!nspired

The door project from HELL is finally finished.

You’ll need a lot of tools if you plan on doing something like this, but none more important than the one I added to my toolbox much too late in the project - Patience.  This project had been on my list for about five years.  We had 14 interior hollow core, stained / varnished Philippine mahogony doors, jambs and trim that were showing their 53 years of use.  I really wanted to restore them and keep the no longer harvested, rain forest wood unpainted and looking like its original mid-century self.  So, six weeks ago I hired a local guy and his team who promised to restore everything using their many years of experience and know-how.  They got started by taking all the doors off site for refinishing.  They were to return the next weekend to do all of the on site jamb and trim restoration and install the restored doors.  It sounded like a good plan.  I won’t go into all of the gory details, but they showed up and started carrying the doors in - they were a mess.  For example, the stain and varnish were still wet, so when they carried the doors in it was raining and, you guessed it, the doors were spotted.  The same scratches that were on the doors when they took them were still on the doors (you can see one that I refinished myself - the one pictured with louvers - that I was assured couldn’t be fixed).  The crew was in the house for about 30 minutes before I fired them.  Since then I’ve been painting and rehanging the doors.  If you haven’t dealt with doors before and don’t have to - don’t.  It isn’t for beginners, especially in an older house.  Some of the tools required are:  Woodfiller (two kinds - one for filling dings and correcting gaps, another for plugging holes to allow for retapping screws), many grits of sandpaper, a rasp, a file, a screw extractor, drill, hammer, chisel, matt knife, high-density foam rollers, primer, paint, calk, stain, varnish - and much more.  There’s a lot more that could be said about this project, but after about 70 hours of frustration, specialty hardware store hopping (even my friends in the orange aprons couldn’t help me with this one), and labor I’m mostly happy to say it’s done. 

While reading City of Thieves by David Benioff, a story that follows two young men during the 900 day siege of Leningrad by the Germans in WW2 (and now one of my favorite books) I was inspired to draw a couple scenes as I imagined them.  One scene describes some kids discovering a German paratrooper who’s frozen to death upon descent.  See attached text from the book.  The second describes the scene discovered in a chicken coop on the roof of an apartment building in Leningrad.  The grandfather has starved to death and his grandson is wild eyed and near starvation when our protagonists enter the coop in search of chicken eggs. 

Cathy and I went to San Francisco to celebrate getting even older (our birthdays are 4 days (and 3 years apart - cougar alert!) and to visit the PIXAR- 25 Years of Animation Exhibit.  You’re not allowed to take photos in the exhibit and they’re very hawkish, but my camera “pocket shot” (that’s sort of like “pocket dialing” - only it sounds a little obscene) a couple while I was in there.  Great stuff.  The maquettes (small sculptures made as part of the design process) are by far my favorite.

This guy’s really good.  I can’t imagine it’s easy to paint like this on an iPad- but, I intend to find out.

LG watch phone.  I must have it.

I’ve been thinking about removing this big yellow hedge for a while now.  I knew it was going to be a lot of work, but after way too many hours behind a desk this winter I was ready to take it on.

I started Friday after work by renting a SawzAll (aka- reciprocating saw).  There were 15 junipers that were probably planted when the house was built in 1958.  That’s right, 52 year old bushes.  They liked it where they were too and didn’t want to go. As you can see the bushes were a lovely acid yellow (but, only on the surface).  About two inches in they became a strange combination of rotting vegetation so dense that it was basically dirt, old-growth like tree trunks and bees nests.  The first step was cutting away the bulk of the branches so I could gain access to the ground.  Some digging around the roots and a few whacks with a pick-axe exposed what was usually two or three wrist sized roots.  I put the SawzAll and its 10” blade to work and started winning the battle.  Then the motor burned out -I hurried back to Aurora Rents for a replacement only to learn the other SawzAll had gone out two minutes after I left.  The battle would continue in the morning.  At 8:30 a.m. I had my new SawzAll, an angle grinder and the warm, fuzzy feeling that comes with knowing a day of beautifully mindless labor, free of client feedback, high technology and information architecture, lay before me.

It was everything I hoped it would be.  Things went pretty smoothly and I even got some help from an unlikely source- my stepson, Charlie.  After letting him know I could use a helping hand I was met with a sloth-like stretch and “Oh, no thanks, Chad.”  I explained that it wasn’t really a request and we were off to the races.  He helped for a couple hours until he was lured away by his mom to play Speed-mitton on the lawn (I hope I didn’t interfere with their score keeping with all of my manual labor noisiness).  I finished removing the bushes and went staright to work cutting out the steel curlicues and grinding out most of the rust.  Some of the rail was in pretty bad shape and I needed to reshape the steel in places by grinding a 45 degree edge back onto it.  Sunday was all about priming and painting.  After priming I went through 3 spray cans of a paint that just wasn’t covering worth crap before I switched to matt black Rustoleum.  A few hours later the project was finished.  Before starting this project we got a couple estimates for just the bush removal part.  They were about $550.  Call me cheap but, tool rental was $14 and having the the debris removed was $160 for a total of $174.  Total cost of salvaging the railing was $14 for tool rental plus about $30 for paint.

This is another one I’ve wanted to do for a while.  Partly because it looked like such an easy fix.  Two 1/2 inch, 6 inch Zinc coated steel bolts, lock washers and washers plus some paint is all it needed.  I had to cut the old bolts off- they were fused together with rust.  The first one came apart with a hack saw.  The second one wanted me to use a Dremel tool with metal cutting blade.  The big washers on top seemed like they might be hard to find replacements for - so I scraped, sanded and spray painted them.  I painted the blue part with spray paint designed for use on flexible plastic outdoor furniture.  I tried painting the white part with similar paint but it just wasn’t covering (same stuff that didn’t cover well on the railing) so, I rolled on some latex paint designated for use in the bathrooms.  We’ll see how that holds up.  it looks good for now:]

The wall behind the television has bothered me longer than just about anything I’ve wanted to fix.  I just could not come up with a solution I liked.  Until now.  The first picture shows the wall with some failed attempts at paint colors, stains and washes.  I’d considered tile, stone and variations of wood and cork.  Nothing looked right in my Photoshop mock ups.  Did I mention I usually make a virtual version of these things before trying them in real life?  It’s a very useful step that quickly eliminates a number of options that look perfectly good in my mind’s eye.  Stupid mind’s eye.  Anway, it dawned on me that the best solution for this wall might be something that looked more like the decoration had been removed instead of added.  Our downstairs is a daylight basement so we’ve got some cement walls in the garage that I sort of mimicked here by using a large rubber tile float to smear some high sand content patching cement onto the wall.  I divided the wall into three horizontal sections with blue tape (which I planned on removing but is now a permanent part of the wall.  I sort of panicked about half way into the project because I had the cement a little too dry and it was all just falling onto the floor.  I did a little cussing and blamed it all on Cathy with my outside voice- sorry again life partner XO.  In the end it turned out great and only cost about $12 - not that saving money is important to me (did I mention I grew up on a school bus?).