The Other Side of The Blade

One of the design features I most admire about the Farm House is its generous windows. The first-floor windows are the size of a doorway, and in the dormers the windows are as large as the size of the dormer will allow.

Here is how dormers are usually built, with the windows set back enough from each side to reveal some of the siding. This dormer is from the garage, which is new construction.

This is, of course, the dormer I'm working on currently. There is no siding to be seen on the front; it's all window and casing.

Here's the inside of the same dormer. As you can see, the windows are as large as they can be, so large that there is only room for half of the casing boards on each side.

This emphasis on natural light and ventilation is reflective of the Victorian concepts of beauty of utility (it's useful to have large windows when you're relying on natural light and windows are your only form of ventilation) and beauty of fitness (large windows are appropriate for a human habitation). While I'm no scholar of Victorian architecture, I have examined a great many Victorian homes in detail, and in my experience, the way the Farm House's dormers are constructed is unique. It seems to me at times as if the windows are actually wider than the dormers.

In fact, when the casing boards are taken into account, they are wider, by nearly an inch on each side. That's why the casing boards are backed on each outside edge by a trim piece that tapers back down to the siding. It protects the ends of the siding and the exposed backs of the casing boards. This is the "one more detail" I mentioned last time that I still had to attend to before getting back to the painting prep. The contractors made a new one for the right side, but they didn't for the left, and the existing one is thrashed beyond repair.

I thus had to fabricate a new one myself. This is what actually sealed the deal for me regarding the table saw. This job was possible using a circular saw, but it would be exceedingly difficult, and I was dreading the task. I knew that with a table saw the job would be considerably easier.

It was however still a bit tricky, simply because the entirety of my experience with the saw was two simple tasks. This would be a fairly wide cut, two inches, at an angle, in a one-inch-wide piece of wood.

Actually, a 7/8" wide piece. Yes, it's our old friend, the 4/4 S1S board. I told you this size of board was used everywhere in the Farm House. A 2-inch-wide  piece of this was no problem; I simply ripped it from the same stock of salvaged beadboard from which I made the new window casing caps on the south side.

The one small limitation I encountered was that I was not able to bring the piece down to a point at the back end of the bevel, because then the blade would hit the rip fence.

I thus had to maintain a small distance between the two. I didn't worry about it, because the contractors had apparently had the same problem when they made their new piece.

The contractors did some amazing things with a table saw. I figured if they couldn't put a finer point on this piece, then I sure wasn't going to. Apparently, this was something you couldn't do with a table saw.

So without any further thought on the matter, I cut the piece, and other than ending up with a few saw marks, the piece came out quite nicely.

Then, I looked at the waste piece.

Oh. Apparently you can cut to a fine point with a table saw.

My error was in using the wrong side of the blade. If I had put the fence on the other side, there would have been no worry of its getting in the way of the blade, and I would have had no problem getting a fine edge on the piece. Funny that never occurred to me beforehand.

This kind of dopey mistake betrays the fact that this work is not in my wheelhouse. The ability to think spatially, to work problems out in three dimensions, does not come naturally to me; it's a facility I've had to develop on the fly. As you can see, I have more work to do on that front.

This mistake also illustrates the underlying message of this blog: If I can do it, you can do it. I show you these mistakes because I don't want you to think I'm some sort of Norm Abrams or Bob Vila. I'm just plain Otis, a simple homeowner who needs work done and would rather save his money for better things.

Of course, once I had figured out my mistake, I had to rectify it. I ripped another two-inch strip from the old beadboard, then set up the saw with the fence on the other side.

Then, I cut the new piece.

Thus illustrating the old saw: Measure once, cut twice.

* * *

Gesundheit.

Closing Things Up

Something tells me I'm going to be needing some more Brushing Putty. Happily, my new favorite place Ganahl Lumber stocks it; most Fine Paints of Europe dealers around here don't. In any event, here's what the can looks like now so you know what to look for:

New can, same old stuff.

At the time of the last post, the new siding pieces and the rehabilitated casing boards were ready to be installed, but before I did that I needed to take care of a few things. The first order of business was to repair a crack in the right window frame.

