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?

The Reveal

2004-11-05T11:45:00.000-08:00

I'd been living in Seattle for nearly two months, having quit my job over two months ago, and my mom had been successfully kept in the dark about it. Until last night!

I had tried to do the reveal after my Wednesday carpentry class. I called her as soon as I got out of the class at 8:45, to no response. So I drove over to her apartment and called a few more times. All the lights were out, and I found out later that she had gone to bed at 8:30 that night, still exhausted from a long bus ride that weekend.

So I left work at 6:30 sharp yesterday evening, determined to catch her even if she did want to go to sleep before prime time. I sent her a few IMs and got no answer. I called her cell phone and got no answer. I drove over to her apartment again, no lights, no answer. Frustrated, I began walking around Fremont, irritatedly banging out complaints with my thumbs to anyone who would read them. Finally, she responded via IM that she had been out to dinner with a friend and was just getting on the bus in Bellevue, giving me around 45 minutes to kill. I walked over and had dinner at Paseo and when I was done, I walked back over to her house, sat in my car, and gave her a call. We made small talk and she said she was getting off the bus. I watched in my side mirror as she stood on the corner by her apartment, talking to me on the phone.

I asked her if she wanted me to come visit, and she said "Yes! I'll be in Seattle this weekend!"

"Why don't I just come over right now?" I said, getting out of my car. "I can be there in a minute or two."

"Oh, and how would you get here in five minutes? Drive a million miles an hour?" she said as I walked up behind her on the street. "Remember when you were kids, you used to say 'Mom, why don't you drive a million miles an hour? We can get there in ten seconds!'"

She sensed that someone was behind her, turned around, and screamed.

"Are you surprised?" I asked rhetorically.

"How did you get here?"

"I drove," pointing to my car.

We walked down the street, and she walked forward with her eyes fixed on me completely, as if I had just landed in a UFO.

"I have another surprise for you," I said, "but you have to come to the place I'm staying. I can't fit it in my car."

We walked into her apartment and she set down her bags, stunned. We walked back out to my car and drove off toward my house. Still, she wouldn't allow her eyes to leave me. She genuinely looked as if she was trying to determine whether or not she was dreaming.

"This is the best surprise you've ever done. I don't think there is any way you can top this," she said perfectly. It was all I could do to keep it together for the big surprise.

We got to the house, walked up the steps, and I took out my keys, and knocked on the door before putting the key in the lock. I felt like I had driven to the place a little too confidently and wanted to throw her off a bit. We walked in and I turned on the light. She looked around at all the moving boxes, baffled, and I said it.

"I bought this house. I moved to Seattle two months ago."

"Do you have a chair I can sit in?"

After settling down a little, I gave her a tour of the house and we walked around the neighborhood for a bit. She was still understandably in a state of shock as I rattled off all the times we had been on the phone and I had been in some hilarious compromising location, such as at one of her sisters' houses.

Most importantly to me, she took it the right way. It wasn't a joke to be made at her expense -- I decided not to videotape the event, despite countless requests -- but a surprise for her. When she told me "This is the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me," I knew that it had gone off without a hitch.

Unexpected project

2004-11-08T11:02:00.000-08:00

While she was showing me around her place, my friend Sheryl told me a story about an emergency remodel of her bathroom and said "It's not the cost that's so bad, it's the timing. These things can strike without warning."

Josh recommended I get started on a project right away, just to get my feet wet and to start making my mark in the house. I thought this was a great idea, so I had planned to spend this weekend, my first weekend in the house, getting started on that. I decided to paint the living and dining rooms, which are this horrible mauve color:

The dining room from the living room

The living room

They even painted all of the moldings mauve. The heating vents and electrical sockets were not spared either. Anyway, I had intended to go to Home Depot to pick up a few basic things, and then off to Queen Anne & Magnolia Paint to get some samples and start choosing colors in earnest.

A couple of guys from 1-800-GOT-JUNK were scheduled to arrive at 8:30am on Saturday to remove an ancient upright freezer and metal desk that the previous homeowners had neglected to get rid of. My real estate agent had arranged for this, and all I had to do was let them in. They showed up right on time and went into the basement. They blanched at the freezer, which really is huge, and said "Are you sure that thing will fit through the door?"

