If You Can't Stand the Heat...

The downstairs kitchen is nearly functional now. In fact, we cooked part of Thanksgiving dinner and most of Christmas dinner here. It was very handy having the double oven, big burners, and industrial-sized refrigerator right outside the dining room table. Makes it easier to cook and serve without dragging everything through the house.

(Side note: In all the time we've lived here, we've never eaten meals on the same floor we've cooked them. Food always seems to go up/downstairs. In the very beginning, both kitchens were nonfunctional, so we plugged in a cheap toaster oven and carried our TV dinners up to the second floor to eat. Then we remodeled the 2nd-floor kitchen but started carrying everything back downstairs to the family room. Lately we've been moving ourselves out of the ground floor in preparation for opening the business, so now we eat on the 3rd floor. Crazy. Christmas was pretty much the first time we've been able to eat without climbing stairs.)

The maple countertops went in just before Christmas, and the sink right after that. Once the plumbing and electrical work was done, I hung the cabinet doors and started loading everything up. Last week, we built some shelves; those got hung yesterday. We're still waiting on the tin backsplash, but apart from that it's just about ready to go!

We also got a freezer. At first, I wasn't sure we'd need one, and didn't want to waste what little space we have, but really, the need became apparent after awhile. It's a freestanding unit, much like the refrigerator, with a stainless worktop. Unlike most residential freezers which keep food at around 5 degrees, this thing operates at -10 degrees and below. It's cold! Makes it very handy for chilling beer glasses on short notice.

One side effect is that it keeps the kitchen nice and warm. Because physics. Any refrigeration unit will put out more heat than it takes in, so having a big refrigerator and freezer in a small kitchen keeps the place toasty. The place is noticeably warmer now (in January) than it was just a few months ago. I'm beginning to wonder if that extra heating duct that we put in last year will be necessary after all.

The Curious Cabinet of Dr. Hart

If we're gonna cook and bake and make tea, we're gonna need some kitchen cabinets.

We're using the room adjoining the downstairs kitchen as our prep room / pantry. The kitchen proper has the stainless range, fridge, and freezer, while the pantry will have wooden cabinets and a butcher block countertop. I suspect we'll spend as much time in the pantry as in the kitchen. Kneading and rolling out dough, squeezing lemons, adding eye of newt, etc. before transporting everything to the oven or stove.

There's not a lot of room here, but we're able to make a nice L-shaped workspace. By regulation, we have to have sink in here for cleaning vegetables and washing our hands. Heaven forbid that we wash carrots in the same sink (sorry: three sinks) that we use to wash dishes. Nope, that requires a separate sink.

I assembled and installed the base cabinets last week; the countertops come next week. Before that, however, we had to move some of the plumbing and electrical because -- of course -- they weren't in the right place. The hot and cold water pipes were on opposite sides of the same stud, virtually guaranteeing that one or the other would be in the wrong position. Naturally, the edge of the sink cabinet fell exactly in between the two. So out comes some of the wall and in comes the plumber to move the hot water pipe a whole 12 inches to one side. We nudged the drain pipe over a bit, too, just for convenience.

And as long as we've got the wall open...

I took the opportunity to add a line of new grounded electrical outlets above the base cabinets. We'll need them for mixers, blender, counter-rotating knives, or whatever. There's a GFCI under the sink, just in case. And even a 220V outlet because, well, why not?

Because this is an outside wall, I insulated it a few years ago when we were doing so much work on the floor above. Seemed like a good idea, but now I had to remove some of that insulation to rearrange the plumbing and electrical, and then try to put it all back. Net result: a lot of foam debris and dust all over the pantry. That stuff's hard to sweep up.

Twenty Days In the Cooler!

Ever heard of a California Cooler?

No, it's not a wine drink. Or a type of Styrofoam chest. A California Cooler was an early kitchen appliance, the predecessor to the refrigerator. If you lived near the ocean around the turn of the century you kept your meat, cheese, and eggs in the California Cooler. And this house had one.

