Kathy Strips In Front of the Neighbors

Oh, is Christmas over? It must be time to get back to work on the house!

Kathy wasted no time in demolishing the old wallpaper in the three main rooms downstairs. No sooner had our family/guests left than she took a scraper to the wallpaper. In fact, she started before they all left.

The three main rooms downstairs were all painted the same color of "bordello red" back in the 1990s when this space was used as a restaurant. Color analysts (I guess that's a real thing) say that red is a good color for digestion, hence its use in restaurant dining rooms. We never liked the color all that much -- what goes with dark red walls? But we also had more pressing matters to attend to. Until now.

Fortunately for us, the original plaster walls had never been painted, not in all the 120+ years they've been standing. Instead, they'd always been wallpapered (probably several different times), and sometimes that wallpaper was painted over, as in this case. So instead of red walls, we really had red-painted wallpaper. Once Kathy started scraping away the old wallpaper, the original plaster was exposed.

That was the good news. The bad news was, the wallpaper had been glued down pretty well, so it came off in little bitty pieces about the size of a business card. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Multiply that times four walls and three rooms and you begin to get an idea of the task ahead of her.

After several weeks of this, all three rooms are finally done. There are a few stubborn little bits of paper that still cling to odd corners here and there, but for the most part the rooms are back to their natural state. We'll be papering them again. So now all we have to do is pick out the new wallpaper. Simple, right?

The Rain, It's Plain, Strays Mainly from the Drain

Ah, winter! The days get shorter, the holidays are approaching. There's a special nip in the air. And it starts raining. That means it's time to clean the gutters.

When the serious rain started last week, we saw that the water was pouring out over the edges of the gutters, not down the drainpipes like it's supposed to. One especially annoying drip was right over the front door. When it's raining heavily you know to avoid the waterfall, but if it's just sprinkling a bit, the drip can catch you out. Splat! Hah, tricked another one!

Every one of the gutters seemed to be overflowing instead of draining properly. It was almost perfectly inverted: The downspouts were all empty, and the gutters were all overflowing from the edges instead. It's like the water was avoiding the downspouts. Time to clean 'em all out.

The gutters on our house are wood, not metal or fiberglass or extruded plastic. They're carved, often lined with lead, and built-in to the structure of the house. Meaning they don't come off and can't easily be replaced. They're also a nuisance to clean.

For starters, the gutters are up high (duh), but they ring the house on the second floor only. That means they're more than 30 feet up from the ground, and I can't reach them with any ladder that I have. (Full disclosure: I'd frankly be uncomfortable standing atop a 30-foot ladder even if I had one.) So the only way to reach the gutters is by climbing out on the roof—not happening—or by leaning out the 3rd-floor windows with a long pole. We went the pole route.

Our cunning scheme was to attach a garden trowel to the end of a long pole and lean through the windows, digging away at the leaves and crud in the gutters. Soon the dam would break and the water would flow happily down the drainpipes and back to the sea! Flow, little water! Run home!

That was all hilarious fun, but it didn't work as well as expected. I collected lots of nutrient-rich crud from the gutters, but managed only to smear it all over the side of the house. It looked like we were patching a wattle-and-daub cottage. There's also no good way to get the trowel/stick arrangement down into the drainpipes, which is where the real problem was. And, since this all happened in the pouring rain, the gutters filled up again just as fast as I could empty them all over the outside of our formerly white house.

Plan B was to wait for the rain to stop and climb outside. There are a couple of flat spots on the roof that are fairly accessible (read: no helicopter required), so taking my now-patented stick with me, I managed to ream out a few of the drains. The obscene glorp, slurggle, slurggle! sound the water makes as it finally breaks through the blockage and starts draining made it all worthwhile.

So the gutters are mostly clear now, but it's stopped raining so I can't even enjoy my victory. I'm tempted to take a garden hose and actually pour water on the roof just so I can see those suckers drain like they're supposed to. But I'll wait. It's supposed to start raining again in a few days. Good thing, too, because that mud is still all over the outside of the house and I'm really hoping the rain will wash it off.

Boo-Ho-Ho!

This entry is a little out of order. Halloween was two weeks ago, of course, and we had a good one.

We've been decorating the house a little bit more each year. Nothing too major, but we enjoy hanging fake cobwebs from the front porch and putting scary stickers on the windows. Last year we made ghost heads using Styrofoam wig stands with cheesecloth draped over them. This year we updated them with shoulders, which looks better. We also made a big cutout zombie and taped him to an upstairs window to make a scary shadow. Little by little, we're scaring away the local kids.

