Epic Kitchen Door Restoration Project

This past weekend, I finally finished a project that has been no less than 4 years and 3 months in the making: the restoration of our kitchen door and door jamb.  Here's a photo of what it looked like in 2005 when I was in the process of buying our house.  Notice that all the walls in the entire house were painted that weird brown.  And all the original woodwork was buried under several coats of paint.

In 2010, I pulled the door out, took it downstairs to the basement, and started working on the door frame.   You can see I'd re-painted the hallway by then.  I still haven't gotten around to replacing the dark brown plywood cabinets on the right side of these pictures.

In the early days, I didn't have my saw horses built, so I was using my old tablesaw for a work bench.

With the paint removed, I found that the spot for the bottom hinge was completely splintering out.  I screwed some backer wood behind the good wood, and created an oak patch for the hole.  I later plugged the screw holes with oak plugs.

I didn't take any photos of the main door-stripping process.  Cindy did most of the early work with a heat gun and scrapers.  A few of the window panes were cracked in the process, and Cindy felt so badly about it, she basically stopped working on the door, and it sat in the basement for a couple of years.  I built some sawhorses in 2013, and I found them to be perfect for the kitchen door, so I started working on it when it was too rainy or hot for working on the green roof.

I removed the window panes and discovered that the wood around the windows was splintered and too weak to keep.

At first, I hoped to just replace what was too weak to keep.  I couldn't get any kind of router plane (electric or otherwise) in there to make channels for new dividers, so I hand chiseled them by giving my chisel a couple of taps to raise a chip of wood, then moving down the line about 1/16" and doing it again.  Once you've got a bunch of wood chips standing up in the channel, you can go back through, scrape them off, and smooth the bottom of the channel.

Once I'd done all of them, I milled some oak and cut some ship-lap joints for the intersections and glued them in place.

In the photo below, you can just barely see that there was a long strip of light, tight-grained wood along the edge of the door that we uncovered when we stripped all the paint off.  At some point, someone had tacked a long wedge of douglas fir (or some such stuff) along the whole length of the door.  I don't know if the original edge was damaged, or if the house long ago settled and it no longer fit the jamb properly, but because I had no intention of re-painting the door, I needed to replace that wood with something that looked more appropriate.  The trouble is, I wasn't 100% sure the door was oak, and I wasn't 100% sure how to go about replacing that strip properly.

I thought about and procrastinated about that problem for several months while I turned my attention to scraping away the burn marks left behind from Cindy's early experience with the heat gun (another reason why she shied away from continuing to work on the door).

One day, I realized I could clamp a straight edge to the door, pull the offending wedge of wood off the edge, route a clean edge along the length of the door (using the straight edge), nail on a replacement strip of the secondary wood (most doors are actually made of two different types of wood - a cheap one on the inside, and a thick veneer of the good stuff on the outside), and then glue on a strip of primary wood to bring the door back to it's proper width.

There was a good chance the door was oak, but when I started trying to find some oak that matched the door's grain patterns, I couldn't find a match.  So I began investigating American Chestnut wood, which I had always sort of suspected might have been what our woodwork was made out of when I wasn't thinking it was oak.  The American Chestnut tree used to be the most prevalent tree in our North American forests.  But it has been nearly extincted by a blight.  It is essentially impossible for any remaining American Chestnut trees to grow large enough to reproduce or to be suitable for lumber, so the only way to get American Chestnut lumber is through salvage dealers.  After a lot of searching, I found a company in Massachusetts that had a few thin boards of the furniture-grade quality I needed in order to be able to patch my door.

This is a photo of the secondary wood strip attached to the door with the American Chestnut wood glued on for the final "show" edge.

After the glue dried on the above edge pieces, I planed the edge flush with the interior strip of wood and began gluing on the front and back veneers.

Then I clamped the door to my work table and planed the face veneer flush with the edge veneer.  By the way, that antique coffin style plane is dreamy.

It's around this time when I figured out I can wake up early and get some shop time in before my day job, so this project really started to move along much faster.  It took me about 4 years and 2 months to get to this point.  The rest only took about 4 more weeks!

Then I figured out I could use my saw horses as an elegant way of holding the door up while I worked on patching the bad hinge mortises and filling the old screw holes with pegs.

The original screws had probably started pulling out of their holes, so someone moved the hinges to fresh wood at the top and bottom of the door.  That's why there was a second hinge mortise to patch.

One side of the door was originally stained a very dark color.  Here's the stain getting scraped off.

I had left the new edge on the door an extra 3/16" wider than the original, so I brought the door up to the kitchen to see how much of that wood I needed to shave off.  But it fit just the way it was!

