One Step at a Time

It seemed so straightforward at the time. Kathy and I wanted to remove the indoor/outdoor carpeting from the front stairs before the painting started. The carpet was getting a bit old, it was gray, and it just didn't look very nice. Better to paint the steps, right?

That's  how it always starts. In reality, the carpet was really hard to pull off. We must have spent more than two hours just pulling little strips of carpet off, piece by piece. It was glued down very thoroughly, and there was no way to get a good grip on it. We'd peel back one corner and try to pull, but it just wouldn't come up. We tried grabbing it with pliers, shoving pry bars under it, and using a knife to cut it into little strips. In the end, we just brute-forced it, pulling the stuff up in rough, irregular pieces. Yuck.

And after all that, what do we get? A really ugly set of stairs. Even after getting all the carpet up, it still had glue all over it, which just wasn't coming off.

We noticed that the painters were in no hurry to strip it, either. They'd find almost anything to work on before getting to those stairs. Now that we're more than four weeks into the project, they're almost out of excuses and the guy who drew the short straw has started stripping off the gunk. As of this morning, he's been through five 1-gallon cans of Jasco stripper, and he's still not done. I predict two more gallons to go.

After saturating the glue with Jasco, he scrapes it off, waits for it to dry, and then sands it down to the wood. Not the most fun he's ever had, I'll bet. But at least the wood underneath is solid (with some exceptions) and should paint up nicely -- in about six months, when he's finished.

Don't Fear the Painter

You know the old saying: Be careful what you wish for because you might get it.

Well, we've always wanted to add some color to the house, but now that we've got it, we're both having a tiny bit of panic. OMG, what have we done?

At first, they painted the entire house from top to bottom in Wedding Dress white, which was very close to the white color that was on it before. Apart from being fresher and cleaner, the house looked just about the same. So no drama there.

Then, the off-white/beige color went on some of the lower trim. At first, it seemed very dark brown (i.e., not glaring white), so that took a bit of getting used to. But we learned that it only looks dark up close. If you stand on the sidewalk or, better yet, across the street, it looks just fine. Our scheme was starting to come together. Hey, we actually know what we're doing!

But then the blue went on, and we both got nervous. Again, the first area painted was just outside the front door, so it stared you in the face as you walked in/out. It seemed like way too much color. But again, we decided that from a safe distance it looks just fine. And then more blue went on, and more blue, and more... Gulp.

Add to that the brick-red trim, and also a bit of gold. Up close, we were afraid it was turning into a circus tent. It's just so... different than before. But taken as a whole, it looks pretty darned good. All the neighbors have complimented the painters and said how nice it looks now, and I don't think they're just being polite. And when it's all done, the house will still be 90% white, so the purists can't really complain.

Best of all, some of the architectural detail is finally starting to appear. This was the main reason for painting the house in the first place. We wanted to highlight the gingerbread, so much of which was lost or hidden when it was all one color. Now that the painters are picking out some of the little details, stripes, knobs, and fiddly bits, it's really starting to show off the design that was there all along. So it's full speed ahead. Keep on painting!

Enter, Sandman

Here's a little still life at Chez Turley. It's dusty. It's always dusty here. Between my drywall dust, Kathy's plaster work, and the painters' dust from sanding the house with the windows open, there's just no way to keep clean. We polish little paths with our socks as we walk, but outside of these well-marked trails, there is dust.

Degree of Difficulty: 5.4

The first weekend after the scaffolding went up, Kathy and I tried climbing on it. After all, how often do you get to climb on someone else's scaffolding? Besides, there were some little bits of hardware we wanted to remove before they got in the painters' way, and the weekend was the ideal time to get up there and get it done.

There are four levels to the scaffolding; it doesn't quite match the floors on the house. The first level is only about 3 feet above ground level, which is even with the "grade level" of the first floor. (The house stands on a low pedestal, because it's on a hill.) The second level is about 8 feet above the first, and so on. The uppermost level of scaffolding is about even with the top-floor ceiling so they can reach the gables and roof. From inside the house, the top level looks like a roof or shelter. Nope -- they guys walk on that. Yikes.

Anyway, we wanted to give it a try.

We got as far as the second level and said, "Yeah, okay, that was fun. Let's go back down now."

