The house was completely renovated in 2006, with woodwork by Craftsman Wood Refinishing. (Photo by Bonnie Nicholls)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nBecause the house was historic, I couldn\u2019t just slap some paint on the shutters. I had to find a way to replicate their rustic appearance. So I peeled back the layers of paint to find the original finish \u2013 a semi-transparent stain \u2013 and the original distressing, which resembled what I\u2019d previously uncovered on the living room beams. I hauled the shutters around to lumber yards and paint stores to get opinions on how they were made.<\/p>\n
I bought some cedar and replicated the pieces that couldn\u2019t be saved, including dozens of hand-whittled wooden pegs. I tried a bit of everything to make the new wood look old: I burned it, chiseled it, hacked it, attacked it, scraped it and scrubbed it with a wire brush. Then I epoxied it, glued it, painted it, stained it, clamped it and screwed it back together again. I did everything but drag it behind a horse. Finally, I returned the shutters \u2013 some parts new, some parts old \u2013 to Heath, who installed them.<\/p>\n
Sometimes when I\u2019m done with a project, all I see are the mistakes. In this case, there were plenty of mistakes all right; but the question was whether they were the right mistakes, in the right place. From across the street, they looked right.<\/p>\n
New wine in old wine skins<\/b>: While I was in the middle of trying to mind-meld with Allen Hilton, I got a call from a client in a crisis. Six months earlier, I\u2019d tried to rescue his five-year-old reproduction door, which had lost its factory-applied finish due to the fact that it was stained a dark color, faced west, had panels that caught rainwater and wasn\u2019t protected by an awning or screen door.<\/p>\n
But the low-cost option (cleaning and recoating the door) hadn\u2019t worked. The old finish under the new finish wasn\u2019t sound, and both layers had peeled off.<\/p>\n
So I stripped the door, stained it a lighter color, and applied four coats of marine varnish. But I still didn\u2019t feel confident. A day after I was done, the new finish already had water spots on it. I pointed them out to the homeowner.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt hasn\u2019t rained for weeks,\u201d he said, as if the spots were my fault.<\/p>\n
I got down and crawled around, looking at it in glancing light. There were water spots on the left side of the door. \u201cMaybe dew is coming off the roof,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s been dry for weeks,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cMaybe someone has been watering that plant.\u201d There was a plant about a foot from the left side of the door. The leaves were green. And wet.<\/p>\n
The homeowner was quiet for a long time. \u201cI\u2019m not saying anyone got water on the door. But I\u2019ll be sure that it doesn\u2019t happen,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAgain,\u201d I thought. \u201cDoesn\u2019t happen again.\u201d Thought it. But didn\u2019t say it.<\/p>\n
Modern Problems:<\/b> Failure haunts my dreams: especially finish failure. That\u2019s why scientists invented paint, in particular paint with pigment mixed in. Once pre-mixed paint got into the hands of the masses in the 1920s, the party began. If they couldn\u2019t have alcohol, at least they could have enamel.<\/p>\n
By the 1940s, paint had muscled shellac off the hardware store shelves and covered most of the formerly clear-finished woodwork in America. But clear-finished wood had a last hurrah in the 1950s, when mid-century architects availed themselves of the last of the West\u2019s once-vast Redwood and Douglas fir forests in their quest to do two contradictory things: build inexpensive, standardized houses for the masses, and make those houses enlightened, artistic and stylish.<\/p>\n
Craig Ellwood was a champion of this idea. He liked to think he was using commonly available materials in creative and compelling ways, which he did. For his only San Diego house, in the College Area, he used inexpensive tongue-and-groove fir paneling for the ceiling and eaves, creating one continuous surface that pierces the glass exterior walls of the house and blends indoors and out. To emphasize that effect, Ellwood coated the ceiling and eaves with thinned paint, applied like stain with a rag.<\/p>\n
The problem is there\u2019s no way to recoat thinned, wiped-on paint without making it progressively more opaque. Eventually, it will just look like plain old gray paint. That\u2019s why, some 60 years later, all the ceilings and eaves in Ellwood\u2019s only house in San Diego need to be stripped and recoated. The question is, with what? It seems to me that there ought to be some kind of environmentally friendly, not-very-smelly stain that can be covered with a clear top coat, which in turn can be recoated whenever necessary, maintaining that unique, artistic warm-gray finish that hovers overhead like a cloud on a foggy June morning. Is that too much to ask?<\/p>\n
An old house restorer\u2019s dream:<\/b> This year\u2019s Old House Fair home tour in South Park on June 15 includes a house I helped restore. The project was managed by Charles Tiano (619-840-3791), a real estate broker and designer who bought and rehabbed the house without knowing whether he was going to live in it or sell it.<\/p>\n
Tiano was a purist about some items; the shingles, for example, which he had custom milled in Oregon and installed in the original pattern. With others, like the kitchen, he was more pragmatic.<\/p>\n
Tiano ended up putting the house on the market, and it was snapped up by Scott Lawry and John Rogers, veteran old-house restorers who were looking for a turnkey home, because the project they\u2019d just finished was massive: a 3,000-square-foot abandoned historic house in St. Louis, Mo. that was destined for the wrecking ball.<\/p>\n
Lawry and Rogers were planning to move back when Rogers retired from the Navy, but they\u2019ve grown attached to San Diego and decided to stay. To commemorate their decision, they decided to do some remodeling.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe enlarged the deck and added a built-in outdoor kitchen with a grill, refrigerator, sink and a gas fire pit,\u201d Rogers said.<\/p>\n
Any advice for fellow old-house owners?<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s always going to be something unexpected,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd it\u2019s always going to cost more than you planned.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2014Michael Good es contratista y escritor independiente. Su empresa, Craftsman Wood Refining, restaura carpinter\u00eda arquitect\u00f3nica en casas hist\u00f3ricas de San Diego. Es un San Diegan de cuarta generaci\u00f3n y vive en North Park. Puede comunicarse con \u00e9l en housecallssdun@gmail.com.<\/i><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What really goes on in the life of an Old House contractor House Calls | Michael Good When you meet a contractor at the annual South Park Old House Fair, you get a rather narrow exhibitor-booth-sized picture of who he is and what he does. But restoring historic homes isn\u2019t all glossy photographs, smiles and […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":726,"featured_media":246134,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"11555","_seopress_titles_title":"Tales from the trenches","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[11547,11551,11555],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-246133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-news","category-uptown-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/726"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246133"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246133\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/246134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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