Avoiding the Sudsorama at all Costs

After the demolition was complete, and the windows in, we could get on with the drywall work. We pulled down the insulation we found here and there in the ceiling. We’ll re-use it somewhere else. Once the room was enclosed, we performed our leaf blower insulation trick on the ceiling to really accomplish something anti-BTU-ish. The ceiling is low in there, so it was a breeze. I didn’t even have to stand on a stolen milk crate.

That bank of drawers you see on the right in the last photo is my chop saw stand. All of my tools are going to have to move to another corner of the basement. I’m not doing as much woodworking as I used to, so I can make do with a smaller work area. The table saw used to be located in the middle of the room, so I could push 14-foot boards through it. If I never push another 14-foot board through anything, it’ll be too soon. Besides, even in the smaller workshop, if you position the table saw properly, you can open a window and still cut a 12-foot board.

Of course this was the scene of a crime. It was where the original electrical service panel once hung. If you’ve never worked in a wooden electrical panel before, I can tell you it’s a treat. I cut the modern-ish circuit that fed the knob and tube wires in the box. That was the end of the last of the overhead lights everywhere upstairs, but c’est la guerre. Once it was dead, there was no more live knob and tube wires in the house.

That wooden box was built like Masada. It was lined with asbestos, so we couldn’t just whack at it, either. I put on enough NIOSH mask to avoid mesothelioma, and then pried the whole thing apart gently, while spritzing it with water to keep any dust from flying around. The pieces went straight into heavy double bags, got zipped, and I exhaled again. When I was a kid, my friends and I used to dive to the bottom of swimming pools and hold on to the drain grate in the bottom and see who could stay down there the longest. I was young and full of vim. Now I’m not young and the vim needle isn’t on empty or anything, but it’s not topped off, either. But I do declare I held my breath for an hour and a half this time. New record.

Well, we slapped in some partitions and screwed up some drywall, among other things, and got the white cubes of suds rollicking again. I found four turned table legs I made somewhere back in the mists of time, and attached them to each other with some aprons, and plopped a tabletop I glued up fifteen years ago and never used. But we’re back in business boys and girls, which is the important part. The laundromat ain’t for us.

We tried the local laundromat back when we suffered our infamous Geyser of Excrement episode. Or more accurately, Mrs. Cottage was forced to try it. She informed me that the clientele at the local sudsorama was like People of Walmart, if you distilled them in casks of methamphetamine and garden soil first. Only the bottle redemption center can compete with it. People will wash anything in a laundromat. It’s not their machine so they don’t care much about what happens when you need to use the washer they just used to rinse out their horse blankets and car floor mats. Gasoline soaked clothing seems to be another favorite in our area. My wife was unsure whether everyone who used the machines before her worked at a 7-11, or dabbled in arson, or both, but they sure did splash around in the stuff. So our washer and dryer could only be out of service for a few hours, because I like being married and stuff.

Everyone who reads my blog should go out and buy a ramshackle place of their own, and fix it up and live in it. I heartily recommend it. I also heartily recommend that you take the day to day operation of the household seriously, and plan ahead like this. There’s subfloor under the washer and dryer, and drains, and a working GFCI plug, and a light overhead, and a trash barrel, and a table of some sort to put the baskets on. Little things like that mean a lot in these situations. And you won’t smell like gasoline. Unless you want to, I mean. I cast no aspersions. Gasoline smells better than Brut cologne, and burns about the same as Hai Karate.

[To be continued]

We Use Electronic Tubes!

Well, we stripped the old wood paneling off the walls to see what’s what in there. That particular paneling, blah brown with black grooves somewhat randomly spaced in it, gave me the shivers. If you haven’t figured it out already, I was born in the basement, and never brought up. And that basement where they kept me was a desert of paneling and drop ceiling tiles. So I didn’t know what I’d find underneath the stuff when we encountered the same pattern in my latest basement, but I was more than willing to find out.

We found most everything, as you often do in an old house. When the house got blown-in insulation back in the day, these walls must have been wide open on the inside. The only way to imagine how cold it must have gotten down there in the winter there would be to go outside in February. I try to go outside in February in May. It’s warmer.

