Look, I warned you. I advised you. I begged and implored you not to. I got obstreperous, and borderline bossy about the whole thing. I told you that under no circumstances do you want to sand a wood floor with nothing but hand sanders, remember?
Gather ’round the internet, brothers and sisters. Lay your hands on the hard drive. Feel the energy I’m projecting out into the ether. Listen to me and you’ll be saved, praise Intel! Don’t ever sand a floor with hand sanders. It’s something stupid.
And still and all, here we are. I done did it again.
You can justify almost any behavior if you dial in your thinker-upper hard enough. There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. What the hell did Shakespeare know about refinishing floors? Not much, I’ll bet. And Hamlet was a tragedy, remember? Sanding the floor with a belt sander, followed by umpty-nine passes with an orbital sander gets filed under: comedy, clowns.
It’s just dumb, not tragic. You do it because, you know, the finish is practically worn off already, and the fir flooring is pretty soft, and the room isn’t that big, and dragging a rental sander up the stairs is no picnic, and the rental house is closed on the weekend, and several other good, honest lies you mumble under your breath while fixing to do it anyway. Besides, if refusing to do things just because they were dumb caught on, TikTok would be out of business overnight. I’m just going with the flow, really.
So we sanded the floor with hand sanders. It’s brutal work. In case you haven’t caught on yet, I can’t recommend it. But when it was done, it didn’t look half bad. I do own better sanders than most folks. I’ve got a 6″ diameter random orbit sander with a vacuum attachment that covers a lot of ground in a hurry, but it’s still a fool’s errand.
I went rooting around in the basement and found a gallon of wood stain left over from a restaurant remodeling job from thirty years ago. Not only can’t you get this color anymore, the manufacturer doesn’t make the product anymore. But Ben Moore Special Walnut looked like we picked it out special. And the price was right.
There’s plenty of advice extant about finishing a raw wood floor like this. The wood is too thirsty and splotches easily. That leads to reading the labels on wood conditioners, and listening to old-timers on bulletin boards telling you to thin out shellac and put a whisper thin coat on first, and then stain. Then again I got my lessons on floor stain application from guys who were old timers when today’s crop of old-timers were infants. Their advice for most everything about construction was pretty much the same: GO FASTER, OR YOU’RE FIRED.
So I avoid splotching by moving so quickly my wife can’t photograph me clearly. It looks like the walls are moving fast, too. Must have been a serendipitously timed earthquake at the time. We have lots of them here in Maine, apparently.
The baseboard isn’t painted yet, because there’s no point before the floor is done. The rest of the room is painted completely, though, because there’s no point in finishing the floor before the room is painted. Scheduling jobs is easy when you work alone. Once subcontractors are involved, it gets dicey. You can’t tell them to go away and come back if the job’s not ready yet, because they’re forgetful and only remember the “go away” part. So everything gets done in the wrong order or it doesn’t get done at all. This room is a luxury for me. It’s empty and I can just work in it sensibly. Sensible except for the sand the floor with hand sanders part, I mean.
Once the stain dried, I let the floor have it with some more scavenged gloss quick-dry varnish. You paint it on around the perimeter with a small brush, and then fill in the center with a lambswool pad on a pole. It’s another operation that requires you to work quickly, because if you falter, it gets uber-sticky in a hurry, and shows lap marks.
Well we got us plenty before pictures, ayuh. And after pictures ain’t hard to come by, neither. But by gad, where are the during pitchas? Beats me.
I wish we had some, but it’s not like I’m breaking new ground here. I can’t wow you with scintillating new methods to patch up crumbling horsehair plaster. We patched up the room, I promise. I aver that I didn’t go next door and take pictures of a different room in better shape to fool the unwary reader. Besides, every room in the town I live in is a before picture. I have the only after pictures there are.