This went unnoticed for a long time, because it was hidden behind the strip separating the top and bottom sash. I at last discovered it when I noticed this:

Happily, at this point it was a simple thing to fix. I just blew out the debris from the crack with some compressed air, applied some 5-minute epoxy, and clamped it together.

Good as new!

The other matter I needed to attend to was to rehabilitate the sill. While the dormer sills are considerably less eroded than were the sills on the south side, they are twice as long, and I didn't have the clearance needed to clamp guide strips to speed my work. Because of this, I had quite a difficult time getting the job done properly. I tried screwing guide strips directly onto the sill, but I couldn't seem to get them in the right place because I really didn't have anything concrete to line them up with. I went through several cycles of placing a strip, puttying, removing the strip, sanding down to find I hadn't done it right, puttying up the holes, and then starting all over again. I really needed to have strips of precisely the right width, because then I could easily line them up with the largely intact bottom edge. My problem was that I simply didn't have the tools to get this done; I knew I couldn't get the kind of straight, clean cut I needed using my circular saw.

By a happy coincidence, when I was at Ganahl to buy the Brushing Putty, I noticed they were advertising a small table saw, a "contractor's saw", for an insanely good price. Usually, contractor's saws in this price range are obvious pieces of junk, but when I inspected the display model carefully, I found that the basic mechanism of the saw was quite solid. The machine certainly wasn't fancy, but neither was it flimsy, and it had all the necessary features. And so, after some serious cogitation, I bought one.

It took a lot of test cuts, and I ended up having to buy a fine-cut blade, but with this and some careful adjustments to the fence and blade guard, I was able to cut myself precisely the pieces I needed.

After this, it was a simple matter to finish the sill. I still have to putty up the screw holes and a few remaining small divots, but I can take care of that business the next time I mix up some epoxy putty.

I wasn't yet ready to put the boards back up, however. First, I had to re-do the flashing along the left side of the dormer behind where the new siding pieces were to go. As you will recall, this area was a particular mess when I first started working on the dormer. Here's how the flashing installation looked after I removed the broken siding pieces and the casing boards:

Yeesh. They had routed the runoff around the sill (and behind one of the trim pieces, remember), with a huge glob of caulk to seal the deal. Before proceeding, I removed the two bottom flashing pieces and the caulk; when I had finished rehabilitating the sill, this is what I had:

By inspecting the analogous area on the other dormers, I had learned that the runoff was supposed to go straight down and under the end of the sill. Sadly, as things stood, I didn't have the materials to do this; I didn't have enough flashing, and I didn't have any extra shingle material.

As longtime readers know, when the going gets tough, the tough go ad hoc. I noticed that above the area to be patched, the flashing pieces were extensively overlapped, far more than was necessary. So I removed some staples, repositioned the next two flashing pieces so that they reached further down while still overlapping safely, and stapled everything back down again. For the small void that needed shingle fill (for cosmetic purposes only, because it was covered by the flashing already), I cut a small piece out of the back of one of the shingles from an undetectable area. Each of these shingles is several layers thick, so this did not compromise watertightness at all. I stapled this small piece in place, and voila!

To tell you the truth, this part of the job had been troubling me for weeks, so I am greatly relieved that I was able to figure it out, with the help of my old pal ad hoc.

With this I thought I was ready to attach the new siding pieces, but I discovered that one more obstacle lay in my way. When I had added 3/16" to the back of the new pieces to shim them out to the thickness of the existing siding, I hadn't noticed that I had made the top of the uppermost piece 3/16" too thick to fit behind the piece above. I thus had to cut a rabbet into the topmost new piece, 3/4" wide and 3/16" deep, before I could proceed.

My heart sank at this discovery: so near, and yet so far! I'd have to make this rabbet the old-fashioned way, with a hammer and wood chisel. With my ruined hands, that would take at least a day. Then I remembered that I had a table saw now. I could do the job with that! A half-hour later, the rabbet was done, and I attached the new siding pieces onto the dormer.

As you can see, the blade height is a bit unstable. I'm going to have to tighten that up. Happily, it doesn't matter in this case.

