Welcome to Oak-Land. Enjoy Your Stay.

The new floor got delivered today. Too bad we missed it.

Kathy and I have decided to install hardwood floors on the third floor. And when I say "install" I mean "stand around and watch other people do it." The first two floors of this house are wall-to-wall hardwood, but the third floor never had that. It just has a quick-and-dirty coat of brown paint over the redwood subfloor. And for the last 30-odd years, there's been carpet over that. Once we pulled out the carpet a few months ago, it exposed the nasty paint-splattered subfloor underneath. Not nice.

So we decided that the third floor should match the other two. Trouble is, they don't make olde tyme hardwood floors any more. Downstairs, it's all American white oak in 2-1/4" strips. But modern floors are generally 4-inch or 6-inch boards. We wanted to match the downstairs floors as closely as possible, which turns out to be a challenge.

We visited three local flooring stores and talked to the friendly salespeople. They were all very nice and showed us some alternatives. The first one said he'd send out an estimator to measure the rooms and give us a quote.* The second one said she'd call us when the appropriate samples came in. And the third one said, "Great, no problem, when can we start?" We went with the third one.

They found us some US-grown white oak that comes pre-stained to an almost perfect match with our other floors. Better still, the wood was on sale. And they could deliver it in a week. Sign here, hand over the deposit, and we'll see you in a few days.

Nothing. We don't hear anything for a week, and start getting nervous. Then -- of course -- while Kathy and I are away for lunch we get a frantic phone call from the flooring guy. "We're out in front of your house but nobody's home. Can you let us in?" Uh, dude. Did you think to maybe call us first?

Fortunately, we're just a few blocks away at our favorite Mexican restaurant (one of the pleasures of living downtown), and could walk back home in 10 minutes. Enough time for the delivery guys to park their big truck and start unloading onto the sidewalk.

It took three guys about a dozen trips each to haul all the wood up to the third floor. Better them than us. Then they open the boxes to let the wood "breathe" and acclimate to the room. They'll let it sit there for about a week before beginning the installation proper.

In the meantime, we have to get all the upstairs rooms ready. When you're getting a new floor put in, you have to remove all the furniture and everything from the rooms. And I mean everything. You can't leave things sitting around because, well, it's a floor. It's not like painting, where you can just cover stuff up. So everything gets moved either downstairs or into the bathroom (which already has a tile floor and isn't getting resurfaced). It's like packing up to move but without the boxes.

We also have to remove all the baseboards from around every room. We don't mind that part because we wanted to replace the baseboards and door moldings anyway. They don't match the ones downstairs. These are simple pine boards painted to look like stained wood. Our plan is to replace them with replicas of the molding on the lower floors. That's going to be a big project. For another day.

*P.S. Part of me hopes that the salesman from the first flooring store will call back in about two weeks to schedule that estimate. Sorry, fellah, but your competitor already measured, delivered, and installed the entire floor in less time than it took you to send out your helper. Better luck next time.

The Hart Cottage

Before Dr. Hart built this house, he lived and worked down the street a bit. Here's his advertisement from the June 20, 1891 edition of the Pacific Grove Review.

For the cartographically minded, 16th Street is three blocks to our right (east), and Grove Street is one block straight ahead (north; closer to the water). So he didn't move far. We haven't been  able to find a specific address for him, so we have no idea if the house is still there. There are some small Victorian-era houses still remaining on that block, so it's possible. We'll keep looking.

Santa's Little Helper

We put up our Christmas lights right after Thanksgiving, as usual. As before, they're completely LED lights, which means they use almost no power. We haven't noticed any change to our electric bill with the lights on or off, so whatever power they use must be pretty trivial.

The only difficult part is actually putting them up. We try to do all three floors, but this is a tall house and I'm still waiting for my 21st-century jetpack. We got a really long ladder from Home Depot, but it almost causes more problems than it solves.

For one, it's a fiberglass ladder, not aluminum. That means it doesn't conduct electricity -- which is good -- but it's also really heavy, which is bad. Combine a heavy-duty 32-foot ladder with damp soil and a sloping yard and you have a recipe for disaster. It's too heavy to move single-handed, so Kathy and I have to coordinate moving it, and we're always afraid we'll smash a window. There goes the original stained glass.

