The Glove Report

by Brian

Hi, my name is Brian, and I’m a glove addict. When I walk past the glove display at any hardware store, I stop and stare and need to buy some. I don’t collect them on shelves in my closet – I use them for all sorts of tasks until they disintegrate, dry in a funny shape that can never be worn again, or become coated in poison ivy. Here is the current roster.

These guys are ubiquitous. When I first went to the store to get yard-working gloves, I got a three pack of these. They cost practically nothing, and you get a lot of them! I’d even buy extras so visitors who would be helping with yard work would have a nice new pair. Sorry guys. Not for making you work, but for giving you such lousy gloves. These are good for about two serious days of work, and then they self-destruct. I wore the above for about three days of post hole digging, then tried to get one more use out of them, hauling branches and vines to the transfer station. They are barely more than rags for my fingers now.

This is the next step up, available at your favorite home center. These gloves are all leather, without terrible cloth liners and the insubstantial mini-gauntlets on the previous offering. When these guys get wet, you can actually wring them out, dry them out, and get back to work the next day. I did that with this exact pair last week during a thunderstorm, which I thought was just going to be a drizzle but turned into a downpour. I wrung them out multiple times, since I was already soaked and decided to just keep going. If I use a pair of these gloves for a solid month of yard work, they will eventually get holes in the fingertips. They usually don’t make it that long, since they tend to dry in a contorted manner when I just throw them in the shed. Plus, these are my go-to gloves for poison ivy work since they aren’t crazy expensive.

Each time I go to the Stihl dealer, which is not infrequent, I admire their vast selection of gloves. I once had a pair with a fabric sleeve that sealed tightly at the wrist, which kept out wood chips and was great for poison ivy work. They are really meant for handling power equipment, not hauling around lots of wood or digging a million holes. They fit very well and breathe nicely, enabling a consistent and good grip. The leather is a little thin (a consequence of good grip), so I destroyed the aforementioned pair hauling around brush. This newer pair has a velcro piece to fasten at the wrist, and is really comfortable. Any time I use a yard tool, these guys get broken out. They look a little dirty after four months, but function perfectly.

Diana took note of my glove addiction and got me these full-leather deerskin gloves. Though they look a lot like the store-bought ones, they are significantly more robust. The leather isn’t as heavy as the other gloves and is much more supple, but stands up well to abuse. I’ve generally used these for stacking firewood, moving wood piles, and then most recently scraping paint off of baseboards. I think that any of the other gloves would have given me major blisters after that intense operation, but these have less bulky seams and fit much better. To keep them going longer, I believe that I will need to periodically clean and oil them, and I think that time has come after eight months!

I have more gloves (of course) and have not given up on trying new kinds, so expect further reports!

I had two of my chains professionally sharpened and bought two new ones. After a few tanks of gas, one is already as dull as a butter knife. Black locust wood is some seriously hard stuff. I’ve made a pile of 6-foot limbs that will be easier to transport to the wood pile area for chopping into smaller pieces. I am going to cut the straight parts of the trunks into 8-foot lengths that Lars might be able to use for woodworking.

Family room mantel

by Brian

Since the furniture won’t arrive for another week, we have some extra time to put some finishing touches on the family room. The only remaining unscraped surfaces are the windows and fireplace mantel. The windows have screens that we will ultimately remove, so I will wait until after that demo to paint the window trim. For the mantel, there was one spot where very loose paint had come off, exposing an almond-glossy paint beneath. I figured I could scrape a little more loose paint in that area, take off any other high point, and get painting. Right?

Wrong. The loose paint turned out to be systemic. With very little effort, entire strips of white latex paint could be pulled off! Diana and I carefully pulled off all of the white paint from the nooks and crannies of the fireplace woodwork. Here is a shot with only the lower left pillar awaiting scraping.

In most spots, we managed not to damage the almond paint below, so I plan to do some very minimal patching before painting. We will also sand all surfaces so that our new paint has a better chance of sticking! I wonder if the heat from the fire will have any impact on the paint finish.

