I was sitting last night in the kitchen staring at a board we found around here long ago. The board is painted white on one side. On the other, painted in black on the bare wood, is “May 30, 1857.”

Whoever painted that date on the board took time to do it with style. Obviously, the day meant something to somebody. Was it when they finished constructing a room or an outbuilding, a structure that no longer exists? What happened here, on a late May day nearly 153 years ago, worthy of being documented?

As I stared at the mysterious board, a winter storm was burying the house in heavy snow. The annoyingly busy state highway out front was covered with snow and there were long periods when no vehicles passed. It was late at night, so Billy across the street wasn’t riding his snowmobile or ATV.  The TV wasn’t on and my son wasn’t loudly playing Borderlands on the Xbox 360.

With the exception of a bubbling fish tank, and the occasional rumble of the furnace, the house was silent. Given that this property is only yards from the highway, is surrounded by neighbors with vehicles and power equipment and serves as shelter to children and pets, silence is a rarity.

Noticing the lack of sound, staring at an inscription from bygone days presumably handwritten by a prior owner, I was transfixed and transported.  I bet most nights here in 1857 were similarly quiet. I definitely could like that.

After the  ”Good night, John-Boys, Good night Mary-Ellens” were spoken, the only sounds in most of these rooms during the mid 19th Century were flickering candles or oil lamps and maybe the pencil scratchings of a man at a kitchen table, a fellow compelled to write about the silence.

The “ceiling” of the front porch is painted light blue because … well because that’s just what you MUST do with a Victorian front porch. A sky-blue porch ceiling was dictated by our forebears. It is a rule carved in stone, one never to be challenged.

You will hear various explanations for why The Wise Ones imposed this law. These include: 1)  The color prevents flying insects from hanging around because they feel they are in mid-air and exposed to bats and birds. 2) For the same reason, the color prevents nesting and web-building bugs _ your bees and spiders _ from setting up shop. 3) The color honors Mother Nature’s choice of the hue we see when we raise our eyes to Heaven.

I assert the bug-prevention claims are bogus, unless the daddy long-legs on my ceiling just don’t care about having that floating-in-mid-air feeling.

As for a sky-blue porch ceiling serving as a testament to The Creator or even just The Natural World, well I suggest maybe I should paint the thing a dreary gray. That’s what I’m seeing when I glance skyward today and far too often in 2009.

I do like the blue. Of course, it needs to be re-painted. I think I’ll choose a lighter color this time around. If I were really artistic, I’d paint some clouds on it as well. If I go down that road, why not throw in a few painted bats and birds just to keep the insects off-guard?

It’s generally a really bad idea to put off repairing a leaking roof. That said, the roof over the front porch has been leaking, on and off, for way too many years.

It is a flat, tin roof that slopes slightly away from the house. There are holes in the two corners farthest from the house, holes that connect to gutters. It was a system that worked well for a long time, but once a section of the roof developed a sag, trouble began.

Rain and melting snow forms a pool before it can get to the gutter on the south side. I’ve slabbed on many thick layers of roofing cement, attempting to prevent the water from working its way down through the roof of the porch. (Yes, it was sinful to cover a tin roof with roof cement). Those patches last a short while, but cracks from baking sun and freezing cold undermine my admittedly half-baked solution.

To fix this problem, I need to tear off at least half of the tin roof and repair the understructure so the slope is restored. It’s on the “to do” list, but it really needs to be bumped-up in terms of priority. I’m afraid to find the extent of rotting under there that’s been caused by dampness.

He Had A Ponytail and A Propane Torch

Already, one of the hard-to-find pieces of concave molding has fallen off.

Also, I really hate to see the porch ceiling get ruined. Of all the work done over the years, stripping paint off that ceiling ranks high on the list of jobs I never, ever want to do again.

Working on anything overhead is backbreaking, neck-numbing and shoulder-wrecking. To get that ceiling paint off as quickly as possible, I used a propane torch and a scraper.

I didn’t set the house on fire. Nor did I ignite my hair or clothing. Those are about the only good things I can say about holding over my head, for days and days, a torch and a scraper.

OK. I confess: I drank a little too much red wine tonight. I’m writing this with my head spinning a bit. It’s a Saturday and I need to just let go sometimes.

In fact, the temporary glow from the vino (in my defense, brought here by friends) helps me appreciate the beauty of what I’ve done. Am I “wine goggling” as I take a mental step back, take a minute to stare at a nicely-refurbished old window and feel happy?

Look, I know it’s just a window, an old piece of wood and glass. But only I know how utterly awful it appeared just a few months ago. Only I know the time it took for me to carefully remove all its caked-on old paint and its hardened, cracking glazing. One person in the world (that would be me) remembers the hours spent in the basement filling that window’s holes and crevices with wood putty before sanding, priming and painting it. Nobody else remembers the satisfying snap felt by me when I cut that pane of glass.