So we use our medium-sized aluminum ladder combined with a long pole. Each year I jury-rig a pole with a bent hook on top that helps hold the Christmas lights. Then I climb up the ladder to about the level of the second floor and use the pole to stretch a string of lights up to the top floor. The housepainters put little cup hooks under the eaves, so all I have to do is catch the wire on each little hook. Piece of cake, right?

The process takes maybe 3-4 hours, but it's relatively safe and repeatable. This is the second or third year that we've done it this way, and it seems to work. Taking the lights down is even faster, the biggest danger being dropping the lights onto the sidewalk from three stories up. Even LED lights won't survive that fall.

Re-Volting Current Events

Electricity. What a good idea.

When this house was built, it had no electricity, of course. In 1893, very few homes anywhere in the world were electrified. It wasn't until the 1920s that even one-half of American houses had electricity. Instead, Dr. Hart's house had gas. Gas lights, gas boiler, gas everything.

That seemed to be pretty much still true until about a month ago. The house originally had exactly one fuse. For the entire house. Its mounting panel is still here, under the crawlspace. Sometime later, it got a proper service entrance (electrical panel) with circuit breakers. And sometime after that, probably in the 1970s, it got a second service panel. The electrical service was split in two, with part going upstairs and part serving the ground floor. That probably made it easier to keep the restaurants' utilities separate from the living quarters. When we moved in, we almost had the two panels combined into one because we wanted all the utilities on the same residential bill. Having two electrical meters (as well as two gas meters) confused the heck out of the utility company.

Anyway, now we have four separate electrical panels and about 40 circuit breakers. A long way from Dr. Hart's day. The first two panels are still outside, but we also have a new one upstairs in the kitchen that mostly serves the third floor, and there's a panel out in the garage. That one handles the garage lights and it has 220V service for a possible car charger, welder, or electric lift. We'll see.

But even with four panels, we don't have enough circuits. The older circuits in the original panel are overused, in my opinion. There are too many ground-floor receptacles and ceiling lights on the same circuit, so I've spent the last few months separating them into individual circuits. That means crawling under the house and cutting old wires, creating new "home runs" with Romex, and deciding what stuff goes on which new circuit.

And hey, as long as we're at it, why not add a few additional circuits, too? There were some unused positions in the breaker panel that just begged for new breakers, so why not?

The trouble is, adding new circuit breakers means reaching into the breaker panel and pulling wires... right next to all that lovely 110V and 220V wiring that's already there. To be safe, you have to shut down power to the whole house, and that's a nuisance. I've also worked around electronics long enough to know that some systems can retain power long after they're shut off. Call me a sissy, but I wasn't eager to reach my hand into that rat's nest of wiring. So we called an expert.

Lucky for us, our neighbor's son is a licensed electrician. Better yet, he's a former safety officer at Lawrence Livermore National Labs, so this guy lives and breathes safety regulations. He's very friendly, but also very by-the-book. And he offered to come over and wire up the first few breakers for cheap, and then supervise while I did the rest. Deal!

He also taught me a neat trick about spreading Vaseline on the wires before you try to feed them up into the service box. I was having a hard time forcing the Romex up through six feet of conduit, but once you grease it, it slides right through. Nice!

Bottom line, we've now got a half-dozen new 15A and 20A circuits feeding the downstairs lights, receptacles, ceiling fixtures, and appliances. No more sharing of circuits. It's not that the old wiring was a problem or anything, but I feel better knowing that it's now over-designed instead of under-provisioned.

How's It Hanging?

Behold! You are looking at something no human has seen for 50 years!

"The doors are closing."

Stunning, isn't it? Two closed doors. I've rarely seen a more beautiful sight.

Perhaps some explanation is in order. These two sliding doors separate two of our ground-floor rooms. They're normally open, so that you can walk between the front room and the "middle" room downstairs. Nobody pays much attention to them because, well, they're open all the time.

The reason they're open all the time is because they're stuck. They've been stuck in place since before we bought the house, and probably long before that. But no more! Today, we got them working again.

Both doors are solid wood. They're more than eight feet tall, four feet wide, two inches thick, and extremely heavy. In short, they're massive, even by Dr. Hart's standards. And they were stuck in place.

Close up of the door-suspension hardware.

They're supposed to travel on a hidden track up above the lintel (door frame). There's a hidden trolley track up there, and each door has two big metal trolley wheels that ride on the track. The doors just hang from those two wheels; there's nothing at the bottom or the sides to hold them in place or guide them. They're simply suspended, with about one-quarter inch of clearance above the floor. Or at least, there's supposed to be.

