We're Bag People

Every year, our town has a cute little street fair called Good Old Days. It runs for a couple of days in the spring and takes up several blocks of the main street. There are booths with crafts, food, paintings, handmade soaps, kiddie rides, a petting zoo, bands, a parade, and every variety of wholesome fun.

Best of all, it all starts directly in front of our house. Lunchtime comes around and we just pop out the front door and get falafel, ice cream, bratwurst, cotton candy, or whatever. It's always fun to browse through the craft stalls, too, and see what's new.

This year we passed one of the booths and stopped to do a double-take. "Hey, that's my house!" Sure enough, one of the crafty people was selling cloth bags that she'd silkscreened with various patterns, once of which was labeled "Pacific Grove" with a picture of... yup, our house. We're a logo!

We talked to the nice lady at the booth, who explained that the artist had taken some photographs around town and then made a silkscreen from her favorite. We definitely wanted one of the bags, and hinted that maybe she could give us a special deal? No dice, so we paid full price.

Harrumph. Next time we're collecting a royalty.

NSFW

We're learning all sorts of things about how to build a restaurant. Frankly, we're total beginners, so most of the rules and regulations are new to us. We found out what (and what not) to put on your kitchen floor, how to handle ventilation, the rules about restrooms, and what you're allowed to put on the walls.

Then there's the small issue of equipment. Kitchens that serve food to the public have to follow all sorts of city, county, state, and federal regulations. You can do whatever you want in your own personal kitchen -- sacrifice goats over an open fire in the middle of the floor if you want to -- but the minute you hand out food to paying customers everything changes.

The first code word you learn is NSF: the National Sanitary Foundation. NSF approval is required for every appliance or significant gadget in the kitchen. That means the stove, ovens, refrigerator, freezer, ice maker  -- even the can opener -- has to be NSF-approved. At home, you can buy the fanciest Sub Zero fridge or the biggest Viking stove in the world, but you still can't use them in a restaurant. Only NSF-approved appliances are permitted, and they're not available at Home Depot.

NSF might as well stand for Nothing but Stainless Fabrication. There are no good-looking NSF appliances; they're all made from stainless steel and pretty thoroughly charm-impaired. Given the current trend for stainless steel appliances everywhere, they look very modern and fit right in. No Harvest Gold or Avocado Green here. NSF also stipulates that all the surfaces be washable, there are no corners to trap crud, and that everything is lifted 6" off the floor. Speaking as a restaurant customer, that's probably a good thing. But as a buyer, it's a nuisance.

Fortunately, there's a thriving and competitive market for restaurant appliances (hope springs eternal), so we had lots of choices. There's even a full-on restaurant supply store just a few miles away from us, and that was our obvious starting point. Unfortunately, the guy running the store doesn't seem interested in actually selling anything. He'd ignore phone calls, miss appointments, and generally just blow us off every chance he got. We asked around a bit, and heard similar stories from other potential buyers. He's apparently got a wide reputation for being difficult to deal with, and no one knows how he stays in business. So scratch the "shop local" angle.

Next-nearest are the Bay Area suppliers serving San Francisco, Oakland, Napa, and nearby areas. There were a lot of those, selling both new and used (failure springs eternal) appliances. We didn't mind the shopping expeditions, but thankfully they've all discovered the Internet and had great online catalogs. And once you start shopping online, you might as well cast your net wider and start looking at stores all across the country, right? On the other hand, shipping an 800-pound commercial range across the country can get really expensive. Local is still better.

Long story short, we found what we wanted at a San Francisco warehouse that had great service, cheap(ish) shipping, and competitive prices. Best of all, their truck drivers would actually bring the appliances into the house. Everyone else drops their deliveries at the curb, so moving them into the kitchen would be our problem. That was a deal-breaker, so these guys got the business.

Several months ago, Kathy and I smoothed out a dirt ramp alongside our garage, in anticipation of this very day. That gave us (and more importantly, the delivery people) a smooth transition from the street, up the driveway, up the ramp, into the backyard -- no steps. Then I used a sheet of thick plywood to build a temporary ramp over the back steps, eliminating the last few bumps into the kitchen. Result: we'll get our appliances delivered inside instead of left sitting outside at the curb.

Now with everything in place, it's time to sit by the window and wait for the delivery truck...

Walls, Floors, and More

We like to think of it as buried treasure. No matter what we dig up, we always find something interesting.

Here's a last look at the vinyl floor that Kathy and I pulled out of the kitchen and restrooms a few months ago. We also removed a hastily home-built storage cabinet that someone had kludged together out of scrap wood and two closet doors. You can see the paint stripes across the back wall where the shelves used to go. It was a handy storage unit for a while, but we knew it wasn't gonna stay.

In removing the cabinet, we came across a metal plate screwed to the wall. Okay... what's this for? Turns out it covers a drain clean-out. Someone had evidently cut into the wall, installed a clean-out, and then mounted this plate over the hole. (And then built a storage cabinet over the plate.)

There's evidence of a water leak here, mostly on the other side of the wall (in the men's room). My guess is that something broke and, in desperation, they cut through the wall and into the pipe to fix it. The hasty patch has held for quite awhile.

After a little detective work with a flashlight, a snake, some colored string, and a hammer (to rap on the pipes) we determined that neither of these vertical pipes is being used anymore. At least, they're not "wet." They now pass air, so to speak, not wastewater. That's good news, because it means we can remove the cleanout and cover up the hole permanently. Just for good measure, we also replaced the cast iron pipe with ABS. After our adventures in the backyard, we don't like to leave any iron pipe in place if we can help it.

