There's Nothing More Annoying Than The Self-Satisfaction Of Someone Who Peels Paint Off A Bannister

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

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Such Is The Power That The Plumber Wields Over His Subjects

By June we were beginning to starting to really settle in at Kawama. The carpet was up. The old tenant was out. The painting was done. The shower was grouted and in working order. We unpacked most, if not all, of the boxes. The lights were working. We now had a washer and a dryer. The sink and the toilet were both installed. Things were looking good. Life was getting back to normal.

Then one day I noticed a yellow stain over the sink. Uh oh. I felt around above the sink. Water was dripping from somewhere above, soaking the cabinets and dripping into the sink. I put a pot under the drips on the kitchen counter and went to work figure out where the leak was coming from.

I thought I knew what it could be. Except when I chipped out the tile and felt around the valve of the handle I broke, it was still completely dry.

Now you might ask, as I did, what was directly above the leak. That would be our toilet. What did I not want the leak to be about? Anything involving the toilet. So I set out to find a cause of the leak that didn't involve the toilet.

For me, the calculus was simple: Something involving the toilet, or at least the part of the toilet below the floor, was above my paygrade. The rest of it maybe — maybe — I could handle. And if all that did was delay the inevitable? Then so be it.

In this way, I ensured that the tub handles were completely caulked. I made sure the window frame wasn't leaking shower water back into the house:

Along the way I learned that it is incorrect to caulk window flashing (that thin metal protecting the window frame itself) because then there is no way for water to escape out the bottom:

Incidentally, if you walk around your neighborhood and look at window flashing, you'll see that most people have their window flashing caulked. It's kind of crazy, especially if what I read on the Internet is correct.
Goober and I went on the roof to see if maybe — maybe? — the leak above the sink on the first floor was the result of a roof leak three floors up:

The leak of course was related to none of these things.

One thing made me scratch my head — the water didn't smell like waste water, which of course it would if it had been coming from the toilet waste line; after all, our shit did not not stink; we knew this. So I developed a new theory: I speculated that the leak had something to do with the humidity.

As I learned through substantial research, it wasn't really about the humidity as much as it was a matter of the dew point. See, you would see condensation on the pipes — and thus a leak (get it?) — if the dew point was above a certain point.

But then we'd have to figure out what the dew point meant exactly. Which I now know.

In short, the dew point is the temperature at which water vapor condenses. The domestic water supply in most places is about 55 degrees. So when the dew point is above 55 degrees, the pipes will condense. In the beautiful summer that happens in the Mid-Atlantic, we get high dew points often. So this being late June, I assumed that our pipes were just condensing and dripping into the kitchen.

Of course, right?

I mean, it just was so obvious that that was what was happening.

So for several days I tracked the dew point and noted when it went above or below 55 degrees, then checked to see if the leak got better or worse.

Eventually I realized that this was stupid, and just tore away at the ceiling tiles and looked up there for myself. Here was what I saw:

The first image is the original ceiling, with the waste pipe for the toilet visible through the wood planks. The second image is the lead toilet waste pipe itself, attached into the main waste line flowing down the wall into the basement and out to the sewer, with what I believe to be condensation collecting at the bottom.

My theory was vindicated! But then, if you turn your attention to the upper portion of the image at the pipe, you'll see a tear in the lead. I think the technical term for this condition is "fucked up," which is what I told the plumber when I immediately called him upon seeing this. He said he could send some guys out that Monday. I said that would be fine with me. I did not ask him how much it might cost to fix because we didn't really have a choice. Such is the power that the plumber wields over his subjects.

Posted: February 8th, 2012 | Author: Scott | Filed under: The Cult Of Domesticity | Tags: Far Too Many Homeowners Have No Idea What They've Done With Their Window Flashing, In Which We Admit That Our Shit Actually Does Stink, Kawama, The Dew Point, The Power The Plumber Wields Over His Subjects, Willfully Ignorant And Stubbornly And Intentionally So

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