plumbing it in. Unfortunately, I don't think it'll be ready to use by July 4th, so guests will have to make do with the downstairs shower for another week or so.

Waiter, There's a Hole In My Wall

As part of our third-floor bathroom remodel, I decided to cut in a transom window over the bathroom door. When open, it should help ventilate the room better, and the window will let in some light. Besides, there was plenty of extra height since the ceilings are 10 feet high here.

Kathy's about done painting the transom window itself (pictures to come later), so in the meantime I've been trimming out the frame around it. I did a fairly straightforward design that looks about right for the period, with trim that leaves a 1/8-inch reveal around all four sides. The same style is repeated on the other side of the wall, in the hallway. I'm pretty happy with it.

The Doors, Garage Band

Here's an update on the garage doors we hung earlier this year. We finally got around to adding the little diamond shapes on the windows. The idea was to make the garage-door windows match the stained-glass windows on the house (below). It's not a perfect match, but I think it looks good.

Each little diamond is four separate pieces of molding, cut to fit diagonally across the window. Pretty simple in concept, but the measuring and cutting were both a bit tricky. Each piece is cut to fit its exact location (lower-left corner of window #3, for example). I tried cutting four "generic" pieces of trim, but they didn't fit quite right. A difference of even 1/16 of an inch was noticeable, so I broke down and cut each one individually.

I suppose if we wanted to go for the full house treatment we'd stain the glass, too, but I'm not sure we want to go that far. It is just a garage, after all. And it's a whole lot better than the door that was here before.

Flush With Excitement

It works!

As you can see by this lovely photo, we now have a toilet. And it even works! Hooray, we're now back to a 4-bathroom house the way it was when we moved in, and we don't have to go down a flight of stairs if we're on the top floor. Better still, our guests won't have to go down a flight of stairs.

Well, unless they want to take a bath or shower. Or brush their teeth. But one thing at a time.

As I mentioned earlier, it's a wall-mounted unit that doesn't touch the floor. This is to accommodate the strangely too-high drain pipe on this floor. Anyway, the thing is rock solid and is rated to support 800 pounds, so even the most, uh, gravitationally gifted guests will be safe.

Plumbing it in was a snap, even though it came with two sets of instructions that contradicted each other. (Reminds me of the old dictum: a man with a watch always knows what time it is. A man with two is never sure.) It turns out that both sets of instructions are correct, they just get you there in different ways.

Oh, and the instructions are all translated from German. Which would be fine if they'd just given me the German instructions. I might've be able to decipher those on my own. But no, the translated ones were just... inscrutable.

The hardest part, would you believe, was putting on the toilet seat. Plumbing? No problem. Wall supports? Piece of cake. Screwing down a stupid toilet seat? Now that's tricky. In typical German fashion, the seat is held on by an elaborately complex multi-part mechanical device that's infinitely adjustable and probably works for 12 different seats, 17 different commodes, 76 foreign countries, and five space stations. That's swell, but how do I get it to work for me? Here the instructions are oddly silent. No pictures, no metric measurements, nothing. Just a big bag of parts. I finally decided that half of the parts were unnecessary (kind of like British sports cars) and made it work. Let me know if it falls off.

I say the toilet works, but actually all I know for sure is that it doesn't leak. We've done a lot of trial flushes, but haven't actually, you know, used it used it. It's all been dry runs, so to speak. Maybe someone will come visit soon. Anybody?

The Paint Goes On

The top-floor bathroom tile is done, and I've resumed covering the rest of the walls. We're close enough to being finished that Kathy has started to paint. The plan is to paint the walls yellow and the "ceiling" (anything that's not vertical) in white. I've put a new transom window over the door, which should let in some sunlight from the nearby skylight / seagull perch, while also venting the room a little better.

Speaking of vents, I've also added a ceiling fan to the far wall, over the window. Local code requires a fan in every bathroom, and we felt like being good citizens and including one here even though it never had one before. What with all the new insulation, the room will trap moisture more than before, so we really want to make sure the room is well-ventilated.

Cutting a vent hole in the outside of the house, just under the roof peak on the third floor, was a bit tricky. There's nowhere to stand on the roof (even if I wanted to... and I don't), so I had to do it all by leaning out the window. I removed the triangular window from its frame, sat on the sill, and leaned out with my tools. Coincidentally, some new guests had just checked in to the Gosby House Inn next door, and they were trying their best to pretend not to watch. Just to mess with them, I'd "accidentally" juggle a screwdriver or say "whoops!" and listen to the conversation below come to a brief stop.

