The Human Stain

After sanding comes staining!

Our marathon sanding session took all weekend but that was nothing compared to the stain and finish work. Kathy and I stained all three rooms (parlor, hallway, dining room) to match the bedroom on this floor. Now there's no carpet anywhere and everything is stained the same color (except the kitchen floor, which is redwood instead of oak).

Staining large rooms is harder than you'd think. Or at least, harder than we'd thought. You have to wipe the stain off the wood after about 15 minutes, which means you can only stain as much as you can reach in that amount of time. Stain too much floor and you won't be able to wipe it off in time. Stain too little and you'll be working forever. Stain the wrong parts and you'll paint yourself into a corner. So we did each room in strips: Stain about three feet across the room, wait 15 minutes, wipe off, repeat.

After it's stained, the wood has a nice dark color, but looks a bit flat and grainy. The clear coat fixes that.

They no longer make the oil-based polyurethane clear coat that we used last year on the bedroom floor, so we had to find a water-based poly that would give us the same finish. I think we got pretty close. The threshhold strip between the bedroom and the hallway is the only place the two different finishes meet each other, and the difference there is pretty much invisible.

Applying the poly coat presents the same challenges as the stain, but for a different reason. You don't have to wipe the polyurethane off, but you do have to somehow cover the entire floor without walking on your fresh poly coat. So Kathy and I strategically divided each room into "his and hers" zones, got identical lamb's wool applicators, and worked across the floor toward the door. Last one out finishes the doorway!

Four successive coats of poly did the job, with about 4 hours drying time between each coat. Overall, it took a couple of days, with lots of TV watching and walks on the beach in between. After the first night, we tip-toed across the floor in our socks. I don't think we wore shoes upstairs for a week.

All in all, I'd have to say we did a pretty good job. We find maddening imperfections here and there, like brush marks or dust trapped in the finish coat. But it's done now, it's nice, and it's a lot better than the ratty old carpet that used to be here.

Portal

It is perhaps some indication of the task ahead of us that only one door in five works. There are five doors to the outside: the front door; the back door to the "milk porch;" the Dutch door in the downstairs kitchen; the door from the downstairs utility room to the backyard; and directly above it, the door from the upstairs laundry room to the back stairs.

We always go in and out the front door because it's the only one that works.

The back door onto the milk porch (so called because I imagine that's where milk bottles were delivered in decades past) is only an exit; you can't come back in that way. It's got one of those push-to-open bars on the inside so that restaurant patrons could get out in an emergency, but once outside there's no handle or lock to get back in. If we go out the back door and it slams shut behind us, it means walking around to the front of the house, up the steps, and in the front door. I keep the keys in my pocket all the time.

As an aside, all five exterior doors open outward, which is a bit odd. Front doors normally swing inward. Presumably that's a carryover from when this was a restaurant. (Except for banks and tightly packed Bangkok nightclubs, doors in public buildings always swing outward for safety.)

As far as the Dutch door in the kitchen, it's never worked all that well. For starters, the doorknob keeps coming off in my hand. We learned after the first few weeks to just leave it alone. And really, we don't spend much time in the downstairs kitchen anyway.

The rear utility-room door gets a lot of use--or it would, if we could get back in that way. Like the other back door, it's only good for going outside, not getting back in. The door's all weather-beaten and the hinges and latch are in bad shape. It looks like it's about to fall apart, and you can see daylight around the edges. We leave this door open whenever the contractors are working outside so they can get into the downstairs bathroom. Apart from that, we ignore it.

Finally, there's the one door upstairs that leads to the back stairs. Or it did, until I demolished those stairs in a fit of unrestrained enthusiasm (see March 8, 2011). We now have no direct path in or out of our main kitchen or laundry room. Groceries go up the front steps, through the front door, up the main staircase, and across the dining room. The long way around, in other words. Eventually, these stairs will get rebuilt, and this will become one of our main paths into the house. The door itself is fine (I patched it up in March) but for now I've nailed a couple of 2x4's across the doorway for safety. Wouldn't want someone stepping out into the void.

Ironically, we have keys to the inaccessible upstairs door, but not to any of the three downstairs doors. For now they'll remain merely decorative. It's only been a year.

Christmas in June

Well, this was a surprise.

Yesterday we found a small envelope on the front porch. Evidently someone had stopped by and dropped it off while we weren't looking. It had no stamp, so it wasn't mailed; just a small hand-written return address with a phone number.

Inside was this photograph. It's from around Christmastime, 2010, or about six months ago. I called the number on the envelope and talked to a very nice man, Dennis Huey, who took the picture. He and his wife had snapped a few photos when they were visiting, and he makes it his policy to always provide a copy whenever he photographs someone's house, a habit that I very much admire. He also gave us permission to post the picture here, so voila!

We can't count the number of times people have photographed our house or the one next door. Almost every night of the week we see flashbulbs outside, and on most sunny days if we happen to look out to the street we spy someone lining up a shot. And that's just when we're looking; who knows how many quick shots we've missed.We often wonder, how did the picture come out?, but this is the first time we've actually seen the result. Thanks, Dennis.

Got Wood? II

A couple of hardwood areas needed special repairs. Apparently, during the carpeting process the installers felt it necessary to remove a few floorboards, which they patched with plywood. That's fine if it's hidden under a carpet but not so cool if you're gonna be exposing the floors.

Trouble is, that flooring isn't made anymore. It's all American white oak cut in two-inch by half-inch boards with tongue-and-groove. Oak flooring isn't hard to find, but it's tough to get the right dimensions. Modern T&G flooring is either wider, thicker, or both. We needed an exact match.

None of the local lumberyards had any good options, and the local floor stores came up dry, too. A local mill could make 'em for us, but the price would be prohibitive. Finally, we came across one source that could get us a small amount (about 20 square feet) if I paid in cash and didn't need a receipt. My favorite kind.

