What I Did on My Winter Vacation

Usually, I take some time off from the restoration project around Christmas to give the Yuletide celebration my full attention. This year, however, my hiatus was a great deal longer for several reasons, mostly beyond my control. First of these was the wind storm and its aftermath, of course, as I have already discussed; there was a lot of debris removal and regrading I had to do just to make the south side of the house accessible again. Frustratingly, I was within a week of finishing that side when the storm hit. Now, I have some new repairs to make, and I'll have to pressure-wash the side before I paint.

Soon thereafter, I came down with a bad case of whatever bug was making the rounds at the time, and that took me out of commission for most of the rest of the month.

Then, just before Christmas our new Malamute pups arrived, Peter and Sally. I anticipated that attending to them would take up all my time for a few weeks, judging from our fairly recent experience rearing Travis from puppyhood. He was no piece of cake to take care of, so I figured I had a pretty good idea of what to expect.

As it turned out, we were woefully under-prepared for Peter and Sally, and it took us until the end of January to figure things out and get on top of the situation. Much of the problem stemmed from trying to follow the dictates of the "experts", which flat out didn't work. So to be precise, I guess I'd have to say we were studiously mis-prepared. It was only when we threw out all the books and returned to the techniques that worked with Travis that our sweet, spirited little pups began to follow the paths of righteousness. Still, with them it's often a case of two steps forward, three steps back. Then again, there's very little in life that is both worthwhile and easy.

Without further preamble, here's what we've been up to lately, in too much detail.

Windstorm Aftermath

I've already covered this subject fairly thoroughly, but there is one matter that remained undone when I last discussed it: the broken limb hanging over our power drop. As I mentioned in "Paul Bunyan Jr.", our arborist was not comfortable with the task at the time because of its inherent danger, and recommended we tell Pasadena Water & Power about it, because they could get it done more safely. Unfortunately, PWP was simply too swamped with emergency work to get to our less pressing matter, so when our arborist drove by at the end of December and noticed the limb still hanging, he stopped in and said, "Okay, let's get that done."

One of the many things I like about our arborist is that he gets things done the old-fashioned way, with rope and tackle instead of cranes. I'm not comfortable with heavy machinery rolling around over the trees' root systems. I find the skill and fearlessness with which he and his men go about their work quite inspiring. This was especially true of their removal of the broken limb over the power drop, because of the significant added danger of the power lines directly underneath the limb. I made a point of taking pictures of the process so that I could show you all.

In this picture, the man up on the limb has already removed the broken limb (you can see where it was directly ahead of him on the limb he's standing on). The broken limb is hanging below him, suspended by a rope secured to a limb above him. He is guiding the limb away from the power line below.

In this picture, the arborist (in blue t-shirt) has looped a rope around the power line and is gently pulling it out of the way, as another man (in orange safety vest) helps guide the limb away from the power line as the man above gently lowers it. You can see how close a thing it was, but they got the limb down without incident.

I've failed to mention that there was another limb broken facing the street, about the same size as the one over the power line. Here's a picture of that limb on the ground:

You can't see it here, but the limb stretches all the way to the street. That's over 45 feet! As one of the men commented, this one limb is itself as big as a tree. I was astonished at its size, because when it was hanging from the tree it looked much smaller. After all, it was just one small part of one of many dozens of limbs on the tree. That should give you some idea of just how massive these trees are.

Christmas

We spent Christmas alone at home, we and the pets. It wasn't a quiet Christmas, thanks to the pups, but it was one to remember. My plan to put lights up along the big side gables was thwarted by the wind storm, so I just put them along the veranda as usual, but we did the tree up as grandly as we ever have.

I say "we", but I was still pretty ill, so Wifey did the tree all by herself. She came home with a tree so big that we could hardly get it in the house, but that's fine, because we have many hundreds of lights and enough ornaments for three big trees. This year, she outdid herself.

Up in Heaven, Dad was smiling. Both Dads, in fact.  It was breathtaking, with great depth, ebullient color, and rich textures. Here's a close-up, to give a better idea of what the tree looked like in person:

And of course, most of the ornaments carry with them some sort of special meaning or tender memory of loved ones and Christmases past, just as it should be. It was so beautiful that we kept it up through Wifey's Mom's birthday on the 15th. It stayed fresh, because I conditioned the tree well and kept it watered.

Pets

Now we come to the main part of the story. We were kept busy not just with the care of two seven-week-old puppies, but also with helping the rest of the Pet Division adjust to their presence.

