La Folie de Ma Vie

I should have made this post over three weeks ago.  Never mind, I'm making it now as the year dies down, before the thoughts and sensations that gave rise to it fade away.

Early in the morning of the 3rd of this month my living room renovation was to the point where I could refill the bookcases flanking my fireplace.  And it didn't give me pleasure to get it done, it made me disgusted with myself and sad.

The books had been stored in boxes in the guest bedroom since August of 2008, and in all that time I'd forgotten much of what I had.  Or at least, I'd forgotten the implications of all the books I had.  For once I got them all shelved, I felt empty, disquieted, disturbed. I hardly knew what to do with myself.

For looking at those bookcases was like peering into a window to the past.  There are books on music criticism and music history.  Musical scores I've carried to symphony concerts and scores I've sung.  There are plays and essays and poetry.  Books on art history, church history, secular history.  On art and architecture, ancient, medieval, and modern; on icons and stained glass and Gothic cathedrals.  All the subjects and pursuits that make for a civilized life, sidelined, ignored, for years. The works of so many great, entertaining, and wise authors and composers sat again on my shelves: Tasso and Browning, Shakespeare and Chaucer, Lamb and Emerson.  Beethoven, Schubert, and Berlioz (always Berlioz!).  Eusebius, Schaff, and Chadwick; Ruskin, Conant, and Arnheim. Coulton and Tuchman.  Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Frank Lloyd Wright.  Where had they been these past years?  Where had I?

There was a time when I sat down and read those books.  When I sang and played that music.  Back when I had a full time architecture career and felt like I was contributing to the beauty and order of the world.  I was a better person then, before I began to dissipate my energies on computer card games and checking my Facebook Notifications tab every fifteen minutes . . .

 Well.  I kept at the work of putting my living room back together.  By the following Tuesday I had all the tools and debris and the dog kennel cleared out and could see and clean the floor.  By early on Thursday the 5th I had the two-seat sofa moved back in from the front room and the chest of drawers pulled in from the dining room to carry my 1970s-vintage stereo system and the lamp I got two or three years ago and had never used (getting the linen chest out of the dining room clears the way to finish stripping the wallpaper in there).

By Sunday the 8th I was in a fair way of looking at it all and emulating God on the sixth day of creation, standing in the middle of the room admiring my work and thinking it was Very Good.  And since then I've cleaned off the sill of the portal to the 1st floor hall and even decorated for Christmas.

But still.  But still.  I can't shake the feeling that I've screwed up seriously.   It's not that I'm spending time on house renovation instead of reading The Stones of Venice.  Redoing the house is an artistic pursuit in itself.  Rather, I feel I've betrayed the whole way of life my books and music represent. I've made several bad career moves these past few years and I don't think I'll ever get back to my life the way I hoped it would be.

And if I spend too damn much time fooling around on the Innerwebz, I'll about guarantee that outcome.

Wheel-Spinning

Sitting in its corner, pretending to be done

It will probably shock you to learn that the tall living room bookcase I started to redo in black last Christmas still isn't done.

No, I guess it wouldn't shock you to learn that the tall living room bookcase I started to redo in black last Christmas still isn't done.

Oh, it's refinished, finally.  Took forever to strip off the crummy oil-based black paint job over white primer, but sometime this summer I finally got that done.  And about a week ago I finally got the black shellac to the point where I like it.

Give it a couple-three days to harden up and cure, and it should be all ready to reinsert the shelves and put the books back in. Right?

But what do you do when you can't remember where you put the shelf hardware or how you even held up the shelves in the first place?

This bookcase has had many shelf-support solutions in its long career.  It came with these bent heavy-gauge wires whose ends fit into little holes in the sides of the bookcase.  Grooves were routed into the side edges of the particle-board shelves to receive the bent part of the support wires.  Trouble is, that method didn't keep the bookcase sides from pushing out from the pressure of all the books and records I keep in it.

The round piece is brown under the shellac, of course

So back in the '80s a woodworker friend of mine retrofitted the shelves each with four plastic disks that receive a screw which fits into a plastic sleeve sunk into the carcase sides.  This did a good job of keeping the whole thing together, but didn't allow for any adjustments to the shelf spacing. From photos I took before I unloaded this bookcase I know the shelves didn't all correspond with the sleeve locations.  And I definitely remember there being some brass shelf spoons I took off.  But I couldn't remember where the aitch I put them last December.

