The Farm House Journal Blog.

My Contribution to Western Civilization

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Tue, 14 May 2013 17:54:43 PDT

As you may recall, I collect records, with an emphasis on coarse-grooved records—what we used to call "78s." The hobby started when I was five, soon after I got my first real record player. It was a Show'N Tell, the deluxe one with the AM radio.

It was my first radio as well. Mine looked just like this. Funny, I don't recall its being made by GE, but there it is right on the top. This was one of the best presents I've ever gotten, in terms of the joy it brought me. It's kinda almost my Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action Two-Hundred-Shot Range Model Air Rifle.

Anyway, Mom came into my room one morning with a stack of about two dozen records, saying, "Here, these have been floating around the house for a long time, and I thought you might like them."

I recognized the records as 78s, because they had only stopped making them at about the time I was born, and my parents still had some in their collection. These 78s, however, were a lot different from those I had seen. Most noticeably, they were not at all shiny; moreover, they were heavier, with bigger labels, and some of them were a swell brick red. I had no idea exactly how old they were, but they seemed positively prehistoric. I was intrigued.

So, I added them to the playlist, and I found that I liked about a dozen of them, and half of those I absolutely loved. Mom had planted a seed. She was always doing that, working subtly to introduce me to the things that she had loved when she was young. Dad did that too, but he was not subtle about it. Both approaches were effective.

Once I grew old enough to travel out and about by myself, I began to add to the collection. Back then, it was easy and quite inexpensive to do so; Honolulu Avenue was lined with junk shops, and they all had vast repositories of old records for a dime or so each. My initial motivation was simply to get new music to hear, but after a time I became interested in the historical aspect as well. I had heard of such illustrious performers as Caruso, Jolson, Paderewski and Rachmaninoff for as long as I could remember, and I was thrilled actually to be able to hear them perform—especially the last two, whose compositions Mom played all the time on the piano.

Once I hit teenhood in earnest, I put this interest aside for many years, until it re-emerged at age 40 with a vengeance, a consequence of the Farm House effect. To review, the Farm House Effect is the extension of one's historical purview that occurs as a result of the activity involved in the restoring of an old house. In other words, when you restore an old house, your mind naturally extends your sense of contemporary familiarity with daily life back to the time in which your house was built, as if you'd lived through it all. Put more simply, your grip on reality weakens.

Adding to my fervor for old records was my deep boredom with contemporary music at the time; it had been nearly a decade since I had found any new performers whose music interested me, and I was desperate to have some new-to-my-ears music to digest.

Thus, my motivations to collect records are the same as they ever were: to listen, and to learn. A significant obstacle to the learning part, however, is the fact that old records have very little information on them: usually just title, composer, performer, and maybe the name of the vocalist or a featured soloist. And so, I rely upon discographies to fill in the blanks.

A discography is a listing of recordings with all available relevant information noted for each recording. They can be organized by pretty much any relevant category, but for the most part one finds them organized by performer, label or musical genre.

Discographies are usually very expensive, because many of them are considered library reference books, and most of them are pretty large. I bought all the basic discographies used, and Lydia has given me some of the more scholarly ones. I duly record all relevant information in the catalogue of my collection, so that I can relate that information to what I hear on the records.

While I now have full discographical information for a great many of my records, there are still lots of them for which I don't know much more than what's on the label. Thus, I'm always looking for more information wherever I can find it on the Internet.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered the Encyclopedic Discography of Victor Recordings (EDVR) online a few months ago. It's precisely what it's called, a comprehensive discography of all recordings on Victor and related labels, combining a thorough examination of the Victor ledgers with all the best scholarly research in one handy place online.

I was insanely elated. There are more than a few discographies covering Victor, and they're all pricey, and I don't have any of them. I had planned to get them eventually, because I have a great many Victors in my collection. Anyone who collects 78s had a lot of Victors, especially if he collects the period prior to 1920, because for most of that time there were only a few labels, and Victor was the biggest of them. And now, here was all that information for free! Well, to be precise, there were a few of our tax dollars at work in there.

And so, I immediately got out my own ledgers and went through them, updating all the Victors. This included the crown jewels of the collection, two dozen Victors dating from late 1900 to 1903, family heirlooms handed down from my great-grandmother. See, this collecting thing is hereditary (as is the packrat thing, apparently). Some of these records pre-date the incorporation of the Victor Talking Machine Company itself.

I have great affection for these records, for they are a connection to an ancestor whom I never met, but who has always been spoken of with great affection in my family. The records are not particularly valuable price-wise, but to me they are priceless.

Naturally, I was particularly interested to learn the history of these recordings. As I mentioned, the EDVR represents pretty much everything known about the discography of Victor. As it turned out, actually, I knew a few things about Victor discography that they didn't know.

You see, I found three of my great-grandmother's records that weren't in the discography. To be more precise, there were three releases not represented; the actual recordings were listed, but these releases weren't. I notified the EDVR staff, and after asking me a few questions about the records, they confirmed my findings and asked me to send some pictures for their files. The changes will be reflected in their next site update.

But you won't have to wait.

Two of the records bear altered labels. At one point early on, Victor changed their numbering scheme, retaining many if not all of their issues under new numbers and re-recording each for the new issues. In some cases, they pasted the new number on the old label and released the old recording under the new number, but until my discovery it was not known that this was done with these issues.

The first was "I Want to Go to Morrow" performed by Dan W. Quinn, recorded February 27, 1901; it was first issued under catalogue number 3150, but here issued with an altered label under catalogue number 12:

Note the obviously pasted-on catalogue number.

When I first saw this label, I was fascinated by it, because not only does it pre-date the "His Master's Voice" trademark with the dog ("Nipper") listening to the gramophone, but it even pre-dates the Victor Talking Machine Company itself, having been issued under the name of the man who would pilot that company for its first quarter-century. You will notice that Johnson is already using "Victor" as a brand name, however.

Thanks to the facilities of the wondrous National Jukebox (more tax dollars at work), I can link you to a copy of this recording right here on this page:

It's quite a funny song, and I believe its humor has not lost any potency with age; in any event, if you like Abbott and Costello's "Who's on First" routine, you'll love this.

The other altered record is "Come Ye Disconsolate," recorded March 11, 1901 (hey, my brother Jon's birthday! That's the second time it's come up in these pages). It's credited generically, as a "Choir Record," but the EDVR reveals that it was performed by the Lyric Trio with Grace Spencer as the soprano. Its original catalogue number was 3196, but here we see it changed to 718:

Sadly, the National Jukebox doesn't have this one, and I haven't had a chance to dub it myself yet.

Take a look at the runout area right above "Monarch" on the label. Notice that the old catalogue number 3196 is handwritten in the shellac, and the new number 718 is stamped directly below. This indicates that the record was actually pressed after the number change, using the label made before the change and then pasting the new number over it. The other record above is the same way. I guess the labels, and the stampers for the old recording, must have been too expensive to waste.

Notice also that by this time "Victor Talking Machine Co." has replaced Johnson's name. By the way, "Monarch" was the designation for ten-inch records at the time; seven-inch records were simply labeled "Victor," and twelve-inch records were called "De Luxe." There were even some fourteen-inch records, that ran at 60 RPM and lasted up to six minutes; these were called "De Luxe Special."

The third record is by far the most interesting.

Notice that Nipper has finally checked in; the Victor label would look basically like this until 1914, with "Victor" banishing "Monarch" for good in 1905.

The reason why this record is the most interesting to me is that, as far as the official discographical record is concerned, I discovered it. The EDVR listed three takes, but each was noted "Believed not to have been issued." And yet, here it is, take 2 as indicated in the runout to the left of the label. You can't see that in this picture, but you can see under the label the recording date, 9-19-02; it's behind "RECORD". Here's a close-up of that area:

Can you see it now? The loop of the first 9 is above the E to the left, and its tail is touching the loop of the R. Once you find that, the rest should be obvious. If it isn't, well, just take my word for it. In any event, this agrees with the recording date noted in the EDVR for take M-2, the M prefix standing for "Monarch" to indicate a ten-inch master.

I hasten to add that omissions in the EDVR were not due to errors on the part of the scholars who created and maintain it; the errors were made by the Victor employees responsible for making the proper entries in the ledgers. The EDVR scholars transcribed the information from the ledgers as faithfully as possible. Recall that with the Arthur Collins record, they made the special notation "Believed not to have been issued" by each take; it seems safe to infer from the use of the word "believed" that they saw some anomaly in the corresponding ledger entries, and since none of their sources had reported seeing actual issues of any of the takes, they reported the situation as precisely as possible. My sighting was the first one that any of them had heard of.

That's one of the best things about collecting old records: every collector has the opportunity to contribute to the body of discographical knowledge. While the Victor production ledgers are the best single source for discographical information on Victor records, they are not enough by themselves. For one thing, they contain errors, as we have learned here. For another thing, no ledger notation can convey the information that the recordings themselves do—and after all, Victor was in the business of making recordings, not ledgers. A record label may contain errors that the ledgers can correct, but there is no trumping the physical possession of a record, no matter what the ledgers may say regarding its existence. Moreover, the ledgers might fail to mention the presence on a recording of a certain instrumentalist, but a trained ear might upon listening to the recording the unmistakable sound of his presence.

