April 2003

April 10, 2003: Yes, we know we haven't updated the journal in three weeks... trust us, we know, and if we didn't know, we'd have all the emails from you kind folks to tell us, right?

So what have we been up to? Well, shamefully enough, we have to admit that we here at Brickman House have been floundering, we tell you... floundering so bad we think Charlie Tuna just asked us for a date.

When last you left us three long weeks ago, we had just spent the weekend getting the better of shrubbery the size of Jabba the Hut, and poison ivy had gotten the better of us. We retreated, vowing to come back to fight another day (actually, we were just going to come back with heavier machinery, but don't tell the bushes). So we called our local tool rental shop, rented a Bush Hog for the next weekend, and spent the rest of the week cackling evilly at the thought of the briars out there blissfully growing thorns the size of Sawzalls, unaware of the imminent arrival of our secret weapon. Well, Mother Nature had other ideas, and being spring in the Mid-Atlantic region, it poured. For forty days and forty nights, it poured. Oh wait, that was Moses, not Noah, and that was the desert. Never mind...

Anyway, notwithstanding the wildly inaccurate Biblical allusions, it rained all weekend, and the briars got a temporary reprieve to continue to grow their thorns. So we decided to do other stuff. First, as you may recall from last month's journal entry, we had painted a turtle border for our daughter's former preschool classroom. Well, we also promised a table to go with it:

We had promised it, and boy, it had quickly become a priority... do you have any idea how demanding (and downright threatening) a mob of twenty preschoolers can be? We'd rather face the briars.

Speaking of demanding, twenty preschoolers are nothin' compared to one preschool child who lives with you. And our preschooler in residence had been waiting patiently since the holidays for us to begin to assemble one of her gifts-- a brand spanking new dollhouse! We told her that she'd have to wait until the studio was finished so we'd have a place to work on it, and since the room was done, we took advantage of the rainy days to start working on it with her. Now, before we show you the photos, you have to promise, promise, pinky swear promise not to laugh...

Promise?

Swear?

No, you're already laughing, never mind.

Ok, we'll show you, but you have to at least promise not to laugh loud enough that we can hear you all the way out here, ok? Here it is:

Hey, we know it's pathetic, but we reallyreallyreally tried! Look... this whole dollhouse thing is just harder than building a real house, really it is.

You follow the directions, and glue the tabs for certain slots, and then you try to put the tabs in the slots, but they don't fit, and then you have to take them apart, and sand the slots and tabs to make them fit, and then they fit, but the tabs on the opposite side don't, so you push one side and the other side falls out, so then you hammer in the side that fell out, whereupon the first side goes flying across the room, so then you retrieve it, goop on enough glue on all tabs and slots to hold the Parthenon itself together, wrap strap clamps and bungee cords around the whole shebang, weigh it down with books, and call "Phase I" a success!

Or not... we dunno. Our daughter's been at the beach on vacation with her grandmother, and the weather cleared up. So Phase II of the dollhouse construction went on hold, upstaged by the Second Battle of the Briars, which, when we last left them, were about to meet their Maker.

Yee-hah! The weather cleared, and we loaded up the BushHog in the truck, drove it home, donned our thick shirts and work gloves, fired up that baby, and prepared to wreak some havoc. We plowed the whirring steel blade into the brush and pushed. Then we pushed harder. Then we pushed some more... and somehow the whole machine ended up at a 45 degree angle atop the brush pile, with the steel blades whirring about on top, and the briars completely unaffected. So we pulled the whole thing back down, and started all over again. Pushing, pushing ... pushing some more, until once again... yep, the machine's on top of the briars, blades whirring ineffectually, and we hear a faint evil cackle emanating from deep within the shrubbery.

Ok... so clearly, this was just. not. working.

We made some faint stabs at the smaller stuff leftover from our last quest to turn brush into usable land, and we actually were able to free a few more trees we hadn't gotten to on the last go 'round (always a good thing), but all in all, we were discouraged.

So shamefully, to this day, a significant contingent of briars exists to mock us daily from the edges of our property, and we hear whispers of a future insurrection. But really, there was nothing for it but to retreat and lick our wounds...

When things go badly around the house, as they are occasionally wont to do, we always have a few simple projects tucked away in our back pocket that are quick, cheap and easy, and are guaranteed for a good old fashioned high born of instant gratification... kind of like that packet of M&M's you keep in the back of your desk drawer.

