The Inn Crowd

Every year, our town holds a special "Christmas at the Inns" tour of the local bed & breakfast establishments. There are a lot of cute and historic inns and B&Bs around, and this is a chance for everyone to peek inside without actually renting a room. A ticket costs $20 and covers two nights with about 10 to a dozen inns on the tour. Kathy and I buy tickets every few years, and we always enjoy it. (Here's a YouTube video from the 2011 edition.)

This year, a few of the usual inns couldn't participate for one reason or another. The organizers found themselves a bit short-handed, with only about eight inns on the roster. So they asked us to join the tour.

"But we're not an inn!" Kathy and I replied, predictably and simultaneously.

"Yes, we know, but you've got an historic Victorian, and it's right downtown, and you are a business. We think you'd fit right in."

So we agreed. We'd never been part of the Christmas at the Inns tour, but it sounded like fun and we're happy to help out the town. The local Chamber of Commerce supplies musicians (we got a harp and a cello) and two docents to help shepherd the visitors through the building. All we have to do is stand around and be sociable, and maybe provide some refreshments. We decided to bake little cinnamon cakes and make some spiced cider.

"How many visitors should we expect?" we asked.

"Oh, about 90 to 100 visitors. The tour runs for two nights, and you're on the slower of the two nights. We'll get maybe 200 on the first night, but about half that on your night."

Okay, great. One hundred little cakes it is, then.

We spent the day cleaning house, dusting, putting away valuables, and making cakes and cider. Then at the stroke of 6:00 PM, we opened our front door to find... a line of people all the way out to the sidewalk. It was like Halloween, for grownups. They couldn't squeeze in fast enough. We collected tickets and poured paper cups of cider as fast as we could. Our two volunteer docents did a great job of directing traffic and shepherding folks through the house, but we were absolutely slammed. It was wall-to-wall people. Our 100-person supply of cinnamon cakes was gone in the first 45 minutes, and the cider disappeared shortly after that. If you didn't come in the first hour, you got no treats.

Our own unofficial tally put the headcount at about 500 people. But the city says they sold over 800 tickets, a new record. Of course, not every ticket holder came to our house that night, but we're pretty sure most of them did. I've never seen so many people crammed into the house. It's possible that it's never held that many people all at once in its entire history.

Glad we could join the fun. Sorry about the snacks.

The Dim Bulb

The local hardware stores were all giving away free light bulbs a few years ago. We couldn't walk into the Home Depot without some hourly employee force-feeding us a brand new light bulb or two. They were the compact fluorescent (CFL) kind. You know, the energy-efficient type with the weird spiral glass "bulb." At the time, I assumed this was part of some industry-wide awareness program to encourage us all to convert from our old, inefficient incandescent light bulbs to the new energy-efficient ones. Or maybe it's a government program to get us to switch. Either way, I was a fan. Hey, free light bulbs!

Now I understand why they were handing them out so aggressively. They're terrible.

First, they had fat bases that wouldn't screw in to most lamps or ceiling lights. They just didn't fit. Second, the bulbs were dim. Sure, they saved a lot of energy compared to normal light bulbs but that's because they were only half as bright. Plus, the "color" of the light was funny -- a harsh ultra-white white, instead of the warmer yellowish white we've all grown used to.

But most of all, the bulbs were terrible because they were slow. They actually needed time to warm up, like an old tube radio. You'd flip on the light switch and there was a noticeable delay bfore the light came on. Like the old Muhammad Ali joke, you could turn on the light and be out of bed before the room got bright. And when the light did come on, it started out sort of pale and gradually - really gradually -- got brighter. It took a solid three minutes for the bulb to reach full brightness. No wonder they couldn't sell these turkeys. They were giving them away to avoid dumping them all into a landfill somewhere.

Anyway, through sheer greed we collected dozens of free CFL bulbs before we realized we couldn't actually use them anywhere in the house. Anywhere, that is, except the bathroom.

One of the few places these crappy CFL bulbs would physically fit into a socket was in our 2nd-floor bathroom ceiling. This is the bathroom we remodeled in 2011, so the ceiling fixtures are brand new and -- aha! -- they're compatible with the fat bases on the newfangled CFL bulbs. But that's not the best part.

The best part is, when you're dragging your tired self to the bathroom at 4:00 AM, you don't want to be dazzled with bright lights. You want a nice dim bulb. It's perfect that these ones take so long to warm up. That's exactly the right thing early in the morning. They start out slow and kinda pinkish, and gradually work up to full brightness, by which time I'm nominally awake. It's like having an auto-dimmer built in to the bathroom. And it's free!

So now all the old, weird, crappy (but energy-efficient) CFL bulbs go in a special box designated bathroom lights. I'll even sell you a few if you want.

The Side Effect

These stairs have been painted, carpeted, painted again, and carpeted again many times over the decades (centuries). That kind of treatment leaves its mark.

It's clear that there used to be full-width carpeting on the stairs, which was later replaced with a somewhat narrower carpet runner. In between those two eras, the stairs were painted. We can tell, because the paint doesn't cover everything. It was obviously painted while the wide carpet was still in place. Then when someone later removed that carpet, it left behind an unpainted stripe along the walls. That's how we found it in 2010.

The net effect is that there's a funny-colored band along the whole length of the staircase. It's just a couple of inches wide, but it's noticeable and there's no good way to cover it up or fix it. And since we were about to install brand new carpeting, it forced us to find a solution.

Once again, Kathy's talent came to the rescue. Rather than touch up the unfinished strip and try to make it blend in with everything else, she painted the whole trim piece from top to bottom so it looks like it's always been that way. The colors and finish are compatible with everything else in that area, so it looks just as old -- but fresh -- as everything else. She even got a nice wood grain effect so that it looks stained instead of simply painted. Nice.

Moving Up In the World

You remember back in April when we stripped the old carpeting off the 2nd-floor stairs? Well, we just now got it replaced.

After six months, we'd gotten used to walking up and down the bare wooden stairs, with no carpet runner. But we knew we wanted to re-carpet them eventually, and we finally found someone to do it. There were some fits and starts and hiccups, but it's finished now and we're very happy with the results.

The first trick is picking out the carpet, which seems easy enough, but whatever we picked would have to be compatible with the, uh, "bold" wallpaper that's alongside the staircase. Finding a color and pattern that didn't clash wasn't easy. We picked a nice dark red color with some gold design in it.

