‘Fuzzy Playroom Shot’ Is the Name of My Flock of Seagulls Tribute Band. But I Digress

Well, we’re a little short on pictures. But what we got, you can have. These aren’t glamor shots by Deb. Real estate photography has gotten real, real good these days, and it makes snapshots taken in a hurry look pretty wretched in comparison. Of course if you rely on modern real estate agent photography to buy a house, you may be disappointed to learn that the basement isn’t really sunny all the time. They just took the megaflash back to the office with them.

Well, let’s get on with it. Remember the hedrons? We do:

Ugh. That poiple. That yaller color on the wall. That sparky baseboard heater. It’s giving me hives just looking at it.

It’s better, I think. We kept the little portal to another dimension, but we evicted all the squirrels and at least dialed the spider colony back a tick in there. Hey look, there’s an electrical outlet on the wall. Wonders never cease.

Ah, yes. The entry door wall. I’m sometimes tempted to put myself in other people’s shoes, and try to think like they think. So they go to the store, and buy a tub of poiple paint and open it up, and start painting, and when they’re halfway done, they ask themselves, “What happens at the top of the wall?” And then they give up. Me? I don’t give up:

We threw a rug down in there, and it cozy-ed up a bit.

Remember the fuzzy playroom shot?

To honor it properly, we’ll show you the underexposed after picture. It sorta matches.

Don’t laugh. The spare heir is attending college at that desk, and killing it. Cybersecurity degree. We hear him make bwahhahhah noises from time to time when he cracks a password for class.

The room makes a pretty fair guest room, too. If you don’t mind sleeping in the same bed I slept in when I was in grade school, that is.

So we need a new project to describe. Dining room? Laundry room? HVAC system? The insulation machine we invented (well, assembled with duct tape and zip ties, anyway). Help us decide which meager set of fuzzy pictures and lame-o jokes you prefer to see next in the comments, if you like.

I Done Did It Again

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.

Tomorrow, before and after pics!

The Gods of Mayhem Strike Again

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.

[To be continued]

Alexander the Great Eat Your Heart Out

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!]