By Thursday or Friday of this week I found them, in the tray of my toolbox.  But only four of them, enough for one shelf only.  And I can't find but three of the twelve black screws I should have for the other three shelves.

And maybe it doesn't matter whether I can find any of this or not.  Because . . .  because . . .  even with some replacement screws I found (intending to paint the heads black, no problem), with the black finish I can't see to get the screws into the sleeves in the sides of the carcase!!

I've been trying the last three days, and it doesn't matter:  Night, day, with a worklight, without a worklight-- with my lousy eyesight I simply cannot see where anything is.  And yes, I shellacked the white plastic sleeves black as well.

Dig the scratches.  And the plastic sleeves I can't seem to hit.

I've already made a mess of my new shellac finish, since the plastic cams or whatever they are that are routed into the shelves have a little protrusion that fits into the sleeve on the bookcase sides.  That didn't matter when it was finished natural teak, but now that it's shellac, I've got scratch marks all over.

Actually, the only reason why I'm not throwing tools across the room and screaming at the top of my lungs is because it is shellac, and therefore repairable.

But I still can't get those screws lined up.

So what should I do?  Get my friend Hannah* to come hold the worklight so maybe I can get at least two of those screw-in shelves in, and thereby return the favor for all the weekends I helped her with some computer work she had to figure out?

Maybe I should invest in some more packs of black metal shelf supports and put all the shelves on those. Oh, and Dremel off the protrusions so they slide in smoothly.

But then the bookcase might go back to falling apart on me once it's reloaded.

Or maybe I could solve that problem by working out something with wires and turnbuckles that'll go behind the books and keep the sides together.

It's too damned complicated having to do all this for a 35 year old Scandinavian Modern particle-board bookcase.  After all, isn't my time worth something?  Better I should have just chucked it and bought a new one.

But I've been online again looking at the price of new ones, and my time isn't worth what they would cost me.  $300 and up for things that aren't built as well as the one I've got.

Maybe I will look into turnbuckles.  It'll give it a high-tech industrial feel.  Just right for my Victorian/Arts and Crafts living room.  Right.

Meanwhile, I'm feeling very, very stupid.  And spending a lot of time I don't have just spinning my wheels.

The Sound of Crickets in the Night

You know what happens when you put out a call like this on Facebook?

Help! I have some garden soil I need to get out of my yard and some friends who live seven miles away who need it in theirs. Anybody have a pickup truck I can borrow to load it onto?

Nothing, that's what.  Crickets.  Because you have sensible friends who know that it's not just their pickup you want to borrow, but their shovels as well, and also probably (ok, certainly) their muscles and time to wield them.  And that's assuming that any friends who might have pickup trucks even see your post, given Facebook's arbitrary practice as to whose news appears in whose newsfeed.

I posted that plaintive appeal last night around midnight, after an afternoon of fun in the south vegetable garden bed, the one where the tomatoes are to go.  Spent about an hour and fifteen minutes weeding it (though it seemed a lot longer),

then started sieving the dirt into the garden cart.  I have too much and some friends up above New Brighton need some yard fill, but I didn't want to give it to them complete with roots and weeds.

And when I considered how much dirt is involved (and they can't help me, because the wife is older and the husband has a bad back), I was feeling very discouraged.  Like existential-angst discouraged.  Why don't I have some nice, useful, significant-other type guy attached to me who could help me do this?  Why am I not making enough money so I could hire it done?  How could I ever bag up all this and load it into my car?  I'm pretty strong, but that would take forever!

Thus the idea to appeal for a pickup truck.  Finished filling up the cart with cleaned dirt-- and slow work it was-- parked it over to the side with a yard bag over it in case of rain, and focussed on transplanting the volunteer lettuces.

(If they want to pop up without my having to plant them, the least I can do is give them a safe home for the season.)

But as I say, nobody (at least not so far) has risen up to be a hero and champion in the way of pickup trucks.  Not even after I pleaded for mercy for the tomatoes:

This is kind of urgent-- I can't plant my tomatoes until I remove the mound that's built up in the garden bed.

So this afternoon I took stopgap measures and potted them all up in gallon pots using the soil from the bed where they'll eventually grow.  Sunk them deep in the bigger pots to give them more support and encourage them to develop roots from the leaf nodes.  Should give the "Red Brandywine" a chance at survival, if anything can.

