My Dog Ate My Paintbrush

First of all, happy Cinco de Mayo! The day means much more to me than it otherwise would because it marks the luckiest day in my life. Nineteen years ago on this day, I met my future wife. So, happy Cinco de Mayo!

It's been nearly a month since I last posted. At that time, I was fixing to mask so that I could paint the middle dormer. As I write, I have masked off the roof flashing, and that's it. It's not that I've been lazy, it's just that life and the weather intervened. Honest!

I've been working on the grading for a larger gazebo pad since February, whenever I had some time to spare, but the work got to a stage where the pups were starting to mess it up by their cavorting. And so, with the prospect of questionable weather approaching, I decided to give the gazebo project top priority until it was done.

The old gazebo pad wasn't large enough, and there was a lot of erosion towards the back of the lot, so I decided to double the pad's size and build a little frame at the low side to keep things level and neat. It was a lot of hard work, because I had to move a lot of dirt from elsewhere on the lot. I took it from the far side of the garage, where I need to do a lot of regrading anyway.

I finally finished it last week. I had planned to do some how-to posts on the surveying and grading, but I couldn't manage to make the telling of it anything but boring. Perhaps I'll try again later. Anyway, Wifey and I put up the new gazebo a few days ago, and here is the finished project:

The pets of course all love the open area of fake turf.

The pups, Peter and Sally, are six months old now, and starting to look like half-sized editions of their future selves.

They've become significantly more well-behaved in the past few weeks, which is a fortunate thing, because they've entered another big growth spurt. Peter is going to be huge once he grows into those ears; Sally should end up to be about Nellie's size.

Oh, yeah, the painting. Anyway, the weather has been wet with annoying unpredictability and timing, which has either made it impossible to paint or led me to believe it would be impossible to paint. It looks like I've got some clear sailing now, however.

* * *

"Ay, ay, ay ay, canta y no llores. . . !"

A Long Nightmare Is Over

The south side is done.

 

I will do the foundation at the end of the painting work all at the same time, because it will involve some civil engineering beforehand.

The Farm House Speaks

I've done what I can to repair the mess I showed you all in the last post. It's hard to tell from this angle, but if you compare it to the previous picture, you can see that it's a big improvement. Once it's all puttied and painted, it will look swell.

Except, that is, for the bottom edge. Both those boards are now firmly butted up against the piece above them, but the board on the left is apparently wider than the one on the right. One would naturally assume that this is evidence of a repair, but at its other end the board fits properly. If this were the result of a repair job, then, why would someone take care to do a neat job but not take the care to install a properly-sized board? Then again, why would someone build such an obvious discrepancy into a new house? 

I think the answer to this riddle is simply that the house has changed shape somewhat since it was built. A lot of things can happen in 126 years, especially considering that the Farm House spent 118 of them sitting right on the ground. According to our building engineer, the ground under that corner of the house settled considerably; it seems likely that the trim piece to the left followed that downward movement, leaving its partner behind. I'm willing to bet that if I removed the trim pieces in front of these boards, I would find that the board the left piece is butted against has also shifted downward, and the left and right pieces are the same width after all. Supporting this theory is the fact that the trim pieces above the boards curve upwards to the right of the picture. In fact, I bet that these discrepancies are what first led the engineer down the path that ultimately led him to conclude that the house had settled in that corner.

We've all heard it a million times: "If these walls could talk. . . ." Well, walls do talk, especially in an old house like the Farm House. They tell many stories of the events they have been through and the people who have lived within them. If you take the time to understand what they are saying, you can learn a lot about the house's history;  more importantly, you may learn important things about its condition. The discovery that the house had settled so much in this corner pointed the way to repairs that were crucial to the house's structural integrity. 

Listen to your house, and it will keep you snug and safe for a lifetime. Ignore it, and it will surely find a way to get your attention.

The Sun Is A Cruel Master

So now it's on to the first floor of the south side, which is even more sun-thrashed than the tympanum, and for the health of the house I can't put any repairs in this area off until later. A lot of the work the contractor left undone [see Journal] involves the trim on this part of the house, either new pieces that were left off or old pieces that were supposed to have been replaced. Some of the old trim has been so ravaged by the sun that it has the consistency of stale cornbread; you could drive a nail, or for that matter a sharpened pencil, right through it with your hand.

To the left is a typical problem I face: five different pieces, each out of alignment with the others. The two flat pieces on the bottom aren't even the same size, and most of the pieces are too spongy to hold a screw. I've already managed to pull them into a somewhat better alignment with a few screws and shims, but now I must consolidate the spongy pieces by soaking them with liquid epoxy, a process I hope to getting around to explaining one fine day, God willing and the river don't rise. Then I will restore the original profiles of the trim with epoxy putty. I'll never be able to make the bottom edges of the bottom pieces align, but at least the result will be vastly improved cosmetically. More importantly, it will be sound, stable and weather-tight.

South Side Tympanum Painted

I've finished the south side tympanum (gable area), and a miserable task it was, with windy Winter weather and no scaffold from which to work. A close look at things up there revealed that all the shingles and much of the trim need to be replaced. 125 years in the blistering Pasadena sun have turned those shingles into tortilla chips; they are so brittle and warped that all I could do by way of surface preparation was to scrub each one carefully with a brass brush to remove the oxidized paint. The wood of the vent casing is quite fragile as well. 

Because I need to keep this project moving along, and it took forever just to brush the whole thing by hand, I decided to skip the plastic surgery work for the time being; I can come back to it after the rest of the house is done, and I have longer, warmer days to work in. It's so far up there that it's hard to see the flaws anyway.

North Side Painting Finished

 

Yes, the north side is now sporting a new coat of paint (except the foundation, which I will do at the end of the job). Compared with the monochromatic olive-drab the house wore for over fifty years, the change is dramatic. This is basically a textbook High Victorian color scheme, but the colors are tweaked a bit to mirror colors found in the huge pine trees that dominate the lot. Note how pretty and graceful the bargeboard looks, now that it is properly picked out with a nice dark contrasting color. It's like curls of hair framing the face of a pretty girl.

I have noticed that the body colors are highly changeable depending upon the light hitting them; at times, the red component comes out with an assertiveness I did not anticipate. This is undoubtedly a function of the green trim color; as the Victorians well knew, complmentary colors serve to strengthen each other. Since green and red are complimentary colors, the red in the body colors is naturally more apparent than it would be otherwise. I am hoping that the addition of the dark brown foundation color will pull the colors back into proper balance. Not that the matter is terribly crucial aesthetically; the scheme looks great in any event. I only mention it to illustrate the truth of the precept that you can't be absolutely sure of your house colors until you see them on the house. These colors are precisely what I wanted; I knew of the complimentary effect, and thought I had accounted for it. Well, we shall see. Context is everything.

Farm House Exterior Painting Underway

The next three posts after this are updates moved from the Farm House Journal home page; they discuss the ongoing exterior painting project.

A little back story: back in July, we received a command from the City to paint the exterior, and gave us a generous three weeks in which to get it done before they started assessing fines.

Needless to say, I greeted this with extreme consternation. This action was egregiously wrong in many ways. Nevertheless, to make a long story short I got right on it, and after about three months of constant torment, Wifey and I wrestled the City to an accommodation: I would get it done as fast as I can, and they would back off as long as the job continued to progress in a timely manner. Since then, they've only bugged me once—the work stopped completely for several weeks while I recuperated from a nasty fall—and that contact was entirely cordial once the code compliance officer saw the lurid bruise along the entirety of my right arm. I didn't even have to show her the other 75% of the injury.

The next post picks the story up from here.