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Coming soon to a porch near … me:
After we get the beadboard ceiling back up, anyway. Seems it’s going to be a two-person job. Mr. Carpenter Cohort started working on it alone yesterday and says with the warping of the old boards, there’s no way to make it a tidy job without an extra hand. And my extra hand isn’t free for several days.
We spent most of the day on scaffolding, taking advantage of a rare day without rain to try to finish the porch-eave project. We did really well, managing to move the rig, scrape, scrape, scrape, patch, sand, clean and get the primer coat on before, uh … well not before dark. Before we collapsed! And I set myself on fire only twice—you don’t want to know how I stopped the glowing paint globs from burning through my pants. Since kids started coming around in costume a couple hours before sunset, we set a monster-head-full of peanut butter pumpkins and cups on the steps and encouraged the costumed to take one (a naive directive to children faced with a bowl of plenty) since we were busy up high. Unfortunately, we had to miss a Halloween party to get all this done, but since we shirked work so much in September we were on the spot to make up for it. Tomorrow we need to get two coats of paint on and get 3 pieces of crown molding on, caulk a bit and pull down that scaffolding since it is partially on our neighbors’ driveway. We have fabulous neighbors. I knew they might be freaked out when we set up infringing on their space (though cars can still get by and park there) since they’d just seen the rig out front for about three weeks. So I put up a sign saying we’d have it down Monday night. We’re really shooting for Sunday night. Cross appendages, and Happy Halloween, everybody!
The front porch ceiling was once a vivid blue, as well as a more muted green. This is what I learned from spending the day stripping the original beadboard with the infrared paint remover.
Sky blue on porch ceilings is traditional, but this is a richer hue. And the green—well, someone who owned this house adored green; it pops up everywhere. The worst thing about stripping this stuff is all the staples from the installation of the aluminum that covered it for decades. I’m just really glad we decided to take this down. Stripping the roof base, which for obvious reasons needs to stay in place, is plenty of performance art for the neighbors. It’s a relief to be able to retreat to the backyard with a pair of sawhorses and a stack of beadboard and scrape away the day.
I’ve advocated using ipe—a hardwood—for exterior wood projects. Here’s a progression that shows how the color properties change when it’s left unsealed.
The first shot shows our deck just after it was finished in 2004. The steps and main deck are ipe. The skirting and pergola are cedar. The handyman hero is bushed.
Close-up of fresh ipe, with critter lounging.
A couple of years later with basking tabby.
And last year—4 years after installation. Note that the cedar and the ipe grey out similarly.
Those of you who have been following along know that certain parts of our front porch were scrapped or chopped down. Well, after trying and failing to find a local woodworking shop that would make reproductions for us, we tried a Michigan outfit, J.J Wohlfert’s. They were, somewhat sadly, faster and easier to work with than the locals. And they made us our 2 missing blocks for only $30 each and in only a few weeks. Here are front and side shots of our savaged old trim and the new reproductions.
I’m pretty pleased. The bottom portions are not as long as the originals, and I’m a little concerned about that. But we sent drawings of the original dimensions, and I didn’t double-check them, so there could be many reasons why the repros are not completely exact. And frankly, evolution is a respectable part of old-house renovation. If these end up looking appropriate in their new home, then everything is good even if they are not perfect to millimeters.
After dithering back and forth over all the various doorbell options, I finally went with the one on the left from VanDyke’s, with copper highlights I added, and the one on the right that is a repro of the inappropriate one I mentioned earlier.
Sorry about the glare in this shot:
Notice the amazing number of tiny nailholes this area has accumulated over the years. I don’t know what previous owners were putting up here, but it surely was well-fastened.
Once I finally scraped all the paint off the oak porch trim, it was time to figure out what to put on it to protect it from Chicago’s squalls. Since it was nearly century-old wood that had been subjected to various treatments and mistreatments over the years, it took some study to pick the final coating. I pondered oils, varnishes and even repainting (shudder) before settling on a marine coating. I’d heard several people say they’d had good results with Sikkens products. But finding the right one took some test swabs, which I thought I’d show here for reference. The expert at our local Epco paint store suggested Cetol Door & Window, but it’s tinted. The test on new oak showed it would be too dark for our weathered wood. In both shots below, the light oak formula is on the left and the dark oak on the right. In the first shot you see one coat of each; but the basic application is three coats, as seen in the second shot—much too dark for my tastes.
