2 steps forward, 1 step back

The doors are done! But I’m holding out on you. Next post you can really see them. For now here’s a bit of the process. I already said I’d be using General Finishes High Performance top coat in satin gloss with TransTint dark mahogany dye mixed into it. I applied this with rags. My parents have an abundant supply of old rags, but my dad gave me even older rags that he was hoarding in the garage. I could tell from the size of his underpants that these rags were REALLY old. The idea was to make a stain that would sit on top of the wood and even out all the different colors. Which means I had a few moments of truth.

I used a walnut colored wood filler in those big holes. I figured it would be dark enough to blend in and disappear. Was I right?

Yup, it blends in pretty well! Then there were the edges of the doors that were cut off exposing new wood and the one door where the Irishman spliced poplar onto the bottom of a pine door. 

That doesn’t stand a chance, does it?

But then I have another type of a story. You remember this vintage light fixture I put up in my front bedroom?

Well here’s the deal. The paper insulators around the bulb sockets are toast. I found pieces of them falling out before. But everything still worked so I decided that danger or not, this can wait till after Phase 1. But here’s the deal. My electrician put the upstairs lights on a ground fault interrupter. I don’t know why. But I took a door off a set of saw horses and smacked it into this light, and enough insulator fragments fell out that now the ground and neutral are shorted out and I can’t use any of my upstairs light fixtures. This also means that if I were using them this light would be live, but worrying about that is just splitting hairs. Anyways, I have a new priority 1 item added to the punchlist.

Anyways, the doors are done. I’ll be tackling small jobs and definitely owe you some pretty reveal photos soon.

Maybe another big job – advice please

I was pondering that back door threshold and a thought entered my mind. Possibly a crazy one, possibly totally sane. Should I rebuild the kitchen floor from scratch?

I took 7 vinyl floors out of my kitchen and found old (but not original) pine underneath.

The plan was always to have it sanded. But here’s the deal: my friend Chris told me that the pine floor in his kitchen is holding up poorly, and I have a feeling that mine is a similar material. (My upstairs pine floors are older and I believe harder than what’s in the kitchen.)

I always said dismissively that if the floors don’t hold up well I’ll replace them later. But the low corner of the kitchen floor is about 2 ½ inches lower than the high one. There’s no structural problem here; unlike Portland cement masonry, lime based masonry can settle without losing strength. South Philly used to be a swamp, so this is kind of a common thing around here. And although I can feel the slope, it doesn’t bother me at all. You see the sub-title to my blog. I wanted a quirky old Philadelphia rowhouse, and obliterating all the quirks is not the adventure I wanted.

So why am I considering this now? Because making a raised threshold to cover this awkward gap and bridge the level-to-crooked transition will take some work. Then installing cabinets and appliances on the crooked floor is more work.

Leveling the floor would raise it to cover that vertical strip of wood under the patio door and the horizontal threshold under it.

Then there’s a structural reason. Apparently someone had to get something big in or out of the kitchen because there was an opening cut through here. The home inspector told me to sister these joists, but I put it on the long list because it doesn’t seem structurally unsound now.

But if I level the floor, out comes everything. Then I will sister all the joists, and the sisters will go in level and support the new floor. This will be much easier than what we did in the back bedroom. Let’s look at a pro con list though. I kind of shudder at the idea of another project.

Pros

• No threshold at the back door.
• Easier to install cabinets and appliances.
• Slope may bother guests and other occupants.
• A level floor may be better for resale.
• Doing more now means less disruption later and an easier job overall.

Cons

• More work now means more work now.
• A level floor and plywood subfloor erases some of the house’s weirdness.
• The Irishman gets to say I told you so.
• More pressure to commit to a permanent kitchen floor right away.

Now about that last point, some people have urged me to put down ceramic tile. I don’t want anything that hard and cold, so that’s probably not happening. I would consider vinyl or linoleum as long as it’s plain and not printed with the image of something more expensive. The vinyl tiles I had in school would be fine. Or I could run the same oak strip flooring as I have in the living room through the kitchen. Or I could have a small bump between the rooms and use thicker tongue and groove oak, which ironically would be cheaper. And if I can’t decide, the plywood subfloor will be fine for now.

So what do you think I should do?