Fortunately for us, the carpet store had just recently installed that very same carpet in someone else's house and had big scraps of it leftover. If we were really lucky, they promised us, we might be able to cover the stairs with the remaining pieces. That would shave several hundred dollars off the price of materials. Bonus!

So Installer #1 came out and took detailed measurements of all the stairs, including making paper templates of some of the oddly shaped ones. Then he goes back to the shop to see if the patterns will fit on the carpet remnants he has. After a few days of noodling on this, he gives up. The carpet store can't say whether the carpet pieces will work or not; it's just too complicated to know for sure. They'll have to get a second opinion from Installer #2.

Installer #2 comes out, takes some new measurements, and declares that yes, it will work. Installation can begin... soon. But on the appointed day, nobody shows up.

Mix-ups and finger-pointing ensue. After a series of delays, installation begins with Installer #2, who turns out to be a great guy. He sings and talks to himself as he works, but he's very thorough and detail-oriented. The first day is spent measuring everything yet again, then installing tack strips and carpet padding. Then he installs the straight run on the bottom stairs - the easy part -- and sews a nice red binding along the edges.

Day Two is spent on the hard stuff: the curved pieces at the top of the stairs. Somehow he figures out how each piece fits together, and how to hide all the seams. On a straight run of stairs (like at the bottom) the carpet is all one piece. But once the stairs curve, each step is a separate piece of carpet, with the pattern turned at a different angle after each step. His job is to make the carpet look like one continuous piece when it's not. Based on the final results, I'd say the man is very good at what he does. Like all experts, he makes it look really easy.

The carpet is held in place with a combination of tack strips, glue, staples, and brass stair rods. The stair rods are mostly decorative, but not entirely. They do actually help hold the pieces in place, and they eliminate the need for additional glue.

Now we're getting reacquainted with walking on carpeted stairs. Give us another six months and we should be used to it.

Blood and Tin

The 2nd-floor dining room is almost finished. We've resurfaced the dropped ceiling, we've cleaned up the parlor stove, and we've cleaned and painted the metal tiles behind it. Now it's time for the big project: the tin ceiling.

We experimented with tin tiles about three years ago when we renovated the 1st-floor (commercial) kitchen. There, we used copper tiles as a backsplash, and they worked really well. So we decided to continue that theme upstairs by adding a tin ceiling to the dining room.

As you can see, the ceiling is currently covered with textured wallpaper, painted pink. It's mostly in good shape, but a water leak at some point in the past must have dripped through and damaged the wallpaper here. The ceiling itself is fine; there's no structural damage. But the textured wallpaper was ruined in one area and we had no way to fix or replace it. (You can see a bit of a damaged area at the far right side of this photo.)

The wallpaper continues from the ceiling down the upper part of the walls (the "frieze" area, if you're into that kind of thing) and we've left that part intact, although Kathy has painted it a lighter yellow color to cover the pink.

Since the ceiling itself is in good condition, we can mount the tin tiles directly to the plaster without having to nail up any plywood or furring strips. The tiles themselves are 24" square, which is pretty big if you think about it. They're embossed metal and finished in whatever color you want. They fit together like tongue-and-groove flooring, but square. Two sides have male flanges and the other two sides have female flanges. The tiles interlock and help support each other when they're screwed into the ceiling.

The interlocking flanges mean that you have to turn each tile the right direction, and you have to install them in a particular order, or they won't fit together. Specifically, you have to start in one corner of the room and work in a particular sequence toward the diametrically opposite corner. That sounds easy, but there are some complications.

For starters, the room isn't exactly a multiple of 24" wide or long, so some of the ceiling tiles -- about half of them, in fact -- will have to be cut down to size. Rather than start with a full tile in one corner of the room and end with the cut-off tiles on the opposite side, we decided to center all of the whole tiles in the middle of the room and distribute the partial ones around the perimeter. That way, the finished ceiling would look symmetrical instead of off-center. Kind of like we planned it.

The trouble with that strategy is that you have to install the cut tiles first, in the corner, before any of the whole tiles can go in. You also have to be careful not to cut off all the flanges that help hold the whole thing up.

After a little bit of grade-school arithmetic, we figured out how many tiles we'd have to cut, how wide/long they'd need to be, and where they'd all go. Not too difficult. Just start cutting and go. Let's do this thing!

Yeah, about that. Cutting through a two-foot-square decorative metal tile is harder than it looks. Especially when you have to keep a straight line. I measured twice, marked with a Sharpie, grabbed my tin snips, and started bleeding.

Those suckers are sharp! It's a good thing that tin tiles are completely sanitary and covered with antiseptic coating, and that the inside of the UPS van is filled with antibacterial gas when they make deliveries. Otherwise I'd be worried.

I was averaging two Band-Aids per tile, but after a while they got slippery and stopped sticking. I finally got smart and wrapped my thumb and forefinger in a whole bunch of fresh Band-Aids. They may not stick to me, but they stick to each other pretty good, and they made a nice padded mitt that slides off the raw metal edges precisely the way my hand doesn't. Who says I'm not a fast learner?

Kathy helped me snap a new chalk line on the ceiling every few hours so that everything stayed straight. The tiles themselves aren't always perfectly square, and they're meant to have a little gap between them. You're not supposed to snug them up against each other or else they might bend or creak when they get warm. So maintaining a constant spacing was important, and just eyeballing the gap wasn't going to work. Not when I'm up on a ladder with ceiling tiles in my face.

The first row went pretty well, and then it got easier. The whole, uncut tiles are definitely less work than measuring and cutting partial tiles (and peeling open Band-Aid wrappers with one hand), and it's nice to see the progress. We did about three-quarters of the room on the first day, and finished it the day after.

We're pretty happy with the result, and it definitely brightens up the room. The new ceiling tiles are also a near-match for Kathy's painted metal tiles behind the parlor stove, which was all part of the plan. There's still a bit of metal trim work to do around the edges, but it feels like 90% of the job is done.

Turning Coal Into Gold

Alchemy is not a myth. You really can turn base metals into gold. With a lot of gold paint, that is.

We gently disassembled our Moore's Air Tight Heater parlor stove to clean it and disconnect it from the gas line. That gave Kathy easier access to the metal tiles behind the stove, so she could finally inspect, clean, and paint them.