Yes, no scholarly discography can exist without substantial familiarity with the recordings involved, and there is no group alive today with greater familiarity with Victor recordings than the many scholars who have contributed to the EDVR. Nevertheless, with such a massive undertaking, involving tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of individual issues, certainly a few are going to fall through the cracks.

That's where the individual collector, the amateur discographer, comes in. By doing as I have, by assembling one's own personal discography of the records he has (and most collectors do), he can find the obvious errors and omissions, and make his own contribution to the general knowledge thereby. I am very, very happy that I've been able to make mine, thanks to my great-grandmother.

Oh, I nearly forgot: I've dubbed my "discovery" to the digital domain, and have given it the benefit of my modest restorative skills. I think you'll find it quite listenable; happily, the record is in phenomenally good shape, so it cleaned up quite nicely. You'll find it by clicking upon this sentence.

You will also likely find the lyrics mildly offensive near the end, but honestly I don't think it's anything terribly galling. Bear in mind that this recording was made in 1902, when the Farm House was only seventeen years old. Lots of stuff has changed since then.

Arthur Collins, the singer on the record, was one of the half-dozen most-recorded singers of the Nineteen-Aughts and -Teens. His sobriquet was "The King of Ragtime Singers." He's perhaps best known today as half of the team of Collins and (Byron G.) Harlan, whose long string of recorded hits can be heard at the National Jukebox and the Internet Archive. Besides this, Collins can be found in hundreds of recordings on all labels, under his own name or as part of the Peerless Quartet. That was all just beginning for him when he recorded this song.

* * *

"What an amazing sound! It's as if I could reach right out and scratch Caruso!"

Part of Our Heart

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Sat, 15 Dec 2012 02:21:53 PST

It grieves me to report that the CEO of our Pet Division, our cat Evangeline, has passed away. Mercifully, she went peacefully, in Lydia's arms, with me and the other dogs and cats around her. We don't know how old she was, for she came to us well into her adulthood over 12 1/2 years ago, but based upon all the evidence we think she was at least 17 or 18.

Evangeline was a special cat. One might with justification say that there was a bit of the miraculous about her. I'll tell her whole story at length in the Journal, but I think one incident in particular will show you why we considered her to be of a breed apart.

Lydia and I quarrel very seldom, and it is blessedly rare for any of our quarrels to get at all heated. The last time we got beyond lukewarm was several years ago.

I remember that we were in the kitchen. Evangeline was there as well; it was one of her favorite hangouts. I started the proceedings by bringing up something that upset Lydia immensely; although it was not my intention to start a controversy, she began to my utter shock to cry bitterly.

I was just beginning to plan my retreat when Evangeline strode over to Lydia with great purpose, reached up and laid her paw gently upon Lydia's leg, looked up at her intently, and meowed a meow unlike any she meowed before or after: whereas her normal voice was thin, reedy and a bit raspy, this meow was clear, full and—well, there's no other way to characterize it but comforting. It was the exact meow equivalent of "Don't cry! It's gonna be okay!"

Her intent was so clear, her actions so human, that we just stared at her for a moment, pondering what she had just done. The only way Evangeline's message could have been more explicit would have been if she had actually spoken in English, and we could hardly have been more startled had she done that.

Then, we looked at each other and realized that neither of us could remember what we had been arguing about. To this day, we still can't remember. Evangeline's actions had completely eradicated the controversy from our memories.

In its place is the indelible memory of our little Evangeline rising heroically above her natural limitations to give comfort to Lydia when she needed it—an act of genuine love.

It is often said that our pets give back more than we give them. Evangeline managed that with this one act. Lydia and I never again have to worry about having an ugly argument, because as soon as we get anywhere close to one, I know that we'll both think of Evangeline, and poof! the ugliness will evaporate.

That's quite a gift. You could even call it a bit of a miracle. At least, that's how we see it.

And with that, I am utterly out of words. There's a lot more to say, but that will have to wait until I can manage it.

I will leave you with some pictures of Evangeline. The first one is from this past Halloween; she's wearing her fetching little costume. As you can see, she never lost her looks! The rest are in chronological order from March 2004 to mid-November of this year.

Requiescat in pacem, Evangeline, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

* * *

Evangeline, c. 1994–November 20, 2012

The Forlorn Dormer

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 22:55:29 PDT

As you have already seen, the dormer I'm currently working on, the front left dormer, has required some serious work beyond the merely cosmetic. Our contractor did a sloppy job on the right side, and did absolutely nothing beyond that.

Here's the right side right after I re-installed the casing boards:

Inexcusably sloppy, really. They replaced all but the top piece of siding, which is swell, but they did a bad job of it, cracking the top piece badly, placing the inside ends right up against the shingles where they are sure to soak up water like a sponge, and cutting the outside ends haphazardly, making sealing that weight pocket a huge pain in the neck.

As a result, the new boards are all cracked and warped, with some large gaps at their bottoms which I am going to have to seal up somehow.

In their defense, however, they merely matched the previous level of work on the dormer.

Now that I've begun to work on the area above the siding, I'm learning that this particular dormer has always gotten short shrift, dating apparently all the way back to its construction. Look at this mess:

At first glance, it's a typical situation I've found over and over on the house, wood cracked and warped by age and the relentless pounding of the harsh Pasadena sun. But let's look closely at the gap between the front and side pieces:

Those nails you see in the gap did not help fix it at all. In fact, they may have caused it. They certainly perpetuated it, and cracked the wood in the bargain. Again, so far this is typical: shoddy repairs causing more problems than they fixed. What is not evident in this picture, however, is that these are cut nails, which indicates that this is a very early "repair". Cut nails became obsolete very soon after the Farm House was built, as the industry moved to the modern style of nail. That of course doesn't necessarily mean that these nails weren't driven much later—I have nails that are 25 years old myself—but these are the first cut nails I have found that are not unambiguously part of the original construction. It's hard for me to believe that this work was original, but it could be, and in any event it's probably from before the turn of the Twentieth Century.

Now let's move up and in a bit:

These are nails—cut nails—that have been driven from the side skirt right through the eave. Because the heads are underneath another piece of trim, they almost certainly were part of the original construction.

And look at this shoddy work!

See that open area next to the apron? That's without a doubt part of the original work, and it's the same on the other side. These gaps open to the inside. Shamefully sloppy.

¡Pobrecito! Poor little dormer! You've never gotten any love, have you. Well, never fear; Otis is here, and he's gonna make it all better.

The first thing I did was get out my trusty Dremel and cut off the end of those protruding nails below the surface of the eave:

There! A bit of putty, and no one will ever know there was ever a problem.

The mess at the corner will be a great deal trickier to resolve. The first thing to do was to remove the errant nails.

Here, I'm easing one of them out by grabbing it with needle-nosed vise-grip pliers and sliding it slowly back out.

There was also the problem of the lower part of the side piece, below the crack. As you can see in that picture, it has warped outwards. I tried to bend it back in and screw it back together with its upper counterpart, but the wood wouldn't have any of that.

You can see that the front piece took exception to my efforts as well. While that piece fell down and was carried off by the wind, I was able to retrieve the large chunk from the side and glue it back in place. As far as the protruding lower half, all I could do was to immobilize it, patch up the corner, then try to sand and sculpt the area so as to fool the eye into thinking it sees a nice, straight, square junction of the two pieces. Here's how I've done so far:

This kind of work is a long process of patching, sanding, and eyeballing. The side piece will have an unavoidable curve in it; the trick is to make the curve so gradual that the eye does not readily see it. I also have to come to some sort of compromise regarding the bottom edge of the junction. The pieces don't line up properly there either, but I can't curve the proud edge in because it's to the front, and from straight on any curve at all will be visible. I'll have to let it jog forthrightly at some location; the trick here is to find the most graceful location at which to do that.

At the bottom of the right side where the siding meets the roof, the shingles were riding up the siding in several places, such as this one:

This will not do, because it will trap moisture under the shingles there and rot the siding very quickly. I had to cut the shingles back neatly, so that the edit is not obvious. In this instance, the cut was simple: straight across.

In other areas, it was more complicated; I had to cut a notch that fit the shingle pattern, as in this example:

The dark area is where I cut.

This part of the work is always like this: myriad varied details to attend to. I have to admit, this is the part I like.

* * *

"I wanna see another Stooges!!"

The Other Side of The Blade

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 01:20:40 PDT

One of the design features I most admire about the Farm House is its generous windows. The first-floor windows are the size of a doorway, and in the dormers the windows are as large as the size of the dormer will allow.

Here is how dormers are usually built, with the windows set back enough from each side to reveal some of the siding. This dormer is from the garage, which is new construction.

This is, of course, the dormer I'm working on currently. There is no siding to be seen on the front; it's all window and casing.