The surprise came when we took a close look at the backside of the wall, just to the right of the old iron pipe. Is that... bead board paneling back there? What's that doing here?

Turns out the whole men's room is done in bead board -- we just didn't know it. The wine labels cover it up so well that you can't even tell there's any paneling there. So, one more reason we think we want to remove all those old wine labels.

Once the old storage cabinet came down, the plaster started to collapse. Clearly, more of this wall had been cut away than we realized. You can see here how we found it, with a big section missing near the floor, and a chunk gone from the back wall, too. Sigh. Time for more plaster repair.

I generally like to repair small problems by mixing up fresh plaster and troweling it on, but these were too big -- and there was no lath to hold the plaster up. Looks like a job for drywall. If you shim it just right, you can get three-eighths drywall to match the thickness of the plaster. After a bit of mudding and sanding, the patch is pretty much invisible.

Somewhere in this process we added a heating duct to the room, too. It sticks up at a funny angle because we figured it needs to blow warm air into the room, not up at the ceiling. And we're planning to put a storage closet over it, sort of like the old one (but better), and this will get hidden in the kick space. Anyway, here's the partially completed plaster/drywall patch. It still needs a lot of sanding, but there will be plenty of time for that later.

Kitchen Confidential, Episode 1

They say that if you like eating sausage, or respect the law, you should never see how either one is made.

I think the same is true of restaurant kitchens. You really don't want to see where your food comes from, and I don't mean just the farm. We inherited a partially intact restaurant kitchen, one that had been serving top-notch meals for more than 30 years. They were all well-respected businesses, with famous chefs, classy menus, and long waiting lists. And yet they all cooked in... this place.

Granted, the kitchen had gotten a bit old, and the two years of neglect before we moved in didn't help. But you start looking closely at the walls, the sink, the floor, and... yuck. Time for a refresh.

And here's the little secret we've been holding back. Kathy and I are going to reopen the restaurant. Sort of. It's not going to be a full-service restaurant like our predecessors'. Instead, we're opening a tea room. Say hello to

The White Hart
Victorian Tea & Treats in the Historic Hart Mansion

We formed the legal business entity back in January, and have been working away on the business side of things ever since. At the same time, we've been restoring, upgrading, and refurbishing the kitchen and ground-floor rooms with an eye toward reopening them to the public. When? Hard to say, but we're shooting for the middle of 2014. (You can come back and laugh at our optimism in July.)

As far as blog posts go, we've been withholding almost a year's worth of kitchen-related upgrades, so prepare for some backfill. Here's the kitchen in June, already partway through the work. Many of the old appliances are gone (range, freezer, dishwasher, etc.) but the kitchen makes a swell place to store tools and work on large sheet lumber!

One of the first things we did was tear up the old sheet-vinyl flooring. Demolition is always the best part of any project, so Kathy and I went to it with a will. Here's Kathy peeling up big chunks of vinyl. Of course, the vinyl top comes off, but it leaves the sticky padding and glue underneath.

Rather than deal with that stuff, we just demolished and removed the wooden underlayment. It was mostly half-inch particleboard, so it breaks apart real nice-like. Besides, I don't like the idea of using particleboard under a (potentially) wet floor; it does bad things when it meets water.

The vinyl flooring extended into the two adjoining bathrooms and "utility room." Trouble is, it's not all the same vinyl, so the pattern keeps changing, and the floor heights are all slightly different, so there were threshold strips across every door. Time to fix it all.

Once we got all the vinyl and the wooden underlayment out of each of the rooms, we laid fresh plywood on the floors. The trick here was to even-out the floor heights, so we used a mixture of half-inch, three-eights, and five-eighths plywood from room to room. One room actually got two layers. Now we've got one flat, continuous surface across five rooms and five separate doors, from the dining room all the way to the backyard. Progress.

Next up: new flooring. And this is where we had our first run-in with the vast bureaucracy that manages restaurants and foodservice facilities. (You'll hear lots more about this.) Restaurant kitchens can't have just any old flooring. They have to be "smooth, cleanable, and nonabsorbent," among other things. We found a nice faux wooden plank flooring that looks like it matches the rest of the house but passes the S.C.N. test. As the final step in preparation, we screwed down special ACX plywood (grade-A finish on one side, grade-C finish on the other side, and water-resistant adhesives) to give the new flooring a completely smooth surface. Here's the ACX going in.

If I'd been smart, I would have removed all the appliances and tools before we started, but no... Instead, I got to play a big game of "move the furniture" whenever it came time to lay down a new piece. Notice that my table saw is upside-down in the sink, and that the floor drain and gas pipe are still in the back corner of the room. That will all change.

Finally, we got all the underlayment in, nice and smooth, and filled in the screw holes and gaps between boards. It was about two more weeks before the installers came to put in the flooring, so in that time our nice clean underlayment got all dirty again. But they seemed okay with cleaning it up.

Installation day dawned and the installers did a bang-up job. One guy installs all the full-length boards, while his helper has to cut all the odd pieces. Then I saw them pull out a blowtorch -- "what's that for?!!" Turns out it's easier to cut the flooring when it's warm, so they heat it up whenever they're working near the corners or edges.

We're really happy with how it turned out. The color and even the grain pattern match the floor in the dining room, so you hardly notice the floor changes at all, even though one's wood and one's water-resistant synthetic. And it runs smoothly through all the adjoining rooms, from kitchen to bathrooms to utility room. One small step toward opening up for business.

Rear Window

We replaced a window. Yippee, I know.

