Summer Hiatus

The blog will be on hiatus until early September, when we're back from Minnesota. In the 17 days that we are going to be gone, the length of the days will decrease by 48 minutes. The average temperature will drop only 2 degrees (from 80/57 to 78/55 - high/low).

In Minnesota, the average temperature drops over that period from 80/61 to 76/56, a steeper drop, as it has further to go to get to Fall. Ipswich's temps drop from, 79/59 to 76/56, pacing her Minnesotan sister.

Item Check-off

Item #1: Wisteria. Planted
Item #2: Stair Railing. Project Postponed
Item #3: Bike Cellar. Secured
Item #4: Hole in the Roof. Contracted (professional)
Item #5: Yard. Straightened
Item #6: PTA Delegation. In Progress.

From the street, we hope it will look (once painted) like merely a continuation of the porch crawlspace.

Andrew has the Organization Gene, at least where it applies to tools and wood. The storage area is so clean! Everything has a place, and a place for everything.

Hole in the Roof

I'm fixing a hole where the rain gets in,
To stop my mind from wanderin'
Where it will go.

I had no idea that song is about using drugs. This is a shot (heh heh) of the hole in our roof, taken from the basement. Just so you know the urgency of Item #4 -- although the rains don't generally start until October, and we do have a flap of plastic over it for now.

Slow progress

If you're keeping track, of the items to finish before we leave for Minnesota:

#1: Plant the wisteria. Done.

#2: Finish the railing for the stairs. Half-done, but we need more wood, and a trip to Home Depot will take 2 hours from other projects, not to mention suck the last remaining spark from our souls.

#3: Secure the bike cellar. Three-quarters-done (The door is complete, although painting will wait until September. The space is almost electrified -- meaning, it has lights inside and a motion detector and light outside, but the wiring isn't complete. This item will probably be completed tomorrow.)

#4: Cover the hole in the roof. Not started. It won't take long to do, just the chutzpah to climb on the roof again, without a safety rope -- or rather, with a safety rope, but it is no longer tied, as it used to be, around the chimney as an anchor.

#5: Yard Clean-up. Half-done. Getting the wisteria planted was a big push forward, but we still have to get all the wood scraps put away. We made inroads on this today, but there is a lot of wood -- this shows about 1/3 of it. We have finished the storage area for wood in the crawl space next to the bike cellar -- laid a tarp and set in hooks for the wood to rest upon -- but have only just started stowing it.

The green stuff is the old tongue-and-groove porch planks, most of which are rotted on one end for about 10-15 inches, but otherwise fine wood. My job today was to cut off the rotten bits and remove the rusty nails -- I got through less than half this pile, taking 3-4 nails from every board. Both Andrew and I have plans for this scrap wood -- he wants to build a sort of table for tools in the cellar, I want to build the "cat structure" that Molly has been designing for months (essentially boxes on a pole, lined with carpeting). We have so many cats living in the yard now that I'd like to provide a cat-house (like a bird-house) for winter.

By the way, you can also see in this photo the edge of the brick walkway I am creating, using the bricks from the chimney (or rather, the ones remaining after paving the patio in back, and the floor of the bike cellar). It's very rough right now -- the mortar (which is like heavily caked sand) is still on these, and I've just set them into place over the grass, which I'm trying to kill. One of my first projects after we get back in September will be to cut out the lawn underneath, clean off the bricks and lay them properly. I suppose I'll talk about why what and how when that project is properly in progress.

Dining Room Project: Prologue (Demolishing the Chimney)

Today was spent more in preparation than in projects, Andrew working on PTA now, rather than in a rush when he gets back in September. However, there's always lots to say.

A few people have written that they are looking forward to hearing about (and seeing) the Dining Room Project. Always one to stretch the suspense, let me back up to last April, when we discovered there was potential for a Dining Room Project.

It all started when we decided to take out the original furnace chimney. This is a large brick chimney extending from basement through roof, positioned in the exact center of the house. The old furnace had plugged into it for air outflow, but the new furnace has a simple pipe to the outdoors, so the chimney hasn't been used for 2 years. You see the chimney in the photo here, next to the pantry in the kitchen, masked by a slip of gray concrete.

