The Farm House Journal Blog.

What I Did on My Winter Vacation

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 21:11:00 PST

Usually, I take some time off from the restoration project around Christmas to give the Yuletide celebration my full attention. This year, however, my hiatus was a great deal longer for several reasons, mostly beyond my control. First of these was the wind storm and its aftermath, of course, as I have already discussed; there was a lot of debris removal and regrading I had to do just to make the south side of the house accessible again. Frustratingly, I was within a week of finishing that side when the storm hit. Now, I have some new repairs to make, and I'll have to pressure-wash the side before I paint.

Soon thereafter, I came down with a bad case of whatever bug was making the rounds at the time, and that took me out of commission for most of the rest of the month.

Then, just before Christmas our new Malamute pups arrived, Peter and Sally. I anticipated that attending to them would take up all my time for a few weeks, judging from our fairly recent experience rearing Travis from puppyhood. He was no piece of cake to take care of, so I figured I had a pretty good idea of what to expect.

As it turned out, we were woefully under-prepared for Peter and Sally, and it took us until the end of January to figure things out and get on top of the situation. Much of the problem stemmed from trying to follow the dictates of the "experts", which flat out didn't work. So to be precise, I guess I'd have to say we were studiously mis-prepared. It was only when we threw out all the books and returned to the techniques that worked with Travis that our sweet, spirited little pups began to follow the paths of righteousness. Still, with them it's often a case of two steps forward, three steps back. Then again, there's very little in life that is both worthwhile and easy.

Without further preamble, here's what we've been up to lately, in too much detail.

Windstorm Aftermath

I've already covered this subject fairly thoroughly, but there is one matter that remained undone when I last discussed it: the broken limb hanging over our power drop. As I mentioned in "Paul Bunyan Jr.", our arborist was not comfortable with the task at the time because of its inherent danger, and recommended we tell Pasadena Water & Power about it, because they could get it done more safely. Unfortunately, PWP was simply too swamped with emergency work to get to our less pressing matter, so when our arborist drove by at the end of December and noticed the limb still hanging, he stopped in and said, "Okay, let's get that done."

One of the many things I like about our arborist is that he gets things done the old-fashioned way, with rope and tackle instead of cranes. I'm not comfortable with heavy machinery rolling around over the trees' root systems. I find the skill and fearlessness with which he and his men go about their work quite inspiring. This was especially true of their removal of the broken limb over the power drop, because of the significant added danger of the power lines directly underneath the limb. I made a point of taking pictures of the process so that I could show you all.

In this picture, the man up on the limb has already removed the broken limb (you can see where it was directly ahead of him on the limb he's standing on). The broken limb is hanging below him, suspended by a rope secured to a limb above him. He is guiding the limb away from the power line below.

In this picture, the arborist (in blue t-shirt) has looped a rope around the power line and is gently pulling it out of the way, as another man (in orange safety vest) helps guide the limb away from the power line as the man above gently lowers it. You can see how close a thing it was, but they got the limb down without incident.

I've failed to mention that there was another limb broken facing the street, about the same size as the one over the power line. Here's a picture of that limb on the ground:

You can't see it here, but the limb stretches all the way to the street. That's over 45 feet! As one of the men commented, this one limb is itself as big as a tree. I was astonished at its size, because when it was hanging from the tree it looked much smaller. After all, it was just one small part of one of many dozens of limbs on the tree. That should give you some idea of just how massive these trees are.

Christmas

We spent Christmas alone at home, we and the pets. It wasn't a quiet Christmas, thanks to the pups, but it was one to remember. My plan to put lights up along the big side gables was thwarted by the wind storm, so I just put them along the veranda as usual, but we did the tree up as grandly as we ever have.

I say "we", but I was still pretty ill, so Lydia did the tree all by herself. She came home with a tree so big that we could hardly get it in the house, but that's fine, because we have many hundreds of lights and enough ornaments for three big trees. This year, she outdid herself.

Up in Heaven, Dad was smiling. Both Dads, in fact. It was breathtaking, with great depth, ebullient color, and rich textures. Here's a close-up, to give a better idea of what the tree looked like in person:

And of course, most of the ornaments carry with them some sort of special meaning or tender memory of loved ones and Christmases past, just as it should be. It was so beautiful that we kept it up through Lydia's Mom's birthday on the 15th. It stayed fresh, because I conditioned the tree well and kept it watered.

Pets

Now we come to the main part of the story. We were kept busy not just with the care of two seven-week-old puppies, but also with helping the rest of the Pet Division adjust to their presence.

Peter and Sally came to us several days before Christmas, and made themselves at home right away. Travis was happy to have some reinforcements, and the pups liked him immediately.

As one would expect, the cats were a harder sell. In fact, at first it seemed as if they couldn't quite figure out just what manner of creatures they were dealing with.

Here, Adam looks as if he could really use a Tricorder: "What is this strange creature? Hmmm. . . it's put together like Travis. it kinda smells like Travis. It makes similar noises. But it's so dang small!"

Actually, Adam quickly made his peace with the pups. Given his Brobdingnagian size and feline curiosity, he's afraid of very little. I often find him walking right up to the pups, trying to engage them in discourse.

He and Peter are not pals yet, but I think they eventually will be.

Evangeline has no problem with them, because she loves dogs, but she does expect them to maintain a respectful demeanor befitting her status as CEO of the Pet Division; they do not always comply, but she always stands her ground.

Benny, a cat through and through, is no big fan of dogs, but he has at least accepted their presence. Still, he does tend to take out his annoyance on Travis, batting him mercilessly whenever the pups get in his face: "Take that, you canine, you!" He is nevertheless willing to be friendly, if they approach him nicely.

The addition of two spirited puppies could not help but cause some upheaval with the other pets, and except for Evangeline they've all required a lot of special attention. But everyone's beginning to become accustomed to the new order, and at times things are positively placid.

Most of the time, however, the puppies simply tire the rest of us out.

That's why during the day I like to keep them outside. It gives the rest of the household a break, and I'm able to keep an eye on them while I work. I can't let them roam free unsupervised, because they have a disturbing habit of eating yard debris and dirt. Thus, much of the time they are in a pen we put up on the astroturf-topped pad that used to house the gazebo. It may seem a bit severe, but they are fine with it. As a matter of fact, they seem to enjoy it.

They're changing on a daily basis, as puppies of their age do, and they're both growing into quite beautiful dogs.

Farmhouse Fauna

As I've discussed over in the Journal, we have a lot of resident animals here. Actually, there used to be a lot more—huge raccoons and it seemed like a hundred possums—but Travis, as he was bred to do, chased them all away. Now, what we have are thriving bird and squirrel communities, and some skunks as well, which Travis has not been able to chase away (not that he hasn't tried, unfortunately).

A lot of people hate squirrels, but all of us here love them. All, that is, except for Benny. Benny is a dedicated squirrel hunter. Think of how Captain Kirk felt about Klingons, and you have some idea of how Benny feels about squirrels.

One day a few weeks ago, Benny and I were sitting out on the garden swing. I ran into the house for just a second to get something, and when I came back out, I didn't see Benny anywhere. I was momentarily confused, because he hadn't had enough time to get out of sight. And then, I looked up.

Benny had actually climbed up in the persimmon tree after a squirrel! Notice that the squirrel is not overly concerned by this; as Benny stares up at him, the squirrel is staring right back, as if to say, "Surely, you can't be serious." Hey, you can't blame a cat for trying.

We have an amazing variety of birds here at the Farm House. We have the usual resident species: crows, mourning doves, band-tailed pigeons, various finches, and our dear friends the scrub jays.

The jays are the cornerstone of our avian community. They always say "good morning" to us, and they always let us know when it's time to replenish the feeder. Once, they even left Lydia a present. One morning they were squawking at the feeder. Lydia wondered what was up, because she'd just put out some food for them. She looked out and saw something odd hanging off the feeder. It turned out to be a necklace!

We also get some interesting birds passing through during migration periods, and some birds that are local but not often seen: tufted titmice, bluebirds, robins, and the most spectacular of our periodic visitors: the Acorn Woodpecker.

With all our oaks, our yard is a perfect fit for them, but they don't usually eat from feeders, and with that big target on their head they need to keep out of the open as much as possible, lest they attract the attention of our local hawk. It's thus a big day when we see one of these beauties.

It may come as a great surprise to non-Angelenos, but we have a number of large parrot flocks in various parts of the city. In Culver City, the flock consists of some sort of long-tailed parakeet: colorful, slender-bodied birds with (of course) long tails. We actually had one of them land at our feeder there; I have a picture of that somewhere. I think it was a Mitered Parakeet.

The flock here in Pasadena, on the other hand, is of some sort of Amazon variety, with substantial bodies and stubby tails. I haven't gotten a close look at them, because they for some reason never light in our yard, but they are mostly green. They typically fly by twice a day, in the morning and late afternoon, and they make a great noise as they pass, because parrots are in constant communication with one another as they fly. Here is but one platoon of their huge regiment:

I was lucky to get this shot, because these parrots fly with astonishing swiftness. I'd estimate that they took about a second to fly the distance captured in this picture.

Well, that's about it for this time, folks.

* * *

". . . and stop calling me Shirley!"

Adult Education; or, A Chump Smartens Up

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 13:48:49 PST

As I promised last time, here is the newly-repaired corner board:

I had to use so much putty because, as I described last time, I did a quick repair. If I had done the by-the-book repair I described, I would not have had to use much putty at all; but then, I'd probably still be working on it.

Today, I noticed another repair that has come undone, on the east window casing:

At first, I ascribed this to the various stresses caused by the windstorm, because of the slight circular protrusion below the crack revealing where a screw hole was patched. This indicates that the board moved inward relative to the rest of the house. Given that there's no evidence of anything having hit the board, this movement almost certainly was caused by the house's reacting to earth movement—and there was plenty of that during the windstorm.