The upstairs guest room has a triangular window, like all the rooms upstairs. We're not entirely sure whether it's original to the house, but it's certainly old. It's also glazed with Plexiglas, not real glass, so it was probably broken and rebuilt and some point. The wooden frame is old beat-up redwood, but we don't know how old.

More to the point, it's drafty and ill-fitting. We've tried all sorts of cheap hardware-store rubber moldings to stop the drafts, but nothing worked very well. And we wanted to take the hard plastic out anyway.

Enter Ocean Woodworks, a local woodworking shop that specializes in restorations and custom milling. What started out as a simple "fix up this old window, please" eventually became, "let's build an entire new window from scratch."

They took a ton of measurements to get the dimensions of the triangular frame just right. It's got a lot of tricky compound angles to make the bottom sill shed water but also allow the window to open inwards into the room. There are no hinges or latches anywhere holding it in. It's just a gravity fit. Measuring didn't work, so they came back and built a full-size cardboard template. That didn't work, either, so they came back 2-3 more times to trim and adjust the template, and still spent a couple of hours with hand planes, chisels, and sandpaper tweaking the final product to fit. In place of my nasty rubber strips they made kerf-cut trim with copper flanges to seal around the edges. Nice.

Now it's a completely new reproduction of the original(?) window, but with UV-resistant glass and a nearly draft-free fit. We did manage to save the little wooden mullions between the lights, but apart from those it's all new. They gave us back the original frame, but I have no idea what we're going to do with it. Anybody want most of a triangular window?

A Little Something for the Ladies

Indoor plumbing: It's a good thing.

We decommissioned both of the downstairs restrooms a long time ago when we started replacing the under-floor plumbing. It wasn't long before they both became storage rooms, filled with tools, wood, miscellaneous bolts and doorknobs, and so on. That worked pretty well for a while, but we missed having a downstairs bathroom (or two), and for legal reasons we needed to get them working eventually.

(Background: Our region has chronic water shortages, and so each property is assigned a certain number of "water credits," which determine how many toilets, showerheads, and faucets you're allowed to have. You can't add -- or even significantly change -- any water fixture without additional credits, which can't be bought or sold. Consequently, the number of water fixtures per house has been fixed for many years. Because our house was used as a 58-seat restaurant for 30+ years, it has a *lot* of water credits, but we risk losing them if we don't maintain all the existing fixtures. Hence the motivation to reinstate the bathrooms.)

We started with the ladies' room because it's larger and nicer. Kathy stripped off the old wallpaper, exposing those mysterious catalog pages. (We've photographed them all just in case someone figures it out.) We mixed our own plaster and patched some of the bad spots where the original plaster had come away from the wooden lath behind it. And we sanded down some of the bigger bumps and wobbles in the walls.

We also took advantage of the naked walls to bury some of the electrical wiring that had been added long ago. When these rooms were first electrified, someone had run metal conduit up and down the walls and across the ceiling, which wasn't very charming. So by cutting a few strategic holes in the walls and fishing the wires through, we managed to hide all the wiring in the walls. A few quick plaster patches, and voila! You'd never know it wasn't all there from the beginning.

New wallpaper went on, and we added some gold-painted picture-rail molding around the top. Naturally, all of these walls are uneven, so running straight wooden molding only serves to highlight the gaps and wows in the walls. We had to get a bit creative in masking some of the discontinuities.

The old bathroom fixtures got thrown out and shiny new fixtures went in, including an ecologically correct low-flow toilet. (For which the aforementioned water bureau is sending us a $100 rebate.)

Kathy found a couple of small tables at the local shops, and we're just about all done. The window needs a bit of work (new glass, and molding touch-up), but now the ladies' room is up and running.

Alone Again, Naturally

Now that the scaffolding is down and the painting is done, I'm alone for the first time in two months. It's strange. I got used to sharing the house with the painters on weekdays, and with Kathy during the weekends. But now it's quiet here and I'm all by myself. Better hire a contractor to bang on something.

Not surprisingly, the scaffolding came down more quickly than it went up. What was surprising was just how quickly it came down. It took the guys two full days to put it all up, but only about five hours to dismantle it and put all the pieces back on the truck.

The process was just as hair-raising, too. They still toss heavy steel bars at each other, but now they're launching them downwards. One guy stands on the top (third floor) level, removes two or three metal bars, and drops them directly at the other guy's feet where they stick in the dirt, quivering ominously. Nobody seems to think this is dangerous.

They're also pretty cavalier about removing all the support structure from under themselves. It's like watching Loony Toons, where Wile E. Coyote cuts off the branch he's hanging onto but doesn't fall. These guys are up in the air pulling boards from under their own feet with no apparent regard for physics.

With the wooden boards all gone, there's nothing much left but a kind of framework birdcage. They seem to have no problem climbing these vertical poles, like monkeys in the zoo.

With the house empty, we can now turn the heat back on (no more open windows!), reset the timer on the hot water heater, and ceremonially turn over the toilet paper roll. Hooray!

Dry Walls

Here are a couple of spare pictures from when we installed the stick work "window" in the upstairs hallway.

This shows the near side of the wall partially demolished with the piece dry fit in place. There's a header across the top, jack studs on each side, and a bit of shimming all around to make the window fit snugly.

The dangling light fixture and the remaining green drywall all got pulled down later and replaced. You can just make out a diagonal roof beam toward the back of the picture. We're up on the third floor right under the roof, so it's all angles and intersecting planes up here. You can see how the green ceiling part is all funny angles, too.

The lath and plaster showing through from the far side of the wall are still in good shape. We left that mostly alone but were unsentimental about the drywall on the near side. Ye olde white Romex is obviously new. I left the original cloth-covered wires in place but ran this new wiring alongside them, taking the opportunity to add a three-way switch at each end of the hallway. You can't do that with knob-and-tube wiring.

