Chapter Next

Our time in this house has come to an end -- the moving van is outside as I write this -- but the story of the house continues, of course.

As anyone knows who's sold a house, it's not as fun as it looks. In our case, the process took more than nine months, from when it was first listed to when we closed escrow. There were some ups and downs along the way, a few false starts, some heated words, and a few missed deadlines and broken promises, but in the end it all worked out. In fact, it worked out really well.

The new buyers are ideal. As sellers, we don't get to pick the buyers, but we couldn't have chosen a better family. They'll be living in the house full-time, just as we did, and they're enthusiastic about preserving it.

Best of all, they'll be taking over this blog and updating it going forward. So you see? "Restoring Dr. Hart's Mansion" will continue, maybe for another 126 years.

Goodbye, old friend. 

The Accidental Tourist

It appears we're "magnificent."

Every year, our town's local historical society puts on a walking tour of historic houses and public buildings. It's a fundraiser for the society and a pleasant day out for architecture buffs or snoopy neighbors. Our house was on the tour a few years ago, and we got plenty of visitors. Then we took a few years off because the organizers like to keep things fresh by mixing up the inventory of houses every year.

It looked like we weren't going to be on this year's tour, either. But then the tour posters started appearing around town and they looked... familiar.

"Hey, honey! Are we on the Heritage Home Tour this year? Because it sure looks like they're advertising our house."

We called the number at the bottom of the poster and introduced ourselves. "Hi, we're from the house in all of your advertisements. Would you like to, uh, include it on your tour?"

The short answer was 'yes.' I'm not sure why they didn't invite us to participate in the first place, but once we offered they were happy to add us to the agenda. The only trouble was, they'd already started printing handouts, tickets, and the tour map. Could we please send them a few photos and a quick history right now, while they tried to stop the presses? Uh, sure.

Within a few days, we noticed that the ads had changed slightly to say there were now 14 houses on the tour, up from the 13 listed previously. The picture stayed the same, but now the accompanying text described the "magnificent Hart Mansion" as one of the attractions.

It's funny to think what might have happened if we hadn't been included at the last minute. Would ticket buyers have come up to our door, assuming that we're on the tour? After all, it's the only house shown on the poster. It's hard to miss. Why would you advertise a home tour with an image of a house that's not on the tour?

The other complication was the potential sale of the house. It's listed for sale and there's a big For Sale sign in the front yard. Is that okay? And what happens if the house actually sells before the day of the home tour? Neither turned out to be a problem, so everything is going ahead as planned.

Kathy and I are happy to be included in the tour one last time. We don't know who will eventually buy this house or if they'll want to share it. This may be the last time it's open to the public for a while.

One Door Closes, Another Opens

It's time for us to sell the house.

That's not a bad thing, and we're certainly not doing it for bad reasons. Nobody lost a job; we didn't run out of money; someone wasn't suddenly taken ill. There was no disaster or mishap that triggered our decision to leave, it just felt like good timing. We'd like to be closer to the rest of our family, and, coincidentally, we feel like we've completed 95% of the restoration work that we set out to do. This just seems like the right time.

The house is now for sale through Sotheby's International Realty (it has its own spiffy listing site at www.TheHartMansion.com), and we've already had a number of interested people come through for showings. From the looks of it, we should be moved out before Christmas.

Our real-estate agents arranged for a photographer, a videographer, and a drone pilot to take all sorts of photos and video over several days. They even created a "Matterport" virtual walk-through, which is pretty cool. You can pretend to walk though the house and see every room on all three floors. I imagine it's especially fun with a VR headset, but you can see it with a normal web browser, too.

Now Kathy and I have to keep the house clean all the time in case someone wants to take a tour. That's not a big problem, and it gives us an excuse to go outside and play tourist in our own town. It's also proved to be good business for the new pub down the street.

If These Walls Could Talk

As part of our kitchen re-do, we replaced the stainless steel backsplash with copper tiles. It's just as sanitary, but a lot nicer to look at. Once the sinks, counters, and cabinets were removed it was easy to pull off the big sheet of stainless and hand it over to a guy with a truck who does recycling.

That exposed the moisture-resistant drywall, and the original bead board behind it. I removed the drywall and carefully pried loose a couple of pieces of the bead board where I needed to get behind them. I numbered each board with a piece of tape so they'd go back into place.

The bead boards are pretty beat-up, and many have round or square holes cut in them for no apparent reason. My guess is that the plumbing has moved around a lot, and the old holes are evidence of old pipes long removed. They're also painted two different colors, and I can't see a lot of logic to where the color changes.

We didn't need to make any substantial plumbing changes, but I did take the opportunity to clean up some old pipe that was in the way.

This shows a section of old galvanized pipe behind the kitchen wall that isn't being used anymore. Presumably, it was the drain from the original kitchen from waaay back. It hasn't been used in decades; it certainly wasn't connected to anything when we bought the house, and it's not wet inside.

It's hard to tell from this photo, but the pipe is wider at the bottom than at the top. From the drain plug down, it's 2" galvanized pipe, but from the drain upwards it's 1-1/2" pipe.

That means it's a "dry vent," a pipe that only carried water downwards, not from anything above it on the upper floors. And since there's no fixture connected to it now, the entire run is empty and abandoned. I'd considered removing it completely... but why? It doesn't hurt anything and it's a nice reminder of how the house used to be plumbed.

