The Dead of Night

Posted on October 19, 2013 by Jef

Just as there are things that cannot be sufficiently described in words, there are sights that cannot be captured by a camera. Many of the hours between sunfall and sunrise, when the light is most distant from us, are like that.

We were beset by an eldritch fog the other night, a fog that may have lurked imperceptibly at the edges of our senses were it not for the dazzling brightness of a full moon just over the mountain. Absent illumination, we may have felt that the air was just a little thicker than normal, that the sounds of the night were just a little closer, but just another dark night save for a creepiness we could not quite place. The night’s strange echoes and odd ticks may have been attributed to our own over-active imaginations.

But the moon’s light shew us the true source of our unease, a fog so thick you could grasp it in your fist. The moon hung pale and cold like a distant sun over an alien planet. This was the stuff of werewolves and zombie apocalypses. The very air glowed with a phosphorescence that is hard to describe, let alone photograph.

If you look at that picture and don’t immediately think our house is about to be devoured by Cthulhu, I just don’t know what to say to you.

Not only does the camera fail to capture the depth, but nothing can convey the eerie sound. The fog makes noises feel closer, like you’re in a cave. The effect is just surreal. Like you’ve wandered into another world, and you better not wander past the orange glow of the windows of your house, lest you become so lost you can never be found again.

If only every Halloween could be like this

What’s been happening lately?

Posted on September 12, 2013 by Jef

Lots going on but not a lot of finished projects yet. Some hints below:

That spider is big enough to pull a cart. I’m going to have to start charging him rent.

Measure fifteen times, cut once

Posted on August 24, 2013 by Jef

I’m making a jigsaw puzzle out of tongue and groove boards. But first I have to cut the boards and make the tongues and grooves. Some pieces have both tongue and groove on both sides, others have just tongues, others have just grooves. If I mis-cut one piece, I won’t have enough left over to complete the project correctly.

The Snowball Effect

Posted on August 17, 2013 by Jef

The bathroom needs to be fully gutted down to the studs and completely redone. Everything. But we can do small things in the meantime to make it a little nicer.Let’s replace the cabinet knobs. And the drawer pulls. That’s cheap, right? Takes ten minutes. Just order some nice ones online and install them. It’ll make a big difference.

Okay, the new knobs and drawer pulls make the hinges look ridiculous. Let’s get some new hinges. Find some nice ones on the internet and swap them out.

Okay, if I put new hinges on then I’m going to have to putty the holes left by the old hinges. You know, may as well paint it. That’s cheap, right? Doesn’t take very long. And that way the holes are completely sealed up.

Oh, if we’re going to paint may as well put some trim pieces along the floor too. And paint those. And that’s going to make the walls look awful, going to need to paint them. And if we paint the walls, may as well get new towel rods. They’re not cheap, not in the least, but this is our forever house. Going to want nice towel rods.

Nice, what a difference. But you know, now that countertop and sink look so awful up there. That stupid two-tone swirled plastic, with fungus growing in the cracks. I can’t live with that a minute longer than I have to. There’s got to be something out there we can replace that with. That’s cheap, right? Doesn’t take long, just a weekend.

So now we need a new sink and new towel rods and I may as well get started replacing the vanity with some new cabinetry. And new trim around the windows. Could use a new fan, too, that thing is awful. Oh, and the shower doors are disgusting. And don’t get me started on the toilet (we did get a new toilet seat lid).

This story doesn’t have an end.

Every light fixture that came with this house sucks.

Posted on August 3, 2013 by Jef

Where did they find this crap? This is shortly before we painted, and shortly after I sliced my finger on the glass bowl that shattered instead of coming out.

The odd thing about this light fixture was it had a switch but it still plugged into the wall. However, when we got the house there was no outdoor light fixture. So it was just sitting there, the only illumination on the back deck, with nothing to plug into. I did put an outdoor outlet to plug it into but it still offended me that I had to plug the light in.

We are very close to having replaced all of the light fixtures in the house. Just two more to go.

Blue tape. Scaffold. Rollers and brushes.

Posted on July 27, 2013 by Jef

Yeah, when you see all that blue tape and plastic sheeting, it can only mean one thing. Over the course of three weekends we painted the house. That colorless layer of latex, peeling and flaking off in places, permanently dirt covered in others, was just getting on our nerves. Pretty sure that was the only layer of paint the house had ever seen before we came along.

Graffiti would have been an improvement, if we had any gangs or crews of taggers on our island. Which we don’t.

We used an airless paint sprayer, which means we spent about 9 hours taping everything off and then 20 minutes painting, per section. A sprayer is really good at painting odd shaped objects, such as bat and board siding, but it does go through a lot of paint in a very short amount of time.

This is a small house, but for some reason it’s still a bitch to paint. Go figure. And yes, I painted the rusty flagpole too. How do you paint a flagpole? Get some rustoleum and put it on a 4″ paint roller and put the roller on a telescoping pole. The roller can reach about 10′ off the ground, or 20′ if you stand on top of a ladder. My advice is to paint the top part of the flagpole first, so you can hold onto an unpainted section of the flagpole for balance. Otherwise you just get wet paint all over your hand.

