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.

Get Off the Ladder and Serve Us

I had a small window of opportunity this morning to continue working on the upstairs hallway. Nobody was around except for two dogs, a reptile, three birds and a pet rat (the friendly, domesticated kind) that has been flirting with Rat Death for Rat Eternity but keeps on eeking out its caged life.

Given that I’d be creating the usual noxious cloud of toxic, paint-stripping fumes, I shut as many doors as possible. This trapped the dogs in a place where they were unable to perform their usual Observe And Bark At Any Running Power Tool act.

They want to attack and destroy heat guns, Dustbusters and all other pieces of equipment that make whirring sounds. It’s cute, but there’s a time and a place for K9 tomfoolery and I had work to do.

So 30 minutes were happily spent doing the usual: Holding the heat gun in the left hand and the scraper in the right. Waiting for the eerie red glow to soften the stubborn paint. Pushing the sticky goo off the wood. Moving down another two inches.

But then came the part where I dropped the scraper. In trying to grab it, I bumped the ladder. That sent two of the other three scrapers crashing to the floor. I still had one left, meaning work could have continued. However, I then accidentally unplugged the heat gun from the extension cord while trying to give the thing a little more slack.

The usual blast of interestingly-mixed, four-to-12-letter-words was followed by a very quick descent from the ladder to plug in the heat gun and gather the far-flung scrapers. However, work was not to resume because the sudden silence revealed the moans of the trapped dogs.

Ignoring a whining dog is a risky endeavor. You never know if they’re just being manipulative by playing the “Dude, I gotta go potty” card while all they really want is freedom to attack the power tool. It’s a game they always win, since I don’t want to deal with the consequences of guessing wrong.

Work came to a halt. Once that respirator comes off, I’m usually ready to leave it off. The dogs went outside and returned in a nanosecond to stare at the Milk Bone box. The ladder stayed put. The window of opportunity closed with a thud.

I know people with shiny, happy new houses. I sometimes envy them.

OK, fine. I envy them quite a bit.

For one thing, they can have company over without needing to apologize for the step-ladder blocking access to the room, for the furniture pushed into the corner so that the stepladder could be set-up, for the fact that the stepladder wasn’t taken down because doing so would have entailed unraveling the thick , orange, heavy-duty extension cord that somehow got wrapped around its legs and for the Wagner #382 Electric Paint Remover left dangling in mid-air between those stepladder legs because it was red-hot and couldn’t be placed on ANY surface.

I could, and do, yak a lot about the deep satisfaction one finds in breathing new life into  a house that, let’s face it, became kind of crappy over the past century or two. Yeah, I used the word “crappy;” It wouldn’t be a “restoration” if the place wasn’t crappy. Ugly yellow exterior paint so thick it was falling off in quarter-inch-by-quarter-inch chips isn’t nice. It’s crappy! And that’s why it’s now ALL GONE.

What Lurks Within?

But it would also be pretty satisfying to be done with it. To be able to fling open that front door and offer adult beverages instead of apologies. To fret over dusting the furniture instead of moving it from an under-construction room to a yet-to-be-under-construction room.

Someday. That’s what I keep telling myself: Keep working, sucker. Someday a knock on the door won’t result in a panic attack. I might be using a wheelchair by then. Maybe just a walker.

I also keep telling myself that while shiny, happy new houses sure are nice, they can be lifeless and dull. If I ever get this seasoned citizen back on its wobbly feet, it’s crooked walls and wavy glass and skewed angles will tell some stories. I guess that’s what they call “character.”

I wasted most of yesterday morning trying to cut wood with a dull chainsaw. Correction: I spent most of yesterday morning trying to sharpen a dull chainsaw so that I could cut wood with a sharp chainsaw. I ended up with neither a sharp chainsaw or firewood, just a lost morning.

Sharpening a chainsaw is NOT like riding a bicycle. It’s something you can learn to do fairly well if you are really diligent and patient or have access to certain prescription-only pills. However, unlike riding a bicycle, sharpening a chainsaw is a skill that will abandon you if you ignore it. Use it or lose it, I guess.

Maybe I should just speak for myself on that, but somehow I know I’m not the only one. In fact, my buddy Mark told me  he finds chainsaw sharpening to be too much trouble. I think he used the word “impossible.” So he pays a guy $5 to do it. I know Mark is intellectually capable, dexterous and mechanically inclined. He regularly takes things apart and fixes them. Nevertheless, he pays somebody to do the chainsaw. That says something.

