Buy the Book

We're in a real book! Well, us and a few dozen of our neighbors.

The bookstore next door to us collaborated with a local writer/photographer couple to write, photograph, and publish a book all about Pacific Grove architecture. And we made the cut! It focuses mostly on Victorian and Craftsman styles, but also includes some interesting modern examples, a few churches, and a couple of notable commercial buildings. Overall, it's a nice look at the variety of architectural styles that our small town enjoys.

Every building gets a two-page spread, with a full-color photo on one side and a few paragraphs of history, lore, or funny stories on the facing page. Rebecca Riddell wrote all of the text and her husband Craig took all the photos.

There was a nice launch party last week, and everyone whose house was mentioned got invited to attend. We got to meet some new neighbors and swap old-house stories.

In a nod to privacy, the book doesn't include any interior shots, nor does it give out specific street addresses or mention the the names of current owners. Kathy and I have decided to turn this into a game. We recognize virtually all of the buildings in the book, but we can't always place the address. So our goal now is to make it into a kind of architectural scavenger hunt, locating each house on our walks and writing down its address on the relevant page of the book. Let's see how long it takes us to collect the whole set!

The first printing of Pacific Grove Architecture & Anecdotes was 1000 copies, and the publishers were kind enough to give an autographed copy to each homeowner included in the book. We got ours at the launch party, and we bought a few additional copies for family. If you're interested in buying your own, you can get it directly from the bookstore/publisher at www.BookWorksPG.com or by calling 831-372-2242.

Now if we see other people out on the sidewalk holding the book and writing in the margins, we'll know what they're doing.

Auf der Mauer

Speaking of Tom Sawyer, we decided to whitewash our fence. But unlike Tom, we didn't manage to talk our friends into doing the work for us.

We're on a hill -- the whole town is on a hill -- so our lot slopes. It's higher in the back than the front, and Dr. Hart decided to build a waist-high retaining wall around the front of the house. That allows the house to sit at ground level without putting the entire back of the house underground. It also means that if you're standing on the sidewalk in front of the house, it appears to sit up on a mound, because it is.

At any rate, the paint on this masonry wall had been steadily flaking off since forever. It finally got bad enough that we decided we needed to repaint it. A simple job, and one we could do in our spare time when the weather was nice. Like right now.

Like any painting job, the painting is the easy part. All the real effort goes into preparation. So Kathy and I started by scraping off some of the loose paint. While that was satisfying, it wasn't getting all the old paint off. So we kicked it up a notch and used a wire brush on a power drill. That was better... but still not quite enough. So we took a break, rented a pressure washer, and really went to town on the wall. Pressure washers are fun if you're careful not to cut off your foot with the high-speed stream.

The wall also has some serious cracks in it. They don't go all the way though, so there's no risk to the integrity of the wall itself, but they're ugly and needed to be patched. We used a combination of ready-mix concrete patching compound (hard) and concrete filler (soft) to fill the cracks and holes. The patching compound dries up really hard (duh), so don't use any more than you absolutely need, because it's hard to remove afterwards. It took a few hours with the angle grinder to smooth it out.

Once all that was done, we wiped TSP all over the wall to remove any traces of mold, grease, adhesive, or whatever. That was followed by some elastomeric masonry primer, which looks watery and useless, like nonfat milk. Time for a lunch break while the primer dries.

Monday afternoon we finally got to the painting part! Kathy and I split the chores, she with the brush and me with the roller. We managed to keep pace with each other and finished the first coat of the entire wall in maybe six hours. Not too bad.

The next morning we put on a second coat, and now it looks pretty good. With any luck, this should last another 20 years or so.

A lot of people stopped by to give words of encouragement or to wish us well. "You kids are doing great!" someone said.

Kids?

Can I Paint Your House?

Sometimes I feel like Tom Sawyer (or is it Huckleberry Finn?). If we're clever, we can finagle other people into painting our house for us.