I'm pretty happy with the way the vent came out. It's almost invisible from the outside of the house. Later today I'll box in the duct so that it's not quite so ugly from the inside.

We've also put in the first of the new light fixtures, a pair of wall sconces that will shine over the vanity (if we can ever find a way to haul that thing upstairs). As an added bonus, I can now work in the bathroom at night!

The Naked Dining Room

We're back from vacation and hard at work again.

Kathy has completely stripped all the wallpaper from our ground-floor dining room. To our surprise, the room had never been painted. Once the wallpaper was off we were looking at bare plaster. And it was in pretty good shape, too, with only a few small cracks and imperfections. By far the worst damage was from the nail holes and screw fittings that people had added afterwards. The plaster itself is remarkably smooth and even. Whoever did that work 120 years ago, you have my compliments.

The one exception is a round spot about waist-high on one wall that happens to sit behind our liquor cabinet. It's oddly colored, like it was maybe patched at one time, and it's got a few cracks radiating out from it. After taking this photo, I realized it creates kind of a tacky, faux Mediterranean still life, like something you'd see for sale in the thrift shop next to pictures of crying clowns.

Now that the walls are all bare, the room is a lot lighter. Much better than the red color that used to be there. We haven't decided yet whether to paint the walls or paper them. If we paint, it would be the first time for this room. If we paper, at least now we've got a clean and well-prepared surface to work with.

847 Years of Bad Luck

Mirror, mirror on the wall...

...Who's going to rescue us if you fall?

We have two gigantic mirrors in the downstairs dining room. We never liked them much, but they were so big and awkward we didn't know how to remove them. That all changed on Saturday.

Kathy had stripped all the wallpaper from this room -- all except for the space behind the two mirrors. We'd arrived at the moment of truth: it's either us or the mirrors.

These aren't just any little vanity mirrors, either. They're each more than 7 feet high and almost 4 feet wide. Bigger than a big person. They reach to well above your head and they're fixed to the wall with no obvious brackets or holders, which means they're probably glued directly to the wall. We'll have no idea how to get them off until we start prying on them.

I'll be honest; I'm afraid of them. Getting my fingers behind a giant mirror and pulling? That's just begging for a Faces of Death-style grisly demise. Imagine 7 feet of jagged mirror shards raining down on your head, under foot, in your eyes... Just thinking about it gave me the willies.

Fortunately, Kathy is made of sterner stuff. We covered the mirrors in plastic sheets in case the glass exploded outward. Here's Kathy taping up one sheet. Note that she's standing on a ladder in this photo. I told you the mirrors were tall. Then we put on goggles, heavy gloves, long sweaters, and heavy shoes. And then... pulled.

Lucky for us, the adhesive on the first mirror was pretty old and came away easily from the wall. (Which begs the question: if we hadn't removed the mirror when we did, how much longer would it have stayed there on its own?) Once it was loose, we had to set it down -- gently -- without scratching the floor. Kathy had wadded up more plastic sheeting, so this went pretty much as planned.

Okay, now to get it out of the room and out of the house. We opened up all the back doors and carefully, gently, slowly tipped the mirror over on one side so that we're carrying it horizontally instead of vertically. (That is, it's now 7 feet long and only 4 feet high.) The thing must weigh 50-70 pounds. It's surprisingly heavy. As we pass through each door I imagine accidentally banging it against the door frame, or catching a piece of furniture, or losing my grip and -- BAM! -- the mirror grenades into a million pieces, throwing reflective shrapnel throughout the house.

Out in the backyard, we lay it flat on the ground, where we've placed a big tarp. Another tarp goes on top of it, and then we get to the fun part: breaking the mirror. Kathy grabs a brick, stands back to what we hope is a safe distance, and lobs the brick directly at the mirror.

It bounces. No lie, a freakin' brick bounced off that stupid mirror. Hmm. Now what? I take my turn, and this time we put a few cracks in it. Several bricks later, and we've finally shattered the thing into poodle-sized pieces. I'm sure the neighbors were horrified by the noise. It sounded like the worst restaurant accident imaginable. We're bulls in a china shop.

