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.