Then, however, I noticed the circular depression up at the top of the long crack. Sure, one could ascribe that to the same cause, but something about that screw, and that crack, tickled my memory. I looked back through the posts until, sure enough, in the post "Onward" I found this picture:

I included this picture in that post to illustrate how effectively the LiquidWood bonds wood together. The wood was warped outward, and where I placed the screw was the best place to bring the board back into alignment.

What we have here, clearly, is a Teachable Moment. And as with a schoolteacher back in the Old West, I'm sometimes only a lesson or two ahead of the class. The bulk of what I know about the home-improvement subjects I discuss herein I have learned from experience, and as you can see, the learning never ends. That's what makes life so fun.

What I said about LiquidWood was not wrong, per se, because the mend did withstand the screw's intrusion without complaint. Nevertheless, a mend is still a weak point in the wood's structure; to counteract that, I would have had to impregnate the wood on both sides of the mend more thoroughly with epoxy, and further back from the mend line. As it was, the mend was already under constant stress from the wood's desire to return to its natural contour, and the added stress of the house's movement caused the mend to fail.

It is thus clear in retrospect that I should not have placed that screw right along the mend, but what should I have done then, and what should I do now to fix it?

To answer the first question: because the wood was warped and I wanted to bring it back into alignment, I should have been more thorough in impregnating the wood at the top of the board with LiquidWood, just to give it more strength and resilience. When bringing it back into alignment, I should have used smaller screws and more of them, placed more carefully back from the edges of the board.

To answer the second question: I think it's too late to depend upon epoxy saturation to keep the mend together, because there is now cured epoxy along both sides of the break. The best thing to do for the good of the house would be simply to replace the board, but that isn't going to happen. So I guess I will have to remove the offending screw, re-mend the crack, bring the piece back into alignment with smaller screws placed carefully to the right of the crack, patch it up, and see what happens. The worst that can happen is that I learn some more stuff.

I Triple Dog Dare Ya!

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 00:48:41 PST

And I have the wherewithal to do it!

Yes, December was an eventful month here at the Farm House. First there was the epic wind storm, of course. Then came the cleanup, which is ongoing. Then, I fell ill with whatever flu is in this season, a pretty virulent one that lasted pretty much the rest of the month. The puppies came on the shortest day of the year, and somehow we managed to fit Christmas in among the other things. What with all these matters, I was not able to get back to the painting prep until this week.

The last thing I did, as you will recall, was to epoxy the crack at the bottom of the front cornerboard. Unfortunately, that mend did not hold.

The Farm House nearly always manages to punish me when I am in too much of a hurry. I did not properly prepare this crack before I mended it. Instead of drilling some ancillary holes to make sure the wood on both sides was saturated with epoxy, I just injected some into the crack and clamped it. Obviously, there was not enough epoxy to generate the hold needed to counteract the wood's desire to spread apart at the crack.

The proper way to mend it at this point would be to fabricate a backing piece that would run the length of the crack and most of the width of the board, sand the oxidation and dirt off the back of the board in this area, epoxy the backing piece to the board, clamp the crack closed, then drive screws through the board into the backing in several places along the crack to clamp those pieces together front-to-back.

Nevertheless, this is not what I did. It would take far too much time for too little benefit. Instead, I dug up a strip of wood from my scrap pile that just filled the gap between the corner board and the siding.

I was pushing the boards together here to check the fit.

I trimmed the strip so that it ends just shy of the corner board, and then screwed everything down on both sides of the crack.

The corner board was twisted outward here on the right side, so while this repair makes the corner board stable and square, the wood to the right of the crack is a bit lower than that to the left. For this reason, I had to do a lot of puttying to finish the repair. I'll show you the results next time.

* * *

"There goes the neighborhood."

Merry Christmas!

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 16:45:02 PST

A big Farm House Merry Christmas to you all, from the newly-augmented Farm House Gang!

Sally (L) and Peter, born on Halloween, arrived at Christmastime.

Aftermath

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 03:59:09 PST

If you're waiting for some sort of play on words involving Rolling Stones references, you can just forget it. I'm just not up to wordplay this evening. You'll have to get your satisfaction elsewhere.

So as I was saying, that was one Hell of a windstorm, the worst weather this Californio had ever been through. And it left our grounds in disarray.

Our arborist did come back later and take away the large boughs seen in this picture, but that still left a lot of mess to deal with.

Here's the view looking from the corner of the garage to the back of the lot:

It may not be obvious here, but the debris here is about eight inches deep. Did I say "debris"? I meant to say "mulch."

Anyway, I started working as hard as I could to clean up the mess from the front of the garage forwards. I worked as hard as I could for two days, and then I fell ill. I was starting to feel better when we got an e-mail from the city saying that we could put as much debris as we had in the gutter area along the street, and it would be picked up later.

So I got well real quick and started hauling out as much as I could, starting with the south side (so I could resume the painting work as soon as possible) and working my way back. I knew I couldn't fit it all out in front, but I resolved to get as much of it out there as I could before they picked it up.

Well, by that Sunday (about five days later) I had gotten all the way around to the front of the garage, where the last of the heavy debris deposits were. It was supposed to rain that evening, but it was only maybe an hour's work left, and since I didn't expect them to be picking up on Sunday I took my time.

Just as I finally got out there to start, I heard the sounds of heavy machinery. Then, I kept hearing the sounds of heavy machinery. Right after that, I heard the sounds of heavy machinery getting closer. I ran to the street and saw a big tractor scooping up the debris at the end of the block, about 150 feet away, and doing a pretty quick job of it. I had about ten minutes tops to do that hour's work, and amidst a fusillade of foul words that I sure hope were drowned out by the heavy machinery, I managed to haul out the last of the stuff just in time.

That night, it rained just enough to settle the dirt, and the next day I took a few photos just to document the back yard's new airier look. Here's one looking in the same general area as the one above:

As I said, airier. You can see that the olive tree still stands, but in a severely abridged state, and the wounds it sustained will eventually prove fatal, I am sorry to say. But for now it lives, and for that we are grateful. After all, that tree almost certainly predates my grandparents. Well, at least now that little scrub oak will have its day in the sun. Plus, now we can actually grow some roses back there.

Even as I was taking these pictures, I was getting sick again, much sicker than before, and sick I still am, five days later. Drat! DRAT!!

Drat.

* * *

"Words fail me."

Paul Bunyan Jr.

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 09:15:06 PST

Wednesday I got an especially early start on the patching work, because I knew that high winds were going to be coming in the late afternoon, and I wanted to be all done before then, so I could get ready.

We customarily get some pretty stiff winds this time of year: 30 to 35 MPH, with gusts to 45 MPH tops. Things get rather messy around here during these winds: Plant pots get knocked over, all the dead leaves and other debris get torn off the trees, the street becomes covered with those annoying palm fronds, and the occasional larger limb comes down as well. So I wrapped things up early and laid the ladders down on the ground so they wouldn't get blown over and break something.

The winds came in due course, and they seemed rather more forceful than usual. I went to the back door and looked out. To my dismay, our metal-framed, canvas-skinned gazebo had been blown off its moorings and was resting on its side some distance away against the side fence. That was our first warning that this would not be our usual windstorm.

This saddened Lydia, because she loved that gazebo. I had fitted it with a nice bright light fixture, and she enjoyed sitting out there in the evenings. I told her not to worry, that it looked unharmed, and that I was reasonably sure that we could just put it back up and it would be fine.

By 7 PM, the winds were blowing a steady 45 MPH, and the gusts were more like 60. I began to get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Fasten your seat belts, I thought to myself; it's going to be a bumpy night.

The winds continued to intensify, and by 8 PM the steady winds were up to about 50. The palm trees were leaned over at a 60 degree angle, but I wasn't worried about them. I was worried about the pines, and the massive oak on the other side of the driveway. The upper limbs of all the trees were being whipped about alarmingly in the wind. At this point, it seemed perfectly rational to be terrified.

Somewhat later on, Lydia was standing in the parlor looking out the bay window looking at the relatively small pine tree right in front of the house. It was only about 60 feet tall and two feet in diameter at its base. She said that she'd seen the base of the tree wobbling, but I thought it was just her imagination. We went back to the TV and tried to watch a movie, turning up the volume in order to drown out the shrieking of the storm.

Then came a sound that could not be drowned out: a sickening CRACCCCCCCCK! We ran to the parlor, looked out the window, and saw this:

Oh, my Lord. What a nightmare! a 60-foot tree, down on the ground, headed right towards the cars in our neighbor's driveway. We ran out, dreading what we would see. This is what we saw:

Sweet Providence, it fell between their cars! It missed the car in the picture by less than an inch. Still, this blocked one of their cars from exiting the driveway, so I resolved to cut the tree and drag the top of it out of their way. I have a whole collection of handsaws, ranging from tiny to massive, designed for arboreal disassembly. I selected a curved one, about two feet long with vicious teeth, and started sawing. Lydia stood by to ensure that the cut piece did not roll over and hit the car.

Just then, the wind kicked into high gear. I looked up at the huge pine between the houses. We were right in its path of destruction should it fall over. I told Lydia, "If I say 'run', or you hear any cracking or tearing sounds, run that way!", pointing towards our driveway. I started sawing as fast as I could, and then some. When I'd gotten about halfway through, I moved to the other side of the tree, so it would tend to fall straight down. At that point, I had my back to the big tree.

Then, an insanely violent gust blew by, and I heard the sickening sound of splintering wood again. "RUN!" I shouted, but I couldn't run the way I'd told Lydia to go, because I was on the wrong side of the tree, and one of its boughs completely blocked my way. So I went between our neighbors' cars, ran down their driveway, then turned up the street towards our house—and right into the wind.

I've seen the gag in films a hundred times: someone finds himself caught out in a storm, he starts running as hard as he can, and he doesn't get anywhere because the wind is holding him in place. I never had any idea that this kind of thing actually happened in real life! Once I turned into the wind, I put my head down and started running as hard as I could, and after about six strides I looked up to check my progress around the felled tree. I hadn't even cleared the neighbors' driveway yet. It's a good thing that the big pine wasn't really falling, because I'd already have been a pancake.