[Historical note: the two red bricks in the chimney, visible near the ceiling: those are a really rough blocking job -- badly cemented in bits of brick. We are pretty sure the original kitchen had a large oil-powered range, with a small chimney that fed into the main one through this hole.The Baptists must have blocked the hole during the renovation in the 1950s -- no need to be tidy about the blockage, since it would be behind drywall. Other evidence of the large original range -- the floor in front of the door to the dining room (installed in the 50's) is a patch. There originally was a pipe to the oil tank in the basement, that fed the range. I found exactly this arrangement in a couple of books about Stickley and Arts and Crafts houses from the 19-teens.]

We knocked a hole in the basement part of the chimney about 2 feet from the floor (sorry for the blurry photo). Andrew constructed a "door" of plywood for the hole, and then we started demolition.

Andrew began by climbing on the roof and knocking bricks down the chimney. They rattled and bumped all the way down to the basement, and hit bottom with a carcinogenic mushroom cloud of ash, soot, brick dust and mortar. The "door" helped reduce the dust somewhat (we faced it with a layer of insulation to make a soft pad), but even so, there was a large puff of dust when the door was opened. I would reach in and remove the bricks (8 in a layer) and pile them in a bucket. Then slam closed the door, leaning against it so it would remain tight against the brick wall of the chimney, yell up that no hands were in the passageway, and Andrew would knock out the next layer of bricks. Periodically, Mel would carry a bucket to the window where we would pass them out (at our chest level) to William (at his feet), who would pile them up outside.

In this way, we removed the chimney, Andrew progressing slowly down from roof, through attic, through second floor (in the photo, he's at the top of the chimney where it passed through the upstairs hall, just below the attic), kitchen and finally joining us in the basement.

Mel and I switched jobs occasionally, but Andrew always got the fun and easy job of pushing bricks over. He was precariously balanced on a ladder for much of the time, but otherwise, it was surprisingly easy. The mortar had almost completely dried out -- the chimney was standing because it was held up by the house around it, and the weight of the bricks above it. He genuinely merely had to push the bricks over, most of the time. Our job, however, was wretchedly dusty. We were encrusted, everything in the basement and much of the house was covered in a fine red-gray dry mist. We had laid protective plastic over everything in my room, and created a little airlock around the chimney itself (like the government-quarantines-the-house scene in "E.T."), but it seemed to make little difference for the amount of dirt and dust everywhere.

However...imagine the moment when Andy was standing on the ladder, leaning into the chimney at the top of the kitchen wall. Suddenly he yells out -- "There's a hole in the wall behind the chimney, into the dining room!" But of course, there is no hole in the wall of the dining room, so we knew this was into a false ceiling space. It was like discovering a false bottom in the antique trunk your great-great-grandfather used when he lived in Germany and was a copywriter for Beethoven. What could be hidden behind the secret door? The photo doesn't show what we saw, which was only a sense of open space broken up by red beams of wood.

More on the Dining Room Project later...

More Progress on the Porch

Having made our arrangements for the annual visit to the childhood stomping grounds, we now have only 4 days left before school starts, generally speaking, to finish any summer projects. So our high priority hats are on, and we are being expedient. We have five must-finish items to complete before leaving.

Thus, the porch is painted, but not detailed. The railings need to be painted the same yellow as the floor; the wall of the house needs to be washed, the holes we created or filled (or both) in the structure need to be painted over. We have to add molding in various places; we have to finish the railings down the front stairs. And paint them. Of this list, only Build the Railings (#4) is on the list to finish by Friday. Mel and Anne can paint when we're gone, or it can wait until we get back.

The porch does look nice, doesn't it? Note the furthest chair is resting on porch floor that didn't used to be there -- that's where the stairs up from the driveway were. The railing behind it is new, too (built by Andrew, of course).

Today, the item we completed was #1) Planting the Wisteria. We bought a large wisteria plant about a month ago, just before starting the bike cellar. We wanted to plant it in the center of the garden in front of the porch, so that it will spread up and over, and shade the whole porch. We realized after we got it home that the space where we wanted to plant it was already filled with 1) the stump of the old beautiful camellia tree, 2) the rain gutter outflow-to-sewer pipe and 3) the main gas line into the house. It's taken this long for us to get Moving the Stump Out (carefully) to the top of the list. That, and planting the wisteria, and then replanting the box elder, scabiosa, and poppy that I had to move so we could dig/saw out the stump, took all day. It doesn't look like much in the picture, but the green fuzzy thing (i.e., wisteria) in the middle was a pain to install.