Dutchmen and Disaster

Last night I was sanding my banister when disaster struck. I decided that it was time to glue on the little piece of wood that I had broken off at the bottom.

So I went over to the stove where I had stored it for safekeeping and my stomach dropped. I rooted around. I stacked up all the random crap that wasn’t lost. I threw all the random crap I stacked. I looked through the kitchen cabinets. It’s not to be found. Is it gone? Or did I just move it someplace so safe even I can’t find it? I called my dad. Maybe he’d remember.

He gasped, and then he hollered. “It wasn’t labeled? You can’t blame me for this!”

This wasn’t the news I hoped for, but it was a good idea. I hollered back, “Yes I do!”

I heard him shout about it to my mom and that was about it. But then I calmed down. There were several little fragments of wood and they’re all missing, so there’s a good chance I moved them all and forgot where I put them. And if it doesn’t turn up, I can repair the damage, but it’s extra work so I’ll defer the banister until after Phase 1. I have a bandsaw and a router, so I can probably make a piece close enough no one will tell. Or if not, I’ve seen this same banister in 3 other houses around the city, so it was obviously an off the shelf product to modernize Victorian houses in the 30’s. I might be able to hack a piece off one to fix mine.

Back to constructive progress. The front bedroom closet doors had thick varnish residue that quickly gummed up my sandpaper and threw me into the depths of despair. But then I had a breakthrough. First I wondered if the globs would come off with paint thinner. And I found that the sort of did if I scrubbed hard. But then I got a better idea. The sandpaper says it’s good for wet sanding. So I slathered paint thinner on everything! This might have been totally insane but it kept the sandpaper from clogging and I could make it last longer by rinsing the goop out of it with yes, more paint thinner.

I may have come closer to restoring these doors to like new condition than I wanted to at first, but the grain is stunning, and there’s no way I’d want to mask this.

Then the other job was on the ends where the doorknob holes used to be. I dealt with the faces by getting massive pocket door hardware, but the ends were exposed. Luckily, I still had a thin piece of wood left over from when the Irishman cut these doors down, and the holes were clean rectangles, so it was easy to make stain grade Dutchman patches. I ripped them to width on the Irishman’s table saw, cut them to length, and then glued them in.

Then I went out for the day and let the glue dry. Afterwards I put coarser sandpaper onto the sander and went at it. You can barely tell it’s there right? So I’m closing in on the end of this dirty job.

So can we hope for a few resolutions in the next post, or is that too much to ask for?

The Phase 1 countdown: Can I call it a punchlist yet?

I’ve had a page up here for ages that I basically stopped updating. Because calling the remaining work a punchlist when it included pretty much the whole house was ridiculous and thinking about everything left to do was depressing. But now the countdown is short enough for an update! Here’s what I need to do to make the house a (livable) home:

• A threshold at the back door. I’ll probably run boards perpendicular to what’s in the rest of the room and with a beveled threshold to meet the existing floor and cover up all the bad spots. There are 3 other thresholds that need minor work.

• Buy cove molding for under the stair treads. I canceled this part of my woodwork order because what Tague sells wasn’t a 100% perfect match. Now I wish I had just gotten it. The first finisher said this can go in before he sands.
• Repair the bathroom sink drain. It’s kind of silly that I’ve been washing my hands in the bathtub for all this time. But if I have a serious time crunch I may put this off a little longer.

• Make a final decision about whose secondhand appliances I want. Put my stove out for the scrappers if I’m not keeping it.
• Finish clearing out the house. Extra doors can go to salvage, radiators go in the bathroom and the back yard, everything else I own goes on shelves or in the bathroom or the basement.
• The Masonite in the living room will become temporary trim around the Phase 2 windows. (Started – more on this later.)

• Finish the doors as discussed before.

At this point I’ll have the floors done. And then:

• A threshold, probably marble, in the bathroom doorway
• Remaining woodwork. I own most of it except for the 1×6 baseboards. The doorway gets the same treatment as the window.

• Kitchen base cabinets. I don’t own the cabinets yet though the kitchen is starting to look like the tentative rendering.

• Dryer vent. Even though Phase 1 won’t include a washer and dryer.
• Door hardware and hanging the 2 downstairs interior doors.