I kept running as if on a treadmill until I finally figured out that I'd make faster headway simply by walking with long strides. It seemed as if I were walking around the block, but I eventually made it all the way back around the felled tree, and I met up with Lydia again on the veranda. We had lost track of each other out there in the maelstrom.

Once back inside, I felt rather silly having gotten so worked up that I imagined the sound of splintering wood. "Oh, well," I mused, "at least Lydia didn't notice my pathetic Buster Keaton impression."

Then I looked out the back door. The great majority of the south olive tree had split off from the main trunk—and landed on what had once been our gazebo.

Hey! I hadn't imagined that big splintering sound! Woo-hoo!

From that point on, I was all nerves. I was honestly afraid. Mostly it was perfectly rational fear of someone or something getting hurt by falling trees, but a little of it was fear of uncharted territory. This was by far the most violent weather I had ever experienced.

Look, I know that this was not terribly catastrophic weather, as catastrophic weather goes. I completely understand that compared to hurricanes or tornadoes, our event was mild. For those of you who live in Illinois or Texas, this sort of event is called December.

The thing is, this is California. Unless you live in geographically risky or foolish places, such as Big Bear or Malibu, you're not supposed to get catastrophic weather. See, that's the tradeoff. In exchange for the ever-present chance that everything you own will be destroyed in 60 seconds by an earthquake, you don't have to worry about old Mother Earth trying to kill you with catastrophic storms. It's a good system. I like it that way. In my personal experience, it has worked quite nicely for over fifty years.

When it seems as if the Basic Agreement has suddenly changed, then, it is certainly a cause for some concern. As I said, this was the most violent weather I had ever experienced, and I was reasonably sure that it was the most violent weather the Farm House had seen in half a century. I had no idea whether the trees were going to hold, and no idea what would happen if they didn't. With their size and proximity, and the light structure of the Farm House, the one thing I was pretty sure of was that a particularly fell, but reasonably possible, set of occurrences would kill one or more of us and destroy the house.

With this in my mind, I proceeded to be more terrified than I have ever been. It was like the first split-second reaction to an earthquake, extended over an entire night. See, in an earthquake the terror goes away in an instant, because my emergency response system kicks in, and I know exactly what to do. Here, however, there was nothing to do but try to keep my charges as safe as I could as the storm continued to rise in fury.

For the next few hours, that meant staying in the kitchen. It was of the newest, stoutest construction, and it was in the location least likely to be in the path of destruction. Moreover, if things really got ugly the basement was right beneath us. I managed to corral Lydia for that long; she surfed the Net cool as a Kool-Pop, while I tried to sit still and get my heart to stop pounding. Just after 1 AM, she called our arborist thinking that she'd leave a message, but he answered himself. Oops. But he was extremely gracious about it, saying he was expecting calls.

After a while, the storm stopped worsening and sat at the same level of intensity, with occasional gusts and infrequent periods of relative calmness. I figured that whatever hadn't come down so far wasn't going to come down as long as things didn't get worse, so I judged that it was worth the risk of going upstairs just to get some rest. Lydia slept well, but I kept waking up every time the wind gusted, because when it did the house rumbled ominously.

At last I fell asleep from pure exhaustion, and Lydia kindly let me sleep in when our arborist knocked on the door at 6:30 AM, ready to start cleaning up the arboreal carnage. Although the forecast had called for the gale to continue through the next day, by dawn things had calmed down significantly. I had stopped taking pictures after our caper outside, so Lydia took some pictures of the carnage before our arborist started to clean it up. It was still pretty dark at that point, so some of the pictures are a bit blurry.


Here's the olive tree. The broken carcass of the gazebo is behind and under the tree in the left half of the picture.

The big pine between the houses didn't get off without some damage.

This and one other smaller break were all that we lost on the
big oak, thank goodness.


The broken oak limb from the front. This made a lot of noise in the wind during the night; I was sure it was going to break a window, but it didn't.

* * *

Lydia was a smart cookie indeed to call our arborist so early, because that allowed us to get our neighbors' driveway cleared in time for them not to be inconvenienced. Not that they complained. No, they were extremely gracious about the whole thing. Good neighbors are among the greatest blessings in the world. They were even laughing over the matter of the felled pine tree knocking down their telephone line: the line did not break, and was still working, until it was broken by the tall antenna on an AT&T service vehicle. The guy riding shotgun leaned out the window and yelled, "We'll be right back to fix that!"

By noon or thereabouts, all our fallen trunks and limbs were cut up and moved out of the way. There remains one major broken limb that still hangs from the front pine tree, right over the driveway and our power drop.

The red arrow points to the break. Note the power drop directly below.

The arborist was unwilling to try to remove it because the power drop underneath made that a very risky proposition. As it is, fortunately, it is in no immediate danger of falling, because it is still well-connected to the tree. At this point, we're hoping Pasadena Water and Power will remove it; otherwise, we'll have to have them disconnect our service temporarily so the arborist can remove the limb safely.

Patching Away on The Thin Wood of A New Day

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 22:51:18 PST

I've been working away at the patching. I've worked my way all the way across the belt course and down the corner board on the west end of the side. As I should have anticipated, I found a lot of little problems with the corner board. The biggest of these is that the earlywood is all worn away, leaving the board heavily grooved all the way along it. This means I pretty much have to skim-coat the entire board with putty. And of course, there are the usual nail holes and divots to fill in.

Another problem is that the corner board mounted perpendicularly to the one I'm patching, facing west on the front of the house, has been pulled away from the wall by the weight of the gutter downspout. I was able to fix this with a few well-placed screws in the front corner board.

This pulled the board back into place, and closed the gap between it and the corner board I am patching,

Since taking this picture, I've made a patching pass all the way down the board. Man, it was great to be working on solid ground for the first time in a while.

The bottom of the board is cracked, because as part of the distortion of the frame from the foundation sag, a half-inch gap opened up between it and the wall. Someone tried nailing in a massive framing nail to correct this, which caused the crack. Here I'm doing a dry test run with the clamp to make sure everything will line up correctly:

As you can see, everything lined up pretty well, so I epoxied everything up and then patched it. Tomorrow, I'll stick a shim between the board and the wall so I can screw it down properly.

Meanwhile, way back up on the belt course, I noticed a problem with a spot I had already patched:

I deserved this, because I didn't take the time to fix it properly in the first place. When patching butt joints seamlessly, one should always drill holes in both pieces and soak the wood with LiquidWood before patching. That way, when the epoxy cures the two pieces are locked together, becoming as a practical matter one piece. Apparently all the carpentry work I did on this trim run caused stress on this joint and pulled it apart. Thus, I have gone back and re-done this joint properly, drilling holes all around, injecting LiquidWood in them, and then patching up the cracks with WoodEpox.

A few more patching runs and I'll be done with the belt course and corner board. Then, I will patch up the trim between the siding and the foundation blocks (I forget what the proper term is for that trim course right now), and then I'll be more or less ready for the final priming and painting. That'll be my Christmas present to myself.

* * *

"Shouldn't there be a big pointy tree with lots of prey on it here by now?"

The Farm House Effect: Restoring A Phone

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 03:14:13 PST

The patching of the belt course continues apace. Sadly, that activity isn't any more interesting now than it was in the last post, and we all know how that went. So, in order to slake the unquenchable thirst of my Brobdingnagian audience for new posts on this Thanksgiving weekend, I thought I'd take a little side trip in our tales of restoration.

You will recall my discussing the Farm House Effect: the extension of one's historical purview to encompass the lifetime of the old home he is restoring. This has made itself most apparent to Lydia and me in our fascination with the history of everyday things one takes for granted, such as phones.

During the excruciatingly long gestation period of the Farm House restoration plan, I was becoming increasingly antsy to be doing something, anything, to get ready for our coming life in our new old home. During this time, our friends Nik and Jo moved into their own fine old vernacular Craftsman home, "Tara", a scant half-mile away from the Farm House. In the experiencing of their own "Tara Effect", they purchased a restored old Western Electric Imperial 202 phone. This was a model Western Electric produced in the early Fifties to commemorate its 75th anniversary, a revamped Model 202 with a gold-plated body and an ivory-painted handset.

Not Nik and Jo's phone, but one much like it.

Nik and Jo chose it because they wanted to have a phone that contributed to the period feel they were working to achieve for their home.

It's a lovely phone, and Nik and Jo's idea struck Lydia and me as a brilliant one. The phone especially fired my imagination because my grandparents had a black 202 in their home when I was a boy. I was always fascinated by that phone, with its graceful lines, pretty porcelain number plate, huge handset, and the dial that purred like a mechanical cat when someone spun it. I loved the big resonant click that came out when one operated the switchhook, and the loud, clear ring of the bellbox on the wall.

My grandparents' 202 looked like this, but it was in better shape and had a coiled rubber cord.

Compared to this magnificent machine, our plain old WE 500 at home was ugly and boring, the Organization Man of telephones.

A WE 500 in the Farm House study just like the one we had at home when I was a little boy.

It was from this comparison between the prehistoric (which in my early years meant "more than ten years old") 202 and the contemporary 500 that I first got the idea that old things were more grand, more beautiful, just plain better than new things.

So we adopted Nik and Jo's idea, and kinda went hog-wild with it. We decided to get a bunch of old phones from different eras and deploy them throughout the Farm House. We would hardly be able to find any phone that wasn't appropriate, because the phone had been invented a scant nine years before the Farm House's inception. We thought it would be fun to watch our guests delight at the discovery of a vintage phone, in working condition and looking fabulous, in each room they visited.

We soon learned that this idea was cost-prohibitive using already-restored phones, but was easily affordable if we restored the phones ourselves. This tapped even deeper into the Farm House Effect, which now that I think of it must have some relation to the nesting instinct. In any event, we soon had quite an inventory of old phones and phone parts, and I was in business.

I read up on how phones work and how they are wired, and how to re-wire them if needed to work with modern equipment. I puttered around with various phones, restoring them functionally and cleaning up their exteriors, until I felt reasonably confident in my knowledge.

