Parade... Right!

We call this the Parade Deck, which makes it sound like the aft end of a cruise ship. We could just call it "the deck," but even that's too grand, since its average elevation is zero inches. It's not so much a deck as it is flat landscaping. A wooden dirt cover, I guess.

We have a lot of parades and street fairs here in town, and most of them pass conveniently in front of our house. Free entertainment! Kathy and I have taken to putting lawn chairs on the front porch to watch, but the porch is so small that the chairs block the front door from opening. We can either sit or enter/exit the house, but not both. It's awkward.

So we decided to build ourselves a little outdoor observation platform for street entertainment (OOPSE) that would give us a place to sit while also covering up some of the loose dirt in the front yard. We can't decide what to plant in the front, and the current drought means we couldn't water anything anyway, so why not just cover it up?

Hence, the zero-height deck. It's completely over-engineered, with eight concrete piers sunk into the dirt, galvanized anchors everywhere, and pressure-treated 2x6 lumber holding it up. And by "up" I mean down. Our lot slopes from back to front, so the deck necessarily is higher in the front than in the back. Or to put it another way, the deck itself is level, but the ground rises up to meet it in the back. And since we wanted the front to be an easy step up from ground level, that forced the back end below grade. So we didn't so much raise a deck as excavate it. This is obvious from the big pile of leftover dirt.

The top is planked with redwood 2x6 alternating with 2x2. It looks nice and should wear well. Of course, we painted it to match the rest of the house. I did my best to match the curve of the front porch steps nearby, but I'm not as talented as those builders. I did get to buy a new router bit, though. So there's that.

You'd think that building a tiny deck at ground level on a warm summer day would be a piece of cake -- it's Home Depot 101 stuff -- but of course Murphy had to stick a finger in our eye. Sinking the concrete piers was easy enough because the soil is very loose and easy to dig out. Even getting them all level with each other wasn't too bad, again because of the sandy soil. But wouldn't you know it, there was a steel rod buried under the ground exactly where we needed a pier to go. At first, I thought it was just a piece of scrap metal and that I could dig it out with my hands and throw it away. Nope. The more I dug, the more it didn't want to move. Hmmm... It was old, rusty, and about a thick as my thumb. And very solid. It must go really deep. That's a lot of metal. No problem, I'll just hit it with this sledgehammer...

Even with my biggest 16-lb. sledgehammer, the thing barely moved. It didn't even wobble in the dirt. But it did make a funny sound... kind of like... a water main pipe. Stop! Evidently this was the original electrical grounding stake that was clamped and/or soldered to the main cold water pipe coming in from the street to the house. That means it's buried deep and I really don't want to try to disconnect it. Instead, I got out the angle grinder (more power tools!) and just cut it off. Ooh, sparks! Pretty.

So apart from that, the project was pretty straightforward. And the weather has cooperated, because Kathy and I have been able to sit outside on our new "deck" almost every evening, enjoying the warm weather. All we need now is a parade.

Hot Dipped Galvanized!

Redwood and zinc just go together, don't you think?

The back steps from our kitchen down to the sidewalk had started to rot and needed to be replaced. We knew they were getting old and starting to give way. The wood was getting spongy and the steps had more of a bouncy spring to them than is strictly necessary. It was just a matter of time before someone put a foot through one of the boards. Our hope was that one of us would be the first victim, and not a guest or lawyered-up visitor.

Anyway, the steps aren't very complicated, and there are only two of them, so how hard can it be, right? Well... Nothing was level, plumb, or parallel, so the geometry was a bit tricky. The porch itself slopes slightly from left to right to shed water. It also slopes from back to front so that water doesn't puddle next to the door. So that's the first challenge.

The concrete sidewalk also slopes, again in both directions. It's a bit closer to the house on one side than the other, in addition to the obvious right-to-left slope. But the steps themselves have to be level or it'll feel funny to walk on. No problem. That's what circular saws are for.

