Are You Board Yet?

Wednesday was woodworking day. And the project of the day was to strip and repaint the base molding in the upstairs kitchen.

That's trickier than it sounds because the kitchen cabinets are now in entirely different places than before, so none of the molding will fit back in its original location. Instead, we have to cut and combine pieces to fit the new arrangement. There's one long wall, in particular, that has no cabinets on it so it needs one long piece of base molding.

Which is what you see here. The molding is redwood, like most everything else in the house. It was painted white (also like nearly everything else), which is fine, except that the white paint was about the 23rd coat of paint on this miserable board. So rather than add a 24th coat, I stripped off all the old layers first, then primed and repainted it... white.


I did that to two of the longest pieces we had, then mitered and joined them together. I also took the opportunity to fill in some of the bigger gouges and holes with wood putty. I didn't want to make the molding look perfect (as if) but did want to remove some of the nastier bits of character it had acquired over the years.

Now that it's all done it looks like... white base molding. Big deal, I know. But that's two days of work yer lookin' at right there. Admire it. Now.

WTF #28

This house is just full of surprises. As we pulled up the carpet in Kathy's 3rd-floor office we expected to find paint-splattered wood underneath—and we weren't disappointed.

What we didn't expect was this metal plate. It's galvanized steel and nailed into the floor right by the doorway. I'd say it measures about 12x18 inches. The nailing job is sloppy, like someone did it with the heel of a shoe.

I know I've got to pull this plate up, just to see what's underneath. Besides, we've got to replace it before we paint the floor; we can't just leave it here. But I'm postponing that little project for a few days. We've got company coming, and if this thing opens up a hole into another dimension or something I don't want to deal with it until after the weekend.

We Need Therapy

"We'll remodel one room per year. That's all."

Yup, we really said that when we first moved in. That was a year-and-a-half ago, and have we done 1.5 rooms? No, siree. We've done about eight rooms, the garage, and some of the outside. And today, just for giggles, we started on another one.

Please make it stop. Somebody plan an intervention. We can't help ourselves. We're sick, we know, but we're too weak to resist the strange urge to remodel, paint, stain, or just plain demolish. The toolbox and paintbrush call to us.

Today started out ordinary enough. A nice day where normal people go to the beach or have a picnic. But when I heard ripping noises coming from upstairs I knew what Kathy had gotten us into. She was ripping up the carpet in her office.

We'd been talking for months about removing that carpet, but always in terms of "sometime next year" and "no rush" and "we're not ready yet." The discussion always ended with, "we don't need another project."

And then the ripping noise.

It's so easy to start. Just pull up a corner of the carpet and there you go. But of course, once you start you can't stop. You can't leave the room with one corner pulled up and the rest still lying in place like nothing happened. You're not going to fool anybody. They'd know what you've been up to. No, once you start carpet ripping you have to go all the way.

It all came up pretty easily. That's the trouble. You can be done in less than an hour: Committed to refinishing the floor, moving all the furniture, and disposing of the carpet scraps and shredded foam padding. And the dust it kicks up is... too disgusting to think about. It's a filthy habit, I know. But we can't stop.

And like the floors downstairs, the wood under the carpet was completely paint-splattered. What were these people thinking? What combination of circumstances would have made that a good idea? The floor was previously painted wood, not stained like downstairs. It was dark brown, and they evidently sprayed (splattered, more like it) green paint on the walls, letting it get all over the floor in the process. They apparently knew they were going to carpet the room immediately afterwards, so they wasted no energy keeping the floor clean. Consequently, it's about half brown and half green. Charming. At first glance it looks fabulously moldy.

Anyway, now we're committed. The floor is bereft of carpet and the scraps are piled up in the garage awaiting our next trip to the dump (do they offer a frequent-customer program, I wonder?). Now Kathy and I get to sit on the floor with pliers and carefully find and remove the billions and billions of little staples and nails that held down the tack strips and padding. Every time we think we've found them all we vacuum the floor and find a few dozen more. Lather, rinse, repeat.

When that's all done, we'll strip away some of the old paint(s), fill in some of the gouges and nail holes, and then paint the floor again. (No staining for us; we've had enough of that for awhile.) But not right away. We're going to wait until after Christmas. Right.

Deck, Deck, Goose

Immediately after the garage was finished (minus the doors) the contractors started on the rear stairs. We demolished the "original" stairs (actually built in the 1930s when the house was already 40 years old) because the city condemned them as unsafe. We knew this before we bought the house. We continued to use the old stairs for awhile, especially during last year's kitchen remodel, but after that it was time for them to go.

That left us with a 2nd-floor door to nowhere and no easy way into our new kitchen from the outside. Everything had to come in and out the front door and up/down the main staircase. Now, with the new back stairs we'll be able to easily get to/from the new kitchen and the backyard. This will be especially important once we start parking in the garage (imagine!) and hauling groceries that way.

Here you can see where the old stairs used to go, circling around two sides of the house from the upstairs kitchen. Apart from being old and rickety, we just didn't like where the stairs were placed. They went the wrong way: when we go downstairs we want to go to the left, not the right. These stairs lead in the wrong direction if you're heading to/from a car in the garage.

