The House With No Doorknobs

We're very open here. In the sense that all of our upstairs doors are standing open because they don't have any hardware on them right now.

Part of fixing and installing all of the upstairs trim naturally involves lots of sanding and painting. (We've got the mess to prove it.) And that means removing all the door hardware so that we can sand and/or paint the doors. We removed all the doors from their hinges and then stripped all the old layers of paint off of the hardware before re-hanging the doors.

That only took a few days, but we never quite got around to re-installing all of the latch mechanisms. So our doors have been swinging open for the past few weeks.

I've heard that doorknobs are a uniquely American thing. Other countries use levers, not knobs. That was certainly the case when we lived in Europe in the 1990s. We never saw a doorknob the whole time. They really do seem to be an American invention.

We've gone that one better. We have no hardware at all.

Down To the Wire

Electricity. It's not just a good idea, it's Ohm's Law!

(nerd humor /off)

Several months ago, we updated the electrical outlets on the ground floor to add, well, grounding. They'd been two-prong ungrounded outlets since they were first installed (1930s? 1960s?) and it was past time for them to get upgraded. That project went well, but it also highlighted another problem: We don't have enough electrical outlets in those rooms.

The front room has two outlets, which is okay. The middle room has three, which seems luxurious. But the back room -- the largest of the three -- has only a single outlet, and it's in an inconvenient location. So we'd resolved to not only upgrade the outlets we had, but to add more someday. Today was that day.

Adding new outlets was a bit tricky because it's an old house. On the plus side, we're working on the ground floor, which means we've got access to the crawlspace underneath. That's much easier than working on the 2nd or 3rd floor with no access to the under-floor space. Also, it's a wood-frame house, so you can drill through anything if you really want to. Much better than working with brick or concrete.

On the downside, the walls and floor are very thick. Two of the three outlets were going on outside walls, which adds and element of chance. Where are the studs? Where are the floor joists? Can I get there from here?

The first step is picking the location where the new outlet will go and hoping there isn't a wall stud behind it. Tapping the walls works with drywall, but the thick plaster and lath sounds the same everywhere. Electronic stud finders aren't any help, either. So I started by drilling a very small hole into the baseboard. If it hits air after about four inches of drilling, I know I haven't hit a stud. But that doesn't mean the stud isn't close by on one side or the other, blocking the electrical box. So I stick a bent wire into the hole and wiggle it around, feeling for obstructions. If I can spin the wire in a complete circle, I know I've got a few inches of clearance on either side. It was just dumb luck, but I found clear space both times I tried. Success!

Next comes cutting the rectangular cutout for the junction box. A Dremel Multi-Max tool is perfect for this job. It allows you to jab straight cuts in confined spaces. I've got to cut through three layers: the wooden baseboard, the plaster, and the wooden lath behind that. Unfortunately, the Dremel blade cuts beautifully through wood but is badly dulled by old plaster. So I've used up a brand new blade after only two or three outlets.

Now for the fun part: wiring. Making holes in the walls is all very entertaining, but ultimately we've got to feed new Romex into (and out of) the holes. And connect one end of the wire to the juice. More good news: There's exactly one live outlet already in the room, and we can theoretically just daisy-chain the Romex from that outlet to the new ones. Piece of cake.

More bad news: Once I crawl under the house I can't tell where I'm working. So I create a little landmark for myself by pulling away the quarter-round shoe molding and drilling a tiny hole straight down through the floor. Then I poke a stiff red wire through the hole until I'm pretty sure the wire is hanging down in the crawlspace. Then crawl under the house, find the red wire, and measure from there. When I'm done, I can gently nail the molding back into place and cover the hole. No harm done.

Still more bad news: To make holes for the Romex to pass through, I have to drill straight down through the floor, but there's no room to fit a drill in the little 4-inch hole for the box. This is where a spiffy little right-angle adapter comes into play. It allows me to hold the drill outside while sticking the drill bit into the hole and drill straight down.

Yet more bad news: The new outlet is on an outside wall, which means the floor underneath it is unusually stout and heavily braced. Even with the right-angle drill, I can't just drill straight down, or I'll hit the thick 12-inch floor joists. There's no way I can drill through that much wood, and I would't want to, anyway. How am I going to feed Romex down through that kind of structure?

Some good news: Because this is an outside wall, there are two 2x12 redwood floor joists instead of just one, but -- hooray! -- they're paired with a bit of space in between them. So if I'm really lucky, say my prayers, and eat my Wheaties, I might be able to feed the wire through the gap in between the two. The only trick is measuring the distance accurately, and I've got a red wire to help me there. After just one or two false starts I manage to drill straight down into the gap between the floor joists, leaving a nice tidy hole that doesn't weaken or damage anything. Now just drop the Romex through the hole and you're almost done!

