Architect of Destruction

Boy, this is fun!

How often do you get to swing a sledgehammer in your own house? There's almost nothing in this kitchen that we're saving (I already removed the hand-painted doors and the stained-glass cabinet), so it really doesn't matter what I hit or how hard. Wheeee!

My first victim was the ugly wet bar. Here's its hole. I never did like that thing, although we are saving its brass handles, as well as all the other drawer pulls. We'll reuse them on the new kitchen cabinets.

Looks like there was green/white checked linoleum on the floor. That's before it was re-tiled in green ceramic. I've popped off a few of the ceramic tiles already, and I'm not looking forward to doing the rest of the floor. Those suckers are on there.

The row of hanging center cabinets went next. Oddly, they're constructed mostly of Sheetrock, with a layer of painted wood on the outside. The base cabinets are mostly wallboard, too. This seems like a weird (and heavy) way to make cabinets. Whatever.

Demolishing the center bar was fun. I ate away at the cabinets supporting it, and let gravity ease the tile downward. I finally took a swing with the sledgehammer and removed the last support. Wham! I live for this stuff.

Kitchen: Before

Okay, kids. Take a last look, 'cause it's all coming' down.

Today we start on a total demolition and remodel of the main/upstairs kitchen. (Yes, we've got permits. You never know who's reading.)


We think this kitchen was built around 1939. It's not original to the house; we know that. And judging from the color of the tiles and the, uh, quaint appliances, the kitchen was remodeled in the 1960s. (More on this in another post.) Either way, it's all coming out, to be replaced with all mod cons.

It's not a terrible kitchen, really. Several families must have used it day in and day out. It even has its own built-in breakfast bar. I wonder how many little kids sat there and ate their oatmeal before going off to Pacific Grove Middle School or PGHS. There's what appears to be a cat door under the last cabinet.


On the other hand, said bar effectively cuts the room in half, making it more claustrophobic than it needs to be. The hanging center cabinets also block sunlight coming through the stained-glass window, which seems a shame.

The sink is old (but surprisingly un-rusty) and the wood under and behind it is... ick. The drawers stick. There's too many layers of paint on everything. Digging down, it looks like everything was originally painted light green, then later white. The green matches the tiles, and the white is, well, white.


The hanging cabinets all have hand-painted doors, which we're saving. Anyone know who "Bernadette" was? When the green cabinets were repainted white, at least someone took care not to blemish Bernadette's work.

Anyway, it's all coming out, starting today. Wish me luck.

Fuzzy Bathroom B-Gone

Kathy took on the bathroom all by herself.

It, like most of the second floor, was covered in wall-to-wall red carpet. It was in okay condition, but... carpet in a bathroom? That just seems like a bad idea. And it was.

Kathy ripped the carpet out, rolled it up, and stashed it in the kitchen, whereupon it was tossed overboard into the backyard. (This will later become a theme.)

After the carpet came the carpet tack strips, including about 639 of them behind the toilet. Better her than me, I say.

Thus prepared, the floor now consisted of icky old linoleum. And under that, particleboard underlayment. She stopped there, figuring three strata worth of excavation was enough for one day.

Behold the glory.



We got the cheapest stick-on tile that Home Depot could provide, and Kathy stuck 'em all over the cruddy particleboard. They even kind of stick.

I have to say, the floor is better than it was. It's lower, for one. We can now shut the bathroom door, which we couldn't really do with the thick carpeting and all its underlying layers. I feel like I've gotten an inch shorter.

Oh, Waiter!

This place was the waiters' station when the house was a restaurant. It's about the size of a phone booth (a tall phone booth; the ceiling is 12 feet high) and had a pass-through to the commercial kitchen. At one time there was a filtered-water supply for refilling customers' water glasses. Oh, and six electrical outlets -- each one on a different circuit breaker. Weird.

The room was painted dark brown from floor to ceiling and had homemade shelves on all four walls. The effect was very claustrophobic. The shelves came down after the first month, which only exposed a second weirdness: two of the walls had been skimmed with plywood over the original plaster, probably to support the shelves. Or maybe not...

Anyway, today the plywood started coming off. Harder than it sounds, when you don't want to damage the underlying plaster or lath. There's really nothing to lean on for leverage, so I sort of eased the wood away from the plaster and then pushed it back to expose the nail heads. Tedious, but it seems to work.

I'm not sure the result is any better. The plaster is still damaged, and I count at least four colors/layers of paint. The wainscoting has been painted and, in some cases, cut away. We'll have to strip the paint and repair the wood. Somehow.

Our hope is to repaint this little room white by the weekend. We'll let you know how it goes.

Voila!

The big finish.

We finally finished the bedroom floor and it looks pretty darned good, if I do say so myself. We made plenty of mistakes along the way, but now we know better for next time. Today, the bedroom. Tomorrow, the world!

Here are the steps we followed:
1. Cut and remove carpet
2. Cut and remove carpet padding
3. Remove tack strips from around perimeter of room
4. Pull ~100 small nails from all over the floor
5. Scrape off largest paint spills
6. Spread paint stripper ("orange goo")
7. Remove paint stripper
8. Apply second coat of paint stripper
9. Remove second coat of paint stripper
10. Apply post-stripper "wash" (actually pretty caustic)
11. Rent floor sander; sand entire floor with 80-grit sandpaper
12. Repeat with 120-grit
13. Repeat with 180-grit
14. Remove dust with vacuum and tack cloths
15. Apply wood pre-treatment
16. Apply stain; wipe off after 7 minutes
17. Despair over condition of stain, sanding, life, etc.
18. Apply second coat of stain; wipe off after 3 minutes
19. Clean entire floor with tack cloths again
20. Apply first clear finish coat
21. Apply second clear finish coat
22. Open windows, leave house, breathe deeply
23. Wait one week...
24. Admire handiwork; find faults; drink heavily
25. Replace bedroom furniture. Done!

La Portola del Diablo

This is the door to/from hell.

If you think it's ugly now, you should have seen it before. The paint was peeling, cracked, and falling off in places. A couple of different colors were showing through. It was badly weathered (it's an outside door) and showed about 100 years of wear and neglect.

We needed to save it. Here is the result.

Hmmm. Not the look we were going for. Buoyed by our success with the wood stripper on the bedroom floor, we smeared some of the magical orange stuff on this door and waited for the paint to gently fall away into waiting buckets.

Didn't happen. Instead, it just gummed up an already ratty looking paint job. It was hard to scrape off the residue and impossible to get it out of the small details. The original redwood was soft and gouged easily. The more we scraped the more we damaged the wood.

Repeated applications of different chemical wood strippers didn't help much, but did change the smell of the project. And the color of the mess. Strip, scrape, despair, repeat.

I tried my new Dremel tool on the old paint, which did kind of work but is like seeding a lawn one blade of grass at a time. Handling a power tool (even a small one) worked off some frustration but wasn't really helping the door that much.

Three days into it we finally gave up and said, &*$# it, we're painting it!

Now it's every bit as ugly... but one color. It looks good from a distance, though.

A Ground (-Up) Floor

After stripping the paint, we rented a massive floor sander and started sanding down the floorboards to something approaching smoothness.

Four hours, one respirator, and several sanding disks later we had a pretty smooth floor devoid of paint spots. Well, almost. Some of the deeper scratches and pits still harbored a little paint, but that was good enough for us. Besides, it adds character.

Next step: a can of wood prep. Here it is going on. Dunno what this stuff does, apart from give Minwax another $10 of our money. Small potatoes at this point.

After waiting an appropriate period, we put the stain on. It's niiiiice. Looks very good wet. Smells bad, though. Photos to follow.