Drone Strike

It's 2017, so we need to have a drone.

Here's how it all started. Pacific Grove is a seaside town, which means we get a lot of seagulls. A lot of seagulls. They're probably charming when you're just visiting for the weekend from some hot, inland location, but they're not much fun to live with. Seagulls are noisy, messy, and very aggressive. We've seen them swoop down on picnics and steal food directly from a 5-year-old's hands.

Like any bird, they like to nest up in high places, which means they leave their... uh... mark all over the sidewalks. This is considered bad for business. It makes the downtown sidewalks look messy and it tends to spoil the pristine seaside look we're going for. So starting last year, the city implemented a "no seagulls downtown" ordinance. Henceforth, it is every downtown business owner's responsibility to make sure that there are no seagulls nesting on their property. And if a nest is found, it's the owner's responsibility to remove it humanely.

To be fair and considerate to the birds, you're only allowed to disturb a nest in the short period between when the birds build it and when it's full of eggs. In other words, you can't disturb a nest with eggs, nor can you molest a nest with baby gulls in it. We're not monsters.

We have to comply with the new ordinance because we're located downtown. So, we somehow have to determine (a) whether there's a seagull nest up on our roof, and (b) how to remove it if there is.

How, exactly, do we accomplish that? It's a three-story house and I don't have a ladder that big. I mean, how would you know if there's a seagull nest on your roof?

Last year, the city rented a falconer. She walked around town every few days with a falcon or a hawk on her arm, on the theory that flying raptors in the neighborhood would discourage gulls from nesting there. She didn't even have to let the birds off of their tethers. Evidently, just the sight or sound of a hawk or falcon will scare the gulls away. It seemed to work, too. We saw lots of the hawks and falcons, but not so many gulls. Mission accomplished.

But that was last year. This year, we're all on our own. Sure, we could hire the falconer again, but she's expensive, and why would I want to bear that cost all by myself? On the other hand, it would be kind of cool to have a resident falconer hanging out in our front yard. What a conversation starter.

You know what else would be cool? To fly a camera drone over the house and scare off the seagulls ourselves. So that's what we did. For roughly the same price as hiring a falconer or (more traditionally) a roofer to climb up on our roof, we got a radio-controlled quadcopter with a high-resolution camera. It's awesome, and it really works. To a seagull, drones are scary, noisy, hovering predators. So the drone serves two purposes: it takes pictures of the roof looking for nests, while simultaneously scaring away any seagulls that are there. Perfect. Plus, it's just a lot of fun to fly. I recommend it.

Here's a short 90-second clip of some of the aerial footage. (You can also find it on YouTube here.) The video may look a bit grainy here because it's compressed for the blog, but the original raw footage is fantastic. The drone shoots 4K high-resolution video; it's the nicest camera I've ever had, or been allowed to touch. It's better than TV-quality, so it's ample for seagull-hunting. If you look really closely you can see me waving at around the 30-second mark.

The thing also has a range of over half a mile, so it's more than capable of flying entirely out of sight. For now, I'm playing it safe and keeping it near the house. No point in scaring off the neighbors' seagulls. They can get their own drone.

I'm Board!

The molding work continues. I've been ripping, stripping, and shaping reclaimed redwood to make molding for the third floor. So far, it's coming along reasonably well. No major injuries to report, in other words.

This is a representative sample of what I've been making. It's five inches wide, and this particular piece is about eight feet long. Each length is different, since I'm reusing the basic baseboard trim that was already installed upstairs, and they were all different sizes.

I'll eventually have to piece these together, but so far I've been able to do the first five doorways using just single pieces of trim with no seams. I'll have to stitch together shorter pieces before long, but I'm saving those for less conspicuous locations.

I'll also need to go out and buy some more lumber, since we weren't able to reclaim enough wood to do the whole job. So the first doorways will use original wood, while the later ones will have new wood. Sadly, I don't think I can buy redwood at any price that will be as good as this old stuff.

Each piece required three or four passes through the molding machine. You can't carve out that much detail all in one go. The first pass allows me to make sure everything's lined up properly. Then the later passes take out more material, until it's all done. For example, this piece here still has leftover paint -- several different coats, in fact -- from its days as baseboard trim. One more pass through the machine should take that off.

Once these pieces were all cut, it was time to move on to the baseboard molding. That's a whole different profile, so it meant taking apart the machine and retooling with different knives.

The good news is, I could reuse different pieces of reclaimed redwood that were too narrow to use for the door trim. Somehow, the DPO used a mixture of thick and thin baseboard trim. The thick pieces are more than 5 inches wide, but the thin pieces are just under 5 inches, so I can't use them for door molding. But they make dandy baseboard trim!

