The Irishman’s Going Gangbusters

So I wanted to do stuff to get wood cleared out of the way. The Irishman has different ideas and wants to do everything. 6 months ago, I was to have no door jambs reaching the floor before the floors are sanded. Now, not so much. But who am I to say no? IT LOOKS SO GOOD

So what has he done? He made some of the doors pre-hung, just like Home Depot. You know, except that mine are either crooked or massive.

And here’s another look at a windowsill.

In fact, we may be far enough along for a before-after! Here’s the same view during demolition 2 years ago. That piece of drywall was just screwed on like that. And yes, this is the original woodwork that sold the house to me.

You need to get a better look at his clean mitered returns on the edge of that trim.

And what else? He cut down my mom’s old stained glass transom and made it fit my house!

He put in the vestibule paneling! Some fancy bits are still missing.

And the anachronistic but awesome big heavy bypassing sliding doors? I planned them out in April 2013

Fancy closet doors will go here.

And again in March 2014

And here they are!

Yes, this is real life. And then there’s the sliding pocket door to the coat closet. He had do do something funny with the trim to make the tops of the two doors line up. And yes, I’m playing pretend with my woodwork again.

He lengthened the linen closet door and even made the wood grain run in the right direction!

And cut scrap plywood from the armoire to follow the wavy ceiling perfectly around the stairwell.

And all this with the drama of the imperfect house, my dad’s and my imperfect framing, and the imperfect doors. Several of them had to be clamped and glued back together. I have different door hardware in different rooms, and I’ve known for 2 years exactly how I wanted everything. I think I could have made his head explode.

But mine may be exploding too.

The Runaway Train and the Armoire

Now, one of the jobs I gave to the Irishman, along with all the trim in my house, was to spruce up the inside of that red armoire (that’s now white). My grandmother picked it up for 10 bucks back in the 60’s. The drawers were missing and the fronts were just nailed on. My grandfather painted it (twice) and fitted it with some rudimentary shelves. But while we were at it working on my house, why not put in good, sturdy, adjustable shelves? Then my mom can put her teacher stuff inside it. And when she retires, it’ll look good enough to go back to holding tchotchkes. Here it is, along with my not yet married parents, 30 years ago.

I told him that my mom wanted it done by the end of the month. Lots of relatives are coming to visit in August and my mom wants her teacher stuff inside it by then. He took me at my word and had it done in about 3 days. And while he was finishing up, he called me. A lot.

“I tell ya, there was a lotta work in it,” he told me over the phone. The sides were crooked and he had to square them up for the adjustable shelving I asked for. Whoops! I would have just had him install fixed shelves had I known. But it’s done now and done well. The inside is all cabinet grade plywood and the shelves have solid poplar nosings.

And then he decided to build drawers out of scraps. The bottoms are the thin particle board that I bought to protect my living room floors.

I felt pretty good about all of this… until I counted up the time he spent on it. Because one of the next things for me to do was to tell my mom what this job was going to cost her. I decided to put it off. I’d pay him myself and hold off until she could see how good it looked. Maybe that way she wouldn’t be too upset, right?

But it grated at me for the rest of that day, so I didn’t waste too much time. The next time I saw my mom, I cautiously broached the subject. “Hey Mom, I didn’t get you anything for your birthday. I was thinking I might… subsidize the armoire work for you.”

But when I told her his price, she laughed. Called it the world’s worst investment. And told me that there was no way she’d let me take any kind of a hit from pay for any of it.

I pointed out that a dishwasher will last about 10 years. 20 if the manufacturer screwed up. (Yes, I believe that planned obsolescence is a thing.) So on the bright side, if the armoire costs as much as a dishwasher but lasts 5 or 10 times as long, it’s far from the world’s worst investment. Right?

So I borrowed a big car from some friends and drove through the EZ pass lane with no transponder. Then got to have an awkward conversation with them about the ticket that’s gonna get mailed to their house. Then I opened the tailgate and the shelves fell on my foot and, worse, got dented on the asphalt.

And then it gets better. With all this new plywood added to it, the piece got really heavy. And it didn’t fit up the stairs. So my dad partially dismantled it (and damaged the paint) and then did this epic job wrapping up the banister.

And this even better job with the ceiling light upstairs.

And at long last, here it is in its new, (temporary?) not-quite-finished, chipped-up state.

So much win with the Irishman

I had very little to do with any of this. Except I went to the Home Depot 5 times this weekend. I’ve been waiting for my next door neighbor, a master carpenter, to be free to work for me on Saturdays. After 4 false starts I was starting to get pissed (but this is what contractors do, right?)

