Wallpaper Progress, on My Part at Least

After working on them for the last month and more, I've finally finished drawing up the elevations of my 1st and 2nd floor halls with the dado wallpaper layout.

I have a lousy case of bronchitis and feel like something a Humvee ran over. I really should be in bed soothing my brain watching mindless videos.

But my student AutoCAD license turns into a pumpkin sometime next month, and everytime I try to sleep with my cough, my dreams turn into torture sessions where I'm trying to finish these drawings or trying to figure out how to calculate the right amount of William Morris "Blackthorn" wallpaper for the dado that runs diagonally up the stairs. Pattern matches and all.

So I've been working on it, and as of this evening I've drawn all the elevations I need for the purpose. And I've done my take-offs for the amount of paper needed, two different ways, and have a number I can rely on.

So I've gone on the Sanderson's Fabrics site and filled out my order form-- 10% discount for quantity, how nice-- and I'm happy to see that the pound-dollar exchange rate isn't as bad as it has been. At least, not according to their calculator.

So now I can push the "Checkout Now" button and see what I'm in for for shipping and handling and get this order in, in, in-- right?

Not right. Because after initially being so expeditious with the samples, Sanderson's has dropped the ball for the past five weeks and hasn't sent me the final-approval swatches I asked for in mid-October.

Well, maybe they did send them and they got lost in the post. Over the Atlantic.

So laryngitis and all, I'm calling Yorkshire tomorrow to see if I can move things along.

And maybe while I'm coughing my way through tonight's slumbers, my mind can roil away at something else.

Nasty Bits

No, not that kind.

I mean the four jamb trim pieces I stripped today.

I was really hoping to stop the current paint stripping campaign at the top of the steps from the first floor. It's tacky enough subsisting with my living room, dining room, and first floor hall denuded of trim. It's quite enough to have to overlook the black-dusty-crumbly grossitude that is the exposed plaster where trim once reposed on the walls of the first floor. I really didn't want to tackle the trim of the five doors, one window, and miscellaneous baseboard in the second floor hall as well. Couldn't I restrict the squalor to one floor only?

No, I could not. The wallpaper and/or paint that starts in the downstairs hall will have to go all the way up. No stripped trim upstairs, no nice new stairhall walls upstairs or down. Those five doors, one window, and miscellaneous baseboards had to be done, now.

So I'm doing it. The trim of the window and three of the doors I tackled last weekend. Today my goal was to strip that last of the long jamb pieces, the two from the bedroom doorway and the two from the closet.

Should have taken me five hours. Maybe six, maximum. Instead, I was at those four nasty pieces of work from shortly after 10:00 this morning till nearly 8:00 this evening, with maybe a half hour out for a mid-afternoon snack.

The problem? On the first two, splintery places some previous owner(s) hadn't bothered to glue down before painting them over. Rather, the object seemed to be to get as much paint behind the splinters as possible. You can literally while away hours trying to dig that out.

And then, of course, these damaged places need to be reglued. Which they should have been several decades ago.

With the third piece, it soon became apparent that it wasn't the original trim. Original to the house, but I think it started out someplace else, someplace where it was painted from the beginning. All except one edge, which was stained and shellacked under the paint. Very strange. There's a story there having to do with the time my POs-1 converted the third bedroom into a dressing room/walk-in closet. But I won't insert my conjectures now.

The paint on this piece, even after two laborious, time-consuming attacks with the heat gun and scraper, still wouldn't yield to the liquid refinisher. Had to order in the light artillery and use the palm sander. It now has squiggly sanding marks all over it, but I Do Not Care. It's stripped, that's the point, and I'll deal with the squiggles later.

This piece also had a chip that needed glued back in, but it broke in two and the heatgun blower blew one of them onto the floor where it got lost amidst the paint shavings. Oh, Darn.

Fourth piece I did this evening only because I finally got the Project Tracker working (with help from Larry at Simpson's Folly) and I wanted to post another percentage point.

So there I was out on my screened-in porch at 7:30 PM. It was dark outside, the north wind was rising, the temperature plummeting, the rain was thinking about turning to sleet or even snow, and I was stripping woodwork. I couldn't be sure if the vapor I was seeing was smoke from the work piece or my own breath, and my feet were so cold I had to resist the temptation to turn the heatgun onto my shoes. But I wanted it done.

