Chez Ficus

It's over

2006-03-18T11:49:00.000-08:00

Chez Ficus is closed for business.

Thank you for your patronage.

Update: I put all the old posts back up for your perusing enjoyment. Is anyone even listening?

Ollie post

2005-05-24T10:28:00.000-07:00

By popular demand, now a permanent Oliver post.

Looky loo

2005-05-22T17:14:00.000-07:00

The living and dining rooms are painted. There are some smaller tasks still to be completed, but the drop cloth is off and the rooms are basically ready to be set up, after a little floor cleaning.

So here's a big bunch of pictures, with a few notes to follow.

Starting to tape off the living room

Work stereo circa 2005

Living room primed

Mantel primed

I get by...

Trim painted on mantel

Jeannie and the red sea

Man of the house

Tinted primer applied

Living room done

Mantel done

Tape off

Dining room set up

More dining room

Tasks still remaining:

Prime and paint closet door and mantel cabinet doors and re-hang
Prime and paint heat registers and install
Caulk a few places I missed
Touch up rough spots on the trim and mistakes
Stain the top of the mantel

A few thoughts:

The colors I used (all Ralph Lauren paint, harumph harumph) were Hunting Coat Red (TH43) on the dining room wall, Cottonwood (TH29) on the dining room ceiling, Palm Leaf (GH88) on the living room wall, Rustic Green (GH63) on the living room ceiling, and Cant Hook (GH89) for all trim.

Red paint is really thin. They warn you about this (and if they didn't, shame on them), but apparently to get that red color, the paint has to be thinned pretty heavily. I bought a gallon of primer tinted to my dining room color and it still needed three coats of paint, plus touchup on a few spots.

If I were to do this all over again, I would have rolled brown paper over every part of the floor and taped off to begin with, even well before painting. Cleaning some of the plaster drips off of the hardwood floor is a major pain. Also, if I do this, I only need drop cloth for covering furniture and maybe setting paint cans and supplies on.

Jeannie had the great idea to go to Value Village and buy a bunch of cheap bedsheets to use as drop cloth. They cost $4-6 instead of the $20+ you pay for a canvas drop, and they're not slippery like plastic. I'd still use heavy canvas over the furniture, but just for throwing on the floor, they worked pretty well.

I'm trying to tell myself I can live with that tile job on the fireplace but I can tell it is gonna get to me and I'm going to want to redo it. The library actually has a ton of books with home design and decorating ideas, so I'll have to run over there and pick some up to see what I think.

At last, I can get drapes. Confidential to my neighbors across the street: sorry about all those times I took a crap with the door open. Also, I can get some rugs, which should cut down on the reverb in the room and hopefully stave off having to refinish the floors for a little while.

My debt to Josh and Megan sinks deeper and deeper, way down, as they came to help me prime the walls last Sunday before knocking off for some of that delicious Ototo Sushi. Even more so, Jeannie contributed an incredible number of hours of help. I am truly grateful for all the assistance I've had.

It feels fantastic to accomplish something with such a visible effect. Rewiring is interesting, but at the end of all the hard work, you have something that is basically equivalent in functionality to what you had when you started.

In other exciting news here at Casa de la Ficus, there is a new member of the household. I got a 10-week-old chocolate lab puppy. One of my goals in buying a house was being able to get a dog, and when I saw him I couldn't resist. I named him Oliver.

Oliver

Ollie by golly

Official mascot of Chez Ficus

On Saturday night, with the thin red paint barely dry, I was finally able to have some friends over for dinner. This morning, exhausted from spending all my free time and some of my sleep time in the last week painting, I sacked out for a nap on the couch in my newly green living room. Shortly thereafter, Ollie flopped down on the floor next to me and we both dozed in the sunlight. It was awesome.

A man, a plan, a mud pan

2005-05-07T15:40:00.000-07:00

On Monday I called up a plastering contractor. He told me had just retired a couple months ago and wasn't taking jobs any more. I asked him for a referral and he opted instead to give me some advice. I told him I was using plaster of paris, which he said was "the worst thing you could use". I was too grateful for the expert advice to point out that, say, mashed potatoes would be far worse. Anyway, he suggested that I use drywall mud, joint compound, Beadex, whatever you want to call it, because it takes much longer to set and you can actually work with it.

I went to my special place this morning and bought a little tub of premixed joint compound and a mud pan, which I probably already had in the basement somewhere. Oh well.

I don't have a lot to say about it other than it went on really, really easily. The plaster sets almost instantaneously and is very hard to shape once you've got it on the wall. This stuff is going to take 24 hours to fully cure, but once it does, I can sand and finish it, no problem.

So I went berserk and did everything that needed to be done -- damage around the heating ducts, cracks in the wall joints, that enormous patch in the dining room with the topcoat missing. That large area will probably need another coat tomorrow, but other than that, I'm done with plastering.

Now I need to caulk around the door and window casings, strip and sand the mantel surface that I'm planning on staining instead of painting, and I can sand and wash the walls. Then, if the good Lord is willing, I'll paint this godforsaken place.

Big patch covered up

Flattened out

Area under the window

Plaster of Paris

2005-05-01T20:19:00.000-07:00

Well, I did all this stuff last Sunday and never got around to writing about it. My goal was to complete all the plastering that needed to be done in the living room, and I mostly got that done.
Most of the jobs were areas of wall missing around electrical boxes.

Sometimes it was just a little gap around the box that would peek out from behind a plate. Those ones were easy.

Before

After

A little more obnoxious is when the plaster doesn't come in close enough to fit the box and so there is nowhere for the ears to grab on and the box doesn't properly sit flush against the wall.

Not enough plaster to catch the box ear

These ones suck because you have to take the box out of the wall. This is especially bad when using this particular variety of remodel boxes I have that hold a clip behind the box with a screw. To get them out, you have to remove the screw, causing the clip to fall off the back of the box inside the wall.

It's on the floor inside the wall

I have a telescoping magnet that is really useful for this kind of task, but I've only ever needed it at outlet level before, and it doesn't reach from lightswitch height. I tied a piece of twine to the magnet and fished the clip out. Hooray.

Magnet fetch rig

Got it

Then I could add a slug of plaster where the box ear wants to hang on and put the box back in the wall.

Porchlight switch filled in

I got all the boxes done, including the ones in the dining room. Unfortunately, flattening the area underneath the window that I replaced completely continues to elude me. I decided to call in a plastering contractor to come fix it. I've done most of it, but I just don't really understand how to make such a large surface flat. So the professionals can handle that one.

One of the many things I have to replace in these rooms is all of the heat register plates, as they have been painted mauve like everything else. So I pulled all of those off, and they are of course plastered in, so even cutting around them caused a little damage. Oh boy, more plaster work.

Some of the heating ducts are unbelievably foul. I estimate the plates haven't come off of the ducts in around 30 years (see below). I should probably get someone to come clean them out.

Some of these dustbunnies are over twenty years old

Much cleaner vent, surrounding plaster damage

I carbon-dated the last cleaning to 30 years after finding a bunch of stuff behind the plates, including a few cards from this United Airlines deck commemorating the bicentennial.

