June 2004

June 1 , 2004: We were flying HIGH at the end of last month! We'd managed to get the western border of the pasture cleared (a sight we'd been waiting two years to see) and we were heading full bore towards jamming out some serious priming and painting clapboards for three, full, uninterrupted days over Memorial Day weekend. The energy was high, and we were celebrating like the Denver Broncos when they finally won a freakin' Super Bowl. High fives, chest butts, and a** slaps all around... The OldHouse-terone was flowing. Boo Yeah!

We were going to spend the three-day holiday weekend busting out house painting. The rest of the rotten clapboards would be repaired, the missing trim replaced, and miles and miles o' siding would be primed and painted. The take-out menus were laid out, and Domino's Pizza was on speed dial to fortify our 72-hour blitz.

Then, once again... the wheels fell off.

Well, actually, our friends called. And then our other friends called, and then, oh yeah... our daughter's friends called. Forgot that it's Memorial Day weekend, it's unseasonably hot and humid, the pool's open, and both guest rooms are free.

Forget the clapboards... time for a party! Time for a dinner to welcome friends in from out of town, time to grill late night filets for other friends we haven't seen in an age, time to cook up some burgers and hot dogs for our daughter's new friend and her family, and then really, we couldn't end the weekend without cooking up Eggs Florentine and strawberries and cream to send off our out-of-town guests for their long drive back to the city.

After that... Business Trips intervened, and the best laid plans of mice and men (yeah, they're still running around in the attic-- the mice, not men) lay scattered at our feet in an unruly mess of hangovers, leftover hot dog buns, and delayed flights resulting in long layovers in the Buffalo, New York airport.

Despite all this, however, we did manage to do a few things around here. The Kilted Pyromaniac enlisted his gallons of diesel fuel and bags of road flares, and got the rest of the pasture brush piles burning. We spent a few days raking and shoveling the mass of briars and cut-up trees into an ever-shrinking pile. We got so good at it after a day or two, that we went out to check on it late one night, and it was so hot and compact, the flames were burning BLUE. We were enthralled-- it was soooo cooollllll! And we soooo need a Life....

The next day, the Governor, in connection with the Division of Environmental Control, instituted her state-wide burning ban for the summer. Something about ozone and air quality. Sheesh... is it too much to ask for state government to work with us around here? Oh... yeah. Well, that brings this season's installment of the Exterior Reclamation Project to a rather sudden end.

Oh well. Time to drag our attention away from Exterior Reclamation and back to Exterior Renovation. Nothing for it, no more excuses. Back to Siding.

Those of you who were around last Spring may remember that we ripped off the asbestos siding on most of the house to uncover the original wood clapboards, went through eight test quarts of paint to find just the right grey to paint them, and started replacing damaged clapboards and trim. We got distracted halfway through the summer to replace the pool deck, but finished out the Fall still busily replacing clapboards and trim. When the weather got too cold to do any more outside, we turned our attention to interior projects for the winter.

Now, we had no more excuses. So one morning, after enough caffeine to semi-clear our hangovers, we went outside and started looking for a bite-size project to chew, and seized upon our laundry room window. We grabbed a couple of screwdrivers, and started poking it to see what trim needed to be replaced. Imagine our surprise, (or not) when the screwdrivers went right through the wood up to the handles.

Hmm... this situation clearly warranted further investigation. Out came the hammers and crowbars, and we started prying away the layers in a hunt for sound wood. We got about this far...

before we finally admitted that there was really no sound wood to be had. Guess the fact that the window had been bumped out right under a poorly installed gutter that poured water over it at every opportunity, the shingles were thick with moss, and the entire window, trim and all, was covered in mildew should have been our first clues.

Sigh. Joey strikes again. However, we were cheered, somewhat, by the idea that we'd have another creative BadJoey framing job to show you all, and so we set about busily dismantling the window, peeling away layers of shims, interior (yes, interior) veneer, and assorted bits of trim stuck all over the place in order to get a good photo of another of Joey's framing projects for your amusement. We peeled, pried, cursed, peeled, pried, and cursed some more. Then, all of a sudden, we had a hole in the wall.