The second mirror didn't come off the wall as easily. We had to really wrench at this one, which made me wince and squirm a little bit. Finally it pops loose, drops to the floor, and gets taken outside like its twin. We're getting good at lobbing bricks so it comes apart pretty swiftly.

So... what do you do with 150 pounds of fatally jagged broken mirror? By no coincidence, tomorrow is "super garbage" day, where the local waste-management company will take up to seven bins of anything you've got. We doled out the shards among three garbage cans and filled the rest with Styrofoam, newspapers, and other light items. They go to the curb tonight.

I hope we don't see any bloody, mangled garbageman corpses in the morning.

17,119 Tiles

In case you're wondering, there are exactly 17,119 tiles on the new bathroom floor. We've filled in all the little edges and corners, usually by gluing in tiles one by one. It's surprisingly hard to keep those little guys straight. Good thing most of them came on 12x12 sheets.

More Tile, Part II

Almost done now.

It's the end of Day 2 and we've laid almost all the tile except for the row in front of the door and the little oddball pieces around the edges. And we're pretty happy with how it's coming out.

The mesh backing on these tiles is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, putting down a sheet of 144 tiles at a time is a whole lot easier than gluing down each little coin individually. But on the other hand, the mesh backing doesn't stay square. Each one twists and stretches just a little bit, so they don't want to stay lined up.The farther you get from your starting point, the more out-of-whack they want to get. Normal square tiles don't have that problem.

Consequently, we've snapped a whole grid of chalk lines all over the floor, over and across, and we try to line up to those. So far it's working pretty well, but we've had to coax some of the sheets a little bit.

You can just see the gray heating mat at the very bottom of this photo. This is the same sort of floor heater we've got in the 2nd-floor bathroom. We like that one so much we put a similar one in here. It's the only source of heat in this room, and it'll be on a programmable thermostat so that we can set it to warm up in the morning and maybe for a little bit in the evening, too.

Meanwhile...

Maybe we have short attention spans. Maybe we're just masochists. Maybe it's both.

At the same time that Kathy and I are beating ourselves up tiling the 3rd-floor bathroom, Kathy's also downstairs stripping the wallpaper off the ground-floor dining room. Just thinking of the two flights of stairs in between those makes me tired.

Anyway, she decided the "bordello red" wallpaper had to go. Actually, the wallpaper itself isn't red; it's a floral pattern that's been painted over, as you can kind of see here. It isn't original, either; we think it was probably applied by the Leitzingers, who ran a restaurant here in the 1990s. Then someone else (perhaps Robert Kincaid?) painted over it. At any rate, all three ground-floor rooms are the same shade of red, and we're tired of it.

Kathy's got a two-step process: she soaks the painted wallpaper and strips it off with a kitchen spatula, then she soaks the wall again and strips off the adhesive backing paper. It would be great if the wallpaper came off in huge strips, but alas, it tears off in little confetti-like pieces. Kathy is a patient woman.

Now that the walls are almost completely bare, the room doesn't seem so dark. It's also exposed the underlying plaster, which is in surprisingly good shape. For being 120 years old, it's only got a few small cracks and holes, but nothing major.

The bare plaster, peeling wallpaper, and slightly damp smell also give the room a kind of dilapidated, haunted house feeling to it. If the whole house had looked like this two years ago, I'm not sure we would have moved in. But knowing this is temporary and that we'll have a cleaner, brighter room soon make it worthwhile. Especially since I'm not doing the work!

The End Is In Sight

Here's Kathy. Kathy is tiling our bathroom floor.

Kathy is busy. Busy, busy Kathy. She's spent the day hunched over, her knees on the hard floor. She's surrounded by the tools of her trade: bucket of water, straightedge, knife, trowel, rags, sponge, and tiles. Lots and lots of little bitty tiles.

As you can see here, we started laying tile from the far side of the room, working our way backward toward the door. Apart from just being good practice, it also avoids the horribly embarrassing mistake of tiling yourself into a corner. We'd look pretty stupid curled up under the window mewling for help.

At this point we're about one-third of the way done, and about ready to quit for the day. We'll finish the room tomorrow, except for the little fiddly bits around the edges. Those can wait another day or so.

We've gone with an old-fashioned black and white tile, as you can see. Each tile is 3/4-inch across, or about the size of a nickel. Thankfully, we don't have to put them down individually. They come in sheets of 144 little coins, so each sheet is about 10x11 inches. We're thinking about 120 sheets (17,280 tiles) ought to do it.

