Twenty Days In the Cooler!

Ever heard of a California Cooler?

No, it's not a wine drink. Or a type of Styrofoam chest. A California Cooler was an early kitchen appliance, the predecessor to the refrigerator. If you lived near the ocean around the turn of the century you kept your meat, cheese, and eggs in the California Cooler. And this house had one.

The principle is pretty simple. The cooler was basically a tall, narrow closet built on an exterior wall. The top and bottom of the closet vented to the outside through small holes in the wall. The idea was that cool sea breezes (of which we have an abundance) would blow in through the vents, forcing air to circulate through the inside of the closet. By making the box tall and narrow, like a broom closet, you could encourage the relatively warm air to rise out of the top, pulling more cool air in at the bottom.

It probably wasn't great, but it beats leaving food out on the counter to spoil.

At any rate, we found the telltale vents on the outside of the house when it was being painted. We'd already suspected they'd be there, since we'd spotted what looked like the insides of the vent holes when the kitchen was remodeled back in 2011. Finding the outside vents confirmed it.

One of the vents got covered up long ago, but the other was still exposed to the outside. At some point, somebody nailed a piece of metal over the hole in a halfhearted attempt to seal it, as you can see here. It's not very weatherproof, and now that the rainy season is upon us, it was time to permanently close off the last of the old vent.

We shrewdly kept some spare cedar shingles when the house was repainted, and one of them was pressed into service today. After a bit of cutting and trimming, the replacement shingle fits neatly over the rectangular hole left by the cooler. After a few coats of primer and paint, it pretty much disappears amidst all the other shingles. Mission accomplished. Time for a cold drink.


 

Out of the Closet

And lo, on the 1,675th day* there was, upon the land of the Hart Mansion, a new closet. And it was good.

Well, good-ish. You see, there's a small space in between the two downstairs restrooms. It's kind of like a hallway, but smaller. More of a passage. Or a wide spot between the walls. You take one or two steps into this "hallway" before turning left for the men's room or right for the ladies' room, but that's about it. Forgettable, in other words.

Which is fine, except that it's also fairly deep, with very high ceilings, and all that space is wasted. And we don't have a lot of space to waste in our 1890s-era kitchen. So Kathy had the bright idea of putting a storage closet in there. Nothing fancy; just something that could sit against the back wall and make it useful.

Trouble is, none of the standard home-store closets fit in the space. Of course. We would've been happy with generic knock-together storage units, but they were all either too wide to fit or so small that they wasted most of the space.

So we built our own out of the same type of white melamine-laminated particleboard that flat-packed ones use. So we've got that whole cheap Swedish look going.

It took a few days, but now we've got a custom-built cabinet that perfectly fits the space. It's secured directly to the walls, not free standing, so it's solidly in place. The sides, top, and shelves are melamine, and the kick space down by the floor encloses the heating vent we added last year.

The doors are pine with bead board inserts. I detailed the doors a bit using the router, just like the doors up in the third-floor bathroom. Some day, future inhabitants may remark on how nice it is that the doors all match. In reality, those are the only router bits I have, so yeah, they're all going to look pretty much the same.

*True. That's the number of days since we first moved in.

A Flower Grows in Brickland

So this happened.

We had a little sprinkle of rain the other day, and the next time Kathy and I went outside she said, "Where did THAT come from?"

No idea. This little guy popped up all on his own. We don't have any other flowers like it in the yard -- actually, we have no flowers at all -- and none of our neighbors seem to have one of these, either.

It's just a nice little surprise. Or Nature's way of telling us it's past time to plant something around here.

Modern Drunkard

We're getting official!

Kathy and I applied for our beer-and-wine license from the ABC (California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control). There are a number of hoops you have to jump through, including having yourself fingerprinted. And you have to read a bunch of rules about hiring minors, serving kids, and avoiding "table surfing."

Did you know that there are more than 45 different kinds of liquor licenses? I figured there were just two: a full liquor license and a beer/wine license. Nope. Turns out it makes a difference (to the ABC, at least) if you're a permanent restaurant, if you're a food truck, if you're serving at a special event, if you're located in a high-crime area, if you're on a boat, if you allow dancing, and more.

If anyone asks, we're getting a Type 41 license. That allows us to serve beer, wine, champagne, sherry, and other non-distilled spirits so long as it's always served with meals. (And "meal" has its own definition for licensing purposes. A basket of peanuts doesn't count.) Total sales of alcoholic beverages cannot exceed 50% of our revenue. Otherwise, we'd be a bar and that's a different license.