I’ve gone that route. I paid Elmer to sharpen my chains. Elmer’s good at  selling tires and pool supplies. Don’t tell him I said so, but he’s not so hot at sharpening chainsaws.

That’s because sharpening chainsaws, frankly, sucks.

I knew I dulled mine about two years ago when I had to use it to cut away at some rotted sill wood. I struck a bit of the stone foundation and my heart sank. I didn’t need the saw to cut any trees or firewood in the intervening years, but I never forgot that I’d dulled the cutters. I knew the day of reckoning would someday arrive. For two years, every time I walked near the saw I’d be hit with a sickening dread.

So yesterday I tried to recapture my chain sharpening mojo. I used the sharpening guide. I used the  proper file. When I was finished the cutters looked nice and shiny. I lugged the orange monster into the woods, took a deep breath and pulled the starter. Within a half-second of placing the saw on the log, I knew I was doomed.

I tried again. File in one hand, (expletive deleted) chainsaw in the other. Push, push, push with the file. Next one. Push, push, push. Fire up the saw, approach the log … Strike two.

I returned home in a bad mood and with no wood. But I’m not giving up. I’ve been through this before. I’m going to keep getting back on the bicycle, back on the bicycle, back on the bicycle.

Tags: firewood chainsaw

Not everything about aging is so bad.

I’m not talking about the house here. The subject is me, and I’ll cut right to the chase. One thing about aging that’s not so bad is the way you don’t get grossed-out by things in nature that send your children right off the edge. For example, I can hold a stinkbug (and why the hell am I still dealing with inside-my-house stinkbugs in February?) right in my hand and not feel even a pang of uneasiness.

I’d like to see my kid do that. I can also unflinchingly clean dog puke, repair broken septic leach field pipes and reach bare-handed into gutters caked with rotting leaves. Pieces of cake. (How’s that for inappropriate?)

This struck me today when I was about to burn a piece of wood that was nearly covered with fungi. I brought the log up to the house earlier in the day. It was among a small pile of split wood at the bottom of the property, a pile made about two years ago. The wood in the pile wasn’t rotted, but to say it was seasoned would be an understatement.

Fungus Among Us

When I put the log in question into the back of the truck, I only gave passing attention to its coat of fungi. It wasn’t until I had the thing in my arms and was heading to the wood-stove tonight that I really took a good look at it and quickly came to appreciate its beauty.

There was no way I was going to burn what, to my eye, was a piece of natural art.

Fun with Fungi

In fact, I headed for my camera and took a half-dozen photos. Far from being grossed-out, I was totally engrossed. I can’t say the same for my boy. He seemed to suffer a deeply-felt aversion to the creepy log.

He didn’t even want to look at it and I think he was incredibly upset that he’d brought it into the house, having gathered it at night when he couldn’t see its fungal adornments. He’d been tricked by darkness into holding something he now didn’t want in the same room.

“Just burn it!” he begged, adding some bogus assertion that the poor log was a bio-hazard.

Sorry kid. Ain’t gonna happen.

It’s almost the end of the first week of February. It’s been one of the coldest winters in memory and the poor furnace is complaining about lack of sleep. Ironically, as the radiators hiss, I”m writing this in a kitchen that is blessed with a huge fireplace.

A huge, cold fireplace.

It’s the first winter that I can remember in which I haven’t started a fire in the fireplace, not even during the Christmas holidays, which would have been nice. I have been burning firewood, but only in the wood-burning stove in the adjacent dining room (right now, even that isn’t “on,” but  that’s another story.

Marshmallows Anyone?

The reason I’ve not fired-up the lovely kitchen fireplace is simple: I don’t have the type of fuel it needs. The beast can easily gobble 3-foot-long logs and it goes through them in no time. In prior years, I had plenty of these because I bought truckloads of log-length wood and cut it myself. That didn’t happen this year.

There’s a snowstorm coming this weekend. Something inside me is yearning to celebrate that winter event by scouring the nearby woods for long logs and finally filling the kitchen with the crackle, the aroma and the subtle warmth of a big fire in the big fireplace.

As is the case with just about anything else around, accomplishing that goal will involve some grunt work. I don’t mind splitting wood and lugging it around. However, I really don’t care for sharpening chainsaws. I got pretty good at it a couple of years back, but it still can be a hit-or-miss endeavor and one that takes some time and patience.