Some time ago, some bozo must have tried to force the doors open and knocked them off their tracks. And there they sat. Fortunately, the track mechanism is such that the doors didn't fall down -- someone would have been killed if they had -- so they just kind of stayed stuck in place. And since they were stuck open, nobody apparently bothered to try to fix them.

Now I understand why. That track mechanism was not designed for easy maintenance. It's hidden up in the wall, out of reach of even the smallest fingers. It's clear now that the trolley track was constructed and installed first, and then the walls were framed and plastered around it. There's no way to get at the workings without busting through the original plaster and lath, and we weren't prepared to do that.

Trolley wheel off its track, leaning against a stud.

We could shine a flashlight into the gap between the door and the wall and get a glimpse -- just -- of the misguided trolley wheels. But how to fix them? There's no room to reach a hand in, and they're too far away to reach with tools. We tried a crowbar. Too thick. We tried a skinny screwdriver. Too short. We tried forcing the doors to move with a pry bar, thinking that maybe we'd get the wheels to skid along the track even if they are misaligned. No dice. Both doors were hitting a hard stop somewhere and refused to budge.

Not only were the wheels off the track, they were also trapped against the wall studs, which kept the doors from sliding no matter how hard we pushed. When the wheels jumped the tracks they came to rest at a crooked angle. There's not enough room in that tight space for the mechanism to roll, skid, or slide without catching on something, so the whole works was jammed up behind a wall stud (on the left-hand door) and an iron gas pipe (on the right-hand door). We were well and truly stuck.



Mechanical door catch and wooden bumper.

Meanwhile, these massive doors are still hanging from the wheels. There's nothing else holding them up. So we can't just gently massage the hardware back into place. There's hundreds of pounds of redwood weighing the whole thing down.

In the end, the fix was a two-person operation. Dad would call it "main strength and awkwardness." Kathy got on a ladder and pushed on the door, trying to take some of the weight off of the rear wheel. I stood on the ground and used a galvanized pipe (in one hand) and a flashlight (in the other) to reach up into the dark recess and push against the wheel -- hard. If Kathy and I timed our efforts just right, we could knock the rear wheel back onto the track just far enough that it would clear the adjoining stud and allow the door to skid/slide/roll partway along the track. Hooray!

Repeat for the other door, and we're good. Double hooray!

The offending gas pipe.

Now that the doors move again, we could slide them completely along the track and out of their pockets. That allowed us to clear decades of debris from the track and shoot a little WD-40 onto the wheels. There's also a clever little iron gadget on each door that prevents it from accidentally moving too far. It catches a hidden latch inside the wall unless you know where to reach in and flip the lever over. We cleaned that, too.

I can't think of a way to prevent the wheels from someday jumping the track again. There are lots of ideas, but no practical way to implement them when you can't even reach up into the track. I guess we'll just have to be careful about how we push on the doors. In the meantime, I'm parking them fully closed. Just because we can.

Let's Play a Game

I have a fun game for you. It's a guessing game. Any number can play. Let's begin.

Here is a picture of a wood floor. How many staples do you see in the floor? Take your time...

Do you see five staples? Ten? Fifty? More than that?

The answer is: We don't know! See? It really is a guessing game! You get to find them all without seeing them first. Kathy and I play this game for hours.

I wish we could recycle staples for a penny apiece. We'd be rich! Instead, we just dump 'em in the trash along with the broken tack strips, the dust, and the shredded padding.

Here's another guessing game. What were the previous owners doing in this picture? My guess is that they were spray-painting a piece of furniture. See where the two round legs and two rectangular legs were standing? It must be fun to spray paint things in the middle of your own bedroom. Later, they must have set a paint can down on the floor, in two separate places. It sure left a nice ring for posterity.

Underneath all the unintentional paint is a solid layer of dark brown. And under that is another layer of brown paint in a slightly lighter color. As far as we can tell, the floor in all these upstairs rooms was painted brown, twice, before giving up on it and laying carpet -- also twice.

When we removed all the carpet staples, we found that some of them had little pieces of green padding trapped under them. But we've never seen any green padding, so our guess is these were left over from an earlier carpet job. So between the two coats of brown paint and the two layers of carpet, this floor has been refinished at least four times in its 120+ years. Not surprising, I guess.

