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.