I was so thrilled about how nice the windows looked in the downstairs stairwell after I cleaned the paint stripper off them, I decided to do the same in my office today. Imagine my dismay when one particular pane did not clean up, and instead even got worse! I was completely baffled. It was as if the goo smeared all over it had mysteriously become hard as diamond when all the other panes cleaned up just as easy as that other window had. WTF??



Well, I showed this to my Spouse and he took one look at it and said, "it's not glass, it's Lucite". Ehhhhhhh? I tapped my finger on each pane and they sounded exactly the same. They even looked the same, in the middles anyway. I'd been looking at these windows for 2.5 solid years and never saw the one as different than the others. Then, to prove it, he took his keys out and tapped on each pane with the metal keys. The dirty one made a conspicuously dull "thud" compared to the other two. D'OH!!! You can't slip one past an engineer! LOL. It will remain like that for now, but ultimately I will have to replace that piece... preferably with a nice piece of glass.



Speaking of the stairwell I have the new door nearly completely stripped now. It matches the trim woodwork perfectly, as if it was always there! Oddly enough it has a powerful scent of pine unlike any of the other wood I stripped. I don't know if it's just a slightly different species, or if the wood is newer, or was preserved differently, or what. When the doors have all been shut up and you first walk in there, the alcoholy piney scent is about enough to knock ya out. Whew!

Got some more paint scraping done in the upper stairwell. I did the top half of the door -- it looks like it was made to go there hehe. The blue line to the right is to protect the previously-bared wood when the second coat of yellow paint is put on the walls.



Once it is completely scraped, I can pull it out of the doorway and scrape the right-hand edge, then laminate more wood onto that so that the door can be made to exactly fit this doorway. That will make it possible to mount it on its hinges instead of having it held in with wedges. One time there was a terrific gust of wind and it popped the door off the wedges so it came crashing down. Boy did that make us all jump :D



The window that had been partially scraped before is now completely scraped. It looks great! The following day, I also washed all the Zip Strip gack off the glass and for the first time in weeks you could see through the window really well. Progress has been made! w00T!

Got the door hung in the lower end of the server room. I am rather proud of myself as it is the first door I've ever hung and it ended up just fine. The definition of "just fine" in this case being, comparable with all the other doors in this house :D



Starting with where I left off on the previous post about this door, the next thing I did was use a hammer and chisel to mortise the replacement hinges on the door. These hinges were replacing the old ones because those were missing their other halves. New mortises were needed because the previous ones were gone due to the door being trimmed an inch on that side.

Here's an article by Tom O'Brien on how to mortise the hinges, since I failed to take pictures when I did mine. It was my first time and they were quite easy. Once the hinges were mounted on the door, I stacked up a computer and some boards and used them to hold up the door at the right height so that I could mark the matching hinge locations on the door frame. Then I used hammer and chisel to mortise those as well.

It turns out one of the new hinges was subtly bent, which might explain why they were cheaper than usual. I remember the clerk at the Reuse Center being puzzled, but declining my offer to pay the full price anyway. When I mounted the door the first time it was subtly atilt, with the top farther from the door frame than the bottom. After puzzling over this for a bit, I discovered the bend in the hinge and modified one of the mortises to match the bend and cancel it out. Viola!



Here's the round wooden plug I made for the old deadbolt hole, now in place. This photo is showing the stairwell side of the door which is ultimately going to be stripped and stained. I did not touch this side of the plug since I will need to do a lot of work in that area and figure it'd be less trouble to fill that gap after scraping than before.



Since the server room side is going to be painted, I went ahead and sanded and filled the plug there, and also on the door-edge where I'd inserted a smaller piece of wood in the deadbolt hole. If you compare the above two pictures you may notice the window trim doesn't match. The server room side has some cheap simple molding that is poorly fitted. I think whoever replaced the glass must have put that there. I would like to replace that with something that matches the rest of the door but all I've discovered so far is I can't get what I want locally.

Probably the most painful part of this whole process was dealing with the latch and lock. As pointed out in my previous post about this door, the inner casing of the doorknob and lock assembly was broken. I had superglued the broken piece then stabilized it with a big piece of black gaff tape back then. When I took it apart now, it seemed to be quite repaired. Cross fingers! Luckily the plate itself doesn't need to withstand much force, it mostly needs to not fall apart again and drop bits of itself into the mechanical works.

