A Promise To Post

Update

Our progress since the end of January has been exciting, but my posting frequency has been abysmal. My apologies - mainly to Michael, who continues to check this website for pictures. In that vein, below is a teaser photo of the family room bank of windows, fully stripped and glowing in all of their richly-stained glory.

I've been waiting to update until I can post photos of the family room COMPLETELY finished, with pictures on the walls, crown moulding holes puttied, and the new sash hardware adorning the lattice window, but since it might be another 3 weeks until all of those little details signify the Finish Line, I'm going to switch gears and start updating this website more frequently to reflect my original intention, which was not only to keep our friends and family aware of our progress on the restoration, but also to provide some insight into the history of our house and the architectural and decorating style of the time period during which it was built. As the King said in Alice in Wonder Land, "Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop." Since I've failed to abide by this sage advice so far, let me remedy that infraction now with a little intro:

Begin at the Beginning

After the sales contract on our house was accepted by the Sellers Who Shall Not Be Named, I had 4 months' worth of idle time to twiddle my thumbs, which were itching to peel back the layers of history in the house and unearth all of the wonders that we've found since moving in (and we HAVE found wonders, which I'll do a better job of documenting in future). Anyway, I was bemused beyond measure that we had landed a stone house in the boro with some real history. How many stories had those stones witnessed since their first placement in 1930? Fortunately for me, Centre County is a friendly community in which people are actually willing to personally assist you when you call the county court house requesting old deed records, and the records are amazingly detailed, including both the names of the sellers and buyers, as well as a lat/lon description of the property and a summary of the previous sale. It became a scavenger hunt, trailing the ownership of the house back through the years, and once I'd discovered the home's lineage, I was more interested than ever to find out about the people who lived here. Who were they? What did they do? Why did they move here and why did they leave? Sometimes the answers were predictable, easy, like the families (4 of them) where a father either attended graduate school or worked as a professor at Penn State and left when new prospects arose in other locales. Other stories, like that of the original owner, Dr. Charles Dietterich, were more murky. Why did Dr. Dietterich have to buy back his own house from the State College authorities in a sheriff sale? Why did his 1941 draft card list Jessie Dietterich, his wife, as his primary contact but a newspaper article describing a car accident decades later lists his wife as Clara (Owens) Aitcheson, who lived right down the street from him on Foster Avenue around that same time period? An intra-neighborhood affair, perhaps, or just a third marriage? And why does a 1928 Mathematics Society bulletin list 526 E. Foster Avenue as the primary address of Clara's parents, Drs. Frederick and Helen Owens, when the original deed for our house is dated 1930, and the lat/lon descriptions on all subsequent property deeds clearly indicate that our house has retained its original address?

A few trips to the local county archives, a subscription to the Centre County records database, and some research with the Special Collections staff at the Penn State library helped me unearth the answers to a few of these questions, but some are still hanging in the ether, waiting to be answered when I find the time to follow-up on leads that I've gathered. In the meantime, I'll devote the next few posts to weaving together the past of our house based on newspaper articles, draft cards, yearbook photos, deeds, obituaries, and lucky internet searches.

Progress!!!

The sanding in the family room is DONE!!! FINISHED! COMPLETE!

WOOHOO!!!

AND....the painting in the master bedroom is finished as well! Touch-ups commenced tonight and, if all goes well, we might actually be sleeping in our new bed before the end of January! WOW!

(I've gotten so used to sleeping on a mattress on the floor that sleeping in anything higher than 4 inches above the ground seems daring, radical even!)

Speaking of the master bedroom.....

While stripping the windows, I called out my discoveries to Jasun as each layer of history was peeled back: "Red! This trim was painted a bright red before the white high gloss latex!" Then, "Ooooh, look at this olive green. Wow, that's pretty, almost the same shade as the color we were thinking of putting in here." And finally, the Reveal: "Oh my gosh! Jas, come look at this! This is the original paint color! It's the exact same shade as the paint color that we're using!! COOL!"

That's right! Completely by accident, we are painting the master bedroom trim the exact same shade that it was painted by the original owners sometime in the '30s. How's THAT for restoration?

Doing it Right vs. Doing it FAST

"I hate this house!"



The words hit me like a physical blow, and I felt myself stagger backwards a little under the force of them. I knew that Jas was frustrated, knew that those words had been germinating for several weeks now, lodged just inside his throat, but how could he say them? Our ship had officially entered Dangerous Waters, and I had a mutiny on my hands.



"Jas, I know you're frustrated. Seriously, I know. I'm frustrated too. This has taken a lot longer than we thought, but we signed on for this. This is what we wanted...together, right?



"Well, I guess not."



So final, those words. What could I say to that? This moment would pass, just as all of the others had. We had been doing this back-and-forth for months now. One of us would get so frustrated that we'd throw up our hands and stomp into the makeshift family room in the back of the house, desperate for a break, convinced that the dust and clutter and construction would never end. The other person's job at moments like that, whether they truly believed it or not, was to say an encouraging word, provide a hug, and then continue working, with the intention of giving the other person hope that, someday, this too would pass. Today was simply Jasun's turn to be The Frustrated One and my turn to be The Encouraging One....except that he'd said the banned phrase: "I hate this house." Ouch.



"I'm tired of camping on our mattress in the spare bedroom!" he continued. "It takes me an extra 15 minutes to get ready in the morning because my clothes are in piles on the floors of two different rooms! There is dust everywhere, and I'm sick of it!"



"But you like camping!" I said, at a loss to come up with anything better. No smile met my attempt at humor. "Go downstairs," I said, softly but firmly. "Take a break. I'll take care of this."