So what happened? The bathroom door! This is the only one that won’t be in the way of the floor finishing. It’s also the one I really want. I can always say, “Stay downstairs, I’m taking a shit.” But having a door brings the place to a new level of classiness. Up to below-average!

And…. he put up the rim lock! I took like 30 photos of this door. Here’s another for you. I took like 30. And opened and close the door about 100 times.

So you know my house is old. My walls are weird thicknesses. My doors are from Philadelphia Salvage and they’re not square and they’re weird thicknesses too. So when I say custom, I mean building jambs for crooked doors installed in crooked walls over crooked floors. He said, “Ya buys couldn’t frame fer shit.” I said, “Who?” and he snapped back, “You and yer father.” But how much can you expect of a civil engineer and a financial analyst?

Also, I realized to my horror that I had neglected to get a decent set of hinges for this door. So check out his craftsmanship going around the bathroom floor and my stupidity of having him install a broken hinge. The upper one is whole, so this is something we can figure out later.

Then it was on to the windows. He asked how I wanted them built. How to finish the edges, how far out beyond the trim to bring them. Totally custom work is not fun for someone who has no idea how to deal with blank slates. So my answer was a trip to the basement. “Build them like these.”

And here’s what I got! Remember how I said the house is crooked? The windows aren’t. It makes for an interesting look.

And he’s pre-cut the trim for the sides of the windows downstairs. I don’t have the materials for the headers but we can pretend. Also, I wanted to make the headers of all the windows and doors toward the back of the house line up. The one window in the kitchen was too low, so the trim steps up. You can see here how that worked out.

I’m thinking that if I put up blinds, no one will ever know that I cheated the trim up to match the others. Much better than ripping the brick out to raise the lintel, eh?

Oh. And remember how my living room became a disaster? This job got it there again. I swept up a half dozen shovels of sawdust today and called it good enough. And one more shot because my mind is blown that this man can build jambs that fit every bit of crooked perfectly and slide right into place. The smoke smell had better not linger though.

Digging Into the History of the Stairway

Since there’s nothing new to talk about with what I’m doing right now and I got quite a few comments about my banister, I thought it’d be a good time go in depth with its history.

People might say it’s original and unique. It is neither of these things. Remember, someone remodeled my living room in the 1930’s. Before this time, I think the house had a parlor, a dining room, a vestibule, and a hall. I could be wrong about some of this but I had proof that the outside corner of the wall separating the living room from the vestibule once had a wall attached to it that divided the room width wise and made a hallway. See how wide the casing was next to the vestibule door? That was because they never plastered over where the wall was!

Living room, front

There are also dowels in the brick wall, indicating that there may once have been a decorative plaster arch dividing the living room length wise. That setup is common on South Philly. But these two ghosts of previous interior treatments contradict each other. That makes me wonder if the unbroken living room ceiling I have now could be the third version of the room (and the one I put back in). But anyways, if I’m right about all this, all the houses on my street may once have had walls around their staircases. Either that or the stairs turned sideways near the bottom and let out into the dining room.

I also found a ghost of the original railing upstairs. Under the oak flooring in the hall, the original pine floors have holes for the original balusters drilled into them. I can only see these two. This is interesting because my upstairs and downstairs banisters don’t match perfectly and I wondered at first if the upstairs one might have been original to the house.

So you believe it’s not original, but why do I say it’s not unique? It looks a lot like the one in my parents’ 1951 Colonial, but that’s not what I meant.

Plus mine is nicer than theirs. The biggest difference (besides that cool carved flower) is that mine has a compound curve. Whereas my parents’ railing has a segment for the vertical curve and a volute segment that is totally flat, mine has a piece that puts the vertical and horizontal curves together in the same spot. It’s still 3 pieces of wood with little seams, but it’s much more graceful that way. Like a roller coaster.

But what of the flower? You’ve never seen anything like it before, have you? That’s what I said when I bought the house, but since then I have been in 3 other Philadelphia rowhouses with the exact same one! One right on my block, one 3 blocks west, and once clear across town in Kensington. The only explanation that makes sense to me is that these railings were all made of off the shelf components. Maybe unique to Philadelphia, but not within it. Renovation contractors in the depths of the Depression must have been putting them into middle class homes all over the city.

