I'm Back

I was a community blogger for GoErie.com but since I don't have the time to finish my house projects in a timely manner, I decided to give up that blog and just take my time and enjoy my house. You can see my website blog here and I'll continue to update this blog as I complete projects.  I'm not sure how long my GoErie.com blog will be active but feel free to search the pages as long as it is.
http://www.goerieblogs.com/lifestyle/oldhouse/

It Won't Be Long Now

For those of us in the North East, waiting for spring to arrive starts to wear on our good nature. A taste of what is to come.

Click To Play

Stories to Tell

We often walk in the area cemeteries. There is some beautiful artwork and stained glass on some of the buildings. The grave markers have many stories to tell.

I took these pictures on my last walk in the Erie Cemetery. I’m thinking of looking up the story of the first grave marker. I often go to the library for research and next time I’ll try and find out where the father and 3-year-old son drowned. Click on picture for slideshow.


Also, check out my new blog. It is still under construction but I'm adding a few things as I go, tweaking and looking for content to fill the pages I've created. Soon I'll retire this one. My new blog http://www.thisolderiehouse.com

Great Blogger Name

(This is mostly for Erie area readers that perhaps haven't seen the houseblogs.net blogroll.)

I was browsing through the Houseblogs.com blogroll and found one that made me laugh. The name is great. This Old Crack House It's a great blog, with a great name. It says under the headline, From log house to farmhouse. Farmhouse to townhouse. Townhouse to apartment house. Apartment house to crack house. Crack house to our house. Our house to our home.

If you follow her link to "My Web Page" on the right side bar you'll see lots of great pictures of their Dayton,OH home.

I wish the originally beautiful, historic homes turned "multi-family" apartments and frat houses in our area would get taken over by families like this one and restored back to what they were meant to be. I hate seeing the mutilation of Erie's great old houses by greedy landlords just to make a few bucks. There aren't many of the grand houses left. And if you restored one in the city of Erie, they'd tax you right out of it. Thank goodness for the Watson-Curtze Mansion Museum. At least Erie will have that.

Some Library Research, Digging Through History

I spent a few hours at the library recently researching the city directories, obits, yearbooks etc. I'm gathering information for my house's scrapbook that someday I will pass on to new owners. Hopefully, the new people will love this house, too.

I'm trying to be careful with my posts about the family as 3 of the sisters are still alive but we haven't had contact with them. There are a lot of questions, though, I'd love to ask them but for now, I won't bother them. They took it personally when we offered less than the asking price. They lived here all of their lives so they must not have known about negotiating prices. They thought the house was worth much more, but that was understandable with all the memories tied up here. They are up there in their years and they no longer could care for the place. There was and is a lot of labor involved in maintaining an old house. It was getting too much for them. They moved to a modern apartment.

When we bought the house, some of our neighbors told us some about what they knew of the former owners. There were 5 sisters and one brother born to the previous owners. None of the children ever married and all but one of them lived here their whole lives until we bought the house. That struck me odd.

The previous owners were the first family to occupy the house other than the builder. Our house was built in 1917 and the husband and wife moved into the house around 1920. They had a son about 1919. So that was my quest at the library. Find out about the son, first.

I knew the mother had died and found her obit. I found the son's name as having died previously in 1925. I was surprised at the date. I looked up his obit. He was only 6 years old. Somehow I had built a connection to these former owners and seeing that almost made me cry. He died in St Vincent hospital and was going to have a quarantined funeral. When people said he never married I assumed he was much older when he died. I cannot imagine the sorrow of losing someone at such an innocent age and I wonder what he died of.

The library announced they were closing so I had to leave. I'm going to return to look up the newspaper microfilm and see if I can find out what he died of or what kind of diseases happened to be going around at the time.

Procrastinator

Since returning from my California vacation I haven't done anything to the house except my normal housecleaning. Once you clean up the mess (which I always do before a vacation) you hate to start working and creating another mess.

But I have been busy. I launched my new personal website that I'm pretty pleased with. I'm going to set up another one like it for this blog. It should go a lot faster now that I kind of know what I am doing. With the new website, my pictures and blog will be together and organized with pages of video, also. Which reminds me that I promised a video on applying shellac. I hope I can deliver.

But for now, at least today, it isn't raining or snowing and the temperature isn't freezing and you know what that means.....see ya on the water fishing!

Colonnade, China or Book Shelf? (pics)

Click here to my new posting website. (I'm still in transition remaking my blog)

My Family's Antique Cookie Cutters (pics)

I'm in transition to Wordpress on my own website. I'll be linking to it for new posts.

Cookie Cutters

Roto Rooter Rescue

(See previous entry) My husband came home this evening and called Rotor Rooter and they came out in just a couple of hours. They kept us informed on their progress to our house with two different phone calls. That was nice as we could do other things and not just be on the look out for them to arrive.

From the sound of things, we weren't the only ones having this problem with the basement drain today.

The water is all gone but I'll still have the cleanup tomorrow. I'll probably be throwing out the area rugs we had down there. I'd just as soon have exposed cement anyways. It would be easier to keep clean. Plus the rugs were a lint trap near the dryer and hair magnet from our lounging cats.

Even though it costs a lot to have these guys come out, I can't imagine having to have to auger the drains ourselves even if we had the equipment. Yuk!

The Black Lagoon

We haven't been home from our vacation for 2 days and something goes wrong in the house. I'm was getting all the laundry done from our trip and was just greeted with black water standing in part of our basement. The basement drain isn't working. In fact, I can pretty much swear the water was coming up from the drain....and from the bottom of an old toilet that hasn't been used in 7 years.