Anyway, because the door was being mounted reverse swing of how it had been originally, I had to take the lock apart and reassemble it in a mirror image of itself. Also because the door had been trimmed a little on the latch side, I had to move the doorknob holes and plate screw holes, and deepen the mortise for the latch plate so that it would be flush once again. Whew!



Here's a picture showing some fill work I need to do on the hinge side of the door. These were exposed when an inch got trimmed off that side. Luckily the edges are being painted, not stained, so I can have a variety of options for the fill. The door opens all the way flat against the wall, because we move a lot of stuff through there between the basement and the garage.

I also did a lot of filling and such on the server room side so that I could maybe do some painting soon. I am getting really tired of seeing that bright white door in the "albino white" room. LOL.

That's all for now!

Last time I went to Minneapolis I visited The Reuse Center and picked up a couple of old doors, one of which is intended for the door to my server room, to go in at a landing at the top of the basement stairs and a few steps down from the kitchen. It was an ugly beast and certainly one of the cheaper doors there.



However, it has several advantages. It's of the horizontal panel type, so it matches the original architecture of the house. It's solid pine and the side facing the stairwell, which is being restored, should match well once it's been stripped and stained. Best of all it has a window, so it will let light through, be safer on a stairwell people are coming in and out, and matches the other server room door nicely.



Here's the doorway where it'll go. It's extra deep because the server room used to be a garage and the dividing wall used to be an outer wall of the house. Whoever did the remodeling just put a stud wall in front of the old surface to put the drywall on, so it's really a double thick wall. Originally they had a very narrow opening with a hollow core sliding door, so there was also a 2" or so gap in between the two walls to accomodate the door. Alas the whole thing was done very cheaply. I am retaining the old cheap molding on the server room side for now, because the entire remodel project was done that way and the server room isn't getting totally redone in this pass. However, ultimately I'd like to strip those moldings and put on something more matching the older areas of the house. I did do that on the other (stairwell) side of this door.



My first step in putting on the door was to remove any hardware that would get in the way of the measuring and cutting to size. Above is one of the hinges I removed. If you don't see a lot of detail on this picture, it's because there isn't any. The hinge screws had been painted over so many times you couldn't see the screwdriver slots anymore. They also did not come with their other halves, so they will be getting replaced entirely later in the project anyway. To get them off I took a hammer and chisel and carefully excavated each screwdriver slot. Once they were cleared the screws came out easily the usual way. These half-hinges will go in my general hinge parts box for eventual reuse.



I initially thought I could leave the door latch in place, but it turned out to be sticky. Once I took it out I found a surprise: the casing inside had been shattered. I think someone may have kicked this door in at one point because there is a repair where wood was replaced near the knob plate. In the above picture you can see diagonal lines where the replacement piece of wood went in.



Here's the broken latch. More bits fell out once I had the door down in the basement. My Spouse suggested cold weld might be usable to repair it. I may rummage my old door parts bin to see if I have one I can sub in first.



Also before sizing the door to the frame, I needed to install the trim that would hold it in place. I used the new replacement hinges (shown above) to see visually where to put the trim. There is actually a standard measurement to place hinges but I believe that only works if you have a bit of flat trim standing the door off from the frame itself, allowing the round part of the hinge to be recessed, and I don't have that here.



Here's the first piece of trim in place on the hinge side. Initially I am going to paint the right hand portion (inside the server room) "albino white" to match the rest of the cheapass trim in that room, and then strip and stain the left hand portion to match the stairwell woodwork.



Measured the other side the same way, and then connected the top. Part of the top and also the bottoms of the two sides need a bit added on, but there is enough here to start placing the door.



Since there are no hinges holding the door up yet, I placed wood of the appropriate thickness on the threshold as a space holder. Actually the threshold itself is a space holder, until the floor is done. I was holding off on doing the floor until all the messy stuff above it was done!



OK, the next step after that was to pick up the door and place it in the doorway with its weight resting on the gap spacers. It's very heavy because of the large piece of glass in it. I matched up the left and top, then pushed the long right side up against the door frame and held it in place. This made it possible to go around to the other side and draw a line on the door where it would need to be cut, using the door frame as the ruler.