Let’s just pretend the stripping is done now

I had a goal to be done stripping, all the stripping, before July came. That’s not going to work out. Because of course everything is slow. Incidentally, I’ve been watching houses getting thrown up  by the dozen on my way to and from work every day. Except that I know a mansion that was in the DuPont family came down to build them. (The crazy one who killed someone.) I was of course mad about that. Especially since half the development is townhouses anyway and you’d think there’d be a way to subdivide the mansion without leveling it. But I was surprised to see that they’re not that bad. Until I saw this. (And yes, I drove the beater car with the junkyard hood that’s the wrong color into the subdivision to take this photo.)

I may be putting 2 years and all my money into the Crooked House. I may have let my social ties lapse, my clothes fall apart at the seams, my hair turn grey, and my parents’ house fill with junk, but at least I will never suffer the indignity of owning a cantilevered chimney veneered in fake stone. If they hadn’t bothered with the stone it would have been better, no? For comparison, here’s the house across from my parents, which shows you that there is a correct way to build a chimney on the same wall as a flat foundation. But a cantilever ain’t it. Cantilever a bay window instead.

Alright, back to my house. I want to say all there is to say about stripping now and be done with it, even though it’s not finished. I’ve been using the heat gun, Klean Strip, and SoyGel. Yup, all 3. The heat gun gets most of the paint off clean, but then I burn the wood if I have teeny bits left, so for these, out comes the KleanStrip. But for what I’m stripping stain grade, the SoyGel works as well as anything, stays wet a long time, doesn’t burn my skin, and cleans up with water. Plus, I paid dearly for it and want to justify the expense. I’m doing the railing stain grade, using only chemicals. There are too many curves for the heat gun to work. Here’s what I’ve got now:

Those little paint chips aren’t stuck to it either. So this is about ready to stain!

Except inside the teeniest crevasses of that volute. You can see them from the underside. And they might drive me insane. Any ideas? I’m talking about inside the crevasse; the flat bottom will practically strip itself.

Then there’s the basement stairway door. Someone busted the panel out and then replaced it with plywood that wasn’t cabinet grade. I busted that out and will replace it again and it’ll look almost as good as new. I was gonna leave the back side because who cares about the basement stairwell. But then I couldn’t fight the urge to make it look decent.

And under the paint I found definitive proof that the door was not free!

And remember how I used a highly alkaline stripper on these scrolly things under my stairs? I’ve finally neutralized them with an acid wash and then (lol) used a heat gun to get off what that complicated process missed.

So there you have it! I’m almost ready to move on to prettier, (hopefully) less labor intensive things!

Three Problems to Bring Back the Irishman

I’m still working on that banister, but there’s not much to see just yet. Luckily, there’ still plenty to plan.

It’s been a while since I’ve had the Irishman help me, maybe all the way back to drywalling. But now this summer he’ll be back to help me with finish carpentry! He’s not consistently available, but I’ve decided to keep just about every Saturday open. If he can’t come, I can sleep in till 8 and take breaks when I’m hungry. If we come, he works without stopping 7-3 on coffee and cigarettes alone. Though his coffee is like half milk so I guess there’s a little food value in it. As nice as it’s been to have only free labor these last few months, I have a few problems that will be a lot easier with a master carpenter’s help. I have them in order here, starting with the jobs I think are the most important.

The first is these doors. I need them cut down and re-mortised for hinges so I can move forward with the staining. Their sizes are all fine, but their previous owner was abusive. Abusive! One of them is going to need to be cut down about a half an inch! Luckily I don’t need to re-mortise any doors for the doorknobs. But more on this later.

Then, my parents definitely want the armoire lined with plywood and fitted out with adjustable shelves. While we’re at it, I need a new upper panel for the basement stairway door. The original one was busted out and replaced with subfloor grade plywood. At least it was better than OSB! I’m putting this second in importance, but it may not be second chronologically since we have to plan and buy materials.

Then there’s this big pile of trim. When the floor finishers come I have to find someplace else to put all this, and I’m tired of moving things around, so now the plan is to install as much as possible.

The door jambs and baseboards are going in after the floors are done. The finishers will charge less and do a better job with very little edging. But window sills and jambs, the bathroom door (!!!), and all the bathroom trim (!!!!!) can move forward right away. Paint may have to wait. My first plan was to do all the trim and doors with a sprayer, but now I just want to finish all the doors with a brush (some stained and some painted) and paint the trim at my own pace after I have furniture in the house (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

And finally, I can consider shelves in the closets and upper cabinets in the kitchen. I have a lot of nice shelves that my friend’s parents had left over and were gonna toss in the trash. You might remember some of the doors I hoarded for no good reason. The shelves are from the same basement. Along with a piece of plywood sheathing that went in around my back door. And maybe it makes sense to put in the upper kitchen cabinets since I already own them?