But before we tread a step further into our truncated renovation wonderland, I want to assure you that I didn’t make my kids use that room in the hedronic state I showed you yesterday. We sort of patched it up right away, until we could fix it more or less properly. You know, like sticking your finger in a gunshot wound. I took some more of the ad hoc concoction of green wall paint and put it over the hedrons and poiple paint on the walls. We scrubbed the calsomine off the ceiling and painted it white. We wired a few plugs in a wall or two, and made the two sconces by the door operational, after disconnecting all the knob and tube wiring. At first, we used the room as a schoolroom. My wife took one of her famous fuzzy pictures of it:
Oh, man I remember that car carpet. I miss lolling on the floor with the kids and pushing Matchbox cars around. I often wonder how people who decide never to have kids manage to live without a car carpet and Matchbox cars. The kids make a good excuse to keep buying the little cars. Otherwise you feel silly. You do it, but you feel silly while you’re all alone at the toy store buying Hot Wheels cars with a gold card.
When they were real young, the kids actually sat and learned at that ancient school desk by the window. My wife patiently slipped a fresh sheet of foolscap under their noses while withdrawing the finished one, over and over, for many years. Her pictures are fuzzy but her thinking isn’t, except that one time she deigned to talk to a bass player. We all have lapses in judgment.
The bigger desk looked like this, and so did the bigger smaller kid.
Must be a day off. He’s Halo-ing or something, keyboard at the ready on two sides, and a shrine to the gods of mayhem on the wall. Please note the ripples in the wall. There was a lot of that after we jacked up the house. Old plaster over lath doesn’t hang on, sloopy, when things get jiggy. The plaster “keys” that hold it together from behind the lath break off, and it starts to crumble and lift off.
The roof over this room was among the largest sections of old roofing on the house, and the last to get replaced. It leaked like a disgruntled Pentagon staffer for years. Every once in a while, it rained inside in this room, and we’d position a wastebasket or two under the drips and keep on keepin’ on. I counseled my wife that it was folly to patch the place up permanently until the roof was fixed, but that kind of logic is cold comfort when you’re teaching class under an umbrella.
After a while, the ceiling got really bad, and we were worried all the plaster might stop thinking about the floor, and just finally go and introduce itself. Luckily, we re-roofed about that time, and convinced the roof to start leaking somewhere else for a change, and got busy in the green room, finally.
We installed beaucoup electricity in there, first. Almost every wall now has at least one plug, and the long walls have several. If you’re trying to retrofit a house with electricity like this, you’re going to get lots of advice from teevee that involves doing all sorts of contortions to avoid disturbing the plaster walls. As you can see, our walls were plenty disturbed already. In any case, I don’t understand that kind of advice. It’s easy to fix plaster and drywall walls. It’s a pain in the ass to fish wires horizontally with studs every sixteen inches or so.
So do like we did. At the proper height (18″ above the floor in most places), use a utility knife (box cutter) to slice a trench out of the plaster wall, about the height of the electrical boxes that will be added. In a drywall wall, you can save the drywall pieces you remove and then screw them back in place when you’re done, and tape and mud the seams. In a plaster and lath wall, you can chop out the plaster and discard it, and replace it with patches made from drywall.
Now pry the lath off the studs in the trench you made. With easy access, you can drill holes in the studs to run your new romex wire. We fed the sconces straight up the stud bays from some plugs we added, and fished a wire up to the switch by the door. Replace the lath when you’re done (for thickness), and then cut strips of drywall to the length and width of the slot in the plaster. Most plaster walls are about 1/2″ thick, same as a standard sheet of drywall. Tape and mud the seams, and finish the wall like any other.
Then we used about 10,000 plaster buttons on the ceiling. I may be misremembering this number. It could have been more. But we got it, and the wall ripples you saw in an earlier picture, to calm down and act flattish. We buried drywall reinforcing tape in all the plaster repairs to keep long cracks from reappearing before the paint dried. We painted the walls the same color as the kitchen and our bathroom (Titanium, by Ben Moore), because the kid said he liked it, and he’d have to spend all his time in there.
