A Hole In One

Kathy and I have been gradually trimming out the 3rd floor windows and doors. We've made really good progress over the past 3-4 weeks, but it's amazing (and a bit discouraging) how much there still is to go. There's so much fiddly detail work that it never seems to stop.

Most of the work has been with the new baseboards, and we'll post some pictures of that in a few days. We've also trimmed out every single door on the third floor, including closets, with our new/old reproduction molding. Just when we thought we were done, we looked up and realized we'd never finished trimming out the transom window above the bathroom door. And... say it with me now... as long as we're up here, we might as well finish off the oddball skylight, too. More tools, more paint, more cutting, and more ladders. It's a good thing we enjoy this kind of stuff.

In reverse order, here is the transom window that's almost (but not quite) finished. Perspicacious readers will recall that we built this window from scratch almost five years ago. There wasn't originally a window above this bathroom door, but when we gutted and remodeled the bathroom in 2012, we cut this in partly for ventilation, partly for light, and partly for appearances.

The window tilts outward, so you can open it for ventilation. It rotates on a pair of brass hinges that we got from an antique hardware supplier. And, since the window is right below the skylight in the ceiling, it lets much-needed light into the bathroom. We'd fabricated the window molding and sill back then, but never really finished it off. So this week, we finally trimmed, sanded, and painted it. Hooray!

The skylight in this hallway isn't original to the house, either. Somebody must have installed it in the 1960s or '70s. Maybe even earlier -- who knows? It's also possible that the opening was originally a hatch up to a widow's walk on the roof. It's nice having the sunlight come in, but the skylight itself was never very finished-looking. There were exposed roof beams and bracing visible in places, as if someone had left the job uncompleted.

This week we added some drywall and some molding to the skylight to make it look more regular, tidy, and finished. Naturally, the "square" skylight shaft is nothing of the sort. All the angles were a few degrees off of 90, which makes cutting and fitting the trim a chore. Lastly, we picked the hottest day of the year to stick our heads up in there to prime and paint it, so that added a certain sweaty charm to the task.

Staring at the Walls

I'm literally staring at the walls, and I'm confused by what I see.

This is a close-up of the painted fabric wall in my room. As I said earlier, this type of wall covering appears in a few places around the house. I assume that it's original, meaning it dates back to 1893. If not, then it's probably from the big remodel the Hart family did in the 1930's. Either way, it's a lot older than me.

It's a bit hard to see in this photo, but there's a discolored area in the middle of this part of the fabric wall covering. It's rectangular and runs left to right. Some of the cracks in the paint roughly follow the borders of the discolored area.

My hunch is that there used to be a shelf mounted to the wall here, and over the years, the sun bleached the paint around it, leaving this rectangular section a slightly different color. The screws, nails, bolts, or whatever hardware held the shelf to the wall may have also cracked the paint as it got old, leaving a kind of border marking its presence.

There's also some handwriting on the surface; I assume they're measurements. Clearly, you wouldn't have scribbled on a finished wall, so the writing must have come much later, after someone decided to cover up this surface. (Possibly the same time that the drywall went in, if not the same person.) Just for fun, I tried measuring walls, doors, and bits of trim hoping to find something that measured 34 inches, 33¼ inches, or 53½ inches. No luck. So what were they measuring and where are those pieces now?

The Woman on the Stairs

Kathy's getting into demolition mode. While I was off doing something typically pointless, she decided it was time to remove the old carpet from the second-floor stairs.

(If the stairs connect the second and third floors, is it a second-floor staircase or a third-floor staircase? Two and a half?)

These stairs have had a red "carpet runner" on them since well before we moved in; probably since the 1970's. It's not a real carpet runner, it's just leftover red carpet that someone installed on the stairs. They did a good job -- it's held up this long -- but it's not what we want. Unlike the rest of the red carpet on the second floor, it's not all food-stained. Evidently they never had to carry plates of lasagna up to guests on the third floor.

Anyway, we've always planned to replace the old red carpet with a proper carpet runner. We just never... you know... got around to it. But the first step in any new project is the demolition. No demo, no progress. Grab the hammer!