The built-in bookshelf

by Brian

The family room has a built-in bookshelf, which we have used since we moved in as a sort of catch-all. It held DVDs, puzzles, oversized coffee table books, books that didn’t fit on the upstairs shelves, jars of miscellaneous stuff, and lots of bookends since the ends of the shelves aren’t square. Plus, it was pink like the rest of the room.

It wasn’t in our initial plan, but as we got the walls cleaned up the shelves stuck out fiercely. Additionally, when the plumber removed the ceiling radiator, it crashed down on the 3rd shelf and splintered the heck out of it. Out came the sanding blocks and spackle.

Diana decided that painting the shelves glossy white would bring more attention to them, and matching the shelves to the walls would make them recede into the background more and let the contents of the shelves speak. So we made the shelves Sabre Gray!

Per the decorating inspiration, this blue/gray room will have lots of red-orange accents. So our color-coded bookshelf upstairs no longer has red and orange volumes!

Diana scoured the house for red books as well as other items that might be at home in the family room – her old cameras, some flea-market glass balls, and the antlers I found in the yard last fall. It is a work in the progress, and I have a feeling she will tweak it over time, as we acquire red books or find more interesting bits of nature in the yard (like a skull collection!). Now we just have to remember where to look for red books… Want to read my ancient copy of War and Peace? Go find it in the family room!

Almost in Time

by Brian

The 2012 Olympics has arrived, and the family room is ready!

But not the new ultra-cozy couch and media console we ordered, which will arrive fashionably late midway through the games. In the meantime, we have some very trusty Ikea chairs in place, which are at least 18 years old by now and have seen plenty of Olympics.

Trees Down

by Diana

A fierce storm rolled through the northeast last night, and took some tree casualties in our yard.

Two trees in the lower front yard snapped at about 20 feet up their trunks. Both are huge old black locusts that we’d done vine removal work on earlier this year.  I wonder if the vines weakened the trees?  The lower tree at the corner of the property was quite encrusted high in the canopy, so I’d believe that it was having trouble getting enough light. On the ground, it looks more like a pile of vines than a tree.  The upper locust only had vines on the trunk, so it should have been getting enough light.  Apparently winds were up to 45mph and both trees were in an exposed area where they could have received gusts of wind.

Luckily, both are far from the house and caused no damage.

The lower front yard is going to be even more clear once we get these cleaned up!

Reinstalling Baseboards

by Brian

Last fall, I removed all of the baseboards in the basement, making way for floor tiling. I even had to grind off all of the original nails so we could store the boards. Standing up in a crate in the mechanical room, the baseboards and molding were basically forgotten for ten months, except for the very long pieces that remained in a pile in the center of the family room, half beneath the couch. Once I finally tackled them, removing the old paint proved to be difficult but not terrible.

But what about the reinstallation?

Installing the boards took patience, since the plaster walls didn’t grip the finishing nails very well. This explained why the baseboards had been fairly simple to pry loose, and why I hadn’t destroyed more of them in the process. Perhaps the larger perimeter area of the square nails helped them grip better? There was one piece of original baseboard that had too much water and pest damage to reuse, so I cut a new piece of 1×8 – I think you’d be hard-pressed to identify which one isn’t original… I set all of the finishing nails and covered the heads with joint compound.

The trim molding that sits on top of the baseboards was a bit trickier, and this was the point where I was incredibly thankful that we had salvaged the trim rather than start over. The corners are all cut to fit one another, so I didn’t have to mitre or painstakingly hand-cut new pieces. The molding required more delicate nail-setting, and there were more spots that I had damaged in the removal process. When I puttied the nail heads, I also filled the void between the wall and the top of the baseboard. That gap was pretty consistent (meaning my refinished walls are pretty even!) and filling it makes the project look finished.

After sanding down the joint compound, another coat of semi-gloss was necessary. Painting the boards before installation was a great idea because the touch-up was much easier now, and I didn’t have to worry about painting the stone tiles. Filling the gap between the molding and baseboard was the most important part. I also had to come back around one last time with the wall paint to make a final edge.