You'll also notice that my new American Chestnut wood is awfully bright compared to the original stuff.  Although I didn't take any pictures of it, after I had the door back down to the workshop, I did some experiments with wood dye and made the new wood match the old a bit better.  I was talking to Cindy about making it perfect, and she mentioned that she liked being able to see it a little bit - it sort of tells the history of the door.  In later pictures (below), you can still see the patch, but it's blended in somewhat - just the way I left it.

The light in this photo below is wonky, but you can see that the bottom panel of the door was cracked.  I had been debating about whether to try to glue the panel back together, and after seeing the light stream through, I decided I had to give it a shot.

First, I gently pulled the molding out from around the panel.  I broke one piece in the process, but it glued back together pretty seamlessly.

I put blue tape on either side of the crack to keep the glue squeeze out from making a mess of the wood.  The panel was tucked under the veneer on the side rails of the door on both sides, so it was impossible to take out without breaking.  I decided to thread the end of a ratchet strap around the panel and tie it tight for my make-shift clamp.

I couldn't wait to see how the crack looked after I took the blue tape off, so I flipped the door over for a look.  It's not perfect, but it's not bad either.  The glue wasn't completely dry yet, so that strap was still on there.

Here's my mortise for the lock.

And finally, I turned my attention back to the windows.  I cut new panes of glass to replace all the broken ones (I broke a few myself too - it wasn't all Cindy's fault).  I have collected a bunch of old windows off the street from time to time, so I have a good stock of old glass lying around.  It took a long time to clean it up, but I love that it's a bit scratched and has waves and bubbles in it.

In this picture I'd milled a bunch of sticks out of more of the American Chestnut wood to hold the glass panes in place.

All the sticks were hand mitered to fit.

See?

Then I started shaping them by hand.

Once they were all done, I clamped and nailed them into place.

I finished the door with two coats of a clear, satin water-based polyurethane finish.  That's blue tape to protect the glass from getting a bunch of finish on it.  I was very excited to install the door back in the kitchen, but my first attempt didn't quite work.  You can't really tell from the photo, but the door didn't close all the way.

I had to mortise the lower hinge deeper into the door jamb.

And I had to re-patch and re-install the upper hinge on the door.

I really love those saw horses.  And, yup, that's our kitchen floor.  It was pretty much worn out when we bought the house, and I still haven't found the time to replace it.

The hinge adjustments worked!

I'm particularly proud of how the new wood to keep the windows in place turned out.  And there's Cindy's silhouette reflected in the window.  She was making us eggs and lox.

Man, I can't tell you how nice it is to have that ding-dang kitchen door back in the kitchen where it belongs.  Wow.

The Arnold Cabin Project Part 2: Planning

Hi there!  Cindy and I are getting ready to fly to California for two weeks to work on the Arnold Cabin.   If you missed Part 1 of the Arnold Cabin Project, click the link to read all about it.

 Now, before all you mashers and thieves out there in Internet Land get excited about pilfering our television while we're out of town, settle down.  The upstairs tenants will still be home, and we have additional people cat sitting and looking after the green roof.

With the home front in good hands, I'm getting nerdy-excited about our trip.

Here's the plan:  We're going to fly into LAX, rent a car, drive up and spend a night visiting Cindy's twin sister, Jodi in Lancaster.  We can't wait to see the school where she teaches and the new house where she lives. The next day, we're going to drive a bit further up and spend the night visiting Daron and his wife Marianne in California City.  Daron is one of my three fathers, and if you don't know what I mean when I say that, check out this previous blog post: Three Fathers. One Me.  Cindy hasn't met Daron and Marianne yet, and I'm very excited to introduce them!  The following day, we'll head up to Carmel Valley and settle into our housing at Hastings Natural History Reservation.

The Barn at Hastings

I spent this past Thursday night, and all day Friday and Sunday researching metal roofing systems and suppliers for the cabin.  I think I found the right thing - corrugated sheet metal.  It'll stop the rain, last a long time, give the cabin a few more minutes of time if a wildfire comes through, and it'll be in keeping with the style of the cabin.  I have the heart of a loyal restorationist and preservationist, so I really thought hard before moving away from a shingled roof (which is what is currently on the cabin), but I've seen photos of other family cabins with sheet metal on them, so I think my ancestors would approve.

Another thing to consider is the delicate nature of the land and the fact that it's used for natural history research.  Most metal roofing systems these days, it seems, come either coated in paint or a polyvinyl fluoride stuff.  I didn't want to risk all that paint cracking off or the PVCF chemicals leeching or peeling off the roof and getting into the environment over time.  So I chose a product that's as safe and environmentally inert as I could find: 7/8" corrugated sheet metal coated in "galvalume".