Other than that, dumping yesterday's cartload of dirt in the new planting bed in the front, and digging out a few more trowels full of nutsedge-infested soil from the lawn, I've let things sit today.  Let's give it awhile longer.  Maybe there is somebody out there I know who's dying to haul a few loads of dirt for gas money and free pop.  Maybe my friends in New Brighton know somebody who has a truck.  Can't hurt to ask.

Disaster, Tragedy, and Woe

Well, more or less.

First a photo of what makes it a tragedy.

. . . Well, good grief, looks like I neglected to take a picture of how my 1st floor hallway floor looked once all the painting and touchup was done.  Guess I was too heartily sick of the effort to  think of it.  Suffice it to say that by the afternoon of the 21st I finished getting the second coat of the brown color (Lowe's Porch & Floor Latex Satin, tinted to match Pratt & Lambert's "Brandywine" tone) onto the 2x6 fake tile shapes on the floor of my 1st floor stairhall. The yellow/buff attempt was covered, and the too-bright "Hot Pepper" tone on the 6x6s was supplanted by the more-appropriate "Barn Red."

It looked pretty good.  It looked even better that night when I peeled off the striping tape and revealed the "Slate Gray" ersatz joints.

(Got a cute squeeze ball out of it.)

Only thing is, in some very obvious places the brown didn't wholly cover the yellow. In fact, the yellow had seeped under the tape in several places, so I couldn't expect the brown to cover it.  To be frank, the red-orange and the blue had seeped here and there too, despite my best efforts to burnish the masking tape down, but they weren't so glaringly noticeable as the yellow.  The daylight of  Tuesday morning revealed that the yellow was showing a lot more than I'd thought.  The brown "tiles" had a nice build up in comparison to the "joints" which gave a nice, realistic effect.  But you could often see the yellow under the brown along the edge when the light hit it the right way, especially towards the front room end where there were two coats of the lighter color.

Thus ensued three, yea, four gruelling days of creeping along on my hands and knees with gray paint on a fine detail brush trying to cover all that yellow, trying to get a hair or two of the brush just to catch that thin but maddeningly visible edge peeking out along my nice gray joint, repeatedly thinking I'd got it all and what I still saw was just highlights and shine, and repeatedly having to go back and try again once the sunlight or the illumination from the ceiling fixture fell upon it.  In all, picking up spilled salt with one's eyelashes would have been preferable.

 By Friday the 25th the yellow wasn't completely covered, but the effect was good enough considering normal lighting conditions.  So I began applying my clear sealer topcoat.  Since I was using floor paint, you'd think four coats total over primer would be enough to stand up to normal use.  But I've used fhe same product in the basement, and after a year or two it does begin to wear.  I've put too much work into this paint job not to give it some protection.  Due to its non-yellowing properties (I don't want my blue squares turning green) and going on the advice of the paint counter guy at Home Depot and following the example of Jayne over at The Kelly House, I went with the Minwax Polycrylic finish.  I wanted a bit of texture to it; maybe I should say, a bit more texture added to what I'd already rolled and stippled on, so that night I applied the first coat using a four-inch long, 1/8" nap mini-roller.

Meh.  Didn't work.  The roller didn't hold enough of the liquid so it dried too fast.  Rolling it back and forth left visible tracks and they didn't level out.  Carp. 

So on Saturday after hand-scuffing it with 220-grit sandpaper,  I said, "Oh, all right," and used a brush, like Jayne did.  A good-quality, synthetic one, like the can recommended.  Focussed on getting the stuff down and not overworking it.

Well, the mini-roller tracks were no longer obvious, but I'd missed several places.  "Holidays," real painters call them.  So I went online to see what the forums said about rectifying holidays in a Minwax Polycrylic finish.

Oh, crumb.  Carpity carp.  Found a site that addressed the problem, but it was referring to furniture finishing.  All the forums were uniform in declaring that Minwax Polycrylic is not recommended for floors.  Including the Minwax website.  And the back of the Polycrilic can.  But what are we supposed to do if we don't want our painted finishes to turn yellow?  There's really nothing else out there that'll dry clear.  So I guess we're stuck.

Maneuvered over to a YouTube video where somebody had done a tromp d'oeil painted wood floor and coated it over with six (count 'em, six!) coats of clear acrylic.  And another one where a professional floor finisher was using the product to redo a wood floor.  He was using a paint roller on a pole.  It appeared that he was getting good, even coverage without premature drying or lap marks.  Hey, it might be a good idea for the next coat.  And it would have to be a whole next coat, because not only did I have holidays, I had brush marks as well.