So as we licked our wounds in retreat, trying to decide how next to defend the Invasion of the Shrubbery, we painted the basement stairway. No, really... we did. Hey, did we not warn you that we were looking for instant gratification? We got it... cheap, and easy, with a shot of renewed confidence to tackle the exterior. Roll your mouse over the photos below for before and after views, or click on either image for a larger view:

Ahhh, much better. Some addicts mainline heroin, others just paint everything in sight a crisp, bright white. Same effect, just a matter of degree...

Meanwhile, we're still too intimidated to mount another attack on the brush. We've resigned ourselves to the fact that it's going to take a full on assault by Bobcat to even make a dent in those beasts, and it's just too wet to actually get power machinery down there, and still have any reasonable hope of getting it back out. So the bushes get a temporary reprieve, at least until the weather's drier.

However, rejuvenated by our brief blast of success with the basement entry, we've been feverishly hatching plans for our next project.

Drumroll, please...

April 14, 2003: Like we've said, the commencement of a "Large Project" at Brickman House is greeted not with heraldic fanfare, but with the arrival of a dumpster:

You'll notice, however, that the dumpster's not down at the property border threatening the native vegetation-- it's up close to the house, preparing to receive...

THE SIDING!

Yup folks, it's time... Papa Smurf and his perverse band of mutant blue midgets are being evicted, once and for all.

We'd thought about just painting over the hideous blue, but when we uncovered the original clapboards during the powder room renovation, we knew we had to unearth the original siding. And to be honest, the sheer number and variety of insects residing underneath that awful residing job were getting a bit out of control. So, our choices were two: form a non-profit corporation to establish the Brickman Center for Entomological Research, or reclaim our house. We opted for the latter...

Reclaiming the house, however, turned out not to be as simple as a weekend with a mallet and crowbar, because, as luck would have it, the ugly old siding is not just ugly and old, it's also carcinogenic-- asbestos-cement. According to our friendly neighborhood landfill, in order to dispose of this stuff, we have to wet it down, double-wrap it with 6-mil plastic, duct tape it all up, and label each and every package with our name and address, and labels designating the packages as a "cancer and lung disease hazard." Awright, so we can't just pitch it in the dumpster. But s'ok... we can manage this, right? ... Right?

So off we go to the Evil Orange, and procure respirators, extra filters, safety glasses, gloves, industrial size rolls of 6-mil plastic, and a pile of duct tape. Everyone's looking at our cart in the checkout lane thinking, "looka dem fools, the war in Eye-rack's about over and they're stockin' up for a chemical attack..."

Iraq. Sure, whatever. Saddam sucks, to be sure, but he's nowhere near as scary as the Department of Environmental Control guys that are waiting for us at the landfill, ok?

So we haul our gear home, suit up, and get ready to go to town on some siding:

Fear me.

Anyway, the first glimpse of the original siding was exciting, but also a bit daunting:

Hmm. Looks like we're going to have some patching to do... better call the lumberyard for an order of replacement clapboards. So we moved on to the second side:

Hmm. Looks like we're going to have some more patching to do... better call the lumberyard and double the clapboard order. In the meantime, we'll move on:

Hmm. Better call the lumberyard and offer them our firstborn child...

Undaunted by the prospective lumberyard invoice, however, we worked our way around the house... stripping the siding, gathering it up, and wrapping it as the landfill specified. We were enthralled by the process as it revealed more and more of the house, to be sure, but really, we were amusingly distracted by what the process was yielding around the house:

Wontons.   Big, white, wontons.    

We had wrapped the piles of siding in our clear plastic, folded the ends up and sealed them with tape as instructed, and left them to collect for the dumpster at the end of the day. And as we looked at them piled about the foundation, we swore the house looked like it had just sprouted a bumper crop of big, giant... wontons.

It's a good thing we're easily amused.

So, back to reality. After our first weekend's work removing the siding, we admit to being both elated and disappointed. We were hoping the original clapboards were in good shape, and one of the post-war Smith farmer's wives just fell for a slick traveling salesman's schpiel that she could side over her perfectly good wood in asbestos ceeeeeement and never paint aaaa-gain! As it turns out, though, a little architectural excavation revealed that the siding was put on in the renovation apocalypse of the late 60's/early 70's (how does anyone even get that stuff at that time?), and that the clapboards had deteriorated pretty badly by the time the house was resided. So the clapboards are not in the condition we'd hoped, and there'll be a lot of patching and replacing to do.