Here's the inside of the same dormer. As you can see, the windows are as large as they can be, so large that there is only room for half of the casing boards on each side.

This emphasis on natural light and ventilation is reflective of the Victorian concepts of beauty of utility (it's useful to have large windows when you're relying on natural light and windows are your only form of ventilation) and beauty of fitness (large windows are appropriate for a human habitation). While I'm no scholar of Victorian architecture, I have examined a great many Victorian homes in detail, and in my experience, the way the Farm House's dormers are constructed is unique. It seems to me at times as if the windows are actually wider than the dormers.

In fact, when the casing boards are taken into account, they are wider, by nearly an inch on each side. That's why the casing boards are backed on each outside edge by a trim piece that tapers back down to the siding. It protects the ends of the siding and the exposed backs of the casing boards. This is the "one more detail" I mentioned last time that I still had to attend to before getting back to the painting prep. The contractors made a new one for the right side, but they didn't for the left, and the existing one is thrashed beyond repair.

I thus had to fabricate a new one myself. This is what actually sealed the deal for me regarding the table saw. This job was possible using a circular saw, but it would be exceedingly difficult, and I was dreading the task. I knew that with a table saw the job would be considerably easier.

It was however still a bit tricky, simply because the entirety of my experience with the saw was two simple tasks. This would be a fairly wide cut, two inches, at an angle, in a one-inch-wide piece of wood.

Actually, a 7/8" wide piece. Yes, it's our old friend, the 4/4 S1S board. I told you this size of board was used everywhere in the Farm House. A 2-inch-wide piece of this was no problem; I simply ripped it from the same stock of salvaged beadboard from which I made the new window casing caps on the south side.

The one small limitation I encountered was that I was not able to bring the piece down to a point at the back end of the bevel, because then the blade would hit the rip fence.

I thus had to maintain a small distance between the two. I didn't worry about it, because the contractors had apparently had the same problem when they made their new piece.

The contractors did some amazing things with a table saw. I figured if they couldn't put a finer point on this piece, then I sure wasn't going to. Apparently, this was something you couldn't do with a table saw.

So without any further thought on the matter, I cut the piece, and other than ending up with a few saw marks, the piece came out quite nicely.

Then, I looked at the waste piece.

Oh. Apparently you can cut to a fine point with a table saw.

My error was in using the wrong side of the blade. If I had put the fence on the other side, there would have been no worry of its getting in the way of the blade, and I would have had no problem getting a fine edge on the piece. Funny that never occurred to me beforehand.

This kind of dopey mistake betrays the fact that this work is not in my wheelhouse. The ability to think spatially, to work problems out in three dimensions, does not come naturally to me; it's a facility I've had to develop on the fly. As you can see, I have more work to do on that front.

This mistake also illustrates the underlying message of this blog: If I can do it, you can do it. I show you these mistakes because I don't want you to think I'm some sort of Norm Abrams or Bob Vila. I'm just plain Otis, a simple homeowner who needs work done and would rather save his money for better things.

Of course, once I had figured out my mistake, I had to rectify it. I ripped another two-inch strip from the old beadboard, then set up the saw with the fence on the other side.

Then, I cut the new piece.

Thus illustrating the old saw: Measure once, cut twice.

* * *

Gesundheit.

Closing Things Up

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Sun, 09 Sep 2012 22:47:44 PDT

Something tells me I'm going to be needing some more Brushing Putty. Happily, my new favorite place Ganahl Lumber stocks it; most Fine Paints of Europe dealers around here don't. In any event, here's what the can looks like now so you know what to look for:

New can, same old stuff.

At the time of the last post, the new siding pieces and the rehabilitated casing boards were ready to be installed, but before I did that I needed to take care of a few things. The first order of business was to repair a crack in the right window frame.

This went unnoticed for a long time, because it was hidden behind the strip separating the top and bottom sash. I at last discovered it when I noticed this:

Happily, at this point it was a simple thing to fix. I just blew out the debris from the crack with some compressed air, applied some 5-minute epoxy, and clamped it together.

Good as new!

The other matter I needed to attend to was to rehabilitate the sill. While the dormer sills are considerably less eroded than were the sills on the south side, they are twice as long, and I didn't have the clearance needed to clamp guide strips to speed my work. Because of this, I had quite a difficult time getting the job done properly. I tried screwing guide strips directly onto the sill, but I couldn't seem to get them in the right place because I really didn't have anything concrete to line them up with. I went through several cycles of placing a strip, puttying, removing the strip, sanding down to find I hadn't done it right, puttying up the holes, and then starting all over again. I really needed to have strips of precisely the right width, because then I could easily line them up with the largely intact bottom edge. My problem was that I simply didn't have the tools to get this done; I knew I couldn't get the kind of straight, clean cut I needed using my circular saw.

By a happy coincidence, when I was at Ganahl to buy the Brushing Putty, I noticed they were advertising a small table saw, a "contractor's saw", for an insanely good price. Usually, contractor's saws in this price range are obvious pieces of junk, but when I inspected the display model carefully, I found that the basic mechanism of the saw was quite solid. The machine certainly wasn't fancy, but neither was it flimsy, and it had all the necessary features. And so, after some serious cogitation, I bought one.

It took a lot of test cuts, and I ended up having to buy a fine-cut blade, but with this and some careful adjustments to the fence and blade guard, I was able to cut myself precisely the pieces I needed.

After this, it was a simple matter to finish the sill. I still have to putty up the screw holes and a few remaining small divots, but I can take care of that business the next time I mix up some epoxy putty.

I wasn't yet ready to put the boards back up, however. First, I had to re-do the flashing along the left side of the dormer behind where the new siding pieces were to go. As you will recall, this area was a particular mess when I first started working on the dormer. Here's how the flashing installation looked after I removed the broken siding pieces and the casing boards:

Yeesh. They had routed the runoff around the sill (and behind one of the trim pieces, remember), with a huge glob of caulk to seal the deal. Before proceeding, I removed the two bottom flashing pieces and the caulk; when I had finished rehabilitating the sill, this is what I had:

By inspecting the analogous area on the other dormers, I had learned that the runoff was supposed to go straight down and under the end of the sill. Sadly, as things stood, I didn't have the materials to do this; I didn't have enough flashing, and I didn't have any extra shingle material.

As longtime readers know, when the going gets tough, the tough go ad hoc. I noticed that above the area to be patched, the flashing pieces were extensively overlapped, far more than was necessary. So I removed some staples, repositioned the next two flashing pieces so that they reached further down while still overlapping safely, and stapled everything back down again. For the small void that needed shingle fill (for cosmetic purposes only, because it was covered by the flashing already), I cut a small piece out of the back of one of the shingles from an undetectable area. Each of these shingles is several layers thick, so this did not compromise watertightness at all. I stapled this small piece in place, and voila!

To tell you the truth, this part of the job had been troubling me for weeks, so I am greatly relieved that I was able to figure it out, with the help of my old pal ad hoc.

With this I thought I was ready to attach the new siding pieces, but I discovered that one more obstacle lay in my way. When I had added 3/16" to the back of the new pieces to shim them out to the thickness of the existing siding, I hadn't noticed that I had made the top of the uppermost piece 3/16" too thick to fit behind the piece above. I thus had to cut a rabbet into the topmost new piece, 3/4" wide and 3/16" deep, before I could proceed.

My heart sank at this discovery: so near, and yet so far! I'd have to make this rabbet the old-fashioned way, with a hammer and wood chisel. With my ruined hands, that would take at least a day. Then I remembered that I had a table saw now. I could do the job with that! A half-hour later, the rabbet was done, and I attached the new siding pieces onto the dormer.

As you can see, the blade height is a bit unstable. I'm going to have to tighten that up. Happily, it doesn't matter in this case.

The rabbet is completely hidden from view, and from the ground the slight difference in profile between the old and new pieces will be unnoticeable.

With the siding installed, it was at last time to install the rehabilitated casing boards. I had to be extremely careful to line the boards up correctly, because they are warped. I measured and marked very carefully and thoroughly, and managed to put the boards back right where they belonged.

Even so, I've only put screws at the four corners of each one in case I have to adjust their placement later on.

And with that, I'm almost finished with the unscheduled fabrication work. There is one more detail I must attend to before I get back to the painting prep, which I'll deal with next time.

* * *

"Left-two-three-dip-two-three. . ."

Brushing Putty

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 07:43:48 PDT

As I mentioned in my last post, Brushing Putty is my secret weapon for putting a final finish on a painted surface. You may recall that I mentioned my using it on the aprons I rehabilitated for the left window casing on the south side of the house.

Brushing Putty, now marketed in this country under the Fine Paints of Europe brand, is an oil-base paint with a huge amount of fine-grained solids mixed into it. It needs a primer coat of oil-base paint. You apply a thick coat of it with a paintbrush; the paint levels nicely, and in the process fills in every tiny irregularity. After it dries completely (from 12 to 16 hours), you sand it flat with 180- to 220-grit sandpaper, and if any surface irregularities remain, you repeat the process if desired. Then, you cover it with a coat of oil-base paint.