Then, I undertook my first thorough restoration. I wanted to start with a black 202 like the one my grandparents had, but that would have required spray-painting the phone body, and I didn't feel I was quite ready for that. So I picked a phone that wouldn't need painting, a 1947 302.

In service from 1937 to 1958, the Western Electric Model 302 is often referred to nowadays as the "I Love Lucy phone", because it's the phone Lucy and Ricky had in their New York apartment (they updated to a WE 500 when they moved to Connecticut). The 302 was Western Electric's first model that contained all needed circuitry within the body of the telephone itself. It began its life with a body made of pot metal, but in 1941, with all metals becoming valuable because of the escalating war in Europe, Western Electric switched to a molded thermoplastic body.

We found our restoration candidate on eBay. It worked, more or less, but it wasn't very pretty.

It was missing its number card holder, and the body was heavily scuffed and in places deeply scratched.

These photos don't accurately depict the depth of the scratches; clearly someone had a serious grievance with the phone company.

Did you know that thermoplastic like this can be refinished in much the same way as is metal? At the time, I had just learned that this was possible, and I was eager to try my hand at it.

First, I removed the body shell, and then I sanded out all the deep scratches, scuffs and dents.

Then, I sanded the whole body with a finer-grit sandpaper, taking care to remove all the scratches from the first sanding:

The basic procedure is to sand out the damage, then keep sanding with progressively finer grits of sandpaper. One sands until all the scratches of the previous grit are removed, then switches to the next finer grit and does the same thing, sanding perpendicularly to the previous pass so the previous grit's scratches are easy to discern. This continues until the scratches are fine enough to be polished out readily. This is the same procedure one uses with metal; the only difference is that one starts with a finer grit because plastic is softer. I used wet sandpaper for all but the first two passes.

This was a long process; the above pass was done with 220 grit sandpaper, and I finished off with 2000 grit. Here's what it looked like at that point:

As you can see, all this sanding has brought the surface back to a soft shine, with hardly any suggestion of scratches. This necessarily took a long time; I typically did this work at night, sitting with the family watching Angels games.

At the same time, I was restoring the inner workings. I took everything apart, cleaned off all the dirt and corrosion, and put it all back together with replacement parts as necessary, lubricating all the moving parts and electrical connections to ensure proper mechanical and electrical function.

Oh, yes. This picture reminds me that I restored the bakelite handset in much the same way as the phone body, but there are some differences. Whereas the body is made of thermoplastic, which is completely solid and unitary in composition, bakelite is a phenolic resin mixed with a filler, usually wood flour. The thermoplastic is molded in a melted state, and it hardens as it cools; bakelite is either molded under heat and pressure or extruded, and it hardens from a chemical reaction brought about by the heat and pressure.

Because the thermoplastic used in the phone body is the same all the way through, sanding down to undamaged material and then polishing it will restore the original appearance; because it is fairly stable chemically, it does not change appreciably with age. Bakelite, on the other hand, is somewhat unstable; while the molding process naturally forces a smooth layer of resin to the surface, exposure to ultraviolet rays breaks it down, causing a fine layer of phenyl alcohol to form on the surface. This yellows and oxidizes the surface, and eventually it begins to reflect the texture of the filler material. For this reason, aged bakelite can never be brought back to its full original shine. Thus, the procedure here is to start with a very fine-grit sandpaper to remove all the oxidized and yellowed material, then sand with progressively finer grits just until the scratches are gone and the sheen is even. This is a much shorter process than with the thermoplastic.

With the sanding all done on the body and handset, the final step is to polish them on a buffing machine with a string buff and some plastic polish, which comes in the form of a waxy white bar. This has to be done with great care with the thermoplastic in order to prevent heating the surface and thus distorting it. With the bakelite, more polish and more pressure are used in order to fill in some of the surface irregularities.

After all this, here was the result:

I was positively stunned by how nice the phone looked: wow, I did that? Aside from the finger wheel, the phone was pristine, as if it were about ten years old and gently treated its whole life. When I replaced the fingerwheel with a restored one a week later, the effect was complete. Moreover, the phone worked perfectly, with the best sound quality I had ever heard from a phone, bar none. It has ever since been my preferred phone for a good long phone conversation.

And so we had our first phone with which to wow visitors to the Farm House. It had come at a significant cost—my hands were severely weakened by the long period of constant sanding, and have even now not fully recovered—but it was worth it to have followed through on a plan with such resounding success. When we moved into the Farm House, I placed it in a fairly prominent place, and waited for the expressions of delighted surprise from visitors.

To this date, six years later, not one person has even noticed the damn phone. Not. One. Person.

The whole affair brings to mind the immortal words of the late, great Rick Nelson:

Well, it's all right now
I've learned my lesson well
You see, you can't please anyone
so you've got to kill yourself.

Or something like that.

* * *

"Get that phone, will ya? I'm not in to anybody."

Serious Putty

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 02:06:07 PST

When Lydia heard about my difficulty finding the fallen screws in among the pine needles, she remarked, "You could have used a magnet to find them." That reminded me that I have a magnet specifically designed for such a task that I had forgotten about. I hate to sound clichéd, but: d'oh!

Since the closing of Furnace Gap, I've been puttying my way along the rest of the belt course. It's slow work, which is why I haven't posted for a few days; puttying in progress seems like rather a boring subject, so I usually leave it out of the narrative, showing only the end product if anything.

Then it occurred to me that this whole blog could be considered rather boring unless one is specifically interested in its subject matter. One of my reasons for writing this blog is to illustrate procedures that are not generally covered in the instructional literature readily available in the usual places, and what I call "putty sculpting" certainly qualifies for that distinction. And so, all aboard the Boredom Express!

Because I must work along the long, narrow strip of the belt course at the top of an extension ladder, the work naturally breaks itself up into sections, the width of which is my safe reach to each side of the ladder: about four feet for close work, and up to six for simple tasks. Some of the patching I can do in one pass, but the more complex patches can take up to three passes. Thus, at any given time during this work I will have areas in different degrees of completeness which decrease as one moves to the left.

Here is the area I pictured in the last post, after two passes with the putty (sanded down after each pass):

It looks a lot better now, but it's not quite done; areas like this take several passes because there are many areas that need patching from several different angles that tend to interfere with each other. If I try to do too much at once, I end up dislodging putty I've already placed.

My main patching tools are flexible putty knives in one-inch and two-inch widths, but they are of limited usefulness on contoured surfaces. In the search for tools more applicable to detailed work, I've had great success looking in artists' catalogues. In the task at hand, one tool in particular is very useful, which I believe is intended for sculpting clay. Here, I'm using it to make a difficult concave patch:

Otherwise, I'd have to slide a putty knife down the divot, trying to stay close to the proper curvature: a much trickier proposition, and one that invariably leaves a big blob of putty to sand off. In contoured areas, the less putty there is to sand off, the smaller the chance of distorting the profile of the trim.

Here is this area after I completed the final patching:

This will be very easy to sand back to profile once it hardens. I'm really on my game now, such as it is. It always takes me several days to get my putty-sculpting chops back up after a layoff; it's just one of those skill sets that does not stay resident in my active mind. I really need more RAM.

From here, I moved on down to the next station, where lies the area I discussed in great detail back in April.

Here it is before any puttying. This was the area that bore the brunt of the foundation's settling below and to the left of this picture. This forced the left lower trim piece down; butted tightly against the right lower trim piece, the friction splintered the piece severely at its right end. In fact, the stress was so great upon this piece that cracks like the ones you see above opened up along its entire length.

At the same time, the top left trim piece was forced inwards, and the top right one outwards; this displacement is not apparent in the photo, although the resulting damage clearly is.

Here is a close-up of the area after the second patching pass:

Now you can see clearly the significant front-back displacement of the two top pieces, but what you can't see is that the bottom half of the bottom left piece is sticking out a bit as well. I didn't see it myself until this point. Because of these displacements, the patching at this spot is going to take several more passes.

The difficulty here lies in the fact that I obviously can't completely eradicate the discrepancies here, as I was able to do for the most part with the gap in the middle trim pieces further up the belt course. I thus have to contrive to handle the discrepancies as gracefully as possible, and just how much gracefulness I can get away with will take some trial and error. More to the point, I know I can eliminate the front-back discrepancy in the lower trim pieces, but I'm not at all sure what I can get away with concerning the top trim pieces.

Tune in again for the next exciting installment of "The Trim-Jog Incident!"

* * *

Furnace Gap, 1943–2011

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 00:58:26 PST

As William F. Buckley might have said, he gone!

Yes, the Furnace Gap Elimination Project is complete. The task I most dreaded when I began working on the south side really wasn't so hard after all.

I've in fact finished the patching of the belt course all the way from the right end to a foot or so to the left of the Gap. Most of what remains is pretty easy except for a few rough patches, notably this one:

Looks like someone had a rough day with the hammer. I can empathize, because I had a pretty rough day myself. Nothing in particular was wrong; it was simply that I was not on my game today. Oh boy, was I not on my game today. It was one of those days when I really had no business being up on a ladder, especially not an extension ladder.

For the most part, I'm pretty comfortable on any sort of stepladder, as long as it is sturdy and on solid ground. This is because most of the time with a stepladder you can position it so that your center of gravity is firmly within the ladder's legs, tending towards the ladder, so that if you get wobbly you'll tend to wobble against the ladder.

With an extension ladder, on the other hand, your center of gravity is at best just slightly in front of the plane of your feet, and most often off to one side of the ladder. In other words, you are in constant danger of falling off if you forget where you are for a split-second. Thus, you are compelled to concentrate on two things at all times: what you are doing, and keeping your balance.

This is why I hate working on extension ladders. Well, it's a big part of why I hate it. I also hate having to carry up all my tools and materials in a bucket and an apron, having to rummage through said bucket (hanging off the side of the ladder) and apron for what I need with one hand while holding on to the ladder with the other, and then having to carry everything back down the ladder and move it (it's heavy!) every few feet. This is unpleasant enough on a good day.

On a day like I had today, the whole affair becomes high adventure.