On the other hand, we were absolutely amazed at the transformation of the house as we stripped away the siding. Uncovering the original clapboards, with their profile and proportions, and rediscovering the proportions of the original reveal between the window moulding and the clapboards made an incredible difference in the house's appearance. She's starting to look like a grand old farmhouse, not just a hacked-up remuddled house that just happens to be, well, old. Roll your mouse over the photos below for before and after views, or click on any image for a larger view:

One of our neighbors, ten acres down the road or so, was nice enough to come over and tell us that our project looked great from his house! He told us it looked like we were uncovering some beautiful grey brown original clapboards, and he just couldn't tell it was a total wreck until he actually drove up our driveway.

We feel much better now.

Anyway, stay tuned for next weekend's "Adventures in Renovation." We've still got half the front of the house, and its east side to uncover. We're certain it will involve wontons, hazmat gear, and wittily helpful neighbors. Add in a lumberyard delivery, and hilarity is sure to ensue... is it sweeps week yet?

April 20, 2003: So it's a three-day Easter Weekend. The perfect opportunity to make some serious progress on the house, right?

Well, being Spring, and the season of new beginnings, it's also an opportunity to bring a fresh, much needed perspective to this week's Journal entry. So if you notice a change in tone and tenor, that is because I, StudlyManinaKilt, am writing this week's entry, for a change.

After I read last week's entry, and the entry before, and the entry before, and asked for the umpteenth time, "Hey, why didn't you write about this, and this . . . ", the esteemed Webmaster (and resident Toolbelt Babe) suggested that maybe I should shut up and put up, and write the next Journal entry myself. So here I am, and Toolbelt Babe's got the week off.

Oh, by the way, "Toolbelt Babe" is neither sexist nor demeaning as a moniker for the site's usual journalist. When we met, I knew I was in love when I realized that her tool collection exceeded mine (how many women do you know who own their own belt sander?) and she was proficient with all of them. More proficient, in fact, than many guys I know. As to the "babe" part, well, she is.

So, Toolbelt Babe and I awoke Friday morning full of high hopes for progress. Our hopes were quickly dampened, however, by the weather which was threatening enough all day to discourage us from getting set up and working outside, but never did quite rain hard enough to warrant us not continuing with the asbestos siding removal... except on the two occasions when we actually went outside and began to get set up, at which time it rained in earnest. It was frustrating.

Not to be deterred completely from getting anything accomplished, we hung paint chips up to take a look at color choices for the exterior:

After deciding upon some initial "maybes," we went to the local paint store (Martha Stewart's "Signature Collection" for Sherwin Williams, if you must know) to get some quarts mixed for sample purposes. Martha's "Prison Grey" was not on the list, but four of her other colors were. So, after collecting our paint samples, and after running many mindless errands... (does anyone else have an "Odd Lots" store? It's great fun to see what they have in once in while, and really... where else can you find an "As Seen on T.V." aisle, where you can check out the ultimate time saving gadgets you never knew you needed?)

Anyway, we returned home and liberally spotched the exterior walls with our paint quart samples. We wanted to cry, "Hallelujah! We have found the color such to make Martha and the angels weep!" But really, it was too dark to fully assess their impact, so we watched a movie and went to bed.

Saturday dawned dry and cloudy, with a promise for clear skies. Early (by Toolbelt Babe's standards) in the morning, say 10:00 a.m., we were back at it, shedding what someone must have thought was a good idea at the time to reveal the, uh, glory underneath. Time for a digression to give voice to the perspective (that would be mine) that has been missing from this Journal thus far... when this whole asbestos siding removal thing first came up, as is frequently the case, Toolbelt Babe, like a peyote sampling mystic, had a vision:

"I'll bet the original clapboards are still underneath, and I'll bet they're perfect! C'mon, StudlyManinaKilt, we can remove those shingles in 4 hours!"

So I mull this prospect over, and in true Mr. Scott from Star Trek fashion, reply, "I dunno, it's probably a mess under there and will take us at least 14 weeks to get the siding removed." (Psst... guys, always multiply your time estimates for a project by a factor of two. When you get it done in half the time, hey, you're a hero. When it takes at least as long as you predicted, well, you called it, didn't you?)

In Toolbelt Babe's estimations, most projects, no matter how large, should only take 4 hours. In my estimation, most projects, no matter how small, will take at least 14 weeks. Not surprisingly, well, we usually end up somewhere in the middle.

So, a couple months back, I was celebrating what I thought was my original fourteen-week estimation successfully forestalling the whole "asbestos siding removal project." Then, she chanced across the section on Enon Hall's website in which Bill chronicled his asbestos siding removal project. Well, that. was. it.

