Heading into July, we were down to the last of the major items on the to-do list: Painting the cabinets, taking the tiles up on the second floor and stripping the paint off the staircase. This was the long July-August of buckling down and finishing what needed to be finished.
The previous owner of Kawama was intent on covering up every floor surface. We already talked about the carpet, for example. The man taking care of the house had told us that the owner wanted to "protect the floors." For what, I don't know, perhaps just future owners.
The other coverup method they used were those horrible self-stick vinyl tiles:
And then there was the strangest coverup of them all — the sickly orange paint on the tile in the kitchen:
Jen got a heat gun to use to take up the tiles. A heat gun is a great tool. It takes up these tiles, no problem, but it also takes off paint, which also came in handy, especially after Jen forbade me from using chemicals to strip the paint on the staircase.
Heating up the tiles and melting away the adhesive was no problem at all:
What was a problem was getting the adhesive residue off the floor afterward. I tried vegetable oil and 409 and neither of those things were working. Someone Jen knows gave us a tip to using washing soda, which is sort of like baking soda but stronger. That did work, though it also took off whatever finish was leftover:
Cleaning the floors of the adhesive was good, important work, but very tedious. I think it took about a week, though I can't really remember after all the beer I drank to break up the day. I'd walk Jen to the subway, pick up a six pack and get to work.
(I did take the day off on July 21. At one point during the day I checked weather.com and saw that it was 91 with a dew point of 74 degrees. Holy shit that was hot. I emailed Threshold in DC to tell her it was 94 there with "an excruciatingly high" dew point of 78. She confirmed that it was, in fact, very hot.)
Scrub, scrub, scrubbing was quiet, as opposed to the heat gun. When the heat gun is on, you're stuck in your head. At least when I was scrubbing I could hear the radio, which sent me on a different tangent in which I'd think about something along the lines of how the musicians on the radio weren't on their knees on the floor just then making their wrists sore and their knuckles soap-raw.
Other times I'd think of things I'd want to Google but couldn't because the clicker was downstairs and, besides, my hands were sticky with glue or wet from soap or just soapy.
After a week or so of scrubbing the floors with washing soda, here is what my pants and shoes looked like (my family has since forced me to throw away these shoes):
But the nice thing about having washing soda caked on your clothes is that they ended up pretty clean:
Then there was the staircase. I had been dreading taking the paint off the staircase, but it needed to happen, especially because once we took up the carpet there was a different color paint underneath.
The only thing with the staircase was, like I said, Jen wouldn't let me use chemical strippers on account of the fetus. So I used the heat gun instead. Even with the respirator it was still pretty stinky, and I couldn't imagine that heating up old paint — some of it perhaps lead paint, though I wasn't sure — was any better.
Once you get going with the heat gun, it's difficult to stop — both because the paint just starts peeling away and because you just want to peel back all those years of paint on the molding:
What goes through your mind while you heat up paint all day? I don't know. Stuff that makes you feel small. What people you went to school with are doing now. Whether your eighth grade English teacher was yanking your chain when she said you should write more. What Steve Albini is cooking. It goes on from there.
Eventually I found a place to stop, and settled on just the staircase.
Jen and I have a word for when things look good enough, which is "rustic." The stairs and the floors weren't perfect in the sense that they are now sanded, stained and finished (I can't even imagine that process, especially now that we've squirreled away all our stuff) but now they looked good enough:
There's something big and self-congratulatory about "peeling away." It's the kind of feeling you get when you sit through a literature segment in the second half of The News Hour, or force yourself to read the business section, or something like that. You sit down at dinner and repeat something about the Bolivia's deficit or Orhan Pamuk and just feel like you've "earned it." In same same way it's like, "I spent the last three days rescuing the bannister — they sure don't make wood like they used to!"
