molding

One of the lingering prep issues with the exterior was the drip cap on the dining room bay.  It was suffering from the double injustice of being the most exposed on the ground floor (because of the bay) and having been installed improperly.  In several areas of the house, the drip cap was horizontal instead of sloped.  With our big eaves it’s not usually an issue, but the dining room catches more rain than any other area.  And if there’s no slope for the water that builds up, what’s going to happen?

Unfortunately, I was unable to find any moldings that matched the profile of our drip cap.  McCoy had one that looked right, but it was 1/2″ narrower than ourso match our house’s (F890 on pg 27 of their molding catalog.)  So, I ended up buying a Cedar 4×4 and table-sawing my way to new drip caps.  I can’t remember which took longer, making them or installing them, but they came out great.  Sadly, my “brilliant” idea of adding  a drip groove feature to the caps was one of short-lived glory.  Once I installed the molding below, I realized that my groove was going to be covered by caulk

Horizontal cap + rain = not so good

Old v. new

8° of freedom

Not yet rotten!

Today was much more fulfilling than yesterday.  If you compare the pictures, you’ll see why!

It always takes me awhile to get back in the groove of hauling up all the tools and starting the circus of sawing, shaving, cutting, sanding, shimming and nailing that’s necessary to install door and window trim.  At least a couple of times during the last two days I wished that we had torn down the plaster instead of drywalling over the top.  Which is worse?  Tearing down some plaster, which takes just a little physical labor, or creating a trim nightmare by increasing your wall depth?  What made it so bad is that the drywall is not at a uniform depth, so the depth difference varies from 1/2″ to 3/4″, sometimes along the length of a given piece of casing.  That meant I had to try to cut and sand down a  strip of fir at an angle to try to even things out.  Of the four openings in this room, only the closet door cooperated by needing a constant 1/2″ filler strip.

Next?  Finishing the base trim and filling all the old and new nail holes, a little more sanding and then onto staining.  I also need to buy, finish and install the crown and the little cap trim that sits on top of the base.  I never have any idea what that piece is called.  I will be going to McCoy Millwork to get these pieces, since I couldn’t find anything appropriate at the usual suspects, Mr. Plywood and Home Depot.

I went through the site and realized that we didn’t have any “before” pictures of this room.  I created a new post so you can see what it used to look like.  Don’t be fooled by the walls in the picture.  The white paint over the wallpaper over the cracked plaster photographed really well!

Door now has trim

Side window and first piece of base trim

Closet door and window facing patio

Today I started installing the hybrid of old and new trim.  Most of what are using in this room is the original trim, but the sills and a few other pieces will be new.  Each piece of casing has to be shimmed out by 1/2″ on the jamb side to account for the increased wall depth.  It is a tedious process to put these back together, but it’s worth it to us to be able to adapt the original trim to the “new” room.

Window trim

Close-up of new sill and old casing

New sill

Ummm…maybe only 3 or 4, but it’s 97 years worth.  Lots of distractions got in the way today, so I only accomplished a few hours of paint stripping and bought a few extra pieces of fir I needed for window sills.  Adding the drywall on top of the plaster means that we’d lose 1/2″ of depth on the sills, which wouldn’t leave enough extend beyond the casing.  That meant another trip to Mr. Plywood for some beautiful 5/4″ 1×4s.

I had mentioned our Speedheater in the last post, so today I thought I’d show what this thing can do.  We bought it when we started the house in 1994 and sort of built the $400 cost into our initial projects.  I was shocked to go to the eco-strip website and find that they are now $600!  Ouch!  Even though it was very spendy, we feel that it’s paid for itself several times over in terms of labor.  While I’ve never been able to get results anywhere near as fast as shown on their video, this thing does work miracles.  It can cut through many layers of paint at once, without chemicals or flames.  It turns the paint into a gummy mess that can be easily scraped off, as long as you’ve heated it up enough.  On average I’d say that I have to hit each area about three times to get down to bare wood, but perhaps we have a particularly tenacious variety of paint in this house?  And I’ll always end up with a trace of residue that I’ll have to finish with a chemical stripper and some steel wool.  Check out the pictures for proof.  This would have been a horrible nightmare to do with chemical strippers.  The second picture is my clumsy attempt to take a self portrait while running the Speedheater.  Since I can’t hold my camera in one hand and reach the button at the same time, it’s pretty tough to do!