At first I thought the toilet was leaking along the bottom. I tried to turn off the water and couldn't budge the faucet. I took a vice grips to it and managed to turn it slightly. Either it is already off or it is permanently fused from non use. But there is no water in the inside of the bowl of the toilet so that means it is coming from under the ground and backing up out of the bottom of the toilet and floor drain.

It is black, like ink, and on the edge is movement. I looked closer and saw little worm-like things moving. Maggots? I can't smell anything, thank goodness, because I'm so miserably sick with a bad cold. I've been complaining about my cold but now I think my cold is a blessing!

I just phoned my husband at work to give him the news. I guess it could have been worse and happened while we were gone. At least I can move things to higher ground as the water is rising. Or I could have come home to a copper caper like what happened to my sister's house in Pittsburgh. Someone broke in (destroyed 2 antique doors to do it) and stripped all the copper pipes and even the water meter out of her house and left the water gushing into the basement. Luckily, her floor drain worked.

I Want to Live in Santa Barbara (pics)

Santa Barbara was just another city to me until my sister guided my husband and I to a walking tour of the main parts of the city. The area is full of outdoor cafes, brick and tile pavers, hidden nooks and alleys that are so clean it is like Disney World. There is a distinct Spanish/Mediterranean flavor to the architecture. The little shops are so awesome! The weather was 81 degrees. The pier was even better than all the ones I've been to in San Francisco.

We saw a house for sale, a real dive and tiny, for over $700,000. A little out of my price range, ha. You could get a mansion in Erie for that! I was told Oprah has a house in the area of Santa Barbara.

We saw a homeless-looking guy on a side street with a bike packed to the gills with his things. He looked very much like Ed Begley Jr. Hmmmm, I guess it is possible he's researching a part for a movie but then I'm pretty sure he is just a homeless guy. My sister and her husband have celebrity sitings all the time, just not this time. Oh, well. If I was going to be a homeless person, I wouldn't do it in Erie where the weather is so cold. I'd hitch hike to Santa Barbara and sleep on the beach. Even if you had to go through the garbage, it would at least be gourmet.

My Walls Whispered Today

IF WALLS COULD TALK-
Maybe it wasn't outright talking but my walls said something today. I was cleaning the kitchen cabinets (see pic) and on the front ledge I found a 2-inch wide indented area that immediately made me think of the old meat grinder my mother used so long ago. It would clamp on like a vise grip to the edge of a table or counter. We have lived here 7 years now and I never noticed it before. These little things become a bit exciting to those of us who would have loved to live in the years before our time. I can now picture that meat grinder working away with the old-fashioned wood stove burning and the smell of yeast bread in the oven.

Keep It Original, But I Want That!

I am a person that totally appreciates keeping things original in an old house unless it can't be repaired or brought back to life. For about 6 years I have posted comments on different message boards and blogs how I feel about it.

The first time I had to eat my words was when we decided we had to put in a patio door and deck in order to have access to the back yard, as small as it is.

Second, is when I had to strip the old finish off of the woodwork because the top layer was peeling like dried egg whites (previous owner top coated shellac with old wax on it with water-based I conclude). I replaced it with the same original material, shellac, but went darker.

Our upstairs has original heart pine woodwork, never painted in all of its 90 years (except the bathroom). I want to redecorate the bedroom into a cottage style but the yellowish, brown color of the woodwork, though beautiful, doesn't look good with the whites, creams and blues I want. The woodwork would look really nice a cream color.

The woodwork needs to be sanded down because of the same egg-white peeling problem the downstairs had. Being it has to be stripped someday anyway because of this peeling, I'm thinking I may become the person I despise the most, the person that paints over original wood (heart pine, am I crazy?).  I'm not having too much problem with this, because there is shellac underneath that would make stripping the paint off later with a heat gun quite easy.  If I do this, I'll be such a hypocrite.

Victorian Mansion Gone Bad

I was going through some vacation photos from a few years ago and came across this one from Williamsport, PA. They had wonderful Victorian mansions everywhere. It was wonderful to walk along the streets. Then we came upon this monstrosity. What the heck! Bungled, bungled, bungled. Yes, that front is attached to the back house. Whoever did this should be tarred and feathered, in my humbled opinion.

Answering Shellac Question-pics

I received this comment regarding this post. (partial comment)

I have a 100 year old house that has Mahogany woodwork throughout. I am trying to replicate the finish which was shellac. I am not sure if is was tinted or garnet or just age. It has a very deep red wine look to it, similar to your oak.

I'm working on some woodwork now using the dewaxed, garnet shellac and I'll try to post video of my process. I'm not an expert but I've learned to do it with good results. If I could find free videos of the process, I'd link to them but I can't find any. They all want you to buy their videos or books. Mine won't be expertly produced but for the beginner who just want to see how it can be done, it will serve that purpose (and they are free.)

To start, I'm posting a photo of my mixed garnet shellac in a plastic jar with true daylight (and snow) behind it. [Also is the color of the shellac on my white oak woodwork in normal daylight lighting in the room. The wood has no dyes or stains, just garnet shellac.] I tilted the jar (see photo) and took the picture. As you can see, the color looks very yellow in the lighter areas. As it gets down to the heavier areas it turns a color with more red tones (garnet). When you apply the first coats, it looks yellowish. But if you keep applying coats, you can build up to the garnet color. How many coats? It depends on the color of your wood and how thick you made the shellac. You'll probably have to order the garnet shellac over the internet in flake form and mix your own. They have shellac dyes, also that can achieve similar colors with less coats. But the multiple coats builds the beautiful depth. If the color you are looking for is one of the shades in the jar, then garnet shellac may be what you are looking for. It will take multiple posts to explain working with shellac.