The last jamb piece wasn't as awful as the others: it just had a lot of that old blue wall color ingrained in the outer edge. Lovely pasttime, freezing your fingers with cold refinisher in colder weather.

My right shoulder needs the chiropractor, I'm so tired I'm liable to forget I have dinner in the oven, but the nasty things are stripped.

Hooray.

Halfway

" . . . [H]alfway. A midpoint in any venture is difficult because that's the place where days gone and miles done equal those ahead, and the result is equilibrium, stasis, inertia. A rollercoaster nearly stops just before the last drop to the finish. In some ways, the first mile of the second half is the most crucial because it's the one that propels the traveler down the slope of endurance to destination. . . . "

Thus sayeth William Least Heat-Moon in his book River Horse: A Voyage Across America. Mr. Heat-Moon was in the middle of navigating America's rivers via a C-Dory, a canoe, and miscellaneous other craft from the Atlantic Ocean at the mouth of the Hudson River to the Pacific at the mouth of the Columbia. I'm in the middle of stripping my house's woodwood piece by paint-covered piece from the dining room on the first floor to the hallway on the second, taking in the living room, front room, first floor hall, and the staircase on the way.

A couple hours ago I stripped piece No. 168. That's 50% of my 336 piece tally. Halfway. Half done.

So here's the question: Am I going to fall prey to the midpoint inertia that Mr. Heat-Moon describes? For him, it gets worse:

"While we were still some miles shy of being exactly halfway, I knew I had already emotionally arrived there. So I dragged up onto my feet, doleful, depressed, dejected, disgruntled, dissatisfied, dissipated, discouraged, disheartened, downcast, and otherwise down at the mouth, and I went into the damp, dreary, dismal day drooping, despondent, disconsolate, and damnably in the deep doldrums."

Well, it is undeniably dreary today in southwestern Pennsylvania. After a week of lovely Indian summer weather, today it's gray, cold, and soggy, and if the temperature got above 50 degrees it was a wonder. It was not fun to go out on the back porch and strip woodwork. The wind was blowing. My feet were freezing. If it hadn't been for the heatgun, I coulda got frostbite!

(Yeah, right.)

I have every excuse to fall into the halfway doldrums.

But I won't.

How do I know I won't?

Because I went ahead and stripped piece No. 169! I'm over the top! I'm on the drop to the finish! I'm descending the downward slope of endurance to my destination!

And oh, yeah, I've also put off doing the front room with its 60 to 70 trim pieces until that dim, distant day when the dining room, the living room, and the stairhall from bottom to top are done, done, done-- trim, wallpaper, floors (as needed), and all.

Wonderful how encouraged you can feel when you can delude yourself about the true magnitude of the job.

Random Rightbrain Thoughts . . .

Mind floaters while stripping woodwork:

. . . Why is there so much spackle-filler stuck on the door and window trim pieces? Are the gaps between them and the jambs really that yawning? . . .

. . . Did my POs-1 really paint their kitchen trim battleship gray? . . .

. . . Could I hire out and do this for a living? . . .

. . . 139 done, 197 to go . . .

. . . There's a sweetsy smell off this paint when I go at it with the heatgun . . . Lead? Or just the foam insulation igniting? . . .

. . . Look at all these dings and depressions . . . steam them all out? Get away with wood putty? Maybe I can just say the piece is "aged" . . .

. . . I can put the trim back up to minimize those gaps-- can't I? . . .

. . . Hold back the winter, Indian summer, I'm not sure if I can take the snow . . .

. . . Nah, I make too many boo-boos. And wouldn't the demand be down "in these economic times"? . . .

. . . Will dark garnet shellac be enough to recover the original tone of the wood, or will I have to stain all these pieces? . . .

. . . Those stair balusters that back up to the wall, I really don't want to strip them in place . . .

. . . Clear silicone sealant after it's all back up and shellacked. Unless the gaps are too wide?

. . . What if I get the stain color wrong and have to redo a piece? . . .

. . . 142 done, 194 to go . . .

. . . John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt, that's my name, too . . .

. . . Oh, crap! Did I just run the belt sander over its own cord? . . .

. . . Well maybe, if it turns out beautifully, I could post pictures and advertise . . .

. . . Maybe somebody on the Houseblogs site can tell me how to take my stair rail apart without destroying it? . . .

. . . Good grief, look at the condition of those jambs! What happened there?? Glad I'm not the one who perpetrated that . . .