So the insulation crew nailed whatever they had handy over the studs to hold in the rock wool. They seemed to have a lot of wooden boxes, and took them apart to get the 1/4″ thick wooden sides to use in lieu of anything expensive. That means the house got insulated before cardboard completely took over for wood in packaging. That would be about the turn of the twentieth century in the rest of the United States, and maybe a few years ago in Maine. All ideas, especially bad ideas, start elsewhere, and only catch on in Maine after everyone everywhere else regards them as vintage, or retro, or passe. I’ve heard disco might eventually gain some traction in the Portland nightclubs, but I’m skeptical.

There was lots of amusing stuff added over the years to patch up holes. Here’s a favorite:

Ugh, there’s that paneling again. Did they only make one color back in 1968, or what? Anyway, a fellow who used to live here in the 1950s and 60s used to fix TVs and radios in this basement. I’ve got pictures around here somewhere, courtesy of one of the long-time residents of this neighborhood. Mr. Tubes had a nifty delivery van in the driveway and a sign on our roof to alert the passersby that he was totally tubular.

Found them:

Before you all comment on the arctic wintry wasteland we inhabit, I feel it’s incumbent on me to point out that these pictures were taken in early November. It ain’t even winter yet.

I’m far from the first person to use anything they could lay their hands on to do anything they felt needed doing in this place. I found this stapled over a hole under the paneling:

It’s painted on actual canvas, like van Gogh’s Sunflowers, or Dogs Playing Poker, or some other masterpiece.  Fancee.

I don’t know who the BLICANs are, but their sign painter gets my vote, anyhow. It’s a daisy.

[To be continued]

Better Is Better Than Nothing

I know how you all worry. You see crazy pictures of me performing lunatic operations in bizarre circumstances, and worry that I might fall down and hurt someone you actually care about, like my wife and children. Don’t fret. I eventually installed a bona fide railing going down the death stairs to the laundry. It’s attached to a fare-thee-well to honest to goodness wood framing now:

The cat, of course, is trying to kill all of us all the time. She’s taken up a strategic position to trip the unwary. She doesn’t mean anything by it. I don’t think she’s ever purposely killed anything. I have noticed that many, many rodents have perished under questioning, however, when she brings them back to her precinct house to interrogate them about something or another.

I’ll paint the walls later.  Manana, jefe. I became fairly fluent in Spanish back in the day, when I was a welder in the desert. I learned the difference between the dictionary and the real world there. According to the dictionary, manana means “later.” In practice, it means “much later, or never.”

The railing is on the correct side now. There was a little stick for a railing on the left-hand wall before. If you grabbed it in an emergency, it would have snapped, just like your femur would have a few seconds later. If you have a winding stairs, you want to force the traffic to the wide side of the winders, so we did.

For additional safety, let’s put a window at the bottom of the stairs. There’s a boarded up hole there where a window used to be. It threw light on the landing at the bottom. We’ll put one back, and a matching window in the other boarded up hole nearby.

Hey, remember this picture?

It’s from our upstairs bathroom renovation saga. Those window frames were toast. Rotten, sagging, and filled with bees and bat guano. We pulled them out and replaced them with some twenty-year-old vinyl windows we rescued from someone’s trip to the dump. Like this:

Well, the window frames were all shot, but the sashes were slightly less disreputable than average in our house. We saved them for later. It’s always later at our house, so we’re going to use them in our potential laundry room.

If I’d known I’d be writing about this, I’d have taken some pictures while I made the window frames. You might have found them interesting. Sorry, I was too busy doing it to record it. But here’s what it looks like in place:

Nothing fancy. The windows will likely never be opened, unless there’s an emergency. I didn’t bother to put in any balances to move them up and down, or sash weights and cords on pulleys like the rest of the windows in my house. I don’t know what kind of emergency might erupt that would cause you to climb out this window instead of walking another twenty feet in either direction to a door that leads out, but you never know. Maybe if the cat trips a tax assessor on the stairs, and he breaks his neck, we can dispose of the body out the window. No one ever goes looking for tax assessors, so we could leave him there indefinitely.