• Touch-up painting on walls and painting the trim that needs to be done right away. Baseboards behind radiators, windows that get curtains or blinds, and closet shelving first.
• Connect the radiators. This will be my first winter with central heat working.

• Install countertops and kitchen appliances. Secondhand, free, and beat-up as discussed before.
• Bring in furniture! I’ll do this in phases as individual rooms are ready.
• Non-essential trim and the walls in the vestibule and upstairs hall.
• Maybe repair the ceiling fan in the kitchen and get the chandelier working? This would be nice but I’m not calling it essential.

And that’s it! This leaves a lot of loose ends everywhere, but it lets me get in the house and take a big break. I’ve tried to put them in order, but the sequencing could change, especially if I find a roommate. Sound manageable?

The biggest jobs left: Floors and Doors

There are only 2 big jobs on my short list right now: floors and doors. There’s also a whole bunch of little things that I’ll talk about next time.

I’ve decided to have the floors done. Because I think it’s the only way to stay sane and still finish the house before my 65^th birthday. The Irishman has a guy I should call saved in his phone, but I’ve been trying to get this guy’s number for 2 weeks and I’m starting to wonder if something fishy is up, but it’s probably just his ADD in overdrive. Anyways, I’ve gotten numbers from reputable sources for three other contractors and they’re all coming in this week to give me estimates!

As for what I want on the floors, I have 3 different types of flooring, and I think I said before that I’m planning on using water based poly and no stain. For aesthetics, my living room floor must be light. That’s really the only constraint I have. A dark stain would hide the border. And though I could use a light stain if I wanted to, no stain is a lot cheaper. Picture them lighter than this. And not wavy from a botched sanding job.

Living room, front

The oil vs water debate is important. My understanding is that a good catalyzed water based poly is the best thing I can get. The Irishman told me that I should insist upon a good catalyzed oil based poly that isn’t legal anymore. He wasn’t joking. I’m leaning away from his advice because I’ve read that

1. The best water based polys are better than the best oils anyway.
2. I like the idea of my floors being really light and oil based poly ambers them and then continues to yellow over time.
3. Oil based poly is bad for the environment and environmental regulations exist for a reason.
4. Oil based poly stinks to high heaven and needs to cure a lot longer before you can walk on it.

The Internet tells me that top of the line water based finishes that take pro level skill to use are great. Like Bona Traffic. Of course the Internet also tells you every viewpoint under the sun, but this is the one I think I believe. Feel free to tell me your experiences though.

Then there are the doors. I thought they were all ready to stain. But I thought this mainly because I was delusional. They had rough spots, raised grain, and globby bits of varnish residue pretty much everywhere. I’m working on sanding them and figuring out what to do with the holes. Then I’ve already decided to use a tinted finish on them to even out the color. This will darken them to a mahogany color. It looked like this would just darken them a little, but they’ve lightened up quite a bit since then. I still think it’s the way to go.

Here are some of the flaws I won’t be hiding. The doorknobs had roses and keyhole escutcheons first, then were updated with rectangular back plates. I’m going back to the original and leaving the back plate outlines. I might put a dark filler in these holes.

But here’s a hole that’s not so okay. Yes, you can see right through to the bathtub. Do you think a dark tinted filler will do here? One co-worker says I should drill it out and put a dowel, but I don’t think I want to cut out the well-worn hole that’s already there and would rather just plug it with something that won’t change the look.

All The Progress While I Was Gone

The best things always happen to my house when I’m not involved. I balked at the price at first, but in the end allowed the Irishman to work 6 days in a row on my place. He finished a nice mix of things I couldn’t to myself and things that would take me long enough to make the Crooked House my retirement home.

To start, he hung all the kitchen cabinets. He said cutting them down to size and getting them tight to the soffits were both tough jobs. I’ll take his word for it. In the end they’re in, they’re square, and the fillers are scribed neatly into the crooked walls.

Boring through 10 inches of brick for the stove vent might have been a little hard to DIY. (Note where the old fan was before we ripped the wall out.)

Then he went ahead and did all the flooring repairs. These boards came out of the 2 back bedrooms upstairs 2 years ago and have been in my basement and then my back yard under the overhang since then. I’ve said this before, but someone did a hack job shifting the stairs over so the door could be in the living room instead of the kitchen, so I want to fix their poor installation bit by bit. The awkwardly thrown together landing now looks like somebody built it on purpose. And some extra oak boards tidy up where I made the doorway to the kitchen bigger. The plan is still to sand out that old pine in there. I could have done this myself but remember how the upstairs floors took me 2 months?

