September 9^th, 2002

Well, I FINALLY finished the apartments. I put an add in the paper on Friday and rented it to the first person who saw it Friday evening. She is a college student who has been looking for an apartment for months. She said she has been living on her sisters couch for three months because she is so picky about where she lives. If she is that picky I’m hoping she’ll take good care of the place.

To celebrate I started taking the asbestos shingles off the house. I’ve got about a third of them off so far. The biggest problem is finding enough boxes to store them in so I can transport them to the dump. The house looks great underneath. The top half is hexagonal shaped shingles and the bottom half is 1 X 8 ship-lap siding (1 inch thick wood that is 8 inches tall)..

Although it is better than I imagined, the house at this point has a “face only a mother could love” look to it. The original paint job was dark brown with tan trim but there is still a lot of the two tone green paint still showing so it looks very odd.

The upstairs windows have small sun-bursts over them. The window sills at the bottom have been cut off so the asbestos would be flush-fit to the windows. I can see a shadow of the originals sills on the old redwood shingles. I’ll need to decide whether to replace to whole sill or try to fabricate the parts that were sawed off. Also removed were the large sun-bursts above the downstairs windows. There is one left over one of the windows on the side of the house and you can see shadow images of where they used to be on the other windows. These could be difficult to reproduce. There are at least four missing, maybe as many as seven.

The asbestos comes off pretty easy but the nails they use to put it up do not. After I pull off all of the asbestos I will need to go back over it and pull out all of the nails. It only took me two days to get a third of the shingles off but I’ve started with the easiest part. It could be several weeks before I get them all off. I also broke one of the upstairs windows with a pry-bar. It is actually just a big crack in the window pane so I’m not going to worry about replacing it right away. My biggest fear was that I would break one of the stained glass windows. The asbestos shingles are about 3 feet long and feel kind of like thin terra cotta tiles. Sometimes when I take one off and drop it to the ground it will float around like a leaf falling from a tree. I was so worried that one would float back towards the house and crash through a window.

I’ve been getting a lot of comments from passers by. Things like, “I can’t believe that was underneath there” or “How did you know that was underneath there”. Then there was the one red-neck guy who stopped and looked up at the hexagonal shingles and said, “What are you going to put up to cover those”. It took a while to explain to him that those were put up in 1895 and that is how the house should look.

In other news, I started at school last week. I showed up for the Residential Wiring class a half hour early in hopes that I could add the class because it was full by the time I tried to register for it. There were already about a dozen people there who also wanted to add the class. By the time the class started a half hour later there were more than 40 people there trying to add the class. It was mob scene. The instructor had been handing out the syllabus to people as they showed up. After he took roll he said he had room for about 15 people and anyone who had a syllabus in their hand could get in. Fortunately I had one and was able to get in the class. This first semester will be all classroom work and then next semester we will go to a house under construction in Fortuna (20 minutes south of Eureka) and put new wiring in the whole thing. Should be fun!

This Tuesday I’m going to my first get together of the old house support group. I’ve talked on the phone to two of the people who sort of run the thing and I get the feeling it is more your kind of crowd than mine. Not that that is a bad thing, but I’m just not sure how well I’ll fit in. I’m hoping the conversation will be more than just “Strategic doily placement in a Victorian home”. J

In a couple of weeks when I get more of the asbestos off I’ll take some pictures and send them to you.