I looked online for a video of someone making a window frame for a double hung window, to edify and amuse you fine folks, but nothing’s doing. Everyone either has no idea what they’re talking about, or uses $100,000-worth of stationary tools to make something they think is fancy. This ain’t fancy. In general, the window jamb is simply made from four pieces of wood. A sill, two side jambs, and a head jamb. Then there’s lots of little ticky-tacky trim work.

Here’s a diagram of an old-fashioned window:

The sill is a little tricky. When the knuckleheads former residents demolished the windows and filled in the holes, they took out everything, including the sills. I had to make everything you see in the image. The sill is slanted down and out, just like me. It’s supposed to shed water, so you have to cut some fancy angles into the back of it to get it to sit flat on the wall framing but slope outward on top. You can make the sill out of a piece of 2″ x 6″ lumber, if you’re not prone to mistakes. I made it out of a piece of 2″ x 8″ lumber. Infer from that what you will.

All the pieces for the window frame can be made if you have a table saw with a tilting blade, and a chop (sliding miter) saw. The sill has “horns” on the outside, to catch the outside window casing, plus a little extra.

Here’s a picture with the exterior sill, interior sill (stool), the interior casing, the parting bead, the side jamb, a window stop (it has three screws you remove to get the sash out if need be), and the exterior casing. And some weeds. They’re actually maple trees, but that’s considered a weed around here.

If you remove a stop, you can see the 45-degree bevel on the top. That fits into the only really complicated piece of woodworking, the head stop:

The head stop covers the gap where the top sash meets the frame.  It has to be notched to accept the parting bead that separates the sashes, and has the matching 45-degree cut to meet up with the side stop. It looks like this on the workbench:

So, the sashes needed plenty of putty love, and the interior side is still that nasty blue color my whole house was dipped in at one time, but they worked out fine. The exterior used to look like this:

Now it looks like this:

So, it might not look good, exactly, but as we say around the cottage, Better is better than nothing.

[To be continued]

The Love Child of Professor Irwin Corey and Fagin

Astute reader and commenter Blackwing wondered aloud in yesterday’s comments if our house was worth saving. What could its value possible be? How could all this effort pay off? It’s not a dumb question. So I’ll try to answer it. What’s my house worth?

Well, it’s worth a lot to me.  More than money, really. Without a house, by definition I’m homeless. I’m not young anymore, so I can’t be sexy homeless. You know, a scruffy indie band drummer sleeping on a different strange girl’s couch every night. I’d be wino-sleeping-behind-the-7-11-grade homeless. You know the look. The love child of Professor Irwin Corey and Fagin. That’s not for me. Plus I have a family, of course. I got some estimates but they came in low would never farm my kids out for medical experiments, or palm them off on Dickensian relatives who would refuse them seconds in their gruel bowls. Not my style. And my wife needs a home to keep the rain off her cat. No.  No house doesn’t work for the Cottage family.

But that’s not a dollars and cents answer. I’ve looked on many a spreadsheet for construction projects, and there’s never a column labeled “Sentiment.” I’ve already told you that our house cost less than $25k. I’m not sure how much lower a house can go before you start comparing it to pup tents and yurts. But let’s get someone else to put a value on our house. Someone with a gimlet eye for what a house is worth. Someone with beaucoup info at the ready. Let’s ask the insurance company.

We went without insurance on our house for ten years. No one would sell us any. Believe me, we looked hard. The only offer of any kind we received back in the day was from Lloyd’s of London. They said they wanted $1,500 to send an appraiser to look at it. If he approved of it, they’d apply the money as a lump sum down payment on the policy, which of course would be much more than that. If he didn’t approve of it, they’d keep the deposit money anyway. Every other insurance company turned us down flat. They didn’t understand our house, and didn’t believe me when I said I could fix it. It didn’t cost enough to make it insurable. All they saw was the price tag. But we’re trying to figure out value. Not the same thing.