Celebrate a Proud Land Born 200 Years Ago

I have to get six new registers, and while I'm at it, all new hardware for these rooms. The door hinges, doorknob collars, everything. All mauve, all the time.

Stack o' registers

L'herbe

2005-04-30T16:23:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned last week, my yard, or yards, or relatively small patches of grass, were getting a little too big for their britches and I had designated this weekend for taking care of it.

I got up this morning and after digging around online for a bit went to Aurora Lawnmower. A really old guy (I'd give him 70, easily) in a mechanic's jumpsuit helped me out. He walked around at about half a mile an hour and took 15 minutes to write out my invoice, but I have a soft spot for old guys like him, so I didn't really mind.

I didn't want to spend too much money on a mower that isn't going to see a lot of use in my small yard, so I bought an old-fashioned push mower. They had a few used power mowers for $175 and up, but I decided since I don't have a lot of area to mow I'd rather get a good hand mower than a low-end power mower. I also got a line trimmer for working around trees and telephone poles.

Old fashioned

Line trimmer

While surveying the area, I realized that because I am on a corner lot, I actually have two sidewalk sections to mow. Whoops.

The line trimmer turned out to be really helpful for knocking the tall grass down to size so I could more easily push the mower over it. It is a really satisfying tool to use; sweeping back and forth slowly with it, you feel like George Peppard with a flamethrower. I evened it out with the push mower and raked the clippings out, nearly filling my yard waste container.

Compare to last week's photos:

Trimmed sidewalk (last week)

Trimmed yard (last week)

I am pretty pooped, so I probably won't get much else done today, but who knows. Last night at about 12:30am I was briefly struck by inspiration and finished plastering the area of wall next to the light switch in the dining room.

My minimum goal for tomorrow is to finish all plastering in the living room, which shouldn't be too tall of an order. The biggest plaster job remaining is a 6-8 sq ft area in the dining room, and I think I'm capable of getting all of it done tomorrow. But I want to keep my milestones small just for the sake of keeping myself unintimidated by large tasks.

The Electric Version

2005-04-25T22:42:00.000-07:00

A weekday. Be still my heart.

I did a little more poking around with that last outlet I need to rewire. I bent a lot of metal flaps trying to remove the section of heating duct that was obscuring it and realized I could probably replace it without taking the duct down, which is fortunate, because the duct was not moving.

I don't remember how I came to realize it, but the next big revelation was that the wire leading up over that piece of duct is not in fact the outlet I need to change at all. It goes to an outlet in my bedroom and fortunately seems to be set up in an identical way to the ones I replaced yesterday (Romex to the panel, illegal knob & tube junction). So I'll be able to knock that one out for extra credit whenever I get around to it.

The corollary of this is that the wiring for The Last Damn Outlet is not coming up from the basement, it's coming from the upstairs. I confirmed this by poking around a bit with my trusty inspection mirror. This also explains why the mostly-rewired second floor has one odd outlet on this circuit: it's right above the other one.

Not sure what I'm going to do about this one. I am loath to tear the upstairs apart much more than I already have.

Dear God, please back a dump truck full of money up to my house and deposit its contents on my front lawn. At least it will keep the grass down.

Bakin' carrot biscuits

2005-04-24T21:19:00.000-07:00

Ethan was in town for a job interview on Friday and he crashed at my place on Thursday and Friday night. I really need to get around to buying a guest bed. Right now, either the guest takes the couch or I take the couch, and it sucks. I have some friends scheduled to visit on May 20, maybe I can get it taken care of before then.

Having deadlines is good. Without deadlines my entire house has come off the rails. But onto the good news.

My mom came over today and helped me make a complete circuit map of the house. At last. This is at best an incredibly obnoxious task to try to accomplish alone. I had already made drawings of each room in the house with letters assigned to each outlet, switch, and light fixture, so I was able to walk around with my notebook and yell for her to hit breakers until we found which breaker controlled which circuit.

I just counted in the notebook; we did 86 outlets, switches, and lights.

The map served only to confirm my suspicion that the wiring in this house is completely berserk. Popular breakers in the house:

Lovely #15, spanning all three floors of the house with

one living room outlet
hall light fixture
one laundry room outlet
laundry room light fixture
one outlet in the master bedroom

Fabulous #16, dazzling in this spring's line:

one living room outlet
three dining room outlets
dining room chandelier
one bathroom outlet
two bedroom outlets
bedroom closet light
one guest bedroom outlet
guest bedroom closet light
one studio outlet
one studio switched outlet

#18, saucy as can be in

three living room outlets
porch light
one bedroom outlet
two studio outlets
studio overhead lights

And finally the immensely popular #29:

bathroom light
bedroom light
guest bedroom light
stairwell light
two master bedroom lights
two master bathroom lights

The two "final" (read on) outlets to rewire are on #18, so I considered diverting them to another circuit to reduce the load. Unfortunately, the only convenient circuit to send them to is #16, which has it the worst of all. So I set about replacing the knob & tube leg of #18 with Romex.

Last seen, I had left these outlets with wire that could fit through the knockdowns in my new boxes attached to the knob & tube with wire nuts:

Old wires

I pulled those splices off and yanked the knob & tube out from the basement, all the way to the junction box where it oh-so-illegally connects to the Romex going to the panel. I removed all the porcelain tubes in the joists to make room for the new cable I'd be running, and that part of the job was done.

Knob and tube carnage

That junction box had two K&T cables running into it (hot and neutral), and since hot, neutral, and ground all come in on one cable, I'd have room for both outlets to come to the junction box. Unfortunately, I was already running the cable for the porch light into that junction box in a completely violating manner, and I would need three free knockdowns to fit it all in properly.

Rather than run two Romex cables across the basement, I decided to splice the two outlets together and run one cable over to the junction box. (This is, in fact, how the knob & tube setup worked, just with sliced up cable and electrical tape.) Electrical tape is not so good here in 2005, so I ran to the hardware store and picked up a junction box.

In summary: Romex from outlet A and B both enter the new J-box where they are spliced with a cable running across to the other box, which then runs to the panel.

A whole lot of cutting, stripping, twisting, and swearing later, it was all rigged up. Two outlets on the left, exit to the other J-box on the right:

New junction box

Rewired junction box

I went upstairs, tested all the wires, put the boxes back into the wall, hooked the outlets back up, and everything worked. I was ready to declare complete victory over rewiring until I realized that there is still one knob & tube outlet in the living room. There is basement access to this wiring, but unfortunately it is under a big heating duct.

Hard to get to

I tried for a while to remove that section of duct but came up wanting. It certainly looks like it is meant to be removable, but just bending the clips down didn't do the job. It is really tempting to just plaster around the outlet with a new box and call it good, but I know I'll hate myself if I punk out just one outlet away from annihilation of the enemy.

After I figure out what to do about that last damn outlet, I can finish plastering. For the record, I have come to hate plaster with a ferocious intensity. When it comes time to do the bedrooms and the main floor bathroom, the cracking walls are coming down and drywall is going up and that is that. I am considering hiring someone to do the small amount of plaster remaining in the living and dining rooms just so I don't have to think about it.