Not only were my eyes simply not working right, and for no good reason, but my sense of balance never really reported for work. Not that I was at all dizzy; it was just that I could never find stable equilibrium. As a result, I had to concentrate so much upon just staying up there that there weren't many resources left for what I was trying to get done. Oh, the sanding went well enough, but everything else was quite a challenge.

At one point, I was driving a few screws up through the bottom trim piece to pull it back in line with the top; this was particularly thrilling, because I had to stay up without holding on. At that point, I had the box of screws open in the bucket so I could reach in and get them as needed; while I was driving one of the screws, somehow the bucket upended, and all the screws disappeared into the thick blanket of pine needles below. I have no idea how that happened. But hey, at least I was still on the ladder! And so I spent the next half-hour looking for pine-needle-colored screws in the pine needles, mostly by feel.

I ended up getting a reasonable amount of work done through sheer stubbornness, but along the way a few other items jumped ship. I still haven't found my pine-needle-colored nail set.

"Your nail set's stuck in your hair."

Happy Veterans' Day!

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 23:07:20 PST

As the headline says, I hope you all had a Veterans' Day that was happy. Happy, and at least partially occupied with thoughts of the veterans, and of the future veterans, in your life. Thoughts, and gratitude.

As is evident in the picture above, I've got both the casings on the south side primed now. The rain did not appear on Friday as advertised, and the first half of it was actually rather nice, if breezy, before the cloud cover came. Nevertheless, I finished priming the west casing just as the light failed Thursday evening. Here's a closer look:

I could do some more patching work, but I have a feeling that I won't. I'd really like to be done with this side soon.

On Thursday, I also removed the mold pieces from the Furnace Gap Elimination Project, Phase I. Although I coated the pieces thoroughly with mold release agent, they at first refused to budge after I removed the screws. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised; epoxy is, after all, an adhesive. Happily, the release agent did ultimately do its job; the pieces popped off cleanly once I persuaded them with a putty knife and a rubber mallet.

Not bad at all! I only missed one little area in the middle of the front. This does illustrate, however, the folly of assuming straight or parallel lines anywhere on the house; although the front piece was straight, and I put it on straight, still you can see that the putty line is too low on the bottom at the right. But it's not a problem; that's what sandpaper is for.

It's not a straight line, but a remarkable simulation! Note that I've extended the plane back beyond where it will meet the lower half of the profile; that's so I can maintain the gap between the two components of the belt course through the patch. Not that the gap needs to go back more than about a quarter of an inch at most, but establishing this plane now will make establishing the gap much easier during Phase II.

That, however, will have to wait until after the rain.

* * *

Thanks, Sergeant.

Rendezvous at Furnace Gap

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 00:30:30 PST

Today I worked on filling in Furnace Gap, the passage cut out of the belt course back in 1943 for the vent from the old floor furnace that used to sit at the bottom of the stairs.

The first thing I did was to sink a few screws into the wood surrounding Furnace Gap in the upper trim piece. These will serve to link the putty mass mechanically to the wood, in order to prevent cracks around the patch later on.

Not that the putty won't stick well to the wood, but these screws will keep the epoxy moving in concert with the wood as it expands and contracts with changing temperature.

Then, I attached the pieces of my ad hoc mold:

I made them wide enough to patch the divots adjacent to the hole at the same time.

Once the mold was firmly attached, I pressed epoxy up into the mold with my gloved fingers, making sure it filled the void completely and completely enveloped the embedded screws. Then, I leveled the surface with a putty knife. It took three ounces of putty.

I stopped at this point because it will make accurate forming of the patch easier. This way, I can establish a nice flat surface for the overhang, and build in the small gap between the two trim pieces much more easily, without having to depend entirely upon carving it out later. Carrying this gap across the patch is essential to the patch's blending in imperceptibly.

I built a ridge into the bottom and kept open a path to the gap in the back so that the bottom half of the patch will key in to the top half and to the surrounding wood as well.

* * *

"Let's see. . .f/5.6 at 1/125 sec. That should work. Now where's the danged shutter button?"

Reunion

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 00:33:39 PST

With the rain all cleared out for a few days, I set about the task of finishing the reassembly of the west casing so I can get it primed before the rain returns.

After cutting the new cap pieces to fit, I removed them and prepared them for their life out in the elements. End grain is like a bundle of straws, ready to suck up any available moisture at the first opportunity. With the ends of the cap pieces pointing up at their junction, it's no surprise that the old cap pieces ended up looking like this after 126 years:

In order to prevent this with the new cap pieces, I gave the ends a pre-emptive drink of LiquidWood, standing them on end in it until they had drunk their fill. I did this on the outer ends for good measure, then wiped off the excess and gave them a ride in the dryer.

This permanently seals the end grain, and effectively counteracts the tendency of the redwood to splinter at the ends.

Then, I primed the cap pieces and aprons on all sides. The world would be a better place if everyone backprimed.

Actually, I've been doing a lot of work on the aprons behind the scenes since last we saw them in May, when I was having trouble getting the epoxy I had soaked them in to cure. I wanted them to look good so that they would blend in with the new cap pieces, so I carefully patched and sanded them. After several patch/sand cycles, they still had a great many little divots too small for the epoxy to fill.

So I pulled out an old weapon I hadn't used for years: Hasco brushing putty. This is a very fine-grained putty that brushes on as a very thick paint, but is sanded smooth like a putty once it dries. One applies it in a thick coat over a piece, then sands it level with very fine sandpaper. Its fine grain fills tiny irregularities, leaving a nice, smooth surface that takes paint readily.

SmooOOOOOth! By the way, it is now marketed in this country under the Fine Paints of Europe brand.

Anyway, with all the needed pieces primed up and ready, I re-attached the cap pieces, then nailed the apron pieces in place. That wasn't easy, because even after rehabilitation the aprons still bear the dimensional distortions of all those years of being out in the weather, so I had to account for all the distortions in my positioning of them. But I got everything to line up properly in due course.

Hey, now! Won't that wow the neighborhood.

* * *

"You missed a spot."

I Get The Blues When It Rains

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 01:53:02 PST

I had been on a pretty good roll there for a while, but Friday's rain really threw me for a loop. I had no idea it was coming until noon the day before, so I didn't really have time to plan for it. I just had enough time to prime the east casing, as I have mentioned.

I had enough tasks to do in the garage to keep me busy on Friday, and if that had been the end of the rain, I could have picked up right where I left off the next day. But even though it didn't rain on Saturday, I couldn't do anything I had planned, because it's quite likely to rain again on Sunday. So I had to come up with a new plan if I wanted to keep moving the ball forward.

There remains one major cosmetic reconstruction to do on the south side, and so I turned my attention to it: the divot cut in the belt course when the old floor heater was installed.

I like to call it Furnace Gap, because it makes me laugh, and when I'm laughing, my head's not in the oven. You know, when I first started painting the house, I looked up at Furnace Gap and thought it was huge, much too huge to fill in with WoodEpox alone. I envisioned either splicing in some wood and puttying it in, or making a mold from another part of the belt course and casting it in. But I didn't give any truly serious thought about the problem until today, when I was forced to do so.

So I gave it a good look from the ground for the first time in months, and after all I've been through in the rehabilitation of this side of the house, suddenly it looked rather small.

I climbed up the ladder to give it a close look.

Yep, it's really not so big, after all. I realized that there was really no problem in just patching it up with WoodEpox, if I sunk a few screws in the sides and pushed the putty into that gap between the trim pieces so there was a physical connection between the epoxy mass and the surrounding wood. Still, it would be rather a slow job doing it completely freehand.

I started to think of how I might apply the idea I used with the sills of clamping a guide to aid my puttying. There was no good place to clamp on the belt course, but I could hold the guide in place with screws on each side. Then the old idea of casting came to mind, and suddenly I had a minor inspiration. I took some measurements of Furnace Gap and its environs, rummaged around in my scrap wood pile, and soon I had this:

Now all I have to do is coat these guides with mold release agent, screw them in place, then press the epoxy in this ad hoc mold from underneath, and half the work will be done. Doing the bottom part freehand will be simple enough. I'd already be well on my way by now, if it weren't for the coming rain.

So here I sit, still stymied despite my best efforts. But at least I moved the ball forward a little today.

* * *

I'm Cuttin', I'm Drillin', I'm Paintin'

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 00:47:53 PDT

With the junction cuts successfully executed on the cap pieces, the next step was to trim the other ends even with the sides of the casing. To do this accurately, it was necessary to attach the cap pieces to the casing first. This is because there was a chance of the pieces' moving slightly when attached, so cutting them afterwards helped ensure that the cuts will remain accurate on the finished casing.

Of course, I wanted to do my best to keep the pieces from moving at all as I attached them. Proper positioning was necessary to keep the pieces in proper alignment at their junction. Happily, I had gotten a good idea of how to get this done from re-attaching the rehabilitated cap piece on the east casing. From that experience, it only took a week of obsessing on the subject to come up with a good procedure.

The first step was to pre-drill the holes for the mounting screws through the cap pieces. To get the screws located properly, I marked where the cap pieces meet the backing piece on each end of the bottom of each piece, transferred these marks to the top, and then drew a line to connect these marks on both pieces. Then, I drilled five holes perpendicular to the top in each piece along these lines. Doing it this way ensures a good angle for the screw through the backing piece safely back from the front edge, but still far enough forward that the screws won't poke through the back of the casing and provide another avenue for the elements to enter.

The diameter of the holes through the cap pieces is large enough so that the screw threads only touch the sides, and do not engage them. This is so when the screw is driven, it will go right into the backing piece, and not just pull the cap piece away. In such a situation, the screws' entire holding power comes from the threads biting into the backing piece, so the holes in the piece to be attached need only be small enough to keep it in alignment.

I have frequently mentioned the virtues of pre-drilling, especially in old wood, to prevent splitting the wood. In this case, however, I did not pre-drill the holes into the backing piece, because if they were even slightly off-center with the holes in the cap piece, the cap piece would be pulled out of position. I felt safe screwing right into the wood in this case because the screws I used have a "drill point", a little slot cut into the tip that provides some cutting action and some clearance for the wood displaced by the screw.