If you're into woodworking porn, you can see the mill marks on the quarter-sawn redwood studs near the right side of this photo. Like all the lumber, these were probably milled on-site when the house was built in 1892. Everything is cut square-shouldered and measures exactly two inches by four inches, not like today's 2x4s. The redwood has no knots or blemishes, even thought it's completely hidden inside the walls or under the floors. Even the lath is redwood. The trees must have been plentiful at the time. Oh, and the studs here aren't 16" apart like today. More like random spacing. Maybe the builders just eyeballed it.

Whenever I have to cut into the studs (as here), I save the wood and reuse it close to the original location. In this case, the two cut-out sections got reused in Kathy's closet about 6 feet away.

The nails are iron, not steel, and have a square section and slightly irregular square heads. They might have been made on-site, too, although by the 1890s it was common to purchase nails. I heard that in the 1700s it wasn't unusual to burn down old buildings just to reclaim the nails. I think we're pretty well past that now.

John 19:30

It is finished.

After nine weeks, our exterior paint job is completely done. We couldn't be happier. And not just because it's finally all over, but because we really like the way it turned out. There were some tense moments when we weren't sure of our color choices, but it came out just right.

Every single bit of the house got painted. Even the white parts are now a different color of white. Just as important, it's new white paint, not the old stuff that was flaking off before. I think the final tally is seven colors: white, tan, blue, red, brown, gold, and sky blue over the two entryways. That's an improvement over the monochrome finish we had before. Bonus points if you can spot all seven colors in the photos.

By sheer coincidence, Jon the painter just met Robert, the restaurateur who lived in the house before us -- because  he's about to paint Robert's new place. Chef Robert admitted that the all-white paint was a bit of a rush job: his dishwasher did it with a spray gun, and got paint on eight parked cars in the process. And that's why he's a dishwasher, not a housepainter.

I think the house looks nicer than it has in a long time. Maybe even nicer than it's ever been in the past 120 years. I like to think Doctor Hart (all three generations of them) would have liked it, too.

That's How We Roll

No sooner did the painters finish outside than we started more painting inside.

Kathy and I hung the wallpaper in the downstairs front room two weeks ago, but we hadn't painted the ceiling. It was still white painted-over wallpaper. (Yes, they wallpapered the ceiling and then painted over it. Just like most of the rooms.) We took a wallpaper scrap down to the paint store and had them match it for us, then started on the ceiling Saturday morning.

We do this tag-team. Kathy gets up on the ladder with a brush and cuts around the corners, fixtures, and other obstacles. I get a roller on a long pole and paint the ceiling in big stripes. If we time it right, we can paint around each other and finish at the same time. That never happens.

Actually, the first step was to cover the floor with paper and cover the walls with plastic. We hung big plastic sheets all around the room. It looked like the quarantine area in E.T., or some sort of biohazard-containment area. But at least we'd keep from splattering our new wallpaper. On the down side, it gets hot and stuffy working in a sealed plastic room.

This room's about done. I have to reinstall the chair rails, which shouldn't be too hard. And we really ought to re-hang those sliding doors in the back of the picture. They're off their tracks and haven't moved in many years. But that's for another day.

Hot Lead and Cold Showers

These are a few of the things you learn when your house is being painted.

• Cold Showers. Our water heater has a timer that makes the water nice and hot about 5 minutes before we get up in the morning. But when the painters pressure-washed the house, they tripped the circuit breaker on the water heater. By the time I reset it the clock was off by a few hours, and all the scaffolding makes it impossible to reach the timer to adjust it. So for the last two months it's taken a lot longer to get hot water in the morning. #FirstWorldProblems, I know.
• The Tissue Inversion Principle. We leave the doors unlocked so the painters can come inside and open windows, paint trim, use the bathroom, or whatever. Regarding the bathroom, we hang the toilet paper the correct way (i.e., unrolling from the bottom). But after the first day or so, we noticed that the toiler paper was flipped around to unroll from the top. I figured Kathy must have done it, and she thought I had changed it. A few days later we put on a new roll and the same thing happens: it flips over partway through the day. Evidently one of the painters has strong ideas about which way the toilet paper should work, so we've just decided to leave it alone. Starting next week, though, we're changing it back to the proper way.
• Idle Heaters. The windows (and doors) have been open almost nonstop for eight weeks now, so there's no point trying to heat the house. Fortunately, it's been warm throughout the project so we haven't gotten too cold. Who knows? Maybe we've even saved a few bucks on heating bills.
• Housekeeping Tip. If you pull the ice cube tray out of your freezer (to fill an ice chest or cooler, for instance) be sure to put it back right away. Otherwise your entire freezer fills with ice cubes.
• Fractal Surfaces. You never know how big something is until you try to paint it. Want to paint a wall? No problem. But if it's shingled, it'll take three times as long. You've got to paint each little shingle, plus the edges, sides, and a little bit underneath each one. A big easy roller job becomes a tedious little brush job.

Gratuitous Window-Letting

So this happened: We added a window indoors.

It was all Kathy's idea. I just wielded the saw. The whole thing started about three years ago when we remodeled the ghastly second-floor bathroom. Among its many atrocities was a walled-in commode with some sort of fancy stick work above it. We demolished the wall but saved the nice piece of turned wooden trim. Once we took it down and had a closer look, it was clear that it wasn't originally from the bathroom, but had been borrowed from somewhere else and repurposed. So we stored it away for later...

