The Hallway Project, Walls

If I look for it, I see the effects of old age throughout the house. Here's a shot of the hallway wall, where a section of the wall expanded and cracked because of moisture from above--it's just inches away from the attic fan opening, and we've had some leaks in the area.

I became intimately familiar with these walls when demolishing the guest bathroom. Unlike the walls of today, which are made from a chalky material, this wallboard from 1924 is made up of fibers and a thin plaster shell, so it expands and cracks when it gets wet. No problem. I've pulled down this entire section am replacing it.

Another thing I've wondered about is this view of daylight from the attic fan opening. In 1924 these louvers would have been opened most of the summer, and the gigantic fan above would pull air from the house. So these cracks would have been no big deal. I'm going to seal the opening.

I've tried the fan in the summer and it is impressive, like watching a small plane get ready to take off, but nothing can take the heat out of a Florida summer. Thinking back to life in 1924, this fan would have been indispensable if, in fact, anyone were here, but chances are that no one actually lived here in the summer--they would have arrived in the fall from somewhere up north. They would have marched up the stairs, first thing, and turned on the attic fan.

Another item on my hallway project is the bathroom door, which is in sad shape. It has been neglected over the years, poorly painted, pitifully primed, dinged and scraped. I'm going to give it a good restoration. All these things can be fixed.

What happens with old age? An opportunity to be young again.

Fluid Dynamics, Viscous Resistance

Water now flows freely from the well. It bubbles and froths and splashes, streaming over in long sheets and ribbons of water that look clean enough to drink, and it has doing this for over two days, with no signing of relenting. Mystery solved.

After blaming everything else--the pump, the pump's o-ring, the pipe, etc.--I finally resolved that the water itself was at fault. And I was right.

Yes, I was right, but only if the stuff that was at the bottom of the well could be called water, because it was as thick as corn syrup and as black as oil. The pump was trying to push clear water into that thick soup and was meeting with sufficient resistance to slow it down.

The well works like this: it's about 6 feet deep; 3 feet above ground and 3 below, which makes it the same depth as the lower pond--and this makes sense, because the pump pulls water from the lower pond and sends it to the bottom of the well. The white pipe in the picture is the water pipe. The black one is the hose from the shop-vac I used to suck out the goop.

There's a rack suspended about 1.5 feet about the bottom, and on the rack is a filter, and on top of the filter are several bags of lava rocks--what seems like tons of lava rocks--and these enable a chemical process to take place, purifying the water.

Cleaning out the well is a back-breaking, nasty job. At least the stuff doesn't smell too bad. And I'm guessing it is good fertilizer, so I've spread it all over the yard.

It's only taken me eight years to figure this out...

Fluid Dynamics and Superstition

As Alice in Wonderland discovered, sometimes it helps to think backwards, especially when it comes to fluid dynamics. I admit that I've been confused about the pond and pump since we've moved in. Sometimes the water flows and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it quits altogether and then starts again hours later. Or it never starts again. To make it work again I go through a little ritual--I might as well be shaking chicken bones and chanting, but it works.

At the center of this mystery is a water pump that pulls (or pushes) water from the pond into the well where it bubbles to the top and flows over into the upper pond, then gravity pulls it to the lower pond, and finally back to the pump.

The water travels from right to left in this picture. The leaf skimmer is on the right and the actual pump is on the left.

My latest suspicion is that a few months ago one of my little fish somehow swam into the 1-inch pipe that goes to the pump and it got stuck and, little-by-little, other debris has piled up, like cholesterol in an artery, and now the water can barely get through. I got out my sewer snake (a long coiled wire) to see if I could sense the obstruction. Nothing. Even so, the theory was fixed into my brain. How could I dislodge that minnow?

I got it! Why not shove a garden hose into the pipe and turn it on full blast? Then I could just open the leaf catcher over and see if water comes out. I did, and of course the hose water just flowed out. There was no obstruction. Normally this sort of news would be encouraging, but it did not bring me closer to the truth.