Demolishing the old stuff is always fun, and this time it came with one of those $^&@#!! moments when you wonder how the thing ever held together in the first place. There was no apparent support under the steps. No wonder they bounced; they were floating in midair. Foundation consisted of dry-stacked bricks lying in the dirt. Mortar? Nah, we don't need that. I think the 27 coats of paint is mostly what held it all together.

The good news was, the porch itself was in pretty good shape. The surface is 3" tongue-and-groove that we really wanted to preserve if we could, and it looked sound so we left it alone. The porch is covered, so the weather damage was limited to just the stairs, which had to be rebuilt anyway. So there's that.

They say the five most expensive words in remodeling are, "as long as we're here..." but that wasn't the case this time. The deck was solid and even the supports underneath were in good shape. I don't know how old the support structure is, but the 2x6 lumber had square shoulders and really did measure exactly 2" by 6", so it's probably older than me. Another win.

But as long as we're here... I took the opportunity to shore up some of the structure anyway and added three new concrete piers, including one right in the middle of the stairs. That should keep the new stairs from sagging for another 50 years or so.

All the new lumber is heart redwood, because that's what the entire house is built from. It's kind of a shame, because we're going to paint over all of this and nobody will see the nice redwood. Still, it would seem like cheating to use Douglas fir or pine on something like this. So gimme the good stuff.

If you've never built stairs, it's surprisingly tricky. Or maybe I'm just an idiot. Seems easy, right? Nice right angles. No curves. Everything regular. But I must've spent hours staring at the open gap, scribbling in my notebook and taking the same measurements four or five times. C'mon, it's only two steps! There's a 7/11 rule of thumb for stairs: 7" vertical rise and 11" horizontal tread is considered comfortable and safe. You can stray from that a little bit, but whatever you do, make all the steps the same. I adhered very close to that standard while also making sure that the finished project fit into the existing deck and sidewalk. The folks who built this place in 1893 certainly weren't working to the same code specifications.

After the new concrete set up and the support posts went in, it was time to frame up the new stairs with new stringers. I imagine you get good at this with practice, but I spent an embarrassing amount of time checking and rechecking to make sure everything was plumb, level, and evenly spaced. Once you make a few critical cuts you can't go back. Remarkably, everything lined up just as expected.

So here are the new steps in all their raw redwood glory. I routed the front edges of the steps to give them a bit of a rounded profile, and so they don't look like they just came from the lumberyard. There's also a bit of cove molding underneath the nose of each step to copy the old steps that came out. It's all held together with galvanized nails, which should postpone rusting for at least a few weeks until Kathy has time to paint it all over.

Take the Dirt Road Home

We stumbled across this old photo in the City Hall office the other day. It shows some schoolchildren crossing the main street through town, as the partial caption shows. The interesting part is that the street is still unpaved dirt, and that our house is in the background.

The light-colored building on the far left is the Gosby House Inn, a B&B that's our next-door neighbor. It's been a boarding house or inn since the very beginning, and currently has 22 rooms, I think.

But right next to it is our house, which is darker and partially hidden behind a telegraph pole and a tree (neither is there anymore).

Since our place was built in 1893, that means that Lighthouse Avenue, the main street though town (and the only route to the Point Pinos Lighthouse, hence the name), was still unpaved at least that far back. We know that a horse-drawn trolley service used to run up and down this street, and that may or may not have come later than this. I almost think I see a trolley track under someone's foot, and it wouldn't be unusual for trolley cars to have run on dirt streets in the 1890s or early 1900s.

The other interesting detail is the wrought-iron railing on top of the roof for the "widow's walk." At first, I thought both buildings had one, but it actually looks like only ours had it. It's certainly not there now, but we've been itching to replace it... someday.

By the way, the dark house color in this photo (and a few others) was a big help to us when we started painting the house a few years ago. Remember, it was solid white before we started, and a few of the townspeople grumbled and complained that we shouldn't be adding any new colors because "it's always been solid white." Uh, no. Not even close. Victorian-era houses were very rarely white, partly because that just wasn't the style, but also because white (i.e., lead-based) paint was very difficult and expensive to make. Most houses, like ours, were dark-colored. Apparently the Gosby family was more affluent than the Harts.

1951 - 2015