Kathy pried up all the tack strips underneath the carpet, with only minimal loss of blood. (Three Band-Aids, I think.) She tore apart the pieces of carpet, which had been all taped/glued together. And she meticulously yanked out all the tiny little nails that had been holding everything in place. In the end, we got a set of nice, smooth, painted stairs.

It's actually a bit disorienting to walk downstairs now. We got so used to the dark red color that it looks funny when it's brown. And not fuzzy. I think we both stumbled a little bit for the first few days as we readjusted to the new look of the stairs. Something in the back of our brains said, Stop!, and made us do a little stutter-step at the first step. We're over it now, but it means we'll probably have to relearn how to walk on the stairs yet again when we put down the carpet runner.

Up Against the Wall

This is my wall.

It's a lovely wall. It separates my upstairs office from the stairwell. It helps hold up the roof. It's a handy place to hang pictures. But it needs... something.

Like most of the third floor, this wall had been covered in drywall (Sheetrock) at some time in its past. And also like much of the third floor, the work had been done inexpertly. This wall also had a light fixture hacked into it (on the other side where you can't see), but without benefit of an electrical junction box. The wires just poked through a hole in the plaster where wire nuts fixed it to the light. Not entirely kosher and not to my liking.

Finally, my room had no light switch anywhere. It had electrical outlets, but nothing on a switch, so you couldn't just walk into the room and flick on a light. All of this needed fixing.

The only way to get at the electrical wiring, of course, is to open the wall, and because it's just drywall I wasn't too worried about that. We're not sentimental about drywall; it's just historic plaster and lath that we try to preserve. Sheetrock? Pfft. Out it comes.

My secret hope was that my room would be like Kathy's room, in the sense of having cool old redwood paneling hidden behind the drywall. In that case, removing the drywall would be a good deed. I was looking forward to exposing the old redwood.

No such luck. Instead, this room seems to have been constructed like an Old West saloon in some ghost town that had no carpenters. There's old wood behind the drywall, all right, but it's not something you'd want to display. It's ratty and ill-fitting and has big gaps in it. It's like some shantytown shelter made from scrap. Bummer.

To cover up this iffy construction, our predecessors had covered the wall with painted fabric. We've found this stuff elsewhere in the house. It's like rough woven linen covered with a thick coat of painted paper. The fabric covering is attached to the wall with small nails (which I've saved) that are on the underside of the painted layer, so they don't show. Not sure how that was done, but it appears to have been common practice.

For the record, I did not cut away the fabric covering as you see it here. That was done much earlier, probably when the wall fixture (the one on the other side) was first installed. They would have had to cut into the wall somehow to route the wires. That explains why some of the covering is missing, and why the nails in the wooden boards don't all match. Some are quite old, square-headed nails while others are newer round nails (1930s? 1960s?). Too bad they didn't install a proper junction box while they were at it. It would've saved me a lot of trouble.

Anyway, now that I've got the wall open, I can fix all of these problems at once. First, I installed a junction box in the wall to support the wall fixture. It's supported by a cross-brace nailed between two studs. (You can't see it in this photo.)

Second, I added the light switch that you see here near the door. It switches one-half of the new outlet near the floor, as well as the new wall fixture in this room.

Third, I removed a lot of the old drywall and replaced it with new. I figured there's no way to dress up the underlying wooden boards to make them nice enough to expose, so I might as well just cover them all up again like before. But at least now I know what's behind there.

Here's a peek into the knob-and-tube wiring that was behind the wall. I like how they twisted the wires around the ceramic knobs for strain relief.

Why three wires? Because one is hot, one's neutral, and one's a traveler between a pair of three-way switches. Yes! They had three-way switches even back in the day!

Finally, here's a century of wiring history in one snapshot. There's the original knob-and-tube wiring coming up through the floor (from three stories down), against some new 14/2 Romex that now does the job. Behind that, you can see the black coax cable for broadband Internet, along with the gray CAT5e cable for the LAN.

