Wall Flowers

We've gotten used to discovering layers underneath layers, and the upstairs is no exception.

As we pulled off the door trim, we'd sometimes expose the plaster underneath, sometimes a hidden electrical wire or two, and sometimes old wallpaper we'd never seen before. In this case, there appear to be two different layers of wallpaper, one on top of the other.

Peeking out from under the baseboard trim we found this flowered wallpaper. It's glued onto backing paper which is, in turn, glued directly onto the rough redwood paneling that makes up these walls. It's cute, but there's not much of it left. Only the bottom few inches where the baseboards were covering it up and protecting it.

Elsewhere, we discovered an additional layer of wallpaper on top of that. It's a kind of metallic green stuff, very 1960s. It doesn't appear to be glued directly over the flowered stuff, but it's hard to tell for sure. At any rate, that wallpaper was later painted over two or three times.

So at a minimum, we've got:

1. Redwood paneling
2. Backing paper
3. Flowered wallpaper
4. Drywall
5. Green wallpaper
6. Gray paint
7. Green paint
8. Tan paint (ours)

Where's Wally?

They say things often look worst just before they get better.* I sure hope that's true in this case, because this place is looking terrible.

The new flooring got delivered a few days ago, so now it's lying in state, acclimating to our temperature and humidity. The installers will be here first thing Monday morning, so Kathy and I have to get the entire third floor of the house -- almost 1000 square feet -- ready before they arrive.

Mostly, that means removing all the baseboards and door trim so that the new floor can get right up to the edges of each room. Then the new trim will go on top of that.

But removing all that old trim is tough work, and as we discovered, some of it had surprise electrical wiring attached to it. We've found four instances of that so far, where somebody hid the wiring along the edge or the top of the trim, then smoothed a bead of plaster over it and painted it. Our first clue was when we pried off a baseboard and it tried to yank a nearby electrical outlet out of the wall. Interesting...

All the trim is off now, and we've got a better idea of what's original up here and what's been updated over the decades. For example, most of the baseboards are old redwood, but about one-third of them are pine. You can't tell them apart when they're all painted, but once you pull them off it's obvious what's old and what's new(-ish). The exterior walls all had redwood baseboard trim, but so did one or two of the interior walls, which suggests that those walls are original. The walls with pine trim are probably newer.

Taking off the door trim really gives you a good peek into the underlying construction. For example, the doorway at the top of the stairs (near the bathroom) is all properly framed out, but the door into Kathy's office was cut into the wall after the fact. The studs and lath around it all have cut marks and you can see where shims and additions were put in.

There were one or two cases where a single piece of baseboard went through a wall and into the adjoining room, which tells us the baseboard was there before the wall got added.

We also found more square-headed nails. They were all in the old redwood stuff, of course, not in the newer pine. Oddly, the old boards had a combination of square nails and more modern round-headed commercial nails. Why? Did somebody come along and pound in a few extra nails to help hold the baseboards in place? Or did they reuse old-fashioned square nails alongside their modern equivalents? No way to know.

The longest single board we recovered is about 13 feet long, and like everything else, it's straight-grained redwood without a single knot or check in it. That must have been some tree. All the molding is about 6 inches wide, so we've probably got about 100 board-feet of aged redwood here.

Our plan is to keep it for a while and then reuse some of it when we fabricate the new trim for these rooms. It would be nice to return some of this old wood to the place it's been hiding for so long.


*Of course they do. That's a tautology. Things are always at their worst right before they get better because that's the definition of "worst." Duh.

Always With the Surprises

You know, it's just never simple, is it? We started removing the baseboards in the upstairs rooms and got at least three surprises.

First, there's redwood paneling behind all the walls. You can see it peeking out at the bottom of this photo. The baseboards always seemed a little shallow -- the wood wasn't as thick as normal -- but it wasn't clear why. Turns out, the drywall was resting on top of the baseboards, not behind them. And that's because they were nailed to the wood paneling behind that. So evidently the baseboards went on first, and then -- probably many decades later -- someone hung drywall over the original paneling.