Fast-forward three years and we found a home for it. The top of the stairwell on the third floor is a bit dark, despite having a skylight. The problem is, the skylight is on one side of a wall, so it lights up the hallway just fine, but no light gets into the stairs. We can fix that.

If you look really closely, you can see that I've cut a rectangular hole in the wall here and started to peel away the wallpaper, exposing a bit of the lath and plaster. This is the one and only time I've cut away original plaster, but we think it's justified. The back side of this wall is covered with drywall, so somebody obviously demolished part of it before. (In fact, almost all of the third floor is drywall, not plaster.)

Once the hole was opened up we had a perfect spot to mount the old piece of stick work. Luckily, it's just a little narrower than the space between three wall studs, so I cut out the middle stud, paired up some 2x4s to made a header, and cut two jack studs to redistribute the load. Like always, I had to mill and/or shim the modern lumber to match the dimensions of the old 2x4s in the wall, which really are 2 inches by 4 inches. Every project takes twice as long in this house.

In goes the "window." We trimmed it out with a bit of ash and molding, and it's about ready to paint. It's not nailed in, but floats inside the trim so it can expand/contract with changes in humidity. So far, it seems to do the job. It lets in light from the skylight, and makes the hallway on the other side a bit less claustrophobic. And it's one less thing we need to store in the attic.

Tall, Dark, and Handsome

No, not me. Stop it. I'm blushing. ;-)

This is a quick shot of the door from the downstairs kitchen to the backyard. It's here because this door has come back almost from the dead. It was really beat-up and had so many coats of peeling paint caked on it that you couldn't see much of the panel detail.

It was also badly crooked. It was so far out of square that there was a 1-inch gap in the upper-right corner. You could see daylight around the top of the door. I nailed in a dutchman to fill the gap, but even that fit so badly that we figured someone must have sawn off part of the door. The hinges were rusted and their screws poked straight through the jamb. Standing outside, you could see the screws sticking out in midair. In short, this door was a disaster.

It's amazing what a week of professional care can do. Scott the carpenter took mercy on this door, scraping away the years of accumulated paint -- four different colors in all. Underneath he found a layer of stain, the door's original finish. Then he loosened up the mortise and tenon joints, trued up the door, and screwed it back together. To everyone's surprise, the door was straight after all. It hadn't been cut; it was just sagging so badly that it looked like it had.

Now the door fits. It swings open and closed -- deluxe! It blocks light as well as drafts. And the original mortised lock even works again. We replaced the rusty old steel leaf hinges with historic reproductions that are pretty close to our original ones. And it got a good sanding and a coat of new paint. After years of abuse and neglect, this one little piece is back in shape.

Meanwhile...

Lest anyone think Mrs. Restoration and I have been slacking off these last eight weeks while the painters were scampering about outside, we've actually been working on all sorts of things indoors. These can be roughly divided into three projects: the downstairs kitchen, the downstairs living rooms, and the upstairs hallway and closet.

Well, maybe five projects. There's also the men's and ladies' restrooms, and the sprinkler system.

Oh, and the concrete wall. That makes six... unless we've forgotten something.

Let's start with the living room.

You may remember that Kathy started stripping the wallpaper from the three downstairs rooms more than a year ago. That was tedious work, and ever since then we've had bare plastered walls. The walls had never been painted, only papered, so removing the layers of wallpaper exposed the bare plaster underneath. It had held up remarkably well considering it's 120 years old and laid on a wood-frame house with no foundation. Sure, there were a few cracks here and there, but Kathy spackled and sanded them to a nice smooth finish. We'd gotten kind of used to the bare walls, although I'm sure visitors thought it looked funny.

Well, last week we finally put up the new wallpaper. (Okay, Kathy did it while I stood on the ladder.) We started with the front room; the two other rooms will come later. For amateur paperhangers, I think we did pretty well.

The walls may be smooth, but they sure aren't straight. That makes it tough to hang paper. The seams don't want to match, and the paper will tend to "clock" or rotate if you're not careful. We snapped a couple of plumb lines to keep things vertical, but there's really more art than science to aligning it on uneven walls.

It got especially tricky alongside the windows, where you've got a big 8-foot strip of wallpaper with a little L-shaped piece sticking out at the bottom that goes underneath the windowsill. Someone has to hold the top up while someone else tries to match the pattern on this little piece under the window. "Move it up a few inches. Okay, now to the right. A little more... a little more... Okay, there!" More than once I let go of the wallpaper too soon and it came down on top of us. Add a soundtrack and a little soft-focus camera work and I'm sure it would have made a cute movie.

The End Is Nigh!

... at least, we hope so.

We're now in Week 8 of our 3-week painting project. That's what the painting contractor told us: three weeks and X dollars, where X is some fraction of what we've actually spent so far. Seriously, this paint job is costing half as much as it cost to buy our first house.

But it's really pretty.

We've got seven colors in total instead of the four we started with. With the help of an actual, professional colorist we tweaked the two main colors (the red and the blue) a little bit, added a new glossy white in addition to the main white color, and brought in new gold and brown colors. These last two go on the "acorns" up high, plus a few of the small details elsewhere. Overall, we're really happy with the result.

The neighbors and passers-by seem pleased with it, too. We can't step outside without someone stopping to chat, comment, or give us a thumbs-up. We haven't heard a single complaint. The sole exception was one of our good neighbors who said she didn't like the "fuchsia color" but then immediately backtracked the next day. I think she sensed she was in the minority and had maybe hurt someone's feelings.

There was briefly (very briefly) an eighth color. The painter added a pale purple color over the front door while we weren't looking, but immediately admitted it was a mistake. We agreed, strenuously, and begged him to paint over it. Maybe that's what the neighbor was complaining about.