From the manufacturer's web site:

The Living Building Challenge (LBC) certification program, administered by the International Living Future Institute, takes a broad view of sustainability and embraces the philosophy of a restorative future by looking at a building’s performance over time.  In fact, certification is not granted until the building has been occupied and its performance documented for one year.

The Institute’s Declare Label is an ingredients-based eco-label around the Red List of “chemicals of concern” that have human health and toxicity impacts.  Declare aims to provide transparency and open communication by allowing manufacturers to voluntarily share their product sources, materials and manufacturing locations.

Metal Sales™ is the first metal panel manufacturer to be included in the rigorous and exclusive Declare™ program. Metal Sales has fully disclosed all of the ingredients in the Acrylic Coated Galvalume® roof and wall panels through Declare, and they are designated as being Red List Free on the Declare Label. 

For more information, please visit www.declareproducts.com

Are you still with me?  I know.  Corporate writing is snoozeville.  I could hardly get through that stuff myself, but I googled around, and it doesn't seem like greenwashing.  Here's hoping I'm making a good choice!

Since I've never built a metal roof, I had a lot of questions in my mind about how to deal with the corners, the roof ridge, the line along the roof where there's a change in slope (which I now know is called a "pitch break"), how the flashing and the roofing panels go together, how to deal with the little gaps under the corrugation, how to cut corrugated sheet metal... 

The internet is a marvel and a wealth of free education if you take the time to poke around and always verify things across multiple sources.  It seems us Americans cut sheet metal with power tools - nibblers and grinders.  In the Phillippines, Australia, and New Zealand, they just snip a nick in the panels and rip them by hand.  Since we won't have electricity (or water, for that matter) at the cabin, I'm excited to give the snip-and-rip method a try.

Well, the metal manufacturer had a bunch of installation diagrams and stuff on their web site, so I downloaded and read almost all of them.  If anyone ever wanted to prove that I'm not normal, they need only point out that I really loved spending three days reading about how metal roofs go together.  

But, before I could order the roofing materials, I had to know the pitch angles of the roof.  There are 3 roof sections on this cabin.  Clearly, the original 12'x21' cabin got too small for my two great-great-grand parents and their 5 children, so they added a section onto one side to make a 21' square cabin.  The new addition - let's call it the West wing - created a second pitch angle.  I took some rudimentary measurements of the cabin when we were out in July of 2013, but there were a couple of critical measurements I didn't think to take.  In order to find the slopes of the roof, I had to trace them off photographs I had taken.  But then I wanted to double check my tracings, so I ended up making a model of the cabin in SketchUp and matching some photos (taken on two different days) to my measurements.  If I did the photo-matching correctly, my measurements were pretty close.  If I didn't, I hope my metal order included more (rather than less) than I'll need - there's a week's lead time for orders, and we'll have to drive to Watsonville for the pickup! 

Arnold Cabin in SketchUp

Arnold Cabin in real life - July 2013

While I think the cabin is pretty square, it's clear from matching the model to the photos that the walls aren't perfectly plumb.  For a roof, square is pretty important so your eaves and gables - the parts that overhang the walls - aren't all crooked.  I'm hoping plumb won't mess me up too much, since I won't have time to starting fiddling with the cabin's foundation.  Someone else worked on that back in (I'm guessing) the '80's, around the last time the roof was replaced.  Want a picture of the foundation?  I'm sure you do:

Family lore has it that the boys slept down here - under the floor of the cabin.  The girls, I gather, slept up in the West wing.

And while I'm trying to impress you with this little cabin, here's a shot of the interior.  That's the front door on the left.  I'm guessing this would have been the living room:

Here's what the ceiling in that room looks like - just shingles on purlins on rafters.  Like my nifty new roofing lingo?  You can see the spot where the wood stove chimney used to be.

And last-but-not-least-ly, this is the West wing with the back door.

So, the plan is to strip off the shingles, sweep out the wood rat poop, nail tin over the rat and wood pecker holes, put the metal roofing system on the house, and replace the missing redwood batons and a couple of broken floorboards.  

Speaking of redwood, I found a guy who salvages old growth redwood logs down in Big Sur.  He's going to be our redwood supplier.  Here's his web site: http://bigsuroldgrowth.com/

Oh, and if there's time, we'll replace the broken window panes and re-glaze the rest.  My Aunt Trish is flying in from Phoenix, my Aunt Lynda is coming down from San Francisco, and a handful of cousins will gather at Hastings for a little family reunion and visit to the cabin on our last weekend.  And for our last night, we'll be heading up to San Francisco to take Lynda home and have a nice visit with my cousin Robert.

I'm looking forward to a great trip.  New roof or bust!!