The metal tiles cover the curved wall directly behind the stove from floor to ceiling. Presumably they're there to reflect heat, but the stove hasn't been lit in years, probably decades, so there's no heat to reflect. The tiles have also been painted flat black, which suggests that a previous owner also felt the tiles weren't functional anymore. But black? They just look dirty and sooty.

In fact, we thought they were sooty until we took a closer look and realized that they'd been painted. There were little telltale splashes of stray black paint here and there, so we know the tiles had been painted after being installed. No problem to paint them over again, then.

Kathy chose a shiny gold color to complement the other (upcoming) colors in the room. We scrubbed all the tiles with TSP to get off any remaining dirt or grease, and then painted over the flat black with a base coat of a lighter color we had lying around. Once that was dry, the first coat of gold went on. That covered pretty well, but a second coat made it look even better. Now the black, sooty wall glows in the sunlight. The stove itself is still old and black and dirty, but at least it's got a nice backdrop now.

Medallion But Not Metal

The three main ground-floor rooms all have plaster ceiling medallions on them. These would have once graced the gaslight fixtures in the rooms, but now they dress up the electric chandeliers.

All three are different, but you wouldn't know it at first glance. They all appear more or less the same, but differ in the details. They're painted solid white, but almost everything downstairs was at one point. I wonder if they were once brightly colored. It's tempting to scrape off a bit of the paint to see what's underneath. Or just jump in and start repainting them.

The medallions appear to be quite old, and are probably original to the house. If you look closely, this one says "PATD NOV 15 1870" That would have been 23 years before this house was built.

A Light From Above

This photo won't impress too many people, but we're happy with it. This is Kathy's 3rd-floor closet, the one we created a few years back when we realigned the wall that divides this room from the adjoining hallway. The closet used to be on the other side of the wall, which didn't make any sense to us, so we basically moved the closet opening from the short side to the long side, effectively "moving" the closet into another room. It was easier than it sounds.

We've had these bi-fold closet doors hung for quite a while, and I'd even added an electrical outlet to the back of the closet because, why not? The closet is quite tall, because we have high ceilings, and that makes it dark inside. We'd always intended to add a light of some kind inside the closet, but how?

The solution presented itself on Amazon.com, as it so often does. We bought a 120V AC relay connected to a proximity switch. The switch consists of two magnets, and when the magnets are close together, the relay opens. If you move the magnets apart, the relay closes. That means you can connect a light (or any other AC-powered device) to the relay, and mount one magnet on the door frame and other magnet on the door. Open the door, and the light goes on! Voila! 

There's even some hysteresis in the magnetic switch, so the light doesn't flicker on and off if you leave the door partway open. I've adjusted it so that the light comes on when you open the door about six inches, but it won't go off until the door is almost completely shut. That prevents weird and annoying effects if you leave the door in just the wrong position.

Hope Springs Eternal

I finally found the missing rim lock for the upstairs closet door. It was outside rusting, naturally. I'd disassembled it months ago and had started cleaning it, but then got interrupted and left it in pieces inside a plastic bucket, along with all the caustic chemicals. Said bucket then got moved to the backyard, where it sat for a few months. I found it purely by accident, when I needed an empty bucket to haul some dirt. Surprise! There's the door lock, all in pieces in the bottom of the bucket!

The additional neglect meant I had to re-clean it all over again before reassembling it. The other problem with this lock is that it's missing its spring mechanism. You can turn the doorknob to open the latch, but when you release the knob it doesn't spring back. You have to manually turn the doorknob both ways, for opening and closing, and that's awkward and unnatural. It's just plain broken, in other words.

Springs for a 120-year-old rim lock are hard to come by. Remarkably, Home Depot doesn't keep them in stock. I could probably source some spring steel from a local metal shop, but they'd make me buy 100 pounds of it. So I improvised.

We had some galvanized flashing in the garage left over from some project or other. It's pretty stiff... and it won't rust... and I can cut it with tin snips... and what's the harm if it doesn't work? It was scrap anyway.

So I cut a little piece of metal and bent it and trimmed it to fit inside the lock. It worked! Once. The latch would snap back after releasing the doorknob, but only the first time I tried it. My little makeshift spring lost its spring and stayed bent after one use.

So I doubled up and made a second piece, alongside the first one. That was better, but...

So I added a third piece to keep the other two company. Between the three of them, they seem to work. They're collectively stiff enough to act as a spring, and they don't seem to come un-sprung with repeated use. And even if they do, I have a lot of that flashing still left.

A little white grease on all the moving parts, and we're as good as new!

Smoke and Mirrors

Central heat wasn't really a thing in the 1890s. This house had one fireplace on the 1st floor, and... that was about it. A three-story house heated by a single wood fire. Fortunately, home builders in that time were clever. They knew full well that heating a tall, narrow house would be difficult, so they designed it so the heat traveled up the staircases to the upper floors. And if you open the windows on the 3rd floor, you create a nice chimney effect that draws the heat upwards. So a single fireplace wasn't such a bad deal.

Nevertheless, it looks like the early Harts doubled up and added a big cast-iron "parlor stove" for additional heat. It sits in the 2nd-floor dining room. It's a heavy beast, and it must have given off a lot of heat, judging by the look of it. We don't know for sure, because we don't use it.

Can't use it, in fact. It's not safe. It's a "Moore's Air Tight Heater" model No. 403B, built by the Moore Brothers Company of Joliet, Illinois. The company was founded in 1852, and a little online research reveals that the No. 403B was patented in 1893 -- the very year this house was built. So it's possible that the parlor stove was here from the beginning, but we assume it was added shortly afterwards.

At any rate, it used to burn coal, which is obviously a non-starter today. Somebody later converted it to gas, with a new firebox inside and a grate filled with lava rocks. The stove vents to the house's brick chimney through a long, circuitous flue pipe that's mostly hidden up in the ceiling. There's a gas line at the bottom and a "Blue Flame Log Lighter" inside the firebox.

The day we moved in, the local PG&E utility man came around to switch on the electricity, take meter readings, and turn on the gas. We asked him to make sure the gas to the parlor stove was working, too, but he laughed, shook his head, and said, "Oh, hell, no! I'm not lighting that thing. Tell you what: I'll get in my truck and when I'm two blocks away, you can light it!"

