Acrophobia 101

It's been instructional watching the guys put up the scaffolding.

These things are apparently a lot sturdier than they look. Because they sure don't look all that safe to me.

Here's the delivery truck parked outside the house. That's one day's worth of scaffolding. They had to come back the next day to deliver more. This load about covered the ground floor and part of the second floor.

It seems obvious now, but I'd never really thought about it before. Every scaffolding job is different. It's like real-time architecture. The guys have to decide on the spot how they're going to arrange everything, where the footings go, how to connect the platforms together so you can walk around the house, how to climb up or down from one level to the next, and so on. Watching them do it, you'd think they had it all planned out and just have to haul the materials in place. But really, they're making it up as they go along, dealing with uneven ground (and my ditches), irregular building shape, varying roof heights, wind direction, and everything else. It's pretty impressive, really.

They're also really good at not dropping things. Here, the guy on the bottom has just tossed a steel rod to the guy up top -- 35 feet straight up. Just try pitching a softball directly over your head; it's not easy. Now try it with something heavy without killing yourself.

By Day 2 they'd finished most of the house, including the top floor, as you can see here. It was a bit strange being inside the house and watching this stuff slowly creep upwards past your window. It's not a noisy process, so I couldn't always tell where they were or what part they were working on. Scaffolding would just appear out the window.

People, too. Here's one of the guys blithely standing outside my window -- on the third floor. He's three stories up, unattached to anything, building the very platform he's standing on. With no safety rail (yet). No hard hat, either, but really, what good would that do?

Trivia: When you rent scaffolding, you get it for 57 days. They won't rent it for shorter periods than that, even if you only need it for a few days. Most customers are plasterers, not painters, and plaster takes several weeks to set, hence the two-month minimum. In our case, that means we can keep the scaffolding longer than we need to, getting a "free" month. We plan to use that time to fix the wooden gutters and hang Christmas lights. Why not? We're not likely to do this again anytime soon.

Miss Sparkles

Newton's Third Law states that for every action there's a reaction equal in intensity but opposite in direction. Kathy has been upholding that law for a couple of weeks now.

As the guys work outside building scaffolding, sanding, and stripping the house in preparation for painting, Kathy has been toiling inside fixing our chandelier. It's a big thing hanging in the entryway but upon close inspection it's missing some pieces. Some of the crystals are gone, and others are just hung in the wrong place. The more she looked at it, the more work it seemed to need.

Friends would sometimes bring us spare parts or pieces they thought might fit, and that helped. But the thing really needed thorough cleaning and reassembly. So Kathy painstakingly removed all the crystals one by one and laid them out on the dining room table. Not least among her problems was how to reach over the second-floor banister and carefully unscrew all the fiddly little bits.

Our dining room table looked like an exploded diagram of a chandelier. It's a bit like repairing a British sports car: the more you work on it, the more parts you have left over, and there seem to be a lot more than when you started. ("Where does this piece go? Oh, well, it probably wasn't important...")

Kathy found a source for replacement chandelier crystals, and after those arrived in the mail she could start reassembling the thing in earnest, washing each piece, drying them, making the little wire loops, and putting them all back where they belonged (and not necessarily where they were before). It took a couple of weeks, but she finished yesterday afternoon and the thing is much nicer, cleaner, and more sparkly than before. I haven't done all the math, but if 5,000 pieces all get 10% more sparkly, that makes the chandelier 500 times sparklier, right? It sure looks that way.

A Certain European Charm

So this is what our house looks like now. A house with an exoskeleton.

We finally decided to paint the house. Okay, we decided to paint it a long time ago, but now we're doing something about it. As in, hiring someone else to do it.

Kathy and I have always painted our own houses. We painted the previous house twice in the space of a few months because we didn't like the first color we picked. The point is, we're not afraid to climb ladders and get dirty. (Well, Kathy isn't. She climbed up on the roof and painted the chimney last time while I, uh, carried the paint cans and steadied the ladder.) But this house is different. There's just no way we can reach the top floor and there's just too much old paint to scrape away. So it was time to call in the professionals.

We talked to three different painters and all three gave us roughly equal estimates. I took that as a good sign: at least agree it's going to be hard work. In the end, we chose Jon Stuefloten Restoration Painting because old buildings are his specialty. Coincidentally, we met Jon through the Point Sur Lighthouse. Like us, he's a volunteer there and he got the job of removing the 19th-century lead-based paint and restoring the lighthouse. We figured if he can do that job, he can do anything. He also painted the Carmel Mission last year, so the man knows his stuff. Plus he's a nice guy.

Reaching all the nooks and crannies of the house became his problem. At first, he was leaning toward using a bucket lift (a "cherry picker") to reach the top floor, but then how do you drive it into the backyard? We've got steps up from the sidewalk just to get into the yard, and very narrow passages around the side of the house. Jon had a carpenter plan out a big wooden ramp up from the street that the painters would use to drive the cherry picker up into the yard. That looked doable, if awkward. But then the painters tried using the cherry picker on another job and pronounced it unstable. They didn't like the way it swayed, so that whole idea was canned.

Scaffolding was Plan B. It took a crew of four people two days to erect the scaffolding you see here. Fortunately (and not entirely coincidentally), Kathy and I had already removed all the plants from around the house, so there was plenty of clear footing for the scaffolds. (Not so fortunately, I'd also left a lot of deep open trenches for sprinkler pipe. Sorry guys -- watch your ankles!)