And by "paint" I mean "paint a picture of it." Not quite the same thing. But we've had a handful of people over the years either offer to draw/paint a picture of the house, or actually make a painting and then show it to us.

Sometimes we even get them for free. A few years ago, a professional photographer took a picture of the house around Christmastime and then gave us a great big print of it for free. Other times, strangers have showed up at the door and handed us framed prints, paintings, or photos and said, "Here. Better it should sit in your attic than mine." A couple of these are hanging on the walls downstairs. Others sit in a closet.

Today was another day like that. A nice lady showed up at the door and offered to sell us her sister's original painting of the house. You can see it here, if you're interested. She was pleasant enough, but we really weren't in the market for a painting, so we took her information and left it at that.

Now, if she wanted to paint the outside, or redo the roof, or fix some shingles, we might be interested...

One Step at a Time

This was a small project that had been nagging at us for a while. When you open the back door from the downstairs kitchen, it's a big step down to ground level. It startled us when we first moved in, and it's startled a lot of other people since then. We've been wanting to put in a proper set of steps for a long time, and this weekend we finally did it.

In case you're wondering, stairs and steps are usually about 6" or 7" high. That feels normal, comfortable, and safe. If you have to step up or down much more than 7 inches, it starts to feel funny. Especially if it's a big step down. Ours? It was 13" down to the ground. People would go "ugh!" and get that momentary look of panic on their faces, thinking they'd somehow accidentally missed the step and were about to face-plant in our backyard. No more.

You can see here that there's a brick step right underneath the door, but it's not the right size. It's old, but we don't think it's original to the house. My best guess is that it was added in the 1930s when the house was remodeled (for the lavish sum of $2000, according to a local newspaper account). It's clear that the brick was done after the wooden skirting, because the ship lap siding goes behind the brick. It's not doing the job, but on the other hand, we don't want to demolish it if we don't have to. And it turns out, we don't have to.

Covering the brick with some wooden steps would be easy enough... but it's never that easy. We also need to accommodate a temporary wheelchair ramp up to the door. We get a fair number of wheelchair-bound visitors here, and we've gone to a lot of trouble to build a ramp all the way from the sidewalk to our backyard. The metal temporary ramp is the final step (as it were), into the house. Without the ramp, the whole project is pointless. So we've got to build steps that go over the brick but stay under the ramp. Piece of cake.

Remember when your 3rd grade teacher said math was important because you'd use it later in life? She was right. We fiddled with the numbers and came up with a design that could do everything we wanted. Rather than use stringers alongside the steps (like we did on the back porch), we just built a kind of box that sits on top of the brick platform. It effectively raises the step to a perfect 6" height below the door and -- ta-da! -- it's also 6" up from ground level! So stepping out of the back door feels less like cliff diving and more like a stroll in the park.

Nothing around here is level, of course, so some shims and sanding were involved. Then the framework got screwed into the skirting underneath the door, plus an expansion bolt down into the brick. That should hold everything in place. The whole thing is designed to shed water so it doesn't get trapped anywhere and start to rot the wood.

Most of the pieces on top are redwood strips about 1 inch wide, except for the very front piece, which is a 2x4. Since it's a lot thicker than all the other pieces, I notched it out so that when it rests on the framework it's the same height as everything else. I also did a quick roundover on the router to put a bullnose on the front. A few extra strips across the front hide the underlying brick but leave just enough of a gap to let water out and avoid resting on the damp ground.

Now my biggest concern is getting used to walking on it. We've made that long step down for so many years that I'll probably trip the first dozen times I come out the door.

It's All In the Wrist

We've been doing electrical work, and I've got the scars to prove it.

Kathy and I are refinishing the 3rd floor, adding new baseboard moldings and door trim. All of the old trim has come off, so we've had ugly exposed plaster and framing for a few weeks. That's not very pretty, so this week we started the long, slow process of making and installing the new trim.