In other news, the plant life surrounding the domicile is threatening to completely take over.

Weeds 1, Walkway 0

Grass in front getting very tall

Yard grass getting tall too

I need to buy, borrow, or steal a lawnmower and cut the grass next weekend. Actually, I needed to do it last weekend. There will be some quality time with me, the weeds, and the gardening gloves, too, but until next time...

Downtown Seattle

2005-03-27T23:27:00.000-08:00

as seen from 3rd Ave W and Highland Drive
10:29pm, March 27, 2005

Suburban agriculture

2005-03-27T20:49:00.000-08:00

I woke up Saturday morning to the sound of pouring rain. Dumping rain. It has been really mild this spring, and I guess it is payback time. Nevertheless, I had made plans weeks ago to go out to the nursery with Megan and Heidi, so I got dressed and went to meet them. We headed to Flower World out in Maltby, WA, near Snohomish, basically BFE as far as I'm concerned.

Flower World is, by my estimate, roughly 100,000 square miles of nothing but plants, and we were there for a while. The order of the day, for me at least, was to get an herb garden going again. My true #1 concern was to get my hands on a shiso plant, but I guess it is still a little early, so despite also going to Swanson's Nursery in north Seattle on the way home, I returned home without one.

I did, however, get a whole bunch of herbs: thyme, lemon thyme, oregano, sage, Italian parsley, dill, chives, basil, apple mint, and orange mint.

Herbs aplenty

Last year in California, I had an herb garden, and one of the things I had wanted to try but never got around to was doing a "salad box" by filling a planter with a bunch of different salad greens. Well, sometimes dreams do come true. I got 2 red Lollo Rosa plants, a Red Giant mustard green, a "Merveille du Quatre Saisons" (French for "salad"), a Speckled Somethingorother, and six small "deer tongue lettuce" plants. And a big box.

Salad box

I didn't get home until late afternoon, and it was both sopping wet and starting to get dark outside, so I had to hope the rain would calm down enough for me to plant on Sunday without my planting soil turning into a giant mud pit.

It didn't seem too bad today, so I decided to hop to it. There is a little raised bed built inside the front fence of my house, but it had sprouted a lot of grass and weeds. I pulled out what I could, and dug the rest of it up and turned it over. Why do I have the feeling I'm going to regret not putting all of this stuff in boxes full of pristine, untarnished potting soil?

Anyway, first up to bat was the salad box. I dumped a bunch of dirt into it and tried to be gentle seating the plants, but I got dirt all over the leaves I didn't break. Well, this is why the good Lord gave us the salad spinner, I guess.

Lettuces planted and in their habitat

I planted all of the herbs except for the basil and mint in the ground. I tried to give them a good amount of space, 7-8 inches of radius around each plant. I particularly want to give the thyme a lot of room to get big.

Herbs planted

I put the mint in a separate pot I bought specifically for that purpose. This is because if you put mint in the ground, it will expand to fit whatever ground there is, usually killing everything else in the process. Heidi, who is a botanical genius, told me that unless I keep these two guys trimmed, the stronger one will eventually take over the pot. It should be all right -- I have a plan for keeping them down to size.

Apple mint and orange mint, in solitary confinement

It was still pretty wet outside and my gardening gloves are looking nastier all the time.

Gross Gardening Gloves

Megan told me she has never had much success growing basil in Seattle, so I'm going to try doing it in the greenhouse window of my kitchen. As insurance, I bought three plants. The way I see it, they will all probably die anyway, and if they are all very healthy, I'd have to have many pounds of basil before I ran out of things to do with it. Sure enough, this morning they were already looking a little wilted. I gave them some water, and I need to get them a container or two.

Basil, basil, basil

Also, violating my usual 100% utilitarian approach to gardening, I picked up a few houseplants. There is a hook in the kitchen for a hanger, so naturally I bought two hanging plants. I need to put another hook somewhere.

Plant life for the kitchen

Another hanging plant

I also got a really cool potted plant to keep in the greenhouse window called a "scarlet skullcap".

Scarlet skullcap

I have a friend coming to visit next weekend, so nothing will happen then. The house meteorologist says there is a slight chance of plaster work happening this week, but there is a laziness front off the Sound that we may have to contend with.

Dustbusters

2005-03-20T17:02:00.000-08:00

I wrote this post last weekend and forgot to publish it. Oops.

I finally did some work on the plaster this weekend. A small amount, but I accomplished something, at least.

It sounds really trivial, but a big part of what was blocking me was dragging everything out of the living room except for the large sofa and piano, and covering those two big items with drop cloth. I finally did it, it took ten minutes just like I knew it would, and I'm suppressing my impulse to beat myself up about it some more.

Covered up

I think I have finally found a method for producing flat plaster walls. It seems like more work than should be necessary, but I don't really care at this point as long as it gets done. Basically, I smear on a bunch of coats of straight plaster until it's caked up nice and good and roughly (and I do mean roughly) thick enough to come flush with the wall. Then I plug in the power sander and grind it down to a state where it is flat with a bunch of pits. At that point I can easily fill in the little divots and finish it with the hand sander.

I tried this on the patch next to the dining room light switch, and it basically works pretty well both at getting the plaster flat and producing more dust than previously thought possible.

St. Josh loaned me this device he got when he drywalled his basement called the Aquair. It is basically an airtight bucket of water with two hoses sticking out of it. One hose goes to your vacuum, the other to a hand sander. As you sand away, the vacuum pulls the dust from the hand sander through the water, where it gets trapped and turned into sludge.

You have to use sanding screens instead of sandpaper, but that's no big deal. The real problem with this system is that I applied the plaster like I was stylishly frosting a cake, and sanding it flush by hand would take more time than just burning the place down and doing the jail time for insurance fraud. So I hooked the device up to the exhaust on my power sander, and lo and behold, it worked pretty well. It throws off more dust than the hand sander, but a manageable amount.

Power sander exhaust

Bucket o' water

Aquair exhaust

Shop vac

Bubbly goop

I sanded down three large areas of plaster, now ready to get their final fill-in and hand sanding, and while I had the sander out, I used it to rough up the paint on all of the window trim. This should give the primer better adhesion to the surface.

Mixing up that plaster is so messy and time-inefficient. I am really not looking forward to it, but there is a very large area in the dining room that needs a new top coat, on the order of 8 square feet, and I guess I'll tackle it sooner or later.

Preferably later.

Your host

Wood shop, pt. 1

2005-03-07T00:12:00.000-08:00

The problem

Rip in half

1/4" x 2" x 2 3/4" each

Pile o' shims

America's Favorite #1 Wood Glues

Glue for the shim sandwich

Shim sandwich

Glue curing on both sides

Fully assembled

Voila!

Allow me to reintroduce myself

2005-02-13T23:04:00.000-08:00

I've been pretty busy for about a month. In the interest of staying on topic, I will make a brief summary of excuses and move on. Weekends are my bread and butter when it comes to finding time to get things done around the house, and the last four have been either booked or hijacked.