Peter and Sally came to us several days before Christmas, and made themselves at home right away. Travis was happy to have some reinforcements, and the pups liked him immediately.

As one would expect, the cats were a harder sell. In fact, at first it seemed as if they couldn't quite figure out just what manner of creatures they were dealing with.

Here, Adam looks as if he could really use a Tricorder: "What is this strange creature? Hmmm. . . it's put together like Travis. it kinda smells like Travis. It makes similar noises. But it's so dang small!"

Actually, Adam quickly made his peace with the pups. Given his Brobdingnagian size and feline curiosity, he's afraid of very little. I often find him walking right up to the pups, trying to engage them in discourse.

He and Peter are not pals yet, but I think they eventually will be.

Evangeline has no problem with them, because she loves dogs, but she does expect them to maintain a respectful demeanor befitting her status as CEO of the Pet Division; they do not always comply, but she always stands her ground. 

Benny, a cat through and through, is no big fan of dogs, but he has at least accepted their presence. Still, he does tend to take out his annoyance on Travis, batting him mercilessly whenever the pups get in his face: "Take that, you canine, you!" He is nevertheless willing to be friendly, if they approach him nicely.

The addition of two spirited puppies could not help but cause some upheaval with the other pets, and except for Evangeline they've all required a lot of special attention. But everyone's beginning to become accustomed to the new order, and at times things are positively placid.

Most of the time, however, the puppies simply tire the rest of us out.

That's why during the day I like to keep them outside. It gives the rest of the household a break, and I'm able to keep an eye on them while I work. I can't let them roam free unsupervised, because they have a disturbing habit of eating yard debris and dirt. Thus, much of the time they are in a pen we put up on the astroturf-topped pad that used to house the gazebo. It may seem a bit severe, but they are fine with it. As a matter of fact, they seem to enjoy it.

They're changing on a daily basis, as puppies of their age do, and they're both growing into quite beautiful dogs.

Farmhouse Fauna

As I've discussed over in the Journal, we have a lot of resident animals here. Actually, there used to be a lot more—huge raccoons and it seemed like a hundred possums—but Travis, as he was bred to do, chased them all away. Now, what we have are thriving bird and squirrel communities, and some skunks as well, which Travis has not been able to chase away (not that he hasn't tried, unfortunately).

A lot of people hate squirrels, but all of us here love them. All, that is, except for Benny. Benny is a dedicated squirrel hunter. Think of how Captain Kirk felt about Klingons, and you have some idea of how Benny feels about squirrels. 

One day a few weeks ago, Benny and I were sitting out on the garden swing. I ran into the house for just a second to get something, and when I came back out, I didn't see Benny anywhere. I was momentarily confused, because he hadn't had enough time to get out of sight. And then, I looked up.

Benny had actually climbed up in the persimmon tree after a squirrel! Notice that the squirrel is not overly concerned by this; as Benny stares up at him, the squirrel is staring right back, as if to say, "Surely, you can't be serious." Hey, you can't blame a cat for trying.

We have an amazing variety of birds here at the Farm House. We have the usual resident species: crows, mourning doves, band-tailed pigeons, various finches, and our dear friends the scrub jays.

The jays are the cornerstone of our avian community. They always say "good morning" to us, and they always let us know when it's time to replenish the feeder. Once, they even left Wifey a present. One morning they were squawking at the feeder. Wifey wondered what was up, because she'd just put out some food for them. She looked out and saw something odd hanging off the feeder. It turned out to be a necklace!

We also get some interesting birds passing through during migration periods, and some birds that are local but not often seen: tufted titmice, bluebirds, robins, and the most spectacular of our periodic visitors: the Acorn Woodpecker.

With all our oaks, our yard is a perfect fit for them, but they don't usually eat from feeders, and with that big target on their head they need to keep out of the open as much as possible, lest they attract the attention of our local hawk. It's thus a big day when we see one of these beauties.

It may come as a great surprise to non-Angelenos, but we have a number of large parrot flocks in various parts of the city. In Culver City, the flock consists of some sort of long-tailed parakeet: colorful, slender-bodied birds with (of course) long tails. We actually had one of them land at our feeder there; I have a picture of that somewhere.  I think it was a Mitered Parakeet.