Yup. One, big, hole in the wall. No framing. Whatsoever. Anywhere. We figured out quite some time ago (as you all probably have by now as well) that Joey was flat crazy. But this time? Joey took off with the medication cart. As we were standing there, contemplating the hole in our house, wondering just what we'd done in our lives to cause Joey to torture us on levels we can't describe, the thunder clouds rolled in.

Into the truck, and off to the lumberyard for a window... Now. We got back with the window and a bunch of 2X4's, fired up the compressor and the framing nailer, and commenced to framing. Mother Nature took pity on us, and held off the deluge until we'd finished installing the window. Sorry, no exterior photos (because it was ten o'clock at night and pouring down rain) but here it is from the inside:

And Joey, honey? That's how you frame a window.

June 7, 2004: We admit to being a bit shaken after last weekend's brief foray, once again, into Joey's world of Bright!Pretty!Colors, but after two years of stumbling blindly into Joey's projects, and writing wine, tequila, and margarita mix as a line item into our budget, we remain undeterred.

Determined to make some serious progress this weekend, we moved around the house, and turned our attention to replacing the powder room window. You can see it highlighted in pink below:

We knew the original installation was another Joey Job, and so, we admit, we were a bit nervous about what we might encounter. Nevertheless, we resolutely gathered our crowbars and hammers, and set about prying off the trim.

The trim came off fairly easily, inside and out, so the Kilted One motored on inside the powder room to wrench the window away from the framing. I positioned myself outside, to ease it out of the wall and haul it off to the trashpile. He wedged his prybar in between the window and framing, and gave it a first, tentative whack with the hammer.

Whereupon the entire thing came flying out of the wall.

I have no idea how I had the presence of mind to catch the da** thing (the Flaming Nuns must have been pulling for me), but I did, and gently lowered it to the ground with shaking hands and quaking knees. After a quick check for broken bones and gushing arteries (we found none), we inspected the framing and the window, and discovered that the process of removal was so unexpectedly swift because Joey had failed to actually attach the window to the wall.

Well, at least he'd managed to frame this one. Good Joey! Then he'd forgotten to nail the window to the house. Sigh. Baaaaaaad Joey. And we had such high hopes for him. Clearly though, he'd not yet returned the medication cart.

The good news was, it made replacement easy. We did some quick framing to fit the opening for the new window size, popped it in, and moved on to our next project for the weekend.

Painting!

Or rather, making pitiful stabs at Painting. See, there's this dirty little secret that no one talks about in renovating a house: Transition Time. Transition time's the period when you're shifting from one major project to another, or in our case, from winter's interior projects to continuing the exterior rehab.

Tools have been scattered all over the place from when you've cannibalized the toolbox for whatever you're working on at the time, materials you bought last summer get stored somewhere (and you swear you'll remember where you put them when you need them again), you buy new materials and tools (forgetting you bought them the first time around), and put them in that same "somewhere" you swear you'll remember.

Transition Time's when you have to gather all this stuff back up, put it in one central location, take inventory, and go back out and buy still more tools and materials that you thought you bought but didn't, or actually did buy but never managed to locate.

So in preparation for Painting, we Gathered. We rounded up tools from the basement, tools from the kitchen, tools from the attic, tools in the armoire that's intended for the master bathroom but is temporarily sitting in the upstairs hallway (no, we Don't. Know. Why.) We actually had the foresight to store all the paint in the back entryway, unwieldy, but ultimately convenient, since it ended up being all there. After a while, even though we knew we still had a bunch of siding and trim to replace, we got tired of hunting down tools, and decided to start painting, since, you know, the paint was All. There.

We decided to go for a quick and dirty, instant gratification fix, and paint a couple of the exterior studio walls, which need no siding or trim repairs. We scrubbed them down, rinsed them off, and caulked all the seams. Then we went hunting for primer. No need to search, it was all stacked in the entryway! So I dragged out a can of primer, and set the Kilted One to stirring. A couple of minutes later, as I'm busily caulking around the other side of the house, I hear...

"Honey?"

I pause, caulk dripping out of the gun. "Yeeeeesssssss?"

"I thought this primer was tinted grey, but it's mixing up pure white."

"Oh." The gears start turning, as I'm desperately trying to remember what happened in the paint store a year ago.

"Well, I think they tried to tint the primer dark grey to match the paint, but it was too dark, so we ended up having to go with white."

"Oh, okay, no problem."

