Please Make It Stop! (pic)

We complain if it doesn't snow (global warming!!) and then we complain when it does, oh, that's global warming, too?

My husband came home in what I call a "blizzard". I wasn't raised in these parts (California girl) so every time
a little snow falls I think I need to stay in the house. He looked
outside and my dear husband, born and raised here in Erie, asked if I
wanted to take a nighttime walk in the snow (blizzard).

Oh, this brought back a fond memory of a midnight blizzard walk when we
lived, for a short time, in the Chicago area (Crystal Lake). It was so
cold that night (about zero degrees) that the moisture in the air froze
into bright little crystals and night had turned bright like day with
twinkling stardust everywhere. I took that walk so bundled up it was
hard to move. The moisture of my breath froze on my neck scarf that was
covering my face.

It was no where near that cold tonight but it
was extra bright out for being so late. The snow was piling up fast. It
was nice to bundle up and feel the cold snow hit my face and cause
frostbite. Really, it was fun and I got my fingers out of my gloves long
enough to snap this photo. Actually, it really was much snowier and
deeper than the picture portrays. Pictures lie with fish size and snow
depth. :-)

Free Historic Home Repair Videos-Interesting

I'm always searching for free home improvement videos. If you like looking at "how-to" videos you may want to check these guys out. It is very interesting how they repaired some antique beams and clapboards, etc. These may give someone an idea of how to attempt some of these things. See their link below. It's free, when you get to their site, just click on their links.

o Timber Repairs
o Exterior Wood 1, Clapboard Repair
o Exterior Painting 4: Surface Prep, Wet Abrasive Scrub
o Exterior Painting 2: Steam Paint Removal
o Exerior Painting 3: Ground Protection, Joint Cleaning
o Steam Paint Removal, testing
.
http://historichomeworks.phovi.com/

Anyone Use Waterlox On Their Floors?

Soon I'll have to order a finish for my stripped oak floors. Originally they were shellac but I couldn't save it as the foam under the 50(?)-year-old carpet was ground into it in a lot of places. I have cats and on occasion they "yak-up" on the wood floors so I'm thinking I may use something else.

I think Waterlox is suppose hold up better than shellac. I don't like polyurethane floors. My shellac floors and stairs were not very slippery and that is the other big issue.

Anyone have Waterlox floors, are they slippery? Are they holding up well to foot traffic?

My Paslode Nailer is Worth the Price

I was a bit scared about nailing that oak trim back on the newel post as I thought it may split being it is very hard and old. I was going to drill little, tiny holes first and then use finish nails but the minute drill bit I bought was still a hair too big for the finish nails.

I decided to try my Paslode cordless, angled, finish nailer that I bought a few years ago and had used on the old oak door trim in the dining room without any splitting. I hadn't used it in several months and after multiple false trigger pulls (and my husband walking away from holding the trim after several negative attempts to shoot the nails) I changed the fuel cell, charged the battery and got it working again. It's always fun to try and lure your helper back after so many "wait a minute, let me try it again, I think its working now" attempts.

It was really hard for my husband to hold the pieces level while I was pushing down on the gun and angling it upwards into the trim in order for the nail gun to fire. But we managed to get it on straight and most of the nails don't even need to be countersunk. I don't know how we would of gotten it on there straight hitting it with a hammer. The best part was that these nails didn't split that super-hard, antique oak trim.


I'll have to paint the silver-colored nails and coat them with shellac so they don't show. This nail gun was one of my more expensive tool purchases but I will be using it a lot, what a time saver! They are a bit tempermental, though. Mine jammed last year and I had to take it in to be fixed. They were able to pull the jammed nails out and the repair shop didn't even charge me a cent. That's a first!

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See the projects I have completed at this link My Website.
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Newel Post Getting Its Crown-Finally

I started the staircase, lets just say it was over 4 years ago and leave it at that. Nothing is so boring as stripping those staircases. You never get done. And I didn't finish it yet. But the stair railings are down to the last step. I just need to wax them. The garnet shellac has been applied and smoothed for the last time and now I'm ready to take my #0000 steel wool and apply my dark wax. It smells so good!

I waxed the top part of the newel post already because I need to put the trim back on the top. I don't know what the actual name is for it, but I refer to the trim as the "crown". I took it off when I stripped the stairs because I read that the builder often put the house's original blueprints down inside the newel post. I needed to take that top part off and the crown hid the joint between the pieces. But mine was empty. I hope I don't split the wood nailing it back on there. I'm excited getting that piece back on there where it belongs after all this time.


note* Notice the window trim behind the newel post in the picture is too dark. That was one of my first projects when we moved in. I stained it too dark and used a different finish, I don't even recall what I used for that, possibly a poly. But it is way too dark. I learned from it. I'll redo that at some point.