Now that I think about it, I should have added a fiber-optic cable just to make it look really modern and up-to-date. Oh, well. Wires will probably be obsolete soon, anyway.

Mister Angry-Face Door

We're updating the trim on the third floor, which involves a lot of woodwork, painting, nails, and dust. One of the many chores involves stripping the old paint off of Kathy's door, which may have had about 100 coats of paint on it.

Rather than add a 101st coat, we decided to strip off the old paint, so we took the door outside to work on it. Pro Tip: It's hard to move a door down three flights of stairs. For starters, doors don't always fit through doorways. Makes sense, I know, but you don't think of that until it's too late. We often had to turn the door sideways to fit it through.

Stripping the old paint was more work than I expected (naturally). It doesn't just magically fall off. What I anticipated to be a few hours' work instead took two full days. There was a *lot* of paint on that door, and it didn't all want to come off. I counted about six colors before I gave up and called it "good enough."

Interestingly, the oldest coats of paint were the hardest to remove. Maybe that's because they used better-quality paint back in the day, or maybe it's because it was oil-based instead of latex, or maybe it's just been on there so long that it doesn't want to come off. Whatever the reason, the last few coats are still there; they're not coming off. No amount of paint stripper would remove them, so I just sanded them smooth instead. Let's call it primer.

Complicating the issue was the detail work on the door. This is the same pattern that appears on most of our doors, and it involves lots of fiddly little grooves that aren't easy to scrape or clean. It's hard to scrape off the paint without gouging the woodwork, so patience is important. Patience and sandpaper. Lots of sandpaper.

Ultimately, I got it to the state you see here. It's not perfect, but it should hold a coat of paint without looking too bad.

I decided -- too late -- to put on a dust mask while I was scraping off all this old paint. I suspect most of the paint was lead-based, and my throat feels kinda funny now, but oh, well.

Tell me what you see, but I count more than six layers of paint here. There's the white top coat, then the red underneath that, then the green, then another coat of white, then the brown, then a lighter shade of brown, and then... who knows. I do know there's a yellowish layer underneath that I never did remove, so that makes at least seven. For the record, we're painting the door white. We'll post pictures when it's all done.

Drone Strike

It's 2017, so we need to have a drone.

Here's how it all started. Pacific Grove is a seaside town, which means we get a lot of seagulls. A lot of seagulls. They're probably charming when you're just visiting for the weekend from some hot, inland location, but they're not much fun to live with. Seagulls are noisy, messy, and very aggressive. We've seen them swoop down on picnics and steal food directly from a 5-year-old's hands.

Like any bird, they like to nest up in high places, which means they leave their... uh... mark all over the sidewalks. This is considered bad for business. It makes the downtown sidewalks look messy and it tends to spoil the pristine seaside look we're going for. So starting last year, the city implemented a "no seagulls downtown" ordinance. Henceforth, it is every downtown business owner's responsibility to make sure that there are no seagulls nesting on their property. And if a nest is found, it's the owner's responsibility to remove it humanely.

To be fair and considerate to the birds, you're only allowed to disturb a nest in the short period between when the birds build it and when it's full of eggs. In other words, you can't disturb a nest with eggs, nor can you molest a nest with baby gulls in it. We're not monsters.

We have to comply with the new ordinance because we're located downtown. So, we somehow have to determine (a) whether there's a seagull nest up on our roof, and (b) how to remove it if there is.

How, exactly, do we accomplish that? It's a three-story house and I don't have a ladder that big. I mean, how would you know if there's a seagull nest on your roof?

Last year, the city rented a falconer. She walked around town every few days with a falcon or a hawk on her arm, on the theory that flying raptors in the neighborhood would discourage gulls from nesting there. She didn't even have to let the birds off of their tethers. Evidently, just the sight or sound of a hawk or falcon will scare the gulls away. It seemed to work, too. We saw lots of the hawks and falcons, but not so many gulls. Mission accomplished.

But that was last year. This year, we're all on our own. Sure, we could hire the falconer again, but she's expensive, and why would I want to bear that cost all by myself? On the other hand, it would be kind of cool to have a resident falconer hanging out in our front yard. What a conversation starter.