Second, the baseboards themselves are redwood, not pine. The rest of the trim on the third floor is all pine that's been painted brown or white. It's nothing special and we intend to throw it away. But the baseboards appear to be much older, possibly original to the house. They're certainly as old as the strange paneling they're attached to.

Finally, there's been an electrical wire hiding in plain sight all this time. When I pulled away this piece of baseboard (which is an unbroken piece of redwood more than 10 feet long, by the way) this old piece of AC wiring peeled away from it. It had been stapled to the top of the baseboard and painted the same color, so it looked like part of the trim. Yikes.

Welcome to Oak-Land. Enjoy Your Stay.

The new floor got delivered today. Too bad we missed it.

Kathy and I have decided to install hardwood floors on the third floor. And when I say "install" I mean "stand around and watch other people do it." The first two floors of this house are wall-to-wall hardwood, but the third floor never had that. It just has a quick-and-dirty coat of brown paint over the redwood subfloor. And for the last 30-odd years, there's been carpet over that. Once we pulled out the carpet a few months ago, it exposed the nasty paint-splattered subfloor underneath. Not nice.

So we decided that the third floor should match the other two. Trouble is, they don't make olde tyme hardwood floors any more. Downstairs, it's all American white oak in 2-1/4" strips. But modern floors are generally 4-inch or 6-inch boards. We wanted to match the downstairs floors as closely as possible, which turns out to be a challenge.

We visited three local flooring stores and talked to the friendly salespeople. They were all very nice and showed us some alternatives. The first one said he'd send out an estimator to measure the rooms and give us a quote.* The second one said she'd call us when the appropriate samples came in. And the third one said, "Great, no problem, when can we start?" We went with the third one.

They found us some US-grown white oak that comes pre-stained to an almost perfect match with our other floors. Better still, the wood was on sale. And they could deliver it in a week. Sign here, hand over the deposit, and we'll see you in a few days.

Nothing. We don't hear anything for a week, and start getting nervous. Then -- of course -- while Kathy and I are away for lunch we get a frantic phone call from the flooring guy. "We're out in front of your house but nobody's home. Can you let us in?" Uh, dude. Did you think to maybe call us first?

Fortunately, we're just a few blocks away at our favorite Mexican restaurant (one of the pleasures of living downtown), and could walk back home in 10 minutes. Enough time for the delivery guys to park their big truck and start unloading onto the sidewalk.

It took three guys about a dozen trips each to haul all the wood up to the third floor. Better them than us. Then they open the boxes to let the wood "breathe" and acclimate to the room. They'll let it sit there for about a week before beginning the installation proper.

In the meantime, we have to get all the upstairs rooms ready. When you're getting a new floor put in, you have to remove all the furniture and everything from the rooms. And I mean everything. You can't leave things sitting around because, well, it's a floor. It's not like painting, where you can just cover stuff up. So everything gets moved either downstairs or into the bathroom (which already has a tile floor and isn't getting resurfaced). It's like packing up to move but without the boxes.

We also have to remove all the baseboards from around every room. We don't mind that part because we wanted to replace the baseboards and door moldings anyway. They don't match the ones downstairs. These are simple pine boards painted to look like stained wood. Our plan is to replace them with replicas of the molding on the lower floors. That's going to be a big project. For another day.

*P.S. Part of me hopes that the salesman from the first flooring store will call back in about two weeks to schedule that estimate. Sorry, fellah, but your competitor already measured, delivered, and installed the entire floor in less time than it took you to send out your helper. Better luck next time.

The Hart Cottage

Before Dr. Hart built this house, he lived and worked down the street a bit. Here's his advertisement from the June 20, 1891 edition of the Pacific Grove Review.

For the cartographically minded, 16th Street is three blocks to our right (east), and Grove Street is one block straight ahead (north; closer to the water). So he didn't move far. We haven't been  able to find a specific address for him, so we have no idea if the house is still there. There are some small Victorian-era houses still remaining on that block, so it's possible. We'll keep looking.

Santa's Little Helper

We put up our Christmas lights right after Thanksgiving, as usual. As before, they're completely LED lights, which means they use almost no power. We haven't noticed any change to our electric bill with the lights on or off, so whatever power they use must be pretty trivial.

