Category: The house

Mixing my shellac sample

First, I apologize for not having yet posted interior photos. I’ve been really busy trying to keep the interior work moving while also getting some garden going. Also, it seems that every time I get the house cleaned and tidy, we mess it up again. The current clutter is for the installation of the kitchen cabinets. Anyway, I’ll have photos as soon as I come up for air.

It’s daunting to see how much wood I have to finish — floors, doors, trim, stairs. There probably is more than 2,000 square feet of wood to finish. I’ve put a good bit of time, anguish, and research into what to use. I have never liked the polyurethane finishes. It’s just a skin of plastic that doesn’t soak into or nourish the wood. After asking a number of people how floors like mine would have been finished in 1935, I came to understand that the answer was almost certainly shellac. Shellac is a natural resin made by a tropical insect. And what goes on after several coats of shellac is old-fashioned Johnson’s Paste Wax.

I ordered a sample of some “button” shellac on line from the Shellac Shack. It’s a lower-cost shellac, with a reddish color that I think will work well for pine. I started mixing the shellac tonight, and I plan to do some tests tomorrow. If I like the results, that’s what I’ll use. Premium shellac, by the way, costs about $20 a pound, and for jobs like floors two pounds of shellac would be mixed with a gallon of denatured alcohol. The shellac I’m planning to use is a grade that fine furniture makers probably would scorn. I would not be able to afford furniture-grade shellac for floors and doors.

The Wikipedia article on shellac describes the source of shellac and how it’s used. Says the article, “These modern chemicals, while some come closer than others, can never completely replicate the warm, inviting glow that shellac lends to wood. ‘Wax over shellac’ (an application of buffed-on paste wax over several coats of shellac) is often regarded as the most beautiful finish for hardwood floors.”

The gothic window in the upstairs bedroom, newly trimmed. I haven’t made a decision yet on what kind of finish to use on the floors and woodwork. Shellac, probably.

A lot’s been happening this week, and I haven’t had time to post photos. Also, the house is cluttered right now with saws, tools, ladders, and wood scraps. By Monday or Tuesday, the work should be finished on the wood trim work, as well as the stairs and balcony rails. The bathroom floors also remain to be done, though I have the materials for that. Lowe’s had a special on some marble tiles that I’ll use for the bathroom floor.

After the trim work is done, I’ll be in the home stretch. The remaining work will be installing the cabinets, the plumbing fixtures, and the electrical fixtures. Then I’ll have a huge amount of work to do finishing all that wood and painting all those walls and ceilings.

My electric service cable will be buried, but first they had to bring the line over the road with a small post below my driveway. The post was installed today. A separate crew will appear soon to dig a 175-foot trench and bury the service line below my driveway.

I was not eager to have a power post on my side of the road, but at least it’s a small post, much smaller than the posts for the main line.

One room finished — that’s a start.

I decided that, to save some money, nailing down my flooring was something I could do myself. The mitre saw seems relatively safe for an amateur, and the pneumatic nail gun really does the job. So my brother got me started on Monday. If I stay at it (not that I have any choice), I may be done in about a week.

This is white pine. I’ll give it a natural finish. I decided not to stain it. The wood finishing work is two or three weeks off.

Big piles of flooring = a long way to go.

At the plant, just finished, invoice waiting

I’ve tried to stick with honest, traditional materials for the house, inside and out. Modern building codes, of course, override some choices. For example, my exterior windows and doors are modern on the outside (high efficiency double-pane glass, aluminum clad) but traditional on the inside (unfinished pine). For my interior doors, I don’t think I could have settled for anything less than old-fashioned, solid wood, paneled doors, even though they’re humble pine.

My brother directed me to a place in East Bend (near the Yadkin River) that sells salvage paneled doors, assembled to order, at about half the cost of similar doors at the local builder’s supply companies. If the doors have flaws, I can’t see them. Anyway, I ordered my interior doors two weeks ago, and they called today to say that they’re ready. Here’s a photo of one of the smaller doors, a closet door. The other seven doors are stacked behind it.

I also ordered my flooring today. The flooring, too, is humble and honest — tongue and groove air-dried pine. I’ll have more photos soon. Mostly this week I’ve been making arrangements for the interior finish work. I’m in the home stretch.

Hammer blow: about three-quarters of a second of reverberation

Whistling test

The drywaller finished this morning. As soon as he was gone, I took the iMac down to the house and, using the Audacity recording program, did some quick acoustic tests. A hammer blow gives about three-quarters of a second of reverberation — not bad.

I’m sure I would have chosen this house plan for the looks and layout alone. But I quickly noticed the house’s acoustic possibilities, with its high ceilings, long lines of sight, and many planes for reflecting and breaking up the sound. The organ — or any musical instruments, for that matter — should sound really good in this house. However, I would not want to live in a house this acoustically live with four children, eight television sets, and three barking dogs.

Here’s a whistling test with my out-of-tune whistling. The computer (using the built-in microphone) is downstairs in the living room. I am upstairs in the radio room balcony, facing the top of the living room, about 16 feet from the microphone.

whisting-1.mp3

I planted 55 pounds of daffodils last fall. I scattered them in little clumps all around, front and back. They bloomed late, but they did well.

While the drywall crew is working, I’ve tried to catch up on some of my outdoor work, including hauling in some compost, planting more grass and clover, feeding and mulching the arbor vitae trees, and so on.

Here are the electrical boxes on the house’s side wall. The box on the right is the meter base. The big box in the middle is a transfer switch. It’s a code-compliant way of connecting the house to a generator during a power failure. The reason the box is so big, I think, is that it’s designed to transfer 200 amps under full load. As the electrician explained it to me, if a switch is closed slowly while under a 200-amp load, electrical arcing could melt the switch. So the switch is designed to open and close very quickly. When you pull the lever, it cocks a heavy spring. Then the switch release fires, and the switch opens or closes very quickly. The box on the left is a breaker box for the heat pump. Also, it’s from the box on the left where a heavy cable runs indoors to the indoor breaker box, which also is a 200-amp box.

After the drywall crew is gone (Monday?) I’ll post some interior photos. I’ve been in touch with people who’re planning to build this house (one in California, and a couple in Canada) who’d like to see more clearly what the interior looks like. The interior is hard to photograph with the lens on my camera, but I’ll do my best to do that next week.

archidave

I suspect my neighbors think I’m kidding when I say that I’m not going to mow my grass. It’s not just that I don’t want to spend the time, maintain the machines, or burn the gasoline. It’s also that I don’t want the manicured suburban look. In the above photo, gleaned off the internet, imagine how it would spoil the gothic mood of the house if it had suburban landscaping.

Of all the scary processes that have gone into building this house, I believe this is the scariest. The drywall for the second floor is brought up by a crane, through a dormer window.

The drywall contractor arrived shortly after the delivery truck. Once the drywall is all inside, the walls will start going up.