But now we have home insurance. We finally found someone who likes money at an insurance company. He must be the only one. I don’t want to say the road to insurance was a long and arduous one, but we started looking when our spare heir was nine years old, and when we finally found an agent who would sell us a policy, it turned out that he was once in one of my son’s college classes.

Our policy is written by a regular company. A household name company, really. Super Bowl ad kinda company. Just so you understand that the numbers we were given are the same sort of numbers that the average American sees when they insure their snouthouse. The insurance company does an estimate of what it would cost to rebuild your house if it was a total loss. It’s an interesting estimate, because it’s based on putting the house back the way it was before it was destroyed. What would it cost to rebuild our house, according to the insurance estimate?

Section 1 – Property Coverages and Limits

A. Dwelling     $635,000

Other Structures  $63.500

I questioned him closely on this. I abjured the need to point out that coverage is the plural of coverage, and stuck to less orthographical topics. I offered that there’s no way we could sell our house for anything like those numbers. Wouldn’t the company rather insure the house for what it would sell for? Nope. They insure a house for what it would cost to put it back the way it was, before you heaped those oily rags next to the woodstove, or left a pit bull alone with a candle burning, or whatever regular people do to make trouble for themselves. The number represents the true value of all the components of the house, (re)assembled in place.

It’s amusing to me, because I know people whose houses really are worth that kind of money, and their insurance replacement estimates aren’t any higher than mine. They don’t have a metal roof or masonry fireplaces or big porches or solid oak woodwork or cedar clapboards or five-foot-square windows, or birch strip flooring. Their houses are smaller, plastic and OSB boxes, filled with undifferentiated plastery spaces inside, with painted particle board trim, and not much of that. If it wasn’t for their granite countertops, nothing much in their houses would be worth more than a trip to the closeout aisle at the Orange Place.

Anne, another pleasant reader and commenter, asked me where I might go to find cheap building materials. I’m living in it. I’ve got $730,000-worth of stuff right here, and I only paid $25,000 for it. Subtract out the land it’s sitting on from the purchase price, and I paid maybe five grand for the 10,000 admittedly poorly arranged two-by-fours that make up the place.

So I’m making a laundry room. It needs windows. I’ll make them out of some sashes we removed somewhere else in the house. Because I’m going to beat the value out of this house if it kills me. Or it. Jury’s still out on who will collapse first.

[To be continued]

Schroedinger’s Bevel Square, and Other Discontents

Well, we’re back at it, trying to fix the stairs that lead down to our potential laundry room. I was gratified to discover that I wasn’t a complete spaz. I’ve been tripping on those stairs for years, and I was tripping on them for a reason. The risers only had a passing acquaintance to each other, instead of being a uniform height.

Starting from the bottom of the stairs, the first riser was short about 1-1/2″. Someone had installed an additional layer of very thick flooring back in the day, and the stairs weren’t modified to conform to the new baseline height. That’s a pretty common occurrence in old houses. The next two winder (pie-shaped) treads were sitting on risers of varying dimensions, somewhere between wrong and pole-vault height. They must have taken a stab at the dimensions back when they built it, but were flummoxed by the winding layout. The rest of the risers were off by a 1/4″ here, 1/2″ there, until the top step which was another pole-vault height. The kitchen floor must have been installed last, and the stair builder forgot to incorporate it into his calculations. That’s also a common problem. When you’re cutting stringers for your stairs, the first and last notches are usually different than all the rest. You have to take finished floor heights into account.

So the risers on our old cellar stairs are all over the place, and the treads are too shallow, and there’s no nosing. This began to knit itself into an opportunity. Instead of ripping out the existing stair, why not build a new one on top of the old one?

Since the first step is too low, and the last step too high, adding a 3/4″ thick tread on top of the existing treads would fix both problems. I could add shims under the new treads to make up for all the risers that were too high. I simply had to find the shortest riser, and make all the others conform to it. I was going to contact the bar owner from yesterday’s essay, and ask him for advice on how to nail a tread over another tread, but I didn’t want to wake him. How hard could it be?

