wideeyedfunk

Category: Home Improvement

If only owning a century home didn’t provide so many interesting surprises.

  • Hello Toilet, Thanks for Being There.

    I’m thinking about toilets this afternoon. Yes, I am feeling just fine, thank you – don’t be crude. I mean I am thinking about toilets, not thinking about using one. I think toilets might be unsung heroes and the porcelain joy of our lives.

    Toilets are there for us. They are always in the same place in the dark night. Toilets are a cool and strong comfort during vile, feverish retching. With their lids down they are nice perch for filing nails, watching kids splash in the tub, resting towels on during dog baths. With one simple push of a lever or a button, everything that is distasteful just disappears. Even when not in use, toilets are witness to privacies of every individual in a household – including guests.

    Toilets greet us, all clean and ours, when we come home. Have you never been happy to be back at your own toilet after some kind of sickening ex-household experience? I mourn the absence of my own toilet when living in the outer wilds. I pine for my own toilet while sharing one with a dozen other people in a field research apartment. Faced with unspeakable highway toilet horrors, I have speculated that when we do develop a molecular transporter, we’ll all use it to get home to our own toilets.

    Three days ago the WideEyedSpouse and I were cruising the country byways on the way to archery class. There, on the side of the road, an abandoned toilet. “Free,” it said.

    Toilet

    We stopped to laugh and take a picture. A few hours later the Spouse noticed the fine print on the Free sign: “to a family who will love me.”

    ToiletClose

    I just felt bad. Poor old toilet. It probably served well for years, keeping secrets, holding steady, only to be tossed on the side of the road for the sake of a fashionable bathroom. Years of use left. Poor old toilet.

    But I mean, ew.

     

  • Too many socks.

    It was a problem. Gym socks. Knee socks. Hiking socks. Fuzzy winter socks. Socks more normally called stockings. Blue, pink, white, black, nude, brown, and striped socks. Hand knit. Silk. Cotton. Socks.

    Simply. Too. Many. Socks. The bureau drawer was a stew of tangled toes.

    Then, one cold spring day in the not too distant past, a miracle. A solution. We trolled through the estate sale remnants of a family’s life in Tonawanda, New York. The memories of nearly a century were laid on tables, stacked on shelves, piled in heaps for eager crowds to paw through. For a WideEyed person it is an overwhelming experience to witness a lifetime of personal items. Sad. Interesting. Somehow the stuff was too infused by another’s life for me to form a connection.

    The WideEyedSpouse and I fought the crowds and made it from the attics and into the basement. And there it was: abandoned among basement junk, shoved against a brick wall, hung around with faux fur vests for sale. It squatted on its turned legs with the remnants of an old, tired dignity. The chifferobe. Sock-home.

    We wrestled the Starr Furniture Company c. 1920 mahogany veneer and cedar chifferobe through a basement door no wider, no taller than the chifferobe itself. Daylight did it no favors. It was dull and awful. Decades of mildew, basement filth, and the recent scars from faux vest hangers befouled it. It stank of basement. From its open doors wafted stale perfume from another generation. It fit in the mighty Pathfinder as though it had been constructed specifically so that I could get it home.

    We bathed it in a 10% vinegar solution. We rubbed crusted gunk and wax away with Life O’Wood. Old English healed the hanger scars. Minwax Paste Finishing Wax fed the wood and made it glow, just a little.

    Chifferobe. Sock-home. Welcome to the WideEyedHousehold.

    Chifferobe

  • One year and three months in the bathroom.

    The WideEyedHousehold spent the last fifteen months without a bathroom door, shower, sink, or toilet more or less sequentially. This embarrassingly long duration of inconvenience was, of course, the fault of unadulterated laziness and winter ennui. In recent days we bootstrapped ourselves into finishing the job.

    More than one year ago, the WideEyedSpouse got to picking at the paint peeling off the 104 year subway tiles (see: 6 Days in the Bathroom). He peeled up the cheap sticky tiles and cleaned pink mold from the antique hexagon tiles on the floor. He stripped spray paint from the tiles around the radiator. I stripped nine to fifteen coats of paint from the woodwork, primed, and repainted. I scraped and sanded the ceilings and walls, primed and repainted. We replaced the tub faucet and shower surround. I bought a new beveled mirror for the old medicine cabinet. I broke it. I bought another one and some glass for the shelves inside because I thought that would look nice. It does.