Roof Railing Update - July 2014

This summer, I've been working on installing the wooden handrail along the tops of the steel railings I made for the green roof.  It's been semi-slow going, though, because my attention has been pretty divided between getting soil and fabric pots set up with vegetables for the growing season, installing drip irrigation for all the container plants, dealing with the plumbing and washing machine issues we've had (more plumbing is in my future for this weekend, in fact - there's a water hammer and a shower faucet leak to solve), and babysitting our godson, Axel.

Oh, and I had a good meeting with a roofing guy about the parapet wall and roof hatch leak problems.  He happens to be a Certified Green Roof Professional in addition to being an experienced roofer, and I had a great time chatting with him.  Here's hoping all of that works out.  I'll give you his name if it does.

But back to the railing project!  As I wrote on the PHL page describing how I made the roof railings (found here or on the left hand side of the PHL web site), I bought a bunch of lumber reclaimed from the rubble of the Rockaway Beach Boardwalk after Super Storm Sandy by Sawkill Lumber.  It's a mix of tropical hardwood species that do very well outdoors in the elements, so I won't have to worry about replacing it any time soon.

I started in April.  The first step was to pull all of the old boardwalk nails out of the lumber.  Alan from Sawkill told me that the "P" stamped on the heads of each nail stands for the NYC Parks Department.

Then, I had to work out the angle of the miters for the ends of the boards.  I laid pieces out on the railing tops and marked the intersections where the boards meet to find the angles. 

For cutting the miters, I could choose between two evils: climbing up and down the ladder and stairs between the basement and roof as I refined the fit of each piece, or I could use a hand saw.  I chose the hand saw for most pieces and went downstairs to my electric compound miter saw for the cuts that needed to be done at precise-yet-unknown compound angles.  That reminds me, I need to learn how to sharpen my handsaws.

And here are the first two pieces laid out.

As I worked my way along the railing, I discovered one spot in particular where one of the boards is sloping into the corner, and one is more or less level.  That's a problem I'll have to figure out how to solve later.  

And here's one of the uprights with the short boards roughed in. 

Now I'm starting to see how the finished railing is going to look.

 And a couple of wide shots of the whole back railing.  FYI - I still haven't started on the front.

By the way, I attached the wood with self-tapping screws from the hardware store.  I drilled holes through the steel slightly wider than the screws, and I ended up needing to drill pilot holes up through the railing lumber, because the self-tapping screws couldn't handle the hardwood.  The whole thing was rather finicky and took longer than I had hoped.  But it's nice to see the complete form of the steel and wood railing together for the first time.

I bought an Arbortech Turboplane for my grinder to do the shaping.  I had been concerned it would dull quickly with this tropical hardwood, but I wrote to the manufacturer and they pointed me to a youtube video of a guy grinding epoxy off a concrete floor without the blade getting dull, so I gave the Turboplane a try.  It worked very well.  I discovered the undersides of the boards and the corners were particularly difficult to shape without getting a lot of chipping and tear-out, so I'm doing a certain amount of shaping with a rasp by hand.  Here are some shots of what I did initially:

I was feeling pretty good about how things were going until I went up to the roof in May and discovered that the screws had snapped on some of the smaller pieces.  We had had some rain, so the best I can figure is that the wood expanded and sheered off the screws.  BUMMER!

I mail-ordered some stainless steel lag screws and spent a couple of days in June taking everything apart and replacing all the initial screws with the lag screws.  All of the broken ones had to be extracted from the wood.  I tried drilling them out, but it didn't work (the screws were too hard to be drilled through), so I stumbled upon this method.  First, chip out some wood around the screw.

Then, grab the end with vice grips and back it out of the hole.

After doing that for all the broken screws, and re-drilling all the holes in the steel and the pilot holes in the wood, I realized I should take the opportunity to do the initial power-shaping on all the pieces before I screwed them back down (to prevent the tear-out on the corners I had experienced back in April).  So, I held the pieces to the top of the railing with clamps and shaped the edges before lag screwing them onto the railing.  Here's the finished product.

After seeing this picture, I decided that's the best place I've found for the home-made digital antenna, so I've since gone up and secured it in place and run the coaxial cable in such a way that it is hardly visible.  After this one dies of rust, I think I'll make one that looks more integral to the fence - like a bug, but hopefully not in a cheezy way.

I've still got the hand-shaping and sanding to do on this railing, and of course, I still have to do the whole front railing, but I'm pretty pleased with how it's turning out so far.  What do you think?

P.S. Happy Birthday to Axel, who turned 1 year old last Sunday.  Cindy and I went to his party to celebrate.  Here he is with his mom and a fiendish face full of ice cream cake and zeppole (or "fried dough" for you non-Italians):