A Posse Ad Esse

Well, it's been an uneventful month, blog-wise, because I've mostly been busy with tasks other than the painting. As I showed you last time, the garage was a disaster area; it had been so long since I'd taken time to put things back that nothing was where it was supposed to be. I had to take a few days to give it a thorough straightening up just so I could find what I needed. At the same time, I put up several more lights so that I could see what I was looking for. The older I get, the more lights I need.

Speaking of lights, I put up a swell new light in the gazebo, a high-pressure sodium light. FarmTek has some very reasonably-priced fixtures, so I decided to give one a try. It works magnificently! Just 150 watts, but it lights up that gazebo at night like the Angel Stadium infield.

Fiat lux.

Speaking of the yard, I had to take some time to tend to that, too. Debris is falling there 24/7, weeds are always springing up, and we have a lot of plants in pots that were beginning to feel neglected.

To sum it all up. I've been pretty busy this past month tending to all the things I've let slip as I worked on the house, but I'm back at it now, finishing the patching of the west window casing. I've been having a terribly difficult time getting the sill to look right, especially since I ran out of the new putty and had to start using the old stuff. I thought I could do it freehand, but as I mentioned before, it's very difficult to establish a straight edge out of putty in midair. No matter how much I worked, I just couldn't get the edge straight. It looked awful.

Sic semper WoodEpox.

I realized I had to make some sort of superstructure to guide me. Fortunately, the profile at each end was correct, so I could use the ends as a guide.

Digging around in my nice neat garage, I found some nice rectangular window stop that the contractor milled for me. I cut two pieces slightly longer than the sill, coated them with mold release agent, then clamped them so they were flush with each end. They thus described a straight, level and perpendicular plane along the front of the sill.

Veni, vidi, putty.

I then puttied slightly proud of this plane, and when it hardened I sanded it carefully back even with the edges of the window stop. It worked! The edge is now straight and level, and the front plane nice and flat. I was stunned to see the difference it made. Before I did this, I was very unhappy with the whole appearance of the casing. I thought it looked bad despite all the work I had done. Now, even though there remain many divots to fill in the sill and the top trim is still off, simply having the sill lines established properly suddenly makes the whole casing look great, at least to my eyes.

Ars gratia artis.

And with that, I've moved on to the east window casing while I await a new shipment of WoodEpox.

* * *

Absit invidia.

Everything's Up to Date in Pasadena

Sorry not to have posted for a while, but I've been busy painting, and I've found that the only thing more boring than watching paint dry is reading a blow-by-blow account of it. I decided to wait until I was done and then bore you all at once. And so, since brevity is the soul of wit, let's get stupid!

The wood was clearly quite thirsty after so long a drought, because the first primer coat was substantially absorbed into the wood.

Fearful that I might need a pore hole key, I sprayed a second coat.

This was much better, but still insufficient in those areas which have seen the most weathering, one of which is pictured here. It illustrates the one distinct weakness of a paint sprayer: it applies paint from a distance, in a straight line, depending upon great velocity to bond the paint with the surface of the wood.. Here, the wood was so deeply contoured from weathering that the sprayer, powerful as it is, couldn't get the paint into all the nooks and crannies, even though I came at the problem areas from several different angles. The droplets, traveling in a straight line, couldn't get into the places that were protected by overhangs.

So, I enlisted Wifey's help, and together we applied a third primer coat the old-fashioned way, with paintbrushes. We were able to scrub and grind that modern, inadequately-fluidized acrylic paint right in where it belonged.

At last, I had a uniformly-colored surface to evaluate. It was clear to me that I'd gone about as fur as I could go towards my goal of fixing only what was necessary for the health of the house, plus any additional glaring cosmetic flaws. I did miss a few of the latter, but these were quickly dispatched with some lightweight exterior spackle, which I applied pretty much with my fingers in order to get it to blend in with the surrounding topography.

I saw no sense in tearing off all that masking only to have to re-apply it later, especially since masking is my single least favorite task related to this whole project. So, I decided to spray the finish coat now, and touch up as necessary with a brush after I finish the trim. This, happily, I was able to do with no further brushing; it only took two coats, one sprayed from an upward angle, and one from below.

