January 2004

Welcome to 2004, Everyone!

Wow... we just renewed our server contract for another year for the Brickman House website. How wild.

A year ago, we were playing around with our brand new copy of Dreamweaver, figuring out how to post photos of our house renovations on the web for family and friends. Now, a year later, we've got a whole site up and running, a year's worth of journal entries detailing the good, the bad, and the ugly parts of our home renovation, and we've just committed to another year's worth of sorry antics memorialized in text and on camera, published on the web for all to see (may our house forgive us).

Does that make us:

(a) pathetic

(b) scary

(d) all of the above

Ehhh, never mind. Do not, do NOT, email us with your votes! We're already firmly committed to option (d)...

But seriously, folks, this year's been absolutely fantastic, and we're glad you've been able to share it with us.

We've had an incredible time here at Brickman House. We've learned about the history of the house, we've become friends with our neighbors, and we've heard unbelievable stories about the property and what's gone on here for the last 50 years. Even better, we've had great times with our neighbors and friends enough to generate a story or two for the future. We've been able to keep far-flung friends and family up to date, and we've connected with a ton of friendly, knowlegable people on-line who've been generous enough to contact us, and share their expertise, hard-won experience, and stories that make us feel not-quite-so-crazy for taking on the project we have.

Anyway, for those of you who are curious, our opening graphic for this journal entry is a quote from the late, great Harry Chapin. He was a dedicated and tireless advocate for eradicating world hunger, but even more importantly, he was an advocate for the idea that one person can make a difference.

So this year... resolve to make a difference. Donate a dollar, volunteer an hour. Take care of yourselves, so that you may take care of your family and home. Take care of your family and home, so that you may care for your community. Care for your community, so that you may care for your world. Take care of yourselves, and each other.

Thanks to all who've made this year so great, and we can't wait to see what 2004 brings!

January 8, 2004: Well, we had a blast ringing in 2004 with neighbors and friends at a fantastic party down the lane.

The house, however, apparently decided to have a diva-sized snit fit at being left alone to her own devices on New Year's Eve, and expressed her displeasure in a spectacularly wet manner.

Somehow, the tub/shower drain that was hanging on by a thread gave up the ghost, and one morning last week, a shower in the master bath resulted in a shower in the kitchen, coincidentally, at the exact same force and velocity. We did not own enough buckets to catch it all. To add insult to injury, the drain's so rusty and corroded we're afraid to touch it, lest it crumble to bits in our hands. So we've abandoned the whole thing for the shower in the hall bath, which only leaks very small puddles into the kitchen with each use.

We've always known that the bathrooms would be our first total gut job in this house, and now that our master bathroom shower has become abruptly and inconveniently unusable, clearly the time is upon us sooner rather than later. So the next six months is going to be spent gutting and re-doing each of the upstairs baths, in turn: the master bathroom first, then the hall bath, and finally, we'll turn our daughter's funky little sink alcove in her closet into a full bathroom for her. Happy New Year to Us.

Our first order of business (right after the Great American Mop-Up) was to take down even more of the kitchen ceiling. It's funny, this kitchen's the first room in any of our houses that we've ever deconstructed in stages, instead of demolished in one fell swoop. The progression of pics from September and October 2003 to this month pretty well demonstrates that this room's just going to continue to come apart bit by bit... kind of like Whitney Houston.

Anyway, we ripped down more of the ceiling to get a better gander at the mess o'plumbing that's there now, and to clear the way to re-route it as we install the new bathrooms:

It wasn't too bad of a job, just more of the same old, same old... hammers and crowbars flying, and the resulting plaster chunks, dust, mold and rodent droppings raining upon our heads for half a day.

Hey... there might just be something to this whole demolition-in-stages deal-- do it piecemeal, and picking mousesh** out of your hair becomes just another day at the office...

January 16, 2004: Alright. No matter how much we drank New Year's Eve, we didn't really expect to wake up on January 1 and magically find ourselves in a meticulously restored, spit-shiny perfect old house, a la Dorothy waking up in Technicolor Oz. Truly, we recognize that she had a huge advantage over us... unfettered access to that big ol' field of Oriental Poppies.

But really, despite the absence of plant-derivative therapy, we honestly thought we'd do better than this. So far, 2004 has brought us nothing but pouring rain (in the kitchen) and freezing cold. Lots and lots o' cold. Matter of fact, we're freezing our butts off here at 5°F today, and it's supposed to be -13°F tomorrow. We suppose we should consider ourselves lucky that the cold didn't manifest itself inside the house like the rain so rudely did, but that's only because we've been selling our bodies down on the corner to pay the oil bills.

