Last update

Well, I think this the last update, since on Monday, I fly out to California, and everything here is pretty much done. Tuesday Jim stopped by and we did some of the lifting—couch, bookshelf, bar, and chairs went back into the living room, and the dining room table went back into the dining room. Then, for the rest of the day, I moved everything else: bookshelf, sideboard, the tall cabinets with all the plates and glassware, little couch, and so on. Everything is back in place, with one largish exception: the rug. For the floors to "cure" properly, they say no rugs for a couple of weeks, so that'll go down once we're back.

 

Here you see a tiny fraction of the glassware waiting to be moved back

The living room looks great. I've had trouble in the dining room, however: every single time I put down a patch, the consistency and finish are different. So, even though I bought exactly the same polyurethane this time (clear, satin), the patches are quite visibly glossy in comparison to the rest of the floor. Not the look I was going for, but I expect everything will be scuffed into submission in no time.

Or possibly it just needs to age, but no—the floor looked quite flat and satiny when it was first finished, not at all like this. Yesterday I bought grout to repair the kitchen backsplash. I didn't get caulk, which makes me wonder if perhaps we don't have any. I feel like there's always caulk somewhere down in the basement or in the garage.

Lots of things remaining in my last three days. I need to do a 17-mile run. Today is sunny (neutral) and warm (negative) but with low humidity (positive). Tomorrow and Sunday are cooler (in the 70s!), but with high humidity and a lot of potential for rain. I'm thinking I might try to do a rare afternoon run, since it's already 11:00.

I've also been recording some guitar pieces—those might get posted somewhere soon, but not here! That's it—I might get everything done that I'd wanted to. It makes me wonder, though, why I work so hard when I'm on vacation. Isn't this not actually work, but it's opposite? But then why is it so much… work?  One of the things that I like about it is that it's all physical (or in the case of music, physical and emotional), and virtually none of it is mental.

Floors are finished

And just like that, the floors are done. It occurs to me that, with the exception of the bathroom—whose time is coming—I have now redone the floors and repainted the walls of every room on the ground floor of this house. It's like I own it!

Yesterday the piano and TV stand were moved to their final locations, the last coats of polyurethane went down, the niche/altar over the fireplace was painted, I switched out another 1930s electrical socket, and I destroyed all but one of our old kitchen cabinets. This morning I moved the phone stand—minus the phone—back to its normal location. I'm pretty sure furniture can be (gently and carefully, all lifting, no sliding) returned to its previous locations. It's been 72 hours since the last coat went down for the main areas of the living room. Hence, it is theoretically possible that tonight I could eat dinner at a table instead of on this thing:

and sit on a couch and watch television, rather than sit on a couch and stare at a still life:

That would be kind of nice. I actually really love the casual "eat lunch over the kitchen sink while distractedly doing something else" for a while—but two weeks is enough.

Let's take a look at that niche/altar that I mentioned, which has its very own electrical socket. Why? WHY? There are so few sockets, and yet one needed to be in the floor of the living room, and one needed to be here. This is original to the house, by the way, not a later addition. What does one do with this? What urgent purpose did it serve in 1930? Clearly you have to plug something in here, but what? I have some ideas, but we'll see if they can be done... Anyway, I'm not certain yellow is its name-o, but it's exceedingly easy to re-paint, so no worries there. I also looked at a kind of celery green, but... nah. Below you can see it in its unpainted state, followed by the new color, and in a distant view, so you have some context for the color (also imagine the big red couch). Finally, note the electrical socket just inside the niche/alcove/altar.

Two tiny things, one that worked, one that didn't. First, the ventilation grates/registers are now painted a beautiful glossy black, and they look fantastic.

So good that it's really sad that two of them will be covered up by the couch!

That combination of glossy black and the warm brown of the hardwoods is pretty sweet. Photo doesn't capture it.

On the not so great front, the wood that I patched the holes in the floor for electrical sockets with didn't really take the stain; nor did the wood putty that is supposed to take a stain. The result is noticeable for the smaller holes, and fairly garish for the larger one. The good news is that the larger hole is covered by a rug normally, and the smaller one is hardly visible, usually being partially under a chair and ottoman.