So on Sunday I put my roller and pole together and went to work.  Aaaaggghhhh!!!!  Lacymosa, dies illa!!  It left lap marks.  Baaaaaaad ones.  They showed up white even after the finish had dried.  And even though I tried to be careful and not push it, the nap on the roller left bubbles all over my beautiful painted floor!

Lord, don't let me cuss.   Though I really, really want to.  I really, really, really want--!!

I don't know.  It looks so bad.  All that work, to come to this.  I don't see being able to hand sand that out.  I'm considering using the orbital sander.  Which might rip up the whole paint job, even with 220-grit paper on it.  Whatever happens, it'll need another coat of the Polycrilic afterwards.  This time I think I'll do what I should have done in the first place:  Lay the finish on with a sponge brush and apply it to the "tiles" individually.  And do it very, very, very gently.

Though gentle is not at all how I'm feeling right now.  Aaaaaaagggggghhhhhh!!!!  Disaster!  Tragedy!  Woe!!!!!

If I Had a (Pneumatic) Hammer

Pete Seeger's got nuthin' on me.  This picture doesn't tell you a lot, and that's not just the fault of the camera that's embedded the wrong rotation code..  No, this picture reflects a good half hour or more of work yesterday evening trying to countersink the nails in the plywood with a claw hammer and a center punch, and blast me if it did any good at all.

This is not working this is not working this is not working!  And I can't do anything more with that floor until those nails are hammered in.  They have to be covered over so I'll have a decent surface to paint.

So I went upstairs  and started looking things up on the Internet, hoping to get a better idea.  I learn it could be the previous owners used ringshank nails to pin down that plywood (the mandatory 2" on center around the perimeter and 4" oc apart in the field.  Or closer), and that's why I couldn't get them to budge.  I mean, I can countersink a very pretty nail and have in my day, many a time.  Something is different in my hall, and I doubt it's because the nails are bewitched.

This is the most useful idea I came up with in my research.  It's a palm impact nailer, it uses regular standard nails and not the strip sort you use with typical nailguns.  YouTube videos I watched tell me I could use it to force existing nails deeper into the wood, as well as driving new nails into a countersunk position in the first place.

You can also get it in a smaller version, which apparently does the same thing, if a bit more slowly.  It's a lot cheaper and less fatiquing, too, being a third of the weight.

But I really don't need to be buying new power tools at this juncture.  And these things need to be connected to a compressor.  I know of one I can borrow, but not for another three or four weeks.  I don't want to wait that long to deal with this floor; because painting will involve my sleeping downstairs for awhile, I want to get the project finished before the new school year starts and I go back to work.

So this afternoon I went to the used tool paradise up in Beaver Falls.  Biggest reason was to see if they had any ½" pipe long enough to use with my pipe clamps to put the screen door back together.  But I also wanted to ask them if they had any ideas about countersinking those nails.

Guy there thought they had one of those little impact nailers for sale, used.  But no, it'd been sold.  He tells me I could rent one from his boss, and a compresser, too.  Hmm.  For what that'd cost I could buy the smaller nailer and have it-- assuming I could borrow the air supply.

Came home with a new (to me)36" pipe clamp assembly and a ¼" diam. centerpunch.  Tried the latter on the plywood floor.  Oh, crumb.  I can make a dent with it, but not a dent with the nailhead sunk in.  .

Fresh ideas welcome.  But I know what I wish I had so I could get things over with . . .

What You Callin' 'Easy'?

Remover applied

I've always wanted ceramic tile in my 1st floor hall.  Had it all picked out.  I'd doodle my tile job detail during choir practice--underlayment, Ditra, thinset, tile, and all.  Then late last winter I got the depressing news:  A trustworthy tile pro informed me I shouldn't do it unless I tore the whole floor out and sunk a new one between the joists.  For even if I reinforced the springy place in the existing floor I'd still be out of Code with a too-shallow bottom  step.  Feasible, but pricey.

Frankly, I'm out of Code already, thanks to the ½" plywood my previous owners two back slapped down to underlay the ever-so-(un)attractive sheet vinyl they chose.  The bottom riser is that much shorter than the rest even now, and it doesn't bother me.  Would another half inch or so of tile, etc., matter that much?

