Staining the steps

So, we were unable to get the old paint off the concrete. And let me say, we all hated the old paint. It is kind of a gray-blueish white, and once cleaned, the stairs and walkway looked ghastly against the green house and red brick pathway (demonstrating that cleanliness is not always a good thing). Faced with the choice of choosing a paint (a choice involving going out again to Home Depot, and then having to decide on a color -- I don't know which part of the task is more dreaded), or just trying out the stain, because we already have a gallon: we stained.



Not much to say -- the pictures say it all. The stain -- which admittedly I just slapped on -- is streaky, blotchy and too transparent. It just looks dirty, and not even as nice as the nice balanced layer of dirt that had been there before we cleaned.

Actually the front looks kind of nice if you stand across the street, maybe because the tree blocks much of the view. However, we haven't a force field to install to keep all viewers of the house at least 45 feet away. Tomorrow we paint. The question is now, Green or Brick Brown?

Digging down

The intensity of the interview yesterday has led to a day of pungent self-doubt. I swing from moments of acute nostalgia for the loss of the sparkly, creative woman I remember being at Infocom, to finding myself unable to love the memory of that same self-absorbed and cock-sure girl. What banalities about the others and mortifications about myself have I now preserved in digital video? How could I have forgotten my place so much as to think, for a few hours, that I was as relevant as Steve Meretzky, or Brian Moriarty, or Dave Lebling, or Stu Galley? And how did my neck get so goose-skinned, like those too-thin older movie stars?

I did work on the pathway, for a little while. The ground under the sod is dense clay tangled with the warp and weft of decades of unaerated grass roots. Two days ago, I set the sprinkler on until the area was a grassy marsh, but the water appears to have slid off ineffectively rather than sinking in and softening the dirt. I did uncover a little "cliff" between the hard clay and a small patch where we dug up concrete months ago, where the ground is wonderfully light and aerated. Using that as a starting point, I was able to carve progressive inch-wide shovelfuls off the cliff, plowing up the packed earth for several feet.

But shoveling, or cutting the ground with a shovel, gets old fast. So I turned to removing the mortar from the bricks, which you do by scraping bricks against each other, mortared side to mortared side. The clumpy gray mortar crumbles off fairly easily, leaving smooth red brick underneath. Then you turn both bricks to a different mortared side and scour them together, repeatedly, over all six faces of the brick. It doesn't show in the photo -- the nearest line of bricks are cleaned and smooth, and will look red after a good rainstorm; by comparison, the ones behind are still gray and lumpy. But all that bending and balancing and rubbing bricks together is really hard on one's back.

A rational person would expect, as I adopted the stances associated with poor Chinese farm workers, spine aching and hamstrings taut enough to pop, that I would gain a little perspective. I'm building a brick walkway around the spacious house in which I live. I'm working on it a couple of hours every day. I'm not starving, standing half-naked in a rice pond for months on end.

But a rational person would be wrong -- perspective remains beyond my grasp. Hard labor and physical pain, however, do push to the back of one's mind the immediacy of self-pity, so in the end the same goal was reached -- I stopped dwelling.

So, after gouging out some dirt, and scouring off a few bricks, I shoved a hypothetical ramrod up my spine, and Andrew and I went to Ikea (for the third time in a week) and then to Home Depot, and then out for gelato and coffee. Sometimes you just have to enjoy where you are, and vigilantly not-think about where you were, or where you woulda-, shoulda-, could have been, had things been different.

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.

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.