As you can see, I've had my can of it so long that the bottom has rusted. Brushing Putty can be difficult to use on figured surfaces, which is why I seldom use it. On a simple board, on the other hand, it's quite easy—especially when the board can be laid flat. The present situation is thus ideal for it. Well, it's actually not quite ideal, because the boards are not flat; the cupping and warping complicate matters significantly. So it's not quite easy. It requires some fancy sanding. Nothing regarding the Farm House is easy except for falling off the roof.

Still, when it's all done and the top coat of primer is on, the improvement is well worth the work:

Now this is more like it! Allow me to indulge in some Before and After action:

As you can clearly see, the garage is much neater now. Thank you.

Ironically, there still are areas of differing sheen on the boards, which you can see in the After photo above. This is visual evidence that very hot weather is not good for painting, even when inside. Without boring you with the technical details, when paint dries too fast (and is not in direct sunlight), the areas drying last are shinier than the other areas. Happily, this difference in sheen will disappear with a light sanding.

And so, none too soon, I am done with painting for a little while. While this extremely hot (over 100 degrees) weather is bad for painting, it is excellent for puttying, and falling off roofs. I'll be doing some of those things when next we meet.

* * *

Board Surfing

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 13:32:37 PDT

I'm nearly done rehabilitating the casing boards. It has been a long, tedious, boring job, so I'll spare you the play-by-play and just hit the highlights, the processes I haven't already covered that may prove useful to you when working with putty.

The long, boring part of the work involved many putty/sand cycles. I went slowly and carefully because I wanted to be sure I simply filled in the divots and built up the corners without removing any wood. Because WoodEpox is harder than redwood, it's extremely easy to blast right through the putty and sand a nice divot into the board before you know it, and a pain in the neck to fill that divot back in. Ask me how I know this. Actually, don't.

In due course, I had patched the boards so that the divots were all filled up—at least, all the divots I could see—and the corners were all built up. I was nonetheless not yet ready to prime the boards. Before I did that, I had to check the boards' dimensions to see if there were any obvious thin or thick areas. As it turned out, there was one of each.

Here's the thick area, on the corner of the board (to the left in the photo). This occurred because of a lateral split that occurred sometime in the past. Instead of gluing the crack back together, the previous workman simply filled it with patching material.

The thin area was also very obvious, although I could not get it to show up clearly in a photograph. Near the bottom of the left board, the thickness came down to a half-inch along about a six-inch area. When I measured along that entire side, I found it was actually worn down to 3/4 of an inch (recall it's supposed to be 7/8") for nearly 2/3 of its length. After some more investigation, I discovered that the wear pattern was barely visible. Here's a picture of the boards at this point in the work:

If you look at the board closest to the camera, you'll see vaguely a straight line running diagonally from the near edge about 2/3 of the way up to the left across to the far edge at the bottom. The triangle thus described marks the worn-thin area of the board. It's a fascinating wear pattern; the only cause I can think of for it is wind abrasion, but I can't imagine how that could cause wear in such a geometrically regular pattern. This is one of the most baffling stories I've seen the Farm House tell, and one of the most subtle.

It would be ridiculous to try to patch this huge area, and in any event it's such a subtle fault that I am sure it will not be visible. I thus undertook to patch just the little valley within this area where the thickness goes to a half inch, which would be visible. I clamped a strip of wood onto the edge to provide an aid to patching, and a photograph of this serves to reveal the thin area:

The strip of wood is level with the edges of the valley; where the side of the strip is revealed is where the thin area is.

By the way, this illustrates the real difficulty in rehabilitating old worn boards. It would be a fairly simple job if the board only had divots to fill; it's the inevitable alterations to the original dimensions (the warping and large-scale physical damage) that make the job a pain in the neck. Rather than patching and sanding flat, which is the natural inclination, I have to be sure to patch and sand along the contour of the wood, lest I create more thick or thin spots. This aspect of the work will come up again when I re-attach the boards; I'm hoping that step will not reveal any new faults.

Here's the completed patching of the valley. It went fairly well, considering that it is quite difficult to feather in large areas with WoodEpox. As dense as this putty is, it doesn't lend itself to smooth application in thin layers, and on top of that, thin layers take a long time to cure because of their small mass. As a bonus, you can't use a blow-dryer or heat gun to speed curing in such cases, because the wind action blows holes in the thin layers of uncured putty.

This is not a problem during the day; out in the hot summer sun, the putty cures in an hour or so. At night, however, the wait can be annoying. I thus cast about for methods of artificially heating the wood to speed things up. I hit upon the idea of using a heating pad.

Okay, this is a good concept. It did speed things up. It is however and old heating pad, and doesn't get as hot as it once did, so it didn't speed things up enough. Next time I'll use a hotter heating pad.

Correcting the thick area was naturally much simpler; all I had to do was to sand it down carefully until it was the right thickness. This did unfortunately reveal a submerged crack which I had to repair. From what I've already taught you about the language of houses, you can read from this picture that this whole problem was caused by a nail driven too near the edge without pre-drilling.

At that point, it was time to prime. For the first primer coat, I use an untinted, thinned primer so that I can see through to detect any underlying problems, and so that I can sand down any remaining high spots easily.

I always know that no matter how careful I am to patch every little divot, the first priming will reveal some significant ones that I missed. This time was no exception:

So it was time for one more cycle of patching and sanding. Since it was evening when I started, I wanted to find some way to speed up the curing, but I'd already determined the heating pad method was too slow. Casting about for some better idea, I hit upon the Easy Bake method.

A 300-watt light bulb generates a great deal of heat. I'd hung this work light up temporarily to throw more light on things, and as I stood there cogitating, I felt my brain begin to heat up. It wasn't the cogitating that did that; it was the work light immediately above me. With a light bulb directly above my head, conditions were ideal for me to have an idea. So I brought the work light down until its protective cage nearly touched the wood.

As it turned out, this was too close.

After some further, more careful experimentation, I found that moving the fixture up until its cage was a foot away yielded the best results. Moving the boards around every 10 minutes or so under the light, the remaining un-scorched epoxy cured in about an hour.

After this, I sanded down this last pass with minute care. I used a small piece of fine sandpaper without a block, folded in thirds, so I could feather the edge of each patch into the surrounding area. For this pass, I had a clear indication of when to stop, namely when I started to sand through the primer. When you get to the final stages in a complicated patching job such as this, you have to be careful not to create more irregularities than you fix; if you don't sand off all the excess putty and feather the edges of the patch into the surrounding area, all you achieve is to replace small divots with large bumps. Of course, this is true whenever you patch, but until you apply the last coat of primer you still have a chance to fix any problems from earlier passes.

In any event, once I had the boards all sanded smooth and thoroughly dusted, I applied the final, tinted coat of primer.

Wait—did I say "final"?

Once the "final" coat dried, it was painfully obvious that I was not done. As you can see, despite my final patches' flatness, they are still telegraphing through the paint because of their decreased "holdout", or saturation, of the primer. This angle actually minimizes this problem; it does not show patches that are behind both coats of primer, which are also telegraphing through the paint, but to a lesser degree. Let's take a closer look at the boards:

As you can see, there's a lot of stuff going on here: wildly differing areas of holdout, remaining minute divots too small for the WoodEpox effectively to fill, and small valleys from weathering and uneven sanding. A few coats of the finish paint will mask these irregularities somewhat, but it will not eliminate them.

I didn't expect I'd get these boards looking perfect, but this will not do. I try not to let my ego get the better of me, but I didn't put all this work into rehabilitating these boards only to have them come out looking so crummy. Besides, the Farm House deserves better.

Duty and honor thus compel me to employ my secret weapon to put the final finish on these boards: Brushing Putty.

* * *

"I. Am. Fabulous."

Epoxy Variations: III (Finale: Allegro Amabile)

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Sun, 08 Jul 2012 01:21:12 PDT

With the cracks in the siding all epoxied up, I had two more epoxy-related tasks to perform before I could start rehabilitating the dormer in earnest: the consolidating of the heavily damaged sill wood, and the sealing of the end grain on the siding. The former task I wanted to do before sanding because I wanted to prevent the many crannies worn in the sill wood from becoming choked with sanding dust, and the latter was simply convenient to do at the same time.

The sill on the dormer is damaged in the same way as those on the south side windows: extreme lignin damage and oxidation from sun exposure. Here's a picture I took a while back, showing the condition of the sill:

Check out the mountain of debris that had built up in the weight pocket!

In any event, the damage is not as deep on the dormer sill, but it is just as severe. Thus, the treatment required here was the same: straight LiquidWood, applied liberally; the only difference is that the wood would require less of it.

So this last variation is essentially a reprise of the Theme, played more quickly and lightly, and sweetly as well, because we don't have to choke on thinner.

Here is the completed treatment:

The top part of the sill didn't need treatment, because it has been protected under the sash. As I mentioned, I've sealed the ends of the siding as well. Aside from the preventing of any absorption of moisture there, I'm hoping it will help discourage further cracking simply by binding the grain more firmly together.

