rebuilding center

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.

Ginger’s room is coming along nicely. The most difficult part, not surprisingly, was the closet doors. We always find that any of the “adapted” house parts that we get from salvage yards (in this case, the Rebuilding Center) end up taking the lion’s share of the labor time. The story here was that we needed doors just a bit shorter than 5′ for the closets, and new fir doors were quoted out in the neighborhood of $800…each! We got these, which are actually some sort of old cabinet doors for $30 or $40. Total cost after having the lead paint stripped off was maybe $150. The downside is that I had to fabricate jambs for them, since they had none. This is the type of project for which I have little patience, skill or interest. But the cost difference is pretty compelling, and of course, we always like to be able to reuse something old in our house whenever possible. Today also saw the new windows go in, so by tomorrow all the trim in the room and closets should be finished as well. Also, I got another coat of mud on the stairwell, but it doesn’t look different enough to warrant a new picture.

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 »

Even before closing on the house, we bought these windows from The Rebuilding Center, a great non-profit building material warehouse here in Portland.  They accept donations of surplus or salvageable building materials and sell them at a reasonable price.  The profits go to fund the warehouse and their community programs.  While much of their stock is from 70’s and 80’s, you can occasionally find gems like these old casement windows.

We really thought that they would go well in our kitchen, and we were excited that they were fir, which would match all of our other woodwork.  Our excitement did not adequately reflect the following issues which our spontaneous purchase would set into motion:

Negative #1) The size and shape of these windows would require a complete re-frame of the long (19′) wall of our kitchen.

Negative #2) They required stripping to get rid of the lead paint.  Luckily, we did find a great local place that could do that for us at a reasonable cost (Houck’s Stripping)

Negative #3) Since these casements had no frames, we’d have to build them ourselves.  That ended up taking a LOT of time and a surprising amount of money.

Negative #4) Some of the glass was broken and would have to be replaced.  Julio’s original plan of replacing all the glass with wavy glass didn’t work out too well, because just about every piece broke either when removing it from the old frame (we bought junky old windows at the Rebuilding Center) or when installing it into these windows

Negative #5) Old, single pane windows are nowhere near as energy efficient as new windows, especially when the windows are warped, which makes it difficult to weatherstrip them well.  Eventually, we are going to make some storm windows that we can put up in the winter.

Once the windows, the stripping, the wood, the “new” hinges (we had to buy antique ones at Rejuvenation, and they cost a small fortune), not to mention the dozens of hours of labor, we easily ended up spending about as much as we would have on new windows.  But, they really do look fantastic, and EVERYONE assumes that they are the original windows.  So while there were a lot of negatives, we’re still glad that we did it this way.