The flock here in Pasadena, on the other hand, is of some sort of Amazon variety, with substantial bodies and stubby tails. I haven't gotten a close look at them, because they for some reason never light in our yard, but they are mostly green. They typically fly by twice a day, in the morning and late afternoon, and they make a great noise as they pass, because parrots are in constant communication with one another as they fly. Here is but one platoon of their huge regiment:

I was lucky to get this shot, because these parrots fly with astonishing swiftness. I'd estimate that they took about a second to fly the distance captured in this picture.

Well, that's about it for this time, folks.

* * *

". . . and stop calling me Shirley!"

Adult Education; or, A Chump Smartens Up

As I promised last time, here is the newly-repaired corner board:

I had to use so much putty because, as I described last time, I did a quick repair. If I had done the by-the-book repair I described, I would not have had to use much putty at all; but then, I'd probably still be working on it.

Today, I noticed another repair that has come undone, on the east window casing:

At first, I ascribed this to the various stresses caused by the windstorm, because of the slight circular protrusion below the crack revealing where a screw hole was patched. This indicates that the board moved inward relative to the rest of the house. Given that there's no evidence of anything having hit the board, this movement almost certainly was caused by the house's reacting to earth movement—and there was plenty of that during the windstorm.

Then, however, I noticed the circular depression up at the top of the long crack. Sure, one could ascribe that to the same cause, but something about that screw, and that crack, tickled my memory. I looked back through the posts until, sure enough, in the post "Onward" I found this picture:

I included this picture in that post to illustrate how effectively the LiquidWood bonds wood together. The wood was warped outward, and where I placed the screw was the best place to bring the board back into alignment.

What we have here, clearly, is a Teachable Moment. And as with a schoolteacher back in the Old West, I'm sometimes only a lesson or two ahead of the class. The bulk of what I know about the home-improvement subjects I discuss herein I have learned from experience, and as you can see, the learning never ends. That's what makes life so fun.

What I said about LiquidWood was not wrong, per se, because the mend did withstand the screw's intrusion without complaint. Nevertheless, a mend is still a weak point in the wood's  structure; to counteract that, I would have had to impregnate the wood on both sides of the mend more thoroughly with epoxy, and further back from the mend line. As it was, the mend was already under constant stress from the wood's desire to return to its natural contour, and the added stress of the house's movement caused the mend to fail.

It is thus clear in retrospect that I should not have placed that screw right along the mend, but what should I have done then, and what should I do now to fix it?

To answer the first question: because the wood was warped and I wanted to bring it back into alignment, I should have been more thorough in impregnating the wood at the top of the board with LiquidWood, just to give it more strength and resilience. When bringing it back into alignment, I should have used smaller screws and more of them, placed more carefully back from the edges of the board.

To answer the second question: I think it's too late to depend upon epoxy saturation to keep the mend together, because there is now cured epoxy along both sides of the break. The best thing to do for the good of the house would be simply to replace the board, but that isn't going to happen. So I guess I will have to remove the offending screw, re-mend the crack, bring the piece back into alignment with smaller screws placed carefully to the right of the crack, patch it up, and see what happens. The worst that can happen is that I learn some more stuff.

I Triple Dog Dare Ya!

And I have the wherewithal to do it!

Yes, December was an eventful month here at the Farm House. First there was the epic wind storm, of course. Then came the cleanup, which is ongoing. Then, I fell ill with whatever flu is in this season, a pretty virulent one that lasted pretty much the rest of the month. The puppies came on the shortest day of the year, and somehow we managed to fit Christmas in among the other things. What with all these matters, I was not able to get back to the painting prep until this week.

The last thing I did, as you will recall, was to epoxy the crack at the bottom of the front cornerboard. Unfortunately, that mend did not hold.

The Farm House nearly always manages to punish me when I am in too much of a hurry. I did not properly prepare this crack before I mended it. Instead of drilling some ancillary holes to make sure the wood on both sides was saturated with epoxy, I just injected some into the crack and clamped it. Obviously, there was not enough epoxy to generate the hold needed to counteract the wood's desire to spread apart at the crack.

The proper way to mend it at this point would be to fabricate a backing piece that would run the length of the crack and most of the width of the board, sand the oxidation and dirt off the back of the board in this area, epoxy the backing piece to the board, clamp the crack closed, then drive screws through the board into the backing in several places along the crack to clamp those pieces together front-to-back.

Nevertheless, this is not what I did. It would take far too much time for too little benefit. Instead, I dug up a strip of wood from my scrap pile that just filled the gap between the corner board and the siding.