I closed the leaf catcher and turned on the pump, with the water hose still going. I could sense a great rumbling the well, which is over 6 feet deep and full of lava rock (in plastic garment bags, so I can get them out). It was like a great volcano threatening to explode. Then it let loose. Water rushed to the top and over the edge.

I turned off the hose and the water continued to flow at a very fast rate. Suspicious. And this continued for hours until it went back to its old ways. More suspicious.

It was time to think backwards. What if the problem is at the bottom of the well. Maybe it is so full of goop that it slowly shuts off the flow?

I'm cleaning it today, and it is a messy, messy job.

To Santa Fe and Back

We just returned from our annual pilgrimage to Santa Fe, chosen once again because we love the food and scenery, with mountains and high desert and green and red chilies on every plate of food, three big meals a day until we couldn't eat another bite.

One goal was to find some ideas for our fence, which Cheryl does not like all, saying that it looks like an English country garden fence and not at all appropriate in its proximity to our house, which though wrapped in stucco is still very different from the typical Santa Fe house with its rounded corners and beams, but I was hopeful to find some ideas because there are countless stucco walls in Santa Fe.

Finally I saw something that made sense, a way to create a fence gate that recesses into an alcove and is covered with the same barrel roof tiles as the main portion of our roof, so as to create a sense of continuity and ease Cheryl's discomfort.

And for the gate I got an idea from the store front and its nice geometric pattern that would be effective on a gate door, I think.

Details to come.

Tea and Good Fortune

Sometimes fate and luck intersect at just the right moment, just when you are actually looking for it, a thing that points to destiny, guardian angels, divine intervention or maybe just to a vague sense that something supernatural has just occurred and, this time, for the good, like winning the lottery or sinking a hole-in-one.

Normally I agonize over these projects, and I suppose I get an odd pleasure in doing so because it allows me to resolve my many doubts: Is it too big, too small, too dark, too light, strong enough? Will it fall over, blow over, explode, fade, crack, decay, burn up? Am I really a hack who has no business doing this stuff? (OK, I'm pretty sure about the last one.)

So with the pagoda tea-house project, I could see months and months of this, working through all of the details, which is OK but a little tiresome with such a big project. I couldn't even find a design to start with, a picture, of what I wanted to do.

So this morning I gave it another shot and went browsing for designs. I'd done these searches several times already over the past few weeks, but nothing had popped up. Then an entry on Google caught my eye. I clicked and there it was--exactly what I had pictured in my mind. Better.

I showed it to Cheryl and she agreed that it was perfect. A miracle, to find something that Cheryl and I immediately agree upon. Haley's comet comes by more often.

But there's more. I scrolled down the page. This site would sell the detailed blueprints for the pagoda. Amazing! I'd found the perfect design and the plans.

How cool is that.

Patina

Looking ahead a few weeks, after we return from our vacation, at a time when I assume that I'll be rested and ready to start a new project--no, not the big Pagoda project in the yard, but the minor and deceptively simple job of fixing the cracks in the hallway walls and getting the surface textures right, and then replacing the damaged floor boards in the hallway and my office.

The previous owners just smeared wood putty into the damaged areas of the floor, something that lasted for a while. But who really gets down on their hands and knees to inspect a floor when buying a house? The floor in the kitchen was horrible, and the owner was offended when I pointed this out, but by the look on Cheryl's face I knew that she was in love with the house and would be crushed to not get it, so here we are.

Notice how the wood putty has crumbled to dust in one sections while a little of it still remains to the right, a sign of some severe termite damage. These boards must go. I have plenty of replacement boards in the garage. But here's where the tricky part comes in. I want to keep the general patina of the floor, that look of character that comes only with time, not unlike the charming picture I see in the mirror, that sea of countless defects and cruel jokes, not that I care, but at least I can do something about the floor.

So I'm researching once again, this time to find the best approach for refinishing the floors while keeping the patina and blending in some new boards. Vacation first.