    WholeThingWe found a 100 year old Empire reproduction bureau to stand in as the vanity. It had a 1930s St Louis bus token in it. And an envelope taped to the bottom of a drawer. We shook with excitement. It was empty. After months of looking at all, at ALL of the sinks online we bought the sink and faucet.

    An exhaust fan went in, which necessitated some filthy attic labor. Blown in insulation has flaws.

    We tore out the cheap vanity and whacked it with a sledge in the back yard. It exploded. We sorted through 500,000 used bathroom tiles at the Reuse store to find the 23 that were antique subway tiles. I think the Spouse caught the plague there. We tore out the (cracked) toilet. The old one had been held in place by insulfoam. If you know something about toilets, you’ll understand that the WideEyedDiningroom below was one scary flush away from…something unpalatable.

    We scrubbed the tile walls with vinegar. We remasticked loose tiles, placed new (old, resued) tiles where some had disappeared over the years. Grouted. Miserable. I scrubbed the floor with an Oxyclean solution. It took days. I don’t like to think about what came up and I hope my gloves were thick enough. We remasticked loose tiles, placed new (old, resued) tiles where some had disappeared over the years. Grouted. Miserable.

    CurtainThe new toilet went in and it has a dual flush button: low water and more water. What luxury to not have to creep down the night dark steps to the halfbath.  The new vanity, all waterproofed with coats of Waterlox, went in. Yes, I turned the fan on in a dog hairy and dusty room while the new varnish was drying. Let’s not talk about that. The Spouse remodeled the drawers to fit around the plumbing. I bought a tissue box caddy on etsy. I made curtains.

    It sounds so simple, just listed out like that. It wasn’t. It stunk. Mostly it stunk. Shopping online wasn’t terrible. But the rest of it was filthy, even unsanitary, grueling, meticulous labor. Although it sure is clean now.

    The moral of the story: don’t start peeling paint (or wallpaper for that matter) no matter how tempting the little loose bits look.

  • I know I would paint better if I had a pair of Dickies painters pants.

    Wine: Does Not Impair My Ability to Paint Awesomely.

    I own a nice brush. I bought quality paint. I sanded and primed properly. I’ve painted ceilings, walls, trim, floors in 5 different states, 6 different domiciles. Satin, flat, matte, semi-gloss, stain, paint stain, epoxy, and varnish. Interior, exterior, basement, attic, kitchen.You name it. I’ve painted it. And while I’m no pro, I can lay some paint.

    But you know what? I was standing in Sherwin Williams the other day waiting for my paint to shake and I saw that their Dickies painters pants were on sale. It was a really good sale, only $18. That’s a great price for any kind of pants, an exceptional price for magic skill infused painters pants. I didn’t buy them.

    Here we are, a little more than 24 hours later and I am commencing with painting the bathroom. I am all geared up in my ladies Carhartts and I am feeling ill-prepared. Queasy that I could do better.

    Don’t mistake the situation. The ladies Carhartts are good, solid pants. They lived in 3 states with me. They traveled to 3 continents with me. They knelt with me inside them in the mud of a 4,000 year old whale hunting household in Chukotka. They crouched with me in 27,000 year old cave deposits in Portugal – where they also worked with me on a 100,000 year old Neanderthal beach camp. These pants and I have spent weeks on survey in the Western Aleutian Islands.

    Now, here in Buffalo, they are paint pants. But the trouble is, the thing that keeps bugging at my mind, they are FIELD pants really. Not paint pants at all.

    I just have this terrible feeling that I do injustice to the pants by painting in them, and injustice to the bathroom paint jobs by not having the proper pants on for the job.

    The magic pants!

    UPDATE, REMARKABLE UPDATE: From 1,500 miles away, WideEyedCousin D had my local Sherwin Williams store put aside a set of painters pants just for me. WideEyedCousinD, I thank you, the paint thanks you, and the house is ever-so-grateful. The Carhartts just want to hug you.

  • Has the stripper arrived yet?

    Pop quiz: Why did the Spouse survive asking me, “Has the stripper arrived yet”?

    A: He didn’t.

    B:  He did, but he is very busy picking rock salt from his backside at his new house.

