Month: July 2009

our generous volunteers

last saturday i started my weekend by going to see the new harry potter movie with my childhood friend, marisa, who i hadn’t seen since october 2007! i returned to find a house full of busy bees…

dadmom

my dad was drilling holes for blow-in insulation. my mom was priming the bathroom walls and ceiling. mathew was working on electrical wiring. everyone was very engrossed in their projects. i walked to the local store to buy paint then helped my mom with the primer.

mathewdad

mathewmathew

on sunday mathew continued with his electrical work adding new outlets and networking cables. this usually starts with cutting holes upstairs (above left) then stringing wires through to the garage downstairs (above right.) it sounds simple but it can be very frustrating if the wires don’t behave and have trouble moving through the walls. last weekend mathew says he spent 5 excruciating hours on one outlet trying to pull wires through at an impossible angle.

momdad

meanwhile my parents and i worked on installing the cellulose insulation into the walls where my dad had drilled holes in the downstairs bedroom, kitchen and office.

medad

in the garage, my mom and i were doing the noisy, dirty work of filling the machine hopper with the insulation material while upstairs my dad had the peaceful job of filling the holes and working the machine through a remote control.

his job did have some drawbacks as the reducing nozzle is only an inch wide so it would often get jammed and the whole process would have to stop. and it wasn’t often easy to un-jam the nozzle. also, sometimes there’s confusion with the switches on the remote control, if you turn off the agitator but not the blower, when you pull the nozzle out of the wall, you will shower yourself in snowy, grey, dusty recycled fibers. mathew and i have both experienced this and i think my dad did too.

mathewkitchen

in the late afternoon i heard a loud noise coming from the kitchen. what i found was mathew cutting the countertop. this downstairs kitchen is HUGE, possibly twice the size of an average san francisco kitchen, with way more cabinets than anyone could ever need. our plan is to eliminate some of the cabinets and bring the refrigerator closer to the stove and sink, then add a built in bench to create a dining area near the window.

larrylarry

last weekend felt a bit like we had tag-team volunteers, just hours after my parents left on sunday night, my cousin larry appeared. and as if he had known we hadn’t gotten a chance to go shopping and were running low on food, he brought all kinds of organic fruits and vegetables for us!

on monday morning larry got to work painting around the trim in the bathroom with a paintbrush, later he filled in the walls with a roller, then painted the window trim and wainscoting. he gave the room two coats on monday and another on tuesday. we think the bathroom looks great and it’s exciting to see it becoming finished. the floors are next…

we are so grateful to our generous volunteers. not only do they give their valuable time but they always seem to bring food. THANK YOU!!!!!! we know that mathew and i can be a bit perfectionistic and we sometimes have people working on things they’ve never done before, but we truly appreciate all of your efforts and enjoy spending time with you. with your help we are getting closer to our goal and one day will be able to spend time with you that doesn’t involve dust masks, work clothes or tools.

to strip, or not to strip

last weekend more quality time was spent with the rented wallpaper steamer. we were determined to remove the remaining stubborn wallpaper in the kitchen. some people wondered, “why not paint over it?” “why not just tear out all the plaster and replace with gypboard?”

doorframewall2_71909

1) painting over the wallpaper was what had been done by previous owners and in most places the paint just didn’t stick well and chipped off easily in large sheets. plus from the way it had browned and aged, we’re guessing the adhesives were not archival and would probably show through the paint over time. 2) and as with the rest of this remodel/restoration project, being as environmentally conscious and keeping as much out of landfill as possible was a big concern. tearing out plaster from all the rooms would require a large dumpster. removing old paint and wallpaper, produces just a few small garbage bins worth of waste. and the old plaster is so much more beautiful and durable than gypboard!

(above left) mathew is removing the door frame for the door that was removed and blocked off leading from the kitchen to the bathroom. (above right) after the trim and wallpaper has been removed.

janeen3_71909janeen4_71909

janeen5_71909coffee6_71909

when the kitchen was almost done i realized “coffee and a kick in the pants” had gotten damaged. all that remained on the wall was “kick in the pants”, “coffee” had somehow gone missing! it’s silly that we got so upset, but it was a clipping given to us by mathew’s brother misha, and it has been with us for 10-12 years! i eventually found “coffee”, it was trying to blend in with the discarded wallpaper on the floor.

hall7_71909hall8_71909

around 8pm on sunday night mathew decided we should tackle the second entry/hallway. his only experience with wallpaper removal had been the kitchen and that WASN’T fun. the paint and wallpaper in this hallway flew/melted off the wall and mathew understood what my experience with my mom had been removing wallpaper in the bedroom. the plaster on this wall was in fairly good condition with only a few cracks. it looked like the previous owners had used some sort of red stain/paint on the bare plaster.

next mathew decided we should work on the opposite wall (not shown.) this did not go as smoothly and when removing the top layers the smell of mold surfaced. basically we were trying to remove paint and wallpaper from moldy gypboard and eventually decided to just replace the gypboard.

afghan9_71909afghan10_71909

and in my free time i knit.

help!

So now we’ve got a real deadline: Po-Po has decided that, in fact, she does want to move in here. We gave her a firm date of the end of September. We need to finish the kitchen, bathroom and bedroom by then!

Janeen’s parents came here both days last weekend, and they worked really hard. I also took a few days off work to get the kitchen moving faster.

01_kitchencabs-09071602_kitchencabs-holes

I took down the cabinets to get wiring in for additional plugs and under cabinet lights. It was surprisingly quick to string the wires in and add the plugs. Had to cut some new holes into the tile, and big gashes into the wall…

05_kitchen-wiresin06_kitchen-wiresin2

Then John showed up and fixed all my messes. He patched in tile where I’d broken it out.

