The Mystery Spot

Any idea what this is all about?

As Kathy was stripping all the wallpaper from the downstairs rooms, she came across this one section that appears to have been painted brown. We can't figure out why.

It's an area about four feet high and maybe two feet wide, and it has fairly straight edges, like someone was trying their best to paint a rectangle freehand. As you can see, it's really more like two squares, because there's a break in the paint about halfway down, and the upper square is a bit wider than the lower square. The paint dripped across the white space between the two halves, as if they were painting behind a shelf without removing it.

The paint goes completely behind the chair rail, so it clearly wasn't there (or was temporarily removed) during painting. And the left edge of the paint goes around the corner until it reaches the window sill.

We can't figure it out. Was there a cabinet or shelf here, and they wanted to paint the back of it without removing it from the wall? If so, why is only this part painted, and why doesn't it match the rest of the room/wall? This particular section of wall is exposed to the outside, so does that have something to do with it? There's no evidence of holes or patching here, so it doesn't appear to have been a mailbox or pass-through of some sort.

(There's less brown and more white in the photo at right because it still shows some leftover wallpaper.) On one hand, someone went to the trouble to paint these squarish patterns on the wall, but on the other hand they're not perfectly straight or tidy. The drips and slightly imperfect edges suggest that it wasn't always visible -- or they just didn't care.

Any ideas? We're open to suggestions.

Now With 30% Less Wall!

This is what Kathy's corner looks like, now that we've begun easing the boards out. The first few boards were tricky, but once they came out the rest of them were pretty easy. The only hard part was getting up on the ladder in the narrow space behind this wall and cutting through the topmost nails with a hacksaw blade above the ceiling line. Awk. Ward.

 

We're building a big pile of 10-foot long redwood boards in her room. I have no idea how we'll get them all downstairs. Maybe we won't; I may just leave 'em there until we're ready to put them back.

 

 

Backs Against the Wall

Holiday season is over and that means it's remodeling time at the Hart Mansion.

For today's project, we decided to punch holes in Kathy's 3rd-floor office walls. Now that the adjoining bathroom is (more or less) finished, we wanted to take the "leftover" space between the two rooms and make it into a closet for Kathy. This room has no closet, so adding one seemed like a good use of the space.

Step One was removing the drywall. But of course, it's never that easy.

Once we broke into the drywall we noticed some interesting painted fabric behind it. The fabric is a very fine mesh, almost like silk, and it's covered with a thin paper-like substance that's been painted white. You can see a bit of it here.

The fabric-and-paper material covers the entire wall, and is nailed to wooden boards behind it. Those boards, as it turns out, are 3/4-inch tongue-and-groove redwood. So the entire wall is made of redwood with an early form of wallpaper nailed over it. Interesting.

Our plan was to ease out the boards and save them for some future project, probably paneling the inside of the new closet. They're harder to remove than I expected, though, because they're nailed to the sill plate at the bottom and nailed to a header at the top -- above ceiling level. The best solution was to sacrifice one board (the smallest one) to create an opening, then pull out or saw off the nails top and bottom, and then ease each board sideways into the gap. One by one, we managed to remove the boards without damaging them too much.

While I was up there sawing through nails with a hacksaw blade, I noticed that this redwood paneling runs everywhere. It's also in the ceiling of the room, and in all the other walls that I can see. As far as we can tell, the entire room (possibly even including the floor at some point) was covered in tongue-and-groove redwood boards. Nice.

Oh, and I found some of these old nails, too. This one was holding some old shims to the framing. It's square, like a tiny railroad spike. But interestingly, all the boards I removed had more modern nails. Not sure if that means the redwood paneling was added at a later time, or if they'd been removed and reattached at some point. At any rate, I'm leaving the old nails, and the old framing, in place.

What Lies Beneath

Well, this took a grisly turn.

We have a lot of concrete in the backyard, and had always planned to remove most of it, leaving just a little here and there to prevent mud. There's one chunk of concrete,  in particular, that was a nuisance. It was a big triangular area that somebody must have poured ages ago as the foundation for a garden shed or something. Whatever its purpose, it's in our way now.

You know how one thing leads to another? One morning after accidentally kicking the stupid concrete pad yet again, I started poking at the edge of it. I wonder how thick it is... I wonder if I'll need to rent a concrete saw to cut through it... I wonder if I can just remove the wood boards around the edge of it... Two hours later, the entire concrete pad was gone.

Turns out the concrete was only about four inches thick and responded well to a sledgehammer. No concrete saw required. A few mighty whacks along the corners and it broke up nicely. It became a game to see how big a chunk I could break off without pulverizing it. Bonus points for big chunks; negative points for pieces that fly into the neighbor's yard. I ended up with 2,004,057 points -- a new high score!

A couple of interesting things were buried under the concrete. (We've learned to expect hidden surprises.) For one, there was a whole second layer of stone underneath the concrete that looked like sandstone. It wasn't a complete layer of stone, and I didn't break it when I smashed the concrete; it was already broken up. Instead, it seems to be fragments of something else that was spread on the ground before the concrete was poured. Maybe a temporary basis for something? The remnants of a paved walkway? The sandstone pieces were all the same thickness and fairly smooth, as if they'd been used as pavers. But they were also irregular shapes, as if they'd been broken off of something larger. A mystery.

Under that were the bones. A couple of good-sized bones, plus a few smaller pieces. As you can see here, the bones where cut off very cleanly, not snapped or broken, so I'm thinking (hoping!) they were butchered beef or lamb bones. Not, y'know... something else.

I also found this small glass bottle embedded in the underside of the concrete. It's really small, no bigger than a few fingers, and must have held only a few ounces of liquid. There's a logo or something embossed in the glass, but it's on the back side and stuck in the concrete so I can't read it. It looks like two letters -- maybe W, A, or L? Sadly, I broke the bottle trying to remove it from the concrete, so it's gone now.

Finally, there were clumps of blue goop scattered around in the dirt, too. I think it was contractor's chalk rendered damp and gooey after years of being buried underground. Either that, or the meat of the blue animals that were secretly buried in our backyard.

You Are Here

Although not strictly relevant to the house, I thought I'd toss in this quick aerial photo. We're looking down on the house, sort of, in the red circle. The green grassy area at the bottom of the photo just above the wing is the Pebble Beach Golf Links, with a semicircle of buildings near the 18th hole. The other grassy area in the lower right is the Spanish Bay golf course. The little pond next to it is called Forest Lake.



Monterey Peninsula from the air

The tip of land in the lower left is Point Pinos, and if you're really sharp-eyed you can just make out the Point Pinos Lighthouse sitting a few hundred feet back from the water's edge, near the trees.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium is on the little spit of land directly above the red circle, and Lovers Point park/beach is the other little spit of land just left of the circle. The airport we left from is at the top center of the photo. Wave!