So, it comes down to this: I want a nice fire. It isn’t going to happen if I don’t get off my butt and sharpen the saw, look for wood, cut the wood, bring it home, stack it, carry in some logs, etc. There is, indeed, some time and effort involved.

Instead, I could just turn up the thermostat, browse the Web for a couple hours or kill time in some other easy fashion. I’d be able to deal with the cold, accusatory stare of an abandoned fireplace. I’ve been doing it all winter. But now that you know about my choice, I’m feeling pressure to do the right thing.

See! Blogging is good for you.

Tags: fireplace

My childhood friend Gary sent me a link to a story about a 25-year-old college student who restored an old Victorian house in the town of Red Lion, Pa. It was a nice story. The fellow seems ambitious and, more importantly, enthused about fixing-up historic (or, at least, long-in-the-tooth) houses.

Since my pseudo-specialty is paint-removal, I had to wonder about the second paragraph’s second sentence. “He spent nearly 200 hours removing seven or eight layers of paint from a wooden handrail around the top of the stairs.” That must be the longest handrail on Earth. Either that or the guy was using some very weak, off-the-shelf paint stripper.

Peel Away 7 Not Doing Much

Earth, and Paint, Friendly

I recently wasted about $30 on a small bucket of Peel Away 7 to use on some interior door frames. I believed the advertising hype about how great the stuff was despite being environmentally friendly. (That last part should have prepared me for disappointment because most things safe for Earth have absolutely no impact on this house’s paint.)

I let the Peel Away 7 sit for about 24 hours and scraped it off.  In fact, the goop was all I scraped off. The wimpy stuff didn’t touch the paint.

So … I too could spend 200 hours or more trying to strip my door frames with Mr. Nice Guy concoctions. I’d rather throw on a respirator, plug-in my heat plate and heat gun, grab some sharp, flat implements of melted paint removal and get it the hell over with.

Tags: paint removal

I can’t just drive to Lowe’s or Home Depot and buy the parts I need to finish this job. This creates many delays. Often it results in outright, dead-in-the-water work stoppages.

I found that even if you pay purported craftsmen to specially recreate items that aren’t found in the aisles of cavernous home-improvement big boxes, you can still be left unsatisfied.

Octagonal Porch Capitals. Primed But Not Forgotten

For example, the porch columns are octagonal. The old ones were perfectly made, with each of the eight surfaces exactly the same width.

They’re not items I could make with my own equipment. So I hired a sawmill to do the job. The ash posts came back octagonal. Unfortunately the cuts were far from precise. Some sides of the octagons were wider than others.

I had to go over each one with a power planer and attempt to make the too-narrow surfaces wider. Left to be tackled on many of the posts is the replacement of the similarly octagonal capitals and posts.still deciding what to do.

Sometimes, when decisions are too difficult or the solutions to costly, I just move to another part of this project that’s within my grasp. I guess that’s what’s happened with the porch capitals and bases. I’ve stared at them. I’ve looked online. I’ve considered hiring specialists or creating latex molds.

This could … no this should be the summer they finally get done. I’m moving them up the priority list. If they’re not done (and painted elaborately) by autumn well then I’ll just come back and erase this post.

Tags: porch posts

The kids are asleep. So are the dogs. The staccato noise coming from the jowls of Chumley, the one who snores, sounds like a woodpecker. I can hear it all the way down in the basement.

Find the not-so-hidden pretzel.

It’s 12:16 a.m., a time that can be eerie even in a new house. When it’s post-midnight and you’re working in the dirt floored, stone-walled cellar of a place built in the early 1800s (or earlier), you dare not give free reign to your imagination.  I step on a piece of plywood that’s beneath the saw-horses. It groans, Crypt-Being-Slowly-Opened style. A bit of adrenaline squirts into my arms and sizzles down to my fingers.

The furnace kicks in and the roar is comforting. Steam works its way through the old pipes over my head. The water heater kicks in with an electric hum. The house is old but alive. The systems are doing their jobs, providing comfort to the innocents above who sleep and snore.

With some effort, I uncover the paint I need: Pratt & Lambert “Rose Mauve” exterior latex. A hard sourdough pretzel in one hand and my favorite brush in the other, alone but not lonely, I spread strokes of  light purple on dozens of natty front porch decorations.

I work into the night until my vision blurs. Flip down the light switch, the scary basement is returned to its ghosts.

Tags: basement night ghosts