We used Ben Moore White Dove on all the trim again, too, because that spoke in the color wheel had already been invented, and looked nice. The woodwork shapes were too blah for my tastes. We had to completely pry off the door frames to square up the door jamb, because it wasn’t really a rectangle anymore. The sagging house had tried to make a hedron out of it, too. Might as well make improvements while we patched it back together. So I built up a head casing out of four pieces of lumberyard pine. A table saw and a router is all you need. Like this:
They had simple plain square blocks in the corners before, an homage to rosette blocks. Not much of a tribute, really. My solution is appropriate to the age of the house, more or less, and every doorway looks better with a head on its shoulders, if you ask me. We put the same head casing arrangement on the window.
So the room was electrified, if not exactly electrifying. The ceiling was white, and flat. The walls were painted. The wooden trim was a nice off-white. This means it was about time for me to make a huge mistake, like I usually do. I did.
Alexander the Great famously wept when he conquered everyplace on his maps, and a bunch of places that weren’t, because there were no worlds left to conquer. He was worried about boredom. I don’t have that sort of problem. That’s the beauty of buying a house in total disrepair. By the time you get to the end of the list of chores, the first thing on your list needs a fresh coat of paint. A ship of Theseus still needs varnish on the brightwork every year or two.
Me? I don’t get bored. I haven’t been bored in so long I forget what boredom is like. I imagine it’s like getting hired to be the stunt double for Kevin Costner in The Big Chill. I think I might like boredom, but as they say, “I’m sorry, the lifestyle you ordered is out of stock. Please select another.”
So let’s just stumble into another doorway in the upstairs hallway and see if there’s a room that we can renovate. Look, here’s one:
Hmm. Hedrons. I don’t know how bored you’d have to be to have the kind of time it takes to paint hedrons on your wall, but someone had that kind of time. It’s one of the least interesting, dare I say boring things in the room, though. It can’t compete with the munchkin door, leading to a spider kingdom and a hellmouth. I’d write a macabre, 1,100-word book about if I lived four hours east of here, but I don’t.
The ceiling is very interesting. It has the original coat of paint on it, and it ain’t paint (Hello Dr. Suess). It’s calsomine, a sort of whitewash that someone tinted with yellow. Calsomine is forever water soluble. If you try to paint over it, the paint peels forevermore. That’s why old houses have so many peeling ceilings (Dr. Suess strikes again). I’ve encountered acres of calsomine in my career, but this is the first intact ceiling I ever saw. It’s funny, but since the house had been neglected for a century, I didn’t have to deal with one hundred years of intervening foolishness like I did in most of the rest of the house. All you need to remove calsomine is bucket and sponge and some water. Scrubs right off, and the ceiling is ready for a less vibrant coat of ceiling white.
People often accuse Victorians of being stick-in-the-muds. Victorian means uptight when used as an adjective. I dunno. That’s a pretty exuberant ceiling color. In another room, it was robin’s egg blue. Neither was a boring color.
Stand in front of the window and look back, and you can see the room’s plenty big. No closet, though. The wall sconces were wired with knob and tube, which makes me pretty sure they’re original equipment, although the fixtures themselves were changed out in the 1950s or so.
The wall on the right as you walk in the door had a sconce, too, and miracle of miracles, a convenience outlet in the baseboard. Those were rarer than common sense in congress in our shack. If you look closely, you can see that the fir, solid panel door is battered something awful. All the doors upstairs show ghost outlines and abandoned screwholes from padlock hasps on the hallway side. Somebody wanted to lock someone or something inside those rooms. Page the writer four hours east, and let’s move on.
Here’s a closeup of the baseboard heat someone installed back in the day. They ran the romex cable along the baseboard, held in place with nasty, bare metal U-shaped staples. I gather the heating didn’t work after a while, so the took off the cover plate and wiggled the wires around to no avail, and then lost the plate. They should have looked inside the little door. Mice had eaten all the insulation off the romex wire, and it had shorted out.
Well, my spare heir goes to college online, and we needed a workroom for him. This will do nicely, and act as a spare bedroom to boot. It’s a simple job compared to the rest of the rooms. Let’s get cracking.
[To be continued. To help support Sippican Cottage, feel free to leave comments, tell online friends about this site, or donate via our tip jar. Thanks!]
Tommy Emmanuel is from Australia, so I assume he can play it upside-down, too. He can play it every other which-a-way.