I had to work (at work) one weekend.

I got a surprise visit from Katie one weekend -- housework was gladly suspended.

I went to Spokane to help my mom pack up her house one weekend. Man, I hate Spokane.

I spent a Saturday at Josh & Megan's, helping them jackhammer out their walkway and remove a couple of fences in preparation for the landscaping of their yard. I think Josh estimated that we hauled off about 4.5 tons of debris.

We worked late enough that we missed the deadline for returning the hauling truck, forcing another day's rental. So despite all of us having worked ourselves into oblivion, they came over on Sunday and helped me haul away all of the debris in my house -- 850 lbs worth. The ceiling is gone, the huge pile of crap in the laundry room is gone, and all that crap I hauled out of the crawlspace is gone. Ding dong, the witch is dead!

The major work to be done on the godforsaken living & dining room, which I had merely intended to paint, is plastering, particularly around the new electrical boxes, where I damaged enough of the existing plaster getting the old boxes out to require repair. The problem is that all my new boxes are remodel boxes, which have to grab onto the wall. I can't mount the box if there is no wall around it, and I can't plaster wall around it if it's not mounted.

My first swing at solving this problem seemed to work all right. I cut a rectangle of wood about the size of the box and glued a dowel in it. So I hold the jig in, plaster around it, and pull/cut it back out before the plaster has set too much. Par example:

Plastering jig

The jig in place for a wall socket box

So this weekend was pretty unglamorous, just plastering around the boxes so the coverplates won't have giant holes peeking out from either side.

Plaster is really messy and basically a huge pain in the ass to work with. I know it is a skilled trade, but I just don't understand how I'm supposed to be getting better at this. Maybe I don't have the right tools? I am currently just using a variety of scrapers to apply it.

Josh loaned me this sanding bong thing, which is a bucket with a place to attach a shop vac and a hose leading out to a sanding screen. You put some water in the bucket, and the vacuum sucks up the dust as you sand, where it is trapped in the water. Once I have finished the boxes, I hope to use this thing to do some sanding without the dust explosion that happened before.

Light switch plastered in...maybe too well

Also, I still have to run real Romex to a few of the outlets and figure out how they're supposed to get to the panel downstairs. I can't just keep splicing the old knob & tube outlets onto the same new circuit, or like 70% of the outlets on the main floor are going to be running on the same breaker.

I've been having trouble getting stuff done on weekdays because by the time I get home, it's dark outside and it makes me tired. To combat this, I'm going to try to set aside a specific block of time, say 1 hour each night, to accomplish something small. Plaster this outlet, run that circuit. Hopefully that will get me back to my former level of productivity, which I was very happy with.

Still other tasks loom. For the last month I have been doing laundry and deciding I would fold it "later". It has finally come to a head:

I have to fold all this laundry

Finally, being back to working on the house means being back to baking bread, the ideal background task for working on one's home, if you ask me.

Prosciutto ring

This bread has cracked black pepper and pieces of prosciutto mixed into it and it is glazed with butter before and after baking, one of the best loaves I've baked yet. Word to Rose Levy Beranbaum, the patron saint of baking.

To infinity and beyond

2005-01-05T10:03:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year, ladies and germs. My insincere apologies for the lack of updates, but my New Year's resolution was to not update my blog or work on the house at all. Like most New Year's resolutions, it was shot almost immediately.

As planned, I didn't do any work on the week after Christmas, with the exception of cleaning up the aftermath of the family visit, expressed almost entirely in wrapping paper and dirty dishes. I had a great New Year's Eve, a great New Year's Day brunch (luxurious oeufs au caviar courtesy of my pal Michael), and a last-minute weekend visit from the world-famous Baron that afternoon.

OK, I actually did do one small thing. I installed a magnetic knife rack on the kitchen wall. I had been wanting one for a while, and I could no longer fit all of my knives in the block I had. Et voila:

Magnetic knife rack

Baron and I hung out for a while, doing good deeds, helping old ladies across the street, etc., and on Sunday we descended down to the shop. My basement door was still missing proper molding and insulation, so we made that. Because the wood needed to extend 5" left and right from the door, but only 3" up, it was not a simple 45-degree miter.

I said that we could calculate the angle we needed to cut pretty easily. Baron thought we could just basically eyeball it. I deferred to him because I couldn't remember how to calculate the angle. (This is why you should finish high school, kids.) There is a detent on my miter saw at 31.6 degrees, and we found that it was pretty much close enough. We just rotated the adjoining board by 90 degrees to cut the complementary angle, so at least I am not a total moron.

I figured that since these pieces of wood would be outside, they should probably get a coat of primer before going up.

Door molding pieces drying

While the primer on the molding dried, we (by which I mean primarily Baron) threw out a bunch of junk and generally cleaned up the shop a bit.

Baron and the shop vac

The pile of garbage next to the door is getting really out of hand. I need to rent a truck and take all this stuff to the dump pronto.

Unbelievable pile of junk

On Monday, Baron took off for his meeting and then the airport, and I went to Costco with my mom. I had not been to Costco since I bought the house, and I went completely nuts, buying huge quantities of trash bags, toilet paper, and Hostess Ding Dongs. They also had laser thermometers, and I couldn't resist.

We had a brief layover at my uncle Steve's house in West Seattle and I helped him install a new electrical box, complete with new switch and outlet. I think I may have actually learned something during all that wiring I did at my own place.

I went home and installed the brick molding with the help of my trusty clamps.

Clamps, the solo worker's best friend

Brick molding installed!

The miters didn't fit as tightly as I would have liked, but they were still pretty solid, and I have a feeling it had more to do with bowing of the wood than anything. I caulked around the molding to get a seal from the outside, and finally got to use my spray foam insulation around the door frame.

Spray foam insulation

Today I was curious about how far off we were in the angles we cut, and I am embarrassed to say that even after finding this excellent trigonometry page, I still had to ask for the help of my brother Aron, who is actually smart enough to go to college.

arctan(3/5) * 180/π = 30.96 = we were only off by 0.63 degrees = not bad

Speaking of degrees, my new laser thermometer reports that putting up brick molding and insulation made the area around the door a full 20 degrees warmer. See, I needed that laser thermometer, I just didn't know it yet.

I'll be bringing the living and dining rooms back down this week to finish up plastering and wiring. I'd bet that if I asked Aron to help me calculate how long it will take, he'd tell me about a number that looks like a sideways 8.

Christmas

2004-12-28T13:29:00.000-08:00

Christmas came and went without any major problems. As I scaled back my expectations for what I could accomplish in time for my family's arrival, my stress level decreased proportionally. I didn't finish plastering, never mind spackling, sanding, washing, priming, or painting, but I did get the important things done.

As I shuffled around on my hands and knees cleaning the floor with a spray bottle and a scraper, I was really hating myself for not putting drop cloth or at least newspaper down. When I was just scraping the wallpaper off dry, it wasn't really a big deal because I could just vacuum up the scraps. But when I started using the steamer, the scraps and their adhesive became wet and dried stuck to the floor. That really sucked, and at the very least, I'm putting a few copies of The Stranger down before I finish plastering.