Video-Around Erie

I took this video last weekend. For those of you from the Houseblogs.net that may be viewing this, I just wanted you to see what it is like during winter in our little city. It can be fun if you like winter sports. Erie has many Victorian and Crafstman houses. The older houses sell pretty cheap but the taxes are pretty high in the City of Erie. But if you want to find an otherwise cheap area to live and restore a house, Erie is it!
Video below has no sound.


Blip.tv

Picture of Medium Sheen Waterlox on Oak

Here is a picture of how shiny the "medium sheen" Original Waterlox turned out on my white oak woodwork. I have multiple coats of the dewaxed, garnet shellac first to build up the color and then 3 hand rubbed coats of the Waterlox Original. It was still too shiny, I thought. So I have added another coat with some flattening agent added to it that I haven't taken a picture of yet. I'll take pictures of the finished product when I'm done.

Finishing Wood

I have been pondering what finish to put on the oak floors. I bought a can of Waterlox back in 2005 and it has been sitting in the back of the refrigerator
since then. It has been opened and a little of it used so I must have
tested it on something but I don't remember it (so many projects going
on at once!) I'm lucky it is still good and didn't gel up. Maybe keeping
it in the refrigerator and that it had its metal plug replaced under
the cap has kept it fresh.

I have half my living room oak woodwork finished in several coatings of dewaxed garnet shellac. I decided to go over the top of it with the Waterlox
I have. I have the Original "medium sheen". I took extra fine steel
wool over the shellac to make sure it will get a good bond. It is so
easy to put on. It is just like rubbing baby oil on the wood! But is
does smell and doesn't dry for several hours. I had gotten used to the
smell but when my husband came home he immediately asked what that smell was.

The "medium sheen" was too shiny for oak to suit my taste. I added a little Shellac Flatt to the Waterlox on the final coat and am pleased. In a few days when it's cured, I'm going to rub some "dark oak" Black Bison Wax on it to give that satin sheen (not shine).

The problem with doing the floors with Waterlox will be
the dry time. I'm going to have to do small sections of the floor at a
time so we can step around it. Shellac would have been so much easier
but it has its drawbacks. Occasional cat accidents (hairballs) ruins
the finish. An area rug over the shellac would probably stick to it in
the summer humidity. You can see what a mess the shellac turned into when the old carpet was pulled up. The foam pad had melted into it so I had to
strip it. See pictures here.
So Waterlox it will be, one small section at a time.

Please Make It Stop! (pic)

We complain if it doesn't snow (global warming!!) and then we complain when it does, oh, that's global warming, too?

My husband came home in what I call a "blizzard". I wasn't raised in these parts (California girl) so every time
a little snow falls I think I need to stay in the house. He looked
outside and my dear husband, born and raised here in Erie, asked if I
wanted to take a nighttime walk in the snow (blizzard).

Oh, this brought back a fond memory of a midnight blizzard walk when we
lived, for a short time, in the Chicago area (Crystal Lake). It was so
cold that night (about zero degrees) that the moisture in the air froze
into bright little crystals and night had turned bright like day with
twinkling stardust everywhere. I took that walk so bundled up it was
hard to move. The moisture of my breath froze on my neck scarf that was
covering my face.

It was no where near that cold tonight but it
was extra bright out for being so late. The snow was piling up fast. It
was nice to bundle up and feel the cold snow hit my face and cause
frostbite. Really, it was fun and I got my fingers out of my gloves long
enough to snap this photo. Actually, it really was much snowier and
deeper than the picture portrays. Pictures lie with fish size and snow
depth. :-)

Free Historic Home Repair Videos-Interesting

I'm always searching for free home improvement videos. If you like looking at "how-to" videos you may want to check these guys out. It is very interesting how they repaired some antique beams and clapboards, etc. These may give someone an idea of how to attempt some of these things. See their link below. It's free, when you get to their site, just click on their links.

o Timber Repairs
o Exterior Wood 1, Clapboard Repair
o Exterior Painting 4: Surface Prep, Wet Abrasive Scrub
o Exterior Painting 2: Steam Paint Removal
o Exerior Painting 3: Ground Protection, Joint Cleaning
o Steam Paint Removal, testing
.
http://historichomeworks.phovi.com/

Anyone Use Waterlox On Their Floors?

Soon I'll have to order a finish for my stripped oak floors. Originally they were shellac but I couldn't save it as the foam under the 50(?)-year-old carpet was ground into it in a lot of places. I have cats and on occasion they "yak-up" on the wood floors so I'm thinking I may use something else.

I think Waterlox is suppose hold up better than shellac. I don't like polyurethane floors. My shellac floors and stairs were not very slippery and that is the other big issue.

Anyone have Waterlox floors, are they slippery? Are they holding up well to foot traffic?

My Paslode Nailer is Worth the Price

I was a bit scared about nailing that oak trim back on the newel post as I thought it may split being it is very hard and old. I was going to drill little, tiny holes first and then use finish nails but the minute drill bit I bought was still a hair too big for the finish nails.

I decided to try my Paslode cordless, angled, finish nailer that I bought a few years ago and had used on the old oak door trim in the dining room without any splitting. I hadn't used it in several months and after multiple false trigger pulls (and my husband walking away from holding the trim after several negative attempts to shoot the nails) I changed the fuel cell, charged the battery and got it working again. It's always fun to try and lure your helper back after so many "wait a minute, let me try it again, I think its working now" attempts.

It was really hard for my husband to hold the pieces level while I was pushing down on the gun and angling it upwards into the trim in order for the nail gun to fire. But we managed to get it on straight and most of the nails don't even need to be countersunk. I don't know how we would of gotten it on there straight hitting it with a hammer. The best part was that these nails didn't split that super-hard, antique oak trim.


I'll have to paint the silver-colored nails and coat them with shellac so they don't show. This nail gun was one of my more expensive tool purchases but I will be using it a lot, what a time saver! They are a bit tempermental, though. Mine jammed last year and I had to take it in to be fixed. They were able to pull the jammed nails out and the repair shop didn't even charge me a cent. That's a first!