No further discussion was necessary. For if the Chapmans could shed their home's cancerous skin, then by heavens, we could, too! Thanks, Bill...   Just for you, I'm going to relate on this website my "fun and happy" experiences successfully re-plumbing a main waste stack and replacing the first-tier branches. It's "quick, fun and easy." You can do it, too! In 4 hours! Really, we wish you the best of luck...

So... back to siding removal. Lots of ladder time. Not that I mind being on a ladder. But levering siding off with a pry bar does not require an excessive amount of thought. Great shoulder/delt/bicep workout... Bally's Gym won't be getting a dime from me this year. But except for the occasional close encounter with a hornet, mind-numbingly dull. Here's my view of the activities:

So, asbestos siding removal efforts leave plenty of time for "deep ladder thoughts" such as:

... You're on a ladder. So what if you're 30 feet in the air? The ladder rung is the same size whether it's up here or whether it's the 2nd rung from the bottom. Whoever fell off of the 2nd rung of a ladder? Whoever got hurt falling off of the 2nd rung of a ladder? Really, no problem...

... This ladder's rated for 250 pounds maximum. I weigh 235 pounds, plus clothes, protective gear and tools, add 10 pounds, that's 245 pounds. If I apply pressure on this asbestos shingle in excess of 5 pounds, will the ladder break? I hope it wasn't a government inspector who determined this ladder was rated at 250 pounds... Maybe we should have bought the ladder rated for 500 pounds. Maybe I should go on a diet...

... Will Jackie Chan ever make a movie equal to his best, like "Project A" and "Drunken Master 2"?...

... Gravity accelerates objects at 32 feet per second squared. I am at the limit of a 32 feet extension ladder, so these tiles should be hitting the ground within 1 second. Hmm, ok... one thousand one, one thousand two, one thous... It seems to be taking more than one second for them to hit the ground. Oh, probably because there is some resistance from the flat side, like a leaf. So, if 250 pounds of asbestos tiles and 250 pounds of StudlyManinaKilt are dropped at the same time... ugh. Never mind.

So, how about some ladder haiku?

Under the siding

a cicada crysalis

who is more surprised?

What... you were expecting Basho?

After a little more than a weekend and a half, we finished the siding removal and began the wrapping process.

The momentous occasion warranted haiku, of course:

6 mil plastic duct

taped asbestos a present

for archaeologists

Here's what it looks like now (roll your mouse arrow over the photos for before and after views, or click on either photo for a larger view):

Pleased with the weekend's progress, we cleaned up (never an easy task), and headed out to a late night Saturday dinner with some good buddies. Sunday morning was reserved for an early Easter Sunday brunch in our old neighborhood, at which time we better eat well, because we headed back home to face the year's First Lawn Mowing.

All in all, a great weekend. Next week, Toolbelt Babe is getting some more color samples for splotching out walls, and we ought to get the first delivery of replacement clapboards. Further, since I'm having a hard time beating her off... herself will, most likely, return to narrate.

April 28, 2003: Phew... yes, I'm back. StudlyManInaKilt had a good time writing last week's Journal entry, and according to the week's mailbag, you all had a good time reading it, but I'm telling you, the raging control freak in me would have demanded heavy duty prescription meds to be quelled another week. I will yield control of the keyboard again shortly, I promise. Really, I will... just as soon as my hands stop shaking and I have another drink.

Well, the Mid-Atlantic Spring that brings us such beautifully sunny, breezy days during which it is a pleasure to remove siding in, also brings us rain, and lots of it. This weekend was, unfortunately, no exception. Why is it that it always pours when you have holes in the side of your house? Oh, it's just us who regularly have holes in the side of our house? Never mind, then...

We spent Saturday praying that the wind wouldn't get strong enough to actually blow the rain into the holes in our newly-uncovered siding. In between prayer sessions, though, we hit the lumberyard for the first batch of clapboards to start the patching and replacement process. We thought, standing at the order counter, that a batch of 20 seven-foot long clapboards would be enough to get a good start on the project, but when the lumber guy loaded them into our truck, and we saw that they comprised two small bundles about six inches by six inches (and seven feet long, of course) we realized just how pathetically deluded we were. Yeah, we'll be back at the lumberyard next Saturday for oh, about a truckload more.