I made a number of NEC violations in order to get all the outlets and light fixtures working in time. The hot wire for the porch light needed to be connected to the panel somehow, so I jury-rigged it into an already-full junction box. I left plenty of slack (but supported the connection into the J-box with a cable staple) so I could chop it down and hook it up for real after Christmas. It may have been a hack, but after I connected the hot wire for the porch light and went upstairs to turn it on, when the light came on, I felt as if I had invented electricity myself.

To save time, I decided to leave the outlets as knob & tube. Unfortunately, I already had new boxes in and the knob & tube cabling does not fit into the knockouts for the new boxes. So I connected some smaller wires to the K&T ones and ran those into the boxes. It'll be easy to fix that, but again, that's not passing inspection.

Miraculously, the dining room light fixture is wired up legitimately. My brother helped me re-hang the chandelier, and it looks really nice, if identical to its former ungrounded self.

I unwrapped all the furniture and got to lounge around on that for a little bit, which was pretty nice. I assembled my IKEA coffee table. I brought a Christmas tree home and set it up. I cleaned the kitchen. I saw the room, and saw that it was good.

Christmas was a lot of fun, but I'm exhausted. I put my sister and her husband in my bed and crashed on the couch and my back is still hurting from it. I decided to lay off work on the living and dining rooms for this week and just relax. I'm so used to working on the house nonstop that I got home last night and had no idea what to do with myself.

Oh, and I got a flippin' sweet router from my mom and brother for Christmas. Maybe I can use that to dress up the wood for my brick molding.

We'll see how my plan to take the rest of the week off works out. I already want to get back to work.

Rally Day 2

2004-12-19T23:18:00.000-08:00

Well, I got the bulk of the wiring tasks done today. I didn't take any pictures because I was so busy, so this will be primarily a textual update.

I woke up sore as could be, but managed to drag myself out of bed into the shower and off to work. I added a little plaster to the large area under the window, snipped the wire and did the finish coat on the doorknob hole, and got to the wiring work.

Removing the little bench between the closets proved to be a formidable task producing a ton of debris. It was framed sturdily with 2x4, covered in drywall, and finished with wood paneling. I cut a hole in the wall between two studs for getting at the porch light. I drilled a hole in the basement ceiling for fishing hot wire up to the porch light switchbox. Mom came over again and finished up scraping the wall. Yesterday I realized I had bought three-way switches instead of normal two-way switches, so I ran to the hardware store and picked that up. I also picked up another 50 lb bag of plaster because I'm probably going to need it:

While Mom was around, I removed the switch box in the dining room, destroying some of the surrounding plaster. I seem to really do a lot of plaster damage on the switch boxes. I tried to fish Romex from the switch box to the second floor. Unfortunately, there was an existing knob & tube wire in the way, and the porcelain knobs are nailed to the studs, making the wire very hard to just pull out. I enlarged the hole around the switch box area enough to be able to pry out the knob and cut the lath in the way with my trusty sawzall. Unfortunately, the sawzall caused a lot of vibration in the lath and a bunch more plaster fell off. Anyway, I got the damn wire out of the way and got new wire fished from the switch box to the ceiling.

I removed all of the electrical boxes for the outlets in the living room. I cut a hole in the dining room ceiling for installation of an electrical box (there wasn't one). Josh came over and helped me fish some wire. We got the really hard ones done, namely, the switch legs. I already had the wire on the second floor, so we just needed to get it to the fixture. We drilled through five joists above the dining room in order to get it from point A to point B. This was a non-trivial operation: there are only three holes in the floor, so two joist cavities would have to be fished blind, meaning poke the fish tape through the side of the joist you can see, and poke around blindly hoping to get it through the next hole where you can see it again. Complicating this further was the fact that one of these had to be done at a slight angle. Also, the drill barely fit in the space between the floor and ceiling, so that was a big pain in the ass. This crude diagram explains it all:

Light fixture wire fishing diagram

Here I am drilling through a joist, courtesy of Josh's Sidekick camera.

Mr. Driller

Anyway, despite the complexity of fishing it, we had a pretty solid plan going before doing the work and we got it done in a reasonable amount of time.

On to the porch light, we fished the hot wire from the basement to the switch box and found that wrapping the connection between the wire and the fish tape in electrical tape means it doesn't get stuck when the sheathing catches against the hole. So that must be why every book on earth tells you to do it. I got out Señor Sawzall again and cut a hole in the awning for the electrical box.

Next we fished wire from the hole in the awning up and through the header above the switch. I had to crawl through the hole I had cut in the wall into the dirty, dusty, fiberglass-ridden space above the awning.

Into the breach

About as comfortable as it looks

This really, really, really sucked. I cramped up badly from laying across all the joists and having no room to move around; there was knob & tube wiring I had to crawl through (it was off at the breaker); I drilled a 3/4" hole in the wrong place, I think it was into one of the studs; I have a hard time breathing with the mask on; it was filthy; etc.

Anyway, we got it done in about the same amount of time it took to do the other one (60-90 minutes, maybe). It was getting late, so we knocked off and went to the Hilltop for some of that delicious Hale's Cream Ale.

I still have to do to the outlets, but those should not be too hard. All the plastering is what is really worrying me. I'm not sure how I'm going to get the remodel boxes mounted without any surrounding plaster, but I need them mounted in order to do the replastering.

I wouldn't have accomplished anywhere near the amount I did this weekend without the help of my mom and Josh, and I am still grossly behind. I cracked the LCD screen on my Sidekick when it was in my overall bib and I was crawling around on my belly. There is no way I am going to get all this stuff done in time for my family's arrival on Christmas Eve. I want to die.

Love,
Ficus

Rally Day 1

2004-12-19T01:25:00.000-08:00

Today was very productive, thanks in no small part to my mom coming over to help out. She graciously offered to come over and do whatever work I could give her to do, and I obliged by giving her the remainder of the wall-scraping duty. Sorry, Mom.

My helpful mom

She is only smiling because it is not her umpteenth day scraping those damn walls.

Mike came over and we set about the big rewiring project. He was at the house for three and a half hours and we did not rewire a single circuit. But we did cut a lot of holes, trace a lot of wires, measure a lot of distances, and I have a step-by-step plan detailing everything I need to do to get down to it tomorrow. I had hoped we would do at least one circuit together so I could be walked through it, but he had already been at the house for so long and I feel like I have a solid understanding of what needs to be done now.

More holes in upstairs floor

Hole in upstairs wall

I have to cut a (bigger) hole in the upstairs wall large enough for me to fit my body through so that I can get at the porch awning and the header above the wall cavity containing the switch box. I have to remove a little bench between the two closets upstairs so that I can cut a hole in the floor underneath it. I have to drill through 4 joists to run wire from the dining room light switch to the box. I have to fish new hot wires to the two switches. I have to install two electrical boxes for the new fixtures (the old ones had no boxes). And I have to do three outlets, one of which actually seems to be receiving power from the wiring upstairs instead of coming from the basement. I have my work cut out for me tomorrow.

