1880s Italianate

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Alot of housebloggers say negative things about realtors, which in my experience is entirely justified.  For instance, when we first looked at our house, we were responding to an ad that started off, "Italianate Victorian built in 1890......"

I mean, imagine buying a car and then finding out it was over a decade older than the salesman told you it was.  If anyone reading this ever decides to move to the Fingerlakes area of NY, email me and I'll tell you which CENTURY 21 um, agency he works for so you can avoid him.   

Anyway, a few days ago the rain was interfering with our housepainting so we wandered over to the historical society and looked at the file they have on our house.  There wasn't alot in it, but it had been confirmed by a PO  who sleuthed around in the library microfilms of the local paper that it had been built in 1878.    The  realtor is just lucky that we're the  deranged types who like it that our house is older than we thought.

Yankee Gutter Repair Update

Does ANY  old house repair ever turn out like you think it will?  John at the Devil Queen advised someone the other day,

3) A high threshold for frustration is helpful if not a must. Things almost never go the way they are supposed to, so be prepared. Beating your head against a wall is a perfectly acceptable coping mechanism.
4) The general consensus among Housebloggers is whatever you think your budget will be (rounding up), double it. This will be the MINIMUM that your project will cost. To date, our costs have been exactly double of what we budgeted.

While his whole post is all true, I'd like to add that your projects will take AT LEAST twice the time you think they will.

The Yankee gutter project still isn't finished.  All my worrying about the topcoat paint the other day was premature because we haven't even gotten to the point that we can paint yet.  We have learned alot, though!

The prep was serious work.  Roof tar over paint over rust is no fun to strip.  We did find another use for the Silent Paint Remover, though - it cooks tar off pretty efficiently.

Austin cooking tar.  The fumes really stink. 

Then we washed the whole thing down with a product called Marine Clean, which is some kick-ass cleaner.  It actually dissolved bits of paint that were left over and removed the tar residue.  They claim it doesn't hurt wood, which made me think it would've come in handy when we were cleaning tar off wood floors in the house last winter.  I'd test it out for everyone, but we're out of interior tar floors.  I hope.

Then the Metal Ready was pretty easy.  Just spray down the entire surface with the spray bottles they send with the product, keep it wet for 20 minutes and then rinse.  We used a garden hose, which is the ONLY advantage to doing this outside.

We let that all dry overnight and started the next morning with the POR-15.  It's alot easier to use than I thought it would be.  It goes on nice and smooth and level.  The fun started with the fiberglass. 

Resto-Motive, the company that markets POR-15 sells a fiberglass called Powermesh that we ordered to use to bridge the rusted out places in the gutter.  Clearly, the market for the Powermesh/POR-15 combination is in the old car restoration business, repairing rusted out floorpans and pickup beds.  They sell a kit for this and the only real instructions are concerning this kit.  After scrounging all over the web and reading old car forums, I cobbled enough information together to figure we could apply the fiberglass.

And we did, really.  The unforeseen problem was that we didn't know how much additional POR-15 we would need due to the fiberglass.  We had figured, based on the square footage and 2-coat requirement, that we had more than enough. 

At first, we had decided to line the entire tray portion of the gutter with fiberglass, but as soon as we started applying the POR-15 to the fiberglass (which was pressed into the initial coat of POR-15)  we realized that it was going to take ALOT of POR-15.  We decided to cut the fiberglass and apply it ony to the gaps and holes, but even so, we had only enough POR-15 to do a third coat on the fiberglass areas, which wasn't enough to completely seal it. 

Then it rained and the gutter leaked through the remaining pinholes.  The End.

Renovation Chemistry

Have you ever thought about how much time is spent in sheer research when you're renovating an old house?  I never considered how much time I'd spend on the internet trying to find answer to obscure questions like

How do you remove tar from a wood floor? How do you remove one piece of siding that's bad and replace it?  Should clapbooard be nailed top and bottom?  How many coats of paint is too much?  Do we have to go down to bare wood?  What kind of primer?  Latex over oil base?  What about oil base lead paint?  Why is the new cedar siding bleeding through the primer?  (Answer: tannins.  Who knew?  Not me!)

And on and on.  I can't imagine how people figured out this stuff before the internet.   Today, our mission is to track down some sort of paint to use as a topcoat over the Por-15 we're using on the Yankee gutters. I considered using regular exterior latex, but I think it would have a pretty short life, especially if water puddles on it as water is wont to do in gutters.  Oil-based enamel would work, but some safety nazis have apparently managed to get it outlawed, except for specialty paints.  I could use Rustoleum, but it can't be tinted, so I'd be stuck with one of their stock colors.  I considered stuff like Yacht paint, but that stuff's expensive!  Epoxy paints are expensive, too, and not available around here.  If I ordered it online, I couldn't be sure the color would be right, and it would be overkill besides, since all I need is a colored topcoat that resists water (i.e. not latex).  Anyway, we're off to find something because I want it on hand tomorrow.