Scaffolding bounces. A lot. It's like standing on a diving board, minus the water. The ironwork that holds the scaffolding together seems solid enough, but the 2x6 boards that you walk on are just, well, 2x6 boards. They lie flat across the gaps with nothing really to hold them together or keep them in place. You want to be careful not to dislodge a board with your toe because it'll just fall straight down. It's a life-sized game of Jenga.

Above you can see Kathy rounding the corner over the front door. She's almost two stories straight up, with her hand resting on the shingles below the balcony. Arrrgh! Walk the plank, me beauty!

The purpose of this exercise was to take down the house numbers and also to reconnoiter a little mystery. One of the painters said he'd found a secret Masonic symbol painted on the front of the house, so we climbed up to go find it. Sadly, it was just a little fleur-de-lis for decoration, not a secret symbol, so we were a bit disappointed. But hey, I can see my house from here!

A Bad Case of Measles

As they say in the painting business, "that looks like crap."

Good painters know that painting is really only 10% painting. The other 90% is preparation. Washing, sanding, scraping, patching, and filling holes take up way more time than spreading the paint. This job has been no exception. The scaffolding alone took two days to set up before the painters could even start. And it's been noisy around here ever since.

First came the power-washing. For two days, the painters had two gas-powered power washers going full time, hosing down the house. First it just washed off the dirt, but later it started peeling away the loose paint. And there was plenty of loose paint. They work in teams: one guy aims the power washer at the house while another guy runs around inside the house with an armload of towels, ready to soak up any water that leaks in. Smart move: old houses leak pretty fiercely when you hit them with 4500-psi water nozzles. It can do more than strip paint; it can take off fingers.

Next came the lead-abatement program. Old paint usually contains lead, and none more so than old white paint. (Lead is the pigment that turns the paint white.) Our painting crew is lead-certified, meaning they know how not to poison themselves when removing lead paint. Part of the secret is to use a special lead-binding goop that they spread on like primer, then scrape off. The goop binds molecularly to the lead, rendering it harmless. It doesn't exactly turn lead into gold -- not for us, anyway -- but it sure costs like it does. Without it, the State of California would make us wrap the house in plastic, cover the soil to a distance of 10 feet, turn off the water, and dispose of all the paint flakes in a toxic-waste facility. And the workers would all have to wear hazmat suits. No, we'll go with the goop, thanks.

Phase 3 involves good old-fashioned scraping. Day after day, we had four guys with paint scrapers climbing on, over, and around the house scraping away loose paint. It sounds funny from the inside. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. And you never know where they'll be, so the sound moves around unpredictably. It can be a little creepy if you let it get to you, like a bunch of small animals scratching to get in.

The final preparation involved sanding, both power sanders and just hand sanding. Again, the noise from inside was pretty strange and monotonous. Four buzzing power sanders on the outside walls for eight hours a day will drive you nuts. It must have been worse for them. Or maybe that's the effect of the lead.

Writing on the Bathroom Wall

Meanwhile... in the midst of painting the outside of the house and remodeling the downstairs kitchen, Kathy's also preparing to hang wallpaper in the two downstairs bathrooms. Good things come in threes, right?

The project started with stripping away the old wallpaper in the ladies room, just off the kitchen. The old wallpaper was a blue duck pattern that you can see here. Then things got weird.

There was another layer of wallpaper behind the duck wallpaper. It looks like an old Sears & Roebuck catalog, and at first we thought it was one of those fake olde tyme reproductions. You know, the kind with the black-and-white advertisements for stiff men's collars, lace-up ladies' shoes, and so forth. But something didn't seem right about it.

For starters, it's backwards. All the text and images are facing the wall. Okay, so maybe the fake old-fashioned wallpaper was designed to look backwards for "style" or so that you wouldn't be tempted to read the bogus ad copy.

But then we noticed that this old "wallpaper" has edges around each page of the faux catalog. It's not wallpaper at all. It's not wide strips. It really is a bunch of individual sheets of paper. Each page measures about 5" x 7" and no two are alike. If it was wallpaper you'd expect the pattern to repeat, but there are no repeats here. Also, the pages are nice and straight near the edges of the walls, as you'd expect, and then they get increasingly crooked as you move into the room. We can also see where the pages overlap each other. I'm starting to think this really is an old catalog with the pages torn out and pasted to the wall.

But if so, why is it backwards? Even catalog pages are (were) printed double-sided, so if you tore out a page and flipped it over, one side would still be facing you, not reversed. These pages all seem to be printed single-sided, and without exception every one is pasted face-down. Very strange.