Test for riser comfort/safety

Late in May I bought one of my chosen tiles at the Big Orange Store, set it on the floor at the bottom of the stairs with some thick cardboard under it to simulate the setting materials, and walked down the stairs a few times.  No.  Ow.  Yep, it would matter.  "Watch that bottom step, Ethel, it's a doozy."

Well, maybe I could pry up the plywood and make something out of the original tongue and groove floor beneath. 

It was no go.  I think the POs-1 didn't merely nail it, they glued it down as well.  And I wasn't up to getting down with the circular saw and cutting it up into little puzzle pieces and heaving them up one by one.  No telling what that'd do to the T&G.  And there'd still be the dried adhesive to deal with.  Hmm, no.

Withal, I've decided, the only thing for it is to fill and sand the plywood (which is a decent, regular, knotless, interior grade) and paint it.  In a faux tile pattern that'll simulate the Gothic Revival tiles I always wanted.  But first, I have to get the vinyl adhesive residue off.

The product in question

Could be worse.  It's only around the perimeter of the L-shaped space and along the verges of the floor heating register.   I rejected trying to sand it off.  Chemical methods should be easier and more economical, I thought.  So I bought a bottle of Henry EasyRelease Adhesive Remover a few weeks ago, and today, I tried it.

Ohhhhhhh, my.  Easy release?  Not so much.  The label says to dilute it 4 to 1 with water, apply it to your dried, hardened glue, then wait one to two hours for the loosening action to work.  I sprayed on the first application around 2:30 PM and according to the instructions renewed it every so often (every twenty to thirty minutes) to keep it wet and working.

After two hours, I went at the (theoretically) softened glue with my 5-in-1.  No joy.  It barely made a dent.  Tried adding more adhesive remover to the bottle to make the mix more like 3 to 1.  Squirted it on and waited another hour or so, reapplying at intervals.

The ordeal begins

By this time it was nearly 5:30 PM.  Upstairs in my bedroom my two younger cats were sequestered behind the closed door, to keep them and their tender paws out of the adhesive remover.  Neither of them was happy to be held captive, and might have been plotting all sorts of dire revenge in the form of poo in the shoes or smelly yellow puddles on the bed.  They had to be sprung as soon as possible.  Meanwhile, the dog, exiled to the back porch, was leaping at the screen door and barking in protest at having to be outdoors without me.  (My oldest cat would stay outside all day and all night if I let her.)  Okay, kids, I'm working as fast as I can!  I went at the old glue again with the 5-in-1, a putty knife (useless) and the paint remover hook.   And went at it, and went at it, and went at it.

Done, barring the gunk hung up on the nailheads

I'm tired, I give up

The old glue started coming up, but it was hard work.  I kept at it steadily but by a few minutes before 8:00 I had less than half the ring of residue removed from the plywood, my knees were hurting, red, and swollen despite the pads I wore, and I was thoroughly fed up.  If this product brings up adhesive residue easily, I'm Mike Holmes' new forewoman.  I had to stop.  Rinsed the application sites with cold water per the directions, including the places I'd sprayed with remover but didn't/couldn't scrape, put everything away, and liberated the captive pets, indoors and out.  Thank goodness the kittens (five-year-old kittens) had controlled themselves.

Still to do, and only part of that

I'll try to get the rest tomorrow.  Pretty tired and disgusted now.  The sander might be an option after all.

Gerroff!

So I've been struggling to strip this salvaged screen door the past week and it's been an ordeal.  Not having fun not having fun not having fun!

I guess I was spoiled with the trim in the house.  Most of it you could flake the layers of paints off the old shellac surface, raise whatever was left over with the heat gun, then wipe it all down with Howard's Refinisher.  That's because nobody bothered to prime it first.

But somebody did prime this door, and the paint wasn't letting go.  It certainly wasn't yielding to chipping, heating, or the refinisher on a steel wool pad.  So I'm trying Citrus Strip for the initial removal.  I might have better luck with Kleen-Strip or Strip-Eeze or something like that, but I'm working in the basement and the ventilation could be better.

The Citrus Strip is supposed to raise all the layers between an half hour and twenty-four hours of the time you brush it on.  Ha.  It bubbles up the first layer of paint beautifully, but for the two or three under that, repeated applications only seems to make the wood soft so it feathers up whether you're using the metal stripping tool or the plastic scraper.