Here is the result.

The side of the house, which before looked like a disheveled mess full of cracks, holes and general infirmities, now looks like . . . well, it looks like it's supposed to. It looks like a wall. A nice, solid, flat, unitary wall. The difference is startling; driving up the street, it really hits you in the eye as soon as you see it. I can hardly wait to finish the rest of the side.

Before I get back at it, however, I have to take a day or two to do something about the garage. I can't find a danged thing!

* * *

The wily Forest Cat returns to his lair with the day's catch.

Breezin' Along with The Breeze

I often joke about there being an Unseen Hand throwing constant barriers in the way of my restoration work, or that "someone up there hates me," but it is a fact that I have caught very few breaks in the course of my painting of the Farm House. Take today, for example: I planned to sand the last of the patches I made yesterday, then mask the siding off in preparation for application of the first primer coat.

So I wake up, go outside, and find myself in the middle of a wind storm. Nothing epic, mind you, but more than merely a stiff breeze; many of our potted plants were knocked over, and the yard and street were littered with palm fronds from our useless street trees. I'd say the winds were going at least 30 MPH: not enough to do any real damage, but more than enough to foil any attempt to deploy masking paper. I guess that's what I get for trying to work on a Sunday. In any event, here's a brief update on what I have managed to get done since inserting the backing in the Milky Way knothole.

First, I re-set all the nails that had managed to work themselves out beyond the surface of the siding. As I went along, I marked all the places that needed mending. As I mentioned earlier, I'm only patching where it's needed for the health of the house at this point, because of the difficulty of making patches blend in with the heavily weathered wood. This included any place where the siding had cracked all the way through and either left a gap or caused looseness in the siding, and of course all the large knots and knotholes. It seems apparent that the Farm House's builders, for some reason, put all the knotty boards on the south side, because there are none to speak of on the other sides, and there weren't on the back either. I'd love to know just why they did this, but I suspect that this will forever remain just another Farm House mystery.

After marking all the areas that needed further attention, I then drove screws through the siding into studs as necessary to stabilize loose areas along cracks or at the joints where two boards butted together along a course. As I did with the backing for the Milky Way knothole, I took care to avoid splitting the wood by preparing the screw holes first.

After this, I glued everywhere it was needed. This step presented a great problem for me, because many of the cracks required some measure of clampage, but were in areas that made use of a clamp practically impossible, even with the swell block-and-wedge technique I showed you all a while back. For that reason, I overrode my previous resolution to ban cyanoacrylate glue from this project; my thought was it would work so quickly that I could just provide the 30 seconds of needed clamping manually. So I bought two fresh bottles of 30-second Super Glue, one thick and the other thin to cover all the situations I was facing.

This time, the glue utterly failed, even though it came right out of freshly-opened bottles. It worked no better than water would have. After giving said bottles of Super Glue a fitting sendoff, I pondered my options for a while, and decided to take a flyer on an iffy idea: using blue masking tape as a makeshift clamp.

You see, I decided my only option remaining was to use a five-minute epoxy I knew of that came in a dual syringe with a long spout that mixed the two parts as it was driven through. This would make application quick, neat and simple, but I'd have to work very quickly lest the epoxy set up in the spout before I was through, and in the process I had to move all over the side of the house, going up and down ladders and moving them as I worked.

I figured blue masking tape would hold the joints together tightly enough to do the job, and I could apply it very quickly as I went along. I was very aware of the possibility that the tape would end up firmly glued by the squeezed-out epoxy at each joint, but I had to chance it, having no good alternative at hand. As it turned out, the tape worked perfectly, and came off with no problem. Another example of better living through doing it yourself!

With the screwing and gluing all done, I then puttied all the cracks, knotholes, and sunk screws. This turned out to be a shockingly big job, considering the small surface area involved; all told, this step took fully ten ounces of WoodEpox, nearly depleting my supply. Putting this in perspective, I've never before used an entire tub of it before it went stale, even the little six-ounce tubs. The Milky Way took two ounces all by itself, even after partially filling it with a wood block. The several long, wide cracks just ate up putty, even though I only used what was necessary to bridge the gaps.