 

The remaining kitchen cabinets have sat out in the garage for many years now. I was going to do... something with them, but I didn't. So, in truly spectacular heat and humidity, I took them apart with a hammer and a crowbar, and managed to jam two of them into a single, small garbage can. That leaves one left, but perhaps I'll get to that later in the week. Why destroy them? They're old, not particularly nice (although they are, as I can testify, quite well-made), but perhaps mostly because they are were completely filled with mouse droppings. After the kitchen was finished several years ago, we had another spate of mouse invasions, as you may recall, which eventually culminated in the infamous über-Maus (aka, the mouse from NIMH) who destroyed our stove the day before Christmas. Anyway, I wore gloves, eye protection and a respirator for that task, and really felt like I ought to have been in a full-blown Hazmat suit. It was hot. Really unimaginably hot, and humid. I had to tie a handkerchief around my forehead—without sweat would instantly fill my protective goggles, and by the time I was done, my clothes were soaked through. Not just my shirt, mind you, but my pants as well, which I've never had happen before. It was like running a distance race, only hotter and more humid. Anyway, here are our old cabinets, now stuffed into a garbage can:

I got out the grout to redo some of the missing bits in the backsplash, only to discover that it had solidified completely over the years. Back to Home Depot!

Almost there... almost there...

There's not much beyond last time's post—yesterday was all about the two requisite coast of varnish on the floor and finding something (even a zombie movie) to keep me out of the house until midnight). They say, however, that pictures speak louder than words:

Obviously, the main issue now is getting the furniture back in, plus a few little things (I might try to reduce squeaks from below by driving screws through the subfloor into the hardwoods—yes, that is the recommended procedure—and I need to re-grout and re-seal the tiles in the kitchen backsplash). But I suddenly have a lot of time on my hands. Guitar, here I come.

Placeholder

No real updates tonight—I put down both coats of polyurethane today, so I spent the whole day out of the house, and had no opportunity to take photos. But that means that tomorrow about 90% of Phase Three will be finished. I will still have to wait until the coats are dry enough to move furniture, move the TV cabinet and the piano, and then coat the remaining portions.

One significant screw up: my second batch of varnish turned out to be semi-gloss, not satin. I only figured this out after opening the can, however—too late to return (and it's painfully expensive). The good news is that the two rooms aren't mixed: satin in the dining room, semi-gloss in the living room (naturally, irony being the strongest force in the universe, it should be the reverse). I think it'll be fine, but we'll see tomorrow.

Living room

Hola, amigos! I know it's been a long time since I rapped at ya'. I've been kind of involved with this flooring project.

Yesterday was a bit of a disappointment, as I looked through what I'd done and found a ton of mistakes—this polyurethane finish is way more finicky than the one that I used in the kitchen—but I only know that now. It seems to want ages to dry, and to be super-sensitive to having anything put on it (it does handle walking okay, though). Anyway, I didn't even take any photos yesterday—plus I had to go make Nancy a drink and brings snacks after her son went sleepwalking at camp, fell out of a bunk in the middle of the night, and got a concussion. And you were worried about the fumes affecting me!  Anyway, he's doing well, and recovering in spite of/because of the three metal staples in his head at the moment.

Today was dedicated to painting. I had done almost all the prep work the night before (masking, mostly), and after my obligatory Home Depot run and taking care of some financial stuff, I prepared my "kill room." If you've seen Dexter, you're familiar with his elaborate preparations with plastic tarps and whatnot before he does in his victims, and my living room looked pretty much the same by the time I was done.

But all I killed was the old paint. Hah! Take that, paint! Afterwards, we had walls that were bright and cheery instead of drab and putty-colored. Hooray!

 I plan on painting the inside of the niche a contrasting color. I'm thinking a red. Would that be too crazy? Maybe just a significantly more yellow shade?

Before removing all the masking, I ran to the store and picked up some wild, fresh Sockeye salmon. Getting decent seafood here, about 1,000 miles from the nearest sea, isn't easy. Finding anything fresh at Schmuck's—I mean Schnuck's—isn't particularly easy either. A lot of stuff is bad, or nearly so, when you buy it. But the Sockeye was legit, so I pan fried it with a reduction sauce of ginger liqueur, lime juice, sugar and soy; plus haricots verts, prepared the French way.