. . . Go in and out the window, go in and out the window, go in and out . . .

. . . 145 done, 191 to go . . .

And a Little Child Shall Lead Them

This afternoon my friend Hannah* brought her kids Stevie* and Letty* over to carve pumpkins for Halloween. There were two smallish ones for the children and one very large one for me, as a gift from providing the venue and extra supervision.

I had to feel wryly sorry for Hannah*, since at the post-Halloween sales last November she'd purchased a couple of pumpkin carving kits, complete with skeleton hand plastic gloves, wee little plastic-handled saws and tracing wheels, a seed scoop, and so on, and stencils for transferring all sorts of cunning and spooky scenes onto your pumpkin. All these past eleven months she'd been looking forward to her kids executing one of these creations, and what happens?

The little saws were effective, sorta, but a kitchen knife worked better.

The plastic scoop was useless; I provided a large metal serving spoon instead.

And despite all her suggestions and persuasions, the children did not want to use any of the store-bought designs. They wanted to carve classic jack-o'-lantern faces. With triangle eyes and noses. And grinning mouths. And pointy fangs.

Alas for us grownups! We forget that what is old and worn to us is fresh and new to the little ones. And when it comes to executing a masterpiece, the young artisan prefers that the design be his own. Even if thousands of others have done the same thing before.

And alas for us grownups, in that we're so easily suckered into finishing the nasty jobs when the kids lose patience. Thus it was I who stood stolidly by the sink with the serving spoon, cleaning the goop out of Stevie's* and Letty's* pumpkins when they'd left them hanging with orange strings.

This wasn't a task to be finished quickly. Not merely because the variety of pumpkin wouldn't let its innards go without a fight, but also because once nine-year-old Stevie* had his jack carved and done, he was at loose ends and went looking for something else to do.

And being a kid who's lived in houses in a perpetual state of renovation since he can remember, he asked, "I can help on the house! What can I do?"

Following him into the front hall, I said, "Well, there's these nails in these window jambs here that I can't get out, but I don't think you could, either. I don't have the right tools."

"I know! Use a crowbar! My dad always uses a crowbar!"

"No, the crowbar's too big. The nails are too close to the wood."

"How about a claw hammer? My dad uses that for nails!"

"No, tried that. Too big."

"What about that?" he asked, pointing to the catspaw pry bar. "That oughta work!"

"Well, I've tried that before, and couldn't get the groove to fit around the nail. See?" And I showed him.

"Oh," he responded. "But what about . . . ? Do you have . . . ?"

And I, ever optimistic and ready to try anything to extract those blasted nails, brought the child whatever he requested. But neither nailpullers, nor scraper blades, nor anything else could he make to work.

Told you so. If I can't do it, how can a nine-year-old kid?

I had to leave him to it, the guts of Letty's* pumpkin still needing curettage. From time to time Stevie* would call me back to tell him what I thought of new nail-removal ideas. Nope, nope, nope. I'd return to the kitchen, and he kept at it in the front hall.

But then: "Kate! I've got it!" Huh? I ran out to see.

"See?" Stevie* showed me. "You put the end of the pry bar here, and you hammer it in around the nail like this-- " BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! "--and it can come out!" Squee-squee-squee!! What a beautiful goshawful noise! By golly, the kid was right! "My dad showed me how to do that! I just remembered! He does it like that all the time!"

He did another, and another. I showed him how to insert the blade of a putty knife between the pry bar and the wood so the jamb wouldn't get dented, and how to finish the extraction with the nail puller, which ditto.

And he merrily went around the house removing the old vinyl trim nails from the piano windows as far as he could reach.

Then he swiped the high step stool out from under his sister in the kitchen, and set up shop under one of the high windows next to the living room fireplace. Fine with me-- she can use the one-stepper to finish carving her pumpkin. I got the stool safely placed and showed him how if he opened the bottom sash he could get at the nails more easily.

And again left him to it.

So now here's nearly half the stubborn nails removed from three out of five of my piano windows; if Stevie* didn't do the others, it's because he couldn't get at them. And thanks to a kid whose dad is an inveterate remodeller, I've got the technique to get the rest of them out of my jambs and out of my life! Hooray!!!

After that, both Stevie* and Letty* went in the front hall and stripped wallpaper. If they hadn't had to go home for supper, they'd likely be at it still.

Hannah* says when I'm ready, they'll all come and we'll have a wallpaper stripping party. Fun unlimited!