We want to duplicate the trimwork on the lower floors as closely as possible, so that means making everything from scratch. To start with, we're making our own baseboard molding. We're doing it in two pieces that will be about 9 inches high when they're put together. The lower half of the trim is pretty plain, so we can do that with simple 1x6 dimensional lumber. It's the upper half that will be tricky, but that's a post for another day.

Ick. And no floor. 

But even the simple stuff is never simple. Before we put in the trim, we have to reorganize every single electrical outlet. Every room upstairs on the 3rd floor is different. Some have a lot of electrical outlets and some have almost none. Some are fed from the old knob-and-tube wiring and some have brand new modern (and grounded) Romex on a 15A or 20A breaker. It's a real mix. So we wanted to rationalize all of that. And since the downstairs rooms all have their outlets mounted within the baseboard trim, we wanted to do the same upstairs. So that means moving what outlets we have from their random locations scattered around the walls down to the same height, about 1.5 inches off the floor.

"As long as we're here..." Think Domino Effect.

The 3rd floor of this house has never had heat of any kind. No furnace, no fireplace, no nothing. So this seemed like a good time (meaning, the one and only time) to remedy that situation. We shopped around for awhile before finding some nice electric baseboard heaters that we liked. Each room upstairs will get one or two permanent heaters, and they'll all be fed by the new electrical wiring that we added a few years ago. Advance planning finally pays off!

Like threading a needle. Blindfolded. 

So the project now involves moving every single outlet on the entire floor, adding a bunch of new outlets where there weren't any, and routing power to a new set of baseboard heaters. All before the baseboards themselves can go in. So this "trim project" is really an electrical project.

But how do you run new electrical wiring in an old house? Where does it go? You can't just poke holes in the drywall and then patch it later like a modern home. So my plan was to bury the wiring behind the new baseboards. It would be out of sight, and semi-safe. We'll call this Plan A.

Technically, the wiring really should be protected by metal conduit so that someone doesn't accidentally drive a nail through it later. That would make it safer. It'll be a huge nuisance to bend all that conduit around the odd corners and angles upstairs, but it's doable. And I'll have to notch out the back of the baseboard to make a channel for the conduit. Call that Plan B.

But then Victorian architecture unexpectedly came to the rescue. The third floor has big exaggerated eaves on the outside, and this means there's a triangular-shaped space behind each wall. A space big enough to hide wires in. A-ha! Let's just route the wires in the hidden space behind each wall! It'll be safe and out of sight, and it leaves the original construction completely undamaged. Plus, I don't have to bend conduit or route a channel behind the molding. Let's go with Plan C.

At least the new wire is bright yellow. 

Piece of cake, right? Everyone knows how easy it is to just toss a coil of stiff electrical wire from one outlet to another one on the opposite side of the room. And hey, the holes for the outlets must be at least four inches wide. How can you miss? Never mind that you're doing it blind, behind a wall. And that your arms don't fit through the holes. And that 12/3 Romex is stiff and uncooperative. And that you have to magically "toss" this wire around corners. How hard can that be?

Pretty hard, as it turns out. I spent two solid days just teasing the %#@& wire from one outlet to the next. If both outlets were on the same wall, it was pretty straightforward. The eaves leave a big triangular space with no obstructions (okay, few obstructions) to get in the way. But coaxing the wire around corners was a real challenge.

After much experimentation, my preferred method was to use a long pole. First, I'd poke the wire through one hole in the wall, aim it toward the corner of the room, and just start pushing. Because 12-AWG wire is pretty stiff, it goes more or less where you point it -- for about two feet. After that, it droops and coils and goes wherever it wants to. But it's a start.

Bottles. Always with the bottles. 

Then, I try to fish the wire out from the opposite hole using a pole. At first, this was pretty easy. I caught the wire on the first try, so I figured I'd get all the rest of them done that afternoon. No, that was just beginner's luck. The gods were toying with me, because all the ones after that were exponentially more difficult.