There’s the scaffold setup for the other side of the house. Note that part of the scaffold had to rest on the deck. The other part? Well, I had to make those footers out of 2×6’s. Fortunately I have about 900 board feet of 2×6’s leftover from the garage construction. It was wobbly as hell but the wobbliness came from the two legs seated on the deck. The footers I made were sturdy enough to support a Mack truck.

Scaffolding is fun. Remember the jungle gyms we used to have on playgrounds? (younger readers may not have these; they were probably replaced with something much safer) Well, those things were training for your future on a scaffold painting your house someday. When you’re trying to keep your balance on them, you use muscles you didn’t even know you had. I’m not exactly afraid of heights but I’m not too fond of them either.

The trim around the windows we left white. We weren’t terribly happy with it at the time but it’s grown on us. The five logs adorning the front of our house were painted that same disgusting beige as the rest of the house so I painted them with varying shades of brown to make them look more like real logs. At first they looked cartoonish, but after some dry brushing they acquired a bit of texture and now they either look really cheesy or they look like real logs. Or both. No one’s really had the honesty to tell us yet.

This is the ugly side of the house. The side with the electrical connections and disfigured deck and crap. The side people first see when they approach the house. Anyway, it looks much better. And I have plans for it. Slowly, over time, it will improve to the point that people might actually look at it and say “ooh, nice house.” We’re about a million miles away from that point (not to mention dollars) but someday it will come.

We got some new light fixtures for the side and the rear, and they look much better than the Ace Hardware clearance flood lights that used to be there. Previously on the side, there were two flood lights set on a motion sensor. Not a bad idea in theory, if you didn’t mind being blinded every time you walked up to the side door. Pretty sure they caused brain damage in the short time I tolerated them. They are now trash. We don’t miss them.

The front deck has now become a nice place to relax. To sit and just stare at the sea. Do I ever sit in those chairs? Ha ha ha! I own a house on Orcas Island. I have things to do. Sit in a chair, ha, that’s a good one.

Painting the house was a real milestone. Now that it’s done, we’re a lot less embarrassed when people have to come over or walk up from the road or simply see us out in front of the house working on some chore or another. It used be like “yeah, we’re just contractors. Migrant farmers. Just passing through. Live here? Oh, ha. Who would live in such a dump? Of course we don’t live here. Silly tourist.” But now, finally, the place is starting to look like a nice little house, and we don’t hide our faces when the cars drive by. Maybe someday I’ll actually sit in one of those chairs and just, well, sit there.

Yeah, it looks much better. I really do enjoy painting, it’s fun and kind of soothing and there’s a huge sense of accomplishment at the end of it. But as far as I’m concerned the next person who paints my house can be the executor of my estate.

Fancy Switchplates

Posted on June 8, 2013 by Jef

Here’s a really quick and easy project to make some decorative switchplates and power outlet covers. It’s very simple and not terribly expensive, and can give you an eclectic look in your home.

Our home, like many old houses, came with a plethora of those cheap, crappy plastic switchplates. You know the kind. Loosely fitted with stripped and mismatched screws, shattered with tiny little cracks, splotched with paint, so dirty that you couldn’t clean it with sandpaper. I really hate those things. You can replace them, of course, either by buying the same crappy plastic plates for about 19 cents each, or you can get them from the high end restoration websites and spend about 19 dollars each. Or anything in between. You get what you pay for. The expensive ones are really nice, but when you have 64 plates in your house it really adds up.

Well, we were looking for copper sheets for a completely different purpose and we ordered a sample pack to see what the colors were like. We got a variety of 36 gauge copper sheeting, each one with a decorative finish on it. It’s like malleable foil, soft but durable. The samples cost money so I considered them mine to do with whatever I pleased. I decided to use them to cover some switchplates around the house.

My only real concern was that the switchplates would look just as cheesy and stupid as the ones people cover with wallpaper. Well, they don’t look quite that cheesy. Copper sheeting is way cooler than wallpaper. Okay, I admit the final product does have a bit of cheese factor in it, but it sure beats the craptastic plastic ones I replaced.

Like any good handyman, I have a small collection of existing switchplate covers of various sizes and materials. It’s a good idea to use metal ones for this purpose. You’re going to form the copper foil around them and plastic just won’t take the beating. The cheap metal ones retail for about a dollar or two so it’s not like some huge expense. Anyway, use metal ones for the backbone.

Once you wrap it around, you can press it down to kind of see the outline of the holes you must cut. This copper foil cut really easy; scissors cut through it like paper and all it took to punch out the holes was a dull x-acto knife. Don’t use your pocket knife; the copper will dull it very quick and you’ll be sharpening it for two hours to get the blade right again.

Just follow the edge and saw your way around and it should look great. Again, this is why you use a metal backbone.