I guess I am making progress. Yesterday I figured the Citrus Strip had done all it could and I came back at the biggest piece of the door (one stile, plus the bottom panel with its rails) with the Howard's.  And it seems to be working.

I'm not enjoying myself, regardless.  Though I find I didn't need to dread tackling the screen insert, which I spread Citrus Strip on last night, as much as I had.  It did seem to have had a natural finish underneath, so the paint came up more easily.

For that matter, I observed that one side of the door (the side it's been hardest to strip), had orbital sander marks in it.  Which tells me that it's been stripped before.

I also noticed-- and this makes me laugh-- marks that tell me that once upon a time the hinges were properly surface-mounted-- on the opposite side from where they were when I found the door at the curb-- and the latchset was mounted on the opposite side, too.  The filler marks don't lie.  This is funny, for I've been debating with myself for weeks which face of the door is supposed to face outwards onto the back porch, and which side I want to face outwards.  I'm leaning towards having the more ornamental moulding be towards the exterior, even though that's not how my front screen hangs.  And judging by the black water stains on that side of the new-old door, I'd say it'd been done like that before.

I'm thinking that the biggest reason I couldn't get those screw cams to budge was all the paint in the slots.  It's out now, mostly.

Can't do anything more with it tonight.  The chimney tech's coming tomorrow and I had to clear out the sawhorses and door parts down the basement so he can get to the water heater flue to put the new liner in.  Excitement.

Working on the 2nd Floor Hall Trim

Oh, gosh, I need to make a blog post like nobody's business, and if I wait around trying to think up a clever title, I never will.

I'm busy reattaching reshellacked trim to the walls of my 2nd floor hallway.  Really.  Been at it for the past, I don't know, do I really have to check the pictures and find out exactly? For the past week at least.

You'd think with a nail gun the work would go quickly, even though I'm doing it on my own.  But in a world-- I mean, a house where nothing is plumb, it's not exactly a matter of slamming up the pieces and firing them in.  Things have to be done to them.

Like with the baseboard that sits to the right of the bathroom door.  Anybody remember this post from July 2007?  It was past fiddling with the shoe mouldings and just lowering the baseboard was out of the question.  No, I had to take a piece of old yellow pine floorboard (removed for the foam insulation job in the attic) and cut a piece the length of the baseboard that sloped from ¼" high at the outside wall to nearly 1½" at the righthand bathroom door trim plinth (all that in less than three feet), shellac it to match, then glue it to the existing baseboard.  Here's what it looks like installed

(and please pardon the picture quality; I'm not having good luck with my new camera AT ALL), with no shoe moulding yet.  In person it looks even more like it's running uphill to the left, despite the wallpaper pattern being straight, but what can you do?  Run it cockeyed across the wallpaper?  Don't align it to the adjacent base?  Leave horrible gaps, as before?  It is what it is.  If the floor has settled, it has settled.

Then there's the  makeshift white pine plinth the POs-1 made to go under the righthand trim at the opening to the 3rd floor stairs, the piece that fits around and under the curved bottom step.  There was no use stripping it and I've always meant to make a new piece to replace it.  That's been the big project for today.

Yeah,  a pieca wood 9" high by 2½" wide with a 1" by 7/8" notch cut out of it at the top left.  Most of the day.  This is what I get for forgetting how to adjust the blade tilt on my table saw.  Because unlike the piece the previous owners made, mine was going to be coped back all along the left side edges to fit the curve of the stair riser and tread.  And that's what I did.  But not after spending more time online this afternoon than it really took to remind me how to set that blade . . .

OK, ok, no sympathy there.  Happily, I got the piece cut and it's not too bad, if you overlook a little messiness in the notch.  Never mind, it'll sit under the step nosing anyway.  And it'll fit to the riser better than the old piece did.

And I got the new stop mouldings for the window at the top of the steps cut to size (the old plastic ones that came with the replacement windows I threw out when I demounted the trim) and ready to sand and shellac.  The big pain in the rear this evening has been the plinth on the lefthand side of the bathroom door, next to the new piece I made today.  No matter what I do, even after spending a good hour or so chipping away at the plaster behind it, I can't get the piece of wood to sit flat to the wall.  Either it sticks out over ¼" too much at the top left, where the trim sits on it, or there's a ¼" gap behind it at the bottom right, where it's supposed to be snug to the face of the door frame.  I've checked the old photos, and yes, it was cockeyed before.  But that was when the trim was still painted.  Back then I was willing to put up with silliness on the assumption that it would all be straightened out Someday.