The principle is pretty simple. The cooler was basically a tall, narrow closet built on an exterior wall. The top and bottom of the closet vented to the outside through small holes in the wall. The idea was that cool sea breezes (of which we have an abundance) would blow in through the vents, forcing air to circulate through the inside of the closet. By making the box tall and narrow, like a broom closet, you could encourage the relatively warm air to rise out of the top, pulling more cool air in at the bottom.

It probably wasn't great, but it beats leaving food out on the counter to spoil.

At any rate, we found the telltale vents on the outside of the house when it was being painted. We'd already suspected they'd be there, since we'd spotted what looked like the insides of the vent holes when the kitchen was remodeled back in 2011. Finding the outside vents confirmed it.

One of the vents got covered up long ago, but the other was still exposed to the outside. At some point, somebody nailed a piece of metal over the hole in a halfhearted attempt to seal it, as you can see here. It's not very weatherproof, and now that the rainy season is upon us, it was time to permanently close off the last of the old vent.

We shrewdly kept some spare cedar shingles when the house was repainted, and one of them was pressed into service today. After a bit of cutting and trimming, the replacement shingle fits neatly over the rectangular hole left by the cooler. After a few coats of primer and paint, it pretty much disappears amidst all the other shingles. Mission accomplished. Time for a cold drink.


 

Out of the Closet

And lo, on the 1,675th day* there was, upon the land of the Hart Mansion, a new closet. And it was good.

Well, good-ish. You see, there's a small space in between the two downstairs restrooms. It's kind of like a hallway, but smaller. More of a passage. Or a wide spot between the walls. You take one or two steps into this "hallway" before turning left for the men's room or right for the ladies' room, but that's about it. Forgettable, in other words.

Which is fine, except that it's also fairly deep, with very high ceilings, and all that space is wasted. And we don't have a lot of space to waste in our 1890s-era kitchen. So Kathy had the bright idea of putting a storage closet in there. Nothing fancy; just something that could sit against the back wall and make it useful.

Trouble is, none of the standard home-store closets fit in the space. Of course. We would've been happy with generic knock-together storage units, but they were all either too wide to fit or so small that they wasted most of the space.

So we built our own out of the same type of white melamine-laminated particleboard that flat-packed ones use. So we've got that whole cheap Swedish look going.

It took a few days, but now we've got a custom-built cabinet that perfectly fits the space. It's secured directly to the walls, not free standing, so it's solidly in place. The sides, top, and shelves are melamine, and the kick space down by the floor encloses the heating vent we added last year.

The doors are pine with bead board inserts. I detailed the doors a bit using the router, just like the doors up in the third-floor bathroom. Some day, future inhabitants may remark on how nice it is that the doors all match. In reality, those are the only router bits I have, so yeah, they're all going to look pretty much the same.

*True. That's the number of days since we first moved in.

A Flower Grows in Brickland

So this happened.

We had a little sprinkle of rain the other day, and the next time Kathy and I went outside she said, "Where did THAT come from?"

No idea. This little guy popped up all on his own. We don't have any other flowers like it in the yard -- actually, we have no flowers at all -- and none of our neighbors seem to have one of these, either.

It's just a nice little surprise. Or Nature's way of telling us it's past time to plant something around here.

Modern Drunkard

We're getting official!

Kathy and I applied for our beer-and-wine license from the ABC (California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control). There are a number of hoops you have to jump through, including having yourself fingerprinted. And you have to read a bunch of rules about hiring minors, serving kids, and avoiding "table surfing."

Did you know that there are more than 45 different kinds of liquor licenses? I figured there were just two: a full liquor license and a beer/wine license. Nope. Turns out it makes a difference (to the ABC, at least) if you're a permanent restaurant, if you're a food truck, if you're serving at a special event, if you're located in a high-crime area, if you're on a boat, if you allow dancing, and more.