Next we considered what’s available at a boat supply house in the burbs: Armada, a clear marine coating; or Cetol Marine Light, the alternative to regular Cetol, which is reputed to have a distinct orange hue. After discussing the project with the salesman at the boat place, we decided to go with the Cetol Marine Light, and we’re quite pleased with it. It was easy to apply, and the hue it added actually helps even out the variations in the wood that are due to it being overexposed to the elements in some spots. Pics of the final product will be up soon. For now I can offer this shot that shows the stripped casings, with one coat of Cetol Marine Light in some spots; the effect after three coats wasn’t much different from this.
As I inch toward finishing the front-door surround, new opportunities arise for tricking out the area. I’m talking doorbells. Later there’ll be the matter of the downstairs chime box. But for now I drool over accoutrements that are older than the house, so innapropriate, but damn:
I think I’m going to end up with at least one button (house demands two!) that has a directive like “push” or a label saying “visitors” because as seen in my upstairs bathroom, I have a bit an affinity for labeling. I hope all this helps me out later in life when my lead-dust-addled brain finds me staring at something wondering what I’m supposed to do with it.
I’m not usually fond of junk mail. Why was I so excited, then, to see these raggedy edges sticking out of the trim on one side of the front door after I’d removed the casings?
I think it’s because they’re messages from the past, ghosts still trying to communicate—about key items like union suits for 59 cents and “genuine Trojian pants—surely a strong pants.” Trojan pants—OK, so were they wooden and chock-full of men? Or are we talking about these? Also, I’m in love with that hand-drawn arrow down there.
More truly, I think it’s because these snippets of ads offer me an awareness similar to what I soak up living every day in an old structure and spending so much of my energy and resources trying to keep it alive: That this day, this moment, this concern is fleeting and soon laid to rest. This house will outlive me, and today’s junk mail might too, so live this moment as best you can.
Also, the graphics and period lingo are cool.
Pies! And a face from a brick that was in the crevice with these papers.
As summer sinks below the horizon and the cold times begin their sneaky but inescapable creep, I’ve really got to figure out what to do about the front door surround. Figuring out how to replace the missing door itself is simply too much, so I’m putting that off for some distant future. But I’ve been moving ever so slowly through trying to restore what the front door region once looked like. This is what’s been facing the street for many years now:
Obviously, that’s a replacement door, and the right side is a cover-up.
Looking at the inside, I had a naive hope that the cover-up hid a narrow door that could be opened sometimes and latched other times. Though really, that’s not what the inside suggests. I guess I hoped that middle piece of wood was added later. But the alligatoring of the shellac is consistent with the rest of the wood trim.
When we started removing the aluminum cover-up outside, here’s what we found, which indicates it was not two doors but a door and a stationary light—and also something chopped off above:
After removing all the aluminum, we have this:
So some detail was chopped off at the top and the bottom of the wood divider.
Having worked on an old house with old paint and old problems for 8 years now, I understand the urge to cover it up and have everything seem nice. But why oh why couldn’t they have simply covered up? Wasn’t it more difficult to chop off than to cover up? I mean, was it ornate and huge in profile? I really doubt it, considering the rest of the house. Now I need to figure out what’s appropriate for the area and determine how I can add it. Any ideas? I need to dig through my 1910 Sears catalog.
So I’ve stripped off all the old paint and found oak underneath:
It took a few weeks to strip all the paint. It was kind of easy because the bottom coat seems to have been shellac. But also kind of hard because the finish was very weathered and had been painted over with brown paint and several coats of other colors, some of them very resistant to removal. Now I am working on how to showcase and preserve the oak for Chicago weather.
And I still have to pry off all the old caulk. But wow it’s going to look so much better when I’m done—in 7 years or so …