Mike left and I went to Paris, Texas to buy some electrical boxes and a hole saw to make room for them with. When I got home, I decided that since I knew that I wasn't going to have to knock any holes in the walls to do my rewiring, I could go ahead and continue with preparing the walls for painting, saving the electrical work for tomorrow. My mom finished the living room and I gave it a once-over with the hand sander to remove any little wallpaper boogers and to rough up the wall for better primer adhesion in the unlikely event I ever get to paint the room.

That done, I moved on to repairing the large damaged sections in the wall. I stapled hardware cloth over the large section of exposed lath underneath the window in the living room and mixed up some plaster.

I had a really hard time with the plaster, getting it everywhere, making too much and having it set too fast, but I seemed to be getting better with each successive try. I got a reasonable base coat on the wall, which I'm allowing to set overnight even though it is quite sturdy already.

Hardware cloth stapled to the lath

Base coat

While the plaster sat, I set about repairing the hole left by the doorknob. This one was a little more problematic because the lath behind it is broken and cannot support the hardware cloth. I tried a trick I read about online: tie a wire or string to the middle of the mesh, fold it up, put it in the wall through the hole, and pull on the string. The cloth comes flush against the back of the wall. Put your base coat on, and once it sets, just cut the wire and put a finish coat on.

About the size of a doorknob

They recommended tying the wire to something heavy across the room. I was lazy and stapled it to the wall and back. I'm going to be spackling the wall like crazy anyway.

Filled in, with retaining wire

I spackled two of the living room walls before calling it a day on housework.

Tomorrow I'm gonna get up, do a coat of plaster, then get everything done in preparation for fishing. Then I'll call Josh to come help me to do the actual fishing and maybe we will go get some ribs. But right now I am going to finish my drink and go the hell to sleep. I'm exhausted.

You'd want one too

25

2004-12-14T22:57:00.000-08:00

I turned 25 today! Check out this bitchin' miter saw my mom got for me:

The ultimate set of tools

I am totally excited about this saw because it will allow me to cut the 45-degree angles I so desperately need for the basement door's exterior trim. Then I will be able to insulate the damn thing.

Katie got in on Saturday evening, so I really haven't got much done at all. The time on Saturday before her arrival was spent cleaning up the house in order to lend some fabricated air of civilization to the joint. I needed to mop the kitchen floor, so naturally, I bought a commercial janitorial Rubbermaid® Brute™ mop and bucket/wringer. It basically wrings the hell out of a mop, and cleaning the kitchen floor was a snap.

The Wringing Machine

I did do a couple of minor household tasks this weekend. I finally got around to installing the deadbolt in the basement door. It sure looks a lot nicer than the plastic grocery bag I had shoved in the hole for "insulation". I also put a few hooks in my kitchen shelves to hang my stand mixer attachments from. Little things like this are what is so awesome about owning a house. If you have an idea of a little something to install to make life easier, you can just go for it.

Little hooks

I went to IKEA today and bought a bunch of lamps and a couple miscellaneous pieces of furniture. My family is coming to spend Christmas here and I am flailing wildly trying to get everything in order for the visit. I'm going to be busting ass pretty hard this weekend to get it all in order. An electrician pal is going to come on either Saturday or Sunday to help me get the circuits I need to rewire done. Sometime before that, the walls need to be cleaned up. Sometime after that, they need to be painted. And sometime in the middle of all that, there's a bunch of debris that needs to be removed from the house. The weekend after that, I'm going to have a bunch of people in the house, so here's hoping it all gets worked out. Maybe all the pressure will get me to the finish line after all.

More lovin' from my oven

Demolition & Discovery

2004-12-05T21:02:00.000-08:00

As usual, I intended to get a whole lot of certain things done this weekend, and as usual, I did get some things done, but as usual, the overlap of those two lists is pretty sketchy.

Things destroyed this weekend:

The basement ceiling. I cut a small hole in the basement ceiling to see where the wires to one of my offensive knob & tube outlets were going. Sure enough, I saw them come out of a joist and go up through the floor into the wall cavity. So I got out my sawzall and tore the rest of the ceiling down.

Ceiling on the floor

Damn knob & tube wiring

The porch light. I thought replacing the porch light wiring would be pretty easy, since the switch is right inside the door and the porch light is right outside the door. You can probably guess how that turned out. I removed the old switch box, too, but to get at the wiring for that porch light, I am gonna have to get in the ceiling somehow.

Once the porch light switch

The upstairs floor. Deciding to just work through my frustration at not understanding the wiring layout of the porch light, I decided to get into the ceiling from above. Sure enough, the wires are in there. I think I'm going to get an electrician in to walk me through doing this circuit and hopefully get off the leash after that. I'm not confident enough to execute on it. Doing all this prep work off the clock will save me money, though.

I did actually cut a hole in the wall of one of the master bedroom closets hoping there would be some crawlspace on the other side of the house. I was greeted by insulation.

Hole in the floor

The failing loft in the garage. There was a loft of incredibly poor design built over the garage door that had begun to sag so low in the center that it was impossible to actually open the door. (There is a side door, too, which is how I got in.) I found an old ladder in the garage and pulled the loft down. It didn't take too much work; the thing was well on its way to the ground already. The hardest part was lugging the half-sheets of plywood out of the way by myself. Now all I have to do is clear out some space in there and I'll be able to park my car under a roof.

Onto the "discovery" portion of our show:

As I was pulling down the ceiling, things began falling to the floor: remnants of what was definitely a stash. An empty pack of cigarettes, a lighter with a bikini girl on it, a bag of Drum tobacco, a couple of Penthouse subscription cards, and some drawings, marginally discernible as naked women.

Ah, the teenage years

Earlier today, I set about making an electrical map of the house. I made simple drawings of each room with notes on where each wiring drop was. Basically, every outlet, light switch, light fixture, thermostat, appliance, etc, etc. I want to index the circuit breaker, both so I know which switch kills what when I need to turn things off, and to wrap my head around the circuit layout of the house.

I crawled behind the furnace, looking for hidden outlets, and found some storage shelving that had not been emptied. The previous homeowner's bank statements from 1991-1993, a mailbox apparently belonging to a houseboat of theirs, an old Polaroid Land camera, a bunch of spice racks (with intact spice jars), a pasta rolling machine, a globe, and a ton of other stuff.

Houseboat mailbox

Polaroid Land camera

Scale model of our earth

And finally, the bad side of what the previous owners left. I was rooting around in the upstairs crawlspace, trying to trace wiring drops. They had thrown tons of junk in there. I found a baby picture and a matte for it, pieces of tubing, shopping bags, a desk lamp, toys, you name it. An unraveled roll of toilet paper, mercifully clean. I threw it all out of the crawlspace -- yet more stuff for the dump.

It Came From The Crawlspace

So, it was pretty annoying to clean out that junk, but that paled in comparison to finding that they had thrown a potted plant in there, upside down, and it had spilled dirt and fertilizer all over the insulation.

Dirt + Fiberglass = Awesome

How the hell am I going to clean that up?