Now that we've got clear access to the plumbing for all the bathrooms from the underside, we should start demo on the bathrooms themselves. But hey, you know what? It's just too damn cold. Home renovation motivation takes a serious dive when we risk frostbite just opening the door to take out a bin full of plaster chunks, and no way we're actually opening windows to toss cast iron chunks of bathtub out onto the ground below. So we light a fire in the fireplace (which is still seriously ugly, but it's just going to have to wait), huddle around it, grab the laptop, and start combing the 'net for vintage fixtures and tile.

Even so, we feel the need to get something, anything done in the house, no matter how small, just to satisfy our fix for instant gratification. To that end, we decided to tackle stripping the stairway.

You may recall from our hall entry that the bannister, balusters, and columns were all stained Biker Bar Brown and sealed with shinyplasticpolyurethane, courtesy of Bad Joey during the Great Renovation Apocalypse. We never had a clue what the actual individual elements of the brushed, caked, gooped-on conglamoration of dirty, sticky, plasticky mess were. So we figured it'd be a good project to tackle on a cold winter's day, when we were sick of researching bath fixtures.

We researched every possible substance (or combination of substances) that the coating on the staircase parts could actually be, and then went shopping in our basement and laundry room. We raided our utility shelves and cabinets, and gathered up every concoction, stripper, cleaner and solvent we had in an attempt to be the big winner in the quintessential Old House Dating Game: match the muck on the surface with the solvent that will dissolve the muck. The trial and error with the solvents, cleaners, and strippers, determining combinations and working time, was frustrating, to be sure, but actually somewhat fun, in a Dr. Moreau, or maybe Dr. Mobius kind of way.

And just as a prophylactic measure... for those of you who have now found us through a Google search on Victorian fictitious mad scientists, and want to email us to debate their relative merits and characteristics... please don't. Really. After all the different solvents, strippers, and cleaners we were exposed to during our experiment, we really don't have three neurons left pinging around in our heads to connect with each other for a coherent thought. It was cold out, we didn't want to open a window, ventilation was minimal.

Brain damage notwithstanding, we actually managed to hit upon a combination that actually worked. We scrubbed the surface with a scrubee sponge and a wicked strong degreaser, dried it off, and then gooped on a thick coat of Strip-X stripper, covered with plastic wrap:

We waited an hour, then pulled it off. Scrubbed off the resulting goop with a stiff plastic brush, rinsed, dried, and then... Repeat. Yup, took two treatments, but we think we've finally gotten to bare wood.

Here's the above column after the first treatment:

Definitely an improvement... after all, even after one stripping, you can actually see the grain of the wood. But check out a section of the bannister after two strippings, and a light sanding:

Big difference. We discovered that the whole staircase is made of pine. No surprise there... the entire house is constructed of 140 year old pine, and whatever was added on subsequently. It's quality wood, no doubt-- hard and durable, but upscale, it ain't. We've decided to strip and refinish the bannisters for practicality, and strip the posts, hoping they'll add a bit of punch and drama to the finished project. The balusters and bottom trim, though, will be painted a bright, crisp white.

We finally both agreed that we hate the current color of the hall, because it's too cold, and we've been researching additional wainscotting and molding treatments.

So, while we're researching, rounding up, and having the materials for the bathrooms delivered, and waiting for the outside temperature to reach a level civilized enough to open windows to chuck stuff out of, we'll actually work on stripping the hall bannister and columns, repainting the walls, and adding wainscotting and molding appropriate to the period.

Doesn't it all sound so intellectual and ambitious? Not bad for solvent-addled brains. We ran out of plastic wrap to mush around the stripper, so we'll be hitting the grocery store this weekend for more, and then we'll slop, mush, peel, scrub and dry our way through the project.

Did we start this journal entry being jealous of Dorothy and her field o'poppies? Pfft... what for?

Clearly, solvent-based strippers rule, and Dorothy was an amateur.

January 20, 2004: Well, it's still January, we're still (at least marginally) in the Northeast, which means it's still cold and we're still stuck inside.

So we stripped. Many, many feet o' bannister, many, many layers of dark stain, polyurethane, and other unidentified goop. It was slow going, messy work, and the buzz we got from the stripper fumes, while good, wasn't good enough to dull the pain of the burns to our hands and wrists when the stripper goop ate through our sleeves. But, after all that, we hit the jackpot... Virgin Wood:

Pretty stuff. We thought Bad Joey'd ruined her forever, but he'd only sullied her temporarily. it's amazing what a little elbow grease and a hefty dose of toxic chemicals will do. And once again, during the stripping process, we had one of those Old House Karma Moments: we discovered that, prior to Joey's 70's faux-Mediterranean treatment, the staircase had been painted white. Yea, though the minions of the Prince of Dark Molding brought forth their worst, they couldn't eradicate the essence of light... yup, after we stripped the wood, we found bits of paint in the cracks and crevasses that clued us in to the staircase's original color.