I was pushing the boards together here to check the fit.

I trimmed the strip so that it ends just shy of the corner board, and then screwed everything down on both sides of the crack.

The corner board was twisted outward here on the right side, so while this repair makes the corner board stable and square, the wood to the right of the crack is a bit lower than that to the left. For this reason, I had to do a lot of puttying to finish the repair. I'll show you the results next time.

* * *

"There goes the neighborhood."

Merry Christmas!

A big Farm House Merry Christmas to you all, from the newly-augmented Farm House Gang!

Sally (L) and Peter, born on Halloween, arrived at Christmastime.

Aftermath

If you're waiting for some sort of play on words involving Rolling Stones references, you can just forget it. I'm just not up to wordplay this evening. You'll have to get your satisfaction elsewhere.

So as I was saying, that was one Hell of a windstorm, the worst weather this Californio had ever been through. And it left our grounds in disarray.

Our arborist did come back later and take away the large boughs seen in this picture, but that still left a lot of mess to deal with.

Here's the view looking from the corner of the garage to the back of the lot:

It may not be obvious here, but the debris here is about eight inches deep. Did I say "debris"? I meant to say "mulch."

Anyway, I started working as hard as I could to clean up the mess from the front of the garage forwards. I worked as hard as I could for two days, and then I fell ill. I was starting to feel better when we got an e-mail from the city saying that we could put as much debris as we had in the gutter area along the street, and it would be picked up later. 

So I got well real quick and started hauling out as much as I could, starting with the south side (so I could resume the painting work as soon as possible) and working my way back. I knew I couldn't fit it all out in front, but I resolved to get as much of it out there as I could before they picked it up.

Well, by that Sunday (about five days later) I had gotten all the way around to the front of the garage, where the last of the heavy debris deposits were. It was supposed to rain that evening, but it was only maybe an hour's work left, and since I didn't expect them to be picking up on Sunday I took my time.

Just as I finally got out there to start, I heard the sounds of heavy machinery. Then, I kept hearing the sounds of heavy machinery. Right after that, I heard the sounds of heavy machinery getting closer. I ran to the street and saw a big tractor scooping up the debris at the end of the block, about 150 feet away, and doing a pretty quick job of it. I had about ten minutes tops to do that hour's work, and amidst a fusillade of foul words that I sure hope were drowned out by the heavy machinery, I managed to haul out the last of the stuff just in time. 

That night, it rained just enough to settle the dirt, and the next day I took a few photos just to document the back yard's new airier look. Here's one looking in the same general area as the one above:

As I said, airier. You can see that the olive tree still stands, but in a severely abridged state, and the wounds it sustained will eventually prove fatal, I am sorry to say. But for now it lives, and for that we are grateful. After all, that tree almost certainly predates my grandparents. Well, at least now that little scrub oak will have its day in the sun. Plus, now we can actually grow some roses back there.

Even as I was taking these pictures, I was getting sick again, much sicker than before, and sick I still am, five days later. Drat! DRAT!!

Drat.

* * *

"Words fail me."

Paul Bunyan Jr.

Wednesday I got an especially early start on the patching work, because I knew that high winds were going to be coming in the late afternoon, and I wanted to be all done before then, so I could get ready.

We customarily get some pretty stiff winds this time of year: 30 to 35 MPH, with gusts to 45 MPH tops. Things get rather messy around here during these winds: Plant pots get knocked over, all the dead leaves and other debris get torn off the trees, the street becomes covered with those annoying palm fronds,  and the occasional larger limb comes down as well. So I wrapped things up early and laid the ladders down on the ground so they wouldn't get blown over and break something.

The winds came in due course, and they seemed rather more forceful than usual. I went to the back door and looked out. To my dismay, our metal-framed, canvas-skinned gazebo had been blown off its moorings and was resting on its side some distance away against the side fence. That was our first warning that this would not be our usual windstorm.

This saddened Wifey,  because she loved that gazebo. I had fitted it with a nice bright light fixture, and she enjoyed sitting out there in the evenings. I told her not to worry, that it looked unharmed, and that I was reasonably sure that we could just put it back up and it would be fine.

By 7 PM, the winds were blowing a steady 45 MPH, and the gusts were more like 60. I began to get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Fasten your seat belts, I thought to myself; it's going to be a bumpy night.