I've been baking a lot of bread on the weekends. It is the ideal thing to do while working on the house, since it's the sort of thing you fuss with for 5 minutes and then leave alone for 3 hours. My lunches will be flush with sandwiches for the foreseeable future.

Hot & Fresh

Join us next weekend, when Katie visits and I accomplish absolutely nothing on the house.

Piece of cake

2004-12-02T23:06:00.000-08:00

First, the bad news:

There's supposed to be a wall there

Plaster rubble

If you don't know how plaster walls work, here's a great cutaway view and brief explanation.

I got home from work and surveyed the area where I was going to replace the electrical box and noticed a crack in the plaster. I inspected it more closely and discovered that there was a very large region of the plaster that was completely unattached to the lath. It was being held up by the surrounding plaster, and understandably, beginning to crack. So I got behind it with my trusty scraper and removed the section seen above, all the way down to the lath.

I went to Home Depot and picked up a few more old-work boxes. They didn't have the kind that attaches to the stud. At the recommendation of a helpful HD employee, I bought some hardware cloth (woven metal mesh) to staple over the exposed lath. 1/4" holes = 4 plaster keys/sq in = much more sturdy. I got a cool folding hand saw that uses reciprocating saw blades. I bought a pair of metal cutters for the hardware cloth. Oh, and a 25-lb bag of plaster of Paris.

I saw Tom Douglas pushing a shopping cart around with an enormous tool chest riding on top of it. I wanted to say hi to him, but "Hi, I've never eaten at any of your restaurants, and I don't have any of your cookbooks, but I had a piece of buttermilk cake from Dahlia Bakery once and it was really good!" wasn't the icebreaker I was looking for. So I paid for my stuff and went to Taco Bell.

Then I went home and replaced the hell out of an electrical box.

Ugly, ungrounded outlet

It pops right out

Unfortunately, I couldn't use my shop vac trick of figuring out which breaker this outlet was on because the shop vac needs a grounded outlet. I used some powered speakers hooked up to my AirTunes output in a home-improvement perversion of Musical Chairs. I really need to make a circuit map of the house.

I had already taken the outlet out last week and discovered that despite being ungrounded, it had modern NM cable. Of course, they snipped the ground wire back to the sheathing, so I couldn't just attach it to a new outlet. I had to restrip the cable, which wasn't a big deal.

The new plastic box didn't quite fit in the hole. I bought the folding hand saw in anticipation of this and used it to provide a little breathing room for the tabs that hold the box to the wall. It slipped right in. I turned the screws and it pulled tight against the wall.

Fancy new box, note copper ground wire

I hooked up a new outlet, turned the breaker back on, tested it to make sure it was really grounded, and bang! Done!

Viva las grounding

I popped my roving outlet cover on it to check for marks.

We're gonna need a bigger cover

There are a couple of nicks in the plaster still visible outside the cover, so I'll fix those when I go on my plastering spree. But successfully replacing an electrical box is a load off of my mind. One step closer to having this room rewired, which itself is one step closer to getting the damn thing painted.

Oh yeah, the Internet

2004-12-02T18:04:00.000-08:00

Today I was eating lunch with my boss and we were talking about my rewiring project. He is trying to insulate the walls in his older house and is rewiring at the same time. I told him I was being held up because I didn't understand how the retrofit electrical boxes worked. I bought one and didn't understand how it was supposed to attach to the stud.

"All I need is for someone who knows how this works to show me how to do it just once," I said.

"No you don't. You need Google."

So I went back to my desk and Googled for "installing old work boxes" and lo and behold, the answer had been waiting for me there the whole time.

Q: How do old work boxes attach to the stud?

A: They don't. They attach to the wall.

Q: Ohhhh.

I did actually find an old work box design that attaches to the stud, and I think I'll visit you-know-where tonight after work to see if they have any of this type. I'll have to remove the old box from the stud first, but that's no problem.

Now I am all amped up to get home and try it out!

Distraction

2004-12-02T02:31:00.000-08:00

Excuses update:

I am easily distracted, and last weekend was no exception. I did finish scraping the wallpaper. I have not started on the final removal stage of steaming and scraping off the leftover adhesive.

The wallpaper, gone

Despite my road-to-hell pavement of finishing the walls, I opted instead to rearrange my bedroom. My bed was in the corner of the room, making it an obnoxious chore to change the sheets. I rotated it 90 degrees and moved it away from the wall, no small feat by myself, and now I can get at it from either side. The only thing left to do is make the bed. I also moved my computer into my bedroom from the cold, cold basement. Making new brick molding for the basement door and insulating it is still hanging over my head.

I have not done any rewiring yet, though I did buy a 50-foot fish tape and 100 feet of NM cable to get myself started. I am going to need to start cutting holes in the ceiling to do any meaningful work. I've decided that my idea to cut a hole in the plywood on the 2nd floor to get at the light fixtures on the main floor is a good one, but that is on hold until I have a couple of outlets under my belt. What is currently holding me up is intimidation, in the form of lack of experience at removing electrical boxes and installing new ones. I bought a couple and I'll take a whack at it this weekend when I can be in the house with plenty of light outside.

On Monday, expect either a tale of having to hire an electrician to bail me out or my obituary. Maybe both.

A variety of other chores and a desire to just sit down for a while have kept me from getting anything done after work. But even if I continue to slack off for the rest of the week, I'll be back in my overalls bright and early Saturday morning. My schedule got all screwed up over the Thanksgiving weekend and I'm still struggling to get back on track. I was really bummed out on Sunday because I woke up late and felt like I had thrown away half a weekend day, when I can get the most work done. I'm going to be in bed early on Friday night, even if it means hitting myself in the head with a cast-iron skillet.

I sent in my first mortgage payment today. I thought it was due on the 10th; it's due on the 1st. Whoops. But I already got the loan, right? Go ahead and wreck my credit, suckers!

Skilled labor

2004-11-26T20:40:00.000-08:00

On Monday morning the electrician came. We found a number of things still using knob & tube wiring, including three outlets in the living room previously thought to be grounded (and therefore NM cable). The only grounded outlet in the room was the one I tested "to see if this room is grounded", naturally. After surveying the scene, the electrician said there is no way I'd get the rewiring done professionally for less than $6K, and therefore recommended I do it myself. I was surprised to hear that, but he explained what has to be done, and it really is just a bunch of manual labor. Besides, I don't have $6,000, so I guess I'm an electrician now!

The entire second floor is a relatively recent remodel and has all new wiring. There are a few things in the basement that should be easy enough to get to. The bulk of the work is on the main floor: there are somewhere between six and eight outlets and five light fixtures that need to be rewired. The outlets are reasonably easy because I can get to them through the basement. Replacing the light fixtures is another story. Either I am going to rip up the walls pretty bad and have a lot of patching to do, or I can remove the light fixtures, plaster over them, and go to switched outlets and lamps.