A little cutting, trimming, and shaping later, we've got our replacement boards. They don't seem to take stain quite as readily as the original boards, but that may be because they're newer/younger. We're pretty sure this floor was originally laid in 1936, so the wood itself is probably around 100 years old. A second stain coat may do the trick.

Here you can see the new and old boards together. The foreground and upper left are old wood; the upper right has the new stuff. There's a seam between the two areas because that's how we found it. The previous owners had evidently cut the floor and/or moved a wall in this area. We can't eliminate the cut but at least we can match the wood as closely as possible and then put a threshold strip over the seam.

The Sands of Time

After ripping out all the second-floor carpet, we chemically stripped (most of) the goo that was holding down the carpet padding. Some rooms were worse than others, but they all needed attention.

That job completed, the next step was to sand down the floors and (we hoped) sand off the last remnants of goo that the toxic sludge couldn't take off. We rented the very same floor sander we used last May--exactly one year ago!--and hauled that sucker upstairs again.

Now a year older and wiser, we knew ahead of time that sanding around 800 square feet of floor space was gonna generate a lot of dust. So we taped off the doorways and put towels under doors to minimize the mess. There's no way to prevent the sawdust from going down the stairs, so we just... hoped. After sealing off everything as best we could, Kathy vacuumed up, as you can see.

I gotta say, 60-grit sandpaper under a 200-pound floor sander tears through rough patches pretty durn quick. It took off the worst of the adhesive goo real nice. Very encouraging. But after the first initial scrape, it starts to get boring and tedious. And it makes my hands go numb.

We did three rooms, and each room got sanded three times, each time with finer sandpaper. The sandpaper disks load up with dust pretty quickly, so you have to stop often and clean off or change the sandpaper. The weekend rental for the floor sander was about $75; we spent over $120 on sandpaper for it and filled an entire wastebasket with discarded discs.

But the end result was pretty nice: smooth floors stripped of any goo, gunk, glue, or residual stain. Now for the fun part.

Roof-Roof

The garage is coming along. We're on Week Four now, and the roofing materials were delivered and installed. We have a waterproof roof now, which is a good thing because it started raining a few days ago. Very unseasonable for May, but there you go.

The flat top is gone, replaced with a peaked roof. The overall idea is to match the style of the house, and we're pretty close. The main roof is steep: a 12/12 or 45-degree pitch. The city won't allow us to do that on the garage because it would violate some height ordinance or other, so it's 6/12, or half as steep. A steeper roof would have given us more storage underneath, but this is okay, too.


You can't see it from the pictures yet, but there's a lot of detail work going on inside the triangular gable area facing the street. That will ultimately get trimmed out to match the house, too, which requires a lot of molding and shingles and fussy bits. Then, a small window will get set into the gable, with a matching vent (but no window) on the opposite end for ventilation.


The old flat roof was recessed below the tops of the concrete walls; the new peaked roof sits on top of the walls. From inside the garage, the "ceiling" is about a foot higher than it used to be, and that's not even counting the peaked area. That also gives us more storage space (and headroom) inside the garage. Enough for a four-poster car lift...

But that's for another day.

Garage

It's ironic, really. The more we do to the house the less time we have to write about it.

It's been more than a month since our last installment, but that's not because we've slacked off. Just the opposite, actually. We're still working on the wood floors, finishing up the bathroom, we completely redocorated the master bedroom, worked on some details in the laundry room, and -- the big new project -- started remodeling the garage. Kathy's been busy with tax season and my racing season has just started. Never a dull moment.

You'll recall that the garage was, shall we say, butt ugly. Even the City of Pacific Grove agreed, granting us rare permission to demolish an historic structure, calling it "an eyesore" during the official public hearing. It hasn't been used as a garage in decades, acting instead as a storage shed for the most recent restaurant(s). It couldn't accommodate a car, much less two. There was a rotted man-door on one side and decrepit swing-out doors on the other that hadn't been opened in years. I replaced some of the rotted wood and put on new hinges a few months ago, which turned out to be a complete waste of time because we haven't opened the doors since.

We decided not to demolish the garage because we'd only be able to replace it with one exactly the same size. Even though it's undersized by modern standards (about 19x19 instead of 20x20), that's close enough for our two cars once we get proper doors on.

The really ugly part is the roof, however. It's flat-topped tar paper. The whole structure looks more like a concrete bomb shelter than a garage, and our neighbors (with one exception) seem thrilled we're redoing it. The plan is to put a peaked roof on top and two sets of swing-out carriage doors on the front. We'll cover the poured concrete exterior with wooden ship lap siding, just like the first floor of the house. When it's done, the garage should look more or less like it belongs to the house, and to the rest of the neighborhood.

Permits took several months, but demolition and construction finally started last week (late April). The flat roof came off in a few days, followed by framing of the new roof. Because we're removing the center concrete support from the front of the garage, it needs an engineered steel beam to reinforce the opening. That arrived yesterday and got installed under the watchful eye of an inspector. It's bolted, screwed, epoxied (and probably duct-taped) in place over the front opening where the doors will go.

From inside the garage, the "ceiling" is about a foot higher than it was before, because the new roof sits on top of the concrete walls instead of being set inside the walls. That will give us a bit more storage and headroom inside, but the real benefit will be overhead. The peaked roof will give us a few hundred cubic feet of much-needed storage.

The new peaked roof will cover only the front two-thirds of the garage. The back third will be flat, like a deck. That's because the garage is too close to the house to accommodate a peaked roof all the way around without interfering with the house's roof. It'll look normal from the street, and give us a small raised deck on the sunny side of the house. We're looking forward to it.