The rabbet is completely hidden from view, and from the ground the slight difference in profile between the old and new pieces will be unnoticeable.

With the siding installed, it was at last time to install the rehabilitated casing boards. I had to be extremely careful to line the boards up correctly, because they are warped. I measured and marked very carefully and thoroughly, and managed to put the boards back right where they belonged.

Even so, I've only put screws at the four corners of each one in case I have to adjust their placement later on. 

And with that, I'm almost finished with the unscheduled fabrication work. There is one more detail I must attend to before I get back to the painting prep, which I'll deal with next time.

* * *

"Left-two-three-dip-two-three. . ."

Brushing Putty

As I mentioned in my last post, Brushing Putty is my secret weapon for putting a final finish on a painted surface. You may recall that I mentioned my using it on the aprons I rehabilitated for the left window casing on the south side of the house.

Brushing Putty, now marketed in this country under the Fine Paints of Europe brand, is an oil-base paint with a huge amount of fine-grained solids mixed into it. It needs a primer coat of oil-base paint. You apply a thick coat of it with a paintbrush; the paint levels nicely, and in the process fills in every tiny irregularity. After it dries completely (from 12 to 16 hours), you sand it flat with 180- to 220-grit sandpaper, and if any surface irregularities remain, you repeat the process if desired. Then, you cover it with a coat of oil-base paint.

As you can see, I've had my can of it so long that the bottom has rusted. Brushing Putty can be difficult to use on figured surfaces, which is why I seldom use it. On a simple board, on the other hand, it's quite easy—especially when the board can be laid flat. The present situation is thus ideal for it. Well, it's actually not quite ideal, because the boards are not flat; the cupping and warping complicate matters significantly. So it's not quite easy. It requires some fancy sanding. Nothing regarding the Farm House is easy except for falling off the roof.

Still, when it's all done and the top coat of primer is on, the improvement is well worth the work:

Now this is more like it! Allow me to indulge in some Before and After action:

As you can clearly see, the garage is much neater now. Thank you.

Ironically, there still are areas of differing sheen on the boards, which you can see in the After photo above. This is visual evidence that very hot weather is not good for painting, even when inside. Without boring you with the technical details, when paint dries too fast (and is not in direct sunlight), the areas drying last are shinier than the other areas. Happily, this difference in sheen will disappear with a light sanding.

And so, none too soon, I am done with painting for a little while. While this extremely hot (over 100 degrees) weather is bad for painting, it is excellent for puttying, and falling off roofs. I'll be doing some of those things when next we meet.

* * *

Board Surfing

I'm nearly done rehabilitating the casing boards. It has been a long, tedious, boring job, so I'll spare you the play-by-play and just hit the highlights, the processes I haven't already covered that may prove useful to you when working with putty.

The long, boring part of the work involved many putty/sand cycles. I went slowly and carefully because I wanted to be sure I simply filled in the divots and built up the corners without removing any wood. Because WoodEpox is harder than redwood, it's extremely easy to blast right through the putty and sand a nice divot into the board before you know it, and a pain in the neck to fill that divot back in. Ask me how I know this. Actually, don't.

In due course, I had patched the boards so that the divots were all filled up—at least, all the divots I could see—and the corners were all built up. I was nonetheless not yet ready to prime the boards. Before I did that, I had to check the boards' dimensions to see if there were any obvious thin or thick areas. As it turned out, there was one of each.

Here's the thick area, on the corner of the board (to the left in the photo). This occurred because of a lateral split that occurred sometime in the past. Instead of gluing the crack back together, the previous workman simply filled it with patching material.

The thin area was also very obvious, although I could not get it to show up clearly in a photograph. Near the bottom of the left board, the thickness came down to a half-inch along about a six-inch area. When I measured along that entire side, I found it was actually worn down to 3/4 of an inch (recall it's supposed to be 7/8") for nearly 2/3 of its length. After some more investigation, I discovered that the wear pattern was barely visible. Here's a picture of the boards at this point in the work:

If you look at the board closest to the camera, you'll see vaguely a straight line running diagonally from the near edge about 2/3 of the way up to the left across to the far edge at the bottom. The triangle thus described marks the worn-thin area of the board. It's a fascinating wear pattern; the only cause I can think of for it is wind abrasion, but I can't imagine how that could cause wear in such a geometrically regular pattern. This is one of the most baffling stories I've seen the Farm House tell, and one of the most subtle.