"It got in, didn't it?" I helpfully replied.

They took a few measurements and found that if they removed the freezer door, it would fit through the basement door with a tiny amount of clearance, but fit it would. It was then that one of them noticed the large pipe running down the back of the freezer with a three-inch-thick crust of ice on it. Neither of them wanted to chip the ice off, lest he be sprayed in the face with deadly freon. I wanted even less for them to leave without the freezer.

Once-icy pipe

What came off

OK, no more excuses! Get this godforsaken freezer the hell out of my house!

They tried to take the door off as specified by the instructions on the side of the freezer and eventually gave up on that and just started hammering away at the hinge, eventually breaking the door off. They loaded the freezer onto a dolly and wheeled it toward the door, and naturally, it wouldn't fit.

The junk guys try to get the freezer out the door

Apparently, there just wasn't enough clearance with the door still on the hinges, so that had to come off. As with every other piece of hardware in this house, the hinge was heavily painted over, so we had to bang on it a bit to get the hinge unstuck. As we tried to lift the door off, a fair bit of the door frame snapped off. Yes, ladies and germs, one of the jambs in my door frame was rotten. We took the hinges off at the frame, moved the door out of the way, and they evacuated the freezer. I signed something, the junk guys wished me good luck, and then they evacuated themselves, too.

The rotted and cracked door frame

So there I was. Just past nine in the morning, not a full week spent in my house yet, and I have no basement door. I figured I had better take some measurements, but somewhere along the line, my measuring tape disappeared. I went to the local hardware store and picked up a new tape, some safety glasses, and a pry bar.

I ran back to the house, measured all of the dimensions of the door and its frame, and went off to Home Depot. The guy in the door department asked me if it was a nice door. "No, it's pretty old and beat up," I said. "Just buy a new prehung door, then," he told me. He told me it would be a lot easier to remove an old door frame with a sawzall. I have been looking for any reason to buy a sawzall for a while now, so I put one in the cart. I also got a few other things on my list: a circular saw (tired of waiting for the class saws), a screw finder, tool belt, a couple cleaning products, basically a lot of minor things. I did not, however, buy a door, because I really didn't have any way to get it home. I still don't have roof runners for my car.

I took my spoils home and called Josh, who has a station wagon with a roof rack. He said Megan had the car, but she'd be back in a bit, so I went over to their place to hang out. She returned soon and the three of us went back to Home Depot, where I bought a door and a doorknob/deadbolt kit. We brought all that and an old dresser they had for me to my house and went out for dinner. I cannot overemphasize how humped I would be in this whole moving and homeownership endeavor if not for the generosity of Josh and Megan.

I realized at the table that it was getting pretty dark outside, and I didn't have a work light, so I ran a few blocks to the local hardware store, getting there ten minutes before closing. Further increasing the damage for the day, I picked up a work light, a Mag-Lite (I lose one every time I move and was down to zero), and a four-foot level. We finished dinner and retreated to my house, where Megan decided there wasn't much to do and went home. We opened up the box the work light came in and found that it had a 2 foot cord. No, I didn't have any extension cords.

So we went to Fred Meyer up in Greenwood for two 50' extension cords and something very important.

Finally, we returned to the house to start sawzalling and prying off the door frame. Apparently the door frame predated the new shingle siding on the house, because we broke a bunch of shingles in the process. Finally, the door frame was out of the way and we could install the new door!

The door doesn't fit

The sides of the old door frame ran all the way down to the floor, on either side of that concrete step. My new prehung door has a threshhold on the bottom and therefore sat on top of the step, four inches higher than it should have been. Back to Home Depot for more advice.

We arrived at Home Depot at 9:01pm, the store having just closed. I dropped Josh off at his house and returned home alone to drown my sorrows in PlayStation crime.

Join us tomorrow for our next exciting episode of "The Door That Wouldn't Fit!"

