process – Page 2 – Old Pittsburgh House

Houses are interconnected systems sharing space, old houses ever so much more so. Years of handyman fixes and improvised retrofits make straightforward projects unexpectedly complicated.

We weren’t going to use the fireplace in the downstairs middle room; the plan was to clean it out, strip the arched iron surround, make a piece to fill in the middle to close off the firebox and make the woodwork nice.

The bottom of the firebox was mostly gone and I realized that the open end of a pipe in the space below was the water heater vent. It’s so dusty it looks like a brick here, but that pink pointer indicated the wide open end of old aluminum tubing.

This is not cool — it’s supposed to be vented up to the roof. The amount of carbon dioxide that water heaters produce is very small and the vented air is warm so it’ll rise, but … no. The fireplace couldn’t be closed up until this had been dealt with.

To vent this properly, there were a few options. One was to put a liner down the chimney, which would require the plumber getting on the roof, removing the chimney cap and threading a flexible pipe down three stories. I’d rather not do this. The cap is big and heavy and since we get hit by the wind up here, I had the contractor to attach it really, really well.

If we didn’t want to deal with the chimney, we could replace the water heater with a power vent water heater that could be vented through the basement wall — or with an electric unit that wouldn’t need venting at all.

The current water heater works okay but it’s over ten years old and would need to replaced in the next few years. Between this and the cost of dealing with the chimney cap and lining the chimney, it started to make more sense to replace the water heater now and maybe upgrade a bit (the current water heater is 30 gallons — apartment sized). We did some research and decided to get a hybrid electric water heater. It’s a more-expensive option; a regular electric water heater could be had for about $400. But here’s our reasoning: hybrids last a lot longer than conventional water heaters and they’re 2-3 times more energy efficient, so you’re supposed to make back the extra cost in a few years. We’ll see (if I remember to pull out the bills and check then).

We bought a water heater from [big box store] and had it delivered and there it sat for a few weeks, because we had other stuff to do. When I started calling around to find someone to install it, I discovered that this was all highly irregular. “You already HAVE the water heater? Hmm, let me ask someone and call you back” — then wouldn’t. Nowhere in our research had there been any indication that homeowners didn’t select and purchase their water heaters. Are you supposed to call the plumber, who orders the water heater and they arrive together — like getting a furnace? What if you want a different kind than the plumber prefers to install?

Finally I found a company that was willing to take a chance on us. They sent someone out and he confirmed that the circumstances and particulars were okay, i.e. the size of the room, since these water heaters don’t work in a small space. A week or so later the fancy new water heater was installed and I joyfully closed up the fireplace.

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

Category: process

How restoring a fireplace turns into a decision about the water heater

What I’m working on now: restoring graining