We also half completed Item #3: Clean the Yard (we've been the poor white trash of the neighborhood for a month now). You may get a sense (photo above) for how the front looked in late afternoon, but here's a shot of the yard this morning. It's still pretty trashed on the other half of the yard and the driveway, however. (Note the white cat stretched out in the sun under the sawhorse.)

Portland is known for its restaurants

This post has nothing to do with the projects at the house, except it may result in my stretching my cooking skills this fall, which might count as a project (then).

Tonight Mel and I joined friend Ray at Simpatico, a charming little restaurant. Ray has been trying for some time to get reservations, and was able to get in tonight. He thanked us for being willing bodies to keep him company.

Simpatico is run by two chefs. They only serve on Friday and Saturday nights, and Sunday brunch. It is prix fixe (not including wine); the menu (and price) varies with every meal and is published on Wednesday. (Apparently brunch is easier to get into, and has a fairly standard, set, menu.) You sit family style, about 40 guests at 4 tables.

Tonight's menu was a re-creation of a meal they cooked at a festival in France in June, centered on the season's harvest and aioli. We started with almonds blanched in olive oil and heavily salted, alongside fresh zucchini pickles (all made in-house). The first course was pork shoulder and couscous stuffed and rebaked in a purple pepper, and it was followed, in successive festive courses, by salted cod fritters; a warm salad of corn (on the cob, in little chunks), mixed tomatoes and green beans; a cold lettuce greens salad with vinaigrette; lamb stew with olives and potatoes; squash flowers stuffed with goat cheese and fried; skewered braised octopus, grilled with zucchini; and grilled rockfish stuffed with fennel. There may have been another course or two, I've forgotten. And for dessert, a crepe (fried crispy) with stewed plums and a dash of creme fraiche. Oh and all of this accompanied by two aiolis, one classic and one spicy with a dash of the octopus braising juice. The aioli frequently made the difference between a good flavor and a tremendous flavor.

It was really quite a divine meal, reminding me a lot of the dinner we ate at the farm in the Cevennes in 2005. Frankly, there was too much food, and they brought the courses too fast (dinner started late because the owner, with a party of 6, arrived 25 minutes late and they held the meal for them -- I think it caused a slight bottleneck in the kitchen. For instance, the octopus was lukewarm by the time it got to the table). Although I thought the final fish course was superb, I was only able to eat about a tablespoon of it; otherwise, the three of us agreed that we could have stopped with the lamb stew.

But I kept thinking how much Alec in particular would have loved this dinner. It was a little unusual for them -- they don't specialize in French food at all, but rather in fresh, local food. I hope I can share Simpatico with visitors again.

Porch Painting

Today we finished prepping (filling in all the holes we could find, sanding, sweeping, washing) the porch and then primed and painted it once. We'll have to paint it again before we're through. Andrew is building the railing at the top of the stair. It and the columns are being repainted too, which requires that we wash the house wall (the fresh paint elsewhere makes that look shabby).

Photos tomorrow, when it is closer to finished. In the meantime, it's an I Spy game. I spy with my little eye something that begins with "H". He's been keeping us company for several hours every day in the garden in front of the porch, apparently unfazed by the noise and construction.

On the Eighth Day, We Finished the Porch

Technically, we only worked on solely the porch for six days, but we feel as if we started on it last Tuesday, when we bought the lumber. (If you recall, we then finished other projects and fought the heat for a couple of days before starting). But however long it took, the main part is done now.

We started the end with a couple of new boards -- 14' 2x6s, which we used to form an extra strut to support the porch floor. It turns out that Home Depot is geared towards contractors (okay, we're slow). It cost $10 for these two humongous boards -- it would have cost $8 for boards half that length. So it's cheaper to buy in bulk. Andrew said it was dicey driving home with wood sticking this far out of the car.

We also rented Andrew's current favorite tool, an Angle Nail Hammer. This is a totally cool sort-of stapler which you position over the porch board and then whack with a hammer (once if you're big and beefy, three times if you're wimpy and at the end of the day). It drives a nail-like staple in at a perfect 45 degree angle, affixing your porch board permanently to whatever you're hammering it on to (which very occasionally, unfortunately, is not the thing you intended to hammer it on to).