This profile rests on top of a basic slab molding, so that the whole stack is 9 inches high and looks pretty similar to the original stuff that's downstairs. Unlike the door trim, the baseboard trim is not an exact replica of the original. Just a close facsimile.

Last of all come the plinth blocks: the thick base piece at the bottom of each side of door trim. It's the same profile as the baseboard molding, but thicker. The door trim is supposed to look like it's resting on top of the plinth block, like a Roman column. Whatever.

Naturally, we had to make these from scratch, too, but they're pretty easy. We start by cutting 5-inch sections of baseboard molding (both pieces) and then nailing/gluing a 3/8-inch piece of wood to the back. This gives us the profile we want, but thicker. Then you just nail that to the wall and you're done!

Here's a batch of them sitting out to dry. After the glue has set up I sand the bejabbers out of them to remove any seams and to hide my nail holes. I can do the edges with the belt sander, but sanding the contours requires hand-sanding and a lot of patience. It gets old after a while.

Speaking of getting old, I started hand-sanding every single piece of molding after it came out of the machine. The knives make nice sharp cuts, which is good. But the molding looks too "new." So I knock down the edges and the corners with some hand sanding, just to soften it up so it doesn't look like it came right out of a machine. I probably don't need to bother -- it'll get nicked up soon enough. But even so, I'd like it to start out looking like it's been here for 100 years.

Got Wood?

A very old project is finally taking shape.

Our third floor has never looked quite as nice as the other two. We suspect that it was originally unfinished, with just a basic floor and walls, minus the nice carved trim that was used elsewhere. The baseboard trim and door trim were/are just basic flat boards. We removed that basic trim several months ago when the oak flooring was installed, and we've stored it all in the garage ever since.

Our plan had always been to replicate the nice trim from the lower floors. But of course, that molding isn't available anymore. It was either carved onsite when the house was built, or ordered from a molding-supply company. Either way, it's been out of stock for... oh... about a hundred years.

No problem. We'll just make our own. Seriously.

One of our first heavy-equipment purchases was a Jet JPM-15 planer/molder machine. This is a noisy, vicious, and ludicrously dangerous woodworking machine that turns flat boards into custom-made molding and trim pieces.

The planer/molder works by spinning one, two, or three sharp knives at high speed while the wood passes underneath. Depending on the shape of the knife(s), you can cut any pattern you want. You can buy ready-made knives in all sorts of pretty patterns from molding-supply places, but none of them had knives that matched our existing trim.

So we bought a length of blank knife steel with the intention of cutting and grinding our own knives. It's very heavy and (duh) very sharp. You cut off a length of the knife blank and then grind it into the pattern that you want.

I spent a few days grinding my first knife and got pretty close to matching our molding pattern. Unfortunately, there are some small curlicues in our molding that I wasn't able to duplicate. I could get close, but my grinding wheels were too wide to duplicate the smaller details. So off I go to find narrower grinding wheels.

No luck. None of the building-supply stores or woodworking shops had what I needed. Dead end.

So I took the knife blank to a local cabinetmaker, along with a section of our old trim, and he agreed to cut a custom knife to exactly match the trim. It took him a few days and a few hundred dollars, but it's a perfect match.

Or at least, I thought it was. At first, I matched up his knife against the sample piece of molding I'd given him, and it was very, very close but not quite exact. No problem -- he got a lot closer than I did, so I can't complain about his workmanship. Then I flipped the knife around and held it up against the trim again, and it was an absolutely perfect fit. Guess what? Our trim is not actually symmetrical. It's slightly different on the left and right sides. More evidence that the original molding was probably not machine-made.

Now that I've got a perfectly-matched knife blade, I'm out of excuses. Time to fire up the beast and make some sawdust.

The planer/molder spins very fast, so you have to be careful about balancing it. I bought some scrap pieces of hardened steel from a local metal shop and cut and ground them to make counterweights. We have a hyper-accurate scale in the kitchen (for weighing food), so I weighed the knife and then weighed the two counterweights so they'd all match. It took a few trips back and forth between the bench grinder in the garage and the scale in the kitchen, but they're all within 0.5 grams of each other now. That's about the weight of a pinch of salt. That'll do.

The next step was to take the old redwood molding we'd reclaimed and rip it down to size. The molding we're matching is exactly 5 inches wide, but the plain baseboard trim we removed from the third floor is about 5-1/2 inches, so we had to trim off the excess. The edges were pretty ragged anyway, so ripping it all on the table saw helped smooth out the edges anyway.

I admit I stood back a bit and covered my face the first time I started up the machine with the new knife and counterweights in it. It's like starting a helicopter in your garage, but one with with heavy steel knives on the rotors. It makes a lot of noise -- and even more sawdust -- and if it's not balanced correctly it bounces menacingly. But everything worked okay. So far, so good.

