New Wallpaper!

We're on a roll. No sooner had we finished the upstairs baseboards and trim (June) and the door hardware (August), than we got started on wallpapering the hallway.

This is just a short hallway that connects all the upstairs rooms: three bedrooms, one bathroom, and the stairs down to the 2nd floor. It has a skylight in the ceiling, courtesy of some previous owners, and it has a reclaimed stickwork piece set into the wall, courtesy of Yours Truly, circa 2015.

We'd done some minor renovation to this hallway a few years ago, and painted it a neutral peach color. (It had been dark green.) That was fine, but it was kind of a placeholder. We'd always intended to paper it later on, and so, here we are.

Kathy picked out a nice wallpaper pattern that didn't clash with the existing (and very old) wallpaper in the rest of the house. We're not removing any of the old wallpaper (much as we might like to), so any new patterns have to coexist with it. Best of all, the new wallpaper was pre-pasted, so it'll be easy to hang!

You would think. We dunked the first piece in the water trough just like they tell you and... nothing. It's just wet paper. What the...?

Turns out, it wasn't pre-pasted wallpaper after all. It just said so on the label. We tried another piece from a different roll, thinking maybe it was just a manufacturing error. No joy.

March down to the wallpaper store (conveniently located just a few blocks away) to say, politely, wassup? They were very nice and gave us all the free wallpaper paste we needed to finish the job. Back home to try again.

Pasting wallpaper is messy work, but we managed to finish the job in one day. It's a small hallway, but every single piece had to be measured, cut, and trimmed to fit around some obstacle or other. A doorway here, a sloped ceiling there. And none of the walls are perfectly straight or smooth, of course. But between us I think we did a pretty good job.

More Brass Work

Before we finished the door hardware upstairs we put the finishing touches on some of the decorative brass pieces. Here are a couple of escutcheons* that go behind the doorknobs. They don't match, but plenty of stuff in this house doesn't.

We also cleaned up the crystal, porcelain, and brass doorknobs (at least one set of each). They were all paint-splattered like everything else, but they cleaned up easily enough. It was also a good opportunity to replace some of the fiddly little screws holding everything together.

*There's a word you don't get to use often! 

Mortise & Tension

The door hardware upstairs comes in two styles: old and older. The merely old ones are called mortise locks because they're mortised into the door, meaning you cut a hollow pocket into the wood to accept the hardware. Then the entire lock mechanism slips into the pocket, completely contained inside the door. Hardly anybody does mortise locks anymore, and I can see why.

The really old locks, however, sit on the outside of the door. They're called rim locks and they're also square boxes like the mortise locks, but they don't go inside; they get screwed to the outside. Internally, both mechanism work the same. They even look pretty similar sitting on the workbench. The major giveaway is the decorative brass end plate on the mortise locks.

The mortised locks have smooth sides designed to fit snugly inside the door pocket, but with a pretty decorative end plate that you can see when it's installed. These were all coated with several decades' worth of paint, but once they're cleaned up they look pretty nice.

Some of the end plates are definitely prettier than others. You can also see the deadbolt that sticks out just below the angled spring latch. We don't have keys for these anymore, but they can't be all that hard to find. I've taken the mechanisms apart, and they're not complicated locks. I suspect one basic key would work on all of them. (For you locksmithing nerds, it's a lever lock, not a warded lock.) It relies mostly on gravity to make it work. Don't install it upside-down or you'll lock yourself in!

Our rim locks mount to the outside of the door. They're more utilitarian and less decorative. They have a thumb latch at the top that locks the mechanism and prevents the doorknob from turning. It's not as secure as the deadbolt, but these are just interior doors anyway. I don't think anyone's going to break into (or out of) the bathroom.

On the other hand, because these locks are mounted to the exterior of the door and not hidden inside, the manufacturer dressed them up a little bit. Here's a closeup of the one in my room. You can see it says, "PAT'D JULY 21 1865 B.L.W."

Presumably BLW is the manufacturer. And just because it was patented in 1865 -- Civil War era -- doesn't mean it was made in that year, but it's clearly very old. Probably original to the house, which was built in 1893. We've got three like this upstairs, plus two of the mortise locks.

Jasco & Brasso

My next two kids are going to be named Jasco and Brasso. Jasco because he (she?) is great at cleaning up old paint, and Brasso for the nice polish afterwards. Those two have been my constant companions for the past few days. I feel like we're related.

Kathy and I finally got around to cleaning up and reinstalling the door latches upstairs. Just in time, too, because the summer weather has been nice and with the windows open the doors have a tendency to slam shut. Or slam open. With no latches to hold them in place, we're reduced to using makeshift doorstops to keep everything from swinging in the breeze. And when a door does slam shut, you have to poke a little finger into one of the exposed holes and try to coax it open again. Not terribly convenient.

All the door hardware was coated in layer after layer of paint. And under that, rust. So it all went out into the garage for a thorough field strip, clean, and reassembly. I thought a simple wipe-down with paint thinner might do the job, but of course that doesn't work. It took several applications of Jasco, along with vigorous application of a stiff wire brush, to get all the paint off.

Surprise! Some of the mechanism inside is brass. It was so dirty I couldn't tell. Most of these door locks are made from iron (not steel), but with brass for the moving parts. I cleaned them inside and out and applied some white grease, and now they work much batter. They even look nice and shiny inside, although nobody will ever know.

The House With No Doorknobs

We're very open here. In the sense that all of our upstairs doors are standing open because they don't have any hardware on them right now.