We decided in the end to solve the length problem with a 10" wide "threshold" in front of the door (a slab of pine) -- so in front of the door, we only needed the 7' boards. You can see the white board in place under/in front of the door in the picture. For the 40 inch space to the left of the door we pieced porch boards together to make 8' combinations with 7' planks. This involved sawing the boards into combinations that would add up to 8' and which coincided with where there was a strut to nail it to and which kept the seams far from the rain danger of the front of the porch (leaving only the options of 1' + 7' and 2' + 6'). This meant that I learned how to use the Skilsaw, so that Andrew could be punching the Angle Nail Hammer on one board as I prepped the next.

The final product is very fine. It is thrilling to walk on this tight, non-creaking, solid surface, that we put together ourselves in only a few hours. There is some metaphor in the fact that we were able to repair and build the floor underneath our feet. Perhaps it is particularly poignant to us because we spent several days in the "pit" created by the porch walls, so we are quite aware of how the porch floor is 3 feet above ground. To me, it still feels like I'm walking in air when I walk across it.

The work is not entirely finished of course. We would just stain the wood if the whole porch were in this pretty wood, but half is still the old green, so the whole thing will be painted. So next, there is patching, priming, and painting (butter yellow) to do (my job) while Andrew finishes the balustrade and the railing down the steps.

And on the Ninth Day, Vacation

We went to Newport (mid-coast of Oregon) for the night, to see the son of Anne's college roommate perform with the All-American Young Boy's Choir. We stayed the night after at the Little Creek Cove Hotel -- a wonderful setup where people buy condominiums but have them rented out as hotel rooms when they aren't staying there. So it's like a homey kitchenette hotel, right on the water. Well, since all the beaches in Oregon are public, right next to the beach.

Will, Molly and I walked up to the top of the Yaquina Head Lighthouse (the tallest lighthouse in Oregon, built in 1873). This involved a 45 minute wait in line (they only let about 10 people into the lighthouse at once) and then a climb up 90+ stairs to the lamp -- still using the original Fresnel lens. Five minutes there, each person perched one at a time at the top of an additional 6 step stairway (which puts you eye to eye with the base of the lamp) to briefly glance at the view, and then back down to the main floor. I found the climb up heart-thuddingly frightening, the terror of the going up narrow open-tread spiral stairs (about which I have a specific phobia) worsened by fear that I'd have to comfort an overwrought child (both of them were sobered, but brave about the climb).

Ate local rockfish fish-and-chips (twice) and pan-fried local oysters, so I had a taste of the coast. Today was one of those picture postcard days of sun, breeze and warm, and it was hard to leave the ocean, but we did. We had to get back to The Porch, of course.

Ready to Rent

.... rent the Angle Nail Hammer, that is, from Home Depot. This is the tool we need to pin the porch boards onto the supporting struts.

Today we finished with all the supporting structure. I slightly exaggerated yesterday's prediction of "only an hours' worth left to finish". It is all soporifically boring (and I'm amazed that you're still coming back to read the blog, after posts about this project), so I won't go into the details, but trust me, the porch is well shored up. I seriously believe it could withstand an earthquake (well, a small one). Now we have only to secure one additional strut -- for attaching the short boards -- and then put in the porch boards, 3" x 7' at a time. I'd say it won't take long, but that would jinx us.

In the photo, Andrew is planing the frontmost board to make it the right height for the floorboards (remember the slope from door to stairtop?). Both of us are so tired of this particular adventure that we ran out of steam about 4 this afternoon. Andrew switched over to the much more exciting project of adding electricity to the under-porch cellar.

From Our Co-Respondent in Ipswich

Byline: From Caro

It would be lovely of you to put it on your blog -- just so family can see it.

I have actually already started to build a blog on google, but got hung up on what to call it, how to describe it etc. And I just don't have time right now to fix it.

The fireplace:

We ripped out the existing incredibly horrible black 70's tile, which covered the hearth and also created a kind of collar around the 3 sides of the fireplace. The tile was placed on a wooden framework which went diagonally between the edge of the fireplace and the edge of the book cases. Ugly ugly ugly. I've always hated it and the moment it was torn out it looked better -- even unfinished.

Then we discovered that there was a mass of old glue on the bricks -- used to hold the wooden framework in place. I tried a number of things, but finally used paint stripper to get that off. They were also very dirty -- soot and stuff, so I cleaned the bricks and put a sealer on them.

Also had to reinforce the wooden surround on the bookcase sides and the top.