Lather, rinse, repeat with the two other outlets. The middle outlet (above) was the hardest of the three because I had to feed wire into it as well as out of it. Feeding Romex up through the hole in the floor is much harder than pushing the wire down. This called for a bit of fishing wire and some electrical tape, but eventually it came up through the dark recesses of the subfloor and into daylight.

The third outlet was the easiest of all because it backed up to the dumbwaiter shaft, which is hollow and big enough to stand in. I could see the back side of the plaster, avoid the studs, and feed wire from either side of the wall. Luxury!

After all that work, the room looks... almost exactly the same as before. All that effort, for no apparent difference. But at least we know that we've got four working outlets in the room now, and that's what we wanted.

Before & After, Part CXXVII

We're not very good at taking "before and after" pictures. Or more specifically, we don't take enough "before" pictures. This time we managed to remember.

Here's my new office wall after the depredations of last March. We've covered up the old wood with new drywall, blended in the seam, primed and painted it, hung an all-new light fixture connected to an all-new wall switch, and installed the baseboard and door molding.

Looks better, right?

Hey, I'm Getting Pretty Good at This!

So here's the challenge. You need to push an electrical wire through a 1-inch diameter hole. The hole is 10 feet away. And it's in another room. And you can't even see it.

Ready... start! I'll wait.

That was the task today. We wanted to run some new electrical wiring to our second-floor parlor, but there's no way to route the wire up to that room without damaging the walls. We've been thinking about this problem off and on for years, before finally deciding that we had two options. Either we run the wiring on the outside of the house (in weatherproof conduit, obviously), or we sneak it through the hollow wall that holds the pocket doors. We went for Plan B.

The pocket doors on the first floor run underneath the room we want to re-wire, so it should be possible to run the wire up through that wall and pop out through the ceiling/floor. Better yet, there's a closet on the second floor directly above the pocket doors, which allows us to hide the wiring in the back of the closet rather than having to expose an ugly junction box somewhere. Perfect.

That's the easy part. The hard part is actually making it happen. For starters, we wanted to be absolutely sure that the closet really was directly above the pocket doors. No use in drilling down through the floor if it just comes out in the ceiling downstairs. So we measured everything, checked twice, and overlaid the floor plans to make sure everything lined up as expected. "Measure twice, cut once."

Once we were 85% satisfied that we knew what we were doing, we drilled down through the closet floor until the drill bit hit air. Then it was time to run downstairs and look for unfamiliar holes in the ceiling. No holes? Splendid. Let's keep going.

Then we fed the electrical wire (12/3 Romex, if you're into that kind of thing) down through the closet floor, letting gravity ease it downward through the hollow wall.  We had to pull the heavy pocket door entirely out of its pocket and shine a flashlight into the gap to see if the wire was going where we wanted. Yup -- bright yellow Romex coiling up at the bottom. So far, so good.

Now for the fun part. Time to drill a second hole in the first-floor floor so the wire can get under the house and into the crawlspace. Oh, and one other thing: the wire can't foul the pocket door as it moves. so it has to be pushed all the way to the far end of the narrow pocket, more than 3 feet back.

There's no way to drill a hole by reaching into the door pocket -- I can't even fit my hand in there -- and there's certainly no way to reach 3 feet back. The only way to drill the second hole is to work from the bottom up. Time to get under the house.

Using plumbing lines as landmarks, I marked where the second hole should go. Grab a drill, cross my fingers, and drill straight upwards through the floor into our living room. Crawl out from under the house, look around nervously for sawdust on the hardwood floors... Nope. No reason to panic just yet.

But where's my hole? It's not in the middle of the living room, which is good, but I can't see it in the pocket wall, either. Duh, it's under all the dust and debris and junk that have accumulated there over 125 years. Time to crawl back under the house and poke a stiff wire with bright red insulation up through the hole as a marker. Topside again, I can just see the red wire poking up though the new hole in the back of the pocket wall. Hooray!

Okay, so I've got two holes, one in the floor and one in the ceiling about 10 feet above it. And a loose coil of wire dangling down from the upper hole in the back on an inaccessible pocket wall. How to coax that wire to magically jump through the lower hole?

I could go back upstairs to the second-floor closet and wiggle the wire, hoping to get lucky. I could try to fashion some sort of 3-foot-long grabber arm and snatch the wire and aim it through the hole, like a carnival game. I could drink more beer...

Aha! Let's go back under the house and push some more of that red telltale wire up through the hole until it's long enough that I can reach into the pocket wall with a 3-foot stick and grab it. Then go upstairs and feed some more yellow Romex down through the upper hole so that I can grab it, too. Now tape the two wires together. Crawl back under the house, pull on the red wire and hope really hard that it pulls the yellow Romex through the hole after itself without snagging on anything.

Got it first time. Piece of cake. Don't know why I was ever worried.

Upper Body Work

Once the baseboard trim was in, it was time to start on the big project: doorway molding.