See all of my recent posts here.
See the projects I have completed at this link My Website.
Houseblogs.net
Oldhouses.com

Newel Post Getting Its Crown-Finally

I started the staircase, lets just say it was over 4 years ago and leave it at that. Nothing is so boring as stripping those staircases. You never get done. And I didn't finish it yet. But the stair railings are down to the last step. I just need to wax them. The garnet shellac has been applied and smoothed for the last time and now I'm ready to take my #0000 steel wool and apply my dark wax. It smells so good!

I waxed the top part of the newel post already because I need to put the trim back on the top. I don't know what the actual name is for it, but I refer to the trim as the "crown". I took it off when I stripped the stairs because I read that the builder often put the house's original blueprints down inside the newel post. I needed to take that top part off and the crown hid the joint between the pieces. But mine was empty. I hope I don't split the wood nailing it back on there. I'm excited getting that piece back on there where it belongs after all this time.


note* Notice the window trim behind the newel post in the picture is too dark. That was one of my first projects when we moved in. I stained it too dark and used a different finish, I don't even recall what I used for that, possibly a poly. But it is way too dark. I learned from it. I'll redo that at some point.

The Tiffany Exhibit at Carnegie Was Fabulous

Last Saturday (Jan 13th) my husband treated me to a day in Pittsburgh to visit the Tiffany Gallery that ran through last Monday at the Carnegie Museum of Art. I was so impressed with the color. The depth of color of the glass just takes your breath away. Printed pictures just can not capture it. There were paintings by Louis Comfort Tiffany, too. I didn't know he was such a good painter. The jewelry, glass and metal work was so beautiful. He definetly had good taste and demanded quality. There was a large floor lamp that looked like an outdoor light post with the most beautiful metal and glass work on it. You should really go and see his work if the exhibit comes to a museum near you.

At Carnegie they still have some of the Tiffany desk sets there until April 29th. Also in the museum was Rembrandt's etchings through Feb 11th. You can see the schedule at the above link. What a great day trip it is.

You could take pictures in the other parts of the museum if you didn't use it for the internet or to be published, but they didn't let you take pictures in the gallery where the Tiffany exhibit was. I'm glad I asked before I whipped my camera out. There was security everywhere. It would have ruined my day to be strong-armed out of there.

Literal Pain in the Butt and Crossword Puzzles

Now and again I get this pain in the buttocks. Down deep, stabbing pain. I don't know from one step to the next if I'll practically faint from the pain or will be perfectly all right. It can be gone as fast as it came. I think it is Sciatica. But by the time I make a doctors appointment it is gone. I look like Igor, dragging my leg behind me.

This gives me that great opportunity to blog, do crossword puzzles, you know, be lazy. When I'm blogging, I'm not working on the house.

I got a Dell crossword puzzle book for Christmas. It has a variety of puzzles, easy to hard. I have gotten 1/2 through the book and have now resorted to tearing the answer page out from the back, crossing out the puzzle answers of the ones I've already done and having the answer there right next to the puzzle I'm doing. It is cheating but it is faster that way. I'm no longer going to stress over a 3 letter word for Lincoln's bill: slang. I looked at the answer and I just didn't get it. I started to think mabye it was talking about Lincoln, a type of car, it had fins in the rear in the olden days. So I asked my husband, just to make me feel better (I knew he wouldn't get it either). He said, "Fin". I was so frustrated, I didn't want him to know the answer. "How do you know that?! How would I know that? I never heard of that before, dog gone it!! Why would anyone call it a fin?". Even cheating with the answers haven't stopped the stress.

See all of my recent posts here.
See the projects I have completed at this link My Website.
Houseblogs.net
Oldhouses.com

I'll Refer Them to My Worst Enemy - Part 2

Read part 1 here.

After all that time and stress, we thought it finally got fixed....

• It rained and water came streaming down the walls of the garage, starting just above where the roof and walls meet and it was wet high up. See photo. It wasn't raining when the photo was taken. It was a lot worse than the photo when it rained. You can see all the mold that was going on.
  
  We called the contractor back out and the roofer showed up and looked at it. Said that water higher up was just wicking up. Said it was the gutter system, that it was clogged and water was feeding behind the flashing. It was old and we needed a new one. Well, just great! We can't see what's going on on the outside as it is way up on the second story and that side of the house borders the neighbor's fenced yard so we really can't see anything unless we were on top of the garage. We took his word for it.
  


• We called a couple gutter guys that didn't return my calls and finally got Home Depot to came out and look at it but he said the job was too small for them. They have a minimum. Ok, that was a week lost waiting to find that out. We finally found another guy that came out and looked at it and said he'd be back out soon. It took a couple of weeks before he showed up.



• When he did show up it turned out he was a really nice guy. Pushed the gutter out to look at it and said everything is as it should be. He could replace it but it wouldn't stop the leak. He took a hose up on the roof and said the water was pooling towards the bottom of the roof, that it flattened out too much for shingles. He said he has seen that before. The ice and water shield doesn't always stop leaks if the slope is pretty flat. Over a hundred dollars but cheap for the time he put into it and he was paying a second employee and had the machines all fired up to make new gutters. It's just that the roof still leaks and it wasn't a gutter problem.
  


• We called the roofers back and told them that the gutter guy said it wasn't the gutter, it was the roof that was leaking. The roofer said, "what does a gutter guy know about roofs". My husband told him, "look, you told us it was the gutter so we paid to have a gutter guy out and he says it is the roof." The roofer said he would be out to look at it.