I practiced on a few scrap pieces of pine first, just to see if it worked. And it does! Kind of. My first practice pieces had some high and low spots in them, as if the knife had dug too deeply in places.

That's because it had. I had to adjust a set of metal and rubber rollers that hold the work piece down so that it doesn't bounce on its way through the machine. Once that tweaking was done, the next practice pieces came out much better. Time to try the real thing.

At first, I started with short (2-foot) pieces of reclaimed trim. Then I moved on to the larger pieces, until we finished with two huge (10-foot) strips that used to live upstairs in Kathy's office. It's a slow process, and you can't really see it working until the wood starts to come out the other end (by which time it's too late to fix anything), but overall I'm pretty happy with it.

We've now got nearly 100 feet of newly made reproduction trim. That's barely half of what we need, so we'll have to buy some stock lumber and cut a lot more. But now that we've got the hang of it, that shouldn't take more than a day or two.

We're especially happy that we were able to reuse the exact same pieces of redwood trim that came out of these rooms initially. It's just being turned into something a little bit nicer.

A Game of Yards, Not Inches

Restoring the inside of an old house is all very nice, but you've got to maintain the outside, too.

We've neglected the outside yard for longer than we'd like, a failing that our neighbors have been kind enough to avoid mentioning. But over the last few months we've made a lot of progress. It's the greening of the Hart house.

This house had a lot of different landscape plants over its 120-plus years. Early on, it didn't have much at all. This photo is from around 1890, when the house was just a few years old and the first Dr. A.J. Hart still lived here (along with his two small children, pictured here on the front steps). As you can see, there's nothing much but some grass(?) and a few bushes along one side. Notice that the corner of the lot (right side of the photo) is nearly flat, with none of the terracing that would come later.

(By the way, this photo also shows the iron railing around the "widow's walk" along the roof line. We'd like to restore that one day. I also like the jaunty stripes circling the top of the "witch's cap.")

The young tree on the left looks like the beginnings of our present-day oak tree, but I don't think it's the same one. The one in this photo seems to be in the wrong place; our tree is a few feet closer to the house. It's unlikely that the tree moved itself, so this one is probably a different tree that eventually died (or was cut down) and was replaced.

This shows the house several years later -- the kids are grown now, and their dog Pedro is on the front steps  -- and the front yard has gained a few bushes. Apart from these, it's still mostly flat grass.

Fast-forward about 100 years, and the landscape has changed quite a bit. This 1970s-era image (below) shows three street plantings belonging to the city, and behind them some big, bushy trees and shrubs. There's a definite tree in the corner of the lot (right side of the photo), but it didn't last much longer. We've found its stump, but there are no other photos of the tree/shrub itself.

It's a bit hard to see in this photo, but the front yard now has its two-tiered terrace divided with bricks. Most of the grass is gone, replaced with low shrubs and flowers. And the house itself is painted almost solid white, with just a bit of dark brown trim. That would later change. It's clearly been re-roofed (probably several times), and the widow's walk is gone, as is the weather vane. Down by the sidewalk, an iron hand railing has been installed on the first set of steps. It's still here.

When we bought the house in early 2010, it had been vacant for more than two years. Before that, the owners had filled the yard with box hedges and agapanthus, neither of which we particularly liked. They're both low-maintenance (good) and green (good), but also overgrown (bad) and deer-bait (very bad). The deer love to eat the purple flowers off of the agapanthus, in particular.

Over the past five years, we've dug out all of the box hedges and most of the agapanthus. The former went all at once, in one big purge that involved a chainsaw, two shovels, and lots of swearing. The latter have been slowly reduced in number as we find time on the weekends and space in the yard-waste bin. Unfortunately, agapanthus have really big root systems that spread far and wide. Fortunately, we have very loose and sandy soil, so digging them out isn't all that hard. What you get is a big ball of thick, juicy roots, like a 10-pound clump of Chinese noodles.

Over in the backyard, things weren't much better. The restaurant used to serve customers out back, so they'd created a small brick patio to make it customer-friendly. Sadly, all that had deteriorated and was pretty ratty and rundown. The bricks were coming loose, the trees and shrubs were overgrown, and the wooden structures were falling over. This photo from move-in day shows a section of wooden fence tipping over. It was intended as a privacy screen between diners and the adjoining bed-and-breakfast inn (yellow building, left side of photo).

We eventually removed all of the bricks and reused them, one by one, to build a new patio. I think we had exactly six left over. The skinny little tree got removed entirely, and the rotting fence/screen disappeared into the back of the truck as well. The ivy growing on the back fence was running wild and pulling it down, so we cut all of that away and bolstered the fence a bit. Now we're training trumpet vines to grow on the fence in its place.