It would be ridiculous to try to patch this huge area, and in any event it's such a subtle fault that I am sure it will not be visible. I thus undertook to patch just the little valley within this area where the thickness goes to a half inch, which would be visible. I clamped a strip of wood onto the edge to provide an aid to patching, and a photograph of this serves to reveal the thin area:

The strip of wood is level with the edges of the valley; where the side of the strip is revealed is where the thin area is.

By the way, this illustrates the real difficulty in rehabilitating old worn boards. It would be a fairly simple job if the board only had divots to fill; it's the inevitable alterations to the original dimensions (the warping and large-scale physical damage) that make the job a pain in the neck. Rather than patching and sanding flat, which is the natural inclination, I have to be sure to patch and sand along the contour of the wood, lest I create more thick or thin spots. This aspect of the work will come up again when I re-attach the boards; I'm hoping that step will not reveal any new faults.

Here's the completed patching of the valley. It went fairly well, considering that it is quite difficult to feather in large areas with WoodEpox. As dense as this putty is, it doesn't lend itself to smooth application in thin layers, and on top of that, thin layers take a long time to cure because of their small mass. As a bonus, you can't use a blow-dryer or heat gun to speed curing in such cases, because the wind action blows holes in the thin layers of uncured putty.

This is not a problem during the day; out in the hot summer sun, the putty cures in an hour or so. At night, however, the wait can be annoying. I thus cast about for methods of artificially heating the wood to speed things up. I hit upon the idea of using a heating pad.

Okay, this is a good concept. It did speed things up. It is however and old heating pad, and doesn't get as hot as it once did, so it didn't speed things up enough. Next time I'll use a hotter heating pad.

Correcting the thick area was naturally much simpler; all I had to do was to sand it down carefully until it was the right thickness. This did unfortunately reveal a submerged crack which I had to repair. From what I've already taught you about the language of houses, you can read from this picture that this whole problem was caused by a nail driven too near the edge without pre-drilling.

At that point, it was time to prime. For the first primer coat, I use an untinted, thinned primer so that I can see through to detect any underlying problems, and so that I can sand down any remaining high spots easily.

I always know that no matter how careful I am to patch every little divot, the first priming will reveal some significant ones that I missed. This time was no exception:

So it was time for one more cycle of patching and sanding. Since it was evening when I started, I wanted to find some way to speed up the curing, but I'd already determined the heating pad method was too slow. Casting about for some better idea, I hit upon the Easy Bake method.

A 300-watt light bulb generates a great deal of heat. I'd hung this work light up temporarily to throw more light on things, and as I stood there cogitating, I felt my brain begin to heat up. It wasn't the cogitating that did that; it was the work light immediately above me. With a light bulb directly above my head, conditions were ideal for me to have an idea. So I brought the work light down until its protective cage nearly touched the wood.

As it turned out, this was too close.

After some further, more careful experimentation, I found that moving the fixture up until its cage was a foot away yielded the best results. Moving the boards around every 10 minutes or so under the light, the remaining un-scorched epoxy cured in about an hour.

After this, I sanded down this last pass with minute care. I used a small piece of fine sandpaper without a block, folded in thirds, so I could feather the edge of each patch into the surrounding area. For this pass, I had a clear indication of when to stop, namely when I started to sand through the primer. When you get to the final stages in a complicated patching job such as this, you have to be careful not to create more irregularities than you fix; if you don't sand off all the excess putty and feather the edges of the patch into the surrounding area, all you achieve is to replace small divots with large bumps. Of course, this is true whenever you patch, but until you apply the last coat of primer you still have a chance to fix any problems from earlier passes.

In any event, once I had the boards all sanded smooth and thoroughly dusted, I applied the final, tinted coat of primer.

Wait—did I say "final"?

