old growth

This is the part where you simultaneously realize how good things are going to look, feel like you are making progress and become completely aware of how long it’s going to take to finish. It’s a 50/50 mix of elation and dread. Today I sanded Ginger’s closet doors and got the first coat of stain on them. The fir looks simply beautiful. I don’t think anything can touch old growth fir in terms of warmth. While new doors, such as the ones we put in the kitchen, look great, the vertical grain doesn’t look as varied or interesting as the flat-sawn to me. And if you don’t remember, we scored these old cabinet doors for $40 at the Rebuilding Center. There aren’t many places where you can find 5′ doors, especially for a great price. Of course the real “price” comes when your back is sore from spending hours and hours bent over while sanding and staining

A couple of days ago I sanded Ginger’s door down to get it ready for stain. Like all the upstairs doors, we had taken it to get dipped & stripped (probably over a year ago!), but unfortunately, the work never ends there. I hadn’t really looked at them too closely after getting them back from the strippers, but while sanding them, I noticed that the strippers had been a little to aggressive with their scrapers. One side of the door had really rough-sawn panels, and apparently the texture wasn’t willing to let go of the paint, forcing the strippers to scrape and gouge the panels to get the paint off. Because these gouges cut pretty deep, I decided to sand all of the panels smooth in order to remove the grooves. On the plus side, we now have nice, smooth panels on both sides of the door, but the negative was the hours I had to spend to sand just one door. Even with a power sander, it took forever to sand enough off to make the gouges less visible. They didn’t come out perfectly, but the great thing about old doors with beautiful grain is that the remaining blemishes actually add more character to the door. At least that’s what I tell myself, so that I can stop sanding. Comparing it to the way it looked when we bought the house, it was worth all the time and expense.

A few weeks ago we got our doors and jambs back from Houck’s Stripping.  Actually, he had been bugging me for awhile, but I was trying to defer picking them up until we were ready for them.  As usual with remodeling projects, it became clear that the timing wouldn’t work out, so I just picked them up and jammed them in the garage.  Our garage has looks more like the Rebuilding Center or the basement at Hippo Hardware than a garage, since it is packed full of wood, windows, a pink toilet and other materials that came out of our house.   In fact, since we’ve never actually parked a car into either of its two stalls, I’m afraid that it probably feels very emasculated. Click to continue »

The plaster ceiling has been pulled down, but the wainscotting is still in place. 

A few days later, we removed the wainscotting, which was made of beautiful, 3/4″ solid old-growth douglas fir.  We had dozens and dozens of pieces of this pristine wood, which we planned to hold onto until we were able to reuse it in other projects, such as furniture.  However, our storage space for materials was constantly under pressure, and we admitted the reality that the wood would likely be sitting around for a decade before we actually had time to do anything with it.

Julio asked around and was able to find a coworker that was interested in the panels to finish off a cabin he was building.  So one day he came over with a trailer, and we loaded up all of the wood.  While it was a relief to get our space back, we were definitely sorry to see the wood go.  After all, it would have been really nice to somehow reuse the wood somewhere in the house or to create something new with it.  After a few months, Julio asked Tim how the wood was working out… 

“Oh, I didn’t have space, so I burned it.”  Other than the fact that that was just stupid because of the lead paint, it was an incredible waste of irreplaceable wood.  We would have gladly taken it back if we’d been able to tell the future, but too late now…

This was one of the worst “surprises” along the way.  Much of the crawlspace area had been sealed off and had been inaccessible since the house was built in 1911.  We found that someone had gotten lazy and left dirt piled up under and against the main beam.  Definitely not what you want to find…

The good news was that the the old growth douglas fir that our house was framed with is an incredible wood.  It had been sitting against the dirt for 93 years, and it had rotted only about 1.5″ on the bottom edge.  And there was no insect damage.  If this had been modern wood, it would have disintegrated long ago.  When we opened up the back wall of the house, we found a piece of wood from the 60’s that had been chewed to pieces by insects.  The adjacent, original stud that it had been nailed to didn’t have a single bite in it.  The bugs just aren’t interested  in this wood.  If they were, the back end of the house would’ve sunk down years ago!