Brrrr.
This is the best place to be when it’s cold.
Or this (it’s good to have options). I designed and made this cat pod a few years ago, when she was a lot smaller. It’s a tight fit now, but she seems to like it that way.
Did they do this on purpose? (and if so, why?)
One sunny day there were five deer in the yard. The young ones cantered about and played, the older ones foraged. See the one all the way to the right, peering over the edge of the wall?
My 30 year old Kenmore sewing machine recently needed repairs for the first time. This was sort of a drag but it ended up leading me to H. Matthie Repairs in the South Hills and to something of a kindred spirit.
Mr. Matthie repairs sewing machines, vacuum cleaners and nothing else. I hadn’t anticipated finding this interesting but it was. His shop was a microcosm of industrial design domes a domestic history. There were old black Singers, tank-like industrial machines, shiny new white plastic Berninas. On the opposite wall, the vacuums — red Kirby uprights, various 1950s styles with swooping chrome, 80s canister vacuums that looked like R2D2 from Star Wars.
Mr. Matthie politely declined when I asked for permission to take pictures of the shop, but as we talked he brought out a couple of particularly interesting things and said I could photograph those.
This is a 1928 Singer red eye (so named for the motifs with red centers). When this was new, it was the best machine you could get. The white mold can be wiped off with a cloth. Mr. Matthie will repair, clean and oil this machine and it’ll be good as new. These are still good machines, he said, if you don’t need all the fancy stitches.
The vacuum cleaner brand most represented in the shop was Kirby. New Kirby vacuum cleaners cost about $1,200, which shows why the old ones are still in use — they’re very good machines (also very heavy).
Vacuum cleaners differ widely in shape and reflect fashions in design more than sewing machines. This 1950s Electrolux vacuum is attractive enough to leave out. It doesn’t have wheels and instead slides across the carpet on runners, like a sled. This wouldn’t work so well if you didn’t have wall-to-wall, but it looks so cool.
The items waiting for pickup included fab machines like the Rainbow, which resembles a cute space capsule and collects the vacuumed-up stuff in a water tank rather than a filter or bag. Or the 50s Kirby, with gently curved aluminum body and vinyl bag with a yellow and black graphic print.
It’ll be a while before we have something else to take to Mr. Matthie. Our vacuum cleaner is new, plastic and works fine, but you never know. Among the shapes and styles of the past were plenty of new ones — he fixes those too.
UPDATE: My sewing machine was fixed, oiled, cleaned and returned with a piece of fabric to show that he tried each of the stitches to make sure it worked.
The biggest gardening success this year was this volunteer mallow, which jumped out of its pot and took root in the tree pit next to it. As of Oct 31, it still had blooms on it. I’ll be collecting these seeds and trying them in other areas.
That vinca was a champ, too. Nice bright white and bloomed steadily for months.
Here was a mystery: one day I went out and discovered that one area of the side yard was all torn up, in a mad pattern, as if there had been some sort of frenzy. These didn’t seem to be paw marks — they were indented at an angle, and the turf was actually torn up, exposing the dirt. My best guess is that a deer encountered the yellowjackets nesting nearby.
Morning sun on my neighbor’s roof peak, with a little bird peeping out of the chimney. In the distance, the Strip and the North Side.
A deer resting in a neighboring yard. She stayed there for a few hours, enjoying a quiet safe spot. I’ve never seen a deer dozing before.
Down in the valley below, (the light areas beyond the trees) is a post-industrial corridor, with railroad tracks, roads, bridges, and bustle. There’s enough green space along here that deer can survive in the middle of the city; we see them regularly. And notice that in this photo, taken in late October, the leaves are still almost completely green.
So here we are back in the middle room on the first floor, with no ceiling and one open wall. It sat like this for a while (two years), but one winter my sister got stir-crazy up in the Virginia mountains and decided to come to Pittsburgh for a few days and put up a ceiling. This isn’t what most people choose to do when they get stir-crazy, but she really likes constructing stuff, figuring out how to do something. She’s all about getting stuff done quickly and is bored by details, finishes and research, stuff that I find interesting, so it works out well.
The plan here was, she’d come for a few days and we’d bang this out, then I’d fill in gaps, the mudding and caulking and all the little details that take a long time. First, we insulated the wall and the ceiling joist bays. This is going to be a media room with big speakers, so the ceiling got two layers of acoustic insulation, which will help keep the upstairs peaceful.
While the wall was open, it made sense to frame in a future window in the north wall. There’s an enclosed porch on the other side of that framed-in opening. It’s a depressing windowless space now, but one day it’ll be a sun porch, with an amazing view. When that happens, we could open up the wall here and put in a window — or a door (to leave the options open, the space is open to the floor).
We measured and took a photo to note the location of the opening and the wiring.
After the ceiling insulation came the blue foam, for another layer of soundproofing, then drywall. The joists aren’t standard, so just attaching full sheets of drywall would require lots of careful strapping, the ceiling version of shimming. We were limited on time and not concerned with making things absolutely perfect and my sister suggested that we put the drywall up in panels, sizes to be determined with some quick math based on the dimensions of the room. The seams would be covered with pine lattice strips for a simple, low-profile coffered effect.
The smaller panels would be much easier than wrangling full-size drywall sheets, but they were still a bit too large and heavy for us to comfortably carry up a ladder, hold and attach, so we rented a drywall lift. It’s so nice to have something held in place, and you can make small adjustments and take your time.
Then we put up drywall on the open walls, applied horizontally because it was an easier fit. It’s always an adjustment to see walls closed up after being open and messy for so long. The room looks so much better, but also smaller; although that perception fades after a few days.
I planned to fill in the open areas with drywall and blend the joint between that and the remaining areas of plaster, but convenience ended up winning and my sister put the drywall over the plaster, all the way to the corner. We’d spent a lot of time scraping that wall down over the previous months so it was a bit frustrating to see that work turn out to be unnecessary, but that happens sometimes.
After the drywall was up I started mudding and they got to work on the bookshelves.
She’s got a great quick method for built-in shelving in a enclosed space like this. In a nutshell: firmly attach the side boards to the wall, then build up the shelves, bottom-up. Put in vertical supports, put in the horizontal, attach, then put the next verticals on top of that.
In the two above photos you can see that the new ceiling between the chimney and the window is a bit wonky and not completely flat. 19th century joist beams aren’t standardized, which we knew, but the time constraints decided against getting into strapping (shimming to level a ceiling). This area was the most uneven, which wasn’t so obvious when it was just the drywall panels, but the lattice emphasized it.
I wish we’d spent a bit more time on this area to even it out a bit, but it’ll look better after primer and paint . I decided that the ceiling needed an additional detail and added the smallest, cheapest pine blocks to each intersection. I put them on a diagonal because the other way looked awful.
Oh, and we also put up simple crown molding. Not only does it make the ceiling look more finished — like a cap on the room — but it covers the gaps between the wall and the ceiling.
We hadn’t decided on a fixture yet, so we left a panel around the box. This will be covered by the medallion.
It’s much fancier than the original was, really a bit too fancy, but it looks nice.
Next: painting, trim, details.