One unexpected extra challenge cropped up. When we installed the tile, we also raised the baseboards about 3/4″ higher than they had originally been installed. At the door jambs and corners this wasn’t a big deal, but at the built-in bookshelf we suddenly had a 3/4″ recess!

Amazingly, the discrepancy was precisely 3/4″, and I had enough scrap from the new 1×8 baseboard to infill the recess. I basically created another shelf plane and stacked it on top of the existing one to bring it up level with the trim molding.  Since the shelves are angled back at the sides, it took some crazy measuring and geometry figuring to get the angles right. Plus, I needed to use two pieces of wood  to complete the deep shelf – the 1×8 at the front, and narrower strip at the back.

With a little joint compound and some priming and painting, hopefully it will look like it has always been this way.

A New Kind of Scraping

by Brian

The family room wall painting is complete, so the next obstacle for reaching our Olympics goal is the baseboards. I removed them last fall before we tiled the floor, and they have been gathering dust in the mechanical room ever since.

The baseboards themselves have a lot of surface area. Lars had an idea when he was here visiting, and he made a card scraper. After determining that most of my hand-me-down hand saws were beyond their useful lives he took the tin snips to one and fashioned a piece of metal into a card scraper .

By running the edge of a screwdriver over the edges of the metal, the hardened steel of the screwdriver burnishes it and forms a slightly sharp edge that can scrape pretty well. It does, however, require frequent re-burnishing. Rather than using the heavy and harsher scrapers that I employ on the interior walls, the card scraper pulls the paint off more gently, but with a bit more muscle since the card needs to be bowed slightly to get enough bite.

But card-scraping alone wasn’t sufficient. There were still stubborn parts of the first few coats of paint (somewhere between 5 and 6 altogether!) and unless I patched them the new paint would be uneven. Out came the angle grinder with a new abrasive wheel.

If I was very careful, and I mean very careful, I could grind the oldest paint layers to dust without gouging the wood itself. It was still important to hand-scrape first, since loose paint takes a long time to grind and less time to pry loose. And a good orbital sanding was required to even out the remaining islands of paint.

But after all of that effort, the boards looked fantastic! And yes, it isn’t a quick effort. I figure I have been processing about four feet of baseboard an hour, from ultra rough to smooth and new. And my thumbs hurt.

Here’s a comparison of the boards in progress – from top to bottom, a board straight from the basement, one that has been scraped, and one that met the power tools.

The raw wood took two coats of primer and two coats of semi-gloss paint, and I am sure they will need more once they are up on the walls.

Diana spent some time stripping paint off of the trim molding, but some scraping and sanding was still needed. I even used the angle grinder to take the paint off the tricky-to-get-to inside curve. I thought I was done and we realized I had missed one piece for the family room! I am sure you can guess which one.

Next up, mounting these back to the walls!

The steam pipes

by Diana

How to deal with the pipes in the family room?

They circle the tops of three of the four walls and can’t be removed.  We considered painting them a bold color or leaving them as raw steel. Taken alone, bold red pipes could be totally awesome, and leaving them as raw steel was also tempting (however it would have required even more paint stripping, as Brian stripped only the flaky steam pipe, not the smooth return pipe).  Steam pipes in living spaces are not particularly cozy;  in the context of this room, what I want is for the pipes to disappear. Short of removing them, I decided the best way to accomplish this is to paint them the same color as the walls.

The first step was priming with an oil-based primer.  On a ladder, I slowly made my way around the room, applying a thin coat of the primer to the raw pipes. (Later, we found out that the priming step was unnecessary and I could have skipped right to the real paint.)

Then, using an oil-based paint tinted to match the walls, I applied two more rounds of paint.

That green tape is frog tape, which I used to protect the beams from stray paint.  All in all, it took about 5 evenings for priming and the first coat of paint, plus one Saturday morning for the second coat.  And despite the added glossiness of the oil-based paint, the pipes are blending in pretty well, right?