Then, the hearth itself. Although tiles had previously been installed there, it turned out to have old brick under part of it and it was very bumpy -- not level at all -- and wooden subfloor under the rest. So I had to get some leveling stuff, which I used. Although I say this in a couple of sentences, it actually took a few days and a couple of trips to home depot and lowe's to get just the level compound figured out.

Then, the tile. I had chosen black granite tiles, but Alec and James didn't like them, so I returned them and bought plain red unglazed tiles. (which did save a lot of money). I laid the tiles myself and grouted them in a matching red color. Not really proud of the job I did, but it's done for now. If I did it again, I'd make a few different choices, but that's the thing about being an amateur, isn't it. And it's certainly better than what was there.

We had the new pellet stove installed by the company we bought it from. As they left they said, did you have a permit? It turns out the law is that they are supposed to tell us we need a permit and they are responsible for getting it. There's a fine if it's installed without a permit.

So I've spent the day filling out very complex forms and basically lying by implying that it's not installed yet. I had to fill out the same forms I would have had to fill out if we had been doing an addition to the house.

I still have to do the wooden surround, after I get back from the midwest. Also I'm going to have a metal piece fabricated to cover the gap between the stove and the brick surround. It will keep us toasty this winter.

C--

Dry Rot!

And the adventure continues. Today, as planned, the first thing we did was get all the surprises out in the open. We removed the threshold plank, and yes, discovered that the 2 - 2x6s under it (that which supported our bodies so softly as we stepped onto the porch) were completely rotted out.

Then we figured out that, for some unclear reason, the column support of the porch roof -- the one on the left as you face the house -- was supported itself only on 2 out of 4 sides (the column is hollow), and also that the rotted out wood was the primary part of the support.

And then we figured out that the central column of the three at the front of the porch, while nicely propped up on all four sides of the column itself, was only kept from crashing to the ground by being nailed to the porch ceiling, and by resting on the mostly rotted 2x6 threshold board, itself resting on a 2x4 coming up from the ground about 2 feet away. Unfortunately, we figured this out after cutting the board out.

So there were several rather urgent minutes of grabbing a jack and a new length of wood, and propping the column back up again between the structural supports that Andrew had added in the storage chamber. (The porch had only sagged about 1/4" to 1/3" in the meantime).

It took all day (we had to stop at 9 p.m. due to noise laws), but we are finally back to only about an hours' worth of work until we are at the point we thought we were at last night.

No pictures yet of the newly rebuilt and finally supported front of the porch. But isn't the hydrangea pretty? I hope it survives the construction.

More about Floors - Kitchen

No work was done on the porch or the garden on Saturday because Andrew was at an all-day PTA Leadership Training Meeting, and Mel was painting someone else's house with REACH, for charity. I turned the radio on loud and started stripping the remainder of the linoleum goo off the kitchen floor. Aside from some aches and pains from two days on hands and knees, and a head full of "Angel in the Morning" and "Like a Virgin" (I gotta change that radio station), it's been a success to balance the frustration of the porch.

When Carolyn visited in February, we three ripped up the wrinkled and warped linoleum that had been put in the kitchen in the 1957 remodeling. We looked at the black and horrid floor beneath and decided it couldn't be saved (although I believe Caro suggested sanding it down). It is really gross -- it is strips of black paper (backing for the linoleum, I'd guess) and globs of glue, and cat hairs and food, all sticking in the floor. The "5 second" rule does not apply in the kitchen. In fact, I'd say it's the "5 centimeter" rule -- if something gets within 5 cm of the floor, it has to be thrown out. It looks grey here, but that's from dirt and dust over the black. We don't, to be honest, even sweep it often, because sweeping seems to create more dust and dirt.

At a sale in March, we purchased about 200 square feet of cork flooring. I am really looking forward to installing it (it's the clickable, floating flooring type).

Well, for some reason it took me 6 months to figure out we might as well try stripping the goo to see what there is to see beneath it. If nothing else, it will make for a cleaner floor in the meantime before we get to installing the cork. So I donned heavy gloves and knee pads, and started glopping Citrustrip, which is a relatively environmentally-friendly stripper.