The top of each page says, "SEARS, ROEBUCK, & CO. Cheapest Supply House on Earth, Chicago, CATALOG No. III." So far Kathy's uncovered pages advertising children's dresses, bicycles, medals/charms, fur coats, furniture, the "book department," men's suits, silverware, and (regrettably) accordions. Every page has a different page number; the highest-numbered one I can find is page #1082. Big book.

We're not sure whether the mystery catalog pages are worth preserving, but the question may be moot. The paper's stuck on really well and we can't scrape it off. So regardless of what it's made of, it's staying on. It seals the plaster and provides a smooth surface for Kathy's new wallpaper. Just another buried mystery for the next generation to solve.

True Colors

Here are our new colors!

After much deliberation, we (mostly Kathy) picked the final colors for our house. There are four: white, white, blue, and red.

If you've ever tried to pick out paint colors, you know how hard it can be. We tried all kinds of tricks: crayons, colored pencils, Photoshop, and finally the Kelly-Moore paint schemer. We tried photocopying a black/white picture of the house and coloring it, we looked at other houses, we checked out library books on Victorian décor and/or house painting (our local library has a surprisingly complete collection of both), and just plain ol' asking people.

Overwhelmingly, people seemed to want the house to stay white. A lot of them huffed and said, "it's always been white" which isn't true. Real 1880s-era Victorian people almost never painted houses white. Partly that's because it just wasn't the fashion, but also because white paint was difficult and expensive to make. (Ironic note on that in a moment.)

Victorian houses of the period were typically painted in dark earth tones, often with reds, browns, and beiges. Kind of boring, actually. The "painted ladies" of San Francisco fame are artificial; actual Victorians were never that garish.

We have a period photo of the house with Doctor Hart himself standing near the front door, and the house color is quite dark. In fact, it looks unpainted, like natural wood. Our paint-scraping crew just confirmed this: the shingles were originally oiled, not painted, which protected them from the elements but also made them a %!#@$ to strip.

So we know the house wasn't "always white," despite the protestations of our neighbors. It may have been white in their lifetime, but certainly not the lifetime of the house. The baker across the street says he knows the previous housepainter, who told him that the owner at the time wanted the house one solid color, as though dipped in white paint, but that he (the painter) talked him into the two-tone white-on-white scheme it has today. The two white colors are pretty similar; most people don't notice it. I couldn't even tell it was two colors until we'd lived here for a few weeks.

We wanted something a little bolder but without being garish. We weren't trying for a painted lady; just a bit of trim color to highlight all the "gingerbread" trim that's almost invisible now. After a lot of experiments and false starts, we finally settled on a combination of four colors.

With help from my sister, we Photoshop'd various color combinations, most of which we didn't like (not her fault). It's one thing to say, "I like green and blue and gold," and another to actually see those colors on the house. Our first (and second, and third...) impulses were all false starts, but at least we eliminated some options. Eventually we talked to Kelly Moore Paints, which offers a free Photoshop-like service using their own special software and paint colors. We told them what colors we were thinking of, and they scurried off and prepared eight alternative color schemes for us.

They were all terrible. "Unattractive" would be generous. They must farm the work out to colorblind felons on a work-release program or something. Their options were all bright, solid colors, like this Orange Julius stand on the left.

Fortunately, when they gave us back the eight renderings, they also gave us the software. That allowed us to experiment further and try some more reasonable options. Eventually we came up with the color scheme shown below. It's not exactly what we're planning, but it's as close as the software allows.

The base ("field") color is called Wedding Dress, which is serendipitous, as our daughter just got married. And no, we didn't choose it for that reason. (Kathy will tell you that I avoid reading the silly color names because I don't want them swaying my opinion.) The slightly tan off-white color will go on some of the larger trim areas, the blue goes on the scrollwork details, and the red will be used sparingly on some of the smaller details -- plus the front door.

But before we can paint, the scraping and sanding have to be finished, and it looks like we're still a few days away from that. The crew is outside from 8:00 AM every morning, with dust masks on, removing all the old white paint, which is probably lead-based. Ironically, Jon Stuefloten started his painting apprenticeship by mixing lead paint for his boss. Every morning, he said, he unwrapped a big brick of lead, scraped off shavings into a bucket using his penknife, added turpentine, and mixed it all together. His boss would then mix in the tints, judging the color by eye until it looked right. Now, 50+ years later, Jon's crew is painstakingly removing that same kind of lead paint.