 

Once the "final" coat dried, it was painfully obvious that I was not done. As you can see, despite my final patches' flatness, they are still telegraphing through the paint because of their decreased "holdout", or saturation, of the primer. This angle actually minimizes this problem; it does not show patches that are behind both coats of primer, which are also telegraphing through the paint, but to a lesser degree. Let's take a closer look at the boards:

As you can see, there's a lot of stuff going on here: wildly differing areas of holdout, remaining minute divots too small for the WoodEpox effectively to fill, and small valleys from weathering and uneven sanding. A few coats of the finish paint will mask these irregularities somewhat, but it will not eliminate them.

I didn't expect I'd get these boards looking perfect, but this will not do. I try not to let my ego get the better of me, but I didn't put all this work into rehabilitating these boards only to have them come out looking so crummy. Besides, the Farm House deserves better.

Duty and honor thus compel me to employ my secret weapon to put the final finish on these boards: Brushing Putty.

* * *

"I. Am. Fabulous."

Epoxy Variations: III (Finale: Allegro Amabile)

With the cracks in the siding all epoxied up, I had two more epoxy-related tasks to perform before I could start rehabilitating the dormer in earnest: the consolidating of the heavily damaged sill wood, and the sealing of the end grain on the siding. The former task I wanted to do before sanding because I wanted to prevent the many crannies worn in the sill wood from becoming choked with sanding dust, and the latter was simply convenient to do at the same time.

The sill on the dormer is damaged in the same way as those on the south side windows: extreme lignin damage and oxidation from sun exposure. Here's a picture I took a while back, showing the condition of the sill:

Check out the mountain of debris that had built up in the weight pocket!

In any event, the damage is not as deep on the dormer sill, but it is just as severe. Thus, the treatment required here was the same: straight LiquidWood, applied liberally; the only difference is that the wood would require less of it.

So this last variation is essentially a reprise of the Theme, played more quickly and lightly, and sweetly as well, because we don't have to choke on thinner.

Here is the completed treatment:

The top part of the sill didn't need treatment, because it has been protected under the sash. As I mentioned, I've sealed the ends of the siding as well. Aside from the preventing of any absorption of moisture there, I'm hoping it will help discourage further cracking simply by binding the grain more firmly together.

Now, I am ready to sand.

* * *

Ganahl Lumber, Pasadena. They really make a guy feel at home.

Epoxy Variations: II (Presto)

While I was waiting for the window casing boards to fumigate themselves, I turned my attention at last back to the dormer itself. Obviously the whole thing needs sanding, but there are a few things I wanted to do beforehand. One of these was to glue up the several cracks in the siding on the right side.

Before he abandoned work on this dormer entirely, the contractor did replace all of the siding on the right side save the top piece. You can see here where he shimmed it out to match the old siding:

As you can see, he simply placed the 3/16" shimming piece behind the shiplap, without laminating the two together as I did. You can also see how the new, thinner stock has already started to warp and crack.

Here, you can see that he was not sufficiently careful, when placing the new boards, not to crack the old one:

You see here what I was telling you about the new, thinner shiplap:

When cut in short pieces, it has a tendency to crack. Now it should be quite evident why I took the trouble to laminate the plywood shims to the new pieces of siding to go on the left side.

All told, there were about a half-dozen cracks on this side of the dormer, and I didn't want to take a great deal of time to repair them. So, I used my secret weapon in such cases: one-minute epoxy, packed in a dual-plunger setup with a mixing tip. All you have to do is put the tip on, press the plunger, and out comes perfectly-mixed epoxy that sets in 60 seconds. It's thick enough to fill gaps and thin enough to get into tight cracks. It's great stuff when you're in a hurry.

So I put on some nitrile gloves, started gluing, and in a scant three minutes I was all done, after pushing the two widest cracks shut while the epoxy cured.

Sure, it's a mess, but I'll just sand off the drips as I do the normal sanding of the surface. Problem solved!

* * *

"Mmmmm. . . beefy fresh!"

Epoxy Variations: I (Allegro con moto)

I hope you all had a fun Fourth!

As you will recall from the post before last, my next task is to rehabilitate the window casing boards. I've been doing some work on them since then.