We didn't have time to go back in to the lumberyard order counter for another batch, because we had a most critical stop to make... the paint store. Whatever we did Saturday, we were going to Sherwin Williams, by heavens, because, after splotching eight different sample colors on the walls of the house, we had finally chosen a color for the exterior. The rush was so that we'd get to the store before we had second thoughts. We did, in fact, manage to get ten gallons of paint and ten of primer successfully mixed without too much waffling on our choice (staying away from the paint chip display by dutifully comparing grades of caulk on the other side of the store helped). The color we chose is "Snail Shell" from Martha Stewart's Signature Colors. It's a deep grey with a bit of green in the undertone. We can't wait to see it up on the walls, if it ever actually stops raining.

Of course, with our luck, Sunday dawned bright and beautiful, but other commitments demanded that it be a short work day. Not to be denied some measure of home improvement satisfaction, no matter how small, we turned our attention to wart removal:

Yep, that ugly bumped out kitchen window just had to go. It certainly wasn't doing a thing for the architecture of the house, and besides, it's not like it was actually keeping out bugs, rain, wind, or whatever. So we figured we already had a bunch of holes in the house, what's one more?

The bump-out's siding came off easily enough, as did the small roof overhang and the windows themselves. Cleaning out the insulation filled with mouse nests and bugs was kinda gross, but we were still optimistic that this'd be a quick and easy deal. Then came the framing:

We went at that deranged conglamoration of two by fours, sixes, eights, and dimensions unknowable with prybars, mallets, small sledgehammers, you name it... It would. not. budge. We really shouldn't have been surprised though, because it was much like the rest of the 70's remuddling projects the poor house had suffered through-- none of the stuff actually worked, but heaven help you when you try to take it out. This wretched window never actually did any of the things a window is supposed to do, but by god, it acted as if it had right to be there, even if that right stemmed far more from longevity than actual utility.

After a while, though, we got tired of arguing with an inanimate object, and brought out the last word-- the Sawzall. God bless Milwaukee... vvvvvrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr! That was the end of the framing.

Interestingly enough, though, removal of the window finally allowed us to place and date the different paint colors and siding on the house. We were able to determine that, despite our intial assessment, the asbestos-cement siding was not, in fact, installed during the Great Renovation Apocalypse of the 70's, but was actually installed much earlier. We know from a neighbor who moved in across the street in the 50's that the house was once yellow, then white. When we stripped away the window framing, we discovered asbestos shingles that were yellow, and subsequently painted over with white, with not a trace of Smurf blue anywhere. We found no evidence that the clapboards themselves had ever been painted either yellow or white. Sherlock Holmes we ain't, but we did manage to figure out that the asbestos siding had to have been installed sometime prior to the building of our neighbor's house in the early 50's.

During this process, we also experienced one of those freaky twilight zone moments... when we pulled the window framing away, and discovered a piece of clapboard that finally showed us the original color of the house.

Until now, all we'd seen was the badly weathered clapboards that we'd unearthed. All traces of the original paint had long since worn away, and the only color they sported (other than, well, brown) was the silver of sun-damaged wood. When we dismantled the window framing though, oddly enough, we discovered that the window framing had been covering one... just one, solitary clapboard that had also been covered and protected from 130 years of weather by the original 1840 entrance overhang dismantled in the 1950's. Here it is (two parts were visible):

Rod Serling poked his creepy head into our world just moments after we'd oohed and ahhed over finally discovering what the original color of the house was, when we looked down, directly below where we were working:

And discovered that our final four choices for paint colors were all virtually identical to the original color of the house shown on the clapboard we'd uncovered. You can see the bits of original clapboard peeking out from behind the magnolia branch on the upper part of the photo, above. Freaky...

After picking our jaws up off the ground, we could only conclude that the ghosts in the house had finally decided it was time they quit making nuisances of themselves by moving the furniture all about the house, and decided to make themselves useful.

And now, to close out this month's journal entry... I'm eating dinner in the bar of an impossibly hip but cheap boutique hotel, curled up on a ridiculously plush couch that passes for cutting edge bar seating these days, with a glass of French chardonnay (politics notwithstanding, they ferment a helluva nice dry white) and my laptop. The mood lighting is red, the crowd is twenty-something, anorexic and dressed in black, accented with teenytiny cellphones and they're all drinking flavored martinis made with bottom shelf liquor. So it is with business travel when the economy has tanked and the budget no longer supports the Marriott. The mood and atmosphere being what it is, it is time for a story... so gather 'round, click here and scroll down to the end of the "about the house" section to learn all about Joey.

return to journal index / continue to next month

home / about us / gallery / journal / links / mail