So with the city's blessing, we re-routed the new stairs to lead down and to the left. The new stairs will hug the house, taking advantage of the "L" shape just to the left of the doors, folding back on themselves and taking up less space than the old ones. Got it?

The first step to making this work is to build a new landing on the 2nd floor. Here it is being framed. It's all being built with pressure-treated lumber, with some redwood pieces where it's visible. The new landing and stairs should last a lot longer than the old ones (and they lasted 70 years).

Here's the same landing a few weeks later. It's bigger than the old one, and gives us a nice little deck just outside the kitchen/laundry door. I'm thinking this is where I might put our new meat smoker (thanks, Steve and Paul!).

And here are the new stairs. It's all dark wood now, but Kathy's already started painting it white--which is a much more tedious job than it sounds. There's a lot of surface area on those little 1x1 stringers and banisters and steps, etc...

As you can (kind of) see, these stairs head in the opposite direction from the old stairs, hugging the back of the house and passing directly behind the garage. Craftily, we planned a tiny 1-inch gap between the stairs and the garage--very close, but without touching. That's to satisfy the city, which forbids the historic structure (i.e., the house) from connecting to the non-historic garage. The gap keeps the two structures separate in the eyes of the historical committee, and also prevents us (theoretically) from stepping off the stairs onto the back "deck" of the garage.

We use the stairs every day now. It's a much shorter route when we're unloading groceries, and a great shortcut when I'm working in the backyard. Now if we can just find a way to pay for all that hourly labor...

The House of Sand and Fog

Ta-dah! Here's our more-or-less completed garage. It's unpainted, of course, but at least we've got the doors up.

I made these carriage doors myself, and they came out pretty good if I do say so. We didn't plan it that way. We got some quotes on garage doors, but even the cheapest estimate was almost $5000. The city says the doors must be wood, not metal or fiberglas. And we can't do roll-up doors because they'd block the stairs into the "attic." So that meant swing-out carriage doors were our only option. Which is fine, because that's the style we wanted anyway.

I figured heck, for $5000 I can buy all the materials for one-tenth that price and make the doors myself. How hard can it be, right?

Pretty hard, as it turns out, but it's doable. Each door is a combination of 2x4 and 2x6 frame construction on the back side and smooth MDO (medium-density overlay) ply on the front face, with 1x4 and 1x6 trim pieces on top of that. The frame pieces are held together with dowels, wood glue, and huge long bolts. The MDO facing is water-resistant and very smooth for painting, while the trim pieces add a bit of texture and character.

The doors weigh about 100 pounds each and swing on three heavy-duty ball-bearing hinges. Hanging them was a real bear. Kathy and I struggled with shims and braces, wrestling each door into place while trying to hold it steady long enough to screw the hinges in straight. And of course, it was hot that day.

The windows aren't in yet, but I'll cut and mount those from the inside. Then I'll cut diamond-shaped trim pieces to match the stained-glass diamonds on the main house. I'm hoping it'll look nice when it's all done.

Garage, Part XCXVIII

It's now late August and the garage is actually... done!

Well, almost. The professional construction is finished. Kathy and I still have to paint the garage and take care of a few small details. But the contractors have packed up, they've submitted their final invoices* and we've got the place back to ourselves.

One of the last steps was hot-mopping the "deck" portion on the back of the garage, seen here. The garage roof doesn't extend all the way over the entire garage. That would have interfered with the house, so we roofed over only the front three-quarters of the garage and left the back portion (that is, the end away from the street) flat. It was waterproofed with black roofing tar covered with a layer of white sand, and that's what this photo shows.

You can also just make out a shiny new metal scupper (gutter) running along the back edge of the garage. This catches rainwater and guides it into a rain barrel that we'll place just out of sight in the lower-right corner of the photo.

The city permit says we're not supposed to have access to this "deck" area. Otherwise it would need a safety railing around it and all sorts of other complications. We're planning to set a few flowerpots on it and that's about it.

The back end of the roof just needs a few more cedar shingles, as you can see, and then it'll be all done. At last!

*The #^&@! garage remodel cost more than the cars parked inside it. Seriously.

So Many Men, So Little Time

This garage project is taking forever.

When last we left, the garage roof had just been framed and the old doors were still on the front. All that has changed. In fact, it's now early July and the garage is almost done. 'Bout freakin' time.

By the middle of June the garage had a roof and siding, as you can see here. Our original plan had called for a door in the back of the peaked roof so we could walk into our new storage space. That didn't work. For starters, the city didn't like that idea at all, saying it would turn the garage into "living space," which would trigger all sorts of zoning problems. That turned out to be moot, because the peaked area of the garage is only about three feet high. There's no way you could walk into it, so no need for a door.

Instead, we put in a hatch. From inside the garage, we just pull a rope in the ceiling and out pops a folding ladder, like an old attic hatchway. That'll give us access to the storage space above, and convinces the city that we're not renting out the space to illegal aliens.

After the roof and hatch came weeks and weeks of... nothing. We could hear the power tools but couldn't see much progress. The guys were doing detail work to the front, making the peak match the gables on the house. They did a terrific job, but it seemed to take forever, and we're paying them by the hour.

By late June the garage doors had come off and the three remaining sides had been covered in ship-lap siding, just like the house. The center concrete post is also gone, replaced by a much narrower framed-in one. Now we're ready for doors. Hah!