The Door, pt. 2

2004-11-08T11:07:00.000-08:00

I woke up early on Sunday morning. The plastic sheeting I had stapled over the rough opening was still there:

It keeps the rain out

I went to Home Depot to ask what I should do. I told Maurice, my main man in the door department, that as I saw it, I had two options: either get a shorter door, or rent a jackhammer and remove the offending step. Maurice said that he could get me a shorter door in about 2 weeks for about $280 (over twice the price I paid for the standard-sized door). So, I could wait two weeks with a hole in the back of my house only to have a door four inches off the ground or rent a jackhammer.

It cost me about $70 to rent a 55lb Bosch Jackhammer from Aurora Rents up in Shoreline, and I hauled it home in my trunk, stopping at Josh's for his leftover tub of patch concrete. This may seem like an obvious thing to say, but jackhammers are totally awesome. Also they are very useful for tasks such as destroying concrete steps that are keeping you from covering up an 82" by 32" hole in your house.

Our hero with jackhammer

Before

After

I had made plans with my family to go see The Incredibles on Sunday at 4pm, so my mom came over while I finished demolition of the old step. We returned the jackhammer to Aurora Rents and went back home. I cut a 2x4 down for a concrete mold and started to mix up some of the patch concrete. I troweled in a bit of it but ultimately had far less than I needed, and we had to go to the movie.

After the movie (which was fantastic), I made yet another trip to Home Depot for a 40lb bag of patch concrete. I also picked up a bag of fiberglass insulation for the area between the door frame and the studs, and a mask to wear when installing that. I dropped my mom off at home and went home to finish off the step.

I won the good-neighbors lottery with my house. Affirmation: as I toiled under the work light mixing concrete, my neighbor Tom stepped out his back door and handed me a Heineken. His timing was impeccable -- it reinforced my feeling that I did well with my choice of house, and I really didn't mind losing a weekend to this door fiasco over it. The neighbors at my mom's house in Spokane have been complete assholes for over 15 years, probably were before then, and probably will continue to be for the foreseeable future, and they are not moving. I hope Tom and Jenny don't move either.

I got all the concrete poured into the mold and reasonably leveled and went off to do some grocery shopping and some sleeping.

I got up the next morning and pried the mold loose -- there were still a bunch of holes in the face of the step, but nothing I couldn't fix with more patch concrete. I lugged the door down into position and saw that it would finally fit:

The door fits in

Now all that's left to do is screw the door into the frame of the house, shim it, caulk it, and do something about all those broken shingles. I'm having a really hard time doing it myself, so I'm going to have a handyman come over tomorrow morning to help me finish the installation.

I hope painting the living and dining rooms go better than this did.

I have a basement door

2004-11-12T11:12:00.000-08:00

On Monday evening, my mom came over and we tried to get the door installed. I was having trouble getting the door frame plumb and after three days of working on such a simple task, my confidence was flagging, so I decided to make dinner and call a handyman the next morning.

Tuesday morning, I got up and walked into the kitchen and heard some rustling. I looked over into my greenhouse window and saw a very irritated looking cat:

Kitty in the kitchen

The prevailing theory is that this cat got in at some point when there was no door in the back and was now trapped in the house. I picked him up to make sure he wasn't hurt or really skinny -- he wasn't -- and let him out.

This basically steeled my resolve to get a professional to come in and finish my door for me. I looked through the phone book and found the "Handy Person Service" section. Nobody could come until the next morning, so I left the plastic sheeting up and John from 206-HANDYMAN showed up around nine Wednesday morning. He got the door frame in plumb, it closes, he installed the new doorknob, it took a couple hours, but I have a basement door again.

I still have a few jobs to do, though:

Seal underneath the threshhold with concrete
Install the deadbolt (I have a plastic shopping bag shoved in the hole right now)
Insulate around the door frame (will probably use that spray foam insulation)
Replace the brick molding on the door
Repair the broken shingles around the door
Remove the immense heap of boards, rusty nails, and concrete from my basement

The current brick molding is fine and everything, but the one I took off was much larger, so the new one only barely covers the rough opening and the area around it looks terrible and is not weather-safe at all.

I'll go to the trouble of taking a picture of it once it's all done.