Not the End of the World

The ravings of a drunk? Perhaps. Charge me with Blogging While Intoxicated! But this little buzz  also allows me to look, with a more mellow nature, at the mountain of work that remains to be accomplished. I can forgive myself for the time it is taking. (One thing is certain: restoration progress is not happening tonight.)

In this tipsy state, I can look, without feeling overwhelmed, at the broken sash-weight rope dangling from a living room window. I can tell myself, “Yeah, I should have replaced that rope when I fixed those windows five years ago. Oh well. There are plenty of other windows that work just fine.” I’m not going to let this stuff drive me to drink.

I’ve never conducted a scientific analysis to find out how many layers of paint are on various parts of this house. It might be fewer than it seems. Maybe it’s only a couple very thick layers instead a dozen thin layers. Maybe some other crazy person in the distant past stripped all the woodwork because the accumulating paint just got to be too caked-on and gross.

I know there are paint-removing house restorers who somehow need to know the number of layers they’re stripping. Not me. I don’t care. I just want all the old junk gone. I want a clean slate. I want naked wood that can be sanded (God, I hate sanding), primed and covered in two coats of glistening, expensive, feminine color.

What About The Doors?

But I can understand why most people don’t bother taking off before putting on, and I don’t really condemn those who are happy piling on fresh paint every couple years. The fact that paint removal is tough work is only half of it. The more frustrating part is that you really can’t do it in a piecemeal fashion.

For example, I’m nearly done stripping the door frames and baseboards in the upstairs hallway. I could stop there, tell myself “at least it looks better than before,” get on with the painting and find another place to attack. In reality, though, I can’t.

For this job to be done properly, I need to also remove all the doors and rid them of their paint. That’s four doors, eight sides.

Doors aren’t that difficult to strip, but it sure is tempting to say, “Hell, they look fine. Let’s just sand ‘em down a bit and paint ‘em.” And here’s the biggest nugget of self-deception: “Nobody will know the difference.”

Do I need to even write the next sentence here? Do I need to tell you that, well, yeah, somebody will know the difference: Me. Every time I’d walk through one of those half-baked doors I’d remember how I took the lazy route. Any pride I gathered in doing a  thorough job on the other woodwork would be diminished. That’s just the way it goes.

I guess it’s a “pay now or pay later” situation like most other aspects of life.

I am trying to take an enlightened approach to the fact that it’s pretty much the dead of winter and, while I get sporadic tingles of that Spring Is Coming energy, the more powerful urge is to hibernate. Included in taking the enlightened approach is attempting to look at the bright side.

So here’s something bright: At least I haven’t had any ice jams on the roof this winter.

I purposely didn’t include the word “yet” at the end of that sentence. A big part of being pseudo-enlightened involves Staying Positive. Like this: It’s almost March. I haven’t suffered an ice jam yet. There’s no reason to think one will happen. So it won’t.

Brethren, let us pray. Because ice jams really suck. They are one of the several reasons many owners of old homes will swear that gutters are, indeed, of satanic design.

An ice jam, or ice dam, occurs when heat leaks through a snow-covered roof and melts a bit of the snow. The resulting liquid tries to leave the area by heading to the gutter. However, because the gutter is full of solid ice, the emancipated water cannot escape safely and it pools. Roofs tend to be waterproof when water flows in one direction (down), not backward.

Better A Yellow House Than Yellow Snow

I remember well the results of the worst ice dam here. It was back in the 90s. Water ran down the inside of the “mud room” wall, leaving ugly brown streaks and loosening some plaster. I also remember going up on the roof in a vain attempt to break the dam.

It’s no fun being atop a roof when the weather is cold enough to form ice jams. You could fall down and die. Maybe that’s one of the Devil’s goals in creating gutters. Catching leaves in the autumn is another.

I realize there are ways to prevent ice jams, including gutter heaters. Let’s just say I’d need a lot more Spring Fever, and cash, to embark on that particular project.

When we moved into the house, there was a radiator situated in the foyer almost directly below the thermostat for the furnace. I don’t know much about home heating design, but that didn’t seem to make much sense.

I might be mistaken (years of breathing airborne home renovation pollutants have taken their toll on my already limited supply of brain cells) but I think we removed the radiator when we put a piano in the foyer. The piano was eventually sold, but the radiator was never returned. Sticking a radiator right under a thermostat is kind of like creating a house-heating short-circuit, if you ask me.