• Nothing, nothing and nothing. Mold is really bad now, the inside of the garage, even on the first floor near the foundation wall, was saturated and slimy. Another couple of weeks goes by. I see the roofer pull up in front of my house when I was working on our front porch stairs. I wave. They go to the neighbors house. Apparantly the neighbor talked to them while they worked on our house and they contracted them to do some work on theirs. When I saw them go to the neighbors house I was so livid I couldn't even go outside. I knew I would lose it.


• Christmas came and went and we made some more phone calls asking when they were coming out as we still have water streaming into our garage. They said their workers were not showing up for work because of the holidays. How nice they all got such long holidays.
  


• My husband had had it and had made it known to them. Well, last Friday the son of the owner of this construction company comes out with the roofer. They look at the mess and said it looks like the ice and water shield isn't keeping the water out. NO DAH, do you think??!!!! They said the roofer would be out the next day, Saturday, to take the shingles off of the lowest part of the roof and put a membrane of some sort down instead. I told them we couldn't be home (had an appointment in Pittsburgh and also went to see the Louis Comfort Tiffany exhibit) but they said they could do it without going into the garage.


• We returned Saturday evening and I could see nothing was done. But it had rained and was kind of windy.


• I'm not sure what the conversation Monday morning was between my husband and the company, but I was super surprised Monday afternoon to hear hammering on the garage roof. I didn't go out and greet them this time as I figured the guy was pretty mad being sent out in 25 degrees weather. But who should be mad here?
  


• If I had to do it over again, I'd put on tin or steel roof panels myself. You can't see the garage roof even from the upstairs windows, only from the next street over between the houses. Even though I am afraid of being up high, I'd get used to it eventually, and that would have been less stress than going through the last 4 1/2 months.

It hasn't rained yet to find out if it is fixed. I'm crossing my fingers.
See all of my recent posts here.
See the projects I have completed at this link My Website.
Houseblogs.net
Oldhouses.com

I'll Refer Them to My Worst Enemy - Part 1

I want to do most of the work in our old house myself. But when the garage roof leaked, we thought we would hire a contractor as there are so many other things that needed to be done. The garage roof is what is called a shed roof, it only slants in one direction and has only a slight slope to it. It was time to take years of old roofing off. It is two stories high and is the main reason I didn't particularly want us to mess with it. It all started innocently enough way back in September of 2006......

• We called a well-known building contractor in the area that was referred to us by a happy customer. They were out in about a week to give us the estimate. They would use shingles with an ice and water shield. They said you can use shingles on an almost flat roof as long s you have that membrane down first. Ok, they're the experts so it must be OK. They said they would fit us in between larger jobs.
  
  


• Week one, two, three went by. No one showed up. Water was ruining the upstairs heart-pine floor of the garage. We had plastic layed down and the drips were so random that buckets couldn't begin to catch it all. Water was pretty much everywhere. We called again, they said they'd get to us.
  



• Week four and five. We were ready to call someone else but figured we'd have to start all over on the waiting list with the new guys.



• Week six, success!! But only after some more phone calls.


• The equipment they took down our little driveway to fix the roof, ruined the yard and took out the neighbors brick border. When they gave us the estimate they said they would come out first and measure the driveway to make sure they could get the equipment in. Obviously they didn't. They missed our house's brick support pillars by only a couple of inches and pushed the dirt up hard against the pillars. We won't know if any real damage was down under the dirt. Ruts 8 inches deep where they cut the corner into our driveway and cement was chipped off the curbing. But, anything was almost acceptible by then just to get the water out of the garage.
• They cleaned up pretty good. We found a few nails around. Aahh, it was finally done. But, yes, that is not the end of the story. I'll be posting part 2.
  
  

I Found More Free Woodworking Videos - Just Click

I came across The Wood Whisperer on the Blip.tv site. These humorous instructional wood-related videos are free, just click on them. There is a series on wood finishes, one on jointers. He has 16 videos and a promo right now but is adding more on different subjects in the near future. His videos have really nice resolution. When working on an old house it pays to be able to do some woodwork. Here is the link. Scroll down a little on his page to see all the videos.

The Wood Whisperer

Don't Be This Girl - DIY Danger #1

You see crown molding, the ceiling and if you look carefully, there is a hook where my small crystal chandelier used to hang. I moved the light to the other side of the room to make room for my new floor lamp we bought at the Erie Estate Buyers. When I moved the light, I noticed the ceiling could use a touch up.

Now visualize a step ladder up against the wall and a DIY'er up on the ladder with a cup of paint in one hand, a brush in the other. Now visualize this DIY'er with her long hair put up in a bun-like thing with clips and clamps and whatever is needed to keep the hair out of one's face while working. Very carefully I ran paint along the edge of the molding. In other words, I got my face right in there with my tongue out in ernest effort and .....

What the heck!! Somehow, someway, my hair got caught in that hook. I couldn't bend down to put the paint down and I'm somewhat leaning backwards on the ladder steps with my hair tight into the hook. I can't reach up with my hands as they are full and I can't turn around as it hurts. I'm just slightly off balance but am alright if I don't panic. What runs through my mind is how do these things happen? They happen all the time! I'm home alone, doing something that I thought was pretty safe.

Slowly I start wagging my head left and right, a little up and down. If someone saw me they probably would have thought I was bopping to a beat, winging my arms around dancing not knowing it's a balancing act. I manage to finally free myself minus some hairs that I really can't afford to give up. My neck muscles hurt for hours afterwards.

You don't read about that danger in those home improvement books.

Is Your Old Erie Home a Sears Kit Home?

Is your old Erie, PA area home a Sears Kit home? If it is, I'd like to feature it on my blog. Email me pictures at thisolderiehouse@verizon.net if you'd like to share your pictures.

How do you know if you have a Sears Kit home? If your house was built between 1908 and 1940 you can go to this link Sears Kit Homes and check the pictures and the floor plans.