It's a standard stripping process - glop on, cover with plastic wrap, wait for an hour, scrape off, clean surface with water. And it works like a dream. I have done 2/3 of the kitchen in 2 intense days of intense orange fumes and scrubbing on hands and knees. I think the worst part is the clean-up -- mopping with water. The mop is filthy after two or three passes across the stripped floor, and has to be rinsed out or it just moves the mud around. Every 4 square foot patch has to be mopped-rinsed-mopped 4-6 times (and probably more, but I get really bored with mopping).

I gotta say, the work has paid off beautifully. Under the horrible linoleum and the dirty goo, there is a pretty red fir floor. Probably this is old-growth fir (much of the original house is). The photo is slightly cheating, taken when the floor was wet after mopping. When it dries, it's a dull pale brown -- the wood is untreated.

If we decide to go with hardwood flooring, this will require sanding and polyurethane (not to mention, I have to finish stripping it). We'll find other places for the cork -- the basement, actually, would do well with a warm touch on the floor, or possibly the studio.

Measure Thrice, Cut Once -- and still cut wrong

My last post was about Tuesday night, and the decision about the lumber for the porch.

On Wednesday, Andrew Hung a Door (check my earlier post -- I can't figure out how to link to my own posts yet).

On Thursday we didn't get much done (ibid.).

On Friday night, in the mosquito-biting dark I mentioned before, we encountered our first major setback.

During the day, we had prepped for the porch floor installation -- pulling off the old wood (not as easy as we expected); removing gazillions of long rusty nails; adding Rotten Wood Repair Filler to the supporting aged 2x6s; leveling the floor of the crawl space (because without a porch floor we could stand, so it was a lot easier to rake than after the floor/roof is installed); laying a tarp over the space to discourage its continued use as Neighborhood Preferred Litter Box, etc.

(I made Andrew take a photo of me pulling nails to prove that I really do some of the work, not just take photos and comment upon his work.)

So, the next thing was to add another strut for the ends of the tongue-and-groove boards to attach to. (Mel is, in fact, screwing the bolts into that very support strut in the picture.) And then (if you recall) we were planning to replace the current 2x8 board -- the "threshold" -- that lays across the top of the steps with a 2x11, which would kiss the ends of the porch boards. In the photo, the current 2x8 (which is rounded and half-rotten) has the drills and box of screws resting on it.

Things went quickly downhill from there. The first thing we realized is that the newly added support was higher than the others, even though it was placed at the right height to meet the threshold at the top of the concrete steps.

The whole porch is built on a slightly-off-from-90-degree angle from the house, so that any water rolls away from the house towards the steps and the garden. The higher support would mean a) that water would roll back towards the house instead, and b) that the porch floor would be spongy -- you'd step on a cushion of air rather the solidity of being supported. That also means c) the porch floor boards would only be supported by two struts, about 7' apart (the two between my boot and Mel's back would not actually support or even touch the porch boards).

If we lowered the support strut, then the boards would be lower than the threshold, giving the water a perfect place to pool and start the rotting process over again. Damned if you do...

The second thing we realized was that we actually need 7'6" long boards, not 7'3" as we had measured. And had measured again. (We had measured repeatedly from a point in front of the door, which has a short extra sill -- a sill 3" deep, to be exact. You can sort of see the dark brown sill in the photo of me, above. We had reliability, but not validity, in our measurements.) The 2x11 option (of making a broader threshold at the top of the stairs) can't be extended to 2x14, at least, not without using two lengths of wood, which brings with it a seam down the middle and more chances of pooling water and fast rotting. The lumber we have is all 7' 0", if you recall.

This is all very hard to describe. The picture at left may illustrate adequately. I am standing on the steps to take the photo. The green at the bottom is the current "threshold", that oft-mentioned 2x8 laid flat at the top of the concrete steps. The line of wood just above that is our newly added strut (from which we've removed all but one bolt, so it's just resting there at the moment). The original struts cross the photo leading into the distance. You can see that the floorboard (coming down from the top) doesn't meet the strut. Damn it.



Solutions?

We have $250 of porch floor boards, and more importantly, a huge hole where the porch used to be, so we're not going back now. The current plan is to kill two problems with one, um, one laying of porch floor. We are going to pull the boards out all the way to the garden end of the top concrete step, so that water rolls all the way down and off onto concrete: nothing to rot. (Andrew will put a thin facing on the front of the step, so that you don't see raw ends of the porch boards.) Back at the "house-side" of the porch, all these boards will now end a full 12" from the outer wall of the house. There we will "patch", with a column of 12" long boards. With careful sawing, sanding, filler and paint, Andrew believes it won't show at all.