Did you know that alcoholic drinks are (supposed to be) served in different glasses than nonalcoholic drinks? That's so servers, waiters, and peace officers can tell at a glance who's quaffing booze and who isn't.

Plainclothes ABC officers are allowed to show up unannounced and prowl through our kitchen. They're allowed to arrest us (or anyone else) for violations of the licensing terms. And we have to buy our stock from an officially licensed alcohol wholesaler, not a retailer. No Costco or BevMo runs.

As part of the process we have to post this lovely poster in our front window for exactly 30 days. We also have to mail a form letter to everyone within 500 feet of the house, informing them of our intent to sell alcoholic beverages on the premises. They have 30 days to lodge a formal complaint if they want to, although we don't expect any trouble. And if anyone does complain, well, we just won't serve them any drinks.

Paint, Counter-Paint

We're back to painting. Upstairs, Kathy is painting her office/study. Downstairs, Jim is working on the trim around the downstairs bathrooms.

Kathy's space has always been baby blue, but the long-term plan was to paint it light brown. After almost five years, we finally got around to it. Here is the darker of the two brown colors going on under the "witch's cap" on the top floor.

Meanwhile, down in the commercial kitchen, we also wanted to paint the small space in between the two public restrooms. The walls there had seen a lot of damage, first when the DPO (damned previous owner) added electrical conduit all over the walls, and again when we removed it. There was a lot of patching and filling going on, mostly with plaster of paris over the old original lath-and-plaster. The repairs left of lot of irregular unpainted areas. But nothing a can of paint can't fix.

That part was easy enough -- so easy, Kathy let me paint it by myself. But you know how one thing leads to another...?

The trim around the doorway here was always kind of second-rate. It was simple four-inch molding, not the nicely detailed stuff that's in most of the other parts of the house. It was okay, but not great. I remember last year I'd spent a lot of time sanding it smooth and caulking around the edges, thinking someday I'd paint it. Now that it's paint time, I wasn't so sure.

At first, my cunning plan was to use the router to cut some shallow grooves in the trim to make it look nicer. But that would mean cobbling together some straightedges along the wall to guide the router. That's a lot of work, plus it'll make holes in the wall I just painted. Better to take the trim down and work it on the router table. And as long as I'm removing the trim...

You remember when we redecorated the men's room we took down the original molding from that doorway (above)? The DPO had cut it down to a smaller size, and it was all covered in faded, dirty wine labels. We tossed that trim into the back of garage. Hey, I wonder if I can reuse that stuff...

My friend Jasco and I spent two solid days stripping wine labels and layers of paint. After about six applications, some of the original wood started to show through. There's no way it was going to be clean enough to stain, but at least we could remove some of the accumulated paint.

For the record, I counted four different paint colors in about six layers. There was a dark yellowish brown, dark battleship gray/blue on top of that, and two versions of white on top of that. The wine labels were applied over the most recent layer of white paint.


But the trim had been butchered, ripped down both sides to make it narrower to fit in the bathroom. One of the decorative rosettes had been cut almost in half. To restore it, I got some redwood pieces left over from another project and cut them to size. With a little practice and a variety of router bits, I managed to recreate the missing part of the trim profile and glued it onto the edges of the original molding. Some sandpaper and wood filler took care of the gaps.  I left a couple of the old nail holes unfilled so that it wouldn't look over-restored.

Now that it's primed it doesn't look too bad, if I do say so. The edges of this trim are all new. Ironically, I put the primer on thick so it wouldn't look like new paint over new wood. I'm hoping the gloppiness will help make it look older, like the rest of the trim.

All Our Ducts In a Row

We have a fan base! Or at least, a working fan.

Once the old kitchen fan was degreased, it was time for the fun part: reinstalling it. This thing mounts to the outside of the house, sucking air out of the kitchen and blowing it into the atmosphere. That's all great, but the machinery weighs about 40 lbs. and needs to be mounted up overhead, outside the kitchen wall. Easier said than done.

Originally, the unit was mounted on stilts about 8 feet tall. That worked fine, but the heavy wooden supports completely obstructed the kitchen window. Who wants to look at the legs holding up the vent fan? So I tore all that down and resolved to suspend the fan from above instead of propping it up from below. Again, easier said than done.

The toughest part was simply lifting the stupid thing up into position. I tried hoisting it up with ropes, but after many scrapes, tumbles, and close calls I never even got it halfway. Kathy and I were able to work together and muscle it up. Once we got it over our heads and more or less in position, we tied it off with ropes. So the think dangled in midair for a few days.