Now, I am ready to sand.

* * *

Ganahl Lumber, Pasadena. They really make a guy feel at home.

Epoxy Variations: II (Presto)

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Sat, 07 Jul 2012 00:47:01 PDT

While I was waiting for the window casing boards to fumigate themselves, I turned my attention at last back to the dormer itself. Obviously the whole thing needs sanding, but there are a few things I wanted to do beforehand. One of these was to glue up the several cracks in the siding on the right side.

Before he abandoned work on this dormer entirely, the contractor did replace all of the siding on the right side save the top piece. You can see here where he shimmed it out to match the old siding:

As you can see, he simply placed the 3/16" shimming piece behind the shiplap, without laminating the two together as I did. You can also see how the new, thinner stock has already started to warp and crack.

Here, you can see that he was not sufficiently careful, when placing the new boards, not to crack the old one:

You see here what I was telling you about the new, thinner shiplap:

When cut in short pieces, it has a tendency to crack. Now it should be quite evident why I took the trouble to laminate the plywood shims to the new pieces of siding to go on the left side.

All told, there were about a half-dozen cracks on this side of the dormer, and I didn't want to take a great deal of time to repair them. So, I used my secret weapon in such cases: one-minute epoxy, packed in a dual-plunger setup with a mixing tip. All you have to do is put the tip on, press the plunger, and out comes perfectly-mixed epoxy that sets in 60 seconds. It's thick enough to fill gaps and thin enough to get into tight cracks. It's great stuff when you're in a hurry.

So I put on some nitrile gloves, started gluing, and in a scant three minutes I was all done, after pushing the two widest cracks shut while the epoxy cured.

Sure, it's a mess, but I'll just sand off the drips as I do the normal sanding of the surface. Problem solved!

* * *

"Mmmmm. . . beefy fresh!"

Epoxy Variations: I (Allegro con moto)

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 02:12:38 PDT

I hope you all had a fun Fourth!

As you will recall from the post before last, my next task is to rehabilitate the window casing boards. I've been doing some work on them since then.

The first thing I did was to wire-brush the fronts of the boards in order to dislodge the loose oxidized paint and dirt, and to sand off the paint ridges and mineral deposits (from water seepage) from the backs. With this superfluous stuff removed, let's take a closer look at what I'm dealing with. Here's a close-up on the tops of the boards, arranged in their proper position on the dormer from left to right:

Note the lack of sun damage on the right one; it's interesting that the right side of the dormer should be so much less exposed to the sun than the left, when the sun's travel is on the right (south) side of the house. Believe it or not, it's the shade provided by the eave that has protected the top of the right board, while the top of the left one is subject to an hour or so of sun at the end of the day; over 126 years, that adds up to 46,018 extra hours of sun, give or take a rainy day or two (and that doesn't include the partial year on top of that), and that may account for the difference. An hour here, an hour there, and pretty soon you're talking about some real time.

Here's a close-up of the bottom end of the backs:

You can clearly see the mill marks on this unsurfaced side (remember, these boards were only surfaced on the front side). You can also see the water damage and oxidation.

For all my wailing, they are actually in remarkably good shape for their age; with the exception of the bottoms, there is no internal lignin damage, the oxidation and water damage are only superficial, and there is no cracking or splintering. They are certainly in far better shape than the casing boards were on the south side windows; all that's wrong with them for the most part is that they are very dry and thus somewhat brittle.

Then again, these boards are off the house, and they are all somewhat warped. As I re-attach them, I need to coax them back into a semblance of flatness without cracking or splintering them.

You may recall that I restored resilience and flexibility to the casing cap I rehabilitated on one of the south side windows by soaking it in epoxy. That was a feasible operation because the piece was fairly small, and was porous enough to provide ample spaces for the epoxy to enter. To give the window casing boards the same treatment would be a huge undertaking requiring great amounts of LiquidWood, and even then the soundness of the wood would not admit the epoxy much further than an eighth of an inch in. No, for this job I needed to take a different tack.

And so, I decided to try an experiment I'd been thinking of for some time: thinning the epoxy. Abatron provides a thinner specifically formulated for their epoxies; it's a foul-smelling brew, like smog concentrate in a can, so I avoid its use; denatured alcohol works very well to clean epoxy off tools and containers, so I use that rather than the thinner for clean-up.

But alcohol only dilutes the epoxy enough to effect its removal; it doesn't actually dissolve it. In this, it is like water with latex paint. A proper thinner must dissolve what it is thinning; it must mix with it so that the thinned material is evenly dispersed throughout the mixture.

My theory was that the thinned epoxy would travel much more readily through the sound wood, and would be transported much further into it by the thinner. Once the epoxy cured and the thinner evaporated, the epoxy density, and thus its effect, would be lessened compared to un-thinned epoxy, but a lesser degree of the same effect is precisely what I wanted, because that was what the wood needed.

And so, after mixing the LiquidWood and letting it sit so that the reaction got well underway, I mixed it thoroughly with an equal amount of epoxy thinner and brushed it on.

As I had hoped, the wood drank the mixture up thirstily, so much so that I had to mix another, larger batch to finish the job. When I was all done and the epoxy had cured, enough remained on the painted surfaces to leave a glossy sheen, but on the unpainted surfaces very little epoxy remained on the surface. In the heavily damaged areas at the bottom, I could have brushed a great deal more into it before the wood was saturated. In fact, the absorption pattern clearly indicates where the lignin-damaged areas are by their relative lack of sheen.

But no matter, for my experiment was a resounding success! I was able to flex the boards easily, just as new boards would flex, and the surface of the unpainted wood was firm and resilient, with all the oxidized wood now incorporated. This is a good thing, for I can't afford to lose any of the boards' thickness, lest they not lie level with the top casing board when they are put back in place.

The only downside is that the boards positively reek of thinner. I might have expected this, had I considered that a great deal of the thinner remains trapped within the cured epoxy. The morning after I applied the epoxy mixture, I was half-flattened by the fumes when I opened the garage door; I had to take the boards outside to make the garage safe to occupy. 24 hours later, the odor of thinner still hit me over the head when I got within five feet of the boards, even out in the open air, although by the end of the day the odor had at last begun to dissipate. This procedure is not one I would recommend for interior wood, needless to say.

* * *

"What's that foul odor?"

Happy Independence Day!

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Wed, 04 Jul 2012 13:20:29 PDT

Or if you prefer, Happy 4B Day! That's Baseball, BBQ, Beer and BOOM!

For my part, I'll be hoisting a cold Red Tail Ale to those brave souls who, 236 years ago, had the wisdom to know what had to be done, the guts to do it, and the will to make it stick.

4/4 Blues

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 00:07:04 PDT

After a good overnight curing, I removed all the clamps and bracing pieces, and found that I had done a pretty good job of gluing the bracing pieces to the siding. I thought they were well out of glue range, but some of the epoxy crept out and seeped between the siding and the bracing pieces, causing a little damage to the plywood backing in a few places when I pried the pieces apart.

It won't make a difference in this case, but I should have wrapped the bracing pieces in plastic wrap or coated them with mold release compound. Well, this is how I learn.

I mixed up another batch of LiquidWood and brushed it on the backs of the pieces and all of the end grain. After seeing the long-term damage moisture inflicts upon wood, sealing end grain with epoxy is a step I will always take from now on with exterior wood.

The cured epoxy. Notice that it mostly stayed on the surface. This is fine, because I only applied it to seal the grain against moisture, but in retrospect I could have used much less epoxy, because I'm just going to have to sand most of this off. I shouldn't have been surprised, because for one thing, the plywood is only 5 mm thick, and for another, I'd already saturated the other side. In any event, these pieces are ready for patching, sanding and priming.

So, on to the next task: rehabilitating the window casing boards.

What a mess. Weathered, warped, and all chewed up at the bottom end. It's going to take a lot of work to get these boards looking right. It would be so much simpler just to replace them, but there's just one little problem with that: you can't get boards in that thickness anymore.

That's the dark secret of restoring a Victorian: they don't make lumber like they used to.

It's a very complicated story, the history of lumber standards in America since the Civil War, and after some study my understanding of it is yet incomplete. Still, I'll do my best to explain the situation, over-simplifying a bit for the sake of clarity.

At the time the Farm House was built, boards were sold on the basis of quarters of an inch: 4/4 boards were nominally an inch thick, 6/4 boards 1 1/2 inches thick, and so on. I say "nominal" thickness, because boards have never been as thick as billed; the reason for this stems from the fact that way back before the Civil War, sawmills served a largely local clientele; they provided rough (unfinished) boards sized according to local standards, and carpenters finished them by hand on site.

After the Civil War, with the spread of rail transportation, sawmills began to cover larger regions, and with this development arose the need for more uniform standards of lumber sizing, and the increasing speed of development led to calls for pre-finished lumber in order to speed construction.