The wood itself is inch-thick redwood tongue-and-groove. No knots anywhere. The boards are 5-1/4 inches wide and have a rough finish underneath but a fairly smooth finish on top. Or at least, they did. Years of abuse have gouged the top surface pretty badly, so now it's dented in places, as if they were juggling bowling balls up here. A few of the boards have been cut away to expose something underneath, but it's not always obvious what they were trying to get to. One opening exposes the ceiling fixture in the room below, but a couple don't have any obvious purpose. We'll keep thinking on that.

The floorboards also change direction in odd places. They'll run north/south for a while, then change to east/west orientation in the middle of the hallway, for example, or partway through a room. Our assumption is that the current walls weren't here in 1893, and that the walls have been moved since -- perhaps multiple times. It doesn't make sense to change the orientation of the floorboards arbitrarily unless the underlying joists change there, too. Hmmm... something else to explore.

Dept. of the Interior, Floor-istry Divison

If defenestration means throwing stuff out a window, what do you call it when you pull up an entire floor? De-floor-estation?

This week we got a bug in our bonnets and finally removed the last remnants (hah! See what I did there?) of carpeting in the house. The entire third floor had wall-to-wall carpet of indeterminate vintage. Probably from the 1960s; possibly as new as the 1980s. Definitely not staying, either way.

We'd pulled up the carpet in Kathy's upstairs office four years ago almost to the day, and found a fairly ratty wooden subfloor underneath. It had paint splatters, cuts, gouges, and various indignities that made it not worth trying to resurface. We'd left the carpet in Jim's office, the guest room, and the adjoining hallways... until now. They also had paint-splattered subfloor underneath, often with chunks cut out and patched. Clearly, the previous owners had given up on this flooring. They'd cleaned paint rollers, dripped paint, and spray-painted furniture right on the floor. This area was never meant to be exposed.

Our plan is to resurface the entire third floor with hardwood, like the 1st and 2nd floors already have. But to do that, we've got to pull up all the carpeting. Piece of cake. The demolition is always the easy and fun part.

Pulling up carpet is sort of like moving: You have to pack up all of your belongings and put them somewhere else. There's no magician's trick of yanking the carpet out from under the table, so we played musical chairs with all the beds, desks, file cabinets, forgotten boxes, and whatnot. First, you shove everything to the left, then tear up half of the carpet, then shove everything to the right and pull up the other half. A good sharp knife allows you to rip the carpet down the middle and roll it up in halves, like a gigantic fuzzy burrito.

Old carpets aren't particularly sanitary, either. Kathy and I both got new respirator masks and wore them the whole time. They're hot and uncomfortable, but the alternative was... ick.

Under the carpet, of course, is the padding. In some ways, it's more trouble to remove than the carpet because it doesn't cut neatly. Instead, it tears into irregular pieces, so you have to chase around the room and get all the bits from everywhere. We went through an entire roll of masking tape just binding this stuff together. There's a trip to the dump in our future!

Then comes the tedious job of removing all the nails, staples, and tack strips. Tack strips are vicious, nasty things with hundreds of sharp nails pointing straight up, ready to catch your fingers, clothes, and tools. They're designed specifically to be painful. (They may also have some incidental use as carpet fasteners; I wouldn't know.) We got to make a lap around each room prying up the tack strips and trying to toss them into a garbage can without hemorrhaging.

Next come the staples. Lots and lots of staples. The padding is stapled down -- quite thoroughly -- all over each room. That's why the old padding shreds and rips when you pull it up. It's held down with several hundred staples (no exaggeration). But before we can put down hardwood, we have to remove all the staples and make the subfloor smooth.

The bad news is, speckled paint splatter makes almost perfect camouflage. You can't see half the staples. You have to feel for them, then pry them up with a screwdriver or pull 'em out with pliers. So you run your hand over the floor, go "ouch!," pull out the offending staple, and repeat.

The good news is... well, there is no good news. It's just plain tedious work, down on your hands and knees pulling out hundreds and hundreds of perfectly camouflaged staples. At least Cinderella got a clean floor when she was done. We just have a paint-splattered floor that looks exactly as it did when we started. But with fewer hazards for bare feet. Stay in school, kids, and get a nice quiet office job somewhere. Otherwise, you may wind up like us.