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?
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.
Fixing up an old house is a lot about subtracting stuff. Even if you aren’t gutting it, there are layers upon layers to remove before you can start fixing it up.
The middle room on the first floor would have originally been the dining room. It was also in the worst shape of any room in the house, and I’ve been working on it between other projects for a few years now. This is also where I fell down the deepest rabbit hole yet.
The initial plan was to roughly strip the excess paint off the woodwork and repaint it. In many areas the thick layers of latex had separated from the older paint underneath. It was easy to remove large pieces by sliding a palette knife between the separated layers. Underneath, I discovered the original graining.
Graining was a decorative painting technique used in the 19th century to make cheap woods like pine look more like mahogany, which was fancy and expensive. The graining here didn’t really represent the highest level of craft — it didn’t really make the woodwork look like mahogany — but it was interesting and I decided to try to restore it. This meant first getting off as much of the later paint as possible.
There were sections where removing the paint layers wasn’t so easy. Under thick layers of cold white gloss latex there was a thin layer of warm white paint. It could be chipped off, but that took a heinous amount of time and removed the top layer of the painted patterning. The white paint was also likely The Paint That Shall Not be Named*, to be treated with caution.
I compromised by taking the time to chip away the old white in areas where the graining was especially nice, like the mantel header. (I wore a respirator, and vacuumed frequently, natch). But in places like doorway moldings, the graining was perfunctory, little more than sponge daubing. There, the old paint was tenacious and couldn’t be removed without damaging the wood.
Rather than keep damaging the trim I was trying to restore, I covered those areas with a transparent brown ground coat, then a layer of shellac, then reproduced the wood graining details with thinned oil paint. The layering is what gives graining its depth. There will be areas where the old graining segues to something more impressionistic, but that’s okay.
Removing paint down to a particular layer takes a while and is maddeningly boring if done for too long at a time. So the graining restoration project has been underway more than a year. I’ve been going in there and chipping (sorry) away at it, sometimes for ten minutes, sometimes for hours.
Now it’s almost all exposed and prepped for the final coats.
*lead