According to the uniform standards in place in 1885, the rule was that the dried, rough board started out at the stated thickness, and 1/8 inch was deducted for each surface that was smoothed; i.e., sanded or planed to flatness. Virtually all of the boards used in the Farm House besides the framing are 4/4, surfaced on one side ("S1S"), so they are 7/8" thick. So it is with the window casing boards.

Simply put, 7/8" thick boards are not available as stock pieces today. Boards of one inch nominal thickness are now 3/4", or even 11/16". In fact, the stock used to make the new shiplap was 11/16", which is why I needed 3/16" plywood to match them with the old shiplap. The boards used to make the window casing caps on the sides of the house were 4/4 S1S as well; in that case, happily, I had plenty of old beadboard, which was also 4/4 S1S, and plenty wide for my need.

The problem I have in the present case is that the window casing boards are 7 1/2 inches wide, and I have no old stock to accommodate that width. Moreover, shimming new thinner stock out with plywood isn't a viable option, mostly because the edges would in that case be exposed and I could never satisfactorily disguise them.

So I must rehabilitate the old boards, or spend an inordinate amount of money to have new ones specially milled. Yes, time is money, but my time is not that much money. So, as Joseph P. Kennedy (John F.'s father) said, "When the going gets tough, the tough get going."

Of course, he also said, "Don't buy a single vote more than necessary. I'll be damned if I'm going to pay for a landslide." Joe Sr. was no Vince Lombardi. But no matter; I'll take the truth wherever I may find it.

* * *

"Open open open open open open open open open. . ."

Wails And Laminations

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Sat, 30 Jun 2012 22:56:45 PDT

After getting a good look at the three pieces of shiplap siding I removed from the dormer, I decided it would be best simply to replace them. Not only did one piece have the entire overlapping part missing from the bottom, but they were all water-damaged and quite badly hacked up. Moreover, they have clear evidence of the original body color on them, so I'd like to stabilize the paint to slow further degradation and keep the pieces in the growing archive of building elements I'm assembling that will stay with the house in order to provide documentation of its history going forward.

This decision was made easier by the fact that I have several hundred board-feet of new shiplap in stock from the construction project. There is but one little problem with it: while the facing profile is an exact match, it is 3/16" thinner than the original. We did this so it could be milled from stock lumber, thus saving us a great deal in material cost.

This is no problem, because all I need to do to make them match with the existing shiplap is shim them out with 3/16" plywood. Well, actually it turned out to be a bit of a problem because all Home Despot had was 5 mm plywood, but since that is only about a quarter of a millimeter thicker than 3/16", I figured I could work with it. At this point in the project, I'm in damn the torpedoes mode.

I could simply have cut a triangular piece of this plywood to fill the entire area behind the shiplap, but I decided instead to cut out individual pieces and laminate them to each piece of shiplap. I did this for two reasons: first, the new shiplap tends to split when cut in short lengths, because it is thinner and made from less dense wood than the original. Laminating the plywood with epoxy onto the pieces will significantly strengthen them. Second, the plywood is not rated for exterior use, so I want to coat the back side with epoxy as well to protect it. This is easier to do with individual pieces that are already epoxied on the front.

This is not a complicated procedure, really, but since I've never done it before (with the exception of the tiny trim piece on the window casing), the setup required a lot of careful planning on my part so I didn't screw it up.

The first thing I did was to rip a strip of the needed width from the piece of plywood. I did this with my handy-dandy circular saw and a plywood blade.

It was then a fairly simple matter to cut pieces from the strip to fit the back of each piece of shiplap exactly. Here's one of the completed pairs.

I've found from experience that it's always a good idea to dry-fit glue setups before applying the glue to make sure that everything is going to go together nice and tight. This minimizes scrambling to make adjustments while wet glue is setting.

Thus prepared, I mixed up a batch of LiquidWood, and after letting it sit for 20 minutes to get the reaction going well, I brushed an even coat on the mating surface of each piece and clamped everything together.

As I said, I'd never done laminating on this scale before, so as you may have noticed I ended up having to use more clamps on the two smaller pieces to offset the hydraulic pressure of the epoxy pushing the pieces apart. I ended up using every usable clamp I have. Except this one:

And so the pieces sit as the epoxy cures.

* * *

"Did someone say 'dinnertime'?"

Unpacking A Mess

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 09:07:10 PDT

In the last post, I mentioned that I had figured out what to do about a scaffold to aid my work on the large dormers, but I had yet to work out the details.

That task took me some time, largely because it took me a while to figure out how to attach the roof jacks to the roof. Here is one of the roof jacks:

My problem was that the instructions assume that you are using these to apply shingles to a roof, so you are going to attach these to an unshingled portion of the roof. I am of course using these on a finished roof, so I took a lot of time trying to figure out a way to avoid nailing through shingles. Ultimately, I realized that I couldn't avoid it, so after a bit of time to work up my courage, I proceeded.

Here's one of the nails of the size specified in the roof jack installation instructions:

Now do you see why I had to work up my courage? These are twenty penny (20d) nails, and three of them are required for each jack. The thought of driving these things through the Farm House's tiny, brittle roof joists was chilling. Nevertheless, the thought of falling twelve feet and landing on my back was even more chilling, so I did what I had to do.

You can be sure I was extremely careful in locating dead center on each joist, and also that I pre-drilled each hole before I drove the nail in.

Here's the finished scaffold:

The board I'm using here is a scaffold plank, which is specifically engineered for this purpose. It's flat, rigid and heavy. I purchased several of these in the 12-foot length and two trestles from the man who rented us the big scaffold we used on the north side; I'd planned to use this setup on the south side, but that didn't work out. Nevertheless, the planks have already proven their utility in several ways. I even used them to help me level the ground for an enlarged pad for a new gazebo to replace the one destroyed in the windstorm. They are actually quite affordable if purchased used, and if you have the room I recommend you pick up a couple. By the way, the plank is nailed to each jack to keep it in place, and I must be careful not to step on the plank beyond the jacks on each end.

Now that I was able to get a close look at the entire dormer, I performed triage to locate any problem areas that I would have to address before I started surface preparation in earnest. This area immediately caught my eye:

The hardware cloth indicates that this is a hole that was plugged by our pest control man, as was the hole in the middle dormer that I filled with foam. Notice that the shingles, quite oddly, rise up the side of the dormer in this area. I removed the screws and the hardware cloth to find this:

Well, this is troubling. The remaining piece of hardware cloth covers a hole caused by a missing piece of siding, there is a piece of flashing running behind the trim piece, and there is a large glob of caulk emerging from behind the flashing and continuing along the end of the sill.

As I've said, houses tell stories, and the story the Farm House is telling here is that the contractor was aware of this problem, and that rather than address it he purposely covered it up. Swell. I was there working alongside the contractor much of the time, and I checked a great deal of his work, but I didn't check everything; so far, I've found that whatever I didn't check was not properly done. Now, we're almost certainly going to have to hire a roofer to fix this, and a similar problem on the other side of this dormer, once I am done with it. Maybe I can have him repair the holes I made for the scaffolding at the same time.

I removed the trim in front of the siding, then removed the broken piece of siding. It was at that point I noticed another problem:

The arrow is pointing to it: the bottom projection is missing from that piece of shiplap, exposing the joint to the elements. So both pieces have to come off, as does the casing board on the front, so I can get the broken piece off without breaking the piece above it.

Which is just as well, because all three casing boards have to come off anyway. Here's why:

This is the board on the other side. Note how it's bent out at the bottom, causing a gap through which insects can get into the weight pocket and thus the house. All three boards are like this. I assume that absorption of moisture wicked up through the unprotected end grain on the bottom caused the boards to swell, and thus to elongate; there was no place for that extra length to go but outwards. These boards have to come off so I can correct this.

With triage thus completed, I proceeded to remove all the necessary pieces with the utmost of care. It's always an iffy proposition to remove old wood pieces, because they are often quite fragile. For this purpose, I have a set of low-friction plastic wedges that persuade wood gently:

I tap these in gently, walking them up each side until all the nails have broken free. From there, I can then remove the pieces pretty safely with a pry bar. After I removed all the pieces and vacuumed the 126 years of debris from the weight pockets, here is what I have now:

This gives us a rare opportunity to view the internal construction of the Farm House.

It's startlingly sparse, isn't it? Lath and plaster (which is what the arrow is pointing at) on the inside, shiplap siding on the outside, and nothing but three inches of space and some small framing members in between. As I've mentioned in the Journal, Victorians built their houses light, in order to keep them stiff and strong. Nowadays, we use tons of wood and steel to accomplish the same thing.

You can see evidence of moisture infiltration quite clearly on the corner framing member; it's indicated by the dark area on the bottom two-thirds. the stud next to it shows it too. This undoubtedly was caused by the exposed joint where the strip of wood broke off. The back of this broken piece of siding provides further evidence:

That's why I have to replace this piece; I really can't make a reliable repair in this location, and left unchecked this kind of damage will eventually lead to loss of structural integrity.