Between 1/4" and 1/2" was cut off. This piece will make an excellent source of material for building up the edge of the other server room door.



This door has a large hole from a dead bolt. Since I won't be needing that I took advantage of its being on the floor to mark a piece of wood to use as filler.



I picked a piece of pine 2x4 that wouldn't clash too heinously with the original wood (at least under 3 million layers of amber shellac) and held it behind the hole, then drew a circle on it using the hole itself as the guide.



I now have the circle marked on the piece so that I can cut it at a later date. I'll cut to the outside of the line since it was drawn on the inside of the circle.



The door fits much better once it is cut! I spent some time yesterday sanding and refining the fit, but did not get to mounting the hinges alas. I hope to make more progress today, once I get out from in front of the computer. ;-)

I was working on the downstairs stairwell today. The first thing I did was fix the doorframe for the inner (stairwell) side of the server room door. I had some old molding that appeared to match the rest of the house, but it had turned out to be too shallow. Today I cut several 3/16" wide strips off a piece of one-by using the table saw. I am not a very big fan of the table saw but since we have one, I am slowly learning its benefits and advantages. The saw we have is another garage-sale special. I love garage sale tools!



I pulled off the molding, which had been cut to length and added, but which didn't fit right because of the aforementioned depth problem. I nailed the 3/16" strips on the back, drilling tiny holes first so as not to split the molding, and then put the molding back up. Perfect!



In the picture above you can see the added strip sandwiched between the molding and the wall. This doorway has  heart pine molding that will match the rest of the original house molding in the upstairs and side rooms once it is stripped and refinished.

Also I worked on the light fixture for this lower stairwell. You may recall I had painted it gold back on January 6th. It also has markings on it for the keyholes that will hold the 3 chains for the shade.



The shade for this one is a lot like the one I put up in my office on the 9th, except it is beige instead of green in color.



Here's the fixture with 2 holes drilled to form the top and bottom of each keyhole-shaped chain hole.



Now here it is with the holes joined to form the keyhole that will cause gravity to trap the chain at the narrow end, holding up the bowl-shaped shade. This fixture is not copper like the other one was. As you can see here there are no guts. In this case there is a perfectly good ceiling-mounted socket up in the stairwell that will fit neatly under this, so I will just leave that in place and add this on over it.



Here's the fixture with its first layer of decoration. It's a base of the same pale yellow as the walls of the stairwell.



Here it is with the beginnings of the 2nd layer, the green. I will need to go back and forth many times touching up the yellow and green before this stage will be done; I'd say it's about halfway there now. Blue, gold and school-bus-yellow (orange) will be added after that. I have a feeling this one will take 3-4 sessions to paint completely... it's a lot of detail work!

Today I was working on the downstairs stairwell. It is being painted the same color of yellow as the upstairs stairwell. As I've mentioned before, I think of the 2 stairwells as being the same project even though they are not connected. Call me a radical!



Here's the "before" picture for the lower stairwell. It appears white in the picture, and to the human eye, but it is actually the same dark gray as was painted upstairs. The ugly wartlike protuberance at lower center is a 1970's (?) vintage Sears smoke detector that alas still works perfectly. The doorway at left still needs a lot of work but it is the future home of the solid pine door I mentioned picking up in Minneapolis on my Christmas trip. This doorway is extra deep because that used to be an outside wall of the house, and the room beyond used to be the first add-on attached garage. This house had been remodeled many times before we got it! We found some evidence that the conversion of the old attached garage to an indoor room around 1985.



Here's the yellow version. It is not a very intense yellow, but it really cheers the space up in person. This color was chosen to coordinate well with the Mexican White tones on the Talaveras tiles that will ultimately be installed on the stair risers. The lower half of the stairs, starting about 1 foot below the ledge, will be white as that is technically basement wall. Alas, the wart is not gone forever. It has just been removed for painting.

I also did some work on the light fixture that will be replacing the bare bulb in this stairwell. I had bought this tin fixture on eBay because it was very cheap (around $2.50) and too worn out to make me feel guilty about painting it. Also it seemed like a good candidate to be converted to the 3-chain type I needed.