Little by little, we've dug out the old and planted the new. We've got an assortment of flowering bushes in the very front now, with some foxglove (digitalis) behind them. Alyssum fill in the small spaces. Some of the flowering bulbs that we found randomly scattered around the front yard have been left in place. We're not sure if they were planted on purpose or just found their way into the yard somehow, but we like them so we're keeping them.

Not everything has been a success. We keep looking for deer-resistant plants, but none of them really are. The young deer will eat absolutely anything. Even if they spit it out afterwards (which they often do), it still kills the plant or ruins the flowers. We've started spraying the yard with nasty-smelling deer repellent, and that seems to work. The downside is that it's, well, nasty smelling. Kind of a Pyrrhic victory.

So how does it look now? It's not finished, but we're getting there. Most of the plants are still new/young, so the front yard is looking a bit sparse, but at least everything there is there on purpose. It's the basis of the yard we want, not just what we inherited or what grew randomly when nobody was looking. And it's got some color, instead of just green leaves.

Wall-Ease

Okay, so the wall is done. It ain't pretty, but it's done.

When last we left our intrepid stonemason, he'd poured concrete up to halfway, then filled in some of the rest with concrete paving stones. That still left an ugly and hard-to-fill gap at the top. How to finish the job?

Taking the advice of everyone but myself, I finally finished it off by tediously cutting and fitting small bits of pavers to fill the remaining gaps. First I'd cut the existing concrete to make the edge more or less straight, then I'd cut a paver to fit. Move over 8 inches, lather, rinse, repeat.

Cutting concrete is remarkably dirty work. The dust it creates is really fine, and gets into everything. It's also abrasive and hard to sweep away, and if you get it wet it just sticks, like, well, concrete. So you have a dusty, gritty mess that doesn't want to go away. Now imagine getting it in your eyes and up your nose. For two days.

It also burned out my angle grinder. I guess the stress of cutting so much concrete and stone finally got to it. Either that, or the gritty dust got into one of the bearings and burned it out. I got to buy myself a new angle grinder. So there's that bright spot.

Here you can see the finished wall, with two coats of white paint. Before you malign my masonry skills, I should say that the blocks are supposed to be crooked and uneven, because the original wall itself is crooked and uneven. The top isn't flat, the edges aren't straight, and the sides aren't plumb. Whoever poured this wall originally wasn't getting graded for style points. Back when it was half-buried beneath our dirt steps, nobody noticed. But now that it's exposed, you can see how quick-and-dirty it was.

I had to somehow match that wavy, uneven wall using flat paving stones. So no, they're not perfectly aligned with neat symmetrical mortar joints. They're just as uneven as the wall they're repairing. It doesn't look too bad, does it?

A Left-Handed Compliment

Kathy overheard someone talking on the sidewalk:

"Oh, that's not a real Victorian house. It's one of those modern reproduction, faux Victorians. It looks too nice to be the real thing."

Uh... thanks?

My Little Yellow Friend

This week we replaced our light bulbs. Yippee!

We have a lot of ceiling-mounted chandeliers, both upstairs and downstairs, and they take a lot of little bulbs. There's always one burned out somewhere. It's like painting the Golden Gate Bridge: as soon as you replace one, another burns out, and so on. We keep a big stock of spare light bulbs in a closet, but it's getting expensive. And it's a nuisance, since replacing a bulb always means getting up on a ladder.

So we finally joined the modern age and replaced most of the little chandelier bulbs with LEDs. You can get LED bulbs in all shapes and sizes now, as well as in different "color temperatures." Early LEDs, like early fluorescent lights, used to give off a funny harsh white light. They weren't as warm and natural-looking as traditional incandescent bulbs. But now you can get LEDs any way you like.

We love 'em. They use only a tiny fraction of the energy of incandescent bulbs: about 4 watts, compared to 40W or 60W for old-style bulbs. So that cuts our lighting bill by 90%. And the LEDs don't get warm, so they don't heat up the room anymore. That's a big deal when you've got a chandelier in every room and six or more bulbs per chandelier. It's especially noticeable downstairs when we have guests in the house. The LED lights keep the room from getting too warm. Best of all, they last forever, so we won't have to climb a ladder every week to replace them.

They're not even very expensive. About $8 to $10 apiece when you buy them in bulk. So we took an inventory of our various light fixtures and bought new LED bulbs for just about all of them at once. We even changed some of the outside lights.

We made a special case for the big chandelier that hangs in our entryway. We wanted particularly "warm" bulbs there, so we picked an LED light that came in warmer color temperature (2100K, if you're keeping track at home), versus the more neutral 2600K color. They're great, but they're noticeably yellow/orange compared to everything else. It was a bit of a surprise when we first flipped the switch, but we kind of like it. You might say we've warmed up to it.