If anyone asks, we're getting a Type 41 license. That allows us to serve beer, wine, champagne, sherry, and other non-distilled spirits so long as it's always served with meals. (And "meal" has its own definition for licensing purposes. A basket of peanuts doesn't count.) Total sales of alcoholic beverages cannot exceed 50% of our revenue. Otherwise, we'd be a bar and that's a different license.

Did you know that alcoholic drinks are (supposed to be) served in different glasses than nonalcoholic drinks? That's so servers, waiters, and peace officers can tell at a glance who's quaffing booze and who isn't.

Plainclothes ABC officers are allowed to show up unannounced and prowl through our kitchen. They're allowed to arrest us (or anyone else) for violations of the licensing terms. And we have to buy our stock from an officially licensed alcohol wholesaler, not a retailer. No Costco or BevMo runs.

As part of the process we have to post this lovely poster in our front window for exactly 30 days. We also have to mail a form letter to everyone within 500 feet of the house, informing them of our intent to sell alcoholic beverages on the premises. They have 30 days to lodge a formal complaint if they want to, although we don't expect any trouble. And if anyone does complain, well, we just won't serve them any drinks.

Paint, Counter-Paint

We're back to painting. Upstairs, Kathy is painting her office/study. Downstairs, Jim is working on the trim around the downstairs bathrooms.

Kathy's space has always been baby blue, but the long-term plan was to paint it light brown. After almost five years, we finally got around to it. Here is the darker of the two brown colors going on under the "witch's cap" on the top floor.

Meanwhile, down in the commercial kitchen, we also wanted to paint the small space in between the two public restrooms. The walls there had seen a lot of damage, first when the DPO (damned previous owner) added electrical conduit all over the walls, and again when we removed it. There was a lot of patching and filling going on, mostly with plaster of paris over the old original lath-and-plaster. The repairs left of lot of irregular unpainted areas. But nothing a can of paint can't fix.

That part was easy enough -- so easy, Kathy let me paint it by myself. But you know how one thing leads to another...?

The trim around the doorway here was always kind of second-rate. It was simple four-inch molding, not the nicely detailed stuff that's in most of the other parts of the house. It was okay, but not great. I remember last year I'd spent a lot of time sanding it smooth and caulking around the edges, thinking someday I'd paint it. Now that it's paint time, I wasn't so sure.

At first, my cunning plan was to use the router to cut some shallow grooves in the trim to make it look nicer. But that would mean cobbling together some straightedges along the wall to guide the router. That's a lot of work, plus it'll make holes in the wall I just painted. Better to take the trim down and work it on the router table. And as long as I'm removing the trim...

You remember when we redecorated the men's room we took down the original molding from that doorway (above)? The DPO had cut it down to a smaller size, and it was all covered in faded, dirty wine labels. We tossed that trim into the back of garage. Hey, I wonder if I can reuse that stuff...

My friend Jasco and I spent two solid days stripping wine labels and layers of paint. After about six applications, some of the original wood started to show through. There's no way it was going to be clean enough to stain, but at least we could remove some of the accumulated paint.

For the record, I counted four different paint colors in about six layers. There was a dark yellowish brown, dark battleship gray/blue on top of that, and two versions of white on top of that. The wine labels were applied over the most recent layer of white paint.


But the trim had been butchered, ripped down both sides to make it narrower to fit in the bathroom. One of the decorative rosettes had been cut almost in half. To restore it, I got some redwood pieces left over from another project and cut them to size. With a little practice and a variety of router bits, I managed to recreate the missing part of the trim profile and glued it onto the edges of the original molding. Some sandpaper and wood filler took care of the gaps.  I left a couple of the old nail holes unfilled so that it wouldn't look over-restored.

Now that it's primed it doesn't look too bad, if I do say so. The edges of this trim are all new. Ironically, I put the primer on thick so it wouldn't look like new paint over new wood. I'm hoping the gloppiness will help make it look older, like the rest of the trim.