And what a lovely beast it is! I am not really sure what colors those originially were, maybe pale blue and pink but I am not sure about the orangey part. In any case, the colors correspond to raised floral, leaf and shield designs stamped into the tin.



A few days ago I painted this fixture and another one meant for my office gold. The gold is just going to be the base color; I have brush paints to fill in the detail and the backgrounds to suit the rooms they'll be in. This fixture will be detailed in green, yellow and colbalt to go with the tiles, with the background of the images being beige to coordinate with the beige wheat-decorated glass bowl that is the shade I'll be using. It should look pretty nice, despite containing the evil BEIGE that my Spouse now hates. It's very odd when someone spontanously starts hating a certain color with this level of passion. My Spouse did not hate BEIGE when we first met! In fact I would say back then my Spouse preferred BEIGE a little. But then a new and very inspirational acquaintance came along and converted you-know-who to BEIGE BASHING. Thus I find myself in the curious position of feeling slightly defensive any time I opt to, say, put a 1" band of beige paint on a light fixture as an artistic touch. What can I say, Marital Adventures R Us ( weak grin ).



Since I failed to drill the 3 holes (for the 3 ball chains that hold up the glass shade underneath the light) before I painted everything gold, this is an opportunity to show how I figured out where the holes need to be. First I took some white string and wrapped it around the fixture at the height I wanted the holes to be located.



After cutting the string to length, I removed it from the fixture and folded it into 3rds as shown.



I then took a black permanent magic marker and made a black dot at each bend. Since it was folded into thirds that makes the black dots now divide it by 3rds.



The string could then be placed back on the fixture, taped in place to avoid slippage, and the black marker used to make a dot on the fixture where each dot is on the string. The 3rd dot goes where the two ends of the string meet.



Tada! These will be drilled out with a hole barely large enough to accept the balls that make up the chains. Then there will need to be a small notch in the lower side of each hole to allow the thin part of the chain between the balls to slip down in and lock the chain in place. I am still pondering how I'll make that part. The real 3-chain fixtures I've seen had keyhole-shaped holes punched into the tin or copper during manufacture.



As an added bonus I was also able to use the same string to mark the other fixture for the same purpose. Form follows function after all so it stands to reason that the general diameter of metal things made to house light bulb bases is more or less similar. Oh yeah, huh.

I can't wait to get to the hand-painting part!

Today I sanded and painted the lower stairwell yellow. It needed to be sanded because there were a lot of plaster repairs from old hooks and nails that had been removed, as well as cracks in the walls and chunks taken out by people trying to get big stuff up and down the stairs. I don't include any pictures because they would have been pretty similar to those shown yesterday of the upstairs stairwell, down to the dark gray ceiling and running out of yellow paint before it was done.

Note to self: buy 2 more gallons of yellow paint.

There is a nice light fixture for the back stairs too, of the antique three-chain hanging bowl design. It's probably a decade or three earlier design than this house, but I like them a lot and have some for other parts of the house as well. The glass part is tan with gleaming clear glass wheat. Very handsome and dignified. I'll be sure to show pictures when I finally get it up, but first the old tin base I got for it needs to be painted. Oh, and the ceiling should probably be painted white also. Le sigh! At least it's only about a 4' x 4' ceiling on that landing.

Also in the spirit of upstairs-stairwell-remodeling, I had bought pieces of light fixtures so that I could assemble my dream light for the stairs. The existing light is actually quite period-appropriate for our 1930's house but it's just really tiny, ugly and utilitarian. Not exactly high art for back then.



Here's the 2 shades I bought on eBay. These are made of slag glass and are called "tulip" shades. There are many possible manufacturers (these two are from different manufacturers I think) and they were made over several decades but by the 1970's they were making plastic ones.



Here's another angle. These guys actually have the same color glass for most of the panels but the larger one has alternating panels of clear amber between the swirled ones. Both shades look differently from the top and bottom, and a third way when lit from within.

I chose these because 1) they will echo similar fixtures I am putting into the kitchen elsewhere in the house; 2) they will reflect a similar flower shape on the tiles I am ultimately going to put on the risers of the stairs in this stairwell, and 3) this amber color will go well with the woodwork when it is done.