What we did do is cut a small section out of the pipe to remove the protruding drain plug. The missing section now has a short run of ABS, with a coupler at one end to adjust for the differing diameters.

And here's some of the new copper backsplash.

Kitchen v1.1

Around the end of February we decided to tweak the downstairs kitchen a bit. Nothing major, but we found that the arrangement of the sinks, cabinets, and worktop weren't optimal. So we took a few weeks off of work and made it all better.

Initially, we'd located all the major kitchen appliances -- sinks, hood vent, refrigerator, etc. - exactly where they'd been before when there was a restaurant here. We figured (a) that a professional restaurateur would know the best place to put everything, so we'd just follow their lead, and (b) that health codes and/or city ordinances might limit our options. Those both turned out to be untrue. The arrangement was awkward, as we discovered over a few years working in that kitchen. Not terrible or anything, but not ideal, either.

Before...

Turns out, we can swap the locations of a few items and make a big difference without costing a lot of money, changing the plumbing, or needing a permit. In actual fact, the changes we made were small, but they paid off in increased efficiency. We're really happy with the result.

Our downstairs kitchen is basically divided into two rooms, one larger than the other. The small room used to have the main work surface and a small sink, while the large room had the big sink. Swapping the two sinks was pretty straightforward: just reverse the sinks and leave the plumbing in place. Same drains, same hot/cold supplies. Just swap the hardware. Simple!

...and after.

Same goes for the under-counter cabinets. Instead of a small L-shaped work space in the small room, we now have a much larger, straight counter in the large room. Much better! And again, no structural modifications required. Just unbolt the cabinets and move them a few feet to the right.

The photo above shows the old L-shaped counter top and cabinets. The problem we had with this arrangement was that the sink cut the work surface in two, so there was never a large place to roll out dough or to place a full-size sheet pan. After the change, this space became the triple-basin sink.

In the bigger room, the space that was occupied by the big sink is now one long butcher block counter. All the cabinets that came out of the small room are now lined up under the new work surface. Same cabinets, just arranged differently.

The one tricky cabinet was the L-shaped lazy Susan that used to be in the corner. I disassembled it and made it into one straight cabinet using all the same pieces. Corner cabinets have funny hinges, however, so we had to source new hardware for the cabinet doors, but that wasn't a huge deal.

Here's a look at the new work surface, where the big sink used to go. It's a hard maple Boos Block, made to commercial NSF-certified quality. (There's even an NSF logo "tattooed" into the side of the wood.) Strangely, it's about the same total size as the old L-shaped maple counter, but it's far more useful because it's not broken up into smaller pieces. I love it.

Under the Big Top

"I see bug people."

The B&B next door to us got tented the other day, which affected us in a small way. The exterminators needed to get into our backyard to assemble the tenting, and they needed to partially disassemble the fence between the two properties. During all of this, the B&B was vacant, of course, so we had no neighbors for a few days apart from the fearless guys climbing all over the roof of the buildings next door.

The big, brightly colored tent lent a festive atmosphere to the neighborhood. It's made out of square pieces clamped together with oversize clothespins. First, the installers put padded scraps of carpeting on the chimneys, roof corners, and other sharp projections. Then they draped the tent over the roof and down the sides, finally weighting it down at the bottom with big sandbags. Because there's no easement between our property and theirs, they needed to get into our backyard to stretch the tent across the back side of the B&B. That's no big deal, and the installers were very nice about not disrupting anything or trampling any plants.

There are two places where our community fence abuts their building, however, and the installers had to cut this away to make room for the tent. (Otherwise, the tent would have draped over the fence, which isn't airtight.) They'd warned us about this a few weeks ahead of time and, frankly, we were thrilled. We've never really liked that fence very much and we were kind of looking forward to replacing it anyway. The opportunity to tear it down and split the cost of rebuilding it suits us just fine.

The whole process took three days, which seems pretty normal. There's one day of tent assembly, one day of gassing the interior, and one day to disassemble it all again.

Their building is only two stories tall in most places, but it's almost as high as our three-story house because it's slightly uphill from us and it's built on a slightly taller foundation. We can look across to their roof, or slightly down onto their second-floor guest rooms. Even so, it's pretty high up and I'm impressed that the installers can scamper about on that roof with no trouble. It's a long way down. but maybe the big padded tent material would make a good cushion.

All Quiet on the Eastern Front

The first thing we noticed was the parked cars. There weren't any.

We live next door to a bed-and-breakfast inn that's been there for 120+ years, so we're accustomed to neighbors who come and go every few days. The B&B itself has no parking lot, so the guests generally park on the side streets around the building, often near us. It's not a problem -- we can always find a place to park our own cars -- but it does lead to an ever-changing array of cars nearby.

Then, suddenly, they were all gone. Hey, where'd the cars go?

Oh, yeah -- that's right. The owners of the B&B had warned us that exterminators would be tenting their building for a few days. We'd have to leave our backyard gates open so they could get access, and we'd want to trim back any bushes or flowers that were growing directly against the structure. We did all of that, but we missed the obvious side-effect: there would be no guests staying in the B&B while the tenting was gong on. No guests, no parked cars. 

The springtime weather has been bright and sunny, and it's nice to sit outside in the morning with a cup of coffee, a peek of the ocean, and no breeze. Normally, we'd observe folks at the B&B doing the same, but not today. It's all quiet on our eastern neighbor's side.

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!