The final straw that had released this maelstrom was the question of the windows in the master bedroom. While I've been sanding my heart out downstairs in the family room, Jas has been painting the master bedroom. Sounds easy, yes? Except that we've chosen a scheme that requires him to paint all of the trim in the room, sometimes in two different colors, and the room has a lot of trim: baseboards, closets, bookcases, a large built-in dresser, and two very old wooden windows. During the summer, the wood in the windows expands just enough that we can barely force the windows open due to several decades' worth of caked paint globules that surround the stops. Since we're restoring this house, I wanted to strip the excess paint from the stops only, which requires taking out the windows, stripping the stops, and then painting the windows and the stops separately. This process would take longer, but ensure free-sliding windows, and a more professional-looking paint job. Jas, on the other hand, was torn. I could see the internal struggle in his face as we talked about the windows before his outburst. Of course he wanted to do this right and he wanted everything to look good, but he also just wanted a bedroom to sleep in where he didn't feel as if he was living like a vagabond. He knew the right course of action. It was just a matter of doing it, and his brain was screaming at him, "I don't want to do that! That's going to take a long time!"

(Master Bedroom "Before" Picture - pretty room, but a little cave-like, don't you think?)

We (well, I) ended up stripping the window stops, and two hours later we were laughing and joking as I scraped paint while Jasun primed and painted the windows. Inevitably, the frustration (for both of us) will continue until we finish at least one room, but we'll have the satisfaction of knowing that we took longer to do things right instead of doing things fast.

The Rule of Three

Our friend Michael made it sound like we had done something right instead of doing something monumentally stupid: "Of course you have to do it again! You haven't done it three times yet. It's the Rule of Three in action! Come on, Sara, you know this!"

Indeed.

For three months, we had stripped paint from the woodwork in our family room. We had gone to bed with the subtle perfume of toxic chemicals and walked on floors coated in fine layers of lead dust. Four weeks ago, we had sat around a can of stain like children awaiting Santa Claus. We took pictures of the paint can. We oohed and ahhed. We passed the can back and forth like we were sharing a particularly tasty dessert. Finally, the anticipation had grown too much for us to contain ourselves any longer:

IT WAS TIME TO STAIN!!!!!

We careened ahead like a kindergartener on their very first day of school: board the bus, heart thumping wildly, full of anticipation; don't look back. "Oh! It's so beautiful!" I squealed as Jasun and I applied the stain to the lattice window. "Look! It glows!"

"Ok, now what?" Jasun asked, lighthearted, so proud of the fact that we'd just slopped some stain on our newly-bare wood trim.

"Now we wait a few minutes, and then we wipe off the excess," I stated, still beaming, reading the can. "This is easy!" I crowed.

Pure hubris. Damn the gods and their vengeful natures!

5 minutes passed, and we took our rags in hand, wiping excess stain in long, even strokes, and then it happened - that curling knot of worry started to form in my stomach as I watched the new wood color appear. My smile faltered. My heart sank. The trim looked like we had just washed it in river muck.

"It's the wrong color," I whispered, hoping that if I said it softly enough, it would be less true.

"No!" Jasun refused to see the obvious. Discussions ensued: heated, defeated, and finally, as we sat on the floor of our empty family room, literally staring at the stained window, willing the color to be correct...resigned. The lattice window would have to re-sanded to remove the stain that we had just applied.

Mistake #1: Test EVERYTHING before you apply it to anything more than a 3 inch square.

So we tested, and tested, and tested again. We made so many different stain concoctions that we had to re-sand a strip of baseboard just to remove all of our "options." Finally, we had a color that we loved: a rich chestnut-style brown with just a hint of red and a few gold flecks. The lattice window had been re-sanded. We were ready to go.

Take 2:
This time, assured that we had the right color, we stained all of the trim in the room....and noticed something odd as the stain dried. It looked...blotchy, uneven, like trim that had developed a bad rash. What was going on? We consulted the can:

Use wood conditioner prior to staining if you have a soft wood like pine, fir, or ash. You do not need to use a wood conditioner on hard woods like oak.

Ok, well great! We had nothing to worry about, right? We, after all, had white oak trim. It was impossible to dent the wood with our nails, so it must be a hardwood like oak, right? RIGHT?

WRONG! After consulting a professor who specializes in wood identification, we found out that we have....antique heart pine, which is only 5% softer than oak, but...still pine.

The blotchy effect was not going to go away. The pine had accepted the stain unevenly. We needed to resand.

Mistake #2: Use a wood conditioner prior to staining pine. Heck, use a wood conditioner prior to staining anything.

...which brings us to the conversation with Michael, and our current situation - The Rule of Three! There was no reason to feel discouraged after all! Sure, my hands were vibrating from 5 months of sanding; my lungs were probably damaged from breathing in toxic paint-stripping chemicals; and the lead content in my body was clearly affecting my brain function, but Cosmic Law had taken over, and the balancing power of the Rule of Three was in effect. Suddenly, I felt calmer than I had in weeks.

If you are lucky enough to have never tackled a restoration/renovation project, and thus have never been bitten by the craving that makes you, like a crack addict, come back for more frustration, physical pain, and eventual elation, then you may not be familiar with the Rule of Three. It states, simply, that any home project will take you 3 times as long, cost 3 times as much, and be 3 times harder than you anticipated when you foolishly began it, filled with bright-eyed hope and wonder.

And so, here we are! Our timeline has doubled! Our frustration levels have tripled! And we are finally, after 5 months, nearly ready to start the staining process from scratch once again....on a very small test spot.

Next Post: Take 3!