One of these came wired as a light and the other was just sold as a shade. My first task was to remove the old wiring. This socket is actually still in usable condition as long as I am willing to solder the wires instead of landing them on screws, so I set it aside in case of future need.



Lighting is one of those odd jobs where you always start out by thinking "I need only a screwdriver to do this!" Above is shown the pile of crap and tools I had already accumulated by this stage of the process. Cat Daisy was a great help.



Here's the new socket all wired up. It's been screwed onto the end of a small threaded pipe that will be the backbone of the new light fixture I am making. I took this in my hand and kind of put the light together around it so that I could see exactly where to place the spacer nut shown on the pipe. That nut will keep the socket nicely spaced away from the inner shade while still leaving enough pipe to be able to fit everything else on above it. A small dab of threadlock should hopefully keep it from moving about in the future.



Here is the fixture with the small shade added. Basically I passed the bare end of the electrical wire (it's nice gold zip cord meant especially for lighting work) up through the shade hole and then passed the pipe up through also until it stopped. Once I put a second nut on top of the shade and tightened it, that left the socket snugged up inside just under that pointy part of the shade.



Now here it is with the large shade added. It is physically resting against the small shade, metal cone to metal cone, so all that is needed now is to tighten a nut on top to squeeze them together firmly to avoid any rotating or slipping.



The nut in question is actually the ring on the end of the chain, which is able to screw on tightly. Once that was on I passed the gold zip cord up through the chain neatly, and then passed it through the ceiling part. The light is now theoretically ready to go up on the stairwell ceiling.



I like to put a pointy bulb in because it looks more like the center of a flower. 



I wired the end of the zip cord to an edison plug so I could give the fixture a quickie test. Nothing is worse than finding out something is broken when standing on a ladder trying to install it. Here's what it looks like with light passing through the petals! So beautiful.



Here's another shot of it lit up, with a different light setting on the camera. This angle also shows the bulb a little. This will go up after the yellow is done being painted in the upstairs stairwell -- it'll just be in the way of the ladder if it goes up before that. All done for now!!!

 

Today is Sunday so that makes it Upstairs Stairwell project day. The upstairs stairwell needs a lot of work, including painting. I had started to paint the walls yellow and was hoping to leave the ceiling as-was but as soon as the yellow paint got near to the edges of the ceiling I realized to my chagrin that not only was the ceiling gray instead of white, but it was a dark gray:



This went for both the ceiling over the landing, and also the small bit of ceiling by the window at the bottom of the stairs:



Part of the reason I had been hoping to avoid painting these was because of the great height involved up on the landing, but since it was clearly necessary I went out and got a long roller handle which was no where near as expensive as I'd feared.



The handle is made of fiberglass so it's quite lightweight, but this does make it flexible. I found the combined flexy-ness of the handle and the non-supported half of the roller to inconvenient at full extension, but if I needed to push hard to paint into a crevice or something I could turn it around to bring the supported half to bear.



I also made myself a "tall brush" for the edges, as shown.

The green-colored walls in the above 2 pictures are in my office. The Pepto-Bismol Pink of the molding is the color the entire office was when we first moved here, including the walls, all the trim and even the ceiling! It positively creeped me out as it was low and dark and entirely too much like being inside somebody else's stomach. The walls are now green and the ceiling is now white, but I have only stripped about a third of the pink paint off the molding yet. Pretty yucko eh? LOL



Anyway, here's what the stairwell ceiling looked like with the first coat of white paint on, before doing the edges. It's an amazing difference! I managed to put 2 coats on both sections of stairwell ceiling, and painted all the edges. Next Sunday I can finish the yellow!

I suppose this might seem odd to some people but I consider the stairs to the 2nd floor and the stairs to the basement to be all the same project. I guess they feel like the same stairwell to me even if they are not physically connected, just one above the other. At any rate I have been working on them both about equally. 

Here is a door I am working on fitting between the living room/upstairs stairwell and the upper end of the server room. It should allow light and a view in both directions while also providing a "cat-proof seal". As with the other server room door way I was working on in a previous post, this had a hollow core sliding door that was truly ugly. My intention here is to strip all the wood and stain it amber color. You can see what the heart pine looks like mostly-stripped if you look at the window area and the right hand doorframe in all of these pictures.