I have a bad feeling about putting all our ends on one plane (so to speak) and have raised the suggestion that we stagger the lengths of the boards across the whole space. This is what we feared that we would have to do on Tuesday, but now it seems little more work (to me) than the other plan, and it seems structurally more sound, too (although Andrew has convincing arguments for why it won't make a difference).

In any case, tomorrow we start by lifting the infamous "threshold" 2x8 plank and seeing what there is below it, which appears to be more wood, on top of concrete. We will do this before we commit to the other porch-boards-across-the-threshold plan. "No more surprises," Andrew said.

Huh? Ripping up the Porch Floor?

Sorry, my adoring readers, for not checking in for a couple of days. There has not been time for blogging: the deadline of Anne and the children's return has been a nervous litany in the backs of our minds. "12:30 p.m. Sunday. Gotta get done by 12:30 Sunday. It will all be too late on Sunday," muttered into our respirators in the misty overcast of morning, the unforgiving sun of midday, the dusty breezes of evening, and in the mosquito-ridden dark after sunset. (Yes, mosquitoes! In Portland! What hast thou wrought, O climate change?) We've been working hard. (And last night Ray came over for beers and grown-up games on the Wii, so there wasn't time for blogging then, either.)

Read this post as if it were written last Tuesday, when it would have been were I not out late at erudite book readings and fine dining (that is, a "demodern post-constructionist metafictional novel" and half a tuna sandwich and beer at McMenamins).

The under-porch storage project is independent of the porch-floor replacement, except that we're working in that part of the house anyway, and we need to put flooring/roof over the steps down into the new cellar. The porch floor has needed replacement since they purchased the house. Due to years of no maintenance and bad gutters (replaced a few years ago by Andrew), standing water near the steps had rotted out the wood. (Here's a little known fact: the porch was carpeted in Astroturf when they moved in.)

Not quite half the porch needs replacement, just the part at the head of the concrete steps. Simple enough to do -- pull off the old boards, slide in the new ones, prime, and paint. We figured it would take a day, maybe two when including unexpected surprises. Ha ha.

The first challenge was to find replacement lumber. The boards on the porch, presumably from 1915, but maybe from 1957 when the house was remodeled, are 3" tongue-and-groove boards long enough to extend from door to step without seams (about 7'). We needed about 40 new boards. Rejuvenation House sells them for $1.86 a linear foot -- or over $500. Ugh. Home Depot sells a cheaper version -- about 3-1/2" wide (which we could accommodate, though they wouldn't match the other, older part of the porch). However, the Home Depot lumber is about 1/4" - 1/2" thinner than the original lumber. The thinner board works with modern construction techniques, where the supporting struts are no more than 18" apart, but this older building has them about 24" or more apart. The Home Depot porch boards would sag pretty quickly, and be more liable to break.

Then, on Tuesday, we were at Woodcrafters, a specialty store for working with hardwood. If you ever want to get a Ph.D. in whittling, this is the store to visit. Anyway, they carry kiln-dried wood of the size we needed, for $1.60 a linear foot -- cheaper than Rejuvenation House but not "cheap". They had only a couple of boards in stock, so we'd have to order more (missing that Sunday deadline). Also, theirs came in 12' boards, giving us the option of wasting a lot (we only needed about 7' a board) or being forced to make a patchwork floor -- requiring a lot more work in cutting, placement and "wood filling" the seams.

We decided to look for other possibilities, such as plain 3" boards along which Andrew could rout out the tongue-and-groove. (Whether that is less work than building a patchwork porch floor remains to be determined, but it would at least have been cheaper). But as we walked through the high-ceilinged aisles of precut lengths of Rosewood, Poplar, Cherry and Cedar, of moldings in Oak, Maple, Walnut and Hemlock, of raw lengths of Exotic Woods (teak from Congo, catalpa, wood I've never heard of, like bubinga) ... suddenly the clouds parted and light shone down in haloed rays, as the demonstration table-saw sang across the store like a thousand shrill voices : we came upon an unmarked palette, there at the back of the store, of literally a porch-worth of our desired 3" tongue-and-groove fir.

It turns out, a client had ordered a special-cut load, and then backed out of the deal. The contractor wanted to get the wood off his hands asap, so it was selling for a mere $1 a linear foot, on a first-come, first-serve basis. It was 5:30 and they close at 6:00, so decisions had to be made.