So... that's a no? Later on, we checked with two different fireplace and HVAC companies, and they both turned us down, too. Their major complaint was the flue pipe. It's not double-insulated, and it's not far enough from combustible materials. So our Moore's Air Tight Heater No. 403B is jut a conversation piece.

That being the case, we didn't see any reason to keep the unsafe flue pipe in place, so we removed it and covered over the hole in the ceiling. Ninety percent of the flue pipe is still there in the dropped ceiling; it's just capped off to stop drafts or to prevent sparks in the chimney from escaping. We haven't done anything irreversible if some future generation wants to re-light the parlor stove.

The next step in our plan is to clean and paint the metal tiles directly behind the stove. They're there to reflect heat into the room, but since the stove doesn't get hot, they're now entirely decorative. The tiles were painted flat black at some point, but we're planning to repaint them gold, to complement the new tin ceiling tiles.

Not Quite Perfect

The Sistine Chapel this ain't.

There's a fine line between "rustic" and "just plain crappy." Bakers describe a loaf of bread as rustic when it's made simply, without special tools or fancy ingredients, or any particular skill. "Rustic" art is a nice way of saying it's amateurish and unprofessional. Well, I am hereby declaring our ceiling rustic.

One corner of our 2nd-floor dining room tucks under the stairs that lead up to the 3rd floor. That creates a low, out-of-the-way corner perfect for storage and whatnot. Like the rest of the room, the ceiling was covered in a heavily textured wallpaper that was then painted over by a later generation.

We're leaving most of the textured wallpaper in place, but we wanted to remove it from the low-ceiling portion of the room. Stripping wallpaper is pretty straightforward -- it holds no terror for us anymore -- so this seemed like a simple project. Wrong.

This particular wallpaper seems to have been glued on with some sort of defense-grade molecular bonding agent. It just won't come off. Kathy spent days and days scraping over her head, scratching off bits and flakes of it. She'd soak it with special wallpaper remover, dig at it with a sharp scraping knife, and get rewarded with a postage stamp-sized smidgen of wallpaper. It's tiring, demoralizing work, but once you start you have to keep going. You can't leave the ceiling half-scraped.

Even after she got all the wallpaper off, the pattern remained. The wallpaper is so heavily textured that the glue filled in the back side of the design and left behind a hardened epoxy-like texture that's even less attractive than the wallpaper was. How are we going to get that off?

Just digging at it with a sharp tool didn't really work, and it tended to gouge out the underlying plaster. Plus, it's tedious, over-your-head work. We tried soaking it with more wallpaper solvent, but that just turned the ancient adhesive into a sticky mess. It was still hard to scrape off, but now it was gooey, too.

So we decided to go the other way. Instead of scraping off all the texture (which we probably couldn't accomplish anyway), we decided to cover it over with our own texture. We waited for all the wet, gooey stuff to dry, then sanded down the worst parts with 120-grit on a hand block. Then we plastered over the entire ceiling with a thin skim coat of drywall compound.

We spread just enough mud to disguise the wallpaper pattern, maybe 1/16 of an inch. When that dried, we sanded it down a bit, applied a second coat to the areas that needed extra attention, and then sanded those. When it was all done, the old ceiling texture was entirely disguised under the new plaster. Voila! 

Trouble is, I'm not a very good plasterer. I can't hide seams very well, and I'm not good at sanding out imperfections. But in this case, that's what we wanted. We don't want the ceiling finish to look perfectly smooth, we want it to look just as imperfect as the rest of the house. Fortunately for me, imperfect is what I do best.

So now we have a "rustic" ceiling finish in the corner of the dining room that looks pretty much like it would have originally. You can almost pretend that it was done by a third-generation master plasterer in the 19th Century, instead of a modern amateur with two left hands.

New Wallpaper!

We're on a roll. No sooner had we finished the upstairs baseboards and trim (June) and the door hardware (August), than we got started on wallpapering the hallway.

This is just a short hallway that connects all the upstairs rooms: three bedrooms, one bathroom, and the stairs down to the 2nd floor. It has a skylight in the ceiling, courtesy of some previous owners, and it has a reclaimed stickwork piece set into the wall, courtesy of Yours Truly, circa 2015.

We'd done some minor renovation to this hallway a few years ago, and painted it a neutral peach color. (It had been dark green.) That was fine, but it was kind of a placeholder. We'd always intended to paper it later on, and so, here we are.

Kathy picked out a nice wallpaper pattern that didn't clash with the existing (and very old) wallpaper in the rest of the house. We're not removing any of the old wallpaper (much as we might like to), so any new patterns have to coexist with it. Best of all, the new wallpaper was pre-pasted, so it'll be easy to hang!

You would think. We dunked the first piece in the water trough just like they tell you and... nothing. It's just wet paper. What the...?

Turns out, it wasn't pre-pasted wallpaper after all. It just said so on the label. We tried another piece from a different roll, thinking maybe it was just a manufacturing error. No joy.

March down to the wallpaper store (conveniently located just a few blocks away) to say, politely, wassup? They were very nice and gave us all the free wallpaper paste we needed to finish the job. Back home to try again.

Pasting wallpaper is messy work, but we managed to finish the job in one day. It's a small hallway, but every single piece had to be measured, cut, and trimmed to fit around some obstacle or other. A doorway here, a sloped ceiling there. And none of the walls are perfectly straight or smooth, of course. But between us I think we did a pretty good job.

More Brass Work

Before we finished the door hardware upstairs we put the finishing touches on some of the decorative brass pieces. Here are a couple of escutcheons* that go behind the doorknobs. They don't match, but plenty of stuff in this house doesn't.

We also cleaned up the crystal, porcelain, and brass doorknobs (at least one set of each). They were all paint-splattered like everything else, but they cleaned up easily enough. It was also a good opportunity to replace some of the fiddly little screws holding everything together.

*There's a word you don't get to use often! 

Mortise & Tension

The door hardware upstairs comes in two styles: old and older. The merely old ones are called mortise locks because they're mortised into the door, meaning you cut a hollow pocket into the wood to accept the hardware. Then the entire lock mechanism slips into the pocket, completely contained inside the door. Hardly anybody does mortise locks anymore, and I can see why.

The really old locks, however, sit on the outside of the door. They're called rim locks and they're also square boxes like the mortise locks, but they don't go inside; they get screwed to the outside. Internally, both mechanism work the same. They even look pretty similar sitting on the workbench. The major giveaway is the decorative brass end plate on the mortise locks.