Then he decided that it’s not a big deal to install all the door jambs before the floors are done after all and put the last 2 in. All the better, now I can finish them before the floors, quite a relief. The crooked door to the front bedroom was apparently a pain.

The back bedroom door needed a threshold made out of a floorboard to transition gracefully from level to crooked floors. It’s made out of an original floorboard so we can pretend I have a finished house when we look at it.

And here’s the upstairs hall now, with all 5 pretty doors in place! It’s kind of funny that after I’ve lived without these doors for years, suddenly they can go in before the floors are done. But somebody wanted to keep entertained while he was marooned in South Philly.

Does it look better than the before photo yet?

Upstairs hall

And now the biggest door mismatch is in place. I was gonna paint all my doors until I realized that 8 of them are far to nice for me to paint if I want to sleep at night. So now all my doors will be stained, except for the ones that aren’t. I think these closet doors were made to be paint grade.

And finally, he’s not 100% done, and one of the things undone is the cleanup. Nothing stays tidy in this house for long. Here’s the living room I just emptied last week. I can barely walk through this but I decided not to mess with it till he’s done.

The Kitchen: Released for Construction

This is the weekend when the pope comes to Philly, and I’ve made plans to get out of Dodge. But that doesn’t mean nothing is happening to my house. The Irishman has the opposite plan: he’s not leaving South Philly, and he’ll be keeping busy by doing (the top half of) my kitchen! I put together a few last minute sketches to discuss exactly how the cabinets will meet the walls. He asked for a little more detail than I provided in the crude sketch I made before. And then when I remembered that we had this stamp at work, I COULD NOT RESIST.

Will this come together without a hitch? Well… have a look!

But I have another problem. I can’t afford appliances. The stove was in rough shape to begin with so I didn’t bother protecting it when I tore the kitchen ceilings down and now it’s really bad.

But my friend Eugene came to the rescue. He lives about 3 blocks away in a house very much like mine, though it’s bigger. And he just got a loan for a total gut remodel that’s set to begin in October. So here you’re looking at my new kitchen! Sorta. I’m now taking his countertops, sink, faucet, and garbage disposal. Pretty exciting! So these countertops will definitely go in my Phase 1 kitchen. The appliances likely will, too, but I have other options. It comes down to which stove is worse.

For the appliances, I was just gonna let them all be white until I saw that he just has a normal range hood. So no matter what I use, the black over-the-range microwave that came with my house is going in. His stove is a little better than mine but it’s not great. I have a black dishwasher and a stainless steel fridge available to me if I want them… and I don’t have a lot of time to choose as both sets are coming out of places that are being gutted.

As for the counter tops, remember that granite that’s still sitting on my parents’ driveway? The one that caused us to put a dent into my parents’ car? Now all that was for nothing because I decided it’s not even worth the trouble of cutting up to reuse. It’s going on Craigslist once I know for sure. And it gets a little worse. My dad sealed the driveway, and the granite was too heavy to move so he just painted around it. So when the slab disappears there will be a very obvious mark there. At the very least, it makes me smile that I’ve turned my nose up at granite and taken beat up powder blue Formica.

Fitting Out the Closets

This weekend went to the closets, and that means last week went to getting ready to build them. But there was a problem. My dad’s miter saw fence somehow bowed about an eighth of an inch and was no good for making accurate cuts anymore. I decided that though I probably couldn’t get it perfect, I could try to clamp it and straighten it out to be good enough for the closets. Don’t tell my mom I did it in the den.

So can you guess where this went wrong? Drumroll please.

The beer bottles are multiplying on their own. I swear.

So I called my dad and told him that the part is discontinued. He said the saw is a piece of shit and he wouldn’t throw away 40 bucks even if it were still available. So I skipped my Friday evening plans and read neurotically about saws instead. I was THIS CLOSE to driving 70 minutes away to Allentown to buy a crazy cheap fancy one on Craigslist. Then I decided that this was a stupid idea and bought a 10 inch miter saw like what we used to have. Except I bought a DeWalt. The Irishman’s miter saws are all DeWalt. And so I was in business Saturday morning. Not as early as I should have been though.