It seems like the bulk of the painting was done a few weeks ago. The guys keep showing up every morning, but it's getting harder and harder to tell what they're actually doing. To be fair, they spend a lot of their time painting on a second coat, which doesn't look any different but takes just as long. And a lot of it is detail work, like painting narrow bits of trim inside the window frames. That can take a long time but not look like much. Still, we're getting pretty tired of looking out through the scaffolding. Kathy and I have threatened to finish off the details ourselves. The painters are very good and we like them. They're just... thorough.

Now we're down to the short strokes, literally, and the scaffolding is scheduled to come down next week. There's nothing up high anymore that they need to reach. Today they're painting the front and back doors and steps, which you can obviously do from ground level.


The new downspouts arrived a few days ago and got painted, and they're being installed at this moment. And we need to find a way to install little hooks for Christmas lights all around the upper story. We've never been able to hang lights higher than the first floor (i.e., the height of my ladder) and this seems like the perfect time to remedy that situation.

Fortunately, the weather has been perfect -- 68 degrees and sunny -- almost every day since this whole project began. That's good, because we've had the furnace off for most of that time because all the windows and doors were standing open. Even without heat in the house for two months, we've been pretty comfortable. It also means the painters have gone through an amazing amount of Gatorade, cola, and iced tea. I think the drinks alone have added $500 to the painting bill.

Oh, well. Almost done. In a few days the scaffolding will come down and we'll finally get our first clear and unobstructed look at the house. I hope we still like it!

Watch That First Step... It's a Doozy

One of the things we discovered after pulling the carpeting off the front stairs was that the bottom step was rotted though. We'd suspected as much. When the wood gives way under your feet, you kind of know something's wrong.

Sure enough, when we ripped off the last piece of carpeting, some chunks of wood came with it. Now we had fist-sized holes in our front stairs. Only the bottom-most step seemed to be affected; the others were all fine.

As it turns out, the bottom step is (a) directly underneath the third-floor gutter, and (b) resting directly on a cement base. Because it's under the gutter, it got hit directly by overflowing water whenever that gutter backed up, which it used to do reliably every winter until I cleaned it out. But it probably overflowed a lot over the years and dumped water directly onto the same spot for decades.

Secondly, because the lowest step was built on a cement base instead of wooden risers, it couldn't drain. The water had nowhere to go, so the redwood just sat and soaked until it could eventually dry out. But because it's on the north side of the house, it rarely got any direct sun and probably took a looong time to dry. Taken all together, it's remarkable the bottom step lasted as long as it did.

For about a week we had a nasty piece of scrap wood lying across the hole so that nobody would twist an ankle. Eventually, Scott the carpenter (go ahead and make your astronaut jokes now) dug into the step and declared it a total loss. Enough of the wood had rotted through that it needed to be replaced, not patched. Fortunately, all the other steps were just fine. They'd been out of the water and lifted up enough to drain, so the problem was confined to just one level.

Here is Scott's replacement, made out of redwood just like the original. He also had to replace the square base of the newel post, seen in the background. Since the bottom step was acting like a sponge, the bottom of the post was constantly saturated, too, and slowly rotted away. We didn't know that because the hand rail was holding the post in place! But once the stair came away, it was clear that the post was dangling in midair.

New post base, new steps, and newly stripped remainder of the stairs. We're almost there.

As a side note, someone from the Pacific Grove Heritage Society wandered by while this was going on and asked if they could keep the original base of the newel post. They wanted it in their collection because the wood showed no pest damage at all, despite its age. You can still see the growth rings after 125 years. It had kept its shape and would have served for many more years if only it had been drained a bit better.

One Step at a Time

It seemed so straightforward at the time. Kathy and I wanted to remove the indoor/outdoor carpeting from the front stairs before the painting started. The carpet was getting a bit old, it was gray, and it just didn't look very nice. Better to paint the steps, right?

That's  how it always starts. In reality, the carpet was really hard to pull off. We must have spent more than two hours just pulling little strips of carpet off, piece by piece. It was glued down very thoroughly, and there was no way to get a good grip on it. We'd peel back one corner and try to pull, but it just wouldn't come up. We tried grabbing it with pliers, shoving pry bars under it, and using a knife to cut it into little strips. In the end, we just brute-forced it, pulling the stuff up in rough, irregular pieces. Yuck.

And after all that, what do we get? A really ugly set of stairs. Even after getting all the carpet up, it still had glue all over it, which just wasn't coming off.

We noticed that the painters were in no hurry to strip it, either. They'd find almost anything to work on before getting to those stairs. Now that we're more than four weeks into the project, they're almost out of excuses and the guy who drew the short straw has started stripping off the gunk. As of this morning, he's been through five 1-gallon cans of Jasco stripper, and he's still not done. I predict two more gallons to go.

After saturating the glue with Jasco, he scrapes it off, waits for it to dry, and then sands it down to the wood. Not the most fun he's ever had, I'll bet. But at least the wood underneath is solid (with some exceptions) and should paint up nicely -- in about six months, when he's finished.

Don't Fear the Painter

You know the old saying: Be careful what you wish for because you might get it.

Well, we've always wanted to add some color to the house, but now that we've got it, we're both having a tiny bit of panic. OMG, what have we done?

At first, they painted the entire house from top to bottom in Wedding Dress white, which was very close to the white color that was on it before. Apart from being fresher and cleaner, the house looked just about the same. So no drama there.