The front of the same piece is actually far more revealing. Here's a detail of it:

The yellow area is the first truly clear evidence of the original body color of the house. It was protected by a later layer of roofing applied over the original roof cladding some time before the current coat of olive drab was applied. Note also that this provides clear evidence that the body of the house has indeed been painted only twice in its history prior to my current efforts, as I had already concluded; you can even see the yellow coat showing through the olive in places. Tucked in against the roof and in virtually constant shade, this is one of the most protected areas of the exterior, which is why this clear visual evidence managed to survive.

I must also point out, with a great sense of astonishment, that this yellow is the very color I selected for the body color in my original color scheme, as documented in the Journal:

Initial color study: north elevation

In fact, evidence I've found while working on the house indicates that, with the exception of the shingled gables (which were unpainted), I in essence recreated the Farm House's initial color scheme. I've found evidence of dark green in the trim, but I couldn't determine whether it was a forest green or more of a slate green; as for the red of the sash, you can see it here in the transom above the front door where I scraped off the paint in order to re-glaze the window:

In all humility, I'd attribute this synchronicity to equal parts of startling coincidence and good research. That, or I'm a freakin' House Whisperer, man!

In case you're wondering why we changed the color scheme, it was because we felt that it violated the Victorian precept that a house should stand in harmony with its surroundings. We concluded that the brightness of the yellow would make the house stand out too much, and make it appear larger than it was. Moreover, there is very little mustard yellow to be found in the natural elements of the lot.

Ultimately, we took the house colors from the most dominant natural feature of the lot, namely the pine trees. The green comes from the needles, and the rest of the colors come from the various colors of the bark. Our result is indeed a genuine High Victorian scheme; it's merely that there is enough latitude in such schemes to accommodate our slight tweaks.

By the way, I haven't yet installed the fall protection gear I mentioned last time, but I feel pretty safe nonetheless, for I am well-supervised:

I am very seldom alone here. I really love that. I'm a pack animal myself.

* * *

Must be dinnertime.

An Instructive Transformation

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Fri, 18 May 2012 01:40:59 PDT

I've finished the bathroom dormer, which means that it's time for my favorite feature, Before and After.

Before

After

It's like magic! Decked out in proper Victorian livery, the ornamentation no longer seems arbitrary. Although there are four distinct colors there, the effect is to bring all the elements together as an organic whole.

Perhaps my meaning will be clearer if I show you a street view of the house:

To my eyes, the center dormer now appears to be emerging out of the roof—an integral part of the structure—whereas the two monochromatic dormers appear to be sitting on top of it. Of course, the Victorians had their quite specific reasons for painting homes this way—they were the thinkingest people you ever did meet!—but the simplest way to explain it is that by echoing the design of the large main gables in the small dormer gables, and then by painting the corresponding elements precisely the same way, the dormers are integrated into the house, rather than looking like stuck-on appendages. Imagine how striking the effect will be once we restore the tiny little bargeboard that belongs in the dormer gable!

Prepping and painting this little dormer proved to be a great deal more difficult than I had hoped, in large measure because it was so fatiguing to stand on a surface that was sloping away from it. The fact that the surface was simultaneously sloping towards oblivion didn't help. Moreover, the rear of the sides was just out of my reach, and the peak of the roof was considerably out of range. I tried to access that area from on top, but I found working upside down to be dangerously disorienting at such a height. I thus had to work on this area—sanding, masking and painting—while hanging from the dormer roof by one arm. I'm particularly proud of the fact that I painted the top two courses of shingles freehand while hanging that way, cutting right up to the green of the eave and managing a straight line without masking. Did I say "proud of"? I meant to say "astonished beyond belief by." Really, I don't know how I managed that, given my general lack of equilibrium and my once-again-poor eyesight. Sometimes, very rarely, the Unseen Hand actually seems to help me out. The Unseen Hand has a sporting side, apparently.

I can't rely upon its continued assistance up where the blues begin, however, because the other dormers are considerably larger, and hanging from the roof ain't gonna get it done.

This is the north dormer, the next task on my list, and it's shown here in roughly the same scale as the smaller dormer above. You can infer from this that about 60% of this dormer is out of my reach, but it's actually more than that, because the veranda roof slopes off on the left side.

This is in fact a problem that has troubled me since I started working on the house eight years ago. It's taken me that long to figure out what I'm going to do: use roof jacks to support a scaffold plank, as a roofer would do, and wear a safety harness to guard against the very real possibility of falling. I have the basic materials, but I have yet to figure out the details.

While I'm doing that, there is a lot of work I can get done on the areas I can reach without help. While the bathroom dormer was in such bad shape that the sill and vertical boards had to be replaced, here as you can see the original materials are still present, and will need a lot of the same reconstructive work as I did on the window casings on the south side.

One difference here is that the vertical boards are unornamented; not only does that greatly simplify restoration, but it also allows me to use Bondo, which is considerably faster and cheaper than WoodEpox, and in this application just as effective.

So there will be lots of new ground to cover, cats and kittens, and I hope you all will find the proceedings to be interesting and informative.

* * *

My Dog Ate My Paintbrush

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Sat, 05 May 2012 17:58:12 PDT

First of all, happy Cinco de Mayo! The day means much more to me than it otherwise would because it marks the luckiest day in my life. Nineteen years ago on this day, I met my future wife. So, happy Cinco de Mayo!

It's been nearly a month since I last posted. At that time, I was fixing to mask so that I could paint the middle dormer. As I write, I have masked off the roof flashing, and that's it. It's not that I've been lazy, it's just that life and the weather intervened. Honest!

I've been working on the grading for a larger gazebo pad since February, whenever I had some time to spare, but the work got to a stage where the pups were starting to mess it up by their cavorting. And so, with the prospect of questionable weather approaching, I decided to give the gazebo project top priority until it was done.

The old gazebo pad wasn't large enough, and there was a lot of erosion towards the back of the lot, so I decided to double the pad's size and build a little frame at the low side to keep things level and neat. It was a lot of hard work, because I had to move a lot of dirt from elsewhere on the lot. I took it from the far side of the garage, where I need to do a lot of regrading anyway.

I finally finished it last week. I had planned to do some how-to posts on the surveying and grading, but I couldn't manage to make the telling of it anything but boring. Perhaps I'll try again later. Anyway, Lydia and I put up the new gazebo a few days ago, and here is the finished project:

The pets of course all love the open area of fake turf.

The pups, Peter and Sally, are six months old now, and starting to look like half-sized editions of their future selves.

They've become significantly more well-behaved in the past few weeks, which is a fortunate thing, because they've entered another big growth spurt. Peter is going to be huge once he grows into those ears; Sally should end up to be about Nellie's size.

Oh, yeah, the painting. Anyway, the weather has been wet with annoying unpredictability and timing, which has either made it impossible to paint or led me to believe it would be impossible to paint. It looks like I've got some clear sailing now, however.

* * *

"Ay, ay, ay ay, canta y no llores. . . !"

Filling A Gap with Foam

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 00:15:00 PDT

As promised last time, today I worked on plugging up that rodent hole at the back of the dormer. First off, here's a better picture of the gap:

There's a lot more copper mesh in there than it appears. It's there to capture the foam filler, to impede its progress so that once the mesh fills up, the foam backs up and fills the front of the gap solidly rather than simply continuing to move inward. Copper mesh is available from gardener suppliers, but in a pinch a copper pot scrubber would serve perfectly well.

As I mentioned, I obtained foam filler that is intended specifically for filling exterior building cavities such as this one. This is not the type of foam one generally sees at Home Depot, intended for filling gaps around windows and doors (although it serves for this purpose as well); it's denser, thoroughly weatherproof, and expands instantly. I purchased it from Gempler's, which is my supplier of first resort for a majority of my Farm House maintenance needs.

I must admit, I was pretty daunted by this new, super-duper foam, because it comes in a huge can and is applied with a pretty impressive-looking gun.

This rig fairly shouts PROFESSIONALS ONLY, and as silly as it sounds, I wondered whether I had the chops to wield it effectively.

As it turned out, it's much easier to use, because the volume of foam is minutely controllable using the adjustment knob at the back of the gun, and the speed of its exit is easily modulated using the trigger. Thus, after some practice shots in the garage and some adjustments, I was able to place the foam right where I wanted it as easily as putting toothpaste on a brush.

After a half-hour of curing, I was able to cut the foam back to its intended boundaries with a utility knife.

It's not terribly pretty from this close up, but from the ground it blends in undetectably. Now, the gap is filled more or less permanently, impervious to critters and the weather.

One last point about this foam rig: if you leave the can on the gun, clean off the tip and close the adjustment valve completely, the foam will stay fresh indefinitely, so that you can keep using the can until it is empty. The Home Depot types that dispense directly from the can are good for one use only, no matter how little foam is actually used, because the foam cures in the applicator tube and blocks the exit of the remaining foam.

That's huge, because not only does that make this system more economical despite the cost of the gun, but it means that as I find any gaps as I work from now on, no matter how small, I can quickly and easily fill them with little added cost or fuss. I wish I'd had this rig from the start of the work.

And with that, it's time to start masking so that I can paint.