High Tech on an Old House

I'm using my student AutoCAD program to work out how much wallpaper I'm going to need in my 1st and 2nd floor stairhalls . . . I hadn't touched the AutoCAD for weeks, nay, for months. It's nice to find I still remember how to do it.

Still, the house often refuses to make sense and let itself be drawn up right, regardless of how many measurements I take. I'm telling myself that that's because after nearly 100 years, it's settled down and gotten comfortable and nothing is precisely straight anymore. But I have to wonder if it's just refusing to be confined and defined by something so 21st century as AutoCAD 2008.

Here's the view of the stairs from the side.

I've dotted in the line of the steps beyond the stringer, and you'll notice they don't track with it. They do in reality, I assure you. I literally spent hours trying to figure out the discrepancy, but gave it up at last. If the house wants to keep some of its secrets, who am I to play the highwayman and insist it stand and deliver?

(Note: You're supposed to swoon over the mouldings on the newel post. Ain't that drawn up keen?)

Here's a possible layout for the wallpaper on the west side. Yeah, it's to scale.



Overlook the white boundary lines if you can. For some reason, the AutoCAD program puts those around every imported image, and I don't know yet how to get rid of them. Actually, I'm pretty bucked with myself for remembering how to insert a .jpg image in the first place.

I'm not sure if I'll use the Morris "Acorn" wallpaper above the new wainscot moulding-- it's actually a lot browner than the Internet image and isn't beige what I'm trying to get rid of here?

I may do a color wash paint job instead, but it was fun to play with the wallpaper while I was at it.

This is as far as I've gotten on the stairhall itself.

I think the Morris "Blackthorn" pattern looks really good running up the stairs. I can't order it till Sanderson's sends me the current sample I ordered two weeks ago, but I'm not getting on their case for that. Despite all this jolly computerized drawing, I still haven't used it to calculate how much wallpaper I need.

Later, later! I still have woodwork to strip.

Maybe, Maybe Knot

I've been turning over in my mind the past month or so what I'm going to do with the jambs and heads of the cased openings between my front room and the living room and stairhall. When at some stage the PO-2 (third back before me) converted the front porch to an enclosed room, she made these openings where the front door and the front windows had been. And to cover the face of the 2x jamb and head members, she applied 1/4" veneer plywood to finish the new openings off.

So what shall I do?

Strip and remount the plywood? Don't think so. I did one piece of it, and it had too much paint stuck in the ply edge. And I really dislike the fat reveal that it produces when added to the exposed part of the jamb.

The 2x members have a few knots in them, and at the old front door you can see where the strike and hinges used to be. Should I cover that up with a bit of trim that'd sit a ways into the opening? No, because there's some weird irregularities going on with the woodwork between the living room and front room, and I'd have to do some fancy notching to get an applied piece of trim to work. Besides, to look right it'd had to be custom made, and I don't want to get into that.

Or do I just clean up the 2x heads and jambs, notch in appropriate shims where the hardware used to be, and trust in the dark garnet shellac I'm planning on using to cover up the patches and knots?

I'm pretty well decided on that.

So today, I noticed in my basement the 1x jamb and head casings I took off the opening between the kitchen and the dining room, oh, at least four years ago. They covered the actual jambs and head of that doorway, having been added by my POs-1 when they redid the kitchen and added sheetrock to both sides of that wall.

These pieces of wood are a primary source of my lack of progress, for when I took my old heat gun to them, I found it took off the topmost layer of paint, then stopped. How futile and useless.

So much for that heatgun.

Besides, I could see from the back that they had a good many knots. Back then, I didn't want to mess with that. So I leaned them against the basement wall and intended to see if I could find some clear material to replace them with.

Anyhow, today. I was down there today, and I thought, Well, those jambs off the front room have knots and I'm accepting them. Why don't I strip these kitchen-dining room facings after all and save buying new wood?

So I did. One piece. With the belt and palm sanders, since the old heatgun had baked the lower layers of paint on so thoroughly not even the Western Wood Doctor refinisher could get it off.

It looks lovely-- if you like knots, knots, and more knots.

And now I'm thinking, Maybe not. If I'm going to obscure my lungs with sanding dust, I'd like to be rewarded with clear wood.

This time, I think I'm going to be less thrifty with the gasoline and the cash buying new wood, and more sparing of the electricity and the effort.