The Tiffany Exhibit at Carnegie Was Fabulous

Last Saturday (Jan 13th) my husband treated me to a day in Pittsburgh to visit the Tiffany Gallery that ran through last Monday at the Carnegie Museum of Art. I was so impressed with the color. The depth of color of the glass just takes your breath away. Printed pictures just can not capture it. There were paintings by Louis Comfort Tiffany, too. I didn't know he was such a good painter. The jewelry, glass and metal work was so beautiful. He definetly had good taste and demanded quality. There was a large floor lamp that looked like an outdoor light post with the most beautiful metal and glass work on it. You should really go and see his work if the exhibit comes to a museum near you.

At Carnegie they still have some of the Tiffany desk sets there until April 29th. Also in the museum was Rembrandt's etchings through Feb 11th. You can see the schedule at the above link. What a great day trip it is.

You could take pictures in the other parts of the museum if you didn't use it for the internet or to be published, but they didn't let you take pictures in the gallery where the Tiffany exhibit was. I'm glad I asked before I whipped my camera out. There was security everywhere. It would have ruined my day to be strong-armed out of there.

Literal Pain in the Butt and Crossword Puzzles

Now and again I get this pain in the buttocks. Down deep, stabbing pain. I don't know from one step to the next if I'll practically faint from the pain or will be perfectly all right. It can be gone as fast as it came. I think it is Sciatica. But by the time I make a doctors appointment it is gone. I look like Igor, dragging my leg behind me.

This gives me that great opportunity to blog, do crossword puzzles, you know, be lazy. When I'm blogging, I'm not working on the house.

I got a Dell crossword puzzle book for Christmas. It has a variety of puzzles, easy to hard. I have gotten 1/2 through the book and have now resorted to tearing the answer page out from the back, crossing out the puzzle answers of the ones I've already done and having the answer there right next to the puzzle I'm doing. It is cheating but it is faster that way. I'm no longer going to stress over a 3 letter word for Lincoln's bill: slang. I looked at the answer and I just didn't get it. I started to think mabye it was talking about Lincoln, a type of car, it had fins in the rear in the olden days. So I asked my husband, just to make me feel better (I knew he wouldn't get it either). He said, "Fin". I was so frustrated, I didn't want him to know the answer. "How do you know that?! How would I know that? I never heard of that before, dog gone it!! Why would anyone call it a fin?". Even cheating with the answers haven't stopped the stress.

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See the projects I have completed at this link My Website.
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I'll Refer Them to My Worst Enemy - Part 2

Read part 1 here.

After all that time and stress, we thought it finally got fixed....

• It rained and water came streaming down the walls of the garage, starting just above where the roof and walls meet and it was wet high up. See photo. It wasn't raining when the photo was taken. It was a lot worse than the photo when it rained. You can see all the mold that was going on.
  
  We called the contractor back out and the roofer showed up and looked at it. Said that water higher up was just wicking up. Said it was the gutter system, that it was clogged and water was feeding behind the flashing. It was old and we needed a new one. Well, just great! We can't see what's going on on the outside as it is way up on the second story and that side of the house borders the neighbor's fenced yard so we really can't see anything unless we were on top of the garage. We took his word for it.
  


• We called a couple gutter guys that didn't return my calls and finally got Home Depot to came out and look at it but he said the job was too small for them. They have a minimum. Ok, that was a week lost waiting to find that out. We finally found another guy that came out and looked at it and said he'd be back out soon. It took a couple of weeks before he showed up.



• When he did show up it turned out he was a really nice guy. Pushed the gutter out to look at it and said everything is as it should be. He could replace it but it wouldn't stop the leak. He took a hose up on the roof and said the water was pooling towards the bottom of the roof, that it flattened out too much for shingles. He said he has seen that before. The ice and water shield doesn't always stop leaks if the slope is pretty flat. Over a hundred dollars but cheap for the time he put into it and he was paying a second employee and had the machines all fired up to make new gutters. It's just that the roof still leaks and it wasn't a gutter problem.
  


• We called the roofers back and told them that the gutter guy said it wasn't the gutter, it was the roof that was leaking. The roofer said, "what does a gutter guy know about roofs". My husband told him, "look, you told us it was the gutter so we paid to have a gutter guy out and he says it is the roof." The roofer said he would be out to look at it.