For anyone who might consider applying POR-15 in the future, here's the deal.  It dries to a rock hard,  non-porous, slick surface.  Rock hard, non-porous, slick surfaces are not known for being easy-to-paint surfaces.  But!  If you paint the POR-15 with any topcoat before it cures it will actually bond to the topcoat.  If you allow the POR-15 to cure before topcoating it you have to (according to the guy we got on the phone from POR-15 World Headquarters) "scuff it up" before topcoating.  They recommend wetsanding with 200+ grit. 

Since most people use POR-15 on things like cars in nice garages with amenities like roofs on them, the process of applying POR-15 in the sequences recommended is manageable.   We're doing this  on the roof, so the most important element - dry weather long enough to do all the steps - is a challenge.

Still, I'd like to eliminate the sanding step, so I'm shooting for doing the whole sequence.  The sequence is:

• Marine clean  - Industrial strength degreaser/cleaner.  Wash down all surfaces to be coated  and let dry.
• Metal Ready - etches metal,  leaves a zinc phosphate coating to insure chemical bonding of paint and metal.  Apply, rinse, dry.
• Por-15 - 2 coats.  1st coat over fiberglass sheets to patch holes.  2nd coat goes on after 1st coat is tacky - about 2-4 hours depending on the humidity.
• Topcoat - goes on after 2nd coat of POR-15 is tacky and before it cures.

It's an ambitious project and undoubtedly there will be complications I haven't even considered. I think I'll break the gutters into sections so if it looks like I won't get it all done, I can have some reasonable place to stop.  The forecast calls for sunny weather on Tuesday and Wednesday.  Wish us luck!

Old trees are for the birds

One of my favorite things about living in an old house is that it is surrounded by old trees.  I just counted 19 trees in our backyard alone.

There are:

3 Norway spruce
4 sugar maples
7 Scotch pines
1 white ash
2 black walnuts
1 Pagoda dogwood
1 American hornbeam

  We have a great backyard for watching birds as a result.    I've always hung hummingbird feeders in the summer, but now that we have a monstrous Norway spruce in the middle of our backyard, I branched out (!) into feeding many different kinds of birds. 

One of the most fun birdfeeders is a peanut butter log, which is simply a branch off a gnarly old lilac with holes drilled in it.  I stuff the holes with a peanut butter/lard/cornmeal/nut mixture.  This attracts a steady stream of chickadees, Carolina wrens, tufted titmice, white breasted nuthatches, and woodpeckers.

Here are two peanut butter log customers that cooperatively posed for pictures:

Hairy Woodpecker

Downy Woodpecker

You'd think that people who live in wood houses shouldn't attract woodpeckers, but the only creatures that have ever tried to eat this house are carpenter ants, termites and squirrels.

Stripping in the gutter

You know how any old house project is like opening a can of worms and in that can of worms you find another can of worms and it goes on and on, like Russian nesting dolls?  So, the inevitable decision is where to stop. 

Step one in the Yankee gutter project was simple.  Remove the tar that had  been glopped on over the rusting metal for decades.  OK, so that's not really simple since removing roofing tar is a hellish job.  But guess what's under the tar?  Everyone's favorite - layers and layers of old paint. 

A good thing about finding paint under there is that it solved one dilemma I'd been mulling over since deciding to try the POR-15 rehab.  Por-15 needs a UV blocking topcoat, so what should the topcoat look like?  Black, like tar?  Metallic?   Now I know that the gutters were originally painted with trim colors that matched the house.  How cool will that look?  And, the bottom color, the original guttter color is almost a match for the red accent color I'm already using on the house!  I think it's going to look great. 

Even though the stripping job is disgusting, smelly, dirty and can only be done while my upper body is hanging upside down, half  off the flat roof above the gutter,  I entertain myself while doing it by appreciating the original construction of the gutters as a design element in the architechture of the house.  For example, look at this corner:

The metal of the gutter goes up the piece of trim on the right and is hammered to fit the molding shapes.   it also goes up the wall where the siding is and the siding is cut to fit over it and functions as a counterflashing.  Just under that ugly white drip edge (which I'd like to get rid of, but that's a can of worms I won't open for now) is a beefy piece of round wood molding.   I'm amazed by the level of finish and quality of workmanship up in this rarely seen corner of the house.  Which, until yesterday was wearing about ten pounds of roof tar slopped onto the siding, covering this all up.

I also pass the time by wondering who first stopped maintaining these gutters and how it happened.  Did the paint build up to the point that stripping was required to stop it from cracking and peeling and thus allowing water to rust the metal?  Or did someone just forget about the gutters and the paint failed from neglect?  Maybe someone couldn't afford to hire a gutter repair guy at some point? 

Anyway, even though this is a terrible job, I'm anxious to see the result.  Here's what the gutter is looking like in the one area where I've used paint stripper and steel wool after heat-gunning it down as far as I could:

I hope I look that good when I'm a hundred and twenty five.