A while later, I'm still busily caulking around the house, and I hear...

"Honey?"

I pause, caulk dripping out of the gun. "Yeeeeesssssss?"

"The primer on this side of the house is dry, and it's ready for a finish coat. Can you grab me a can of paint?"

So I head on into the entryway, grab the first can I see with a custom mix label on top, and give it to him. No sooner have I gotten the caulk gun back in hand, do I hear...

"Honey?"

Once again, I pause, caulk dripping out of the gun. "Yeeeeesssssss?"

"This can is mixing up grey, but it says Primer on the label."

I dropped the caulk gun.

"Whaaaaaa?!?!?"

I inspect the label, which does indeed say "Primer," and start frantically pawing through the paint cans stacked up in the entryway. And with a sinking feeling, memories of our order in the paint store last Spring come flooding back to me. We had tried to get the primer tinted the color of the finish coat, and the finish grey was too deep-- the pigment was overflowing the can. So we settled for the paint store's regular mix of primer grey for the body of the house. We'd also gotten cans of white primer for the trim, and then the grey finish coat for the body of the house, and gloss white for the trim.

And I had just gotten the Kilted One to prime an entire side of the house with the trim primer.

I was ready to steal Joey's medication cart. Armed and dangerous, if need be.

I arrive back around the side of the house, sheepishly toting an actual can of the finish grey, and proceed to explain my mistake, all the while brandishing a kitchen knife at my own throat. And he says...

"Honey?"

"Yeeeeesssssss?", I reply, having relinquished the dripping caulking gun in favor of a Henckel's 9-inch Chef's Knife.

"It's okay. Don't worry about it. I'll just reprime what I've already done in grey, since I don't want the finish coat to show up different. We'll get another can of white if we need to for the trim, and we'll start fresh next weekend."

And you know what? I put down the knife, and he did:

Or at least he started to, until the season's evening thunderstorms rolled in, and we had to clean up for the night.

There are a million reasons why I love this man, and only the first twelve involve the way he looks from the waist down in a kilt...

So we cleaned up the paint, opened a terrific bottle of red wine, and preheated the oven for a frozen pizza.

What? ... What? Hey look, it was late Sunday night after a long, frustrating weekend's worth of work. And here's a tip-- if you drink the bottle of wine before you eat the frozen pizza, the pizza doesn't taste so bad.

So I wander out to the pool to check for damage from the thunderstorm with a glass of wine, visions of Freschetta Fine Italian Ready-to-Eat Pizza dancing in my head, and after a moment, the Kilted One, washing dishes in the kitchen, hears...

"Honey?"

He pauses, dish soap dripping out of his hands. "Yeeeeesssssss?"

"The pool pump's not on, and according to how I've set the timer, it should have started an hour ago."

@#$%&. There goes the pizza. At least we had the wine...

After two hours of chasing down six wires, two different breakers, two subpanels still on fuses in the garage, through a GFCI that we found out didn't work anyway after we'd bypassed it temporarily, we discovered the pool pump motor shorted out, and couldn't be saved. Time for a new pump.

Sigh. Some days it just doesn't pay to wake up and chew through the straps...

June 14, 2004: Some days it does pay to wake up and chew through the straps!

After the last couple of weekends taking two steps forward and one step back, we actually got stuff done this weekend.

With the liberation of the jigsaw from the recesses of the basement, the Gathering of the Tools was complete. Our first trip to the lumberyard for this season's replacement clapboards was a success, and we were ready to go.

We finally repaired the siding we'd torn off during our discovery of the Giant Mutant Honeybee Invasion of last November:

And trimmed out the replacement for the powder room window that fell on me a couple of weeks ago:

Never fear. The replacement window is nailed in. Very, very well.

We trimmed out the replacement for the laundry room window, and resided the hole left after we'd framed in and repaired Joey's Giant Mutant Hole:

A good weekend's work, after a couple of frustrating starts over the last few weeks.

And stay tuned for next weekend's Journal entry, because Brickman House is going on the road!

A good buddy of ours bought a magnificent old house outside of Boston-- a three-story Second-Empire beauty that needs a ton of work. Most immediately, it needs roof repairs, and since We. Do. Roofs, we're heading up there to help out!

Sometimes you just get tired of working on your own house...