The other day I was upstairs looking at the horrible carpet. I cut a patch out of it with a utility knife to see what was underneath, not-so-secretly hoping for untarnished hardwood floor, and not-so-surprised to see plywood. So if I'm going to replace that carpet upstairs anyway, maybe I should just yank up the carpet, cut a hole in the plywood, and get at the fixtures from above, rather than trying to dork around with an eighty-year-old plaster ceiling. Is this a stupid idea?

Tuesday morning brought another plumber. This one was friendly and helpful and didn't try to tell me I needed to burn my house down and let his cousin Frank rebuild it out of platinum. He told me basically what my home inspector did: the corrosion has effectively sealed the pipe back up, and it's fine for now. He also capped off a loose pipe in the attic crawl space that had a leaky valve and looked at why the toilet in the main floor bathroom wiggles a bit, and got it all done in half an hour.

The jackasses from the other plumbing company sent me a card thanking me for my business and a survey entitled "How Did We Do?" with spaces for me to write the names and addresses of my "friends" to be added to their mailing list. They also included a refrigerator magnet. Thanks, guys!

We Appreciate Your Business

On Thursday I made three pies and thirty dinner rolls and it reminded me that not far down the line, I have to re-grout the kitchen counters, which are in pretty bad shape in some places.

Where's the grout?

Today I had to take care of a bunch of stuff at work and didn't get much done house-wise. I did stop off at Krusty Burger to pick up a heat gun, though. One of my home improvement books talks a lot about removing paint with a heat gun, and since that paint on the walls has been so troublesome, I thought I'd give it a shot. It works like gangbusters and I fully expect the wall to be done tomorrow. The only problem is that now that I know I have to rewire a bunch of stuff, I'm not sure if I want to paint the room yet. I will at least get the walls cleaned up and patched in the meantime.

The wonderful heat gun

My goals for this weekend are to get the walls cleaned up and at the very least, get a plan together for rewiring, if not get started on it altogether.

2004-11-22T01:05:00.000-08:00

Our hero

I Sing The Outlet Electric

2004-11-21T18:43:00.000-08:00

So I got up this morning, fresh off six hours of sleep and ready to do the scrapity-scrape dance. Actually, that's not true. I felt as stiff as a board and my hands were swollen from chiseling away at the wall for ten hours yesterday. But the show must go on!

I went right to applying the toxic death to the living room wall. As I brushed away, taking care to keep the chemicals on the wall and not on me, I looked over to see a very large chunk of wall exposed in the corner. Apparently during the first pass of wallpaper removal, the backing paper and several layers of paper and paint had come clean off, right to the layer I wanted to stop at.

Putting the solvent on hold for a bit, I went over and chiseled at the dry area, and it started coming off in huge pieces. I was getting pieces as large as 2 sqft coming off at once. So the biggest wall in the living room really came off like it was nothing. There were a few stubborn areas, but I applied the paint goo to them individually.

I hadn't finished scraping yet, but I wanted to give myself some time to work on the outlets. I have zero prior experience in household electrical work and I wanted to make sure it was still light outside at least while I got my bearings. I do have 50 ft extension cords and a work light if it comes down to that, though. I was starting to get a headache and my hands were very sore, so I said uncle on the wallpaper for a bit and went to working on replacing the outlets.

Step #1 is to determine which circuit breaker kills the outlet you want to replace. (You can actually bypass this step if you want, and if you do, you won't have to do any of the other steps.) I went downstairs to the panel and turned off the first 20-amp breaker, ran upstairs, hit the outlet with the induction tester, and it was still hot. So I ran back downstairs, turned that breaker back on, turned the next one off, and so on.

I got all the way through the panel, eventually trying the higher-amp breakers too, and the receptacle was still hot! Finally I just hit the main breaker and went back upstairs. OK, the outlet is dead now, so how did I miss it?

At this point, I was desperately wishing for a helper, because I had run up and down the stairs over 20 times and my legs were killing me. Finally I wised up and plugged the shop vac into the outlet I wanted to kill, then went downstairs and started hitting breakers until I heard it turn off. The reason I missed it on the first pass? The breaker that the dining room outlets are on also controls the ceiling light at the bottom of the stairs where the panel is. I had hit that one, saw the light over my head go out, thought "well, that's not it," and moved on. Live and learn, I guess. Next time I'm plugging the shop vac in the first time.

I should mention now that I am completely terrified of electricity, and more specificially, being electrocuted. I don't think this is an unreasonable position. But I was pretty convinced that if I could just replace one of these suckers, I'd be over it, and I was right. Everything looked exactly like the book said it would, and it was done in a snap.

Hey! I installed a new outlet!

An outlet replacement under my belt, I decided to move on to this very old-looking safety outlet under the picture window. I checked to make sure it wasn't hot and pulled it out of the wall. There was a lot of plaster damage around it, but it's not like I'm not going to be fixing a bazillion holes soon anyway.

Ancient ungrounded "safety" outlet

I pulled the wires out of the box. This was a little different from the last one -- the NM cable was much older and more beat up, and there were two of them hooked up to the outlet, so this outlet was in the middle of a circuit leading somewhere else. I pulled them all out of the wall and turned the breaker back on to find out which one was upstream.

Two sets of wires

I should mention at this point that despite having grounding wire available, whoever ran the NM chose to use a two-prong outlet and just tie the two ground wires together. It is the older style NM -- maybe three-prong outlets weren't used yet

Anyway, I determined that the hot wire on the left was hot, and the hot wire on the right wasn't. I was going to install a three-prong outlet, so I could just hook the ground to the screw on the outlet, but I had to connect two ground wires, and it is against building code to attach two wires to one screw terminal. You are supposed to "pigtail" the wires: run the two (or more) you want to attach into a wire connector along with one wire that will actually go to the screw terminal. In a rare moment of foresight, I had bought some wire connectors at HD when I made my recent big trip there, but in a usual moment of density, I didn't buy any actual wire.

I wandered around the basement for a bit and saw an open electrical box in the ceiling with loose hot, neutral, and ground sticking out of it. I hit the main breaker to the house, checked that the box was dead, clipped a few inches off of the ground wire, and I was back in business.

Wired to code

I had a really hard time getting the outlet to fit back in the box. It was a very old box with screws sticking out where the mounting plate normally sits flush with the wall. I put a cover plate on to test and there was a decent gap between the wall and the plate. I think I could pull the screws out and drive them through the outer holes on the outlet's mounting plate, but I'm kind of afraid of taking those screws out, since I can't see where they go or how deep. I have an electrician coming tomorrow morning to deal with the knob & tube issue; I'll just ask for his advice.

New grounded outlet amongst the plaster damage

My mom just had foot surgery and is laid up at home, so I went over to help her get a place set up where she could use her laptop lying down. It was nice to have a break, but once I stopped working, I realized that I was really running on fumes. Probably Jasco Premium Paint & Epoxy Remover fumes. I'm going to just relax for a couple hours and then try to clean up the wallpaper and paint debris and the kitchen. I am on the hook to make some pies and dinner rolls for Thanksgiving, and I have no hope of accomplishing anything in the kitchen in its current state.

I was hoping to be further along, but I worked really hard this weekend and I feel good about that. The project marches on.