The second step in getting the cap pieces installed properly was to do as much assembly as I could beforehand. To this end, I inserted screws into position at the first and last holes, positioned so that the tip was even with the bottom edge. In that way, all I had to do was to put the pieces in place, hold them there with one hand, and drive the screws with the drill in the other hand.

And so, with everything as thoroughly thought out as I could think of, I ascended the ladder with the cap pieces and the drill. I was nervous, because attaching pieces of wood in proper alignment is another one of those tasks at which I have not had great success in the past. This time, however, all my preparation paid off.

Success!

Now it was time to mark the ends of the cap pieces for trimming. I took my trusty carpenter's pencil, all nicely sharpened, and marked the cutting location on each piece as precisely as I could.

I removed the cap pieces, took them back to the garage, took a deep breath, and made the cuts. Then, I took the pieces back to the casing and re-attached them.

Wow, what a relief at last to have this done! I've been fretting about this task for months, ever since I realized I'd have to do it. And I had done it as well as I could possibly have hoped, i.e., with a minimum of patching necessary to bridge the gap.

It may be difficult to see clearly in this picture, but the horizontal placement is perfect; the two pieces meet flush at the crest. There is a bit of a gap that opens towards the front, but as it turns out, this is due to the slope on the backing piece not being constant along its whole length.

As is quite obvious here, the slope lessens considerably at the far left; this pulled the back of the left piece down just a bit on the left side, which is what caused the gap at the junction. Happily, it will be a simple matter to putty both gaps up imperceptibly.

With the cap pieces now well and thoroughly made, I took them right back off again in order to do some final preparations. Before I could get to those, however, my plans changed suddenly.

I was planning to wait and prime both casings at the same time, but just after noon, I learned that there was an 80% chance of rain the next day. I did not want the unprotected wood on the east casing to get wet, because then I'd have to sand again. I couldn't start painting right then, because the sun was shining directly on the casing, so I had to wait until the sun went down behind the trees. This gave me only about 45 minutes to work before dusk. I just barely made it, although it was pretty dark by the time I got to the apron under the sill, so I couldn't inspect my work until the next day, before the rain started in earnest.

Not bad, if I do say so myself. It's far from perfect—as I've said, I didn't have time for perfection—but I'm very gratified to see how well the top of the casing came out. The cap pieces look just fine from this distance, and the patch in the apron is, as I had hoped, imperceptible. The variances in sheen visible in places are due to differences in how the primer penetrates the putty compared to bare wood; these will be eliminated by the top coat.

* * *

. . .to boldly go where no man has gone before.

I Am Curious (Stupid)

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 08:28:45 PDT

Yesterday, I caulked the gap between the top of the west casing and the siding.

Not at all pretty, but the joint will be covered by the cap pieces, so who cares? I am phenomenally inept at wielding a caulking gun; under absolutely ideal conditions, I can lay down a pretty good bead, but most of the time it ends up glopping out, and I just smear it into place with my fingers, wasting about 60% of it in the process. For my purposes, it might as well just come in a tub like spackle. And as if caulking itself were not enough of a challenge, I'm using a super-duper 90-year guarantee urethane caulk that starts to cure immediately, making it difficult to clean up all the caulk that gets where I don't want it to be.

Once this task was done, I returned to the thorny matter of fitting the cap pieces. I'd taken the needed angles from the restored right cap piece of the east casing, but that didn't get me a lot closer to understanding the geometry of the situation, and I wanted to understand it. Whenever I am confronted by a distinct lack of ability in some area, my first impulse is to try to develop this ability, as one would exercise a weak muscle in order to strengthen it.

I realize this flies in the face of common wisdom, which instructs us to play to our strengths, so perhaps I'm just a dope. Still, if I weren't this way, I wouldn't be doing any of the work that I am writing about in these pages, because not too terribly long ago I couldn't do anything more complicated, home improvement-wise, than to change a light bulb. Whether this is an argument for or against my way of doing things is a conclusion I leave to you.

So, I measured every pertinent angle on the restored east casing, wrote them down, and stared at them as I tried to retrieve my high-school geometry and trigonometry lessons from under the huge piles of baseball stats, movie trivia, and BMW chassis codes in my disordered brain. I was able to figure out the theory behind the side-to-side angles, and I used that understanding to verify the accuracy of the angles I had measured for that direction.

But the front-to-back angles continued to baffle me. I couldn't understand why there was a need for an angle in this direction of the end profile, and what geometrical rule dictated the size of this angle in relation to the other angles involved. I could have simply cut these angles and hoped they were correct, but I really wanted to understand the whys and wherefores first, so I could verify the accuracy of these angles as I had the side-to-side angles. I felt that verifying the angles was important, because I was not at all confident of the accuracy of my measurements, given that they were taken from a 126-year-old house that had seen a lot of living. At length, I decided to sleep on the matter.

Sure enough, I woke up with a start in the middle of the night with the answer I was seeking. I'll spare you the details, because I imagine it's obvious enough to you already, but let's just say that I had cleared my mental clog, so that my thoughts could now flow freely down—okay, let's not say that. Let's just say that I figured it out.

And so, I strode out to the garage the next morning confident that a few minutes' time would see this perversely difficult task at last behind me.

Forty-five minutes later, I was standing in front of the miter saw holding one of the cap pieces, completely baffled. I knew what angles to cut, sure enough. Now, the big question was this: what combination of saw movements and stock orientation would yield said angles?

The reason this was difficult for me to comprehend was that while the miter saw can be adjusted both to the left and to the right horizontally, vertically it can only be pivoted counter-clockwise. I really needed it to move clockwise. Everything would have been so easy if it could only pivot clockwise.

I rotated the piece one way and the other, and I just couldn't make the angles come out right. At last, I decided to make a test cut on a spare piece of stock and check it out. It was wrong, but at least it led me to figure out that I had to orient the piece with the long dimension vertical, so I got the proper cut on the next try.

The next problem was how to cut the other piece to match. By then I realized that the fastest way to figure it out was simply to try every possible way until I hit upon the right one, so I found two identical scrap pieces of wood, cut one the way I had cut the first piece, then tried cutting the other piece turned 180 degrees from the other and on the other side of the blade. This time, I got it on the first try!

I then duplicated this cuts in the actual cap pieces, and put them in position on the casing to check the fit.

WIN

It's not quite evident in this picture, because it was impossible to hold both pieces while taking the picture without some movement of the pieces, but the fit is, as a practical matter, perfect. At least, it will look perfect after some judicious patching and sanding. Reconciling the measurements I made to the geometry involved really paid off.

This excruciating lesson in geometry may not lead to an increased ability to visualize in three dimensions, but at least next time a problem involving compound angles arises, I'll know how to handle it.

* * *

. . .to seek out new life and new civilizations. . .

The One Stooge

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 23:45:37 PDT

Today was one of those no-paint days; between the extreme sunniness and the breeziness, it would have been hard to lay down a good coat. So instead I returned to the west casing.

I stopped work on this casing earlier and went on to the east casing because I realized that fitting the new cap pieces would be trickier than I first envisioned. You see, I'm not one of those lucky people who came from the factory hard-wired to think abstractly in three dimensions. I've developed a serviceable level of ability in that regard through hard work and experience, but conceptualizing the end profiles of the cap pieces proved too much for me. It didn't help to look at the pieces I was replacing, because their original end profiles were lost to history:

I thought the matter through thoroughly, looking at the pieces and the place where they are to go. I took careful measurements of the angles involved. I measured twice, cut once. And here is the result of my best efforts:

FAIL

For all my cogitating, I hadn't understood that the downward slope facing forward would affect the junction of the cap pieces. It wasn't even apparent to me when I held these pieces in position with the ends still cut square. It wasn't until this point, when I had cut them to the proper up-down angle, that I understood that I had to cut to a front-back angle as well.

It's humbling to find oneself confronted so inescapably by his own mental failings, but it's also instructive; you can be sure I won't make this mistake again. Just getting just the front edge to line up required precise positioning, so I realized that I needed to re-think the entire process thoroughly in order to ensure that I affix the pieces in the proper position.

That's why I moved on to the east casing: I hoped that the exercise of removing and replacing one of those cap pieces would give me a better understanding of the process. Happily, it did, and so now I think I can do a reasonably good job installing the cap pieces on the west casing.

But there is other work to do first. I want to caulk the joint between the casing and the siding along the top. In places the gap is quite wide, so before I caulk I need to insert some foam backing rod.

You can see in the illustration on the package how this works. Caulk can't properly fill a gap more than about 3/16 of an inch wide, and so one must insert this foam rod to provide a flexible, weather-resistant bed for it to sit upon.

Inserting the rod is pretty easy; all one does is stuff it in the cracks. Where it doesn't fit, it isn't needed.

At this point I ran out of day, so I'll caulk tomorrow.

* * *

. . .Its ongoing mission: to explore strange new worlds. . .

East Casing Ready to Paint

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 22:44:30 PDT

After nearly three months and over a quart of putty, I've finally finished the reconstruction of the east casing.

Please forgive the odd angle; the pine tree is in the way, so the only way I can get a picture of this casing straight on is by sitting on the ground with my back pressed against the trunk. In fact, the close proximity of that tree is a large part of why this casing has taken so long, because it's made it very difficult for me to get a good angle on my work in the upper left area of the casing.

I was planning to show some before/after pairs of photos in order to illustrate the extent of the work done, but to tell you the truth, the comparison does not show any real improvement except for at the sill, because before it was least painted, and now the extensive patching makes it look worse in many places. I'll thus skip the comparisons for now.

There are still some shallow voids in the major patching areas, the sill and cap pieces, but I've gone about as fur as I can go with WoodEpox. Any patching material is limited by its granularity, i.e. the size of the particles of which its solids are composed; eventually, the defects become too small for the putty to fill. I'll attend to them as part of the painting work.

I'd like to discuss one detail of the patching before I move on. Because I patched the left cap piece in place, at its left end I had to patch it flush with its adjoining pieces.