(You'll notice in the photos above that there is no floor. The space in the eaves behind the walls just drops away, so if the wire starts pointing downwards, it's likely to go down a very long ways. Just adds to the challenge.) 

I taped a paperclip to a collapsible pole to make a hook to catch the wire. But how do you get a 10-foot pole through a 4-inch hole? Very carefully. I can collapse the pole so that it's only about 3 feet long, and then carefully poke that through the hole. Then I let it rest behind the wall, totally out of sight, and reach one hand through the hole and, little by little, expand the pole using my fingers. It takes a while, and really cramps up your hand after the tenth time, but it works. Now that I've got a long pole, I can wave it around behind the wall and try to catch the wire. And then try again. And again. Keep going... Almost got it... Maybe this time... C'mon, where is that %@#$ wire? You get the idea.

There's no way to see behind the wall (it's really dark) and putting my eye up to the hole doesn't tell me anything except that there's cobwebs and dust back there. (Don't inhale too deeply.) But you know what does fit? My phone. So after every dozen or so failed attempts to catch the wire I'd stick my phone through the hole, snap a flash photo, pull the phone back in, and examine the situation. I now have about a hundred photos of the insides of my walls. Can you say that?

Little by little, outlet by outlet, wall by wall, room by room, I got them all done. We now have shiny new wiring pulled all the way around the upstairs rooms, all fed by a total of six circuit breakers. That should be enough for all the new outlets as well as the new heaters. And if not, I can tell you just where you can put the extras.

Drip Rail

Some woodworking is decorative. Other times, it's just functional.

I made three drip rails the other day to try to stop some invasive water problems. The back of the house faces south, so it gets most of the sun and a lot of the wind. In wet weather, the rain often beats against the doors and windows on that side of the house. And in a couple of cases it's sneaking its way in.

I've caulked and sealed around the doors and windows, but water is crafty stuff. Like ants, but more persistent. So I finally got a clue from other parts of the house and installed drip rails over the affected openings.

They're not super fancy or anything, but they do the job. I modeled these after the drip rails on other parts of the house, particularly the second-floor roof overhang. It's just redwood 2x4 with the edges rounded over and then angled at about 40 degrees -- same as the rest of the house. I put a small kerf cut into the bottom surface to stop the water from wicking up the underside.

A few screws, some caulk, a little paint, and voila! Rain stopper.

The project was not without its complications, though. I almost goofed up and nailed a door shut. One of the doors opens outward, and I was about to install the drip rail so low that it would have blocked the door. Oops. Better raise that one up a few inches, boss.

The Hunt Begins

Now that the third floor has, well, a floor it's time to start on the next phase of the project: new molding.

The upstairs never had the same nice molding as the two lower floors. Instead, it's all just 1x6 painted in a variety of 1960s colors. We want the third floor to be as nice as the other two, so we need to duplicate some of the same trim work. Trouble is, the stuff downstairs is 120+ years old and they aren't making it anymore.

But we foresaw this problem. That's why we planned ahead and bought a secondhand Jet JPM-15 planer/molder, a massively heavy machine that turns ordinary wood into beautiful custom molding. Just push the button and whoosh! instant molding pops out. That's how it works, right?

Well, almost. There might be just a wee bit of prep work involved, but we'll talk about that later. For now, I need to find a way to replicate these rosette corner blocks. They're exactly 5 inches square and made of redwood, but I'd be happy with pine or just about anything else. It's easy to find similar corner blocks at a lumber yard -- heck, even Home Depot has something close -- but they're all too small and missing the octagon around the central rosette.

I don't have a lathe, so I can't make my own. And I don't know how I'd make the eight straight sides anyway, except maybe with the router. It would be tedious, but it might work.

I'd much rather find something ready-made, but I can't find any equivalents online. If anyone out there knows where we can get some, let us know! We'll even offer a bounty of... uh... some sacks of redwood sawdust.