Peeling back the last layer on the front windows

I have these neat paneled alcoves under my living room windows that are original to the house – I think about 40 years older than the rest of my living room’s current incarnation.  One of them is super crooked. The paint was chipping badly, so even though they’re not going to show, I conceded that they needed to be stripped.

They came out way nicer than I thought they would. By better, I mean stain grade. Once I burned the paint off, stripping the varnish was effortless.

I’m happy with the way they look, but it creates a dilemma. I’ve already committed to painted trim throughout the house. I peeled back a lot of layers on this wall, so I think it might be good to go through them again.

Before I started there was a lot to like: Craftsman trim, deep sills, alcove radiators, and those awesome inlaid floors.

Living room, front

But other things were not so hot. If you look at the upper left corner of the left window, there’s a chunk missing from the crown molding. And worse, the jambs were lined with crappy plywood paneling. It turned out that this was covering damage from when the interior wall sagged. But the windows were attached to the outside brick wall that stayed level. You can see the crappiness of the paneling and the huge amounts of caulk holding in the boring radiator covers here. It’s the best shot I got of this.

Radiator cover removal

And the best part is, the sagged jambs were holding the wall up! They were the framing! so I couldn’t fix them without sacrificing the whole wall! I still feel a little sad about sacrificing so much of the before house.

But anyways, I now have drywall jambs around these windows. I’ll recreate the “before” look with nice trim after those crappy windows meet their demise. The problem is, I still think it will look best to paint the alcoves. If they’re stained, the painted trim will look weird. Or I could paint the sides but stain the panels. And in the end, I’m probably going to put deep window sills back on and they won’t show anyway. The original sills are wrecked. The original sills were nailed to them and I did the best I could to put them back together.And though I want to recreate that part of the 1930’s remodel, in my dreams I will also reinstall the pocket shutters that were taken out at that time.

So what do you say I should do? Paint it? Stain it? Paint the sill and sides but not the panels? Do you want to smack me for being neurotic enough to even ask this question? Staining this teeny bit of trim is either doing right by 120 year old pine… or wasting my time on something that won’t be visible or fit with the rest of the house.

Planning the stairway… to the end!

This is exciting because although I’ve been thinking about the end of this project (meaning the whole house) for a long time, there’s been too much left for me to be able to write out every step to anything. But now I’m starting to get there! So here’s the deal, I plan to have all the floors in the house (except the tile in the bathroom of course) sanded and refinished, professionally, all at the same time. This means finishing this and that messy job and then preparing to empty the house and turn it over to strangers for the second time. But certain things I’m doing with the stairs get kinda mixed up, so let me know if I’m not sequencing this right.

My stairway is a pretty common traditional/Colonial style that I think dates to a major remodel in the 1930’s. They’re built with true 1-inch thick oak and have these nosings that wrap around the ends of the treads. I plan to take them all down and number, de-nail, and strip them. And that wasn’t my pating job!

Why? Because the balusters are mortised into the treads and with the nosings off, they can be knocked out and sanding the treads should be easy for the finishers. And cheap for me. You can also see how close the last baluster was to the box newel at the top of the stairs. I got it out to make stripping and painting easier.

The bottom step that flares out for the scrolly railing thing (bill and keys shelf) just had the balusters nailed down to it so I took them all off. Most of these are just square baluster stock and the same size so I cut them in half to get them out. But now the step should be easy to finish. And yes, you do see thick puddles of polyurethane on there.

I won’t even think about replacing the balusters at the bottom until the floors are done. But the one that I took out up top I think needs to go in after the floor finishers sand but before they finish the steps. I’ll probably also need to paint the newel first since I don’t want to have to push my paint brush through narrow gaps. But the rest of the balusters are getting painted after because the floor finishers will probably damage the paint job anyway. It may be their job to put that one baluster back in and reinstall the nosings. Also, the cove molding under the stair treads is gone, victim to another previous owner’s wall to wall carpet installation. I need to replace it with new read oak, which may not be perfect but I don’t think it’ll be obvious.

Oh. And with how well the banister is looking with all the paint stripped off, I couldn’t stand the sight of the baseboards anymore. So now they look like this.

Anyways, I haven’t actually brought a floor finisher in to look at my job yet, so if my ideas here are off base, I’d be glad to know now.

