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.

* * *

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

Another Mystery Uncovered

I've put the casing work aside temporarily to work on the siding. Every so often I need to get some paint up in order to keep the City happy, and the casing has taken much longer than I had expected, what with the continuing weather problems and the epoxy mishap. Getting a coat of primer up on the siding will reset the clock and buy me some time to continue the complicated putty-sculpting work I have ahead.

Normally, I prefer to wait to do the primer until I am ready to do the finish coat as well, so I only have to mask once. In this case, however, I will not be able to judge where the siding needs further patching until I see it all in a uniform color, and I'll have to caulk between the colors before I paint, so I'll have to mask twice anyway. Thus, I might as well do it now, since I can get it done without too much fuss. I'm not going to sand the siding, because it is largely cupped, and the weathering is so extreme that I'd have to sand off a considerable amount of wood to get it smooth. Wifey and I tried in one corner, and after several hours of work with the big random orbit sander and 40-grit paper, we still were not down to a clean surface. So, as with the shingles in the tympanum above, I brushed all the siding with a brass-wire brush to remove all the oxidized paint.

There is one spot where the previous coat of paint is exposed, in the place where there was a bracket for holding up the vent pipe from the old floor heater. Before I brushed there, I made sure I took some clear pictures of the area to document what seems to be the original body color.

It's hard to see here from the few remaining traces, but in person it's clear that it was mustard yellow, which was by utter coincidence the very color we were originally considering for our paint scheme. The color studies, however, indicated that the color was too bright for the surroundings, and would make the house stand out too much. We wanted the house and grounds to strike the eye as an organic whole, so we chose a darker color suggested by the bark of the pine trees, derived from the precise compliment of the trim color. We're quite happy with our color scheme, but it's great to know that we did our homework well regarding the appropriate colors for a house of the Farm House's vintage.

As I brushed the siding, I re-set the nails that had popped out, and marked the areas that needed further attention before I primed because of cracks or knots. While I am not going to do much patching on the siding because of the difficulty of making the patches blend in, I am nonetheless going to fix the areas that are not weather-tight, because I have to for the sake of the house's health.

Most of the problems are cracks that just need some glue, such as this one, but some of the cracks are wide enough that they require putty as well. I figure that I can putty them more or less level, then wire-brush them after the putty has partially set to emulate the grain pattern of the surrounding area.

This area has long been a mystery. This patch, made of thin sheet steel, is uncommonly well-done relative to most of the patching work I've found, nicely formed and thoroughly tacked down. What terrible secret lay behind it? Wifey advised leaving it alone, but I had to know, so I pried up the bottom of the patch carefully and took a look.

It's a huge knothole, almost as big as the patch, big enough for a rat to get through, which is why I left the patch in place until I patch it up properly. I'll have to slip a piece of wood in as a backing and glue it in, then putty over that. Since there's no way to hide that a knot was there, I won't have to worry too much about making it blend in. Chalk up another badge of honor for the Farm House.

The Farm House Effect

[Prefatory note, April 2019: While I don't like to edit posts ex post facto, I'd like to revise and extend my original remarks here in light of what we have since learned about Anne Wilson and her family. 

As I mention in my post of August 25, 2017, "Happy Birthday, Morning!", Anne and her family did indeed make many, many happy echoes within the Farm House walls; it just took us a long time to be able to hear them.

To correct the factual inaccuracies in the following: Anne was indeed born in 1865; she moved here with her sons David and Lucian in 1900 from Cucamonga after the untimely passing of her husband Archibald, and she lived here until her passing at 104 in 1969. 

I have it on good authority that Anne Wilson was as happy as she was indomitable, known as "Morning" by the family for her sunny disposition, and the Farm House served as a joyful center of Wilson family life. I know for a fact that, along the way, a goodly number of Wilsons lived within these walls.]

* * *

As I mentioned long ago in the Journal, we didn't really know much of anything about Victorian homes when we purchased the Farm House. I knew Craftsman homes intimately from having been in and around many of them. My grandparents had a classic 1905 bungalow, and along the way I've lived in a few myself. I thus had a firm idea of precisely what details were appropriate for them, from light switches to kitchen fixtures. We in fact were looking to buy a Craftsman fixer-upper when we found the Farm House and fell in love. Landing it was the hardest battle Wifey and I have yet fought, but land it we did.

The thing is, once we did I felt like a car-chasing dog who suddenly discovers that he's caught one: okay, now what do I do? I mean, I knew enough to know that when the Farm House was built, it didn't have light switches or kitchen fixtures. Beyond that, I was pretty much clueless.