June 22, 2004: We should definitely take our Gig on the road more often!

There's a lot to be said for gettin' outta Dodge, and going somewhere else for a change.

On this particular trip, "Dodge" consisted of a Storybook Mid-1800's Second Empire house in the suburbs of Boston recently purchased by Very, VERY good friends of ours.

"Very, VERY" means friends of ours so good that I've known one half of the couple since high school (translation: She knows where all the skeletons are hidden, and still speaks to me). We met our significant others around the same time, and over the last nine years or so since we hooked up with the The Kilted One and The Cook, respectively, we've traded many funny, sad, inspiring, and mortifying stories over four-course dinners and countless bottles of wine. They spend occasional weekends at our house, politely ignoring the wreck, and show up with bells on at holiday dinners, including last year's holiday season, when the water heater died with eight overnight house guests (and 20 for dinner) on Thanksgiving, and the dishwasher died Christmas Day.

So when they bought the House of Red Doors, we recognized that we owed them big, and We. Were. There:

"There," because we were seized with a wicked case of Old House Envy, sucked in because this beautiful old house had developed catastrophic roof problems which threatened the structural integrity of the attached Carriage House, and oh yeah... did we mention those skeletons in the closets?

So we packed our tools in one suitcase, our grungy clothes and work boots in another, and hit the airport for our flight to Boston.

The Transportation Security Administration luuuurrrrrrved us. No, really... they did. The suitcase with the crowbars, hammers, toolbelts, screwdrivers and 30 assorted drillbits got Extra Special Attention. It was opened, packed, re-opened, and re-packed with Tender Loving Care throughout its entire journey. And when we arrived at our destination and sorted through the hopelessly tangled mess that became our tools, we were comforted by the knowledge that the TSA had pawed through every inch of our bags in search of a Weapon of Mass Destruction.

We were a bit saddened, however, by the realization that the TSA had failed to recognize that my Sawzall, coupled with the Kilted One's hammer, could actually conquer Iraq. They completely missed their opportunity to harness the singular force capable of bringing Democracy to the Middle East, and simply trumpeted their commitment to their mission through the presence of a little, bright orange, circular "TSA" sticker stuck everywhere on the outside of our bags.

Right. On with the show. The catastrophic roof problems had appeared on this side of the carriage house:

In the form of a solid sheet of water pouring in to the house where the slate mansard roof on the second floor meets the roof deck over the first floor. It was rather reminiscent of one of those Zen Water Wall fountains. Lovely, to be sure, and peaceful to look at, except that there was no catch basin to recirculate the water at the bottom-- it kind of poured all over the floor after it overflowed the various buckets and bins set underneath it to catch it. Hmmm...

This?

Is a disaster. Something must be done.

So we reassembled our tools, strapped on the tool belts, climbed some ladders, and started poking around. Poking around, as we've learned from our exploits with Bad Joey, can yield some interesting surprises, and clearly, this house had a Joey of its own. We discovered that the roof deck had been sagging for quite some time around the other two sides of the carriage house as well, and after digging through a few layers of tragically bad patches (Joey would have been proud), we found this:

No roof deck, rotting trim, and well... that's it. Nothing else. The third side yielded much the same result.

Time to come up with... A Plan.

The first plan contemplated jacking up the three sides of the carriage house to remove the sags in the middle, stripping all three sides of the mansard, rebuilding all the decks, and re-shingling with the slates we'd removed.

That was scrapped, as it was deemed too intensive for a 2 1/2 day weekend. Can't imagine why.

The next plan involved rebuilding the worst of the decks on all three sides, stripping all three sides, re-shingling the two most visible sides with the salvaged slates, and shingling the back with new asphalt where no one would ever see.

That plan saw more debate, but was also eventually scrapped as too intensive for a 2 1/2 day weekend. Still can't imagine why.

The plan we ultimately settled on (after much heated discussion, a few brief sessions of pouting, and free-flying use of four-letter words) tackled the worst of it, and temporarily preserved the rest: we would rebuild and re-roof the Zen Fountain side of the carriage house, and put better patches on the other two sides to hold them until they could be properly re-done.