    C: He meant, of course, “has UPS delivered the gallon of Multi-Strip non-toxic paint and varnish remover?”

  • Ceiling Fan of Damocles

    The Ceiling Fan of Damocles

    For a solid year the ceiling fan dangled unbalanced and clearly crooked above the Spouse and me as we slept. We knew full well that failure was imminent with this fan – one among many coming problems in the house. We knew that buying a historic structure was going to be…tense. That we’d have moments of joyful accomplishment while living under the threat of crushing large scale repairs and near disasters. Since we moved into the place last year, the ceiling fan has been the physical embodiment of stuff we didn’t want to think about.

    This spring the fan waggled in an increasingly catastrophic rhythm. After 13 months of lying under a 52 inch, 30 pound whirling death trap – except for a few short weeks when we graciously permitted guests the use of the room and shared with them potential dismemberment, contusions, or electrocution – the Spouse gave destiny a shake up last weekend and had a look at the situation under the fan’s cowling.

    Hanging by a single near prehistoric screw thread.

    Two antique wood screws wedged the fan bracket into a splintered fragment of lathe. One fell out when the Spouse poked it with a screwdriver. The fan swung back and forth in ponderous arcs, suspended by one last turn of the second ancient screw. Oh, hey. It really was dangerous. Huh.

    The spouse sawed through attic floor boards for a while. He pawed old insulation, a lot of old insulation, out of the way. He found the old gas pipe. Defunct. Which is good. He found the splintered hunk of wood that had sort of been holding up the fan. Which wasn’t good. A proper bracket went in. The fan was wired properly. Mounted properly. Nine hours of effort and the fan is balanced and a lot safer than it was before. Our shoulders eased with this threat abated and the Spouse and I took turns flicking the fan on to watch it operate in a completely normal manner.

    “No problem,” he said, “We’ll just get at it from the attic.”

    But then I started to wonder, to where does the exhaust fan in the downstairs bathroom vent? And why is there no visible soil stack for that room? Now it’s the Bathroom of Damocles. But at least that probably won’t kill me in my sleep. Or at least not as dramatically.

    Hamish the Job Dog.

  • You say that like beer would somehow impair my ability to be awesome.

    Actually, I didn’t say it like that at all. It was a simple query about the wisdom of the action being taken.

    Probably it’s completely safe.

    We were having a rainy and cold Saturday evening. The husband was fussing with the 1920s ceiling light we found at Buffalo Reuse last weekend. It was tucked up in a back room of that cavernous, dark, and very, very grungy retail outlet for parts yanked out of “green” demolition projects. Stacks of tiles torn from bathroom walls (the husband is still fighting an infected cut from one of those), old toilets (I mean used toilets, really really used toilets), doors, windows, tin ceiling chunks, and other house bits are piled next to only slightly worn tanks of corrosive fluid.

    Anyway, the husband had just discovered that with careful use of Bon Ami he could remove the filth crust of nearly 100 years to make the molded milky glass of the light gleam like new. All that remained was to replace the dangerously inept 1970s era rewiring with new, legal, and safe wiring and we (meaning “he”) could hang it in the upstairs foyer. The wiring he took out of that poor light fixture was thick and patinated, melted copper wire forcibly shoved through the historic porcelain sockets. I can’t believe the whole thing hadn’t caught the house it lived in on fire – although maybe it had. It was at Buffalo Reuse because its old house had been torn down as too useless for even the crack and meth demons.

    So on this cold Saturday evening the husband wandered from the dining room, where the lamp was laid out in bits, into the kitchen, where the beer is kept. I heard the fridge door open and shut. A few steps and the bottle opener drawer squealed open. Fzzt. The bottle cap clanked onto the counter. He wandered back into the dining room and drank some beer while looking down at the lamp bits. Deciding something, he plonked his beer down in the mess of lamp parts. He picked up one of the bulb sockets and inspected it. With his other hand he gave himself some beer. Plonked the bottle back down. This went on for a little while. I wasn’t exactly watching events, but it wasn’t a real exciting night around the homestead so I was, well let’s say I was aware. There may have been more than the one beer. It is at least possible that there were a few beers. That can happen on a Saturday.

    1920s ceiling light, during beery rewiring.