The first thing I did was to wire-brush the fronts of the boards in order to dislodge the loose oxidized paint and dirt, and to sand off the paint ridges and mineral deposits (from water seepage) from the backs. With this superfluous stuff removed, let's take a closer look at what I'm dealing with. Here's a close-up on the tops of the boards, arranged in their proper position on the dormer from left to right:

Note the lack of sun damage on the right one; it's interesting that the right side of the dormer should be so much less exposed to the sun than the left, when the sun's travel is on the right (south) side of the house. Believe it or not, it's the shade provided by the eave that has protected the top of the right board, while the top of the left one is subject to an hour or so of sun at the end of the day; over 126 years, that adds up to 46,018 extra hours of sun, give or take a rainy day or two (and that doesn't include the partial year on top of that), and that may account for the difference. An hour here, an hour there, and pretty soon you're talking about some real time.

Here's a close-up of the bottom end of the backs:

You can clearly see the mill marks on this unsurfaced side (remember, these boards were only surfaced on the front side). You can also see the water damage and oxidation.

For all my wailing, they are actually in remarkably good shape for their age; with the exception of the bottoms, there is no internal lignin damage, the oxidation and water damage are only superficial, and there is no cracking or splintering. They are certainly in far better shape than the casing boards were on the south side windows; all that's wrong with them for the most part is that they are very dry and thus somewhat brittle.

Then again, these boards are off the house, and they are all somewhat warped. As I re-attach them, I need to coax them back into a semblance of flatness without cracking or splintering them.

You may recall that I restored resilience and flexibility to the casing cap I rehabilitated on one of the south side windows by soaking it in epoxy. That was a feasible operation because the piece was fairly small, and was porous enough to provide ample spaces for the epoxy to enter. To give the window casing boards the same treatment would be a huge undertaking requiring great amounts of LiquidWood, and even then the soundness of the wood would not admit the epoxy much further than an eighth of an inch in. No, for this job I needed to take a different tack.

And so, I decided to try an experiment I'd been thinking of for some time: thinning the epoxy. Abatron provides a thinner specifically formulated for their epoxies; it's a foul-smelling brew, like smog concentrate in a can, so I avoid its use; denatured alcohol works very well to clean epoxy off tools and containers, so I use that rather than the thinner for clean-up.

But alcohol only dilutes the epoxy enough to effect its removal; it doesn't actually dissolve it. In this, it is like water with latex paint. A proper thinner must dissolve what it is thinning; it must mix with it so that the thinned material is evenly dispersed throughout the mixture.

My theory was that the thinned epoxy would travel much more readily through the sound wood, and would be transported much further into it by the thinner. Once the epoxy cured and the thinner evaporated, the epoxy density, and thus its effect, would be lessened compared to un-thinned epoxy, but a lesser degree of the same effect is precisely what I wanted, because that was what the wood needed.

And so, after mixing the LiquidWood and letting it sit so that the reaction got well underway, I mixed it thoroughly with an equal amount of epoxy thinner and brushed it on.

As I had hoped, the wood drank the mixture up thirstily, so much so that I had to mix another, larger batch to finish the job. When I was all done and the epoxy had cured, enough remained on the painted surfaces to leave a glossy sheen, but on the unpainted surfaces very little epoxy remained on the surface. In the heavily damaged areas at the bottom, I could have brushed a great deal more into it before the wood was saturated. In fact, the absorption pattern clearly indicates where the lignin-damaged areas are by their relative lack of sheen.

But no matter, for my experiment was a resounding success! I was able to flex the boards easily, just as new boards would flex, and the surface of the unpainted wood was firm and resilient, with all the oxidized wood now incorporated. This is a good thing, for I can't afford to lose any of the boards' thickness, lest they not lie level with the top casing board when they are put back in place.

The only downside is that the boards positively reek of thinner. I might have expected this, had I considered that a great deal of the thinner remains trapped within the cured epoxy. The morning after I applied the epoxy mixture, I was half-flattened by the fumes when I opened the garage door; I had to take the boards outside to make the garage safe to occupy. 24 hours later, the odor of thinner still hit me over the head when I got within five feet of the boards, even out in the open air, although by the end of the day the odor had at last begun to dissipate. This procedure is not one I would recommend for interior wood, needless to say.