Were I to leave it like this, once I painted the casing this area would look unnatural because of the lack of seams among these three pieces, especially because the seam between the apron and the backing piece opens up at the bottom end where the triple-bead figure carries through. An X-Acto knife and a ruler will take care of this:

There. Now it looks as if the three pieces are butted up against each other perfectly. Now, in general details of this size are not visible from ground level, and these tiny lines are no exception. Nevertheless, the shadows they cast will be visible, and if they were missing the eye would tell the viewer that something was wrong, even if he couldn't figure out exactly what it was. This is a small detail, but it only takes a minute or so to add, so why not?

I'm now going to give the casing a coat of primer to protect it, but I will then go on to the rest of the trim patching. There's no sense in putting the finish coat on and then covering it with sanding dust from the belt course directly above.

* * *

These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. . .

TV Time!

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 08:40:29 PST

One of my favorite corners of the World Wide Web is the Internet Archive. If you've never been there, it's a massive repository of all sorts of public-domain media. One can even view old iterations of Web sites via their Wayback Machine, should you be nostalgic for the comfortably clunky look that even the biggest sites had back in the last millennium.

Our main interest in the IA, at least thus far, is in their "Moving Images" archive, wherein repose thousands of films and episodes of TV shows that have fallen into the public domain. Many, many good Netizens have taken the trouble to transfer these shows into digital form and post them for us all to enjoy, and Lydia and I are quite grateful for this. We have a strong yen for the old and the obscure, especially if it involves familiar actors, and we have found some real gems at the IA.

One can stream all IA content directly from the site, but we prefer to download things and watch them on our TV. Thus, when I am otherwise idle, I am often rummaging through the IA listings, downloading promising items to watch later. We view them using a Boxee box, which is essentially a little specialized computer that aggregates audio-visual content from the Web and from your own local network files and presents it all (well, mostly all) in a neat, menu-based format, accessible from your TV or networked computer.

Tonight, we watched a real gem, as obscure as they come. It was the premiere episode of Diagnosis: Unknown, entitled "The Case of The Radiant Wine." We enjoyed it so much that I resolved to present it here for your enjoyment.

This show was a summer replacement show (remember those? then you're older than me, Dearie!) for The Garry Moore Show (remember Garry Moore? then you're older than me, Dearie!). Summer replacement shows usually ran thirteen weeks, but this show was interrupted twice, two weeks each time, for the Presidential conventions (remember when the networks covered those like a blanket? okay, the bit's played out). That's a shame, because based upon this episode, if the show had run the full time, it might well have been picked up for a full season.

Diagnosis: Unknown starred Patrick O'Neal as a research physician with a strong sideline in homicide investigation, and co-starred Chester Morris as his contact on the police force. This episode guest-stars Tom Bosley, Larry Hagman, Murray Matheson and Patricia Barry. The first two you know, the third you will recognize, and the fourth--well, if you are a fan of Columbo, she was the gallery owner in the episode starring Peter Werner, "Playback". Oh, and keep an eye out for what I think is a brief cameo by Garry Moore himself, in the delicatessen scene.

The quality of the video is pretty good, actually excellent by IA standards, given that it obviously didn't look great in the first place; it appears to have been shot like a soap opera, live with just general lighting. It may have been televised live, then re-broadcast on video for the West Coast, although this print looks as if it were shot directly on film. Quien sabe?

Enough of the technical stuff. Watch, and enjoy a slice of TV the way we watched it back in the day. I mean, the way they watched it.

UPDATE: I watched it again, and confirmed that it is definitely Garry Moore. He's at the end of the delicatessen scene, the man standing talking to someone in a booth that Bosley touches on the shoulder as he walks by.

Also, I forgot to note that the much more recent show Diagnosis: Murder, starring Dick Van Dyke, bears more than a passing resemblance to this show.

Regaining Focus

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 01:00:40 PDT

The next day, I took stock of the progress on the rebuilding of the east casing sash.

Uh, did I say "progress"? Man, did I make a mess of things! I guess I was just in too much of a hurry. I had tried to use the forms before I had built the sash up enough to provide the proper support for them. I realized that I couldn't determine how to fix this until I had smoothed things out a bit. I filled in the remaining large voids in the top. sanded out the wood remnants and the rough spots, and took some measurements and levels.

As it turned out, the situation actually wasn't bad; the only problem was that I had built the top front edge out too far in places, which was throwing off all the other angles. So I rehabilitated my wood forms by flipping them over and scraping off the remaining epoxy, made sure they had a good coating of mold release agent, and carefully re-clamped them, matching the dimensions of the completed west sash. Once I had sanded off all the putty that projected beyond the forms, it became quite evident where I needed to apply more putty.

Right at that point, I was just about out of putty. Truth be told, my mind has not been on my work these past several weeks; I've pretty much just been putting one foot in front of the other and slogging through, so to speak. I've been mechanically scooping equal amounts of Part A and Part B from their tubs without taking note of how much was left. Honestly, it never occurred to me that I would go through an entire quart of putty on this one casing and still not be done, but that's what happened.

I did have one other issue to deal with during that time: my new contact lenses. After the initial thrill, my eyes and my brain rebelled against the drastic change. These new lenses are huge in diameter, with an abrupt change in profile at the junction between the two corrections; the resulting irritation caused the lenses to cloud up frequently. The odd configuration of the corrections, with close vision coming from the middle of one lens and the mid-range coming from the periphery of the other, baffled my brain for several weeks, and there were many times when neither region was in focus. Thus, for a few weeks my working vision was actually worse than before.

I finally had to start consciously prompting myself where to get focus from for a particular situation, actively training my brain to work with these lenses. Just this week, my brain finally caught on, and now everything in my field of vision is in seamless focus, if still a bit cloudy at times.

I had actually noted my dwindling supply of putty last Friday and had put an order in late that afternoon, but I didn't expect it to arrive until next week, because Abatron is in Wisconsin and I didn't imagine the order would go out until after the weekend. But they really came through for me; they somehow managed to ship the same day, and I got it on Thursday, just when I needed it. Yay, Abatron!

Thus reprovisioned, I puttied the front plane of the sash flush with the forms, and when I took the forms off and sanded back to profile, I found that I finally had all the lines established properly.

Now, it's a simple matter of filling in the remaining divots and leveling out the top slope. After what has seemed like an eternity, I'm just a few days away from being ready to prime this casing. That is, I am as long as the patching of the cap piece does not present any unforeseen difficulties.

* * *

Space: the final frontier.

I Haven't Got Time for The Pain

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 00:46:51 PDT

If you all learn only one thing from my efforts herein, then let it be this: don't rush. Or, as my wise supervisor used to tell me constantly when I worked at a Japanese bank, no lush! Honest, she really did, and she was definitely on to something. Now, I never got hurt rushing around dear old Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank, but I was young and ept then, and could see what I was doing. Now that I am older and increasingly eptness-challenged, and my new contacts are giving me hell, I constantly find myself outrunning my headlights, and damaging myself thereby.

The latest instance of this occurred last night, when I was rushing to do my chores and ended up (Lord, this sounds stupid) gashing my finger on a tape dispenser. Now, in my defense, it is a huge dispenser, for packing tape, and the cutting blade is savagely serrated. Nevertheless, it only happened because I was in a hurry. The irony of it is that the injury occurred when my finger got stuck between the blade and its safety guard; if it hadn't been for the guard, I would have gotten off with a light scratch, if anything.

In any event, I've had to put myself on the DL, at least for today, just to give the finger some time to stop throbbing and me some time to find my danged finger guard. So that means I can bring you all completely up-to-the-minute on the thrilling restoration of the east casing!

After installing the rehabilitated right cap piece, the next step was naturally to patch the left cap piece. Actually, I began to patch it before installing the right piece, because there was a big gap on its underside that I wanted to patch in order to immobilize it while avoiding the driving of more nails, and I wouldn't be able to do that with the right piece in. In the process, I immobilized it in the wrong position, out of vertical alignment with the right piece.

The misalignment is most evident where the arrow points. Actually, I rather lucked out here, because the upper side of this piece at this point is so worn by time and the weather that had it lined up properly on the bottom, I would have had to raise the upper plane of the piece along much of its length by this much to make it match up. That would have involved significant amounts of time and putty. This way, the top lines up nearly perfectly, and I only have to build up the small exposed area of the bottom plane for about a quarter of its length in order to make the cap pieces line up visually. This involves considerably less work, and very little putty.

I'm trying a new method of patching when I must re-establish missing edges. As I've mentioned, this kind of work takes several passes with the putty, because the edges must be built up along the intersecting planes that define them. Up to now, I've sanded after each pass in order to see clearly where I must patch further. When I was less experienced at this task, I needed to do it this way in order to keep track of where the edges were; as I gained experience, I kept doing it this way because I thought it used less putty.

I have however begun to suspect that I'm not really saving that much putty this way, and I am sure that repeated putty/sand cycles take a lot of time. I am thus experimenting with making successive putty passes until I've substantially completed the task of building the piece back up, and then sanding back to the desired profile. In this way, I hope to limit the sanding passes to three at the most. I expect this will save time because I won't have to wait until the putty is completely cured before doing the next pass, and because fewer sanding passes will take less time as a matter of course.

Here is where I'm at with the left cap piece using this method:

It's substantially built up, but not completely so. At this point I need to sand back to profile in order to ensure that the lines are established so as to line up properly with the right cap piece. Note that I've masked off the right piece in order to prevent altering its already-perfected profile. I'll have to sand with great care at the junction.

I've also been working on the sash, and that hasn't been going so well. This time, I planned from the start to use the guide form method I devised while patching the sash on the west casing. That time, I had both ends and the middle established, and only had to fill in the divots and establish straight edges; this time, I foolishly only established the ends, and applied the forms with no place in the middle to apply a clamp. This allowed the forms to bow outward in the middle, so I had to hold them in more or less the proper place as I did the first pass, let this pass cure fully, and then clamp in the middle for the second pass. This worked amazingly well, considering how ad hoc it was.