• Nothing, nothing and nothing. Mold is really bad now, the inside of the garage, even on the first floor near the foundation wall, was saturated and slimy. Another couple of weeks goes by. I see the roofer pull up in front of my house when I was working on our front porch stairs. I wave. They go to the neighbors house. Apparantly the neighbor talked to them while they worked on our house and they contracted them to do some work on theirs. When I saw them go to the neighbors house I was so livid I couldn't even go outside. I knew I would lose it.


• Christmas came and went and we made some more phone calls asking when they were coming out as we still have water streaming into our garage. They said their workers were not showing up for work because of the holidays. How nice they all got such long holidays.
  


• My husband had had it and had made it known to them. Well, last Friday the son of the owner of this construction company comes out with the roofer. They look at the mess and said it looks like the ice and water shield isn't keeping the water out. NO DAH, do you think??!!!! They said the roofer would be out the next day, Saturday, to take the shingles off of the lowest part of the roof and put a membrane of some sort down instead. I told them we couldn't be home (had an appointment in Pittsburgh and also went to see the Louis Comfort Tiffany exhibit) but they said they could do it without going into the garage.


• We returned Saturday evening and I could see nothing was done. But it had rained and was kind of windy.


• I'm not sure what the conversation Monday morning was between my husband and the company, but I was super surprised Monday afternoon to hear hammering on the garage roof. I didn't go out and greet them this time as I figured the guy was pretty mad being sent out in 25 degrees weather. But who should be mad here?
  


• If I had to do it over again, I'd put on tin or steel roof panels myself. You can't see the garage roof even from the upstairs windows, only from the next street over between the houses. Even though I am afraid of being up high, I'd get used to it eventually, and that would have been less stress than going through the last 4 1/2 months.

It hasn't rained yet to find out if it is fixed. I'm crossing my fingers.
See all of my recent posts here.
See the projects I have completed at this link My Website.
Houseblogs.net
Oldhouses.com

I'll Refer Them to My Worst Enemy - Part 1

I want to do most of the work in our old house myself. But when the garage roof leaked, we thought we would hire a contractor as there are so many other things that needed to be done. The garage roof is what is called a shed roof, it only slants in one direction and has only a slight slope to it. It was time to take years of old roofing off. It is two stories high and is the main reason I didn't particularly want us to mess with it. It all started innocently enough way back in September of 2006......

• We called a well-known building contractor in the area that was referred to us by a happy customer. They were out in about a week to give us the estimate. They would use shingles with an ice and water shield. They said you can use shingles on an almost flat roof as long s you have that membrane down first. Ok, they're the experts so it must be OK. They said they would fit us in between larger jobs.
  
  


• Week one, two, three went by. No one showed up. Water was ruining the upstairs heart-pine floor of the garage. We had plastic layed down and the drips were so random that buckets couldn't begin to catch it all. Water was pretty much everywhere. We called again, they said they'd get to us.
  



• Week four and five. We were ready to call someone else but figured we'd have to start all over on the waiting list with the new guys.



• Week six, success!! But only after some more phone calls.


• The equipment they took down our little driveway to fix the roof, ruined the yard and took out the neighbors brick border. When they gave us the estimate they said they would come out first and measure the driveway to make sure they could get the equipment in. Obviously they didn't. They missed our house's brick support pillars by only a couple of inches and pushed the dirt up hard against the pillars. We won't know if any real damage was down under the dirt. Ruts 8 inches deep where they cut the corner into our driveway and cement was chipped off the curbing. But, anything was almost acceptible by then just to get the water out of the garage.
• They cleaned up pretty good. We found a few nails around. Aahh, it was finally done. But, yes, that is not the end of the story. I'll be posting part 2.
  
  

I Found More Free Woodworking Videos - Just Click

I came across The Wood Whisperer on the Blip.tv site. These humorous instructional wood-related videos are free, just click on them. There is a series on wood finishes, one on jointers. He has 16 videos and a promo right now but is adding more on different subjects in the near future. His videos have really nice resolution. When working on an old house it pays to be able to do some woodwork. Here is the link. Scroll down a little on his page to see all the videos.

The Wood Whisperer

Don't Be This Girl - DIY Danger #1

You see crown molding, the ceiling and if you look carefully, there is a hook where my small crystal chandelier used to hang. I moved the light to the other side of the room to make room for my new floor lamp we bought at the Erie Estate Buyers. When I moved the light, I noticed the ceiling could use a touch up.