Then, the off-white/beige color went on some of the lower trim. At first, it seemed very dark brown (i.e., not glaring white), so that took a bit of getting used to. But we learned that it only looks dark up close. If you stand on the sidewalk or, better yet, across the street, it looks just fine. Our scheme was starting to come together. Hey, we actually know what we're doing!

But then the blue went on, and we both got nervous. Again, the first area painted was just outside the front door, so it stared you in the face as you walked in/out. It seemed like way too much color. But again, we decided that from a safe distance it looks just fine. And then more blue went on, and more blue, and more... Gulp.

Add to that the brick-red trim, and also a bit of gold. Up close, we were afraid it was turning into a circus tent. It's just so... different than before. But taken as a whole, it looks pretty darned good. All the neighbors have complimented the painters and said how nice it looks now, and I don't think they're just being polite. And when it's all done, the house will still be 90% white, so the purists can't really complain.

Best of all, some of the architectural detail is finally starting to appear. This was the main reason for painting the house in the first place. We wanted to highlight the gingerbread, so much of which was lost or hidden when it was all one color. Now that the painters are picking out some of the little details, stripes, knobs, and fiddly bits, it's really starting to show off the design that was there all along. So it's full speed ahead. Keep on painting!

Enter, Sandman

Here's a little still life at Chez Turley. It's dusty. It's always dusty here. Between my drywall dust, Kathy's plaster work, and the painters' dust from sanding the house with the windows open, there's just no way to keep clean. We polish little paths with our socks as we walk, but outside of these well-marked trails, there is dust.

Degree of Difficulty: 5.4

The first weekend after the scaffolding went up, Kathy and I tried climbing on it. After all, how often do you get to climb on someone else's scaffolding? Besides, there were some little bits of hardware we wanted to remove before they got in the painters' way, and the weekend was the ideal time to get up there and get it done.

There are four levels to the scaffolding; it doesn't quite match the floors on the house. The first level is only about 3 feet above ground level, which is even with the "grade level" of the first floor. (The house stands on a low pedestal, because it's on a hill.) The second level is about 8 feet above the first, and so on. The uppermost level of scaffolding is about even with the top-floor ceiling so they can reach the gables and roof. From inside the house, the top level looks like a roof or shelter. Nope -- they guys walk on that. Yikes.

Anyway, we wanted to give it a try.

We got as far as the second level and said, "Yeah, okay, that was fun. Let's go back down now."

Scaffolding bounces. A lot. It's like standing on a diving board, minus the water. The ironwork that holds the scaffolding together seems solid enough, but the 2x6 boards that you walk on are just, well, 2x6 boards. They lie flat across the gaps with nothing really to hold them together or keep them in place. You want to be careful not to dislodge a board with your toe because it'll just fall straight down. It's a life-sized game of Jenga.

Above you can see Kathy rounding the corner over the front door. She's almost two stories straight up, with her hand resting on the shingles below the balcony. Arrrgh! Walk the plank, me beauty!

The purpose of this exercise was to take down the house numbers and also to reconnoiter a little mystery. One of the painters said he'd found a secret Masonic symbol painted on the front of the house, so we climbed up to go find it. Sadly, it was just a little fleur-de-lis for decoration, not a secret symbol, so we were a bit disappointed. But hey, I can see my house from here!

A Bad Case of Measles

As they say in the painting business, "that looks like crap."

Good painters know that painting is really only 10% painting. The other 90% is preparation. Washing, sanding, scraping, patching, and filling holes take up way more time than spreading the paint. This job has been no exception. The scaffolding alone took two days to set up before the painters could even start. And it's been noisy around here ever since.

First came the power-washing. For two days, the painters had two gas-powered power washers going full time, hosing down the house. First it just washed off the dirt, but later it started peeling away the loose paint. And there was plenty of loose paint. They work in teams: one guy aims the power washer at the house while another guy runs around inside the house with an armload of towels, ready to soak up any water that leaks in. Smart move: old houses leak pretty fiercely when you hit them with 4500-psi water nozzles. It can do more than strip paint; it can take off fingers.

Next came the lead-abatement program. Old paint usually contains lead, and none more so than old white paint. (Lead is the pigment that turns the paint white.) Our painting crew is lead-certified, meaning they know how not to poison themselves when removing lead paint. Part of the secret is to use a special lead-binding goop that they spread on like primer, then scrape off. The goop binds molecularly to the lead, rendering it harmless. It doesn't exactly turn lead into gold -- not for us, anyway -- but it sure costs like it does. Without it, the State of California would make us wrap the house in plastic, cover the soil to a distance of 10 feet, turn off the water, and dispose of all the paint flakes in a toxic-waste facility. And the workers would all have to wear hazmat suits. No, we'll go with the goop, thanks.

Phase 3 involves good old-fashioned scraping. Day after day, we had four guys with paint scrapers climbing on, over, and around the house scraping away loose paint. It sounds funny from the inside. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. And you never know where they'll be, so the sound moves around unpredictably. It can be a little creepy if you let it get to you, like a bunch of small animals scratching to get in.

The final preparation involved sanding, both power sanders and just hand sanding. Again, the noise from inside was pretty strange and monotonous. Four buzzing power sanders on the outside walls for eight hours a day will drive you nuts. It must have been worse for them. Or maybe that's the effect of the lead.

Writing on the Bathroom Wall

Meanwhile... in the midst of painting the outside of the house and remodeling the downstairs kitchen, Kathy's also preparing to hang wallpaper in the two downstairs bathrooms. Good things come in threes, right?

The project started with stripping away the old wallpaper in the ladies room, just off the kitchen. The old wallpaper was a blue duck pattern that you can see here. Then things got weird.