The work took longer than usual, because I took great pains to apply only what was needed right where it was needed in order to make the patches blend in with the weathered wood. The method of wire-brushing that I proposed earlier worked well to remove the excess putty from places where it was not needed, but it largely failed to provide a grooved appearance in the patch areas themselves. I had limited success to this end using very coarse sandpaper sparingly after the putty hardened.

Here are a few pictures of the results.

Up there in about the middle of the picture you can see one of the big, long cracks, and the places at each stud where I screwed the sides of the crack down. At the right end of that crack you can see that there was a lot of damage at the butt joint between the two boards. This whole mess is likely due to the house-settling I talked about a few months ago, because it's right below the messed-up joint in the belt course that took so much work to fix. There are also a few filled knotholes in view, as well as a few places that could use patching but didn't get it, because they are not essential and I just don't have the time.

  

Here's what the Milky Way looks like filled. Kinda looks like malt nougat, doesn't it? Even though I took great care to ensure that every void was filled completely, looking at the picture I can see where I missed a few spots. This illustrates what I mean when I say that at a certain point in patching, you are looking at so many different colors that you just need to put down a coat of primer to make everything the same color so you can see what still needs patching. These small remaining gaps I will probably fill with a kind of exterior spackle that finishes level and dries quickly; they're simply too small to bother with any more mixing and sanding of epoxy putty.

It's a bit difficult to discern here, but where the sides of the crack below the knothole are not level, I simply filled the crack level with the lower side. It's better to leave the jump revealed than it is to try to hide it; never throw good putty at bad cracks, I always say.

"Brief update." Heh.

* * *

"Nobody here but us dogs."

Million Dollar Movie

Adam and Benny's epic couch fight.

No Snickers, Please

The picture I posted last time of the huge mystery knothole reminded me of something, but I just couldn't put my finger on it.

At last, it hit me: the Milky Way!

Thanks to the good folks at NASA for the great photo.

* * *

No pre-rinsing needed.

Calling In Backup

For once, our inexplicably crummy weather worked for me today. It gave me the time I needed to devise a temporary solution to my computer problems. Moreover, you can be sure I'll never delete pictures from the camera again before verifying they were safely transferred to the computer. My procedures are all idiot-proof, but that doesn't necessarily mean they are Otis-proof.

During our technical difficulties, I worked on the newly-discovered knothole that was hidden behind the metal patch. Here it is, seen by human eyes for the first time in well over fifty years.

This knothole is about four inches at its widest, and as you can see, a small crack has opened through it, and a very large one below it. Moreover, the wood above the large horizontal crack has sprung forward. In short, we've got quite a mess here.

If the siding were not so terribly weathered, I could simply replace this piece of siding, because I have at a few hundred board-feet of it up in the garage rafters. But a new piece of siding would stick out like brown shoes with a black teddy, so I decided instead to patch the hole with epoxy putty. Before I did this, however, I needed to insert a backing for the putty in behind the hole. I determined that if I made the backing piece long enough, I would be able to pull the sprung part of the wood into a closer alignment with the rest at the same time.

Consulting my stash of Junk (with a capital J), I found the perfect backing piece, a long, narrow strip of quarter-inch-thick poplar. Poplar was a perfect choice, because it is an even-grained hardwood that I could count on not to split when I drilled it, even near the edge.

Here you can see that I marked its halfway point for reference, and wrapped a piece of string around it so that I could maneuver it into position without dropping it into the wall. This I did in a dry run, determining the best position for the piece so that I could both back up the hole and provide a brace with which to bring the crack back in line. Before removing the piece, I noted where the halfway mark was so that I could put it back in the same position later.

Then, I prepared the siding. First, I marked the position of the patch on the outside of the wood. Then, I marked where to place the screws that would hold the backing in place and provide the clamping action to pull the sprung wood back in. Then, I carefully drilled a hole large enough to clear the threads of the screw, and then drilled a countersink so that the screw head would seat below the level of the wood. I did this to prevent the very real possibility of cracking the siding with the screws. Note that the clamping action of the screws depends upon their threads only engaging the backing piece, and not the siding. This is to ensure that the screw pulls the backing piece tight against the siding.