So I started to learn all I could about Victorian homes, and early on I noted that not only did they represent a distinct break from the homes that came before, but that the Craftsmen homes that came afterwards themselves represented a distinct break from Victorian homes. Pondering the distinctness of Victorian homes, it eventually dawned upon me that the people who built and lived in them must have been fairly distinctive as well. My area of study thus expanded dramatically: I had to learn not just the what of Victorian homes, but the who and the why as well.

At the same time, the people who had lived in the Farm House had not left many clues regarding how they had lived, and as I have discussed in the Journal, those they did leave indicated strongly that they had not lived the typical Victorian lifestyle—or at least that they had maintained that lifestyle for many decades after the rest of the world had moved on from it. Anne Wilson, who was born no later than 1865 and who lived in the house for well over 60 years, was clearly stubbornly intent upon maintaining the simple lifestyle into which she had been born; she did not install a gas heater until 1944, and the house was not electrified until 1950 by younger relatives (she was widowed by 1924). It's an intriguing history, but by no means a typical one, and not a terribly happy one either.

On the one hand, Anne and her grandson Dick left us a house that was still much as it was when it was built, with relatively few changes to obscure its original condition; this was a rare gift that few who undertake to restore an old house receive. On the other hand, they left a house with no memories save for sad ones, a house devoid of happy echoes, of dreams built and lived, of life.

The only characteristic the house had was its dogged stubbornness, its contemptuous disregard of the passage of time, its determination to withstand earthquakes and the relentless depredations of sun, wind and rain, its indomitable will to survive with dignity. It was this quality with which Wifey and I immediately fell deeply in love, and is so like the Anne we have come to know that we have to conclude that she did leave behind something quite fine, after all.

Thus, all we had to work with at the beginning was a strong indication of the house as originally built, and that air of indomitable dignity. We resolved to retain and enhance both aspects, but that was not enough. All this would give us was a museum, when what we needed was a home. Clearly, we needed more to work with.

So I conceived a narrative for the house's history. In this narrative, the Farm House had been lived in all along by a family much like our own, who had maintained the house reasonably well all along, but who otherwise had changed things no more than necessary to keep the house in compliance with the prevailing standards for comfort and utility. In this way, we hoped to end up with a home exuding Victorian exuberance with all the dignity that comes with age, one that continued to maintain the Victorian precepts of beauty in a modern context. This narrative has guided our work ever since.

To flesh out this narrative, I had to gain a familiarity with the way people lived not just when the house was built, but during the Farm House's entire existence. This added to my field of study not just the what, who and why, but the when and how as well, and not just for the Victorian period, but for every period between that one and the present. In other words, I had to become conversant in the history of everyday life since 1885.

Now, I was already up in such knowledge back to the late Thirties just from talking to my parents, who had come of age at about that time and were always happy to talk about the way things were. I knew, for example, that when my Dad was a young man before the war he smoked Wings cigarettes, because they were cheap but serviceable. He even told me how much they cost compared to name brand cigarettes. This is the kind of ephemeral knowledge from which one may build an understanding of how people lived, what their money was worth, what was important to them and so on. But before that, there was pretty much a brick wall. I knew a few details about a few things, but otherwise I was utterly in the dark. 

I threw myself into learning every little thing about American life from 1885 to 1935: art, music, architecture, popular entertainments, what they ate, what they drank, what they paid for everyday things, what they earned. And somewhere along the way, my sense of time changed.

Before this, I was like most people, I expect. Time began from my early memories, and everything before that was old. Things from before my parents' time were prehistoric. When I was 30, my date of birth did not seem terribly long ago, but 30 years before that seemed like 100 in my sense of history.

But once I started immersing myself in old ephemera, trying to get into the mind of the Victorian, the Edwardian, the Ragtime Bear and the Jazz Baby, my sense of history became quite linear. I began to understand the path from Al Jolson to Frank Sinatra as well as I did the path from the Rolling Stones to Nirvana. I started to view a film from 1925 with something approaching the cultural context of a man from 1925, and not as some moldy old piece of corn. With great speed, time was becoming less of a barrier to me, and to Wifey as well, because she has been right there with me all along.

Put another way, I was becoming the homeowner of my narrative, the man who had lived in the Farm House since 1885. I had synthesized a living memory that extended back many decades before my birth, and this synthesis continues to broaden and deepen as a natural consequence of the continuing Farm House restoration.

This is what I call the "Farm House effect": the extension of one's historical purview to encompass the lifetime of the old home he is restoring. I hypothesize that anyone who becomes intimately involved in the restoration of an old house experiences this effect to some degree, and that it becomes stronger the older the house is. I can only imagine what goes on in the mind of one whose labor of love is not a Victorian, but a Late Colonial.

I'd love to hear from those of you who are also restoring their old house, in order that we might compare notes. For my part, I will be providing examples of the Farm House effect in our own lives from time to time.