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.