Now visualize a step ladder up against the wall and a DIY'er up on the ladder with a cup of paint in one hand, a brush in the other. Now visualize this DIY'er with her long hair put up in a bun-like thing with clips and clamps and whatever is needed to keep the hair out of one's face while working. Very carefully I ran paint along the edge of the molding. In other words, I got my face right in there with my tongue out in ernest effort and .....

What the heck!! Somehow, someway, my hair got caught in that hook. I couldn't bend down to put the paint down and I'm somewhat leaning backwards on the ladder steps with my hair tight into the hook. I can't reach up with my hands as they are full and I can't turn around as it hurts. I'm just slightly off balance but am alright if I don't panic. What runs through my mind is how do these things happen? They happen all the time! I'm home alone, doing something that I thought was pretty safe.

Slowly I start wagging my head left and right, a little up and down. If someone saw me they probably would have thought I was bopping to a beat, winging my arms around dancing not knowing it's a balancing act. I manage to finally free myself minus some hairs that I really can't afford to give up. My neck muscles hurt for hours afterwards.

You don't read about that danger in those home improvement books.

Is Your Old Erie Home a Sears Kit Home?

Is your old Erie, PA area home a Sears Kit home? If it is, I'd like to feature it on my blog. Email me pictures at thisolderiehouse@verizon.net if you'd like to share your pictures.

How do you know if you have a Sears Kit home? If your house was built between 1908 and 1940 you can go to this link Sears Kit Homes and check the pictures and the floor plans.

Remember, often there were later additions, remodels or porch enclosures done to a home. Sometimes the architectural features like the brackets on the eves are taken off and the eves boxed in so your house may not look exactly like the pictures. Sometimes it takes an expert to tell (and there are a few actual experts out there that do travel around the US verifying Sears Kit homes.) But for our purposes, if your house has most of the features for a particular model, please email me some pictures of your house and I'll feature them.

If you can't find your house in the Sears Kit catalogue, try this link for homes from 1908 to 1954 Aladdin Kit Homes. I'd like to feature those, too.

A Card Cabinet Scraper vs Sandpaper

If only I had known sooner. I have gone through so many packages of sandpaper trying to smooth out the shellac I applied to the woodwork. Friction and/or heat balls up the shellac into little corns on the sandpaper making it useless almost after the first stroke. Using mineral spirits with wet/dry sandpaper on shellac does help but I still had to use a lot of sandpaper.

I had a card cabinet scraper but I never could get it to work well for me. I knew I didn't have the right sharpening technique. That was then, this is now. I'm the happy owner of a new sharpening system for my cabinet scraper and have become a scraping fool (among other things, ha).

I doubt I'll have to use much more sandpaper because my shellac finish is now flat and smooth, ready to be waxed with 0000 steel wool and dark wax. It is so much cheaper to use the scraper than buying all that sandpaper. Of course you always need a little fine grit on some projects but for the woodwork, steel wool is my last step.

The only downside to this is the curved areas. I think I'll have to purchase a curved scraper for that. I still need the sandpaper for the moldings.

I'll let you know how the curved scraper works for the curved moldings.

Still Thrilled With Antique Gift

When showing my sister around Pennsylvania and New York during her visit from California, we happened across an antique shop in Westfield, NY. I spotted a beautiful framed antique print of a little girl and a St. Bernard-type dog. I loved it but wasn't sure if I should spend that much money. With many more shops to look at we moved on. My sister and I often referred back to that wonderful print.

On Christmas Eve a large, wrapped, what looked to be a frame was in my pile of gifts. I don't know how he managed to get to NY and back without my knowledge but my wonderful husband did it. I just adore the print and it goes well in our old house.

I have come to find out through hours of researching the internet, that this is actually a photogravure from between 1850s to 1900. I had never heard of photogravure or intaglio before. So this print was from an actual photograph that was etched onto a copper plate and retouched with an engraver. That is why it looks a lot like it is a picture of a painting. I'm including a few closeups to see the hand engraving. I guess the process wasn't entirely reliable enough to not have to touch up until the first decade of the twentieth century. If you click on the dog to enlarge it, you will see the whiskers were touched up, the background I think was added or was a backdrop. I find it all fascinating. It looks a lot like a painting. I found other original photos by the photographer in the Library of Congress but not this one.

The photographer that took this photo served in the Civil War. He was from St. Louis, MO. Luck would have it that we will spend a few days this summer in St. Louis for a conference. I know I'll be scanning the library there for info on the artist while my husband is working.



Click to enlarge.