So, since the staircase was white originally, and now will be again, we don't feel bad saying we're done with the stripping. We'll do a couple of coats of satin polyurethane on the posts and bannisters, and then start painting the balusters, and the balusters, and the balusters. There are a lot of balusters.

By the way, after reviewing this journal entry, we're a bit worried about what the future will bring. Not with our house, but with our website tracking service. See, our site hosting service provides, along with site hosting, a tracking function which logs the traffic to our site. Ours is obviously not a commercial site, so it's not that important to us, but we check in every few months just out of curiosity. It's kind of fun to see what pages people are most interested in, and to see how they find us from the web. It's especially interesting to see what searches people enter in Google, Yahoo, or any of the other major search engines that end up hitting our website.

Now, the searches that are logged are ordinarily what you would expect-- renovating old houses, Delaware history, even hits from searches on particular projects like refinishing wood floors or laying flagstone patios. The only eyebrow-raising search we've ever come across in the last year was from the user who hit our site doing a Google search for "spanking on the patio." Spanking? On the patio? A thousand bucks to the person that can figure out how he got here... from there.

But anyway, these last couple of months must have been reeeeeeally boring out there on the web, and there must be a ton of people housebound from the cold, because our latest visit to our site tracker yielded a truly remarkable group of searches.

We start with the searches from people who were clearly captivated by our August travelogue:

"stockholm's beautiful women" and

"reykjavik blonde"

Obviously, connosieurs of Scandinavian culture.

But really, what in heaven's name was the guy who searched

"photos helsinki 'this building' "

expecting to find? Don't you just want to email him to find out what building? (Sorry, but no, we have no way of knowing who entered these searches).

Next was a guy after our own hearts, looking for the easy way to get a project done around the house:

"mortar removal automated"

Yeah, don't you just wish?

Then there was the obviously sincere and earnest housekeeper who found us by searching

"how to keep house smelling great"

Ehh, maybe not so much. We have three cats, a dog, a young child, three acres of mud, and half the county traipsing through the place during the summer months using the pool. Frankly, we want to email this chick just to see if she actually found something that works.

But the one that just left us speechless was

"mob sledgehammers photo"

Huh? Just...

Wha'?

Anyway, so now that we've written a journal entry that not only recaps our Greatest Hits Searches, but also contains phrases "stripping" and "virgin wood," We Are Afraid. Seriously Afraid.

And... yeah. We'll probably pop on our hit counter in a few months, and we'll probably tell you all about the people that found our incredibly hard, frustrating, sweaty, stripped, virgin... stair bannister. Yeah... uh, probably.

January 27, 2004: Baby, it's cold outside. Not only is it cold, but over the last couple of days, it's been snowing, raining, and sleeting, all at the same time-- The Unholy Trinity of Winter Weather in the Northeast, at least according to the local weathercasters.

All of whom we've seen, by the way, on our television in the last few days. Every couple of hours, some fluffily made-up and coiffed local correspondent bundled up to her eyebrows in Gore-Tex, buffeted to the extreme right of the camera frame by nor'easter caliber gales, appears on our screen to breathlessly deliver to us the "Latest!Breaking!News!" ... to wit, it's snowing. We haven't the heart to tell the parade of Shackleton Chicks that we could get the same information by looking out our parlor windows. Because, well, far be it from us to clue people into the fact that they're useless.

All that by way of saying that... it's snowing here. It's been snowing here for three days, and we've been housebound for three days because, well, it's been snowing.

We've been good though. We resisted all temptation to break out the rest of the can of solvent stripper left over from the staircase project (yes, Virginia, there is a down side to finishing your bannister stripping project), and instead confined ourselves to several bottles of wine whilst we watched the snow fall. Once a critical mass of alcohol had been reached, we broke out the paintbrushes and set to work on the balusters. Three people (yes, we even drafted our five year old into service), three paintbrushes (a 2 1/2" angled trim brush, a 2" straight trim brush, and a 1/2" artist's brush) and three days later, we got two coats of polyurethane on the bannister and posts, and most of the first coat of paint on the balusters:

It looks great! Well, it looks great in the photos. It looks seriously ratty in real life, and it's clear to us that we'll be spending an equal amount of hours on a second coat, and possibly a third. But hey, at least we can look at the photos, squint a bit, hop up and down on one foot, and kind of get an idea of how great it will look once it's done.

Anyway, just around the time we finished up the first coat of paint on the balusters, the snow conveniently decided to take a break, and so did we:

And after many runs down the best sledding hill in the county, a.k.a. our front yard, we trudged our cold, wet, snowy selves back into the house, and heated up some seriously chocolatey, marshmallowy, whipped creamy hot cocoa. Looking out our dining room window, snug, warm and dry...

we decided that, even with the showers in the kitchen, the half-finished exterior siding leaking frigid air into every room, and the miles o'balusters needing acres o'paint...

There's no place in the world we'd rather be.

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