In the Dining Room of the Cheney Cottage

The Dining Room of the Cheney Cottage

Stripping paint is an arduous job, but ultimately, extremely rewarding.

The process involves long hours with the heat gun. I've learned that the best way to use the heat gun is to wear gloves, as the paint strips tend to be pretty hot (the heat gun has a range of 500 - 750 degrees). As you point the gun at the painted surface, the paint bubbles, and you slide a putty knife underneath it to lift ift off, while moving the gun to the adjacent painted surface. Often, I can pull off a strip of paint that is several inches long.

The wainscoting after initial paint stripping

Once the paint is removed, then the entire surface has to be scraped down to remove the last bits of the paint. On Saturday, Lisa Wahl came over and volunteered a couple hours to scrape paint with me. It's again arduous and pretty boring, but the results look even better, and you can see the woodwork returning to life. It was kind of fun doing it with Lisa, having someone to talk to. And Lisa is meticulous, so did a great job scraping all the tiny bits of paint off.

The wainscoting after most of the scraping is done

Next, we'll have to wash the woodwork with alcohol. This removes the top layer of the shellac, and will take off any haze of paint left on the surface. Then the completely stripped woodwork will be ready for shellac.

The dining room has wainscoting that is about 4 feet high, plus wood trim around the doors, plus two wood doors that need to be stripped, and the built in cabinet. All of it takes time, but all the wainscoting is stripped, one of the doors is stripped, and the trim around the doors. Between Lisa, Tom and me, we've scraped probably 1/3 of the wainscoting,

The half stripped built in china cabinet

Outside, things are happening as well. The biggest change is that the scaffolding is finally down from the front of the house, and the newly painted front can be clearly seen. Except for the bandboard (which is missing one piece), and some smaller areas that need to be touched up, the front of the house is done, and looks great. The colors are bright and vibrant - a major change from the grey facade the house presented for so many years.

A new paint job for the Cheney Cottage

Tom also has been working on replacing the siding on the west side, and he's probably about half way done. The new siding (obviously) will not need to be scraped, and it comes pre-primed, so we should be able to paint it as soon as it's up. Then we'll replace the 2nd story trim, and paint that as well.

Still no new roof, still no porches. But the place continues to come together.

Mr. Home Energy

In the past week, we've made pretty good progress on the Cheney Cottage.

The west wall of the Cheney Cottage, nice and warm

Tom has put on his Home Energy hat in a big way, and spent the last three days getting the west wall to meet energy standards. With the siding off, it was the perfect time to install insulation, but Tom went beyond that. He cleaned out the debris that generally sits in stud bays, then caulked and sealed every crack he could find. Insulation came next, cut carefully to fit each stud bay. Finally, a vapor barrier covered the entire wall, carefully trimmed to fit around the windows.

So the siding is still off, but next weekend we'll be replacing the old siding with new pre-primed siding, and the west wall will be ready for paint.

Inside, the work continues. I have done about 75% of the stripping of the woodwork in the front room, and it all looks great. There's still a long way to go, however. We'll take a second pass at removing paint, going over each area and removing the small particles that remain, and trying to get the wood all clean. Then we'll use an alcohol wash to remove the top layer of the original finish, which will take with it the slight haze of paint that often remains behind. Then Tom Piedemonte will do his magic, and spray new shellac on the woodwork. The room will go from how it looked when it arrived on 62nd Street (streaked with dirt and water marks) to how it looked when it was built on College Avenue in 1902.

The opening between the living room and the front hall

The main beam and the west window

The bench seat in the living room

I also started stripping the paint in the dining room. The dining room is probably my favorite room in the house, with its cove ceiling and redwood wainscotting. As the paint has started to come off, we found that the dining room was painted orange at some point in time. Not a gentle soft orange, but 1960s psychedelic orange.

The dining room

It should take only about 8 hours to strip the rest of the dining room, and probably 3 or 4 to finish the front room. This excludes the ceiling in the front room: at present, we're thinking we might hire someone to help strip the ceiling. Holding the heat gun and stripping paint which then falls into your face and hair gets tiring quickly, and maybe this is one of the jobs that we'll hire out. Of course, we say that - then we end up doing it ourselves. But for now, as sore and stiff as we both are from working pretty solidly all weekend, it's a nice fantasy.