The winds continued to intensify, and by 8 PM the steady winds were up to about 50. The palm trees were leaned over at a 60 degree angle, but I wasn't worried about them. I was worried about the pines, and the massive oak on the other side of the driveway. The upper limbs of all the trees were being whipped about alarmingly in the wind. At this point, it seemed perfectly rational to be terrified.

Somewhat later on, Wifey was standing in the parlor looking out the bay window looking at the relatively small pine tree right in front of the house. It was only about 60 feet tall and two feet in diameter at its base. She said that she'd seen the base of the tree wobbling, but I thought it was just her imagination. We went back to the TV and tried to watch a movie, turning up the volume in order to drown out the shrieking of the storm.

Then came a sound that could not be drowned out: a sickening CRACCCCCCCCK! We ran to the parlor, looked out the window, and saw this:

Oh, my Lord. What a nightmare! a 60-foot tree, down on the ground, headed right towards the cars in our neighbor's driveway. We ran out, dreading what we would see. This is what we saw:

Sweet Providence, it fell between their cars! It missed the car in the picture by less than an inch. Still, this blocked one of their cars from exiting the driveway, so I resolved to cut the tree and drag the top of it out of their way. I have a whole collection of handsaws, ranging from tiny to massive, designed for arboreal disassembly. I selected a curved one, about two feet long with vicious teeth, and started sawing. Wifey stood by to ensure that the cut piece did not roll over and hit the car.

Just then, the wind kicked into high gear. I looked up at the huge pine between the houses. We were right in its path of destruction should it fall over. I told Wifey, "If I say 'run', or you hear any cracking or tearing sounds, run that way!", pointing towards our driveway. I started sawing as fast as I could, and then some. When I'd gotten about halfway through, I moved to the other side of the tree, so it would tend to fall straight down. At that point, I had my back to the big tree.

Then, an insanely violent gust blew by, and I heard the sickening sound of splintering wood again. "RUN!" I shouted, but I couldn't run the way I'd told Wifey to go, because I was on the wrong side of the tree, and one of its boughs completely blocked my way. So I went between our neighbors' cars, ran down their driveway, then turned up the street towards our house—and right into the wind.

I've seen the gag in films a hundred times: someone finds himself caught out in a storm, he starts running as hard as he can, and he doesn't get anywhere because the wind is holding him in place. I never had any idea that this kind of thing actually happened in real life! Once I turned into the wind, I put my head down and started running as hard as I could, and after about six strides I looked up to check my progress around the felled tree. I hadn't even cleared the neighbors' driveway yet. It's a good thing that the big pine wasn't really falling, because I'd already have been a pancake.

I kept running as if on a treadmill until I finally figured out that I'd make faster headway simply by walking with long strides. It seemed as if I were walking around the block, but I eventually made it all the way back around the felled tree, and I met up with Wifey again on the veranda. We had lost track of each other out there in the maelstrom.

Once back inside, I felt rather silly having gotten so worked up that I imagined the sound of splintering wood. "Oh, well," I mused, "at least Wifey didn't notice my pathetic Buster Keaton impression."

Then I looked out the back door. The great majority of the south olive tree had split off from the main trunk—and landed on what had once been our gazebo.

Hey! I hadn't imagined that big splintering sound! Woo-hoo!

From that point on, I was all nerves. I was honestly afraid. Mostly it was perfectly rational fear of someone or something getting hurt by falling trees, but a little of it was fear of uncharted territory. This was by far the most violent weather I had ever experienced.

Look, I know that this was not terribly catastrophic weather, as catastrophic weather goes. I completely understand that compared to hurricanes or tornadoes, our event was mild. For those of you who live in Illinois or Texas, this sort of event is called December.

The thing is, this is California. Unless you live in geographically risky or foolish places, such as Big Bear or Malibu, you're not supposed to get catastrophic weather. See, that's the tradeoff. In exchange for the ever-present chance that everything you own will be destroyed in 60 seconds by an earthquake, you don't have to worry about old Mother Earth trying to kill you with catastrophic storms. It's a good system. I like it that way. In my personal experience, it has worked quite nicely for over fifty years.

When it seems as if the Basic Agreement has suddenly changed, then, it is certainly a cause for some concern. As I said, this was the most violent weather I had ever experienced, and I was reasonably sure that it was the most violent weather the Farm House had seen in half a century. I had no idea whether the trees were going to hold, and no idea what would happen if they didn't. With their size and proximity, and the light structure of the Farm House, the one thing I was pretty sure of was that a particularly fell, but reasonably possible, set of occurrences would kill one or more of us and destroy the house.