After the door has been fitted properly I'll take it elsewhere to be stripped. I have found the doors are really much easier to strip when lying horizontally on the floor with all their hardware removed!

This door mostly fits really well but there are gaps at the upper right where the door or the frame are not square:



For the right hand side my intention is to laminate another piece of heart pine to the right hand edge, and cut the extended door to match the opening shape. As for the top, since there is a fairly narrow opening at the bottom I will likely just cut off the top of the door as-is to make it match the top of the frame better. Here's the other side of the top:



With the left hand side butted up it's clear there's just this small gap at the top. Once it's cut off the whole door can slide up a little and fill it. Since I have to re mount hinges anyway this isn't going to add work or anything.



The bottom of the door. I think it'll look really nice when it's in. The steps on the left are the last 4 to be stripped; aside from the door frame shown, part of another door frame, and some of the window the entire rest of the stairwell is done. It was about a week and a half's work. I have a lot of pictures of that I'll probably post as an early dated post corresponding to when I did the actual job.

The most photogenic thing I did today was to work on the doorway between the back stairs and the server room. This has been sitting around unfinished ever since I ripped out the very cheezy hollow core sliding door that had been there before. It wasn't just a case of popping a different door in, as the opening passed through two walls (the server room is the old, first garage addition so that used to be an outside wall). My idea is to do pine paneling/moldings shellacked (sp?) the same amber tones as the upstairs woodwork will be.

The obstacle that had been in the way of further progress was a bit of wood sticking out so I took a rotary sander and buzzed that off. Actually the whole reason I did this today is I needed the rotary sander downstairs to work on the log spray station and this one little piece was the only reason it was waiting on standby upstairs!



Some of the wood used is already exactly the stain color I was going to go for.

Once that was out of the way I was able to put back on the old door frame molding on the server room side. It looks like I forgot to take a picture after doing all the frame caulking but I did get that part done on top too. It looks very nice.



The opening had grown with the removal of all the sliding door infrastructure, which was good because the door had been too narrow before. However it did mean the doorframe pieces were no longer quite big enough. Also, as shown in the picture below there was a considerable gap between the hardwood floor of the landing and the 2x4 frame of the server room's inner wall. It was way bigger than it looks in the picture; probably 1" gap all the way across. The contractors who committed these atroc worked on it before had handled this by covering the entire landing and threshold with 3/4" ply and covering that with vinyl. They used so much glue and 3" screws it took 2 people a couple hours to remove that one tiny square of floor surface. Le cringe! I also had to remove a board that had been nailed to the wall underneath the door opening, presumably to protect the edge of the drywall there. This left a gap in the baseboard, or rather I should say, made the gap a lot more obvious.



The woodwork is all partially stripped in the stairwell beyond. I did that part last year and have since refined my paint stripping technique with lots of practice upstairs, so finishing it off should be a snap. I apologize for the dirty floor. This is the "mud room" for the back door and it is mud season right now.



Here's the new threshold. We had discussed various options and making a wide one and just covering the gap completely seemed like the most obvious solution. Even though the server room will have its own color scheme (including off-white painted moldings) this threshold will be stained to match the stairwell instead, forming a transition.

The backbox and other stuff on the floor to the left is the little heap o things I need to finish permanently wiring in the home audio and television plug ins in the server room. I am sure you'll see that project up in here sooner or later ;-)



Here it is with the extra pieces added to complete the bottom of the door frame. It was at about this time that I totally ran out of both wood dough and spackle. What are the odds of running out of both on the same day? Added those to my list for tomorrow's outings.



Here it is with the bottom molding completed. I had to make that out of 2 other moldings as we didn't have the exact scrap here at the house. I think whoever did this server room remodel project had taken all spare materials with them cause there's nothing of any of that around here.



Here's showing the right hand side also where it'll need to be planed a little bit to match the existing basebord. This is as far as I ended up getting today, aside from having also added a small piece of molding underneath the lip of the door that I forgot to take a picture of. 

All in all I thought it turned out very nice. Can't wait to finish it off!

I did do some on the log spray station also but I will include those pics in a later post. for now, good night!