I didn't rely upon screws alone to hold things in place. I also used some 5-minute epoxy. I could have used a longer-setting epoxy, but 5-minute is what I had. While all of the clamping work is done by the screws, the epoxy will help keep the mend stable, plus it helped to keep the backing piece from falling as I maneuvered it into position. Once I had it in the right place, I held it firmly with the string while I drilled tiny pilot holes in the backing piece and drove the screws in, which I did with a plain old manual screwdriver. This gave me precise control, and allowed me to feel when the backing piece had been pulled tight against the siding. 

You will notice that I used screws with a large head; I did this to spread the holding force over a larger area, to help prevent splitting the wood.

In order to complete the backing of the hole and partially fill the void, I then attached another small piece of wood on top of the backing piece, Fittingly, it is a piece of plaster lath scavenged from the inside of the house. This piece I split on purpose, in order to drive the halves out to wedge against the irregular sides of the hole. This will make the hole easier to putty up. Notice that I had to drive a third screw on the other side of the crack; this proved necessary in order to provide enough clamping force to pull the upper part into alignment.

It was then too late in the day to putty, so I went to the garage and cut out a cardboard pattern from one of the aprons with an X-Acto knife.  This pattern will provide a guide to aid in the replacement of a missing section of apron on the other window casing.

Never Mind

Never mind what I said in my last post. I'll keep posting despite my computer difficulties, although the posts may be pretty bland until I get my computer problems resolved.

Wifey and I were driving along Colorado Boulevard the other day, headed toward the feed store, when we came upon a venerable old denizen of the highway, a Chevy from the early '50s. I'm no expert of this vintage, but I think it was a '54 210. Here's a picture of a '55 210, from the good folks at Wikipedia.

 

Coincidentally, the car we saw had the same colors, and in general looked quite similar. 

We traveled together for several miles, and I got a close look at the car, front, back and passenger side. I love to see old cars in service, and I have great respect for the people who restore and maintain them. But this car commanded especial attention from me because, while it didn't look like it had just been stolen from an automotive museum, neither did it look like a junker or a work in progress. 

It in fact looked like a car that had been driven regularly since it was new, maintained well inside and out, and updated as comfort and safety standards had advanced over time. It had modern radial tires on slightly-wider-than-stock wheels, and I could see through the window that it had some sort of modern stereo setup, two improvements I would certainly make on a car of that vintage before I drove it daily. Moreover, the way the car rode strongly suggested that the suspension components had been somewhat modernized as well.

Now, I am quite sure that the owner had to have done some restoration work; that era's paint simply was not good enough to last in such condition for 56 years no matter how good the upkeep. What impressed me was how tastefully and accurately he had done the work. 

I'm just old enough to remember what cars like this looked like when they were commonly seen on the road. I remember the particular shine of that era's paint, and the gleam of its chrome, and this guy had nailed them both; he had avoided the trap of finishing both to modern standards. As a result, what with the modern running gear, the car truly gave the impression of a car that had been simply taken care of that lovingly all along. I just couldn't stop looking at it; I was grateful that Wifey was driving!

Then I realized why I found the car so compelling: because the owner had successfully created for his car the same narrative that I am working towards for the Farm House. I can't tell you how much that inspired me. With all the problems I've been having and the pressure I'm feeling to work quickly, the temptation is strong just to slap some paint up on what's there and have done with it. Seeing that car in all its tasteful glory both firmed my resolve to do a job I can be proud of and reminded me that I shouldn't strive for perfection.

Whahoppen?

Wow, bummer. The world didn't end after all, so I have to keep on painting the danged house.

Now, before I go on, let me make clear that I'm not making fun of Christians here; that would be to make fun of myself, too. No, I'm making fun of idiot publicity-hounds. For the record, this whole Jesus-is-returning-on-date-certain is un-Christian on its face. Jesus himself said that we won't know of His return beforehand. You can look it up. So this "preacher", whoever he is, will have a lot of splainin to do when he gets upstairs for leading his flock astray.