It's not working. This year we counted 130 kids, which is more than last year. In fact, we ran out of candy. With about an hour to go, I had to dash to the gas station mini-mart to get more. Not the most economical way to stock up on candy, I can tell you. I got a bunch of jellybeans and gummi bears and whatnot, and Kathy put then into little Dixie cups and wrapped them in cellophane. It all worked out okay, but for the first time ever we had no leftover candy for ourselves. :-(

This year we put red and green bulbs in some of the outdoor lights (Kathy's idea), and it looked pretty good. Er, I mean, bad. Some of the local downtown businesses were passing out candy, too. One of the shopkeepers later told us that a lot of the kids that visited her said, "Have you seen that white house at the end of the block? It's really scary!" So I guess our little scheme is working. Bwaaa-haa-haa!!!

Water, Water, Everywhere...

"...nor any drop to drink." So goes Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere. And right now, it also applies to our front yard.

It all started with a surprise in the mail: A $500 water bill. Yikes! We normally use less than $100/month in water, so this was way out of line. Okay, sure, we'd been watering the plants a bit more than usual (i.e., at all) in preparation for the Historic Home Tour, but still! A 5x jump is surely evidence of a leak or a problem somewhere. Thinking quickly, we called the local water monopoly to ask for forgiveness, and they gave us a ray of hope. If we can find a leak and document the fix, they'll refund most of the exorbitant fee. So there's your incentive: Fix the leak for under $500 and you're money ahead.

Game on. I crawled under the house looking for damp spots. Nothing there. Toilets running? Nope. Teenagers showering? Not anymore. Sprinklers leaking? Hmmmm....

We never liked the drip system the previous homeowners had installed, so here was our chance to remove it. And it did appear to be leaking. The wet spots on the ground weren't always near the sprinkler heads, so that water had to be coming from somewhere. Unfortunately, our soil contains a lot of sand (okay, it is sand) so leaks can disappear very quickly. You could be pouring, say, $500 worth of water into the ground and not know it. So out comes the old sprinkler pipe.

And in with the new. We jumped into the pickup truck and headed to Home Depot, where they're painting a reserved parking spot for us. Loaded up with PVC pipe, valves, elbows, and tees, we're all set to play underground Tinker Toys.

Here's my spiffy six-valve manifold. A thing of beauty, innit? At least I was smart enough to connect it directly to the city water and not downstream from the water softener. ("Hey, how come we're out of salt again?!")

The sandy soil is easy to dig up, but as any prison escapee will tell you, it also collapses in on itself really easily. You wind up digging each trench twice, once to mark the path and again to empty out all the dirt/sand that just fell back into it. So far, I've excavated one coffee mug, half of a broken clay pot, plenty of roots, and a whole lot of old sprinkler pipe.

The hardest part so far has been routing the new pipes to the far side of the house. There's a cement walkway around our front yard, so my best route was to tunnel under it. And then to tunnel under it again to get past the front steps. So far, I've dug three tunnels, but it's quick and therapeutic work. Somehow I wind up with bigger piles of dirt than when I started, though. I can't figure out where the extra dirt is coming from. Maybe someone is sneaking dirt into our front yard in the middle of the night. Or I've disturbed some really big gophers.

Five Hundred of Our Closest Friends

October 7th was Pacific Grove's annual Historic Homes Tour, and for the first time, we were on it. The premise is simple: you clean house for a month, leave your front door open for six hours, and let 500-600 total strangers walk through your house. Easy, right?

The event is put on by the Heritage Society of Pacific Grove, the same people who make the little green wooden plaques that go by the front door of local homes with historic significance. They charge $20/person for a ticket, so it's quite a good fundraiser for the Society. In return, Kathy and I got brunch.

We're not complaining. After all, we volunteered. We'd considered being on the tour last year, but the house just wasn't ready. There were too many holes in the floors (figuratively speaking) for it to be safe for visitors. Amazing how quickly another year came around, though, and suddenly we're up against a deadline.

Which was partly the point. We knew that if we were going to open the house to visitors on October 7, we'd better be done with our remodeling chores sometime on October 6. We got close.

The bathroom was almost done. It still needs trim around the door, and I can see a lot of small details that didn't get finished properly. It also forced us to clean up the backyard and hide the biggest piles of junk. A little paint here; a little spackle there; a lot of dusting and vacuuming everywhere, and everything's ready to go.

Each house on the tour (there are about a dozen) gets its own set of volunteer docents who guide visitors through the house, make sure nobody gets lost, and generally act polite and answer questions. That means Kathy and I had to "train" our docents a week beforehand, in that we led them through the house and told them stories that they could later relay to their guests. In all, we had 12 docents, who worked in two shifts of six, with two on each floor. That seemed like a lot of docents to us, but that's the way the Heritage Society likes to do it.