The Balusters are Heating Up

I had high hopes about all the progress that would happen when I switched to the paint stripper that burns skin. The post about it was to be called Toxic Love. You’ve probably already gathered that I was unimpressed. I’d put it on, have a beer (very important) while the paint alligatored. And then scrape off just one layer, leaving the next one down more ghastly and blistered than the last. It looked like it would take a solid 5 coats to get this off.

So I got even moodier than I was last week. Saturday morning, while the stripper was doing its work, I went to the corner café (because beer before noon is simply not done) and ran into an old friend who I haven’t seen in at least 5 years even though she happens to have moved like a block away from me. But it gets better. Her partner loaned me his heat gun.

And I had written off the heat gun before (partially because my dad’s broke and I didn’t want to buy another one) but it works AMAZINGLY. Usually pulls off all the paint. Down to bare wood. Sometimes a foot of it in one scrape! The removed paint stays hard and solid and not dusty. Also kind of fun, when I stripped the box newel at the top of the stairs, a little sap bled out of the wood. Amazing how new it looks as I’m pretty sure it’s 80 years old. Also, you can see that the Shop Vac took over the railing’s role as interim towel bar now.

This changed things. In a big way. Then even better, on Sunday a friend came to help me because he thinks paint removal is fun. So now the upstairs railing is essentially complete! (A few hard spots where the two railings overlap are still goopy.)

And the stripping is marching down the stairs. Does it look better yet?

And here it is an hour and 15 minutes later.

S

I think you can see in that last photo how much thinner the balusters look without the paint. Even when I knew it had to come off I didn’t appreciate just how bad this paint job was. And now I can see that the balusters are a weensy bit crooked. But I guess that’s as it should be. So before the paint-wax-goop look is gone forever, here’s one more look.

Now, I should admit that I scorched the wood a bit. The heat gun worked really well on plain square paint grade pine posts, but if you have trim that deserves to be stained, this could be dangerous. And it would be hard to get it off anything with curved details in it. We’ll see how the newel at the bottom goes. It looks like at this rate I’ll be stripping the handrail itself (to stain) before long!

When it Rains it Pours

So you know that I was a little bummed about the unexpected ignored work I had to do on the banister. I was especially upset because if you didn’t know, the Pope is coming to Philadelphia September 21-25. And the demand for lodging is massive. I was kind of excited to put the Crooked House up for rent for the week at Waldorf-Astoria rates. I’ve given up every deadline I ever hoped to have so far, but it would make me terribly, terribly sad to miss this one. And my house is in a good spot.

But with this on my mind, what do I need to change my mood? How about a flood? Not in my house, but my parents’. They have a beaver system to waterproof the basement. These baseboards are made of vinyl and create a dam. Any water that comes through the walls drains out onto the driveway. It’s kind of a weird setup with the walls on the wrong side of the waterproofing dam, but it seems to have always gotten the job done.

Until Monday, that is. We had a bit of a downpour and the gutters were clogged, so they overflowed and water flowed into the window well. No action shots but here’s where the action was. You can at least see the erosion and the missing bricks.

I disconnected the garden hose and threw it in to make a siphon and then went to get my mom to help me clean the gutters. My dad was on a conference call and I tried to leave him alone. But then the rain slowed up and I decided to go down and clear out any area that got wet downstairs. You remember what the basement looked like after my grandmother moved and I took all her stuff in December?

So basically we had to play Tetris. The living room, formally a bastion of civility, is now adorned with 10 extra chairs. (Yes, 10. After having dinner parties in college where I used the radiator for seating I want all of them.) There’s a futon mattress and a bunch of trash bags under my mom’s piano. (Did piano lesson season just end? If so, that was good timing.) A stack of boxes in the hallway.

And downstairs, that air mover that saved my kitchen ceiling’s drywall is making the carpet look like a moon bounce. This might have been fun if it weren’t to dry out a flood.

The first time I saw the rugs tenting up like that I was a lot younger. I think it was the water heater that time. And I gleefully ran all over it. Part of me might still do that at my age, but most of me will just tell everyone I know don’t carpet your basement!

I’ve been counting down my to-do list 27 months. It’s grown for most of that time, not shrunk. But now I’m counting it a little harder. Not even all of it; just the handful of jobs that need to happen before I call in the floor finishers. Overall, I think the list looks kind of short. But I need to compress the bannister restoration, so I canceled my third jug of SoyGel and invested in a can of the scary stuff.