Anyway, I was going to say that I can at least understand why people might think this was the end times, even though people have been thinking that for at least the last 150 years or so. I mean, the weather alone is enough to raise suspicion. It's been horribly devastating in other parts of the country. Hereabouts, thank goodness, the weather has merely been odd, sometimes bordering on the bizarre, since the beginning of Winter. 

Goodness knows it's slowed my work down considerably. Rain has stymied me for weeks at a time. Even the threat of rain has done so when I'm ready to paint. Truth be told, I've caught very few breaks since I started the project. Even now, just when I'm really beginning to enjoy writing this blog, a number of issues have arisen involving my computers that have really put a wrench in my desire to bring you more multimedia content. 

As of today, it's even prevented my bringing you pictures of the work. I uncovered the big knothole I was telling you about, and took a lot of pictures. Some were to show you, and others were just for my reference, with a ruler held across various spans to assist my preparing a patch. I brought the camera in and put the flash card in my laptop, waited for them to copy over, then ejected the card, put it back in my camera, and erased the images in the camera so that I'd not get crossed up regarding which were new. Then I went back to the laptop to process the pictures, and they weren't there. This is just the latest incident in a run of erratic behavior, and I can read the handwriting on the wall: the thing needs a complete disk wipe and re-loading of Windows. All you Johnny Appleseeds, smirk here. 

No problem, right? I have my desktop as a backup. Uh, no; its hard disk is completely full, with nothing I can delete, so I have to install another hard disk. So I have two big computer projects, and no time in which to do them. You know, sometimes I suspect that somebody up there hates me.

I'm afraid, Dear Reader, that this all spells H-I-A-T-U-S for this blog, until such time as I can take care of my computer problems. There's not much point to my posting without pictures. I'll do my best to take pictures as I go along, so that when I do return here I can catch you all up with the proceedings.

Until then, Mazel Tov, and have a great Spring!

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.

Grazing

Today was a day off from the Farm House restoration work, because the middle of it was taken up with a visit to the vet for Evangeline, for a checkup. Her vet is all the way over in West Hollywood, so the whole affair takes a good chunk of time. It's a bit of an ordeal, but Evangeline is worth it.

After a visit with the vet, they took Evangeline in the back office for a short time to take some tests, and while we waited Wifey and I went down the block to a coffee house to have a wee nosh and a cuppa, as is our custom during visits to this vet.

As is now traditional, the coffee house provided free Wi-Fi, and as we left I looked back at the seating area and saw six people, all in a row, in front of identical Apple PowerBooks. I mean identical, and from the look of them I believe they were the latest model. It was the Organization Man redux; all that was missing was matching gray flannel suits and Phi Beta Kappa keys. It was like performance art, only performance art is never this good. I made a mental note never to bring my Windows machine here, lest I get recognized as an intruder and trampled to death by the herd.

After we got back, I checked on the aprons, and to my great relief I found that the treatment had worked sufficiently well. There is still a trace of stickiness, but the epoxy is nonetheless completely hardened. 

To recap, then, what worked to complete the curing of the sticky epoxy was to heat the wood so that it was warm to the touch, and to keep it at that temperature for a long period. I applied the heat in three two-hour sessions, and it needed the whole time to achieve the desired result.

I have concluded that the reason that this experience with LiquidWood has been more troublesome than the others is that I was applying it to wood that was fragile because it was dry and thin (one-quarter of an inch), but was not spongy from rot or destruction of lignin. Moreover, I did not drill holes to help penetration of the wood, because of its thinness and fragility. This resulted in a lower mass of epoxy than I have ever used before, spread out over a greater surface area. As a result, despite the induction period, the heat dissipated so much after applying the epoxy that it was too cold for a proper curing. 

In such a situation, then, it is necessary to apply heat directly after application, so that the epoxy will cure properly without needing a lengthy session of corrective action afterward. It is also a good idea to drill tiny holes partway into the wood whenever possible, in order to increase the mass of epoxy deployed.

Alternatively, you can just fabricate a new piece.