Slow weekend

2004-11-15T10:17:00.000-08:00

Katie was in town visiting this weekend, so I didn't get a whole lot of house chores done.

I bought a can of that expanding foam insulation stuff to seal up around the basement door frame. I'm going to install the deadbolt tonight and I'll probably do the insulation at the same time.

I also got two paint samples for the living and dining rooms -- a green called "Palm Leaf" for the living room and a red called "Hunting Coat Red" for the dining room. I painted a a couple 1'x1' areas on the walls and checked them out at various times of day. The red is definitely going to be a keeper. The green was a little lighter than I'd like; kind of "minty". I picked a lighter green to use for the ceiling in the living room, and a fairly neutral color for the dining room ceiling. I need to pick a trim color -- I am thinking of something like an almond cream instead of the standard white-white-white trim.

The weather stripping inside the front door had come off from the frame in one section, so I pried out the old rusty nails and nailed it back up with finishing nails.

A guy from Speakeasy is coming by today between 4 and 7 to install DSL, and I fully expect that to drag house work to a crawl.

Action-packed!

2004-11-20T03:01:00.000-08:00

My home inspector recommended that when I paint my living and dining rooms, I just paint over the wallpaper, because "it's going to be a real pain to get it off". I am 100% in favor of avoiding pain and I had intended to go along with this plan. The only problem is that the wallpaper is this sort of burlap-texture affair, and the seams are just terrible. I decided not to go to the trouble of priming and painting just to have an ugly wall with a nice color. I had heard that wallpaper is especially onerous to remove if it is painted, but that if you sand it up a bit, it's not so bad. So I bought a wallpaper steamer and a lot of sandpaper.

Last night, I was winding down to go to bed and idly stabbed at the wall with a drywall knife:

A drywall knife gets right under the wallpaper

The wallpaper peels off in a little strip...

And then in a big strip!

Excited at how easy the stuff was coming off, I ripped down about 3/4 of the wallpaper in the dining room in around 15 minutes. There was still some backing paper underneath it, but without the paint, I thought the steamer would make quick work of it. I got so revved up at this prospect that I had a hard time going to sleep and didn't manage to bed down until 2:30am or so.

After staying up too late, when I tried to get up this morning, I was really feeling the lack of sleep. I called in sick to work and slept for another hour or two. When I got up, I felt a lot better, and soon enough to put in a full day at work, but what I really wanted to do was rip down my wallpaper, so I decided to just get up and kick ass on the house for the day.

My homeowners' insurance carrier, the wondrous USAA, has set a number of contingencies on my policy. Essentially, there is a list of work I have to have done within 30 days of closing or they'll cancel my policy. They basically took anything negative my home inspector wrote on the inspection and demanded it be fixed. There are about seven things ranging from replacing the toilet tank assembly in the master bathroom, easy to do myself for $10, to replacing or disabling any knob and tube wiring in the house, potentially prohibitively expensive. I had let time get away from me on calling in an electrician and a plumber to take care of those items specifically requiring them, and I figured I might as well see if I could get some people in today, seeing as I closed 29 days ago and everything.

I called around to a couple electricians until I found one who said he might be able to come by toward the late afternoon. I called a plumbing service who said they would have someone out within the next couple hours, and I set to wrecking shop on my arch-enemy, the mauve burlap wall covering.

A couple surprises were in store, such as an area underneath a picture window where the wallpaper had been stapled back into the plaster, because there was a big hole underneath:

Nothing some plaster and spackle can't fix

All in all, I found three hidden major holes in the plaster. There was already a big doorknob-shaped hole in the living room, bringing me to a total of four. But patching a few holes isn't really a big deal when you already have to do one, and it's really not a big deal if you're going to paint the entire wall and don't have to worry about making the patch blend in.

I put a good dent in the wallpaper job and the plumbers arrived.

I showed them an open pipe in the upstairs crawl space that seemed to have a slightly leaky valve. I thought it just needed to be capped off or something and they agreed. I took them into the basement to look at a galvanized pipe connection that had a little rust on it. My home inspector said this wasn't really a big deal, since the rust tends to just seal the pipe back up, but USAA wanted a licensed plumber to sign off on it.

