May 7^th, 2003

Things are progressing nicely on the house, albeit slowly. The idea is that everything I do these days is geared towards the goal of re-wiring and re-plumbing. If I can get these two things done this summer then I can start on more cosmetic stuff. A few weeks ago I removed the toilet, sink, and tub from the upstairs bathroom (the original bathroom in the home). I then pulled up a few floor boards and cut out all of the old water pipes. I then noticed the walls are in rough shape in a few places.

The walls in this bathroom are 9.5 feet high. The first 4 feet are bead-board wainscoting and then there is 5.5 feet of plaster up to the ceiling. All of the plaster and bead-board was covered in several coats of paint. I noticed that there were a few small bad patch jobs on the plaster ceiling. I figured I might as well deal with this now so I decided to try and strip off the paint around these areas to fix them. Well, one thing led to another and two and a half weeks later I have stripped off all of the paint from both the plaster and the bead-board. Almost all, anyway. I’m still working on it.

It is a lot of work. For the plaster I used chemical paint strippers. It is pretty caustic stuff so I had to wear a respirator, goggles and thick rubber gloves. It took about a week to get it all off. I then tried the chemicals on the redwood bead-board but it did not work as well on the wood. I switched to a heat gun and that worked better. A heat gun looks just like a hand held hair dryer but it gets much hotter (1000 degrees) and does not blow as much air. It is a slow process but it works very well. The bead-board was originally varnished and/or shellacked. I’m not sure which. Anyway, on top of that was 6 or 7 coats of paint. As the heat gun heats up the top layers of paint they begin to bubble. The shellac underneath heats up too and turns to a consistency of hot syrup. Once the shellac liquefies like this the 7 coats of paint peel off in a sheet.

This removes about 95 percent of the paint and varnish from the wood. I’ve now started going back over it with both the heat gun and chemicals strippers to get the remaining bits. The next step will be to put in new plumbing and wiring. I will then skim coat the plaster and refinish all of the wood trim, bead-board, and wood floor. This is the bathroom that will have the original marble sink, 6.5 foot long claw-foot tub, and the antique high tank toilet. It should look very nice.

In the dining room there is this odd opening that does not look right. It is obvious that something used to go there. I’ve always thought it would have been a sideboard. Last week I was at a place called Empire Furniture and I may have found the perfect thing. Empire Furniture is huge. It is three floors packed with used and antique furniture. There are pieces of furniture from 19^th and 20^th century. You can find an oak secretary from 1890 right next to a Formica kitchen table from 1980. I go in there a lot to look for doors mostly. I’ve been able to find 5 interior doors that match the ones in my house.

Last Saturday I was strolling through the store and I found a mahogany side board that looked like it would fit perfectly in the opening in my dinning room. I took some measurements and it is almost as if it was built for the opening. I’m not sure how old it is or where it is from. The woman who owns Empire Furniture gets a lot of things from auction houses in the bay area. A neighbor of mine who works there on Sundays says that a lot of the stuff comes Eastern Europe. She told me how it comes over in shipboard containers and the owner will bid on an entire lot.

I don’t think this piece is really old but it does have some nice aspects to it. There are no modern building materials like plywood and the drawers have dove-tail joinery and all wood construction. It has some heavy, turned spindles and beveled mirrors that are similar to the ones on the fireplace mantle in the dining room. It has some relief carvings on some of the door fronts. It is about 5 feet wide and 7 feet tall. She is asking $850 for it. I don’t have $850 but I do have two claw-foot tubs that I don’t need. As you may remember my house used to be 4 apartments and so it had 4 bathrooms. Each bathroom had a claw-foot tub in it. I’m only going to have two bathrooms so I have two extra tubs.

I working with her to take some money and some tubs for the sideboard. I’ve been a good customer with doors and a toilet I’ve bought over the last 6 months so I’m hoping I can get a good deal. I wasn’t planning on purchasing anything like this for a long time but I’m not sure if I should pass this up. I think about that space a lot. If I have to get something custom made to fit there I would want it to be a nice, ornate Victorian piece, and that would be very expensive to get something custom made. Not to mention that a custom made piece would be new and I don’t want anything new for that space. It would seem out of place in this room. If I can get $250 each for the tubs and talk her down $75 dollars that means I would only need to come up with another $275. If I split that up over two or three paychecks it is something I think I can handle and stay on schedule with the plumbing and wiring. It’s only money, right?