Maybe it would be, if I hadn't used Big Wally's to stabilize that plaster.  Rory B claims it changes and strengthens the composition of the plaster, and blasted it he isn't right.  It now holds together like plastic, even against the onslaught of my mason's bolster.  I still don't know exactly where the high point is.

But oh, well, I can report that after three tries, as of this past Sunday, my bedroom door frame is finally back up in such a way that the door closes-- without ridiculous gaps.  And as of last night most of the face trim is remounted in the 2nd floor hallway, barring some pieces that have to be recut or augmented.  So actual progress is being made.

I only wish I had decent pictures to show it.

And that I wasn't having very expensive and therefore futile second thoughts about hanging another William Morris wallpaper on the top part of the stairhall walls, instead of covering them with the faux finish paint . .  .

Oh, Fudge

I've been working on resecuring the plaster on the south wall of my living room since this time in February.  I'd been contemplating repairing that plaster since July of 2007 at least.  Now, a major cause of procrastination is the fear that a project won't come out the way you hope and visualize.  A major cause of depression is when you discover that your fears very likely were right.

The only problem with the plaster, as I originally perceived it, was up at the righthand corner of the cased opening between the living room and dining room, where the doorway jamb and head casings come together.  When I pulled off the trim to strip it, lo these many years ago, I found that the plaster protruded beyond the room face of the casing a good half inch.  Meaning that the face trim gapped more than a little.  Previous owners had fudged that over with spackle and paint, but I'm going back to natural wood. 

When I learned about Rory Brennan's Big Wally's PlasterMagic® system, I knew it was just the thing to take care of that protruding area and make the plaster nice and flat to receive the newly-shellacked trim. 

But things have not been that simple.  Back on the 9th of February when I started drilling the holes for the conditioner and adhesive, I noticed, for the first time in eight and a half years of living here, that the entire top fourth of the south living room wall bulges outward.  On the righthand side, especially, the protuberance was a half inch and more.  Clearly, I was going to need more Big Wally's adhesive than I had on hand.

Insert interval while I got around to ordering more tubes, while it shipped, and while it sat in the box in my dump of a living room waiting to be used.  All right.  So this past Sunday, I got to work.  And noticed two odd things:

First, that the plaster bulge on the righthand side, where I started my operations, went in a little with the washers and screws, but not as much as I expected.  Only a quarter inch at the most.  But the plaster wasn't flexible and it didn't give, and the wall developed no cracks as I drilled the washers in, though that's what you might expect if the keys where pressing against the lath.

Second, that up at the crucial corner the plaster wouldn't move in hardly at all.  At this point I did have cracking before and the washers caused more yet.  It wasn't salvageable.  So I pulled some goodish-sized chunks of it out, and saw-- And saw that up there the lath sits at the most an 1/8"back from the room face of the wood casing.  Seriously.  I poked the lath and it's in there solid.  It has no place to go.  Around that area the plaster thickness ranges from 3/8" to 1", and it's no wonder the door trim needed some fudging before!  It's going to need some fudging again when it's time to fill in the holes--but I'll describe that when I get to it.

But what did this mean?  That maybe the plaster at the top of the wall is thicker and the old wallpaper concealed the problem?  No idea.  The plaster I'd treated seemed well-secured enough, and I let it go because I was out of washers anyway.

Well, now.  Give it a few days for the adhesive to try and for me to take care of other business.  So Monday night I'm up there on the ladder snugging up the areas above the doorway and on the lefthand side.

And what's this?  In these places, where the bulge wasn't as bad, the plaster moved in a good 3/8" or more, with a soft, subdued, stomach-squeezing whhummphh!   What the dickens?  Why did that pull in but not the worse area to the right?  Was there something wrong with my drill bit, and did I not drill the holes deeply enough on the right-hand side?  Did the whole wall actually need    to be done?  After all this labor and material, was I still at risk of it failing and falling down?

Not to mention that where I power-screwed the anchors in too hard, the plaster just crumbled.  But the surface of the wall looks fine!  What's up with this?