With this in my mind, I proceeded to be more terrified than I have ever been. It was like the first split-second reaction to an earthquake, extended over an entire night. See, in an earthquake the terror goes away in an instant, because my emergency response system kicks in, and I know exactly what to do. Here, however, there was nothing to do but try to keep my charges as safe as I could as the storm continued to rise in fury.

For the next few hours, that meant staying in the kitchen. It was of the newest, stoutest construction, and it was in the location least likely to be in the path of destruction. Moreover, if things really got ugly the basement was right beneath us. I managed to corral Wifey for that long; she surfed the Net cool as a Kool-Pop, while I tried to sit still and get my heart to stop pounding. Just after 1 AM, she called our arborist thinking that she'd leave a message, but he answered himself. Oops. But he was extremely gracious about it, saying he was expecting calls.

After a while, the storm stopped worsening and sat at the same level of intensity, with occasional gusts and infrequent periods of relative calmness. I figured that whatever hadn't come down so far wasn't going to come down as long as things didn't get worse, so I judged that it was worth the risk of going upstairs just to get some rest. Wifey slept well, but I kept waking up every time the wind gusted, because when it did the house rumbled ominously.

At last I fell asleep from pure exhaustion, and Wifey kindly let me sleep in when our arborist knocked on the door at 6:30 AM, ready to start cleaning up the arboreal carnage. Although the forecast had called for the gale to continue through the next day, by dawn things had calmed down significantly. I had stopped taking pictures after our caper outside, so Wifey took some pictures of the carnage before our arborist started to clean it up. It was still pretty dark at that point, so some of the pictures are a bit blurry.

Here's the olive tree. The broken carcass of the gazebo is behind 
and under the tree in the left half of the picture.

The big pine between the houses didn't get off without some damage.

This and one other smaller break were all that we lost on the 
big oak, thank goodness.

The broken oak limb from the front. This made a lot of noise in the wind 
during the night; I was sure it was going to break a window, but it didn't.

* * *

Wifey was a smart cookie indeed to call our arborist so early, because that allowed us to get our neighbors' driveway cleared in time for them not to be inconvenienced. Not that they complained. No, they were extremely gracious about the whole thing. Good neighbors are among the greatest blessings in the world. They were even laughing over the matter of the felled pine tree knocking down their telephone line: the line did not break, and was still working, until it was broken by the tall antenna on an AT&T service vehicle. The guy riding shotgun leaned out the window and yelled, "We'll be right back to fix that!"

By noon or thereabouts, all our fallen trunks and limbs were cut up and moved out of the way. There remains one major broken limb that still hangs from the front pine tree, right over the driveway and our power drop.

The red arrow points to the break. Note the power drop directly below.

The arborist was unwilling to try to remove it because the power drop underneath made that a very risky proposition. As it is, fortunately, it is in no immediate danger of falling, because it is still well-connected to the tree. At this point, we're hoping Pasadena Water and Power will remove it; otherwise, we'll have to have them disconnect our service temporarily so the arborist can remove the limb safely.

Patching Away on The Thin Wood of A New Day

I've been working away at the patching. I've worked my way all the way across the belt course and down the corner board on the west end of the side. As I should have anticipated, I found a lot of little problems with the corner board. The biggest of these is that the earlywood is all worn away, leaving the board heavily grooved all the way along it. This means I pretty much have to skim-coat the entire board with putty. And of course, there are the usual nail holes and divots to fill in.

Another problem is that the corner board mounted perpendicularly to the one I'm patching, facing west on the front of the house, has been pulled away from the wall by the weight of the gutter downspout. I was able to fix this with a few well-placed screws in the front corner board.

This pulled the board back into place, and closed the gap between it and the corner board I am patching,

Since taking this picture, I've made a patching pass all the way down the board. Man, it was great to be working on solid ground for the first time in a while.

The bottom of the board is cracked, because as part of the distortion of the frame from the foundation sag, a half-inch gap opened up between it and the wall. Someone tried nailing in a massive framing nail to correct this, which caused the crack. Here I'm doing a dry test run with the clamp to make sure everything will line up correctly:

As you can see, everything lined up pretty well, so I epoxied everything up and then patched it. Tomorrow, I'll stick a shim between the board and the wall so I can screw it down properly.