The mortised locks have smooth sides designed to fit snugly inside the door pocket, but with a pretty decorative end plate that you can see when it's installed. These were all coated with several decades' worth of paint, but once they're cleaned up they look pretty nice.

Some of the end plates are definitely prettier than others. You can also see the deadbolt that sticks out just below the angled spring latch. We don't have keys for these anymore, but they can't be all that hard to find. I've taken the mechanisms apart, and they're not complicated locks. I suspect one basic key would work on all of them. (For you locksmithing nerds, it's a lever lock, not a warded lock.) It relies mostly on gravity to make it work. Don't install it upside-down or you'll lock yourself in!

Our rim locks mount to the outside of the door. They're more utilitarian and less decorative. They have a thumb latch at the top that locks the mechanism and prevents the doorknob from turning. It's not as secure as the deadbolt, but these are just interior doors anyway. I don't think anyone's going to break into (or out of) the bathroom.

On the other hand, because these locks are mounted to the exterior of the door and not hidden inside, the manufacturer dressed them up a little bit. Here's a closeup of the one in my room. You can see it says, "PAT'D JULY 21 1865 B.L.W."

Presumably BLW is the manufacturer. And just because it was patented in 1865 -- Civil War era -- doesn't mean it was made in that year, but it's clearly very old. Probably original to the house, which was built in 1893. We've got three like this upstairs, plus two of the mortise locks.

Jasco & Brasso

My next two kids are going to be named Jasco and Brasso. Jasco because he (she?) is great at cleaning up old paint, and Brasso for the nice polish afterwards. Those two have been my constant companions for the past few days. I feel like we're related.

Kathy and I finally got around to cleaning up and reinstalling the door latches upstairs. Just in time, too, because the summer weather has been nice and with the windows open the doors have a tendency to slam shut. Or slam open. With no latches to hold them in place, we're reduced to using makeshift doorstops to keep everything from swinging in the breeze. And when a door does slam shut, you have to poke a little finger into one of the exposed holes and try to coax it open again. Not terribly convenient.

All the door hardware was coated in layer after layer of paint. And under that, rust. So it all went out into the garage for a thorough field strip, clean, and reassembly. I thought a simple wipe-down with paint thinner might do the job, but of course that doesn't work. It took several applications of Jasco, along with vigorous application of a stiff wire brush, to get all the paint off.

Surprise! Some of the mechanism inside is brass. It was so dirty I couldn't tell. Most of these door locks are made from iron (not steel), but with brass for the moving parts. I cleaned them inside and out and applied some white grease, and now they work much batter. They even look nice and shiny inside, although nobody will ever know.

The House With No Doorknobs

We're very open here. In the sense that all of our upstairs doors are standing open because they don't have any hardware on them right now.

Part of fixing and installing all of the upstairs trim naturally involves lots of sanding and painting. (We've got the mess to prove it.) And that means removing all the door hardware so that we can sand and/or paint the doors. We removed all the doors from their hinges and then stripped all the old layers of paint off of the hardware before re-hanging the doors.

That only took a few days, but we never quite got around to re-installing all of the latch mechanisms. So our doors have been swinging open for the past few weeks.

I've heard that doorknobs are a uniquely American thing. Other countries use levers, not knobs. That was certainly the case when we lived in Europe in the 1990s. We never saw a doorknob the whole time. They really do seem to be an American invention.

We've gone that one better. We have no hardware at all.

Down To the Wire

Electricity. It's not just a good idea, it's Ohm's Law!

(nerd humor /off)

Several months ago, we updated the electrical outlets on the ground floor to add, well, grounding. They'd been two-prong ungrounded outlets since they were first installed (1930s? 1960s?) and it was past time for them to get upgraded. That project went well, but it also highlighted another problem: We don't have enough electrical outlets in those rooms.

The front room has two outlets, which is okay. The middle room has three, which seems luxurious. But the back room -- the largest of the three -- has only a single outlet, and it's in an inconvenient location. So we'd resolved to not only upgrade the outlets we had, but to add more someday. Today was that day.

Adding new outlets was a bit tricky because it's an old house. On the plus side, we're working on the ground floor, which means we've got access to the crawlspace underneath. That's much easier than working on the 2nd or 3rd floor with no access to the under-floor space. Also, it's a wood-frame house, so you can drill through anything if you really want to. Much better than working with brick or concrete.

On the downside, the walls and floor are very thick. Two of the three outlets were going on outside walls, which adds and element of chance. Where are the studs? Where are the floor joists? Can I get there from here?

The first step is picking the location where the new outlet will go and hoping there isn't a wall stud behind it. Tapping the walls works with drywall, but the thick plaster and lath sounds the same everywhere. Electronic stud finders aren't any help, either. So I started by drilling a very small hole into the baseboard. If it hits air after about four inches of drilling, I know I haven't hit a stud. But that doesn't mean the stud isn't close by on one side or the other, blocking the electrical box. So I stick a bent wire into the hole and wiggle it around, feeling for obstructions. If I can spin the wire in a complete circle, I know I've got a few inches of clearance on either side. It was just dumb luck, but I found clear space both times I tried. Success!

Next comes cutting the rectangular cutout for the junction box. A Dremel Multi-Max tool is perfect for this job. It allows you to jab straight cuts in confined spaces. I've got to cut through three layers: the wooden baseboard, the plaster, and the wooden lath behind that. Unfortunately, the Dremel blade cuts beautifully through wood but is badly dulled by old plaster. So I've used up a brand new blade after only two or three outlets.

Now for the fun part: wiring. Making holes in the walls is all very entertaining, but ultimately we've got to feed new Romex into (and out of) the holes. And connect one end of the wire to the juice. More good news: There's exactly one live outlet already in the room, and we can theoretically just daisy-chain the Romex from that outlet to the new ones. Piece of cake.

More bad news: Once I crawl under the house I can't tell where I'm working. So I create a little landmark for myself by pulling away the quarter-round shoe molding and drilling a tiny hole straight down through the floor. Then I poke a stiff red wire through the hole until I'm pretty sure the wire is hanging down in the crawlspace. Then crawl under the house, find the red wire, and measure from there. When I'm done, I can gently nail the molding back into place and cover the hole. No harm done.