Part of fixing and installing all of the upstairs trim naturally involves lots of sanding and painting. (We've got the mess to prove it.) And that means removing all the door hardware so that we can sand and/or paint the doors. We removed all the doors from their hinges and then stripped all the old layers of paint off of the hardware before re-hanging the doors.

That only took a few days, but we never quite got around to re-installing all of the latch mechanisms. So our doors have been swinging open for the past few weeks.

I've heard that doorknobs are a uniquely American thing. Other countries use levers, not knobs. That was certainly the case when we lived in Europe in the 1990s. We never saw a doorknob the whole time. They really do seem to be an American invention.

We've gone that one better. We have no hardware at all.

Down To the Wire

Electricity. It's not just a good idea, it's Ohm's Law!

(nerd humor /off)

Several months ago, we updated the electrical outlets on the ground floor to add, well, grounding. They'd been two-prong ungrounded outlets since they were first installed (1930s? 1960s?) and it was past time for them to get upgraded. That project went well, but it also highlighted another problem: We don't have enough electrical outlets in those rooms.

The front room has two outlets, which is okay. The middle room has three, which seems luxurious. But the back room -- the largest of the three -- has only a single outlet, and it's in an inconvenient location. So we'd resolved to not only upgrade the outlets we had, but to add more someday. Today was that day.

Adding new outlets was a bit tricky because it's an old house. On the plus side, we're working on the ground floor, which means we've got access to the crawlspace underneath. That's much easier than working on the 2nd or 3rd floor with no access to the under-floor space. Also, it's a wood-frame house, so you can drill through anything if you really want to. Much better than working with brick or concrete.

On the downside, the walls and floor are very thick. Two of the three outlets were going on outside walls, which adds and element of chance. Where are the studs? Where are the floor joists? Can I get there from here?

The first step is picking the location where the new outlet will go and hoping there isn't a wall stud behind it. Tapping the walls works with drywall, but the thick plaster and lath sounds the same everywhere. Electronic stud finders aren't any help, either. So I started by drilling a very small hole into the baseboard. If it hits air after about four inches of drilling, I know I haven't hit a stud. But that doesn't mean the stud isn't close by on one side or the other, blocking the electrical box. So I stick a bent wire into the hole and wiggle it around, feeling for obstructions. If I can spin the wire in a complete circle, I know I've got a few inches of clearance on either side. It was just dumb luck, but I found clear space both times I tried. Success!

Next comes cutting the rectangular cutout for the junction box. A Dremel Multi-Max tool is perfect for this job. It allows you to jab straight cuts in confined spaces. I've got to cut through three layers: the wooden baseboard, the plaster, and the wooden lath behind that. Unfortunately, the Dremel blade cuts beautifully through wood but is badly dulled by old plaster. So I've used up a brand new blade after only two or three outlets.

Now for the fun part: wiring. Making holes in the walls is all very entertaining, but ultimately we've got to feed new Romex into (and out of) the holes. And connect one end of the wire to the juice. More good news: There's exactly one live outlet already in the room, and we can theoretically just daisy-chain the Romex from that outlet to the new ones. Piece of cake.

More bad news: Once I crawl under the house I can't tell where I'm working. So I create a little landmark for myself by pulling away the quarter-round shoe molding and drilling a tiny hole straight down through the floor. Then I poke a stiff red wire through the hole until I'm pretty sure the wire is hanging down in the crawlspace. Then crawl under the house, find the red wire, and measure from there. When I'm done, I can gently nail the molding back into place and cover the hole. No harm done.

Still more bad news: To make holes for the Romex to pass through, I have to drill straight down through the floor, but there's no room to fit a drill in the little 4-inch hole for the box. This is where a spiffy little right-angle adapter comes into play. It allows me to hold the drill outside while sticking the drill bit into the hole and drill straight down.

Yet more bad news: The new outlet is on an outside wall, which means the floor underneath it is unusually stout and heavily braced. Even with the right-angle drill, I can't just drill straight down, or I'll hit the thick 12-inch floor joists. There's no way I can drill through that much wood, and I would't want to, anyway. How am I going to feed Romex down through that kind of structure?

Some good news: Because this is an outside wall, there are two 2x12 redwood floor joists instead of just one, but -- hooray! -- they're paired with a bit of space in between them. So if I'm really lucky, say my prayers, and eat my Wheaties, I might be able to feed the wire through the gap in between the two. The only trick is measuring the distance accurately, and I've got a red wire to help me there. After just one or two false starts I manage to drill straight down into the gap between the floor joists, leaving a nice tidy hole that doesn't weaken or damage anything. Now just drop the Romex through the hole and you're almost done!

Lather, rinse, repeat with the two other outlets. The middle outlet (above) was the hardest of the three because I had to feed wire into it as well as out of it. Feeding Romex up through the hole in the floor is much harder than pushing the wire down. This called for a bit of fishing wire and some electrical tape, but eventually it came up through the dark recesses of the subfloor and into daylight.

The third outlet was the easiest of all because it backed up to the dumbwaiter shaft, which is hollow and big enough to stand in. I could see the back side of the plaster, avoid the studs, and feed wire from either side of the wall. Luxury!

After all that work, the room looks... almost exactly the same as before. All that effort, for no apparent difference. But at least we know that we've got four working outlets in the room now, and that's what we wanted.

Before & After, Part CXXVII

We're not very good at taking "before and after" pictures. Or more specifically, we don't take enough "before" pictures. This time we managed to remember.

Here's my new office wall after the depredations of last March. We've covered up the old wood with new drywall, blended in the seam, primed and painted it, hung an all-new light fixture connected to an all-new wall switch, and installed the baseboard and door molding.

Looks better, right?