There was another layer of wallpaper behind the duck wallpaper. It looks like an old Sears & Roebuck catalog, and at first we thought it was one of those fake olde tyme reproductions. You know, the kind with the black-and-white advertisements for stiff men's collars, lace-up ladies' shoes, and so forth. But something didn't seem right about it.

For starters, it's backwards. All the text and images are facing the wall. Okay, so maybe the fake old-fashioned wallpaper was designed to look backwards for "style" or so that you wouldn't be tempted to read the bogus ad copy.

But then we noticed that this old "wallpaper" has edges around each page of the faux catalog. It's not wallpaper at all. It's not wide strips. It really is a bunch of individual sheets of paper. Each page measures about 5" x 7" and no two are alike. If it was wallpaper you'd expect the pattern to repeat, but there are no repeats here. Also, the pages are nice and straight near the edges of the walls, as you'd expect, and then they get increasingly crooked as you move into the room. We can also see where the pages overlap each other. I'm starting to think this really is an old catalog with the pages torn out and pasted to the wall.

But if so, why is it backwards? Even catalog pages are (were) printed double-sided, so if you tore out a page and flipped it over, one side would still be facing you, not reversed. These pages all seem to be printed single-sided, and without exception every one is pasted face-down. Very strange.

The top of each page says, "SEARS, ROEBUCK, & CO. Cheapest Supply House on Earth, Chicago, CATALOG No. III." So far Kathy's uncovered pages advertising children's dresses, bicycles, medals/charms, fur coats, furniture, the "book department," men's suits, silverware, and (regrettably) accordions. Every page has a different page number; the highest-numbered one I can find is page #1082. Big book.

We're not sure whether the mystery catalog pages are worth preserving, but the question may be moot. The paper's stuck on really well and we can't scrape it off. So regardless of what it's made of, it's staying on. It seals the plaster and provides a smooth surface for Kathy's new wallpaper. Just another buried mystery for the next generation to solve.

True Colors

Here are our new colors!

After much deliberation, we (mostly Kathy) picked the final colors for our house. There are four: white, white, blue, and red.

If you've ever tried to pick out paint colors, you know how hard it can be. We tried all kinds of tricks: crayons, colored pencils, Photoshop, and finally the Kelly-Moore paint schemer. We tried photocopying a black/white picture of the house and coloring it, we looked at other houses, we checked out library books on Victorian décor and/or house painting (our local library has a surprisingly complete collection of both), and just plain ol' asking people.

Overwhelmingly, people seemed to want the house to stay white. A lot of them huffed and said, "it's always been white" which isn't true. Real 1880s-era Victorian people almost never painted houses white. Partly that's because it just wasn't the fashion, but also because white paint was difficult and expensive to make. (Ironic note on that in a moment.)

Victorian houses of the period were typically painted in dark earth tones, often with reds, browns, and beiges. Kind of boring, actually. The "painted ladies" of San Francisco fame are artificial; actual Victorians were never that garish.

We have a period photo of the house with Doctor Hart himself standing near the front door, and the house color is quite dark. In fact, it looks unpainted, like natural wood. Our paint-scraping crew just confirmed this: the shingles were originally oiled, not painted, which protected them from the elements but also made them a %!#@$ to strip.

So we know the house wasn't "always white," despite the protestations of our neighbors. It may have been white in their lifetime, but certainly not the lifetime of the house. The baker across the street says he knows the previous housepainter, who told him that the owner at the time wanted the house one solid color, as though dipped in white paint, but that he (the painter) talked him into the two-tone white-on-white scheme it has today. The two white colors are pretty similar; most people don't notice it. I couldn't even tell it was two colors until we'd lived here for a few weeks.

We wanted something a little bolder but without being garish. We weren't trying for a painted lady; just a bit of trim color to highlight all the "gingerbread" trim that's almost invisible now. After a lot of experiments and false starts, we finally settled on a combination of four colors.

With help from my sister, we Photoshop'd various color combinations, most of which we didn't like (not her fault). It's one thing to say, "I like green and blue and gold," and another to actually see those colors on the house. Our first (and second, and third...) impulses were all false starts, but at least we eliminated some options. Eventually we talked to Kelly Moore Paints, which offers a free Photoshop-like service using their own special software and paint colors. We told them what colors we were thinking of, and they scurried off and prepared eight alternative color schemes for us.

They were all terrible. "Unattractive" would be generous. They must farm the work out to colorblind felons on a work-release program or something. Their options were all bright, solid colors, like this Orange Julius stand on the left.

Fortunately, when they gave us back the eight renderings, they also gave us the software. That allowed us to experiment further and try some more reasonable options. Eventually we came up with the color scheme shown below. It's not exactly what we're planning, but it's as close as the software allows.

The base ("field") color is called Wedding Dress, which is serendipitous, as our daughter just got married. And no, we didn't choose it for that reason. (Kathy will tell you that I avoid reading the silly color names because I don't want them swaying my opinion.) The slightly tan off-white color will go on some of the larger trim areas, the blue goes on the scrollwork details, and the red will be used sparingly on some of the smaller details -- plus the front door.

But before we can paint, the scraping and sanding have to be finished, and it looks like we're still a few days away from that. The crew is outside from 8:00 AM every morning, with dust masks on, removing all the old white paint, which is probably lead-based. Ironically, Jon Stuefloten started his painting apprenticeship by mixing lead paint for his boss. Every morning, he said, he unwrapped a big brick of lead, scraped off shavings into a bucket using his penknife, added turpentine, and mixed it all together. His boss would then mix in the tints, judging the color by eye until it looked right. Now, 50+ years later, Jon's crew is painstakingly removing that same kind of lead paint.