The only difficult part is actually putting them up. We try to do all three floors, but this is a tall house and I'm still waiting for my 21st-century jetpack. We got a really long ladder from Home Depot, but it almost causes more problems than it solves.

For one, it's a fiberglass ladder, not aluminum. That means it doesn't conduct electricity -- which is good -- but it's also really heavy, which is bad. Combine a heavy-duty 32-foot ladder with damp soil and a sloping yard and you have a recipe for disaster. It's too heavy to move single-handed, so Kathy and I have to coordinate moving it, and we're always afraid we'll smash a window. There goes the original stained glass.

So we use our medium-sized aluminum ladder combined with a long pole. Each year I jury-rig a pole with a bent hook on top that helps hold the Christmas lights. Then I climb up the ladder to about the level of the second floor and use the pole to stretch a string of lights up to the top floor. The housepainters put little cup hooks under the eaves, so all I have to do is catch the wire on each little hook. Piece of cake, right?

The process takes maybe 3-4 hours, but it's relatively safe and repeatable. This is the second or third year that we've done it this way, and it seems to work. Taking the lights down is even faster, the biggest danger being dropping the lights onto the sidewalk from three stories up. Even LED lights won't survive that fall.

Re-Volting Current Events

Electricity. What a good idea.

When this house was built, it had no electricity, of course. In 1893, very few homes anywhere in the world were electrified. It wasn't until the 1920s that even one-half of American houses had electricity. Instead, Dr. Hart's house had gas. Gas lights, gas boiler, gas everything.

That seemed to be pretty much still true until about a month ago. The house originally had exactly one fuse. For the entire house. Its mounting panel is still here, under the crawlspace. Sometime later, it got a proper service entrance (electrical panel) with circuit breakers. And sometime after that, probably in the 1970s, it got a second service panel. The electrical service was split in two, with part going upstairs and part serving the ground floor. That probably made it easier to keep the restaurants' utilities separate from the living quarters. When we moved in, we almost had the two panels combined into one because we wanted all the utilities on the same residential bill. Having two electrical meters (as well as two gas meters) confused the heck out of the utility company.

Anyway, now we have four separate electrical panels and about 40 circuit breakers. A long way from Dr. Hart's day. The first two panels are still outside, but we also have a new one upstairs in the kitchen that mostly serves the third floor, and there's a panel out in the garage. That one handles the garage lights and it has 220V service for a possible car charger, welder, or electric lift. We'll see.

But even with four panels, we don't have enough circuits. The older circuits in the original panel are overused, in my opinion. There are too many ground-floor receptacles and ceiling lights on the same circuit, so I've spent the last few months separating them into individual circuits. That means crawling under the house and cutting old wires, creating new "home runs" with Romex, and deciding what stuff goes on which new circuit.

And hey, as long as we're at it, why not add a few additional circuits, too? There were some unused positions in the breaker panel that just begged for new breakers, so why not?

The trouble is, adding new circuit breakers means reaching into the breaker panel and pulling wires... right next to all that lovely 110V and 220V wiring that's already there. To be safe, you have to shut down power to the whole house, and that's a nuisance. I've also worked around electronics long enough to know that some systems can retain power long after they're shut off. Call me a sissy, but I wasn't eager to reach my hand into that rat's nest of wiring. So we called an expert.

Lucky for us, our neighbor's son is a licensed electrician. Better yet, he's a former safety officer at Lawrence Livermore National Labs, so this guy lives and breathes safety regulations. He's very friendly, but also very by-the-book. And he offered to come over and wire up the first few breakers for cheap, and then supervise while I did the rest. Deal!

He also taught me a neat trick about spreading Vaseline on the wires before you try to feed them up into the service box. I was having a hard time forcing the Romex up through six feet of conduit, but once you grease it, it slides right through. Nice!

Bottom line, we've now got a half-dozen new 15A and 20A circuits feeding the downstairs lights, receptacles, ceiling fixtures, and appliances. No more sharing of circuits. It's not that the old wiring was a problem or anything, but I feel better knowing that it's now over-designed instead of under-provisioned.