You don’t need to use an adhesive, but it’s not a bad idea. I did one without any adhesive and the copper wrapped around sufficiently to hold together, but over time it might fail, and I wasn’t very happy with it. A spray adhesive would probably work best but that’s messy and I was all out of spray adhesive so I used some double sided tape that I bought two years ago and never found a use for. That’s why I buy things like that. It may take two years but you never know when you’ll need it and if you have it when you need it you’ll be glad.

The only drawback is the tape is thick enough, believe it or not, that its contour will show through the foil if you look at it from a certain angle. Had I known, I probably would have run to the store to buy some spray on adhesive. Yeah, I’m kind of a perfectionist. But I’m also a realist. I’m making really cool switchplate covers for about $3 each instead of spending $19 each at some fancy pants restoration store.

The final product looked great. I mean, not nearly as cheesy as wallpaper covered switchplates and a vast improvement over the shoddy plastic ones I had. One of the covers I replaced was this resin bas-relief of a moose and a tree that looked like it was a rejected prop from the Red Green Show. I’d post a photo but it’s too embarrassing. I didn’t have enough to do all the switchplates in the house but I got most of the visible ones.

Sadly, they make the paneling look even worse. But the paneling is not long for this world. Never fear, it will soon come down, replaced by sensible drywall and real woodwork.

Anyway, I thought that was a good use of the samples we bought. Adios, amigos. Until next time!

Scrap Wood Project: Planter Box

Posted on May 5, 2013 by Jef

Every woodworker has a surplus of scrap wood. It just piles up, faster than you know. I purged a lot of my scrap wood on the move out here but I did keep a few choice pieces. But after the garage was built, I inherited a small pile of lumber, mostly construction grade stuff. Lots of 2×6’s and a few nice 2×12’s, and quite a few pieces of cedar trim.

When you live on this island, you don’t let a lot of things go to waste. I get that, and I’m totally down with that concept, but at the same time I don’t want to be a hoarder. Not only do I not have the storage space, but the tenets of my religion forbid it. Thou shalt not be a freaking hoarder. Don’t own stuff you don’t need, don’t keep stuff you won’t use.

Anyway, that’s a long way of explaining why I feel compelled to periodically make a woodworking project entirely out of scrap wood. In my case, I have a crapton of 2×6’s, most of which are marked to make a deck or a shed or something but I can spare a few.

The back door of the house is a double door with these big glass panes that let the light through. They’re lovely. And they afford the entire living room a direct view of the ugliest shed in the San Juans (click here if you think I’m joking). So we figured we’d get some bamboo for screening and put it in a big planter box so we can look at the bamboo and not the shed. We’re pretty smart, huh?

The wood, I discovered, was being guarded by a small army of carpenter ants. I’d ask them to work for me since I have a myriad of carpentry jobs to get done but they’re union and I’d have to pay out the wazoo. Well, the rule of ants is that where there’s one, there’s a million, so I had to make sure the wood I took from the wood pile was ant free.

The planter box would be pretty simple, I hoped. I’d just cut notches in the ends of each piece and stack them all together. I’d like to thank my mother for buying me Lincoln Logs for Christmas in 1972. They taught me a lot about how to build things.

I was actually hoping to not have to use fasteners or nails of any sort but I decided to toe it together with some tenpenny nails just to make sure it didn’t fall apart. Since I don’t own a nail gun, that involved me hammering nails at an angle into corners and hard to reach places. Yeah, there was a lot of colorful language coming out of the garage in that particular hour.

The bottom was a piece of scrap plywood that had been sitting outside in the rain for about eight months so I figure it’s already acclimated to being moist and moldy. I did line the inside with some thick plastic, just to help the thing live longer. This planter box should age well. I expect within a year it will be gray and pitted and have moss growing on it, which is the intended look I’m going for. A bald eagle stopped by and gave my planter a little nod of approval, and I took that to be a sign of good fortune.

So there you have it. Nothing but a few 2×6 beams and a sheet of plywood screwed to the bottom with like twenty decking screws just to make sure it stays affixed for as long as possible. I didn’t even treat the wood with anything, I’m just leaving it outside to rot. In a good way. It should weather well out here, and should look great for many years. When it’s finally ready to be put out to pasture, literally, it can be simply taken and set in a field where the planter and whatever’s growing in it can just become part of the earth. It happens faster than you think out here.

It sure beats staring at that ticking time bomb boiler in the crappy shed.

I fully expect that bamboo to take off like a weed on steroids. There’s actually two species of bamboo in the planter, both known for their aggressive growth and screening properties. If the whole thing gets overtaken by bamboo growing out the sides and bottom, I’ll be happy.

Extremely Blue

Posted on March 30, 2013 by Jef

Here is a Before Picture of our lovely roof.

It was kind of mold colored, covered with years of dirt, bug parts and fungus. Well, we had it pressure washed and who knew how blue it was underneath.

Extremely blue. Swiss Miss blue. It’s going to be interesting when we go to paint the house.

The Mark Of The Boob

Posted on March 15, 2013 by Jef

If you can’t cut kitchen countertops at 90 degrees, maybe you shouldn’t be cutting kitchen countertops.

There are right angles and there are wrong angles.

Diary of an Orcas Island Homeowner

Category Archives: House