* * *

"What's that foul odor?"

Happy Independence Day!

Or if you prefer, Happy 4B Day! That's Baseball, BBQ, Beer and BOOM!

For my part, I'll be hoisting a cold Red Tail Ale to those brave souls who, 236 years ago, had the wisdom to know what had to be done, the guts to do it, and the will to make it stick.

4/4 Blues

After a good overnight curing, I removed all the clamps and bracing pieces, and found that I had done a pretty good job of gluing the bracing pieces to the siding. I thought they were well out of glue range, but some of the epoxy crept out and seeped between the siding and the bracing pieces, causing a little damage to the plywood backing in a few places when I pried the pieces apart. 

It won't make a difference in this case, but I should have wrapped the bracing pieces in plastic wrap or coated them with mold release compound. Well, this is how I learn.

I mixed up another batch of LiquidWood and brushed it on the backs of the pieces and all of the end grain. After seeing the long-term damage moisture inflicts upon wood, sealing end grain with epoxy is a step I will always take from now on with exterior wood.

The cured epoxy. Notice that it mostly stayed on the surface. This is fine, because I only applied it to seal the grain against moisture, but in retrospect I could have used much less epoxy, because I'm just going to have to sand most of this off. I shouldn't have been surprised, because for one thing, the plywood is only 5 mm thick, and for another, I'd already saturated the other side. In any event, these pieces are ready for patching, sanding and priming.

So, on to the next task: rehabilitating the window casing boards.

What a mess. Weathered, warped, and all chewed up at the bottom end. It's going to take a lot of work to get these boards looking right. It would be so much simpler just to replace them, but there's just one little problem with that: you can't get boards in that thickness anymore.

That's the dark secret of restoring a Victorian: they don't make lumber like they used to.

It's a very complicated story, the history of lumber standards in America since the Civil War, and after some study my understanding of it is yet incomplete. Still, I'll do my best to explain the situation, over-simplifying a bit for the sake of clarity.

At the time the Farm House was built, boards were sold on the basis of quarters of an inch: 4/4 boards were nominally an inch thick, 6/4 boards 1 1/2 inches thick, and so on. I say "nominal" thickness, because boards have never been as thick as billed; the reason for this stems from the fact that way back before the Civil War, sawmills served a largely local clientele; they provided rough (unfinished) boards sized according to local standards, and carpenters finished them by hand on site.

After the Civil War, with the spread of rail transportation, sawmills began to cover larger regions, and with this development arose the need for more uniform standards of lumber sizing, and the increasing speed of development led to calls for pre-finished lumber in order to speed construction.

According to the uniform standards in place in 1885, the rule was that the dried, rough board started out at the stated thickness, and 1/8 inch was deducted for each surface that was smoothed; i.e., sanded or planed to flatness. Virtually all of the boards used in the Farm House besides the framing are 4/4, surfaced on one side ("S1S"), so they are 7/8" thick. So it is with the window casing boards.

Simply put, 7/8" thick boards are not available as stock pieces today. Boards of one inch nominal thickness are now 3/4", or even 11/16". In fact, the stock used to make the new shiplap was 11/16", which is why I needed 3/16" plywood to match them with the old shiplap. The boards used to make the window casing caps on the sides of the house were 4/4 S1S as well; in that case, happily, I had plenty of old beadboard, which was also 4/4 S1S, and plenty wide for my need.

The problem I have in the present case is that the window casing boards are 7 1/2 inches wide, and I have no old stock to accommodate that width. Moreover, shimming new thinner stock out with plywood isn't a viable option, mostly because the edges would in that case be exposed and I could never satisfactorily disguise them.

So I must rehabilitate the old boards, or spend an inordinate amount of money to have new ones specially milled. Yes, time is money, but my time is not that much money. So, as Joseph P. Kennedy (John F.'s father) said, "When the going gets tough, the tough get going."

Of course, he also said, "Don't buy a single vote more than necessary. I'll be damned if I'm going to pay for a landslide." Joe Sr. was no Vince Lombardi. But no matter; I'll take the truth wherever I may find it.

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"Open open open open open open open open open. . ."