You know what else would be cool? To fly a camera drone over the house and scare off the seagulls ourselves. So that's what we did. For roughly the same price as hiring a falconer or (more traditionally) a roofer to climb up on our roof, we got a radio-controlled quadcopter with a high-resolution camera. It's awesome, and it really works. To a seagull, drones are scary, noisy, hovering predators. So the drone serves two purposes: it takes pictures of the roof looking for nests, while simultaneously scaring away any seagulls that are there. Perfect. Plus, it's just a lot of fun to fly. I recommend it.

Here's a short 90-second clip of some of the aerial footage. (You can also find it on YouTube here.) The video may look a bit grainy here because it's compressed for the blog, but the original raw footage is fantastic. The drone shoots 4K high-resolution video; it's the nicest camera I've ever had, or been allowed to touch. It's better than TV-quality, so it's ample for seagull-hunting. If you look really closely you can see me waving at around the 30-second mark.

The thing also has a range of over half a mile, so it's more than capable of flying entirely out of sight. For now, I'm playing it safe and keeping it near the house. No point in scaring off the neighbors' seagulls. They can get their own drone.

I'm Board!

The molding work continues. I've been ripping, stripping, and shaping reclaimed redwood to make molding for the third floor. So far, it's coming along reasonably well. No major injuries to report, in other words.

This is a representative sample of what I've been making. It's five inches wide, and this particular piece is about eight feet long. Each length is different, since I'm reusing the basic baseboard trim that was already installed upstairs, and they were all different sizes.

I'll eventually have to piece these together, but so far I've been able to do the first five doorways using just single pieces of trim with no seams. I'll have to stitch together shorter pieces before long, but I'm saving those for less conspicuous locations.

I'll also need to go out and buy some more lumber, since we weren't able to reclaim enough wood to do the whole job. So the first doorways will use original wood, while the later ones will have new wood. Sadly, I don't think I can buy redwood at any price that will be as good as this old stuff.

Each piece required three or four passes through the molding machine. You can't carve out that much detail all in one go. The first pass allows me to make sure everything's lined up properly. Then the later passes take out more material, until it's all done. For example, this piece here still has leftover paint -- several different coats, in fact -- from its days as baseboard trim. One more pass through the machine should take that off.

Once these pieces were all cut, it was time to move on to the baseboard molding. That's a whole different profile, so it meant taking apart the machine and retooling with different knives.

The good news is, I could reuse different pieces of reclaimed redwood that were too narrow to use for the door trim. Somehow, the DPO used a mixture of thick and thin baseboard trim. The thick pieces are more than 5 inches wide, but the thin pieces are just under 5 inches, so I can't use them for door molding. But they make dandy baseboard trim!

This profile rests on top of a basic slab molding, so that the whole stack is 9 inches high and looks pretty similar to the original stuff that's downstairs. Unlike the door trim, the baseboard trim is not an exact replica of the original. Just a close facsimile.

Last of all come the plinth blocks: the thick base piece at the bottom of each side of door trim. It's the same profile as the baseboard molding, but thicker. The door trim is supposed to look like it's resting on top of the plinth block, like a Roman column. Whatever.

Naturally, we had to make these from scratch, too, but they're pretty easy. We start by cutting 5-inch sections of baseboard molding (both pieces) and then nailing/gluing a 3/8-inch piece of wood to the back. This gives us the profile we want, but thicker. Then you just nail that to the wall and you're done!

Here's a batch of them sitting out to dry. After the glue has set up I sand the bejabbers out of them to remove any seams and to hide my nail holes. I can do the edges with the belt sander, but sanding the contours requires hand-sanding and a lot of patience. It gets old after a while.

Speaking of getting old, I started hand-sanding every single piece of molding after it came out of the machine. The knives make nice sharp cuts, which is good. But the molding looks too "new." So I knock down the edges and the corners with some hand sanding, just to soften it up so it doesn't look like it came right out of a machine. I probably don't need to bother -- it'll get nicked up soon enough. But even so, I'd like it to start out looking like it's been here for 100 years.