But just when you feel high and mighty about righting a home decor wrong (like self-stick vinyl tiles), there's all the stuff you yourself are determined to cover up. The horrible laminate on the cabinets, for one:
And the longer I looked at it, the less happy I felt about the idea of wood laminate some of the kitchen walls:
Yeah, you're into "authentic" touches? What's more authentic than sallow grey fake wood laminate?
Some things are just self-evident.
I was skeptical about whether this would work, but Jen looked it up online and found that you actually can paint laminate. So we bought the Zinsser primer they talk about and I set about taking off all the doors, pulls and hinges. I would have just replaced the hinges but do you realize how much those damn things are? Like $2 or $3 a hinge! So we spray painted them. (Pulls are a different story — we bought plain ones at IKEA for nothing.) The Zinsser stuff is nasty smelling, but it works. We then painted over the primer with some color called something like "Yellowstone" or something like that and put everything back on.
A few weeks later I looked at the fake wood laminate and realized that it had to be covered, too. It was either that or pull it down, and I didn't think it was wise to roll the dice there.
So some stuff they covered up, and some stuff we covered up. Not the best moment for transparency, I suppose, though I am happy with the results . . . the before, to refresh your memory:
Then after:
And after this stuff was done, we started to see the end of the work on Kawama.
Posted: February 12th, 2012 | Author: Scott | Filed under: The Cult Of Domesticity | Tags: An Endorsement Of Zinsser B-I-N, How To Make Laminate Look A Lot Less Shitty, Kawama, Let's Get Small, The Caustic Nature Of Washing Soda, The Dew Point, The Heat Gun, The Miracle Of Washing Soda, The Sin Of Self-Stick Vinyl Tiles
So the Inscrutable Bag Of Grunt seems to be losing his "baby hair," meaning the hair that came out with him on day one. (I keep thinking of how the characters on Up All Night were grossed out by watching a video of childbirth: "It's like hair coming out of hair!")
We now know that it's normal for a baby to lose his hair before the for-reals stuff grows in. The only thing is that it's a little unsettling to see a newborn with apparent male pattern baldness.
At first, Grunt's hair sort of looked dignified — a widow's peak, like Minor Threat-era Ian MacKaye — or maybe even Richard Nixon. Then it started to leave his head and he began looking more like Ed Harris or, say, Scott Adsit on 30 Rock.
In the last couple of days Animal's hair has dwindled to a dainty copse on the top and what seems like a small mullet in the back. I don't know that anyone has tried to do a hair style that was only the mullet, but this comes close. Jen thinks it looks like a friar's hair, but that was so three days ago.
So one of us — it doesn't matter who — took a look at this "hair" and decided that maybe we should do something about it. In other words, take Charles Barkley's advice to LeBron James to heart and just shave it. (Get shaved!)
Which all sounds well and good until one of us — it doesn't matter who — was like, "You can't shave a baby's head!" And the other one — it doesn't matter who — was like, "Why not?" And it went back and forth like this until one of us — it doesn't matter who — finally said, "Why don't you call the pediatrician and ask him if he thinks it's a good idea to shave a baby's head bald?"
That spawned a new guideline for us: Would this be something you felt comfortable asking a medical professional about? And if the answer is no, then you probably shouldn't consider doing it. It's a variation of what they tell you about posting crap online: Would that picture on Facebook of yourself shotgunning beers be something you'd want a future employer to see? You get the idea.
In our case, I think we've decided to let nature take its unfortunate course. And perhaps we might invent a new hairdo: The "Mullette" or "Bro" as the hair also basically resembles a backwards visor.
Posted: February 10th, 2012 | Author: Scott | Filed under: The Cult Of Domesticity | Tags: Charles Barkley's Hair, Ed Harris' Hair, Get Shaved!, Ian MacKaye's Hair, LeBron James' Hair, Mean Old Daddy, Mommy's Basically Been Plowing Through The Entire Broadway Video Catalog On Netflix Watch Instantly, Richard Nixon's Hair, Scott Adsit's Hair, Shit You Don't Say To A Pediatrician, The Mullette
The great thing about indoor plumbing is that it's indoors. The bad thing is that it's indoors.
