por Michael Bueno
Columnista SDUN

Editor’s note: Is your house speaking to you? Do you need help understanding what it’s saying? In this new column Michael Good of Craftsman Wood Refinishing will answer your questions and help you restore your vintage home.

It happens, eventually, to everyone. You find something – or perhaps it finds you. A lost puppy. A dusty picture in an antique store. A pile of parts in a box in a barn with the words “Harley-Davidson” stamped on them. Suddenly you’re like Moses on the mountain. Van Gogh at Arles. Willy E. Coyote with that anvil. You are obsessed, and the only way you are going to convince the world of the rightness of your vision is to just do it.

For me it was a house. My grandmother had just died at age 93 after a long and somewhat cantankerous life. By that point renters had occupied her house for a few years. It was a humble bungalow: three bedrooms, one moldy bath, orange shag carpet, popcorn ceilings and a pervasive odor of untrained animal that could bring tears to your eyes. My parents, eager to be rid of a house they saw as a burden, hired a Realtor and advertised an estate sale.

It’s amazing how much stuff can be crammed into a little house. We naively thought we could go through everything in a weekend. We were wrong. It occurred to me as I opened box after box, never knowing if it would contain treasure (a photo album, a family Bible, a stack of 50-year-old letters) or dross (stained dish towels), that you don’t really know someone until she’s died. As we went through my grandmother’s things, we discovered a lot about her we didn’t know – including a previously undiscovered husband (for a total of four).

As the house filled with people during the estate sale, and the mountains of stuff disappeared, a transformation took place. With a little air and light, it became clear the old place still had some life left in it. Watching everyone cart off their bounty, I realized I wanted the biggest and messiest relic of all: Grandma’s old house.

Everyone thought I was crazy. Of course, this only caused me to redouble my efforts. I found myself waking up in the morning and, instead of going to work, stripping paint for three hours. And once I was in the office, I just wanted to go home and tear into the kitchen. Or the back porch. Or strip some more paint. It wasn’t enough to restore my house – I also wanted to understand the people who had lived there, and the times in which they lived. Looking back, I see I was really trying to understand myself.

The arts and crafts movement holds an obvious appeal for someone ready to step off the 21st-century merry-go-round as I was after more than 20 years as a magazine editor. That era before World War I was the last time when it was cool to be modest in America. Everything was understated, muted, harmonious and homey. People made their own curtains and table linens. They hand-decorated their pottery and painted their own art.

Eventually, without intention, my obsession became my profession. I walked away from my magazine job, started freelancing and then took on some refinishing work for friends, family and neighbors. Pretty soon the small refinishing jobs got bigger and the editing jobs became less satisfying. I had been a construction worker before I became an editor, so I found I had gone full circle.

Today when I meet with homeowners to talk about their woodwork, they often ask me about their house – what it looked like originally, what is valuable and worth saving and whom they should hire to restore their windows or floors.

This column is my attempt to broaden that conversation. I will answer as many of your questions as I can, turn to experts when necessary and learn from you, the old-house homeowner. I’ll even visit your houses to see what you’ve got going on. The one thing I won’t do is provide step-by-step instructions on how to fix something.

As I was writing this column (or avoiding writing it – which for a writer is almost the same), I went on a ski trip with friends and family, and brought along my dog.

Apparently I underestimated the psychological strain of being locked up inside a condo all day while the humans go skiing, but my 14-year-old dog reminded me with numerous scratches on the door.

The next morning I went to the hardware store. I bought gel stain, polyurethane, cotton rags, steel wool, a drop cloth, a foam brush, a stain pad and a natural bristle brush. I’m a professional – I had a plan. But before I got very far, I realized I had forgotten the disposable gloves. While my friend Steve went back to the hardware store, I was looking under the sink for some kitchen gloves when I found an oil-varnish blend, tinted with asphaltum, called Watco. Just for the heck of it, I put some on a rag, and rubbed it on the scratches. When Steve returned, he said, “Hey, that looks pretty good. Let’s go skiing.”
And so we did. But we took the dog.

The moral of this story? There are no simple fixes in wood refinishing, or in any other form of restoration. Except when there are.

(And now I’m sure somewhere a bungalow homeowner is putting down his paper and saying, “That guy in the Uptown News said just put Watco on it!”)

I’m glad I could help.

E-mail Good at [email protected].