How To Tile a Bathroom Floor

The right way:

1. Hire a tile crew
2. Sit back and drink iced tea
3. Pay the nice people when they leave.

The way Kathy and Jim do it:

1. Buy some Sunset how-to books*
2. Make several trips to tiles stores and Home Deport
3. Wait for hot weather
4. Kneel on the floor for 10-12 days
5. Get clothes dirty 
6. Make several more trips
7. Groan about aches and pains
8. Admire handiwork

 *Sunset Publishing Co.: "The triumph of ambition over incompetence, for over 50 years."

I'll get straight to the chase: Kathy and I spent the last two days tiling our upstairs bathroom, and it looks pretty darned good. If you ever want to do this kind of thing yourself, here's what we learned.

The first step was to make sure the underlying redwood was in solid condition, and it was. We had to scrape off a lot of old adhesive and goo from the previous carpet (and the tile before that), but eventually it was flat and clean.

Next, you want to eliminate all the squeaks. Bounce around the room in your socks looking for squeaky floorboards and screw 'em all down. You can sometimes sprinkle talcum powder between the boards to silence squeaks, but that's just a temporary fix. You really want to drive long screws through the floor and down into the joists. That means finding the joists, which can be tricky. But if you're covering up the floor with tile anyway, you can drill all the holes you want until you find the right spacing.

When the floor is solid and silent, put down Hardie Backer cement board with a combination of adhesive (mastic) and more screws. Hardie makes special screws for this (naturally) with heads that lie flat and won't split the backer board. Don't worry about butting the boards right up next to each other. You're just supporting the tile to come, not making a pretty floor. Small gaps between seams don't matter. Tape over the seams with mesh tape and more mastic.

Now you're ready to lay tile. Or are you? What you don't want to do is starting laying your tile along the edge of the room, working toward the opposite wall. I know that seems logical, but it's wrong. You'll wind up with a roomful of slightly out-of-kilter tile and wonder why.

What you really want to do is measure the entire room very accurately. Don't round off the numbers or assume that two walls are the same. Measure everything and measure it exactly. If a wall is 68 and 7/8" then write that down; don't round up to 69 inches. Mark all the dimensions down in a notebook, paying special attention to small obstacles like plumbing, outlets, uneven studs, or whatever.

Also don't assume that your walls meet at right angles (ours certainly don't). Dust off your old high school geometry texts and relearn how to find an angle. Measure the four walls, then draw diagonals from the corners to the opposite corners and measure those. Are they the same? If they are, you're square. If not, you'll have to accommodate the out-of-square room when you start laying tile. (You'll also know where the exact center of your room is.)

Our room gets slightly narrower at one end. You can't see it, but the measuring tape says it's definitely there. That means we had to align the tiles in such a way that you won't see them "creeping" away from one wall or toward another. The tile should always look straight, even if the room isn't.

The best way to accomplish this is to pretend you're going to start laying tile from the door, but actually start laying it from the opposite side of the room, working toward the door. In other words, the doorway is the most important spot and should look the best, so start your measurements from there. You want full, uncut tiles in the doorway because that's the first thing everyone will see. But you actually want to lay the tile starting from the far side of the room, and that means taking very careful measurements so that when you finish, you wind up with perfect, uncut, straight tiles right in front of the door. Easier said than done, I know.

Decide which direction is perpendicular to your doorway and snap a straight chalk line along that dimension, which may not be exactly parallel to any of the side walls. This line will be your starting point. It might be near one of the walls, or it might be right down the middle of the room; it doesn't matter. What matters is that you believe it, trust in it, and respect it. That line is your beacon, your guide. You're going to line up your tiles to that line, not to the walls. Measure as many times as you have to until you can completely trust your chalk line.

Now you can start getting dirty. Smear thinset and trowel it out as thick as the tile maker says. Generally, the bigger the tiles the thicker you want your thinset. Always trowel your grooves in the same direction; don't make swirly patterns. This allows the goop to spread evenly and avoids trapping air bubbles. It's also good discipline. Think of it as a Zen rock garden.

By the way, trowels are right-handed. It's a nuisance to hold a trowel in your left hand, but it's just one of the crosses we bear. (sigh)