    The husband settled himself at the table and picked up the coil of new wiring. He sort of held it up to one of the sockets. Measuring like. I thought about that for a moment. I flashed it through in my head, seeing him wiring the lamp, putting it back together, hanging it upstairs, admiring it, and then I imagined the cascade of sparks showering from it because maybe, just perhaps, something went a little wrong, a little beery in the rewiring. The husband is sort of like a savant with this kind of stuff, but I kept thinking about the beer.

     I couldn’t help myself. I asked, “Do you think it’s smart to do that when you’re drinking beer?”

     You know what he said.

     And now you can wonder about that lamp, the house, his ability to be awesome. And you might be examining the image for the kind of beer. Because obviously, some beers lend themselves to rewiring antique ceiling fixtures and awesomeness better than others.

  • 6 Days in the Bathroom with Dental Probes and a Razor Blade

    I promise you, it is safe to read on. This isn’t about mental health. It isn’t about a hostage situation. It has nothing, whatsoever, to do with home veterinary surgery. It is about antique tiles and latex paint, achieving their disunion, and bothering with old things.

    Once upon a time, Buffalo was the center of the universe and Olmsted’s parks were filled with flowering vines, nannies and prams, horses and bicycles. In this 1912 world of hope and money, Mr. and Mrs. Butler built my house. Its rooms were airy, the windows numerous. The bathroom gleamed with state of the art, antiseptic white subway tiles and tiny hexagonal floor tiles. Let’s imagine it was a joy to clean – for the woman who lived in the attic room, whose own toilet was in the basement.

    Mr. Butler died fairly young in 1920. He spent only 10 years shaving in front of the shiny, new bathroom mirror. Catherine, his widow, sold the house within two years. As I picked latex paint from grout lines among the tiles next to the toilet with my sickle dental probe, I thought about her getting up the morning after her husband’s death, and facing the future in that same mirror. The Kaeselaus bought the house and stayed, one generation after another, for 40 years.

    I imagined Mr. Kaesalau rinsing the cold sweat of disaster from his face on October 24, 1929 as I razored the paint from tiles near where the old sink was. As I stretched behind the radiator I wondered if Mrs. Kaesalau and her daughter dried their flimsy World War II stockings on it – Mr. Kaeselau was gone by then, and their sons may have been at war. What happened that Gladys, the daughter, inherited the house in 1955 instead of one of the sons? Why did she sell it to Mrs. Moni in 1962?

    I do know that Mrs. Moni redecorated the house during her 30 years, using wood and melamine paneling. But she left the bathroom tiles alone – although maybe she is the origin of the vibrant turquoise paint I picked and scraped from the top rail tile…maybe she is responsible for the deep smoke patina in the tiles and on the house’s woodwork. I squeezed under the clawfoot tub to get to the paint back there, and envisioned a 1970s, fading glory, over middle aged woman lounging in a pink bubble bath. Chain smoking. With a martini. Didn’t everyone smoke and drink martinis in the 70s?

    Mrs. Moni died, although hopefully not in the tub, and a series of folks moved in and out. Someone fixed the kitchen. Someone took out the paneling. Some couples divorced, others lost the house in foreclosure. I figure a lot this drama was acted out in the bathroom. The tiles I freed from their latex coat along the side wall probably saw their share of weeping and wailing, screaming and hairbrush throwing. But they survived it.

     Approximately 98 years into their life on the wall, the tiles were covered with a slick coat of white latex paint. Age marks, patina, old holes from old toothbrush holders, missing grout gaps, mysterious stains – all were covered in a clean wash of white. It’s awful. It’s sad. And after several days of quiet picking and scraping, the old tiles are again witness to life and history.

    Are they unlovely? Sure, in some places. Do they look old? You bet. Would a sledge hammer have been quicker? Absolutely. Would I do it all over again – spend days picking and razoring paint? Yeah, I would. In fact, removing the glue and goo of new tiles from the hexagons on the floor is next.

    I’ve seen bathroom tiles that are 2000 years old. Ok, maybe the bathroom around them is gone, but they are still there. I’ve used the bathroom next to tiles that are 200 years old. Yes, they were a little sketchy. No, I didn’t mind. Old isn’t bad. Old lets us think about the passage of time. 100 year old bathroom tiles? Entirely worth six days with some probes and razor blades.