Once the siding is up, the breaker box can be installed, and we'll get to start hooking up all the wiring I've installed. And we're about ready to start installing plumbing in the kitchen and the two bathrooms.

Outside, the purple has gotten mixed reviews. Our neighbors mostly seem tolerant of our somewhat unorthodox choices in colors. But the house does seem to have originally been purple (although we also think that the wood was originally just stained and sealed). This matches a recollection of one of the Cheney grandchildren, who visited the Cheney's house and told researchers he remembered when it was purple. So maybe May and Warren liked purple houses as much as we do.

A Question of Trim

At the Cheney Cottage, I've been painting on the outside, and stripping paint inside. Surprisingly, it's all very satisfying.

The parlor has beautiful woodwork, all of which was painted at some point in the past. We've been slowly stripping it, and most of the paint is coming off relatively easily - but it's still a big job, and going to take a long time. So I try, every time we're there, to spend at least part of the time stripping paint. I'm using the heat gun that we bought to strip paint on Wool Street in San Francisco, back in 1983.

The reason the paint is easy to remove ("easy" being a relative term - it's still hard work) is because the wood was originally shellacked. The original finish kept the paint from adhering permanently to the wood, and, once heated, the paint tends to peel away. But in places where the wood was never painted, the paint grabs and is almost impossible to remove. This is also true in places where the wood was damaged, and then painted.

Every time I strip a door frame, I come across the same thing: When I strip the top piece of trim (the lintel), there are two vertical marks directly above the side pieces. Clearly, there were two pieces of trim that at some point in the past were removed. Now that we're removing the paint, the unfinished wood refuses to give up the paint, so I can clearly see the marks left where the trim was.

See below for some pictures of what I'm talking about. We've never seen trim with this pattern before, so I'm hoping someone on the blog has a house with similar trim, and can send me a photo of what it looks like.

The door to the dining room, in process of being stripped.

Detail of door trim - note the two vertical marks above the capital

As for today: despite the fact that I'm up so early, we plan to get a lot of work done over the next two days. The exterior siding was delivered yesterday, so we plan to replace the worn out siding on the west side of the house, and then continue working on putting up the half timber trim that we removed to cut the house. Most of that trim has been replaced on the east and north sides, but we still have several pieces to put back on the south side (the back of the house) and the west side.

Paint Colors

The final colors for the Cheney Cottage are more subdued than the primer colors. At least, a little bit more subdued.

What more can I say?

Don't Freak Out

To everyone who has gone past the Cheney Cottage in the last 24 hours: trust me, it's just the primer.

The Cheney Cottage is going to be painted in bright colors: deep purple, dark green and cream. We made these choices because a) the house was originally purple and green, judging from what we found when scraping the paint, and b) the house has been grey for so long, we felt it deserves to be bright, colorful, even somewhat outrageous. We think the colors are going to work well.

So our painters have put primer on the house. Bear in mind, the primer is tinted, to make coverage with the top coats easier, but it is NOT the same color as the top coat. So the electric purple base color and the psychedelic green trim are not the colors the house will be.

Trust me on this. It's going to look much better. Be patient.

NOT the final color choice

Plodding Along

The stair railings, ready for more stripping and refinishing

The last two weekends have been good, and we've gotten a lot of work done. There is also work happening on the outside of the Cheney Cottage.

We've been working on the wiring, and have completed two of the upstairs bedrooms, the hallway light (a 30way switch), and much of the kitchen and living room lighting. We still have to run romex for the bathrooms and the dining room.

The front door, with trim being stripped and a new electrical box

We've been adding more trim on the outside of the house. The east side is mostly done, as is the north side (the front). We also fixed the trim on the west window that had no trim, and added the window in the kitchen (where the door was).

The bathroom with the wainscot and window trim replaced

We've been replacing trim inside as well. Much of the trim in the upstairs bedrooms is now back in place, and if the trim hasn't been installed, we have at least figured out what goes where and put the pieces of trim in the correct rooms.