Satisfied that we had hit upon a plan to repair the worst of it and salvage the rest for a later date, we retired to the dining room, and threw ourselves upon the mercy of The Cook, who took one look at our tired, filthy, bad-humored selves, and whipped up a three-course dinner. We raided the wine cellar (a well-stocked room in the basement, with 9 foot high ceilings and two-foot thick stone walls) and four hours later, a good meal and several bottles of wine quelled the last grumblings over WhatMightHaveBeen.

We retired that night, ridiculously fat and happy (and ok, maybe just slightly Bent), luuuurrrrving each other, and convinced that all parties involved are on board with whatever we'd decided. Hey, come morning, someone would remember, right?

The next morning found us at the local Despot for roofing materials. Now, trips to the Despot are, in and of themselves, cause to bring out the worst in people, and this one was no exception. Since the roof would have to withstand New England winters, The Plan called for (in my mind, if no one else's) roofing the deck with asphalt impregnated, granulated sheet, running 8 inches up the mansard, sheeting the remaining mansard in ice and water dam all the way up to the top, and then shingling over it.

But when we got to the Despot, the Kilted One discovered that it carried some new roof underlayment, which promised to withstand ice, water, terrorist attacks and nuclear wars, and was much lighter weight than the ice and water dam. He was all for carrying lighter weight up the ladders, I was all for working with materials I knew. Now, the threat of nuclear war ended up not being an issue, since we ended up waging an actual one, right there in Aisle 22 of the Leominster, Massachusetts Home Depot.

For anyone who actually keeps track of such things, the Home Depot survived, the participants survived, the homeowner (who spent much of the actual time of engagement observing with some confusion and barely-concealed amusement)... Survived.

We rolled to the checkout line with two carts full of lumber for decking, roofing cement, flashing, asphalt shingles, roofing nails, asphalt roll roofing... and ice and water dam.

The next 48 hours involved removing Bad Joey-like deck patches, rebuilding and patching what we could, removing slate shingles (most of which ended up crumbling, but some of which actually disintegrated into small piles of powder in our hands... wild!), salvaging what we could, wrestling large, heavy sheets of asphalt roll roofing onto the deck and up on the mansard, fitting, cutting, and placing ice and water dam, removing, re-placing, wrinkling, hopelessly entangling ourselves in the stuff like the Tar Baby, cursing, recutting, and re-placing ice and water dam. Then endless shingles, shingles, shingles. Nail, nail, nail. Nail... ouch! @#$%! Nail...#$%@! @#$%! @#$%! @#$%! Trim shingles to fit along the trim boards, nail... @#$%! Then roofing caulk on the seams with the caulk gun, pump, pump, pump... got another tube down there? Pump, pump, pump... gimme another!

We emerged, with hideously swollen thumbs, scraped knees and elbows, and roofing tar in every conceivable bodily orifice (it would ultimately take two weeks to fully remove, but any fool who emails us for details will be summarily shot on sight).

After all that, however, we managed to produce this:

And even managed to replace the decking and temporarily re-patch the roof on the other two sides of the carriage house like so:

This project was absolutely Wild-- it was like nothing we'd ever done before.

We'd never worked on anyone's house but our own, we'd certainly never travelled hundreds of miles to work on a house before, and we'd never been confronted with an absolute deadline to complete a project by Sunday Afternoon.

It's easy here at Brickman House, comparatively speaking, because we plan a project Friday night, rip into it Saturday morning, and if it turns out (as it usually does) that the project's more intensive than we expected, we can spread the work out in stages over time to finish the job. We didn't have that luxury with the House of Red Doors, because we had 72 hours-- period. We'd come up that weekend to "fix the roof," and whatever we found had to go through Old House Repair Triage to determine what was most critical, what could be fixed in a finite amount of time, and what had to be hack patched to stem further damage until it could be done right.

Considering all that, we thought the project was a complete and total success! We had a great time taking a break from our own house to work on someone else's. We repaired the worst of the roof, and did an okay job patching the rest.

Most importantly, we had a terrific time hanging out with Old Friends. It's absolutely amazing how easily tales of bruised thumbs, tired muscles, and Despot Wars morph into funny dinner party stories when everyone gathers around a table bursting with good food, good wine, and good company.

That said, there's much more roofing work to be done at the House of Red Doors, many more quality dishes to be sampled, and we've promised to re-stock the wine cellar. Sooo... when can we come back?

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