Finally, I took two photos of the living room at night with the orange lamps in it, so Lilya could see if it looks less cave like. Honestly, I'm not sure if anything short of an overhead light will do that, but I feel that this is a pretty decent improvement.

All right: that's all for tonight, cats and kittens. Tomorrow's plan is what I call "varnish and vanish." I put down the polyurethane coating and immediately leave the house for 8 hours (campus? work? guitar?), then varnish and leave again (I've already seen all the crappy movies!). I figure 10 AM and 7 PM should make for a bearable house by midnight. It probably won't happen, but it's a nice idea. (Keep in mind that after this is done, I still have to wait days before I even think about moving the two remaining furniture items, and then I have to varnish again—twice—where they were sitting. And then wait more before moving furniture again... well, you get the idea.)

Phases Two and Three—and beyond...

I'm not really sure what each of the phases is, except Phase One is definitely sanding. Then there's staining and varnishing, necessarily in that order—but at any point in between, painting or Other Repairs might intervene. In any event, the dining room is getting awfully close to being done. I put down the first coat of varnish Sunday night, and this is the "super-duper-ultra-fast-so-fast-you-won't-believe-it-literally-this stuff-will be dry-BEFORE-you even-put-it-on-the-floor" formula (that means, by the way, "dry enough to look at sideways in 8-10 hours, you can step on it in 24 hours, once, gingerly, while wearing socks, don't even think about putting furniture back in that room for a week"). I put it down shortly before midnight, and it didn't dry by the next morning. At all. Nor by the afternoon. Why?

Perhaps the... 100% humidity? Sunday and Monday were insanely humid, and it's terrible weather for anything that needs to dry. I'm pretty sure the varnish was more wet by Monday morning—when we were enveloped in hot fog (albeit much cooler that the pervious day's high), to give you some idea of the humidity.

Anyway, I put down a second coat, sealed the house, turned on the air conditioning, and went out to the movies. Twice. After Earth and Superman: Man of Steel. For the record, both movies showed some signs of promise (design was very good in After Earth, and casting was great in Man of Steel), and both ended up being pretty bad. After Earth has sections that are so bad, so poorly written and with such stilted dialogue that it's cringeworthy, while Man of Steel has a pretty excellent 90 minute long movie in it, almost entirely ruined by over a hour of continuous, unimaginably tedious explosions. I have seen many otherwise good movies now ruined by the "45 minute long fight sequence" which is generally followed by the "extra 23 minute long fight sequence because we're not sure we courted the young male demographic quite hard enough this time." I actually blame Peter Jackson for both a little bit: his excellent Lord of the Rings convinced everyone—for no reason at all—that epic films needed to be as long as possible, no matter how little story there was, and his wretched T-Rex vs Giant Ape in King Kong also let budding directors know that "it's okay to have fight sequences that never end."

So I rolled back in at midnight—stink mostly gone, and very bearable in the bedroom. Next morning, everything was dry and nice looking. I messed up a few spots trying to get paint preparation done in the dining room before giving up. Overall, it looks amazing.

I'm particularly pleased with the kitchen to dining room transition—although they're two different woods, the color is essentially identical, which is how stain is supposed to work, I guess. Here's  a shot looking straight down at the transition.

If not for the width of the boards and the different grain patterns, you might think they're the same.

I then turned my attention to some OTHER LITTLE THINGS. Like those holes in the floor I mentioned a post ow two ago. Well, I braced from below, filled in the holes, and cut and matched with wood putty, and check it out:

Number one looks pretty great, if I do say so myself. Now, before we celebrate, however, I'm going to tell you now that this didn't work out. It looks great like this, especially the first hole that was cut by a human with a brain (the second, jagged mess was clearly cut by a sub-human without a brain, and can only be made to look so-so). The problem? I didn't stain before setting them in and working in the wood putty. This putty is supposed to accept a stain, but... it doesn't. You'll see pictures tomorrow—it's basically a piece of blindingly white/yellow wood in the middle of brown goodness. The one hole—fortunately the jagged mess—is covered up by a carpet, so it doesn't really matter. I'll see what I can do tomorrow to make this better, but for such a promising start, a bit of disappointment.

