Sign o' the Times

Our new sign got installed!

We've been working on a logo for the business off-and-on for about a year. Kathy and I quickly realized we can't do it ourselves, so we hired somebody creative to design one for us. We had all sorts of clever ideas about integrating the "hart" (elk) into the logo, incorporating an outline of the house, adding swirly Victorian elements, etc. In short, we were probably a graphic designer's worst nightmare. "Oh, goody. Customers who think they know what they're doing..."

Eventually, we hit upon a design and a designer that we really liked. He's done a number of signs for local businesses around here, and we've always admired his work. His initial designs were a little too elaborate, with 3D pop-out deer and cute hearts, but in the end we think he got it about right.

The sign itself is made from a block of solid red cedar that's been sandblasted to give it a wavy textured background pattern. The main lettering is laser-cut from PVC (the same stuff they make sprinkler pipe out of) and will last more or less forever. The smaller lettering is expanded foam. The whole thing weighs maybe 100 pounds or so.

The black signposts were already here -- they held up the previous restaurant's sign -- but the top bar had rusted badly. No way it was going to hold up the new sign. Replacing it turned out to be pretty easy. I cut off almost the entire bar, leaving short stubs at either end. Then I rummaged around the local welding shops looking for inch-and-a-half square stock, the same size as the original bar. I also got some scrap pieces of square stock that were slightly smaller in cross section -- just the right size to slip inside the hollow cut-off ends of the old bar and support the new bar. A couple of metal screws and some JB Weld, and it's all as good as new. I can even disassemble and replace the bar again if I need to.

One nice side-effect of hanging the new sign is that we'll probably get fewer misguided visitors who want to check into the B&B next door but drag their suitcases up our front steps instead. This makes it pretty clear that we're not the local inn. On the other hand, if you try to make something idiot-proof, you just encounter newer idiots.

Bringing Home the Hardware

A lot of the "remodeling" lately has had less to do with making the house livable, and more with outfitting the business. Which isn't to say it's been easier...

Exhibit A is the collection of pots, pans, dishes, and glassware we've accumulated over the past few weeks. It's like moving to a new house after all your old stuff was lost in a fire or something. We need cooking utensils, forks, knives, and spoons for 30+ people, spatulas, mixing bowls, cutting boards, and so on. And most of the new stuff has to be NSF approved for commercial foodservice, so we can't just pop over to Costco or Target or Amazon and get what we want.

Instead, we've set up accounts with a handful of big foodservice distributors and have starting raiding their catalogs for hardware, like these pots and pans. The biggest surprise -- they're cheap! Most commercial stuff is stupidly expensive, but this 10-inch aluminum saucepan with the red handle was just eight bucks! (Actually, the handle was not included, and cost an extra $2.95.) Heck, for that price I can afford to ruin a pan a month and still stay in business. My next step is to season them all, which promises to use up a lot of vegetable oil and produce a lot of smoke. Should be fun.

Over in the "front of the house" (see, we're learning restaurant lingo) Kathy has assembled all the dishes and dinnerware we need. Every few days the UPS driver brings us a carton or two of bulk wineglasses, or plates, or those little ceramic sugar-packet holders. I never paid much attention to that stuff when we're eating out. Now we've got to find it all and bring it in-house. And find someplace to store it.

Some items seemed oddly expensive, like salt and pepper shakers, compared to wineglasses, which are pretty cheap. I'll remember that the next time I'm tempted to swipe goods from a restaurant table. And we found some beer glasses that can double as water glasses (we'll likely serve more of the latter than the former).

And of course, we have teapots. Lots and lots of teapots. The lids on these ones stay on pretty well, so we don't expect too many messy accidents.

The biggest downside to all this is the packing material. We've been going through a lot of cardboard boxes lately. Too many for our garbage company to handle, so we accumulate cardboard out in the backyard, where it gets wet overnight. A weekly chore is cutting up soggy cardboard and stuffing it into the recycling bin. Nobody told me the new business would be like this.

Turning the Tables

The tables are done, so now people have a place to rest their elbows when they sit. We made eight tables in total, four large and four small. Between these and the big dining room table we donated to the business, we should be able to seat about 32 people at once.

The tabletops are pine with pine trim around the edges. We put on two coats of stain, and then four or five coats of clear varnish. As usual, we did a very light sand in between coats, so it came out nice and smooth.

Getting the Lead Out

We went mining for metal in the front yard the other day. Not deliberately, of course. But these things happen.

Kathy and I were enjoying the nice weather all last week by gardening in the front yard. And by "gardening" I mean "pulling weeds." Almost nothing growing in the yard is there by choice. We just maintain the random flora as best we can, and try to eliminate the least-desirable ones.

I get bored easily, and so after dedicating a few strenuous minutes to weed-pulling, I found another project to occupy my attention. One that involves tools, electricity, and an element of danger. There used to be a big restaurant sign hanging out in the yard (and there soon will be again) that was illuminated at night. There are two lights atop the posts that hold up the sign, and two more lights down in the ground that shine up onto it. The wiring was getting old and ratty and really needed to be redone. Since Kathy had so conveniently removed all the weeds from that area, this seemed like a good time to redo it all.