Remember, often there were later additions, remodels or porch enclosures done to a home. Sometimes the architectural features like the brackets on the eves are taken off and the eves boxed in so your house may not look exactly like the pictures. Sometimes it takes an expert to tell (and there are a few actual experts out there that do travel around the US verifying Sears Kit homes.) But for our purposes, if your house has most of the features for a particular model, please email me some pictures of your house and I'll feature them.

If you can't find your house in the Sears Kit catalogue, try this link for homes from 1908 to 1954 Aladdin Kit Homes. I'd like to feature those, too.

A Card Cabinet Scraper vs Sandpaper

If only I had known sooner. I have gone through so many packages of sandpaper trying to smooth out the shellac I applied to the woodwork. Friction and/or heat balls up the shellac into little corns on the sandpaper making it useless almost after the first stroke. Using mineral spirits with wet/dry sandpaper on shellac does help but I still had to use a lot of sandpaper.

I had a card cabinet scraper but I never could get it to work well for me. I knew I didn't have the right sharpening technique. That was then, this is now. I'm the happy owner of a new sharpening system for my cabinet scraper and have become a scraping fool (among other things, ha).

I doubt I'll have to use much more sandpaper because my shellac finish is now flat and smooth, ready to be waxed with 0000 steel wool and dark wax. It is so much cheaper to use the scraper than buying all that sandpaper. Of course you always need a little fine grit on some projects but for the woodwork, steel wool is my last step.

The only downside to this is the curved areas. I think I'll have to purchase a curved scraper for that. I still need the sandpaper for the moldings.

I'll let you know how the curved scraper works for the curved moldings.

Still Thrilled With Antique Gift

by: F W Guerin of St. Louis
When showing my sister around Pennsylvania and New York during her visit from California, we happened across an antique shop in Westfield, NY. I spotted a beautiful framed antique print of a little girl and a St. Bernard-type dog. I loved it but wasn't sure if I should spend that much money. With many more shops to look at we moved on. My sister and I often referred back to that wonderful print.

On Christmas Eve a large, wrapped, what looked to be a frame was in my pile of gifts. I don't know how he managed to get to NY and back without my knowledge but my wonderful husband did it. I just adore the print and it goes well in our old house.

I have come to find out through hours of researching the internet, that this is actually a photogravure from between 1850s to 1900. I had never heard of photogravure or intaglio before. So this print was from an actual photograph that was etched onto a copper plate and retouched with an engraver. That is why it looks a lot like it is a picture of a painting. I'm including a few closeups to see the hand engraving. I guess the process wasn't entirely reliable enough to not have to touch up until the first decade of the twentieth century. If you click on the dog to enlarge it, you will see the whiskers were touched up, the background I think was added or was a backdrop. I find it all fascinating. It looks a lot like a painting. I found other original photos by the photographer in the Library of Congress but not this one.

The photographer that took this photo served in the Civil War. He was from St. Louis, MO. Luck would have it that we will spend a few days this summer in St. Louis for a conference. I know I'll be scanning the library there for info on the artist while my husband is working.



Click to enlarge.

Epoxy for Rotten Wood

I came across this post at www.woodcentral.com in regards to repairing rotten wood. I have used lots of different epoxy products so that's nothing new but I found the fact that you can thin it to where it will wick into the rotten wood interesting and would save quite a bit of money. After treating you can then make your larger repairs with the Bondo-type epoxy. I also like the idea of adding sawdust to the regular strength epoxy to make a wood filler. By the way, woodCentral is a great website for woodworking information. See excerpt from their post below.


The product you're thinking of is called C.P.E.S. (Clear Penetrating Epoxy Sealer) and it's common in the boating industry. It's a thin, two-part epoxy that wicks itself into the compromised wood fibers before hardening. It's not the be-all to end-all, but it can buy time until permanent repairs are made.

If you can not find C.P.E.S. or if the price bothers you (and it probably will), you can achieve similar results by thinning a standard two-part epoxy. If you go this route, use acetone as the solvent (please wear gloves and make sure the area is ventilated) and don't dilute any more than 30%. This is a case where less is more and any further dilution will alter the product to the point where it may not pop (harden). Even at 30% it may be a problem (depending on the brand of epoxy you get) so be sure to experiment a bit first.

Epoxy can also be a bit picky on the temperature and humidity it likes. You want warm (70) and dry. If the humidity is too high the epoxy could blush as it cures. This blush is an opaque coating. If this occurs, wash it off with water and it should go away.

The advantage of rolling your own thinned epoxy is you'll have "regular" thickness epoxy left over. You can then mix it with sawdust to thicken it and use it to fill any voids etc. in the wall.

Lastly - minimize sanding (eliminate it if possible) and make sure you're work area is extremely well ventilated.

The Completed Front Stairs (pics)

What a difference a few nice days make. I finished the stairs and one of the wrought-iron railings. The other railing is still in the garage half prepped. I'm trying to get all the old paint and rust off before painting but it is quite the job. The weather is turning and I will have to do it in the basement. But that's OK as I bought a respirator so I can paint safely down there.

So here is the pictures of my hard work. Everything about these stairs had to be custom as nothing was "standard". The stairs had to stay at the old dimensions because the railings were made to fit those dimensions. The treads are of yellow pine sealed with a sealer and painted 3 times on all sides. The risers and and stringers are of pressure-treated yellow pine and finished in garnet dewaxed shellac. Supposedly shellac is not good for outdoors but I have found the dewaxed shellac to hold up well in our wintery climate. The open, covered porch sides on the inside are the original 90-year-old beadboard that was finished with shellac under decades of paint. The boards were still in good condition so I stripped the paint off and used dewaxed garnet shellac and after 4 years of snow build up and humid summers they still look like new. If it does fail, all you have to do is recoat it, it desolves the former coat and bonds to it. I mitered the moldings under the treads with painted poly molding and caulked with clear paintable caulking around all the cracks and where the railings were mounted. One railing to go but the stairs are done.