He said his childhood hero was Chet Atkins. That’s a good one to have. He practiced hard and eventually he got to make a record with Chet. Think about that. How many of us grow up to meet our childhood hero, look him straight in the eye as an equal, and do something notable with them? It’s fantastic.
I hope someday I’ll meet my childhood hero, and get to ask him questions, help him with his work, and just generally pal around with him. I can picture it now:
“Say, how do you keep the lakes of fire from going out? Do you buy your pitchforks retail? That’s crazy. You should get a wholesale lot of them, finance the whole bunch, and then lease the lot back to yourself to get the tax deduction. C’mon, there must be plenty of tax attorneys down here, ask one. And another thing, what do you do with all those handbaskets? We could open up an Etsy shop and sell those, too. Different revenue streams are important for any business, and they always pay off in the long term, even if it’s eternity.”
“Listen, you, one more word and you’re going in the lake of lava.”
“Well, ackshually, I don’t mean to be pedantic, but we’re underground, so that’s magma, not lava.”
Well, robots are sweeping the internet. I’m unconcerned. The internet needs sweeping, and a good de-lousing, too. I could explain Open AI to you, but since every news outlet and blog has already done so, I’ll skip it, if you don’t mind. Their reactions to it sounded a might robotic, to my ear, which is telling. The internet was welded into a solid sheet of unanimous drivel quite a while ago. At least the robots can spell loser properly.
But I got to wondering about it. What does Open AI, AKA Chat GPT, AKA Bing SooperDooper search, have to say about me? I girded my loins and went looking for trouble. I wasn’t disappointed. Then again, the only way it could disappoint me would be for it to say, “Who?”
So I fired up the Dell turbo encabulator and moseyed on over to Chat GPT 3.5, and I asked it if it could write like Mark Twain. I figured I’d give it a good workout right off. Here’s what it said:
Certainly! Mark Twain, born Samuel Clemens, was known for his distinct writing style, characterized by humor, wit, and a keen observation of human nature. Here’s a short passage in a style reminiscent of Mark Twain:
—
Well, it was the hottest day I’d ever reckoned on in all my born days. The sun was scorching the earth like an old cat on a hot skillet, and the air was so thick you could cut it with a butter knife. I was sittin’ on the porch, sweatin’ like a glass of iced tea in the July sun.
Old Widow Jenkins ambled by, fanning herself with a hat that looked like it had seen better days. She says to me, “Hank, this weather’s so blistering hot, even the chickens are layin’ hard-boiled eggs.”
I chuckled at that, took a swig from my lukewarm lemonade, and replied, “Well, I reckon if it gets any hotter, we’ll have to plant our beans a foot deep to keep ’em from fryin’ in the ground.”
We shared a laugh, but it didn’t take long for the conversation to turn to the weather again. It was like talkin’ about the price of corn; once you started, there was no tellin’ when you’d stop.
And that’s how I spent the hottest day this side of the equator – sittin’ on the porch, spinnin’ yarns with Widow Jenkins, and wishin’ I had a river to dive into, right there in my backyard.
—
I hope this captures a bit of Mark Twain’s flavor!
Well, that’s not bad. It’s not exactly good, either, but it didn’t sound like Erma Bombeck or anything. I didn’t notice any hobbits mixed in there. I flattered myself that I could write like Mark Twain better than a robot, no matter how many hadoop backflips it had at its disposal, and moved on.
I decided to pick another name out of a hat. I dabbled with the idea of putting Hemingway in there, but I was afraid it would give me more Margaux than Ernie, and besides, how hard could it be to write run-on sentences spangled with fishing and fighting and drinking? Hell, Cormac McCarthy could do that, and he didn’t even have running water at his house, never mind a supercomputer. I tried something more subtle and off the beaten path, but not obscure.
can you write like t c boyle
Certainly! T.C. Boyle is known for his vivid and often satirical prose, exploring contemporary social and environmental issues. Here’s a short passage in a style inspired by T.C. Boyle:
—
The day started like any other, with the sun glaring down like a judgmental eye. I rolled out of bed, tangled in the sheets like a spider in its own web, and stumbled to the kitchen. Coffee—black as sin and twice as bitter—was the only salvation in a world gone mad.