Meanwhile, way back up on the belt course, I noticed a problem with a spot I had already patched:

I deserved this, because I didn't take the time to fix it properly in the first place. When patching butt joints seamlessly, one should always drill holes in both pieces and soak the wood with LiquidWood before patching. That way, when the epoxy cures the two pieces are locked together, becoming as a practical matter one piece. Apparently all the carpentry work I did on this trim run caused stress on this joint and pulled it apart. Thus, I have gone back and re-done this joint properly, drilling holes all around, injecting LiquidWood in them, and then patching up the cracks with WoodEpox.

A few more patching runs and I'll be done with the belt course and corner board. Then, I will patch up the trim between the siding and the foundation blocks (I forget what the proper term is for that trim course right now), and then I'll be more or less ready for the final priming and painting. That'll be my Christmas present to myself.

* * *

"Shouldn't there be a big pointy tree with lots of prey on it here by now?"

The Farm House Effect: Restoring A Phone

The patching of the belt course continues apace. Sadly, that activity isn't any more interesting now than it was in the last post, and we all know how that went. So, in order to slake the unquenchable thirst of my Brobdingnagian audience for new posts on this Thanksgiving weekend, I thought I'd take a little side trip in our tales of restoration.

You will recall my discussing the Farm House Effect: the extension of one's historical purview to encompass the lifetime of the old home he is restoring. This has made itself most apparent to Wifey and me in our fascination with the history of everyday things one takes for granted, such as phones.

During the excruciatingly long gestation period of the Farm House restoration plan, I was becoming increasingly antsy to be doing something, anything, to get ready for our coming life in our new old home. During this time, our friends Nik and Jo moved into their own fine old vernacular Craftsman home, "Tara", a scant half-mile away from the Farm House. In the experiencing of their own "Tara Effect", they purchased a restored old Western Electric Imperial 202 phone. This was a model Western Electric produced in the early Fifties to commemorate its 75th anniversary, a  revamped Model 202 with a gold-plated body and an ivory-painted handset. 

Not Nik and Jo's phone, but one much like it.

Nik and Jo chose it because they wanted to have a phone that contributed to the period feel they were working to achieve for their home.

It's a lovely phone, and Nik and Jo's idea struck Wifey and me as a brilliant one. The phone especially fired my imagination because my grandparents had a black 202 in their home when I was a boy. I was always fascinated by that phone, with its graceful lines, pretty porcelain number plate, huge handset, and the dial that purred like a mechanical cat when someone spun it. I loved the big resonant click that came out when one operated the switchhook, and the loud, clear ring of the bellbox on the wall.

My grandparents' 202 looked like this, but it was in better shape and had a coiled rubber cord.

Compared to this magnificent machine, our plain old WE 500 at home was ugly and boring, the Organization Man of telephones.

A WE 500 in the Farm House study just like the one we had at home when I was a little boy.

It was from this comparison between the prehistoric (which in my early years meant "more than ten years old") 202 and the contemporary 500 that I first got the idea that old things were more grand, more beautiful, just plain better than new things.

So we adopted Nik and Jo's idea, and kinda went hog-wild with it. We decided to get a bunch of old phones from different eras and deploy them throughout the Farm House. We would hardly be able to find any phone that wasn't appropriate, because the phone had been invented a scant nine years before the Farm House's inception. We thought it would be fun to watch our guests delight at the discovery of a vintage phone, in working condition and looking fabulous, in each room they visited.

We soon learned that this idea was cost-prohibitive using already-restored phones, but was easily affordable if we restored the phones ourselves. This tapped even deeper into the Farm House Effect, which now that I think of it must have some relation to the nesting instinct. In any event, we soon had quite an inventory of old phones and phone parts, and I was in business.

I read up on how phones work and how they are wired, and how to re-wire them if needed to work with modern equipment. I puttered around with various phones, restoring them functionally and cleaning up their exteriors, until I felt reasonably confident in my knowledge.

Then, I undertook my first thorough restoration. I wanted to start with a black 202 like the one my grandparents had, but that would have required spray-painting the phone body, and I didn't feel I was quite ready for that. So I picked a phone that wouldn't need painting, a 1947 302.

In service from 1937 to 1958, the Western Electric Model 302 is often referred to nowadays as the "I Love Lucy phone", because it's the phone Lucy and Ricky had in their New York apartment (they updated to a WE 500 when they moved to Connecticut). The 302 was Western Electric's first model that contained all needed circuitry within the body of the telephone itself. It began its life with a body made of pot metal, but in 1941, with all metals becoming valuable because of the escalating war in Europe, Western Electric switched to a molded thermoplastic body.