Blow Drying Front Porch

I have been painting indoors for 2 weeks as our Erie weather just does not cooperate. My dining room table turned into my paint station. I rolled up the area rug and put it aside. My thought was that my oak floors are stripped but not refinished and the top of my dining room table needs to be refinished so what the heck. I put an old shower curtain over the top and painted the parts to the steps. I bought a box fan to help the drying process and set it on a chair facing the table. I finally got the stairs together a couple days ago and just completed drying the painted molding and put them on.

Yesterday was the first nice day I could work outside as Thanksgiving day, as nice as it was, was filled with other things. I scraped and painted the top of the porch where the stairs attach. I needed to do it before winter as the wood was exposed in a few places where the paint had chipped off.

The sun was out and it seemed to be going well when all of a sudden fog rolled in. I couldn't just leave wet paint there so I grabbed the blow dryer and an extension cord and spent my afternoon blow-drying the front part of the porch. What a waste of my time. Of all the things I could be doing I spent the foggy afternoon feeling pretty silly with that blow dryer (a few honks and shaking heads from passing cars). It took forever but it worked. I have tried the blow-drying method a couple of times before when I get caught waiting too long to get ready for winter. It has successfully dried caulking with snow flakes falling from the sky.

Lots of Online Woodworking Streaming Videos

Another raining day in Erie keeps me from finishing up my front stairs. Everything is done except screwing it all together.

I was internet surfing for woodworking videos and came across a wonderful site by the Long Island Woodworkers club. They have the videos online for anyone to see free if you have Windows Media Player (which just about everyone has already). Of course you'll have to have DSL because many of the videos are 15 minutes, some shorter, some longer. They cover lots of woodworking subjects. Here is the link. They are free to watch.

http://www.liwoodworkers.org/media/video/onlinelibrary.asp

My New Scroll Saw - I Found All The Lumber

I went to Kraft Lumber last week after having lost more than half a day the day before at the big box stores looking for the right lumber for my porch stairs. It wouldn't have been so hard if they were 4ft wide as most places carry treads that width. But I was able to get the 6 ft ones at Kraft and also the boards to make the stringers, risers and framework. The store stringers only had a 7-inch rise and I need 8 so I need to make those myself.

My sister was looking at dryers to put into the victorian house she is restoring in Pittsburgh, so we headed back up to Lowes in a last ditch effort to see if she could get one delivered before she headed back to California. While she was doing that I went to my favorite department, tools. And there it was, a scroll saw and it had a stand. It looked to be a nice one made by Delta. I need to cut the stair stringers out of 2 x 12 boards and I wanted a band or jigsaw for that but I sure have been wanting a scroll saw for other projects I have done. They only had the display model and I bought it at 20% off. I want to try and make some victorian scroll work for my sister's victorian house.

I spent over an hour trying to put the scrollsaw stand together. The instructions were absolutely terrible. The legs of the stand were sticking out in the wrong directions. I knew that wasn't right. After trying every kind of combination, I got it put together right. I finally hoisted that saw up into position and tightened it down. Nothing left but to figure out how the blade attaches and how to use it. I hope it isn't as hard as putting that dumb stand together.

[update: The scroll saw was missing a piece, wouldn't you know Murphy's Law strikes again. I contacted the store but this was their last one. They told me that I could probably return it to the other store in town but sheez I spent so much time putting the stand together! Instead I contacted Delta (bought out by Black and Decker) and they are sending me the part. If it works I'll keep it, if not I'll take it back.]
[update2: They sent me the part but it turned out there was one more spring missing. They sent it right out and it is all working. I'm very satisfied with the customer service at Black and Decker. Also I bought a top quality Dewalt jigsaw and it cut the stringers like butter. It was one of my best tool investments.]

Removing the Front Steps

This cold weather isn't going away so I went out to tackle the front stairs anyway. Armed with hammer, crowbar and gloves I gave my steps the once over. It wasn't going to come apart easily. But as I hit away, I noticed (finally) that the stairs were free standing. The whole thing was held up by its own framework and I was able to just pull the whole thing away from the house. It wasn't even bolted to the side of the house. But they were held tight to the house only because of the wrought-iron railings. I removed those the other day. The railings are very, very heavy. It took both my sister and I to move them into the garage. I haven't painted them yet because the weather has been too cold.

I took one of the stringers from the old steps to the stores with me (Home Depot and Lowes). As with everything else in this wonderful old house, you can't find premade ones that will be the same. In order to fit the area and the height, I have to make my own using the old stringers as a template. I can't even get the right size pressure-treated boards to match the old ones. I can find it in white pine but that wouldn't hold up. Tomorrow I'll go to Kraft Lumber to see what I can find there. Maybe I can find cedar or redwood. Redwood would be perfect but that is hard to find anywhere in the East. I'll also look for southern yellow pine. I plan on painting the steps this spring anyway. I almost wasted a whole day just looking for the right kind of wood. It gets so frustrating.

Rusty Wrought Iron and Rotten Front Steps

I've put off this job long enough. I'm running out of time as winter is knocking on the door.

Yesterday, I removed two wrought-iron railings from the front steps. There is some rust on them that needs attention. I have been searching the internet about how to prep the iron when I came across a product that you can apply right over rust. It reacts chemically with the rusty iron and turns the rust harmless leaving a coating that protects. I'm going to do a little more research but then I think I may give it a try. It uses the same chemicals that they use on ancient artifacts to preserve them. But what are the odds finding that product in Erie? I'll let you know, maybe it is in all the stores and I just was unaware of it.

