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!