Old growth fir, out from its hiding place

Speedheater self-portrait

I didn’t bother taking a picture of the 2nd coat of paint in the family room, so you can just look at the last post and pretend it’s a new picture, if you’d like

Today saw the end of the painting and the beginning of the stripping of the door jambs. Used the Speedheater (infrared paint remover) to remove the bulk of the old paint layers and then followed up with a stripper gel. Although not exactly quick, this has proven to be our “go to” combo when we have to strip trim in place. It’s the best way we’ve found to get paint off without sanding (obviously a no-no with lead paint,) but it’s still not very fun! And lastly, here’s a picture of our trim, ready to go on the walls!  Some of this was actually taken to be dipped and stripped 4 years ago!  It’s been patiently sitting in the basement, ready to return to its rightful place.  Most of this pile is original, but the base trim will be new, as will the crown molding.

Dipped & stripped and new trim

Just posting a few pics to show what’s changed lately. I was supposed to be going back to work today, but I asked for another day off to try to wrap up some of the loose ends. Pic 1 is Chloe posing in Ginger’s room.  Pic 2 is an example of the pain of some of the compound cuts required for trim in this sloped upstairs. If everything were perfectly square, it’d be easy, but there seems to always be just enough variation to make it tricky.  Although, they are definitely easier than the cuts in Chloe’s room, because those had to be notched out to accommodate other sections of the ceiling that sloped into them.  Sometimes it feels more like sculpting than sawing. Pic 3 is of the new shelves I finally constructed to fill the built-in bookcase in the playroom.

The good and bad news is that Stephanie is now a week overdue.  While it’s been helpful to have all these extra weekends to work on the upstairs, enough is enough!  She is definitely ready for the baby to come out now.  Yesterday and today I worked on finish coats for the trim, paint edging and cleaning up.  While there are still a lot of areas that need further touch up, the rooms are looking REALLY good.  We had taken pictures earlier today but then retook them at night to really show how nice things are looking.  During the day, the mix of lighting is not as flattering and a lot of the details are lost in shadows.  At night the lighting is much more even, which I guess really means that we did a really good job planning out our lights (OK, really we were just lucky).

Getting all the paper out from under the base shoe was a real daytime nightmare.  I suppose there is some trick that professional painters use, but I sure don’t know what it is.  After 4-5 coats of primer and paint, the base shoe and paper had become one.  I ended up having to use a utility knife to score them apart, which sounds much easier and faster than it really was.  It probably took me at least two hours to remove all the paper.  And while I usually try to do everything by hand and without masking, there was no good way to get paint on the base shoe and not the floor.  I know that everyone’s thinking “well, why not paint the base shoe before installing it?”  And yes, that would’ve been a good idea, but I had so much other unpainted trim (sills, separator beads) that I just didn’t want to be bothered.  Sometimes you get on a roll and don’t want to be slowed down by such tings.  Of course, all I did was defer one lousy job for an even worse one.  Not only was the paper hard to remove, it was even harder to slide get it under the base shoe in the first place (I wasn’t going to settle for a sloppy masking tape line!).  This is how I do so many of my jobs…bounce back and forth between two methods that I don’t like, always thinking that the other one would’ve worked so much better.  There’s always next time.  Regardless of my construction inefficiencies, I’m really happy with the way it’s turning out.

This weekend saw another closet door hung, as well as more trim in Chloe’s room. I basically just worked until I ran out of wood, which didn’t take too long. Got to pick up more MDF this week.  As often happens, I realized that my “vision” was limited when I created the closet openings.  If I had just put them a few inches over, I wouldn’t have had to do all the funky cuts in the trim.  On the other hand, I think they look kind of cool with the notches for the rafters in them.

As of today, ALL of the the windows we replaced have now had all their trim installed. We are still debating what to do about the front windows (major restoration of existing vs. replacement – we have strong motivations for both). Here’s how the windows in Chloe’s room look now. Because of some of the weird depth issues this wall has, it was easily the most time-consuming window trim project I have ever done. I had to cut a lot of pieces at strange angles and even scribe a couple of them. It doesn’t look complex now that it’s done, but believe me, it was! Below are pictures of the windows on the east side of the main room…

This weekend we put in 3 (out of 6) new windows and started the trim…

I pulled off all the vertical trim on the exterior and cut new pieces to better camouflage the wood strips I had to put in to make the windows fit better. It took so long (and used more wood), so I’m thinking of skipping this step on the other side. Even if it doesn’t look as clean, it shouldn’t be a big deal once everything is all painted.

Some door and baseboard trim

My formerly clean work space is trashed again. The MDF molding makes an unbelievable, eternally-reproducing pile of sawdust!