They also hinted that they'd prefer it if we weren't at home during the tour itself. That suited us fine; we didn't want to be hanging about while strangers whispered about the hideous wallpaper, odd paint colors, etc. In order to gently nudge us to a safe distance from home, the Heritage Society puts on a nice brunch for all the affected homeowners. And, ironically, provides us tickets so that we can visit everyone else's house.

Fortunately, it was a beautiful day out, and Kathy and I had fun walking all over town spying on houses or just enjoying the day out. When 4:00 PM rolled around and we were finally able to return home, we didn't notice anything out of place. Remarkably, there was almost no evidence that anyone had been there. Had it not been for the balloons out front and the article in the newspaper, I wouldn't have suspected a thing. Even so, we think we'll take the next few years off. Too much pressure getting everything ready by October 7.

Before and After

December, 2011

So here's our third-floor bathroom a year ago...













...and here it is from the same angle today.

October, 2012

Just about everything has changed. The floor, walls, ceiling, electrical, plumbing, vanity, toilet, and bathtub are all new. Well, the tub isn't new but it's been relocated to the other side of the room.

Every little bit of the old sub-floor, carpet (ick), drywall, and  plumbing has come out and been replaced, as chronicled elsewhere. (None of it was historic.) By removing the old knee walls, the floor space has gotten somewhat larger, and built-in cupboards replace the blank walls. The new inset ceiling also raises the effective height of the room by about 2 inches.

Ceiling light before...

The vanity swapped places with the tub, and the toilet has moved a bit closer to the door. The dangly little light that used to be over the door is now a small chandelier that actually uses less energy but puts out more light. The transom window is completely new.

The old made-from-cereal-boxes vanity has been replaced by a real one near the door. We reckon that improves the traffic pattern in the room and reduces the necessity of standing under the lowest part of the ceiling.

...and ceiling light after

Vanity before...

...vanity after

The Perception of Doors

You may remember we wanted to make use of the awkward space in the "knee walls" in the corners of the bathroom. Because this room is directly under the roof, the ceiling slopes at 45 degrees all the way down to the floor. That leaves you with very short triangular spaces on the sides of the room, and I didn't want to waste that space. So I made storage cabinets.

They're framed in just below the rafters and above the floor joists, as you can see here. I used oak laminate for the "floor" and "walls" of the cabinets, and pine for the face. (Forgive me, Dr. Hart, for not using redwood.) There's also some stranded board visible in the picture, but that's just backing for the bead board to come.

Of course, nothing was at right angles (or even a solid 45 degrees), so there was a lot of guessing, fitting, tweaking, and swearing involved. This was made all the more awkward because the bathroom is on the 3rd floor and my table saw is on the ground floor. And the lumber is in the garage, one floor down from that. So the process works like this: Down three flights of stairs, cut, up three flights with cut wood in hand, test fit, back down three flights, cut again, upstairs again, swear, repeat.

Eventually, I got everything to fit well enough to nail it all in place and insulate around the back sides. There's one cabinet on the right side of the room (shown) and a matching one on the left.

Then come the doors. They're also pine, with bead board inserts to match the walls. They're a stile-and-rail design using pocket-hole joinery, with trapped panels. If you do much woodworking, that's no big deal, but I'm pretty proud of them.

I started with select pine (no knots) and ripped it down to the size I wanted, then cut rails and stiles to length. I cut them each in pairs so they'd match exactly. Then I routed a groove along the inside length of each piece to "trap" the bead board insert. The insert isn't glued, so it can expand and contract slightly with changes in temperature or humidity. Since I don't have a dado blade, I just made multiple passes over the table saw with a standard rip blade. The trick here was to remember which side of each piece will face outward so that the grooves will all line up when the door is assembled.

Before assembling the doors, I routed a stopped chamfer on the inside edges of the doors with a simple 1/4" cove bit. After some experimentation I decided it looked best stopped 2" from the ends of the stiles and about a half-inch from the ends of the rails.

That done, I drilled pocket holes in the backs of the rails using a $19 jig (new tool!), inserted the bead board pieces, and screwed everything together. There is no glue. After the doors were all assembled, I went around the outside of each one with a Roman ogee bit to make the little edge detail you see in the photo above. 

Remarkably, each of the doors is square and true. I'm getting better at this. This photo shows one of the doors taped into place. Now I just need to source some hinges, paint it all, and we should be all set.