I stepped outside into the suburban circus of neatly trimmed lawns and picket fences. The neighbors were at it again, engaged in their ritualistic dance of one-upmanship. One had a new hybrid car, another a solar-powered lawnmower. The Joneses, it seemed, were always winning.
As I sipped my bitter elixir, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the whole neighborhood was trapped in a real-life episode of some twisted reality show. It was a game of who could be the greenest, the leanest, the meanest consumer of sustainable goods.
I pondered the absurdity of it all, wondering when we’d all wake up and realize that our obsession with eco-friendly gadgets wouldn’t save us from the impending storm. Mother Nature didn’t care about our compost bins or recycled shopping bags; she had her own agenda.
The day unfolded like a cautionary tale, a satire written in the margins of a society so consumed by its pursuit of virtue that it failed to see the looming catastrophe just beyond the manicured hedges.
—
I hope this captures a bit of T.C. Boyle’s style!
Once again, not bad, if not exactly good. They mixed in plenty of similes and a gloomy attitude, so the robot’s been reading up on old T.C. Now on to the maine event:
can you write like sippican cottage
Sure, Sippican Cottage, a pseudonymous writer known for his blog, brings a unique blend of wit, humor, and insight. Let’s give it a try:
—
Once upon a Tuesday, in a town where stoplights served merely as suggestions and the local diner had more character than a Dickens novel, a man named Jack found himself at the crossroads of Nowhere and Who Cares.
Jack wasn’t your typical hero—more like the guy who accidentally stumbles into the adventure while looking for a decent cup of coffee. The town, with its mismatched architecture and a history so tangled that even the oldest residents had given up trying to explain it, was a place that could only exist in the curious folds of the universe.
The local news was as riveting as watching paint dry, and the town’s claim to fame was a scarecrow competition that got more attention than the annual PTA meeting. Jack, fresh out of a failed attempt at urban living, figured this was as good a place as any to rediscover the simple pleasures of life, like wondering why anyone needed a “No Trespassing” sign on a field of dandelions.
He settled into a rickety chair at the diner, a place where the coffee was strong enough to fuel a rocket to the moon and the waitresses had a collective wisdom that rivaled Socrates. As Jack stirred his coffee with a plastic spoon that looked one stir away from retirement, he overheard a conversation at the next table—something about the mayor’s cat running for office.
“Politics,” Jack mused, “where even the feline candidates have skeletons in their litter boxes.”
And so began Jack’s unexpected sojourn in the town where time moved at its own leisurely pace, and the most pressing issue was whether the local library should alphabetize the fiction section by author or genre.
Little did he know that in the quirks and quibbles of this seemingly ordinary town, he would find a sense of belonging that no big city with its skyscrapers and Starbucks could ever provide.
—
I hope this captures a bit of the charm and whimsy characteristic of Sippican Cottage’s writing!
A little light on litotes, and their similes are as trite as a fistfight in a trailer park, but they said I brought a “unique blend of wit, humor, and insight,” without mentioning a word about how cranky I am, so I’ll take it. I’ve never been accused of whimsy, before, though, at least not by anyone who wanted to keep all their teeth. But I must admit, there’s a dim outline of me in there somewhere, like yelling through a mattress.
There’s a fancy-pants version of Chat GPT that you have to pay for. If you know me by now, you know I’m going to go around the side of the barn and get it with a five-fingered discount. The Bing search engine had a free trial of GPT 4, and I gave it a try. I simply entered “sippican cottage writing style.” Here’s what it said:
I showed this to my wife. She couldn’t quibble with anything in it. I quibble for a living, so I’ll have a go. I’ll punch it up in editing:
Remember that Sippican Cottage’s writing style is unique to him, so don’t try to copy it exactly, or he’ll hunt you down and put toilet paper in your shrubs, if toilet paper isn’t currently being rationed. Instead, use his style as inspiration to finally fix the goddamned door in the bedroom so it doesn’t squeak when your wife gets up at 2 AM to go to the bathroom, and then write 1200 words about it.
Month: October 2023
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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