Rooting around in the garage, I found a stud finder I didn’t know my family owned. It wasn’t 100% accurate, but I was able to find framing to anchor my shelf cleats into. Easy peasy! And I used a prototype to figure out how deep to build the shelves. I’ll probably use shelves for sweaters while they’re in season.

And I used up all those old shelves my friend’s parents gave me from their basement. The nosings are thicker than the shelves, so I was gonna notch them, but I put them in upside down and once I had the sides cut to meet the not-square walls, I decided to be lazy and leave them like this.

I said I found studs to anchor everything into. I wasn’t talking about the linen closet, which is tiny and original to the house. I can’t tell what’s holding it together. The cleats are glued on. And also, the shelves that don’t have hardwood nosings aren’t getting them. My closets are an aesthetic free zone. (Also you can see that I have strips of other wood behind the shelves that are too shallow.)

And in the back bedroom, the door is too close to the end of the wall to fit full depth shelves so I’m cutting curves into them with the bandsaw. Freehand, so they’re not perfect. Every one I do gets better than the last though.

And then there’s the reason why this is a big deal. (Partially) clearing out the basement (partially) made the living room look like this.

Now the living room looks like this!

So things are really starting to look decent, eh? Except I’d like to clear this out and let the paint cure before I move in. The other closets can wait. (Also you can kinda see the double bar/single bar split in this photo.)

The Porch Jacking

I got an invitation to be a guest blogger! Julia at Home on 129 Acres is having other bloggers write about their favorite tools to help her decide what to buy. I gave her a fun throwback story about a project replacing porch columns at my parents’ house using a tool she’s probably never buying. Read on here: The Porch Jacking: Chad’s Crooked House

The last kitchen cabinet plan?

Maybe the last you’ll hear if the uppers anyway. For like 2 days I could walk around my living room. It was so great. Then I cleaned up the basement and that went away. So I want to burn through a lot of the crap that’s sitting out everywhere by (1) installing all the cabinets and shelves and then (2) putting tools in said cabinets and shelves. So I’m doing the top half of my kitchen. I don’t own the rest yet.

Looks wise, I’m emphatic that the kitchen is a work room and if form and function are in conflict, function wins. I want to work and store things in here. But once those are taken care if, of course looks matter.

You might remember this rough sketch of my wall cabinets on the stove/fridge side. I’m putting in 4 foot tall wall cabinets to get as much storage as possible, putting a deeper cabinet over the fridge, and installing an over-the-range microwave. The first plan was to stack small cabinets over big ones, which I think is normally the more attractive way to do it, but I was never sure if I liked the cabinet doors bouncing up and down like this.

It’s not that bad. Not like the advertisements granite fabricators put in Clipper Magazine showing kitchens that look like casino lobbies with horrors like carved corbels, Corinthian columns, and elaborate ogee countertop edges. It doesn’t have apothecaey drawers or wine racks or staggered caninets that look like a Chichen Itza that wants to be a hutch. Over the range microwaves aren’t pretty, but they aren’t pretending to be 18th Century mantles like some range hood covers do.

But it’s not as plain as I wanted. Something is still off. So when Ross (a reader with an amazing blog of his own) suggested flipping this and putting the 30 inch cabinets on top instead, I was thrilled to see a defiantly plain, orderly row of wall cabinets that still accommodates the practical things I want. And most importantly, it won’t cost me a penny more.

The other side of the kitchen is going to get the same treatment with cabinets flanking the window. I am not fond of disrupting the shapes of rooms with pipe/duct chases or closets, but I did have to have one visible chase in the kitchen. But on the bright side, the chase centered the window!

You can see that my 1930’s reproduction woodwork is up. The Irishman had his co-worker make a custom knife to match the old trim and then mill all this out of scrap wood for a scandalously low price. I’ve already committed to custom doors on my wall cabinets because IKEA doesn’t make all the cabinet sizes I wanted, so I’m going to cut the cabinets on this wall down to whatever width I think gives the awesome trim enough breathing space. I’ll have big cabinets stacked over little again, but I could consider having 4 foot tall doors made and scrapping the stacked look. I have options.