Still more bad news: To make holes for the Romex to pass through, I have to drill straight down through the floor, but there's no room to fit a drill in the little 4-inch hole for the box. This is where a spiffy little right-angle adapter comes into play. It allows me to hold the drill outside while sticking the drill bit into the hole and drill straight down.

Yet more bad news: The new outlet is on an outside wall, which means the floor underneath it is unusually stout and heavily braced. Even with the right-angle drill, I can't just drill straight down, or I'll hit the thick 12-inch floor joists. There's no way I can drill through that much wood, and I would't want to, anyway. How am I going to feed Romex down through that kind of structure?

Some good news: Because this is an outside wall, there are two 2x12 redwood floor joists instead of just one, but -- hooray! -- they're paired with a bit of space in between them. So if I'm really lucky, say my prayers, and eat my Wheaties, I might be able to feed the wire through the gap in between the two. The only trick is measuring the distance accurately, and I've got a red wire to help me there. After just one or two false starts I manage to drill straight down into the gap between the floor joists, leaving a nice tidy hole that doesn't weaken or damage anything. Now just drop the Romex through the hole and you're almost done!

Lather, rinse, repeat with the two other outlets. The middle outlet (above) was the hardest of the three because I had to feed wire into it as well as out of it. Feeding Romex up through the hole in the floor is much harder than pushing the wire down. This called for a bit of fishing wire and some electrical tape, but eventually it came up through the dark recesses of the subfloor and into daylight.

The third outlet was the easiest of all because it backed up to the dumbwaiter shaft, which is hollow and big enough to stand in. I could see the back side of the plaster, avoid the studs, and feed wire from either side of the wall. Luxury!

After all that work, the room looks... almost exactly the same as before. All that effort, for no apparent difference. But at least we know that we've got four working outlets in the room now, and that's what we wanted.

Before & After, Part CXXVII

We're not very good at taking "before and after" pictures. Or more specifically, we don't take enough "before" pictures. This time we managed to remember.

Here's my new office wall after the depredations of last March. We've covered up the old wood with new drywall, blended in the seam, primed and painted it, hung an all-new light fixture connected to an all-new wall switch, and installed the baseboard and door molding.

Looks better, right?

Hey, I'm Getting Pretty Good at This!

So here's the challenge. You need to push an electrical wire through a 1-inch diameter hole. The hole is 10 feet away. And it's in another room. And you can't even see it.

Ready... start! I'll wait.

That was the task today. We wanted to run some new electrical wiring to our second-floor parlor, but there's no way to route the wire up to that room without damaging the walls. We've been thinking about this problem off and on for years, before finally deciding that we had two options. Either we run the wiring on the outside of the house (in weatherproof conduit, obviously), or we sneak it through the hollow wall that holds the pocket doors. We went for Plan B.

The pocket doors on the first floor run underneath the room we want to re-wire, so it should be possible to run the wire up through that wall and pop out through the ceiling/floor. Better yet, there's a closet on the second floor directly above the pocket doors, which allows us to hide the wiring in the back of the closet rather than having to expose an ugly junction box somewhere. Perfect.

That's the easy part. The hard part is actually making it happen. For starters, we wanted to be absolutely sure that the closet really was directly above the pocket doors. No use in drilling down through the floor if it just comes out in the ceiling downstairs. So we measured everything, checked twice, and overlaid the floor plans to make sure everything lined up as expected. "Measure twice, cut once."

Once we were 85% satisfied that we knew what we were doing, we drilled down through the closet floor until the drill bit hit air. Then it was time to run downstairs and look for unfamiliar holes in the ceiling. No holes? Splendid. Let's keep going.

Then we fed the electrical wire (12/3 Romex, if you're into that kind of thing) down through the closet floor, letting gravity ease it downward through the hollow wall.  We had to pull the heavy pocket door entirely out of its pocket and shine a flashlight into the gap to see if the wire was going where we wanted. Yup -- bright yellow Romex coiling up at the bottom. So far, so good.

Now for the fun part. Time to drill a second hole in the first-floor floor so the wire can get under the house and into the crawlspace. Oh, and one other thing: the wire can't foul the pocket door as it moves. so it has to be pushed all the way to the far end of the narrow pocket, more than 3 feet back.

There's no way to drill a hole by reaching into the door pocket -- I can't even fit my hand in there -- and there's certainly no way to reach 3 feet back. The only way to drill the second hole is to work from the bottom up. Time to get under the house.

Using plumbing lines as landmarks, I marked where the second hole should go. Grab a drill, cross my fingers, and drill straight upwards through the floor into our living room. Crawl out from under the house, look around nervously for sawdust on the hardwood floors... Nope. No reason to panic just yet.

But where's my hole? It's not in the middle of the living room, which is good, but I can't see it in the pocket wall, either. Duh, it's under all the dust and debris and junk that have accumulated there over 125 years. Time to crawl back under the house and poke a stiff wire with bright red insulation up through the hole as a marker. Topside again, I can just see the red wire poking up though the new hole in the back of the pocket wall. Hooray!

Okay, so I've got two holes, one in the floor and one in the ceiling about 10 feet above it. And a loose coil of wire dangling down from the upper hole in the back on an inaccessible pocket wall. How to coax that wire to magically jump through the lower hole?

I could go back upstairs to the second-floor closet and wiggle the wire, hoping to get lucky. I could try to fashion some sort of 3-foot-long grabber arm and snatch the wire and aim it through the hole, like a carnival game. I could drink more beer...

Aha! Let's go back under the house and push some more of that red telltale wire up through the hole until it's long enough that I can reach into the pocket wall with a 3-foot stick and grab it. Then go upstairs and feed some more yellow Romex down through the upper hole so that I can grab it, too. Now tape the two wires together. Crawl back under the house, pull on the red wire and hope really hard that it pulls the yellow Romex through the hole after itself without snagging on anything.

Got it first time. Piece of cake. Don't know why I was ever worried.

Upper Body Work

Once the baseboard trim was in, it was time to start on the big project: doorway molding.

Our doorway trim downstairs is exactly 5 inches wide and was probably carved onsite when the house was built in 1893. It's all beautiful redwood, including the plinth blocks and the 5-inch square medallions in the corners. Sadly, that trim was never installed up on the third floor. Or if it was, it got removed at some point.