03_kitchen_plug07_kitchen-johnmixing

And taped and plastered over the holes in the walls. Meanwhile, Janeen and her mum worked with a wallpaper steamer that we’d rented to take all the old wallpaper and many layers of paint off the walls in the bedroom.

09_kitchen-patching08_bedroom-steaming

The photo below shows John and me getting perfectionist about the caulk on the edge of the old tile. The person who had put in the tile had failed to polish off the grout from the surface of the tile when they put it in, so the tile all had patches of grout; we scraped and chipped it off. They’d also used grout where they should have used a flexible caulk – at the interface between the counter top and the tile – so it had cracked; chipped that off too.

15_kitchen-chippingcaulk

The photo below is of me plumbing the dishwasher drain hose into an “air gap”. Previously, it had been directly fed into the drain, but the air gap prevents water backing up in a blocked sink and emptying into the dish washer (a good thing, I’d say). Janeen and Judy had become pros with the steamer by now. I wish we’d known about this tool before.

10_kitchen-plumbing11_bedroom-steaming

Not content with a solid day of work, they came back for more punishment the next day. John caulked the gaps in all the wainscot boards and helped me put the cabinets back in. Janeen and Judy moved on to steaming the kitchen. The photo below right shows them installing plaster washers as a team. I think Judy thought her job (assembling the screw onto the washer) was too easy.

12_bathroom-caulkingwainscot16_bedroom-plasterwashering

I went and hid down in the garage and put the final coat on the door that goes to our hallway. I think John thought the steamer looked like fun, so he took it and did a wall.

13_halldoor17_kitchen-johnsteaming

Below left you can see the mess we’ve got the kitchen into. Not quite finished steaming off the wallpaper here. We suspect that grease in the air has made the wall paper much more water resistant, so steaming in the kitchen went very slowly. The special scoring tool would cut right through the wallpaper and damage the plaster, so it wasn’t much help. Sanding the wallpaper helped a bit. Below right shows the kichen cabinets back up, and the new under cabinet lights on.

19_kitchen-majorcleanup20_kitchen-cabinetsup

Here are a couple of photos of the old wallpaper in the kitchen.

04_kitchen-wallpaper18_kitchen-oldpaper

and another door

done a lot of door sanding and finishing lately. this is the door between the hallway of the downstairs unit and the hallway that leads to the upper unit. i’ve developed some techniques that makes it go faster. first we strip off the paint from all flat surfaces. on the first pass, i just work to get as much of the paint off as quickly as i can. janeen is really good at getting paint off the intricate areas of molding.

Door to upstairs before stripping03doorpartiallystripped

after getting all the paint off, then we do a second pass to clean up the edges and corners, and missed paint. it works much better to do two passes, because if the paint gets too hot, it melts and smears into the wood.

04doorpaintoff05doorcleaninguppaint

Then sanding. sanding the flat areas is really fast. the intricate bits are really, really slow though. i’ve added a piece of wood at the bottom of the door. it still needs trimming and filling in the photo below.

06doorsandingstarted08dooraddingbottom

i guess the old door hardware did not work very well, so they installed modern hardware. To do that, they drilled out a large hole in the door where the hardware attaches. i’m trying to go back to traditional hardware, so i’ve filled most of the hole that was cut out of the door. The remaining part will be covered by a brass cover plate.

07doorfilling09doorsandingfiller

janeen couldn’t resist doing more paint scraping in the downstairs bedroom (below left). we also primed the wainscote in the downstairs bathroom.

10janeenscrapingpaint12paintingwainscote

13paintedwainscote11deskclamping

i made the top for janeen’s standing desk. got a bit fancy with the edge of the desk, using a 1/8″ thick strip of redwood as an accent. it would look better if the edging were maple (like the veneer on the plywood.) the accent strip would hide the join and look decorative. but i had left over oak from doing the floors, so used that. now it’s an amalgam of woods!

photo above right: almost all my clamps were needed to clamp on the edging while the glue dried. the desk isn’t finished: i still need to make draws. below: the desk in its temporary home, until we get the office done.

00desk01desk

Living Room Doors

We finished one more thing on the list: the doors between Janeen’s office and the living room. After stripping all the paint off the doors, we carefully sanded the doors.

Sanding living room doors2livingrmdoors

I then stained the doors with an oil based stain called ‘Old American’. It’s actually a lot more yellow than the photo below right shows. Below left you can see the door before it was stained.

3lrd_before-stain 4lrd_stain

We had some trouble at first figuring out how to strip the paint off the old brass door hardware. It’s much more delicate than the steel hinges, so we couldn’t attack it with a wire brush and heat gun. At first we tried using the heat gun, but the paint just wouldn’t come off completely. Chemical paint stripper and a toothbrush did the trick beautifully, though. And it didn’t damage the black oxide background to the patterns on the hand grips. They then polished up nicely with Brasso. Below right you can see how they looked on the door before.

5lrd_handlespolishedLiving room door handles before

After two coats of oil based color polyurethane (‘cherry’), the doors are done.

8lrd_fromoffice7lrd_fromlivrm

I reinstalled the brass hardware, and after a bit of adjustment, it all works quite nicely. The doors are not perfect, but I like the slight dents and imperfections: the doors are 100 years old, after all.

6lrd_handles-installed

Janeen took the photo below. I think she was trying to decide if these are good work boots. The photo on the right shows the stain rags, air drying. Apparently if you bundle them up in a plastic garbage bag when wet, they can spontaneously catch fire. Not good in a wood house.

9jashoes9rags

We ordered a fancy new desk for Janeen: It’s height can be adjusted electrically, to be a standing or sitting desk. I need to make a top for it, though. Until we get the office complete, the living room will be Janeen’s office.

9desk1-assembly9desk2-assembly