We found our restoration candidate on eBay. It worked, more or less, but it wasn't very pretty.

It was missing its number card holder, and the body was heavily scuffed and in places deeply scratched.

These photos don't accurately depict the depth of the scratches; clearly someone had a serious grievance with the phone company.

Did you know that thermoplastic like this can be refinished in much the same way as is metal? At the time, I had just learned that this was possible, and I was eager to try my hand at it. 

First, I removed the body shell, and then I sanded out all the deep scratches, scuffs and dents.

Then, I sanded the whole body with a finer-grit sandpaper, taking care to remove all the scratches from the first sanding:

The basic procedure is to sand out the damage, then keep sanding with progressively finer grits of sandpaper. One sands until all the scratches of the previous grit are removed, then switches to the next finer grit and does the same thing, sanding perpendicularly to the previous pass so the previous grit's scratches are easy to discern. This continues until the scratches are fine enough to be polished out readily. This is the same procedure one uses with  metal; the only difference is that one starts with a finer grit because plastic is softer. I used wet sandpaper for all but the first two passes.

This was a long process; the above pass was done with 220 grit sandpaper, and I finished off with 2000 grit. Here's what it looked like at that point:

As you can see, all this sanding has brought the surface back to a soft shine, with hardly any suggestion of scratches. This necessarily took a long time; I typically did this work at night, sitting with the family watching Angels games.

At the same time, I was restoring the inner workings. I took everything apart, cleaned off all the dirt and corrosion, and put it all back together with replacement parts as necessary, lubricating all the moving parts and electrical connections to ensure proper mechanical and electrical function. 

Oh, yes. This picture reminds me that I restored the bakelite handset in much the same way as the phone body, but there are some differences. Whereas the body is made of thermoplastic, which is completely solid and unitary in composition, bakelite is a phenolic resin mixed with a filler, usually wood flour. The thermoplastic is molded in a melted state, and it hardens as it cools; bakelite is either molded under heat and pressure or extruded, and it hardens from a chemical reaction brought about by the heat and pressure.

Because the thermoplastic used in the phone body is the same all the way through, sanding down to undamaged material and then polishing it will restore the original appearance; because it is fairly stable chemically, it does not change appreciably with age. Bakelite, on the other hand, is somewhat unstable; while the molding process naturally forces a smooth layer of resin to the surface, exposure to ultraviolet rays breaks it down, causing a fine layer of phenyl alcohol to form on the surface. This yellows and oxidizes the surface, and eventually it begins to reflect the texture of the filler material. For this reason, aged bakelite can never be brought back to its full original shine. Thus, the procedure here is to start with a very fine-grit sandpaper to remove all the oxidized and yellowed material, then sand with progressively finer grits just until the scratches are gone and the sheen is even. This is a much shorter process than with the thermoplastic.

With the sanding all done on the body and handset, the final step is to polish them on a buffing machine with a string buff and some plastic polish, which comes in the form of a waxy white bar. This has to be done with great care with the thermoplastic in order to prevent heating the surface and thus distorting it. With the bakelite, more polish and more pressure are used in order to fill in some of the surface irregularities.

After all this, here was the result:

I was positively stunned by how nice the phone looked: wow, I did that? Aside from the finger wheel, the phone was pristine, as if it were about ten years old and gently treated its whole life. When I replaced the fingerwheel with a restored one a week later, the effect was complete. Moreover, the phone worked perfectly, with the best sound quality I had ever heard from a phone, bar none. It has ever since been my preferred phone for a good long phone conversation.

And so we had our first phone with which to wow visitors to the Farm House. It had come at a significant cost—my hands were severely weakened by the long period of constant sanding, and have even now not fully recovered—but it was worth it to have followed through on a plan with such resounding success. When we moved into the Farm House, I placed it in a fairly prominent place, and waited for the expressions of delighted surprise from visitors.

To this date, six years later, not one person has even noticed the damn phone. Not. One. Person.

The whole affair brings to mind the immortal words of the late, great Rick Nelson:

Well, it's all right now
I've learned my lesson well
You see, you can't please anyone
so you've got to kill yourself.

Or something like that.

* * *

"Get that phone, will ya? I'm not in to anybody."