At one point when I was looking up dew points for all of April, May and June I thought about it and just shook my head: Why does plumbing even need to be indoors? And, Who thought it was smart to put a toilet above a place where you prepare food?
Now if you're like me, you want answers. Why, for example, did the toilet waste line leak? Some might not care. But I was interested in avoiding further waste line disruptions, so I wanted to be prepared for the next time.
It could have been that we had upset the balance of things at Kawama. Maybe superstitions were real.
Or it could have been that I hammered away furiously at the extra lead from the waste line sticking up out of the floor so I could put in the new flange when I put in the toilet, peeling the old lead away and perhaps — perhaps (but not definitely!) — fucked up the waste line and caused it to leak.
Or — here was another idea — the lead waste line was an original, or at least an old, feature of the house and since lead is soft, over time, as the house settled, the lead line bent and broke. And since the waste line was angled down, the water collected in the line and then the pipes condensed when the dew point rose above 55 degrees, which accounted for the leaking.
I tried asking one of the guys who came to put in the new line about my theory and he kind of shrugged. Then I asked him if I put in the wax ring correctly on the toilet and he confirmed that I did. Small victories.
Anyway, it was fixed, so that was that. I could move on.
One thing they did that was odd — or at least I thought it was odd — was that when they needed a piece of cardboard to use as a bed for the cement around the toilet where they poked through the floor to install the new waste line, they just grabbed a pizza box out of the recycling. I mean, I guess it was clean:
So one lesson I took away from all this is that I now know why the previous owners added drop ceilings:
I guess waste lines poop out over the years and fuck up the ceilings.
It occurred to me that there were drop ceilings all around the house. Or more specifically, there were drop ceilings where plumbing was concerned: the kitchen, the bathroom, our bedroom (it being under the kitchen on the third floor). It's a lesson worth remembering: If you see drop ceilings, ask what's under those tiles. So yeah. That.
Cleaning up afterward, I had to retile the bathroom floor around the toilet, clear out the debris that fell (or at least as much as I could), and fix the ceiling tiles in the kitchen. While fixing the walls around the cabinets, I found where past handymen had plugged up various holes with newspapers. The pizza box suddenly made sense: grab whatever was on hand and plug up a hole.
I found two eras of newspapers. The first was a The New York Times from 2010. Actually, it was the business section from July 25, 2010, based on this article and this article. Things made sense: They must have done some work in 2010 in anticipation of selling the house. Maybe that's why the stove looked so new. It's probably when they painted the tile orange (don't ask; or, more accurately, we'll get to that, I suppose).
Then there were the other pieces of newspaper shoved into spaces into the kitchen wall — and it corresponded to what I assumed to be the age of the kitchen, at least judging by the tile. These look like they're from the 1960s, and they probably are:
The ad for the "burlesk" theater seems to be the Mayfair Theater on 235 West 46th Street; it shows up in this issue of New York Magazine from 1968. I think it's a Dean & Deluca now:
Another clue — these pages look to be real estate classifieds. One notice (on the left) talks about some Mitchell-Lama project, with the requisite honorific shoutouts to those in charge: Governor Rockefeller, Mayor Lindsay and Commissioner Gaynor. Rockefeller was governor from 1959 to 1973. Lindsay was mayor from 1966 to 1973. But James W. Gaynor was New York State Commissioner of Housing and Urban Renewal until 1969. So this is from before 1969. Again, guessing the late 1960s (especially with those ads for mid-1960s Buicks in that second image):
Which is to say, the walls hold clues: Destroy the toilet waste line and dig around, you'll find something.
Posted: February 10th, 2012 | Author: Scott | Filed under: The Cult Of Domesticity | Tags: Grabbing The Wax Ring, Kawama, New York State Commissioner of Housing and Urban Renewal James W. Gaynor, The Golden Age Of Burlesk, The Problem With Indoor Plumbing