The front bedroom door, with trim replaced and a new electrical box for the light switch

Outside, the work continues. Dale and Miles of Walker Morris Painting are starting the prep work to paint the house, so the front of the house is covered by a screen to catch the lead paint as it is scraped. The University did a lot of the lead abatement when the house was still on campus, but Dale and Miles are working to get everything ready for paint. This week, they'll put up a gallon of each of the new colors, so we can really see what the house will look like. After all these years of being grey, it's going to be pretty vibrant with the new colors.

The window on the stairs, with the trim replaced

And Eric and his crew will be back at the end of the week to pour the foundations for the front and back porches. After that, we can start rebuilding the porches on the house.

We've even begun planning the landscaping. We have plans for a front retaining wall, with some good dirt brought in for plantings and a new walkway up to the front porch steps. Since we took one of the rose bushes from 62nd Street and put it on Parker Street (where it is flourishing), we want to repay the gift by taking one of the seedling Japanese Maple trees, from our 60 year old tree, and plant that in the front yard of the Cheney Cottage. Our neighbor Mark has several growing in pots in his yard, where the seeds floated down into pots he was using for orchids.

It's going to be a busy summer, but we're feeling like we're on track. Keep watching.

Trim and Wire

It was yet another wet, chilly weekend working on the Cheney Cottage. Which is a pretty strange way to describe a June weekend in California. Once again, the lot on 62nd Street is muddy and flooded. It's a lovely place to spend the weekend.

We seem to have gotten the tarps repositioned so the roof is again not leaking, except in one or two spots. Tom went out and bought some metal pails, which are strategically positioned to catch drips, so we're doing well with preventing further damage, beyond the wet plaster where the drips are coming through.

But it's brought up the need to replace the roof, which is something we've known about but have been trying to ignore. We can't ignore it any longer, and so, even though we can't afford to have someone do the roof, Tom and I will start tearing off the old roof, and re-roofing the Cheney Cottage, probably in the next week.

In an earlier post, I talked about how we have gotten too old to do some of the work, and roofing was definitely high on the list of what we're too old to do. The roof of the Cheney Cottage, with jerkinhead gables (otherwise known as "clipped gables") on all four sides, and steep pitch, is difficult to work on. But as we have always said "Poverty is the Mother of Invention", so our lack of working capital has made us younger - or raised the age of roofers in the Bay Area.

Anyway, we'll try to do it without falling off and breaking our necks. Stay tuned for that.

In other news, the wiring is moving along, and we probably have about half of the interior wiring completed. It's a big job, and at time complex. I had to sit and again figure out how a three way light switch works, so I could wire them in correctly, but I got it done, and a lot of the outlets are now roughed in as well.

When the Cheney Cottage belonged to the University, they upgraded the wire by running conduit along the surfaces, and through the walls, and mounted electrical boxes for switches and outlets on the surface. But for the house to really be a residence again, we need to put the outlets and switches in boxes that are recessed into the wall. In many places, it's easy to do, because the plaster is missing, but we still have enough walls where we have to cut through the plaster to put new electrical boxes.

Cutting through plaster and lathe is dirty and dusty, and often cracks the surrounding plaster. But as we already have tons of plaster to patch, what's a few more holes? So now the front bedroom has a wall switch that is connected to the overhead light, and all the wiring is hidden inside the walls (or will be when the walls are patched). Doing the wiring also includes fishing the wire through the walls, so this weekend Tom spent a lot of time in the attic, drilling holes through top places and fishing the wire down for me to grab. It sounds easy, but again: dusty, dirty, and often frustrating.

The other big job that is progressing is we're continuing to work on the exterior of the house, and we have a lot of the trim up on the front and on the east side. It all looks somewhat bizarre, with the old wood trim covering the new wood siding, but once the house is painted, we hope it'll look like it did in 1902.

The Cheney Cottage, with much of the second floor trim re-attached.

So progress is being made. Next up: more wiring; starting to install the plumbing; the foundations for the front and back porches; and the new roof.