On the other end of the spectrum is the woodstove. It’s in the dining room and it does a great job of heating the dining room. As for the living room, which is on the opposite side of the now radiator-less foyer … not so much. There was once a woodstove in the living room as well, but I took that out because it was an inefficient, cheap Ben Franklin stove that went through wood way too fast and made the room unbearably hot.

So, with the current set-up, you can break into an instant sweat walking through the dining room when the woodstove is cranking full-tilt, but begin shivering by the time you settle into the living room couch. OK, I’m exaggerating. Nevertheless, there are heat-distribution issues here that we just have to live with. Chalk it up to being part of the “charm” of an old house.

In winter months, the two residents of the house that get the most benefit of burning all that wood are the dogs. They will sleep for hours next to their warm, metal friend. Sometimes they become almost too hot to touch, but there doesn’t seem to be any discernible  internal organ damage taking place.

Since they are reaping most of the benefit, it would be nice if the dogs helped out with its use. I don’t expect them to split logs, but maybe they could bring in some sticks for kindling now and then. But we’re talking about Boston Terriers. When they bring in a stick, they jointly chew it to sawdust. Then they relax their tired jaws by flopping down, almost atop each other, as close as possible to the crackling stove.

Removing the old paint off the entire exterior of the house was onerous, but  it wasn’t the most obnoxious part of the outdoors renovation. That dubious honor, at least from the perspective of the neighbors, goes to the sanding phase.

I hate sanding. Some people hate disco. Some hate Rush Limbaugh. I hate sanding. And I don’t just hate sanding wood. I also hate sanding plaster. On too many occasions, I’ve taken the time to mix plaster patch, spread it into the cracks in the walls and ceilings, let it dry and then shy away from finishing the job because it entailed sanding.

Somebody Sand Me

So, if I’m repelled by sanding small plaster cracks, imagine my panic at sanding the entire exterior of a house. But there’s one thing that will make a guy come to terms with doing something he hates: A loud, dangerous power tool. As described here, I modified a docile Porter-Cable paint remover and turned it into a Sanding Beast that not only tore away all the nasty old wood that needed to be removed but also made me feel like a Manly Man while using it.

One slip of concentration and this sucker would have ripped a gouge in at least one of my body parts. I’d be deaf today had I not worn earplugs. It made so much sawdust that I not only wore a dust mask but I also donned a full-face motorcycle helmet so I could see what I was doing. That must have been food for derision by any onlookers: A crazy person wearing a sportbike helmet while he wrestled with a man-eating rotary sander as he was trying to balance himself on a 12-inch-wide plank suspended 20 feet in the air on wobbly pump-jack poles.

On one (OK, maybe more than one) occasion, the spinning 16-gauge disk did slip a bit and touched, for a split second, the power cable. Sparks flew as the insulation was shredded. Amazingly, I maintained my balance way up there on the teetering plank, despite the rush of fear-induced adrenaline. But I remember being annoyed that I then had to climb down to splice the severed wire and tape it up.

I’m sure the neighbors appreciated the brief period when quiet returned to the village.

I struggled for 17 years with the decision by this house’s prior owner to use tongue-and-groove pine boards as decking material. I don’t care how much wood preservative or paint you dump onto pine boards, they’re going to rot, especially when they make up the surface of a flat porch or deck.

A Snowstorm Hits The Deck

One of our friendly relatives gave us a big squeegee to wipe off water from the deck. I confess: I rarely used it. I’m not sure how much good it would have done because,  even though those tongues fit tightly into those grooves, plenty of water worked its way into the joints and stayed there squeegee or not.

So, for most of those 17 years, at least one summer day was spent replacing the worst of the decayed boards. I rarely replaced entire boards, choosing instead to cut away the bad sections. It was hokey, but I had other priorities and nobody (that I’m aware of anyway) crashed through and fell to their death on the brick patio below.

When the columns supporting the deck showed signs of rot in 2007, I knew the bullet needed to be bitten. All new columns were purchased and the pine got cut up for kindling. The new deck is pressure-treated. It’s sturdy and will last forever but it leaves something to be desired. The tongue-and-groove pine, when freshly painted, was more aesthetically pleasing than the run-of-the-mill pressure-treated planks that replaced them.

To an extent, I felt giving up on the high-maintenance pine was capitulation. Was I on a slippery slope that would lead to, God forbid, vinyl siding or replacement of  the roof slate with asphalt shingles?

Vinyl siding. Pressure-treated decking. Asphalt roofing material. None of it was available when this house was built and I do my best to avoid modern stuff. However,  the deck tonight is covered with snow. In the past, when the structure was still pine, every snowstorm got me to thinking about how all that white stuff was just water waiting to soak into those vulnerable cracks. I guess I can live with one less thing to worry about.