When we lived in Munich, we used to drive around a lot and play tourist, visiting old towns, cathedrals, museums, castles, and whatnot. Inevitably, the buildings were always covered in scaffolding. It got to be a running joke with us. "Have you seen the scaffolds of Berlin? I hear the scaffolding in Paris is lovely this time of year!" Everywhere we went: scaffolds and restoration. We should have bought stock.

Now our place looks like one of those old buildings, hidden beneath pipes, boards, and braces. We get a lot of curious looks from the people on the street. But they take fewer pictures, I notice.

Venting Anger

I hate vents. One of the basics you learn in Plumbing 101 is that all drain pipes need a vent pipe. Basically, for the water to run out of your sink (or bathtub, or toilet, etc...) air needs to take its place. Without a way for the air to get in, the water will get "stuck" in the pipe and drain slowly, if at all. It'll also make a gurgling noise, like pouring soda out of a bottle.

Anyway, real plumbers know this and they design houses accordingly. At least, nowadays they do. Back in 1893... not so much.

One of the bathrooms downstairs is not original, and was probably added sometime in the 1930s. When the plumbing was added for the sink and the toilet, there was nowhere to put the mandatory vent pipe, so they stuck it on the outside of the house.

Nothing yells "retrofit" like plumbing on the outside of a building. And because vent pipes have to extend all the way to above the roof line, that meant a three-story flagpole (with a kink in it) broadcasting their poor planning. I hated it.

So let's see... as long as we're rejiggering the plumbing anyway... yeah, that'll work.

The five most expensive words in remodeling are, "as long as we're here..."

Nevertheless, we called Marc the plumber back for one last fix. "As long as you're here, Marc, why don't we eliminate that %&@$# vent line?" So Marc craftily tapped into his brand new handiwork and merged the bathroom vent into the other new work, almost before the cement had even dried. Result: no external vent pipe. Jim is very happy.

The only downside is that Marc got to remove the offending pipe himself. When I wasn't looking, he set up a ladder and dismantled three stories' worth of pipe. He grinned and said that was partial payment for cutting into his brand new lines. He knew how much I hated that old thing.

True to form, part of the pipe was iron (and very heavy) and part was ABS plastic. I'm guessing that the plastic bit was replacement for an iron section that either rusted out or fell over in a storm.

Die, you gravy-sucking pig.

A Three-Holer

Because the crawlspace under the back of the house is too small to work in, we had to lift up sections of flooring back there and work from the top down. We cut away three parts, one in the ladies' restroom and two in the adjoining utility room. Fortunately, we were going to replace the vinyl flooring in both rooms anyway, so this just accelerated the process.

Here's the ladies' room floor with the toilet removed and the floor cut away. Sadly, this meant cutting some of the original redwood subfloor, which I hate to do. It's half-inch tongue-and-groove redwood, perfectly fit and laid on the diagonal for strength. I'm sure it hasn't been disturbed in 120 years. But there was no way to avoid it; it had to come out. Once removed, we could reach down into the crawlspace and work on the plumbing.

On the other side of the wall is this utility room, which used to hold the dishwashers when this was a restaurant. Again, I cut some rectangular holes in the floor and the plumbers reached down and worked from above. Between the three holes, plus the parts they could reach by crawling under the house, they managed to rationalize the whole plumbing scene under there. Progress!

Trench Warfare

The fun just never stops. Replacing the tangled spaghetti of old sewer pipes meant first digging out all of the old ones. Emphasis on digging. Here's a glamour shot of the 4-foot-deep trench I dug through the backyard to reveal the main pipe that makes a big 270-degree turn around the house, collecting up most (but not all) of the eight separate waste pipes that exit the house.

Fortunately, sandy soil is pretty easy to dig out. Easier than the adobe clay you get farther inland, for example. They used to make bricks out of that stuff. On the other hand, sand doesn't like to stay put, so your nice neat trench tends to collapse on itself. And our yard is small, so before long I ran out of places to toss the soil. Once it got over my head I knew I was done.

Digging the trench through the backyard was only half the problem. Sure, it exposes the sewer pipes outside the house, but what about the ones inside? The plumbers still had to work underneath the house, and -- of course -- the crawlspace under that area is too small for even the smallest guy on the crew. Solution? Lift up the floor.

Unearthing this little gem shows how the plumbing was put together. Some predecessor put together this three-way manifold that connects an old clay pipe (left), an iron pipe (middle), and an ABS pipe (right), with a cleanout for good measure. The modern ABS pipe is only ABS for a few feet, though. As the next picture shows, it degenerates into cast iron and then splits about four ways. Every branch is a different diameter and the ABS gives way to iron and then back to ABS. It's no better once it disappears under the house, as we were to discover.

The Inverse Completion Principle

You might think that, with no new blog posts in a long while, we've stopped working on the house.

Um, no. Quite the opposite. We've been busy with all sorts of projects. So busy, in fact, that we haven't had time to post any of the pictures or stories. That should change this week.

Also this week, we've got scaffolding going up (more on that later), a new floor going in (ibid), and all sorts of news to post. So grab your Froot Loops and stay tuned.