Oh, fudge.  Aggrieved, aggravation, frustrated, crabby.  Last night I tried the conditioner and adhesive in a few more places on the upper righthand part of the wall, trying to pull that bulge in a little farther.  Drill penetrated more than an inch, inch and an eighth even, but the pull-in when I tightened the washers was a fraction of that.  Maybe the plaster is extra-thick at the top of the wall.  Or maybe the big hairy plaster/lath gap is there-- full of keys cushioned by all the Big Wally's I pumped in.  However it is, I can't do anything more to true it up-- and no, demolition and drywall is not an option.

This is not what I had in mind nearly five years ago.  I'm holding my breath that a lot of joint compound and the new wallpaper will disguise the mess.  I even have visions that the wallpaper will end up holding the wall together.  But I have no call to throw rocks-- or chunks of plaster-- at my fudging previous owners.  It's a pot we're all in together.

Dark Reflections

Two or three weeks ago I promised to post pictures of the 2nd floor hallway floor shellacking I was finally, finally getting done.  Here they are, with commentary (including a great deal of whingeing and wailing):

The work commenced a little around a quarter to one AM on the 13th.  First step was to float a fresh coat of mahogany-tinted shellac over the stairs to the 3rd floor that I did a year ago October.  I made the mistake back then of letting the animals with their capers and their claws back onto the finish too soon, and in several places they'd scratched the treads to the bare wood:

With cat and dog scratches

What you see above is actually after I took some plain, untinted Kusmi #1 shellac to it and rubbed some of the worst of the scratches out.  Here the upper stairs are with the fresh coat:

Too dark and red

Now, I wouldn't take the evidence of my Canon PowerShot SX120 camera to convict a cockroach.  It knows nothing of accurate color-rendering, and it's useless for depicting degrees of sheen.  But this photo does testify true, first that the scratches were colored in, which is good, and second, that the color of the top shellac coat is too damn dark.

All this is what I get for failing to look for the scratchpad where I wrote down the proportions of mahogany and walnut dye to shellac a year ago.  As it happens, it wasn't actually up in my study where I thought I'd left it; no, that notepad has to be in the avalanche that is currently my guest bedroom, where I dumped everything before I started repainting the study in late August.  In any event, I didn't even try to look for the recipe when I mixed up the latest batch.  Instead I used a formula inverse to that I used to mix the walnut shellac for the trim in March (meaning, mostly mahogany with a smidge of walnut instead of vice-versa).  And even with that, I used less dye than the formula called for.  I thought it'd match.

So my first mistake was laying on that shellac at night, under insufficient light.  It wasn't till I got to the bottom treads down at the hallway that I noticed how dark the new color was, and how I'd merrily killed the golden-brown color I'd loved so much in those steps.

This I loved.  Too late now.

My next mistake was not drawing the obvious conclusion from the effect of the new shellac on the upper stairs. No, I was so keen to get things moving that I went ahead and used it on the floor. You'd think when I saw how reddish and dark it was on the first floorboards in the back of the closet, I'd dip a rag in the jar of alcohol, wipe it off, then go dilute the mix with more shellac and alcohol and start over.

But no, I had to keep going.

You'd think I'd remember that the first coat on the study stairs looked like this:

But somehow I thought it'd be All Right and marched-- I mean, brushed-- on.

This is where I left it around 3:30 in the morning on the 13th.  The camera with the flash makes it look more finished than it is.

But this isn't exactly accurate, either:

Since then, it's hit me that I made another mistake: I forgot that with fully-stripped and sanded wood with no patina, the first colored coat sets up so much better if an untinted coat is laid on first.  So even though I knew good and well by the next evening that what I had was too dark, in the following days I still had to lay on two or three more coats of mahogany-tinted shellac, though not half as strong, so the color wouldn't be just a watered-down burgundy red.

The next two days, the 13th and 14th, I finished the first coat on the hallway and brought it down the stairs. 

The second stage starts at the bathroom door

Then on in front of the upper stairs

Did this in 3 stages, to have a dry place to perch on

And if I thought looked watered-wine color up in the hallway, did it ever go red on the main stairs!

My friend Frieda* came by about the time I finished up the bottom tread.  She thought it looked "beautiful."  I'm trying really hard to take her word for it and so make the best of it.  Wiping it down and starting over wasn't an object once I got to this point-- too much damage to the walnut-shellacked risers and stringers.  I'll follow up with a post or two on how it looks now, two weeks later, with the caveat that my crummy camera is not to be trusted . . . And I'll promise to buck up and not whinge any more.  Really.