Nevertheless, I could not avoid the consequences of another error I had made: forgetting to coat the forms with mold release agent before putting them in place. The bottom form came off with some tugging, but I had to coax the top form off with a stiff putty knife and a rubber mallet. This didn't go too badly, because the epoxy was harder than the wood of the form, but it did leave something of a mess.

All I can say here is, no lush!

Onward

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 02:05:28 PDT

The blog has lagged behind the work, so in the next few entries I'll catch you all up.

We left off with my re-establishing the triple bead pattern. Besides the one major divergence I showed you last time, the work went pretty well, although I discovered that I had to do the upper third of the other side as well.

After that, I returned to the replacement of the missing piece of trim at the top of the casing. To review, this was the condition of the area in question when I began work:

As I've mentioned, I faced this situation with dread, because it necessarily required my fashioning a new piece out of wood to replace the missing part. I'd not had much success with freehand cutting of curves in wood, and here I was faced with a piece of complex shape that had to match up at least well enough so as not to attract the eye.

That actually went pretty well, as you know, but now I had to put the piece in the right place and patch up the seams. First, however, I had to prime the back of the piece, and sand and prime the wood that would be behind the piece.

I primed the whole apron piece after patching and sanding it, just so I could see at that point where I had to patch it further. I also primed behind where the cap piece was to go (and I primed the back of the cap piece, too). It's always a good idea to back-prime; not only does it provide extra protection, but in the case of trim pieces, it helps to avoid the cupping that can happen when more moisture gets in the back of the piece than the front.

I was determined to take every precaution to make sure the patch piece went in exactly the right place and stayed there, so I glued it in with one-minute epoxy and then nailed it in (after pre-drilling, of course),

There's that danged mis-matched grain again! Well, at least it's in the right place. From here, it was a simple matter to patch it in with epoxy putty.

So far, so good! It looks as if I've aced this job. We can't be sure until I've primed it again, but I want to finish all the patching first.

I'd like to show you just how effective the LiquidWood is at thoroughly re-integrating fractured wood, and I think this picture should do it:

I needed to pull this piece back level with the casing, and the screw is in the perfect place to get that done. Notice that I was able to place it right on the repaired crack with no fear of opening the crack up again. LiquidWood is designed specifically for wood; it penetrates on both sides of the repair, so that when it cures it locks the two pieces together, making the piece stronger than the wood ever was on its own. The piece may in time crack again, but certainly not where it cracked before!

After this, I replaced the cap piece that I repaired earlier, resulting in the casing's looking like this:

There's still some patching to do, most notably the sill, but this is already a huge improvement. This casing is going to come out just fine.

* * *

It grieves me to report that our dear golden girl Nellie passed away last Tuesday. We got her full-grown from the pound a little over thirteen years ago, so by our reckoning she was fifteen. But she retained her great beauty and joyful spirit right up to the end. We loved her and depended upon her, and we will miss her terribly.

I will write more about Nellie in due course over at the Journal. Until then, I offer a brief memorial in photographs.

Nellie, c. 1996 - October 4, 2011

Vision Quest

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 02:42:14 PDT

You may have noticed that I haven't posted in a while. This is mostly due to our having been quite busy with various animal husbandry matters, but I have also been slowed by my eyesight.

I have abysmally poor vision. It's entirely correctable with contact lenses, but as I've gotten older, getting the right correction has been increasingly difficult. At times, in fact, my vision has been something of a handicap. A new prescription will take care of things for a while, but soon I'm back in the fog again.

As it happened, I'd gotten a new prescription, from a new optometrist, just before I started the painting project. The timing was fortunate, because he moved me to soft lenses, which handle things like sanding dust much better than do rigid lenses.

By last June, however, I had descended back into the fog, this time worse than ever. I had effectively lost my depth perception, and my mid-range vision (from arm's length out to several feet) was completely out of focus. This combination resulted in my not seeing anything in my mid-range that I was not specifically looking at; my brain simply was not receiving enough information to register it.

And so I began to go through life like a pinball, bouncing off door jambs, tripping over table legs, and stepping on our ever-underfoot pets. Climbing up a ladder or working with sharp tools required my full concentration, lest I do something stupid. This quickly became quite a hindrance, because after an hour or so of this I'd be pretty much done for the day.

I tried to work through this, because I've found that sometimes my eyes get a "second wind" with a prescription, and my vision comes back again for a while. I just didn't want to take the time to drive across town for several visits to the optometrist until I had at least finished the south side.

Then, about a month ago, circumstances forced my hand. I was up on a ladder in the garage, fetching some boxes out of the rafters, when on the way back down I completely lost track of where I was and stepped off into thin air.

Miraculously, I avoided serious injury, landing in the one soft spot within range, although both my hands got messed up when I landed and heavy things fell on them. I was incredibly fortunate to get off that lightly. Someone up there must have taken pity on me.

Of course, the immediate cause of the injury was simple carelessness; I was not staying within the limitations my degraded eyesight had imposed upon me. Still, the underlying cause was my degraded eyesight itself, and it was just a matter of time until it led me into another tight place. I couldn't count upon being so lucky that time. Since my hands were pretty useless for work anyway, I decided to take some time off to attend to my vision.

I knew my optometrist had a kinda new, kinda now plan to address my vision problems; he'd given me an experimental pair to try out along with the regular prescription. While I found that this new method completely restored my depth perception and brought everything back into focus, I didn't want to be making major changes in the way I saw the world just as I was clambering around a 25-foot scaffold, so I put the change off until later.

Clearly, later had come. Then, I couldn't afford to have my depth perception suddenly restored; now, I couldn't afford not to. Long story short, I went to the optometrist, and several weeks later, I was seeing the world with higher fidelity than I had experienced in many years.

And so I returned to my work with great enthusiasm, exhilarated by the return of the third dimension to my life. My enthusiasm was tempered when I saw what I had been doing in its absence:

Ouch. Believe it or not, before I got the new prescription I hadn't noticed the leftmost bead going just a bit wide there. Must. . .resist. . . urge. . .to. . .fix. I'd love to go back and fix the mistakes I made while in my purblind state, but I just can't take the time. It'll give me something to do the next time I paint the house.

* * *

"You want cute? I can do cute."

A Rather Irksome Realization

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 02:13:23 PDT

As much as I'd like to do a quick job on the east casing, its extremely degraded condition makes that impossible. I was forced to face this grim fact when I got a good look at this:

Notice that my inadvertently over-aggressive initial sanding of this piece has virually obliterated the triple-bead figure, leaving only four shallow, wobbly, mostly paint-choked grooves. Great. Since this would be noticeable from a distance, I have to re-establish some semblance of the original profile; given my skill set, the fastest way to do this is to sand it back into the wood.

The first thing to do is to deepen the grooves while keeping them as narrow as possible at their deepest extent. To do this, I needed something thin and rigid around which to wrap some sandpaper—say, something like a utility blade.

I filed down the edge enough to prevent its immediately cutting the sandpaper at the fold, and then I went to work.

I soon found that I had to use a straightedge to guide me at first, to keep the grooves in their proper place until a straight line was established. Once I started doing that, the method worked well.

In the photo above, you can see that I have re-established the grooves completely about halfway up the visible portion of the piece. You can also see that the middle two are a bit too close together, but since they are at least parallel, this will not be a fatal flaw.

Then, I used a sanding wedge with a concave profile to round off the internal edges and thus re-establish the beads:

I think this will do just fine. Although one can see in this picture that the middle bead is smaller than the others, what the eye sees from a distance is not the beads themselves, but the shadows they cast, and those will check out just fine from the street. In other words, the re-established figure will be fake, but accurate.

This is quite a time-consuming process, and it is extremely taxing of my weakened hands, but if I take my time the job will be done soon enough. Happily, I only have to do it on this one piece; the figure elsewhere is still in good shape.

* * *

"Kenneth, what is the frequency?"

Inch by Inch, Step by Step

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 07:50:47 PDT

Well, I haven't got much done since the last post. We had a pretty busy weekend, and since then it's been brain-damagingly hot. But I have gotten some work done.

I got the first pass of widespread patching done: the big divots, the more obvious smaller holes, and the ends of the sill. I'm going to get the top and bottom profiles on the ends of the sill struck accurately so that I can clamp the guides as I did last time and then establish the front plane and the top and bottom edges in one or two passes. You can already see at the top how the apron pieces are looking a lot more solid, but there's still a lot of work to do there. Remember, I still have to attach the patch piece and do extra work to hide the grain up there. First, however, I want to sand and prime beneath it.

Because of the extensive epoxying I had to do, I have already reached the point where I'm going to have to put down a coat of primer just to get everything the same color so I can see where I need to do further patching. With my weak eyes and all those colors and textures going on, I need as much help as possible to see all the divots.

And by the way, I've vetoed the idea of brushing the wood with diluted epoxy to firm it up. The main reason for this is a basic work precept I've learned from experience: when you come up with a scathingly brilliant idea that you've never heard having been done before, be absolutely convinced that you're really on to something new before you try it. That's because the chances are very great that it's a bad idea. Don't ask me how I know.

Because I hate having only one picture in a post, I thought I'd give you a little background on the difficulties of working on a house that is essentially situated in the middle of a forest, and the specific difficulties of working on this particular casing.

This particular casing is especially difficult to work on because there is a massive pine tree standing less than five feet away, and an air-conditioning compressor sitting right next to it. Because of this, there are parts of the casing I simply can't get to easily, so I have no choice but to lean way off one ladder or the other at times.

In general, working on this house is difficult because there is a constant barrage of debris falling on every square inch of the property. A case in point: I moved the extension ladder over against the house to get at the top left part of the casing, and as I began to climb it I saw this:

Gobs of the stickiest-imaginable pine sap were splattered all over the ladder. So before I even started to work, I had to go up the ladder with a bottle of paint thinner and a rag, cleaning off all this sap before I started to work. Otherwise, the sap would have gotten all over my clothes, my hands, and ultimately my work. I tell you, there are times on especially hot, messy days that by the time I have prepared everything for working, I'm already tired.

Thank goodness I don't do this for a living!

* * *

"Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnn!!!"