As far as the steps go, I'm ready to start tearing them out and using the old pieces as templates for buying new wood. I hope I don't run into any odd setup. Please, just once, I'd like to have a generic setup that goes according to plan. My plan is to use pressure treated lumber as western cedar would be too expensive. I won't be able to paint the new steps for several months due to the weather but that is the recommendation for pressure-treated wood anyway. It needs lots of time to dry before it holds paint well.

I'll take pictures and let you know how this project goes.

Bathroom Built-ins Completed - Sept 7 06

If video doesn't work use this link
http://blip.tv/file/70786/

I took on the project to use the wasted space behind the wall in the bathroom. The cabinets on the left are the original and I built the bank of cabinets on the right. There were lots of problems I had to deal with along the way, mostly things not being level or square, such are things in old houses and life. The thing I like best is the vanity area I made.? Now I can organize everythigs as I have the space to do it. I think I used about every tool I have to complete this project. The worst part of the project, other than sweat rolling down into my eyes, was having to carry all the tools back down from the 2 story to the basement. oh, and that plaster, lathe cleanup, awful!!

Humidity Woes

New built-in cabinets in the bathroom:

Nothing gets done when it rains all the time. The humidity in the house is at 73% according to my meter. So what was suppose to be an easy fun painting day turned into a waiting-for-the-spackle-to-dry day. I sanded the first coat of spackle from yesterday and put on a second coat to make sure I would get a smooth transition from the old cabinets and the new ones. I turned the fan on it do help but all it did was circulate wet air. I hate humid days.

So, instead, I worked on updating some of the pages of my website. I'm learning to use video, which is fun and I'll be using it a lot on this website. I hope to stop stammering as I get used to talking in the videos.

I learned to really like the spackle called Fast 'n Final. The first time I used it I just scooped some out of the tub. I didn't stir it. It crumbled and was hard to use. I almost threw it out. But I tried it again and this time I stirred it. There was a lot of liquid on the bottom that I didn't know about he first time. It works great! It is the best thing for the final coat, I think.

Bathroom built-ins update aug 28, 2006

Click to Play

I have built-in drawers in the bedroom that are behind the wall in the bathroom.? There was some unused space so I tore out the plaster and lathe and added additional built-in cabinets in the bathroom.? This video shows where I'm at in the project.

Painting Radiators (Before/After)

I took on the project of painting our bathroom radiator. It had some chipping paint and the color was more of a cream than a white. We just recently painted our bathroom walls white and the cream looked dirty.

I cleaned the radiator really good with a vacuum and a radiator brush. The radiator brush was hanging in the stairwell of our basement when we moved in. I never knew what it was for, it looked like an extra long bottle brush with black bristles. I thought maybe it was to clean out a wood stove that perhaps the house had at one time. I never lived in a house with radiators before this one so I was clueless.

It wasn't until recently when I was cleaning the radiator with a Swiffer (I have 3 cats that like the radiator in the winter and the hair, oh my!) that I had a light bulb go on. I was thinking, "If only they made something that would fit between those little horizontal pipes and had bristles on it, or something of the sort, it would make cleaning these radiators much easier." Then I remembered that brush in the stairwell. Yep, fits perfectly and obviously is what it was made for.


After the good cleaning, I took a cloth soaked in denatured alcohol and cleaned the surfaces really, really good. Then I took a wire brush and a scratchy pad and made sure I got all the loose paint off. I slid paper under the feet of the radiator and cardboard behind it and used Rustoleum white spray paint. I have a few more places to touch up when it dries. I think I'll also coat it with the same white paint (acylic) that I used on the walls as the white doesn't match exactly.

So far it looks so much cleaner and nicer being white.

An additional bonus of this project is the date I found stamped on the radiator inside. Niagara 2-17. I had been wondering if the radiators were original or if they were added later. The house was built late in 1917 so now I know they were probably installed when the house was built.

Tip #2 - Looking Behind Walls

This is probably obvious but I didn't think of it until I had my eyeball and flashlight sharing a small hole I cut in the wall to see if there were pipes or wires behind the wall. I wanted to put in a deep built-in medicine cabinet.

I made the hole big enough to put my digital camera through it and snap pictures from all directions. I almost dropped the camera when I was trying to press the button with one of my fingers. (there wasn't room to use the other hand.) Put the strap around your wrist or you may be tearing down the whole wall to retrieve it.

Anyway, after reviewing the pictures I could see I had nothing in the way at all so I was able to cut out the area to the size of the medicine cabinet and then build it according to the space available. I made mine 24 inches high by 12 inches wide by 8 inches deep. Now we have a his and hers mirrored built-in medicine cabinets. I love it!

Tip for Removing Paint From Metal Hardware

Somewhere (I want to give credit due but I don't remember) maybe it was on a TV show like HGTV or in a magazine I read that an easy and non toxic way to remove paint from hardware was to soak it in hot vinegar. They used a pot with simmering vinegar and added their antique doorknobs and hinges to get the paint off.

I'm painting my bathroom right now and I painted the sliding door lock to match the door. Latex on metal just didn't look good. So I decided to remove the latex and use a metal spray paint like Rustoleum.

The latch is small so I took a small bowl of white vinegar and heated it to a simmer in the microwave and dropped the latch in it. I came back about 5 minutes later and there was some kind of action going on as there were minute bubbles forming on the surface of the paint. I took a spoon and moved the latch around and the latex fell right off. No scrubbing!

I'm always a skeptic, though. I don't know if this only works with latex but it sure is nicer than having to use stripper or steel wool to get it off. I guess I should have tried it in just hot water first to see if that is the reason it came off or if the vinegar is the thing that made it come off so easy.

I'll have to test further.