We walked back up to the main floor to conference, and then an unpleasant conversation began:

"So what do you want done about the pipe in the basement?" asks the plumber.

"If it's not a big deal, I want you to write down 'It's not a big deal' and I can fax that to my insurance company. If it is a big deal, I want you to fix it," I reply.

"How old is this house?" asks the plumber.

"It was built in 1924, so, 80 years," I reply.

"See, all of your pipes are 80 years old, they are so old at this point that my recommendation is that we get in there and replace all of them."

"I don't know that the pipes are 80 years old. A lot of them have been replaced."

"Those pipes are 80 years old."

"You looked at it for about ten seconds, how can you be so sure?"

"Look, I've been in plumbing since 1978, and those pipes are 80 years old."

"Then why did you have to ask me how old the house was?"

"You're the owner, I wanted to see if you had any prior knowledge."

"Right, so you can't fix the pipe, you have to re-pipe the entire house."

"Yes, my recommendation is that we gut everything and replace all the pipes."

"Well, I can't afford to have the house re-piped, so what are my other options?"

"Hey, don't get mad at me just because you can't afford to fix your house."

At which point I said "Thank you for coming out, but it is time for you to leave now," and showed them the door.

I don't know what the guy's problem was, but he was giving me attitude from the jump. And on top of that, now he wants to scare me into some five-figure remodeling job? Let's just say I don't recommend Southwest Plumbing. I called the dispatch office and wasted another 5 minutes of my life complaining to the customer service manager, who pretended to take down my information and told me he hoped I'd try them again sometime, because I "didn't receive the normal service." He didn't expect me to be happy, and I didn't expect him to care. We were both just going through the motions, like an embarrassed couple the morning after a one-night stand agreeing to call one another.

But on with the day. I called up USAA and told them I was having trouble lining up all the work on time, and because USAA has the best customer service known to mankind, they told me to just keep them updated on it. So I made another appointment with another plumber for Tuesday morning, relieved to have the deadline off my back, and finished up the wallpaper removal.

Wallpaper debris

The electrician called and asked if he could come on Monday morning instead. OK.

At this point, I decided it was time to make a trip to Tijuana for all the supplies I'd need to complete my painting project. Because they had painted absolutely everything mauve, I needed to replace all of the electrical outlets (these are called "receptacles" in Electricianese). I figured while I was at it, I might as well replace the light switches, too. I needed plaster and spackle for repairing the holes in the walls, a door stopper to prevent further holes, TSP for washing the walls, primer and paint, rollers, brushes, tarps, trays, a pole for painting the ceiling, a stepladder (I had been using a dining chair), a shop vacuum for cleaning it all up, and god knows what else. I got away for just under $500. Everyone on my Christmas list is getting a Maruchan Ramen and glue portrait this year; I can't even afford macaroni anymore.

I ate dinner with "I would be humped without" Josh & Megan and got back to work.

While the steamer heated up, I collected all of the debris from the first wallpaper removal into four 33-gallon trash bags. These will most likely go away when I get around to calling the junk guys to remove all the debris from the basement door replacement.

I scraped away at the backing paper: underneath it was a layer of lime green paint; under that was another layer of paint in a neutral, but too close to mauve color, and under that was the plaster wall. I steamed away at it, but the steamer actually seemed to make it harder to get the paint off as various sections became limp.

The layer of paint just above the plaster seems to be reasonably flat. I'm going to strip away everything on top of that and spackle over the plaster, wherever it may expose itself, to get it flush with the paint. Then patch the holes, replace the receptacles and switches, wash, prime, and paint. Scraping and sanding all that paint is going to be a formidable task.

So many layers

Green paint, neutral paint, plaster

Off to bed. It's 3am, and I have a long day ahead of me tomorrow.

Your Working Boy

Grunt work

2004-11-20T23:35:00.000-08:00

I spent all day scraping. Scraping wallpaper, scraping paint. Scrape, scrape, scrape.