So we set about duplicating it by removing the basic, flat redwood trim that was installed here and milling it to reproduce the antique profile. Unfortunately, the boring door trim that was installed upstairs is less than 5 inches wide, so we couldn't simply carve it and put it back. Fortunately, the flat baseboard trim that was installed upstairs was slightly over 5 inches wide, so it became our molding stock. In the end, the old baseboard trim became the new doorway trim, and the old doorway trim became part of the new baseboard trim. Nice!

We don't have a lathe, and I don't have the talent to reproduce the corner medallions, so we were considering having someone make reproductions for us. (Thanks, volunteers!) But we noticed that the house has two slightly different styles of medallions already. The ones on the first floor are a little bit different than the ones on the second floor. So why not add a third style on the third floor? We found a mill on the East Coast that made a medallion that closely resembled the other two, so we bought a stack of those.

The new medallions were too big, so we cut them down to exactly 5 inches on a side. This is trickier than it sounds, because you can't just cut two adjacent sides to get the dimensions you want. You have to center the design and cut exactly the same amount of material off of all four sides. Probably easy for an experienced woodworker; slightly troublesome for me.

Cutting the medallions down leaves them with flush-cut edges that don't look nice, so I ran them all through the router table to add a slightly sunken roundover edge. Then we added some grooves to the pattern using the table saw. In the end, the new medallions look very much like the old ones downstairs.

The door trim itself we've documented elsewhere. We made miles of it, or so it seems. It really is an exact match for the original trim because we used a piece of trim as the template for the molding knives. Because we're reusing the old redwood, it tended to splinter in places, and because it was used as baseboard trim for decades it's beat up, dented, and has holes drilled through it in odd places. It was a challenge to allocate the holes and dents in such a way that they wouldn't show. Can I get a clean six-foot piece for this doorway? Can I use that ugly piece over here? Where can I fit this short piece?

Lots of hand sanding removed some of the uglier blemishes, but it was never going to look new. Nor should it. The way we figure it, it's pre-blemished. Don't they charge extra for that in the furniture stores?

Trim & Fit

This is what we've been doing for the past several months. We're trimming out the top floor. And we're this close to being finished -- just like always.

The baseboard molding, door trim, and medallions are all reproductions of what we have on the first and second floors of the house. Almost all of it is reclaimed redwood that was already here; about 20% of it is new wood.

Here's a shot of the baseboard. The bottom five inches (the flat part) is new wood that we cut to size. Everything above that is reclaimed redwood that we milled out in the garage using the big molder/planer (otherwise known as the Sawdust Generator 2000).

I forget how many linear feet we made; my notes are around here somewhere, but it was a few hundred feet, at least. We had to trim every upstairs room, including three bedrooms and a hallway. (The upstairs bathroom got its molding in 2012.) Kathy's room, in particular, is large and has a lot of funny angles because it includes the round "witch's cap" tower. It's not fun guessing and testing angles for a pseudo-round room.

Remarkably, we didn't make any wrong cuts or waste a single piece of baseboard trim. What little leftover pieces we have are now back in the garage to use for repairs or templates for a future project, if necessary.

We also had to fabricate our own plinth blocks (the pedestal pieces that the door trim rests on), like the one on the far right of this photo. These are also duplicates of the size and style used downstairs, reproduced in existing redwood with a bit of new redwood and pine added. They're made with the same molder/planer profile as the baseboards, but much thicker so they stand out. I think we made 20 of these. Three doorways needed four apiece, but four doorways are "one-sided" and get just two. Everything was sanded, primed, and painted in Antique White (really!) paint.

Baseboard molding seems really easy, but of course it never is. Nothing is ever straight, plumb, level, or meets at 90 degrees. A miter saw is definitely helpful, but I rarely got to set it to that nice 45-degree stop that normal people get to use. Kathy's curved tower room was one problem area, but even the "square" rooms aren't, really. I had to tweak most of the cuts by one or two degrees to get everything to line up.

On top of that, the floors aren't always level. They're very, very close. If you place a ball on the floor it won't roll. But if you place a spirit level on top of the baseboard molding, it won't be exactly level. So then you have a decision: Do I level the baseboards and leave a (very small) gap underneath, or follow the floor and have slightly cockeyed baseboards? The answer: Do whatever looks best.

I split the difference. The lower portion of the baseboards follow the floor exactly, even in places where the floor isn't level. Then the upper trim portion of the baseboard is level, leaving a small gap between the two pieces, which I fill in to remove any shadow. It looks pretty good, IMHO.

A Hole In One

Kathy and I have been gradually trimming out the 3rd floor windows and doors. We've made really good progress over the past 3-4 weeks, but it's amazing (and a bit discouraging) how much there still is to go. There's so much fiddly detail work that it never seems to stop.

Most of the work has been with the new baseboards, and we'll post some pictures of that in a few days. We've also trimmed out every single door on the third floor, including closets, with our new/old reproduction molding. Just when we thought we were done, we looked up and realized we'd never finished trimming out the transom window above the bathroom door. And... say it with me now... as long as we're up here, we might as well finish off the oddball skylight, too. More tools, more paint, more cutting, and more ladders. It's a good thing we enjoy this kind of stuff.

In reverse order, here is the transom window that's almost (but not quite) finished. Perspicacious readers will recall that we built this window from scratch almost five years ago. There wasn't originally a window above this bathroom door, but when we gutted and remodeled the bathroom in 2012, we cut this in partly for ventilation, partly for light, and partly for appearances.

The window tilts outward, so you can open it for ventilation. It rotates on a pair of brass hinges that we got from an antique hardware supplier. And, since the window is right below the skylight in the ceiling, it lets much-needed light into the bathroom. We'd fabricated the window molding and sill back then, but never really finished it off. So this week, we finally trimmed, sanded, and painted it. Hooray!

The skylight in this hallway isn't original to the house, either. Somebody must have installed it in the 1960s or '70s. Maybe even earlier -- who knows? It's also possible that the opening was originally a hatch up to a widow's walk on the roof. It's nice having the sunlight come in, but the skylight itself was never very finished-looking. There were exposed roof beams and bracing visible in places, as if someone had left the job uncompleted.