* * *

"I remain thoroughly disgusted by the rank
anti-rodent bigotry of this establishment."

"No rodents, no peace!"

Fun with Dormers

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 12:53:58 PDT

Since last I wrote, I've been busy repairing, sanding and patching the dormer. It's taken a long time because of the vagaries of weather, and the sheer difficulty of reaching the back and top of the dormer. To sand the very top, I found it easier to climb up on top of the dormer and reach down.

The view from the crow's nest.

Complicating matters further is the fact that the level of the new roof is over an inch lower than that of the previous roof. The old roof consisted of wood shingles sandwiched between layers of sheet roofing on top and substantial redwood slats underneath. The new roof is one layer of plywood sheathing with three-tab dimensional asphalt shingles on top. The receding roofline left in its wake lots of wounds and irregularities where the formerly submerged dormer cladding was uncovered, and an awkward gap underneath where the cladding ends and the underlying structure is exposed. I'm still not sure how that gap will look when the dormer is painted; in fact, I'm not sure just how much detail will be visible from the ground, so I'm uncertain just how detailed I need to be in my patching. I may have to do another round of patching after I prime.

Here's what the dormer looks like right now:

The push broom is there to provide a handhold when working on the furthest extent of the sides (the broom head is securely attached to the handle and well-braced).

You can see that the sides are pretty messy, but I'm hoping that a good coat of paint will take care of that.

One more detail remains before I can mask everything off and start to paint. There's a gap at the back of the right side between the eave trim and the roof that opens up to the inside. This is just the kind of thing rodents use to get into attics, and it needs to be plugged up. We did have some hardware cloth covering the gap, but I'd like to replace it with something more permanent, and more presentable.

Here's a picture of the gap:

It's larger than it appears here, but in any event, you can see a bit of shiny copper material peeking out from inside the gap. This is copper mesh. Gardeners use it around planters to keep snails out; pest control people wad it up and stick it in gaps like this to serve as a backing for insulating foam filler. You will recall that I used a foam filler to fill a gap underneath the new window in the south side; the foam I will be using here is similar, but is specifically designed for this kind of situation. It's completely weatherproof, paintable, and impervious to rodents.

It's also a big mess, so stay tuned. This should be fun.

* * *

"I don't see why you don't just let the rodents come in, you spoilsport."

Well, How 'Bout That

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 01:56:47 PDT

In the last post, I said I'd replace the broken shingle on the west middle dormer if I could find my spare shingles. I didn't want to waste a lot of time that could be better spent actually working on the house.

Well, I soon thought better about it, and realized that even though it's up high, it is the front of the house, and it really needs to be done. So I resolved to dig through the garage until I found the stupid shingles. As I suspected, they were buried in the farthest extent of the garage, with the spare restoration glass and the complete window that used to be where the kitchen pass-through is now. It only took half a day to disinter them, and I'm nearly through putting everything back; it should only take another hour or so.

At first I considered just splicing in the missing part, as I did with the apron on the east window casing on the south side, because I was afraid of splitting the shingle above the damaged one if I replaced the shingle entirely. After thinking the situation out, I realized that even if I did, the job would still go much faster and would also look better when it was done. So with an X-Acto knife I freed up the head of the nail going through both shingles, and then I coaxed it out as gently as I could.

Yep, I cracked the upper shingle; the nail was simply too firmly attached to the wood from oxidation. After all, they had been together for 117 years or so. And speaking of that, I must tell you I can't help but get a bit solemn it such situations, because I realize that I'm looking upon something that hasn't been seen by human eyes for well over a century. Just slightly batty? Sure, but that's what it took to have bought the Farm House in the first place.

Oh, and take a look at the nail I removed. Note its rectangular cross-section. This is a cut nail, so called because it was cut from a strip of steel (which is why it only tapers along the wide dimension). They weren't originally blunt like this; the tip has rusted off. It's hard to tell in this picture because of the debris sticking to the nail, but the head was formed, basically, by squashing the end of the strip together during its manufacturing. Cut nails, although still available today, were in common use roughly from the early 19th century to soon after the Farm House's founding, so when I find them I can be reasonably certain that I'm working with the original construction.

While we're on this sleuthing tack, take a look at what became clearly visible when I began to sand the wood exposed by the removing of the broken shingle! Yes, it's a pencil mark, parallel with the roof line, clearly drawn by the carpenter who laid out the shingles. Awesome.

In order to measure the new shingle for cutting, I made a paper pattern. I have a big roll of thick kraft paper I got from Uline along with an inexpensive dispenser; it has proven its handiness on at least a weekly basis since I got it, and I highly recommend it if you have the room. Anyway, first I made a kraft-paper replica of an uncut shingle:

Then, I cut it down to the length necessary to accommodate the pattern, slid it in place behind the upper shingle, slid a bone folder (a popsicle stick will do nicely) along the diagonal where the shingle meets the eave, then took it out, folded it along that crease, put it back in to check fit, then adjusted it until it fit well:

The black tape is there to keep the split shingle together until I can fix it.

The rest of the job was blessedly simple: cut the shingle and slip it into place.

Perfect! It hardly needs nailing, but of course I'll do that.

Note something interesting about the shingle pattern in this gable: the size of the shingles, and the pitch of the dormer roof, cause each course to be a whole number of shingles, increasing by one shingle for each course. Perhaps this is a coincidence, but it suggests a purposeful relation between the shingle size and the roof pitch; otherwise, one would expect that partial shingles would be necessary to complete the pattern in places. I know that the foreman on the construction project mentioned that there was a complicated calculation necessary to plot the proper placement of the shingles. I'll have to look into this further.

Climbing back into the house after this triumph, I happened to look up into the eave. Here is what I saw:

Funny I'd never noticed that particular pattern in the wood before; I guess usually when I'm out there I'm either looking down at the veranda roof or up at the house roof. In any event, this was a significant discovery, for it was evidence that, as I have long suspected, the front gables originally had bargeboards.

Now, I understand that these architectural terms I tend to throw around can be confusing, so here is what a bargeboard is:

It's the large, gracefully-curved green trim piece running along the gable in this picture. The pattern I saw in the eave of the dormer gable was exactly like the pattern I saw in the south gable before the missing bargeboard was replaced, but it was inconclusive, so I looked for the conclusive evidence. I found it higher up:

This shows the unmistakable pattern of a mounting block for the bargeboard. I can't believe I didn't notice this before, because as I said I suspected there were bargeboards in the front dormer gables, but better late than never.

This is quite a thrilling discovery, because the restoration of these bargeboards is going to make the Farm House even more beautiful than it is now. I'm not going to do anything about it until I'm completely finished with the exterior painting, but I'm going to take complete pictorial and video documentation of the evidence now, and I'm not going to sand out any of these marks, because when the time comes I'll have to bring this matter to the Cultural Heritage Commission for approval.

* * *

"I bring you this offering of fresh-killed prey in token of my appreciation for your fealty."

Triage

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 23:11:14 PDT

Whenever I begin a new segment of this project, my first impulse is to plunge right in and start whacking away at it. By now, fortunately, I've finally learned that before I do anything else, I must brush off all the loose dirt and debris and examine the areas to be painted closely, looking for anything beyond the usual sanding and patching that needs to be done before I paint. For the most part, this involves looking for any loose or damaged pieces that need mending.

There is surprisingly little of this nature on the middle west dormer. There are in fact just two items, only one of which affects building health: a split piece of siding.

This split is complete, and the bottom half is somewhat loose. This allows the elements unauthorized entry, and must be repaired. I'll secure the loose piece, and fill the gap with epoxy putty.

The other item is merely cosmetic: part of a fish-scale shingle is missing.

This doesn't compromise building integrity, so it is not essential that I repair it. I will if I manage to dig up my spare fish-scale shingles from the deepest recesses of the garage, but I'm not going to waste a huge amount of time looking. Time's a-wastin'.

* * *

"Hey, Warden! How's 'bout springin' us?"

My Next Nightmare

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 23:57:51 PDT

The center west dormer is next to be painted. While it needs a few repairs on the sides, and there will be some tight spots to get to where the dormer meets the roof, this should go fairly quickly, because it is small and I can reach everything readily except for the eaves in the very back. I'll fix that broken shingle if I can find my spare shingles, which is a big if.

The most complicated aspect of this job is that I will have to remove the sashes. There is simply no other way to paint the window jambs, or in fact the sashes themselves. It's a small opening, so I should be able to get away with taping some black plastic to the inside of the opening for a few days.

This will be an all-brush job, as will be all the dormers. There's simply too much risk of overspray getting on the shingles to use the sprayer. I have just obtained some new, stiffer brushes that I hope will yield a more satisfactory result than I achieved on the brushed parts of the south side using the kind of thick, instantly-curing paints that we are forced to use hereabouts nowadays by an overweening bureaucratic entity with no connection to the electorate.

A Long Nightmare Is Over

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 22:30:56 PDT

The south side is done.

I will do the foundation at the end of the painting work all at the same time, because it will involve some civil engineering beforehand.

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."