After quite a while of whaling away at the layer of backing paper above the layer of lime green paint above the layer of purple paint above the layer of painted plaster I actually want to prime, I decided it might be best to call in the chemical reinforcements.

I drove over to Queen Anne & Magnolia Paint and they recommended a can of this extremely toxic goo. I bought that, a couple buckets, and a canvas drop cloth. I stopped off at the local hardware store on the way home to buy an induction tester.

A detour about the induction tester: I am trying to figure out the magnitude of my knob & tube problem as well as I can before the electrician arrives Monday morning. I can see the wiring in the open ceiling in the basement, but the only ungrounded outlets I have are in the living room, and the offending wires don't go anywhere near there. So I thought (perhaps wishfully) that maybe the K&T wires weren't even live anymore. An induction tester will tell you if there is current running through a wire without having to cut and splice it, so I thought I'd pick one up and check to see if the wires were hot or not.

I got home and realized I had left the drop cloth on the counter at the paint store. Before returning to get it, I checked the wires in question, which were, of course, hot. Damn! My mind boggled, I wandered around the house doublechecking for ground. I did find that the outlets in the living room are in fact grounded, they just have two-prong sockets, and that the three-prong socket in the bathroom does not have a working ground. So it's probably in the bathroom, and maybe some light fixtures. If it's only in the bathroom, that will be pretty good news to me.

After this lovely ten-minute detour into the world of electricity, it was back to Scrapeathon 2004. The instructions for the solvent said to wear a mask and heavy duty rubber gloves, pour some into a jar, and use an old paintbrush to apply a coat to the surface. I didn't have a jar, but I had bought some plastic cups to apply my paint samples from. Well, the solvent ate through the cup in about 30 seconds. "Boy, that was dumb," I thought as I raced to drop the leaking cup into a bucket. I worked for a while pouring a little bit directly from the can onto the brush and spreading it around on the wall. It only seemed to remove the top layer of paint. Just scraping away at the dry stuff, I was able to get a few layers at a time, so I went back to that.

I scraped and scraped and scraped and scraped and noticed that the areas I had put solvent on a couple hours earlier were coming off the wall like it was nothing. I went to Safeway looking for a mason jar, settled on a Pyrex cup, and returned home to cover the walls in paint stripper.

I alternated applying solvent and scraping for a while when I ran out of solvent. It was just after 8pm. Of course I wasn't going to get away with a day of working on the house without a visit to Disneyland. I returned with a gallon of gunk and set to covering the dining room walls in it.

A coat of solvent working its way in

I scraped and scraped and scraped until I could scrape no more and finally called it quits at about 11:30, leaving a huge mess of paint and wallpaper fragments behind. Once I've crammed the paper bits into more trash bags, the shop vac should make quick work of the paint chips and dust.

Big mess

Remaining tasks:

Apply solvent to living room walls
Scrape living room walls
Steam and scrape leftover adhesive from walls
Replace electrical outlets and switches
(Figure out how to) detach light fixture in dining room
Fill holes in wall with plaster
Caulk moldings and corners
Spackle dents and cracks
Sand everything smooth
Wash walls
Prime walls and trim
Tape and apply tinted primer for dining room
Lots of taping and painting
Replace all cover plates and heat registers
Clean up the war zone

I had hoped to at least get the rooms primed this weekend, but I didn't anticipate what a job removing all the old wall coverings would be. If I can get things scraped, spackled, and sanded by the end of tomorrow, I'll feel pretty good.

I am having a lot of fun working on the house. Even tedious and repetitive tasks, say, scraping the walls for hours and hours, aren't too bad. It would be nice to have another person around to help out and chat with; it can feel a bit solitary to scrape at the walls for 8 or 10 hours by oneself. I have a stereo set up so I can listen to music while I work, which helps, but I think the real secret of staying motivated and on task is that I planned the project very thoroughly. I always know where I am and what's coming next. It can be hard to feel like you're accomplishing a lot when there is an undefined amount of work ahead of you.

For me, there is a defined amount of scraping tomorrow: lots and lots of it.

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.

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

Our hero

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.

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!

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!

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

Downtown Seattle

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

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