This week we added some drywall and some molding to the skylight to make it look more regular, tidy, and finished. Naturally, the "square" skylight shaft is nothing of the sort. All the angles were a few degrees off of 90, which makes cutting and fitting the trim a chore. Lastly, we picked the hottest day of the year to stick our heads up in there to prime and paint it, so that added a certain sweaty charm to the task.

Staring at the Walls

I'm literally staring at the walls, and I'm confused by what I see.

This is a close-up of the painted fabric wall in my room. As I said earlier, this type of wall covering appears in a few places around the house. I assume that it's original, meaning it dates back to 1893. If not, then it's probably from the big remodel the Hart family did in the 1930's. Either way, it's a lot older than me.

It's a bit hard to see in this photo, but there's a discolored area in the middle of this part of the fabric wall covering. It's rectangular and runs left to right. Some of the cracks in the paint roughly follow the borders of the discolored area.

My hunch is that there used to be a shelf mounted to the wall here, and over the years, the sun bleached the paint around it, leaving this rectangular section a slightly different color. The screws, nails, bolts, or whatever hardware held the shelf to the wall may have also cracked the paint as it got old, leaving a kind of border marking its presence.

There's also some handwriting on the surface; I assume they're measurements. Clearly, you wouldn't have scribbled on a finished wall, so the writing must have come much later, after someone decided to cover up this surface. (Possibly the same time that the drywall went in, if not the same person.) Just for fun, I tried measuring walls, doors, and bits of trim hoping to find something that measured 34 inches, 33¼ inches, or 53½ inches. No luck. So what were they measuring and where are those pieces now?

The Woman on the Stairs

Kathy's getting into demolition mode. While I was off doing something typically pointless, she decided it was time to remove the old carpet from the second-floor stairs.

(If the stairs connect the second and third floors, is it a second-floor staircase or a third-floor staircase? Two and a half?)

These stairs have had a red "carpet runner" on them since well before we moved in; probably since the 1970's. It's not a real carpet runner, it's just leftover red carpet that someone installed on the stairs. They did a good job -- it's held up this long -- but it's not what we want. Unlike the rest of the red carpet on the second floor, it's not all food-stained. Evidently they never had to carry plates of lasagna up to guests on the third floor.

Anyway, we've always planned to replace the old red carpet with a proper carpet runner. We just never... you know... got around to it. But the first step in any new project is the demolition. No demo, no progress. Grab the hammer!

Kathy pried up all the tack strips underneath the carpet, with only minimal loss of blood. (Three Band-Aids, I think.) She tore apart the pieces of carpet, which had been all taped/glued together. And she meticulously yanked out all the tiny little nails that had been holding everything in place. In the end, we got a set of nice, smooth, painted stairs.

It's actually a bit disorienting to walk downstairs now. We got so used to the dark red color that it looks funny when it's brown. And not fuzzy. I think we both stumbled a little bit for the first few days as we readjusted to the new look of the stairs. Something in the back of our brains said, Stop!, and made us do a little stutter-step at the first step. We're over it now, but it means we'll probably have to relearn how to walk on the stairs yet again when we put down the carpet runner.

Up Against the Wall

This is my wall.

It's a lovely wall. It separates my upstairs office from the stairwell. It helps hold up the roof. It's a handy place to hang pictures. But it needs... something.

Like most of the third floor, this wall had been covered in drywall (Sheetrock) at some time in its past. And also like much of the third floor, the work had been done inexpertly. This wall also had a light fixture hacked into it (on the other side where you can't see), but without benefit of an electrical junction box. The wires just poked through a hole in the plaster where wire nuts fixed it to the light. Not entirely kosher and not to my liking.

Finally, my room had no light switch anywhere. It had electrical outlets, but nothing on a switch, so you couldn't just walk into the room and flick on a light. All of this needed fixing.

The only way to get at the electrical wiring, of course, is to open the wall, and because it's just drywall I wasn't too worried about that. We're not sentimental about drywall; it's just historic plaster and lath that we try to preserve. Sheetrock? Pfft. Out it comes.

My secret hope was that my room would be like Kathy's room, in the sense of having cool old redwood paneling hidden behind the drywall. In that case, removing the drywall would be a good deed. I was looking forward to exposing the old redwood.

No such luck. Instead, this room seems to have been constructed like an Old West saloon in some ghost town that had no carpenters. There's old wood behind the drywall, all right, but it's not something you'd want to display. It's ratty and ill-fitting and has big gaps in it. It's like some shantytown shelter made from scrap. Bummer.

To cover up this iffy construction, our predecessors had covered the wall with painted fabric. We've found this stuff elsewhere in the house. It's like rough woven linen covered with a thick coat of painted paper. The fabric covering is attached to the wall with small nails (which I've saved) that are on the underside of the painted layer, so they don't show. Not sure how that was done, but it appears to have been common practice.

For the record, I did not cut away the fabric covering as you see it here. That was done much earlier, probably when the wall fixture (the one on the other side) was first installed. They would have had to cut into the wall somehow to route the wires. That explains why some of the covering is missing, and why the nails in the wooden boards don't all match. Some are quite old, square-headed nails while others are newer round nails (1930s? 1960s?). Too bad they didn't install a proper junction box while they were at it. It would've saved me a lot of trouble.

Anyway, now that I've got the wall open, I can fix all of these problems at once. First, I installed a junction box in the wall to support the wall fixture. It's supported by a cross-brace nailed between two studs. (You can't see it in this photo.)

Second, I added the light switch that you see here near the door. It switches one-half of the new outlet near the floor, as well as the new wall fixture in this room.

Third, I removed a lot of the old drywall and replaced it with new. I figured there's no way to dress up the underlying wooden boards to make them nice enough to expose, so I might as well just cover them all up again like before. But at least now I know what's behind there.

Here's a peek into the knob-and-tube wiring that was behind the wall. I like how they twisted the wires around the ceramic knobs for strain relief.

Why three wires? Because one is hot, one's neutral, and one's a traveler between a pair of three-way switches. Yes! They had three-way switches even back in the day!

Finally, here's a century of wiring history in one snapshot. There's the original knob-and-tube wiring coming up through the floor (from three stories down), against some new 14/2 Romex that now does the job. Behind that, you can see the black coax cable for broadband Internet, along with the gray CAT5e cable for the LAN.

Now that I think about it, I should have added a fiber-optic cable just to make it look really modern and up-to-date. Oh, well. Wires will probably be obsolete soon, anyway.