Problem is, the special cut boards were 7' long, with a handful of 9' lengths. But our 7' was a rough estimate -- we had measured the space, but were expecting to have to cut it when we got home, so hadn't been exact about how much we needed where. We raced home and measured the porch again. How many boards did we really need? Would 7' work or were we back to square one? Would we pay $1 a linear foot in any case and just patch?

We measured -- we needed 7'3" lengths. Thirty-five of them. The clock was ticking -- I had to battle traffic to get to the suburb where Jasper Fforde was speaking, and Andrew wanted to get back and buy the wood, if it was usable, before the store closed. And, after all, Anne and the children were due back in only 4 days.

Okay, we reasoned, we'll just replace the header board (a 2x8, visible in the photos up top) with a 2x11, gaining those three inches in a deeper threshold at the top of the stairs. This would have the added benefit of placing that seam (between end of tongue-and-groove and side of header board) a couple of inches further away from rain splashing off the steps. It would require adding a 4x4 in the structural struts (to nail the ends of the boards to) but that would be a relatively trivial thing to add and we already had the extra wood (we checked). In Portland speak, "No worries. No worries".

I dashed off in one direction for my erudite evening, and Andrew in another direction to buy lumber. He bought 36 boards, (sold in packs of 6), including all of the 9' (one pack), just in case. And we were set to go on the porch.

Porch Floors

We have little to complain about, about the weather, in Portland. Not as cold as Minnesota or Massachusetts in the winter, less humid and more sunny in the summer, with cool nights to offset the day's heat. It just softens us up for when the real weather happens. Back in La Grande in the '70s we'd joke scornfully about how Portlanders would close down the city after two inches of snow (as they still do). Wimps, we are.

So today was officially 87 degrees (my car read 91), low humidity, with lots of breezes. And it started out in the low 60's and already at 9:30 pm it's back down to 73. But it hit Andrew and I like a ton of bricks. We did not make much progress today.

We did rip up the porch floor. Okay, Andrew ripped up the porch floor. We didn't put it back together again however. There is a 20 inch wide strip of boards remaining in front of the door -- our morning paper is sure to fall into the hole, the crawl space, between concrete steps and front door.

Doors or Gates - what's the difference?

There hasn't been as much tangible progress on anything in the last couple of days as we would like. Much of yesterday was spent shopping for minivans (and in the evening, some of us went to hear Jasper Fforde -- he was marvelous, and I highly recommend going out of your way to hear him, not to mention reading one of his books, of which the latest is First Among Sequels). And much of today was spent in PTA interactions.

However, that is not to indicate that no progress has been made. Andrew has Hung A Door. (Technically, it's a gate, but we're referring to it as a door.) This was not insignificant to do (problems with less than 90 degree angles and gravity and tiredness -- the first door he made was 7 " too long due to an oversight). And now the frame is causing problems: it is wonderfully straight, but it is 3/4 inch offset from the house "wall" beside it, so it sticks out a little. Andrew has a 1/4 inch tolerance, so this means Measures Must Be Taken. What they will be, I'm not sure yet.

Let me back up. The picture of Andrew in a red shirt was taken last Sunday. This photo predates the stairs; I (the camera) am standing on the edge of the porch, at the head of where stairs up used to be (you can see the outline of them in painted concrete slip along the house wall next to Andrew in the photo).

The second photo was taken about 9:30 tonight. Andrew is in a black shirt, and much sunburnt (it has been hot and dry; it was 92 degrees today). The stairs down are sort of visible -- they are red, Andrew is standing on the top one. The door is framed in properly -- the hefty 4x4 his left hand is resting upon is the lintel. You can see the skeleton of the door hung in the space (the black hinges are a giveaway). The two struts stretching from lintel towards my feet are the props that will support the porch floor when we put it in. The door will be trellis on the top half (to match the trellis elsewhere on the porch) and solid on the bottom half.

We've also decided (one of those Royal "we"s) not to encase the whole unit in plastic as originally intended. Someone pointed out the plastic might be quite noisy in a wind storm, of which we get many; and the winters aren't so bad here that we need to keep the contents of the space warmer than they will be next to the house anyway. The primary need was secure, covered, space, and that we'll have.

Tomorrow: The Porch Floor.