Our doorway trim downstairs is exactly 5 inches wide and was probably carved onsite when the house was built in 1893. It's all beautiful redwood, including the plinth blocks and the 5-inch square medallions in the corners. Sadly, that trim was never installed up on the third floor. Or if it was, it got removed at some point.

So we set about duplicating it by removing the basic, flat redwood trim that was installed here and milling it to reproduce the antique profile. Unfortunately, the boring door trim that was installed upstairs is less than 5 inches wide, so we couldn't simply carve it and put it back. Fortunately, the flat baseboard trim that was installed upstairs was slightly over 5 inches wide, so it became our molding stock. In the end, the old baseboard trim became the new doorway trim, and the old doorway trim became part of the new baseboard trim. Nice!

We don't have a lathe, and I don't have the talent to reproduce the corner medallions, so we were considering having someone make reproductions for us. (Thanks, volunteers!) But we noticed that the house has two slightly different styles of medallions already. The ones on the first floor are a little bit different than the ones on the second floor. So why not add a third style on the third floor? We found a mill on the East Coast that made a medallion that closely resembled the other two, so we bought a stack of those.

The new medallions were too big, so we cut them down to exactly 5 inches on a side. This is trickier than it sounds, because you can't just cut two adjacent sides to get the dimensions you want. You have to center the design and cut exactly the same amount of material off of all four sides. Probably easy for an experienced woodworker; slightly troublesome for me.

Cutting the medallions down leaves them with flush-cut edges that don't look nice, so I ran them all through the router table to add a slightly sunken roundover edge. Then we added some grooves to the pattern using the table saw. In the end, the new medallions look very much like the old ones downstairs.

The door trim itself we've documented elsewhere. We made miles of it, or so it seems. It really is an exact match for the original trim because we used a piece of trim as the template for the molding knives. Because we're reusing the old redwood, it tended to splinter in places, and because it was used as baseboard trim for decades it's beat up, dented, and has holes drilled through it in odd places. It was a challenge to allocate the holes and dents in such a way that they wouldn't show. Can I get a clean six-foot piece for this doorway? Can I use that ugly piece over here? Where can I fit this short piece?

Lots of hand sanding removed some of the uglier blemishes, but it was never going to look new. Nor should it. The way we figure it, it's pre-blemished. Don't they charge extra for that in the furniture stores?

Trim & Fit

This is what we've been doing for the past several months. We're trimming out the top floor. And we're this close to being finished -- just like always.

The baseboard molding, door trim, and medallions are all reproductions of what we have on the first and second floors of the house. Almost all of it is reclaimed redwood that was already here; about 20% of it is new wood.

Here's a shot of the baseboard. The bottom five inches (the flat part) is new wood that we cut to size. Everything above that is reclaimed redwood that we milled out in the garage using the big molder/planer (otherwise known as the Sawdust Generator 2000).

I forget how many linear feet we made; my notes are around here somewhere, but it was a few hundred feet, at least. We had to trim every upstairs room, including three bedrooms and a hallway. (The upstairs bathroom got its molding in 2012.) Kathy's room, in particular, is large and has a lot of funny angles because it includes the round "witch's cap" tower. It's not fun guessing and testing angles for a pseudo-round room.

Remarkably, we didn't make any wrong cuts or waste a single piece of baseboard trim. What little leftover pieces we have are now back in the garage to use for repairs or templates for a future project, if necessary.

We also had to fabricate our own plinth blocks (the pedestal pieces that the door trim rests on), like the one on the far right of this photo. These are also duplicates of the size and style used downstairs, reproduced in existing redwood with a bit of new redwood and pine added. They're made with the same molder/planer profile as the baseboards, but much thicker so they stand out. I think we made 20 of these. Three doorways needed four apiece, but four doorways are "one-sided" and get just two. Everything was sanded, primed, and painted in Antique White (really!) paint.

Baseboard molding seems really easy, but of course it never is. Nothing is ever straight, plumb, level, or meets at 90 degrees. A miter saw is definitely helpful, but I rarely got to set it to that nice 45-degree stop that normal people get to use. Kathy's curved tower room was one problem area, but even the "square" rooms aren't, really. I had to tweak most of the cuts by one or two degrees to get everything to line up.

On top of that, the floors aren't always level. They're very, very close. If you place a ball on the floor it won't roll. But if you place a spirit level on top of the baseboard molding, it won't be exactly level. So then you have a decision: Do I level the baseboards and leave a (very small) gap underneath, or follow the floor and have slightly cockeyed baseboards? The answer: Do whatever looks best.

I split the difference. The lower portion of the baseboards follow the floor exactly, even in places where the floor isn't level. Then the upper trim portion of the baseboard is level, leaving a small gap between the two pieces, which I fill in to remove any shadow. It looks pretty good, IMHO.

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.