The trick then was to build permanent supports around it while keeping it hanging in place. As the support structure went together, I could gradually loosen, and finally remove, all the ropes. Before long, the fan mechanism was firmly mounted to the underside of our back deck -- almost as if we'd planned it!

Actually, we had. Our original deck had been red-tagged even before we moved in, and had to be demolished. When the new deck went in, we were careful to make sure it left a fan-sized hole right outside the kitchen. To be honest, I wasn't entirely sure we'd planned it right (or that the builders had constructed it right), and that caused some sleepless nights. What if the fan won't go back in place? What do we do then?

But it fit just fine. Not a single beam or brace was in the way. Now the fan mechanism is back in its accustomed spot, but held from above instead of from below.

The second problem was routing the exhaust vent. Sucking air out of the kitchen is only half of the equation. Where does it go after that? The health department and fire codes have strict regulations about that. The exhaust vent has to be a certain distance from the house, it can't blow towards flammable materials, etc. We didn't have a lot of options.

The old vent was J-shaped and pretty badly deteriorated after all those years out in the weather. We had a new duct fabricated and I installed it just a few days ago. A couple of coats of house paint help it look a little less conspicuous.

Oh, and then there's the electrical hookup. The fan is operated from a switch next to the stove, but those wires were cut off long ago when the deck was rebuilt. Rerouting and reconnecting the wires presented its own complications, but that eventually sorted itself out.

Fan mounted. Electrical connected. New duct installed. Everything degreased. Let's test it. Throw the switch, Igor. Hooray, it works. The hood fan drones away and sucks so much air out that it pulls the kitchen door open. Success.

So we're in business, right? Not to fast. We need official sign-off from the Fire Department.

As the fire marshal watches, the fire-suppression installers again tie balloons over all the nozzles and pull the big red handle. POOF! The CO2 cartridge blows and all the balloons inflate. Pop! Pop! Pop! They overfill and bright little scraps of balloon flutter down all over the stove. Smiles all around.

As proof that we've officially passed inspection, we get a tag tied to the handle. I feel like we won the blue ribbon at the state fair.

What Cannot Be Un-Seen

May the grease of a thousand meals infest your vent fan -- ancient restaurateur's curse

One word: yuck.

After sitting outside in pieces for almost four years, it was time to reinstall the kitchen vent fan. This is the thing that sucks kitchen fumes out of the commercial kitchen, like an industrial-sized version of your average hood vent.

Except that the duct is 14 inches in diameter, the fan is the size of a fifth-grader, and the motor that drives it has more horsepower than my first car. The whole thing weighs about 40 pounds, and that's not counting the grease.

The grease . Oh, the grease.

Neither the fan nor any of the ductwork had been cleaned in at least ten years, which is sort of okay, because it hadn't been used in the last six. But imagine a full-service restaurant, cooking steaks and chops and fish and chicken and who-knows-what, every evening, night after night, for years. Imagine what goes up the hood vent in all that time. And imagine where it stays.

Now imagine cleaning it. I did, but the reality was still a surprise. Old grease gets really hard and black and sticky. It laughs at Dawn and normal household cleaners. So Kathy and I went to the local restaurant-supply place and got a gallon of the good stuff. At first, we picked up a big bottle labeled stove and oven cleaner, but the owner of the store said, "Oh, no. THIS is what you want," and pointed to a different bottle. "Use gloves. And a mask."

Okay then... we're talking industrial-strength cleaner.

Even so, the grease put up a valiant fight. You pour the solvent on full-strength (no dilution) and let it sit for 20-30 minutes. The grease starts to bubble a little bit. That's how you know you don't want to touch it. Then you scrape the resulting goo off and... uh, where am I supposed to put this stuff?

Fun fact: The brush I was using to spread solvent now has no bristles. They got shorter and shorter as I worked, and now they're just... gone.

This is sort of like stripping paint, but with a worse smell. Like paint stripper, the grease solvent doesn't really make the old grease dissolve and liquefy, it just makes it sticky and gooey and marginally easier to scrape off. It turns old grease into the consistency of honey, because of course honey is so easy to remove, right?

And it makes a big, sticky, biodegradable mess. I worked over a tarp in the backyard, which (in hindsight) added the complication of blowing sand. Cleaning sand out of the honey-coated machinery made it a perfect day.

I've burned through the entire gallon of solvent and barely managed to clean everything once. The fan turns freely now, and without throwing off chunks of beef fat. I had to rebuild the AC motor, but that wasn't terrible. Now I need a fan belt to connect the motor to the fan, because the old one was rotted. I figure any ol' belt will do, so I'll see what's on sale down at the auto parts store. I hope they'll let me in.