I also fixed something that's driven me crazy for years. I replaced all the two prong sockets from 1930 with modern, 3-prong ones so we can stop using "cheaters." They are ugly, clumsy, and don't actually ground your device. Now we have elegant three-prong outlets that... don't actually ground your device. Overall, a huge improvement, however. Jim and Renée came over for a drink. Or two. And then it was time to start the staining. Pictures tomorrow!

Food and Drink

So, as I usually do when I'm by myself, I'm watching TCM, the greatest television channel ever invented. All they do is show classic movies from sunrise to sunup, generally films from the 1930s and 1940s, with an occasional foray into the 1950s. But to my dismay, I discovered that they were showing the film Smokey and the Bandit. It's not that it's such a horrible movie – but it's one of the films that I saw growing up, one of the essential films from the 1970s. Is this like when you hear music you listened to in high school—in the supermarket? Is it yet another sign of age, that films of my childhood are now "classic"? Anyway, it turns out that TCM is showing Smokey and the Bandit as part of their Father's Day series of movies. More on why in a moment.

One of the hosts of TCM is Ben Mankiewicz, and he was the host for Smokey. The Mankiewicz family is an unbelievable fairytale about both immigrants in the US and in Hollywood. For Father's Day, Ben brought in his dad Frank, who fought in WW II, was a journalist, Robert Kennedy's press secretary, and later on, President of National Public Radio (he had previously worked for George McGovern, attempting to get McGovern to capitalize on the fact that he had been an incredible war hero, which McGovern refused to do. This then set the stage for Democratic presidential candidates for decades to come.) Frank was, among other things, the person officially responsible for announcing the death of John F. Kennedy. Ben's grandfather, Herman Mankiewicz, was one of the co-writers for Citizen Kane, which in the film world is a little bit like saying you're one of the co-writers of the Bible (he also worked on a little film that you may have heard of called The Wizard of Oz).

Frank's uncle, Herman, directed All about Eve, quite possibly still the best film ever made about women, family and careers, and certainly one of the best films ever made. Lilya introduced it to me, I don't know how many years ago. Herman also wrote Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which I've written about it—if ever so briefly. It is not, technically speaking, the funniest film ever made by classic Hollywood: that would be Some Like It Hot. But it is a delightful and quite funny film all on its own. There is a literally unbelievable anecdote involving Herman Mankiewicz, a fish, and white wine, which I will not repeat on this blog. But in any event, it is enough to note that Herman died on the same day, in the same year, as Joseph Stalin, and Sergei Prokofiev. It would seem that all great Slavs think alike.

The final upshot for all of this is that after Ben Mankiewicz had made his introductions, he explained that it was his father who chosen Smokey and the Bandit, and not him. He agreed it was an odd choice for him, but it has the defining thing he wants to see in a movie: a clear character that you're supposed to root for.

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Because I have not done enough today, I decided to make chiles en nogada for dinner. My history with this dish goes back many decades, and I don't have the time to relate all of it right now. Suffice it to say, I first read about this dish in a brilliant long short story, or short novella, bye Italo Calvino. I tried it for the first time in Mexico City, many years ago, on a trip that I took there with Lilya. You take a poblano pepper, you roast it, and then you stuff it with pork, dried fruit, fresh fruit, tomatoes, onions, garlic, raisins, and chopped nuts. If done properly, it takes a very long time to make. I've done it properly once before, but I was not prepared to do so again today, and so did it over the course of an hour or two. This was a highly abbreviated form of chiles en nogada. But it worked out pretty well. Lilya and I always make fun of these recipes: ragù alla bolognese in 10 minutes. Fresh croissants in half an hour, immortalized in the now-epic thread on recipes for ice cubes. "I made your fantastic spaghetti alla carbonara recipe, but I substituted elbow macaroni for spaghetti, lettuce for pancetta, and dirty dish water for parmesan—my husband loved it!"

In any event, I made something closer to Chiles à nogade, including a roux in place of the queso fresco, which I didn't have, and pecans in lieu of the walnuts. It was pretty delicious. What we're looking at here is ground pork, onions, almonds, raisins, garlic, bell peppers, tomatoes, and a few other ingredients, stuffed into a roasted poblano pepper, then covered with a walnut pecan cream sauce, sprinkled with parsley, and chopped red bell peppers. Take a look at this dish which, like pizza Margherita in Italy, was designed around the new Mexican flag. These are the dishes of Romantic Nationalism. 