But the treads are still not deep enough. So what? I’ll put on new treads that are 1-1/4″ deeper, and round over the nose. After I shim them and attach them to the existing treads, I’ll add a new riser that sits on top of the new tread, and helps hold it in place. We can put a little molding under the nosing. That molding will cover any gaps left from shimming the treads to make the riser height uniform. Now the treads will all be at least 9-1/4″ deep. Not great, but much better. More than half of my foot will land on it for a change.

Hardwood stair treads are expensive if you buy them as blanks. We’ll make do with lumberyard pine. We made blanks and the spare heir varnished them. Like this:

The big one in the foreground is a blank for one of the winder stairs. They taper down to almost nothing on the inside, but are more than twice the depth of the other treads on the outside edge.

You start at the bottom, fit the tread, sit the new riser on top of the new tread, plop the next tread on top of that, and make your way up the stair. The molding under the nosing will cover any gap between the riser and the next tread. I had to shim the treads on the second two winding treads a lot, but the stairs ended up more or less uniform.

In installed wall stringers before the treads. you can see them on either side of the stairwell. Once they’re in place, you have to fit the treads in between them. How do?

You can’t just cut them all the same length. The walls bellow in and out. Hell, you really can’t even cut the ends off square. You have to fit the ends to the stringers. Here’s how you do it.

First, you spend four hours looking for your bevel square.  The first hour is spent in fruitless frisking of all your toolboxes and workshop drawers. The second and third hours are taken up with interrogating your children, of course. “By all that is right and holy, try to remember where you put the bevel square. Please oh god please remember what you did with it last time.” Then you give up and search around again in the same places you looked three hours before, hoping that your bevel square was involved in some kind of quantum entanglement and might re-appear at any moment. Then you perform multiple sessions of thought experiments in the Schroedinger’s Bevel Square vein. Maybe it’s both there and not there, you muse, and then swear. Swearing doesn’t help you find your bevel square, but it doesn’t hurt, either, and feels better than plain musing.

Then you finally give up and go upstairs with a hangdog expression on your face and you and your wife go to the Aubuchon and buy another bevel square. When you return home you go to throw the bag and receipt away and you see the old bevel square stuck between the trash bin and the shelf. This is why I have seven bevel squares. Well, I think I do. They’re around here somewhere.

So you use the bevel square to measure the angle between the wall stringer and the riser. It’s usually something like 92 or 89 degrees or something, but I haven’t been able to find my protractor since 6th grade, so there’s no way I’m measuring that. No need to, anyway. You just lay the bevel’s stock (the thick wooden or plastic part) square on the back of the tread blank, and mark the line where the tongue (the metal blade) rests. Then you lay the blank on the sliding miter saw and adjust the angle until the blade is aligned with the mark, and one side of the blank will fit against one wall properly. Now what?

If you try to measure inside dimensions like this, you’ll fail. I know, I’ve failed at it, long and hard, many times. It’s hard to get interior measurement correct with a tape measure. It’s easier with a wooden folding carpenter’s rule, but your children lost that fifteen years ago. Besides, the other side isn’t square either, so a single measurement won’t be enough. You have to measure fore and aft and connect the marks and cut that. Here’s how the old-timers did it: Pinch sticks.

There’s a lot of “satisfied hammer owners” on YouTube. That’s what I call (well, Kliban calls) folks who spend more time arranging their tools than using them. That makes it hard to find anyone doing things quick and dirty. There are umpteen guys using $30,000-worth of stationary tools to make elaborate “pinch rods” with brass fittings and mahogany parts, but really, it’s just two sticks from the scrap pile. Just cut a long stick in half at a 45-degree angle, and slide them past each other until the beveled tips hit what you’re measuring, and pinch them with your fingers. You don’t even need the clamp used by the nice fellow in the video who’s dressed to rob a train.

[To be continued. Thanks for reading and commenting, and recommending Sippican Cottage to your interfriends, and buying my book, and hitting my tip jar. It’s greatly appreciated]