The DPO* seems to have had a strange attitude toward electrical safety and code compliance. In some places, the 110V wiring was encased in conduit (metal in some places, plastic in others) and buried about a foot underground. No problem there. But in other places, the high-voltage wires were just sitting in the dirt inches under the soil. We've hit this wire with a shovel more than once, and the weed cover was about the only thing protecting it. With the weeds gone, the wire was often exposed, just lying on the ground. Not ideal.

So out it comes. I dug up all the 110V wiring, whether in conduit or not, traced it back to its source, and laid new conduit with fresh new Romex. And it only took me four trips to the hardware store! You know how it is: Once you get started on a fix-it project you think, "as long as I'm here, I might as well..." So the scope of the project keeps changing. And you never seem to have the right combination of elbows and unions in your junk box, do you?

Anyway, when it came time to cut off the old, dirty wires under the weeds, I was having a hard time. My cutters didn't want to nip through the wire as easily as usual. Hunh? That's strange. I know the wire's dirty and kind of stiff, but that's just encrusted mud, right?

Nope. Turns out it was encased in lead! Cleaning off the outside of the wires revealed a lead casing wrapped around it, like metallic Romex. I'd never seen that before. It had the usual 18AWG solid-core copper wires inside, but the outside was a thick jacket of this soft metal. Well, that explains how it held up to all those shovel strikes for so long.


*Damned Previous Owner.

A Bit of a Foot Fetish

This house requires a lot of woodworking. Good thing we've got a lot of wood. And sandpaper. And power tools!

Down in the kitchen, there's a doorway that needed some trim. It had been removed at some point in the past and replaced with simple, flat boards. We wanted to restore the original fancy redwood trim. Luckily for us, there was another door that had had its trim removed, and we could reuse that. Unluckily for us, only some of that old trim remained. The rest we had to fabricate.

We put up the reclaimed trim back in October, but it was heavily damaged, so we had to add onto it with some homemade prosthetics. Once that was all stripped, sanded, and painted, it looked pretty good.

Abraham Lincoln reportedly said, "a man's legs should be long enough to reach the ground." But our trim did not. The original doorway and the new doorway were different sizes. The reclaimed-and-patched trim was a bit too short. And the little footer pieces that sit at the base of the trim were lost, so we'd have to fabricate those from scratch.

I started with some leftover redwood molding that we'd used to repair windowsills when the house was painted last year, added some redwood stock to the bottom of it to get the right height, and put a pine backer on the whole thing to get the right thickness.

It's not an exact match for the original footer, but it's close enough. I wish now that I'd turned the redwood stock 90 degrees so that the grain ran horizontally to match the molding, but since it's getting covered with paint it won't matter. Still, it bugs me.

Here's a finished footer installed next to an original (and badly banged up) doorway. The new footers are a bit taller because the doorway is taller than its neighbor. After the first coats of primer and paint, I could see that the new pieces looked too "new," so I sanded off all the square corners and nicked and scratched it in a few places. On top of the footer, the left one-third of that vertical door trim is all new, too. I figure in about 20 years and another 15 coats of paint it will all look just like the original.

All Your Base Are Belong To Us

Sing it with me: "It's beginning to look a lot like... a restaurant."

We got our chairs a few months ago, and now we're getting tables. It turns out, restaurant-supply places all have ugly tables. It's easy to find your basic Formica countertops with steel table legs, but a lot harder to find something that doesn't belong in a diner.

So we approached the problem piecemeal. Let's find good table bases we like, and then find separate tabletops to put on them. Only half of that plan worked.

We did finally find some nice table bases. They're heavy, which means they're awkward (read: expensive) to ship. We got eight of those: four for smaller tables and four larger ones. The smaller ones will accommodate two-person tables, while the larger ones should seat four.

Then we went hunting for tabletops, and that was a complete bust. Discouraged and disappointed, we suddenly had the aha! moment. If we're going to cover them with tablecloths anyway, who's going to see the tabletops? Let's make our own. How hard can it be?

Right now we're about halfway through the process. We've assembled all of the table bases and bought the wood for the tops. Yesterday I built the first four tabletops; the next four are today's project. They're 3/4-inch pine with 1x1 pine molding around the edges. Once they're sanded we'll stain them a nice dark color and finish with a few coats of clear varnish. That should give the tabletops a nice smooth finish that repels water and won't snag tablecloths.

I'll let you know how it goes.

I Am Tin Man

No sooner had we put up the new shelves in the kitchen than they had to come back down again. The tin tiles we ordered arrived yesterday and they got installed today. Ta-dah!

These are reproduction tin ceiling tiles that we're repurposing as a backsplash. The county health department is okay with that, and we like the look better than your traditional tile, Formica, or composite material. The hardest part was picking a pattern (there are lots of different ones) and then picking a finish color (there are lots of different ones).

The other hard part was cutting openings for the electrical outlets. I carefully measured -- twice -- and then jabbed a starter hole in the tin with an ice pick, before using tin snips to cut out a rectangle. The trick is to cut through the tin tiles without bending or distorting them too much. Tin snips are not good for delicate surgery. I've got the sliced fingers to prove it.

These are individual tin tiles, embossed with a round-ish pattern and hand-finished in a sort of copper color. They're glued to the wall with industrial adhesive; I may add a few nails, too. In a day or so, when the adhesive dries, I'll run a bead of silicone around all the edges to make the backsplash watertight and keep crumbs out. Then the lower shelf will go back up. Should be nice.