What rounded things out quite nicely was the classic dinner accompaniment, the Manhattan. I have recently acquired, I shall not say how, the ability to make perfectly spherical ice cubes. And it turns out that, even when you don't have a dining room table, or really for that matter any other furniture in the house, that you can still make pretty great drinks if you have a good bourbon, a good vermouth, and some excellent homemade bitters—which I have:

All right—I'm off to enjoy To Kill a Mockingbird. Happy Father's Day to all fathers, potential fathers, potential humans about to be fathered, and—let's be honest—really, mostly mothers, who do 99.99% of the heavy lifting in this whole parenthood thing. Peace out.

Happy Father's Day

The day started off nice, with a lovely Father's Day gift from Lilya:

We have some beautiful little Iittala plates that have gorgeous, highly stylized foxes on them; this is the same designer, but with owls (sacred symbol of Athena, and hence not to be taken lightly). It being Sunday, and a holiday, things got off to a slow start and an early end today, but a lot got done, including one of those things that I just really love about home improvement: a small thing that takes very little time, is quite easy, and makes an enormous difference.

But first, the paint. There are some issues with our current paint. It's okay during the day, but at night, it turns into the drabbest, greyest, ugliest putty color imaginable. The highly textured walls we have may be classic and original, but they don't help either. The whole thing begins to take on the appearance of an artificial cave, like something you might see at Disneyland, or a set on the original series of Star Trek (cue fight music!).

The extreme texture also makes repainting a real pain: it sucks up huge quantities of paint, and always leaves a spot behind that you missed. The dining room is particularly odd, because rather than the whole wall surface being textured (as is the case in the living room and the stairwell and hallways), the texturing is confined to "framed panels" set in the walls, as if the textures were paintings (the "frames" are pressed into the plaster as well). In any case, the upshot is that the whole gallon of paint went to two of the walls, and evidently a second gallon will be needed for the remainder. The living room will be even more paint-hungry, I imagine. I was also not sure about the color. Because of the whole "drab Star Trek cave made out of putty" problem, I really wanted to brighten things up. We've read that an off-white with a touch of yellow will remain "warm" looking in pretty much all lighting conditions, but my walls weren't looking warm—they were looking a bit ill, in fact. Lilya pointed out that the room was only half-painted, which can affect the color quite a bit, and then I realized that the entire floor was currently covered with an electric-blue plastic sheet. And indeed, with the sheet out and more of the room painted, it has a much healthier look. Not exactly daring or innovative, but it'll do.

Lilya's favorite part? The dark blue painter's tape. Typical. It's like the old joke about the venerable Chinese musician who has never before heard Western music. He attends a concert where they play Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Afterwards, they eagerly ask him what his favorite movement was. "The Ode to Joy, right?" "No, no. The one at the beginning was sublime," says the old man. "The first movement?" they ask, surprised. "No, no—before the first movement." He means, of course, when all the musicians were tuning their instruments.

 Here you can see a direct comparison of the two paint colors.

But I promised a radical change, and here it is: I put down stain. First of all, it's a physical pleasure. No effort, no time, the lambswool pad is delightfully soft and slides across the floor all on its own. And in seconds, the floor goes from this:

 to this (although this exaggerated the darkness):

It is, for the record, the "natural" or lightest stain they make, and it's the same one we used in the kitchen—the two colors are remarkably close now, for all that they're two different kinds of wood. Here's an "in progress" shot:

It's like Photoshopping, but happens in real time, in real life! And one last shot of the other corner, all aglow. Both of these are pretty close to the real color:

Not surprisingly, this adds to the "warm" look of the walls, too.

In other news, I spray painted all the ventilation grates ("registers") black—they look old, rusty and just generally bad, so hopefully this will help. It certainly looked a lot better when we did it in the kitchen. I'm going to save those, however, for when the floors are finished, so we get the combined look.

Either tonight or tomorrow morning I'll do the first coat of polyurethane, which means breaking out my Darth Vader respirator, and possibly moving out of the house for a few days.