House Epilogue

It’s time. I think I can finally write a follow-up on our house. It was more emotionally difficult (if not also physically) to walk out of that building than I ever imagined.

What kills me is that there are so many more stories to tell of our woes and laughs as we did the last few projects, but graduation, Christmas, and moving cross-country squashed my writing sessions, and time thieves have eroded the moments that barely now exist.

One quick comic remains:

This is the mail box that I committed to replace as soon as the weather changed that first winter we moved in. Two summers later, it still taunted me. Finally, one afternoon when the baby was asleep, I marched out to tackle it.

2011

First, I tore the crossbar off with my bare hands.

 

Then, I pushed and pulled and kicked and hammered at the post. Nothing.

“hey, choo nid sum heylp?

Yeah, our neighbor a few houses down was having his roof replaced by some youthful Mexicans. They found my attacks on the post quite humorous.

“Well…sure.”

So Alexis from Cancun (but he goes by Alex, because Alexis is a girl’s name here) dug out my mailbox post. Quite enthusiastically, I might add. I think I had to tell him four times that, no, I did not live alone, that my husband and my baby and my sister all lived with me too. But, yes, it was my house. And, no, I did not want to reuse the post, so he could slaughter it all he wanted.

Thankfully his buddies called him back before more conversation was required.

And, yes, I did install the new mailbox without any male help. Thank you.  

 Here are the final shots we took right before pulling out on our wintery adventure:

Yes, that's Eliza sleeping on the floor...

This was me, pathetically tearing up and trying to catch one more picture. 

 As hard as it was to leave our blood, sweat, tears, and so much money behind, our first rent check came in the mail today. 

It all just might have been worth it. 

Repairs

Before I could put all the boards back on, I also had to repair the soft pedal. I found two loose sticks in the piano when I opened it up. I figured these had something to do with the useless pedal, but had no clue how they worked together. It seemed simple enough, but I had to scour the internet for one 38 sec. video showing how the soft pedal works.

By the way, it’s called the “una corda” pedal, because on grand pianos it shifts the hammers so that they only strike one of the three unison wires in the upper notes and they hit the lower single-wire notes off-center, to create a softer sound. On my old upright, though, the una corda pedal actually just presses the dampeners (the ones that sit on the wires when they’re not in use, to prevent extra ringing) against the wires when they are played, so, again, they sound quieter. 

Once that was fixed, I successfully reassembled the piano (with no left-over parts, thank you!). 

Then I spent the next 7 days tuning two-hundred-and-some-odd wires. It's still weird to me that they're called wires and not strings on a piano. I found out the hard way that when you break one, it actually ruins two, as the wire is looped through a peg at the bottom and up again to make two separate sounding tones. Ooooh Mr. Anderson!

Keys

So now I have 88 keys sitting in my garage. 

I couldn’t just put them back in the piano without improving upon them a little. I found an ebony stain at Lowe's and darkened all the black keys.

Then, after much researching of contradictory information, I settled with a regiment of vinegar, then peroxide to clean and help whiten the real ivory keys. Did you know ivories need sunlight to stay white? So, hiding under the fall board for days and months is actually what yellows them. Apparently, the opposite is true for the modern plastic keys: sun fades them.

 

After a few days, I assumed everything was dry and I went to replace the keys but found the ebonies still tacky and covered with dust! I freaked out a bit, but then read can: “Rust-o-leum.” Never buy it. It’s the same brand of the pretend-stain-that’s-actually-paint that I used on our kitchen cabinets in MO. So, it was actually just paint that needed a clear coat an hour after application because it doesn’t contain a drying agent. Dumb.

I had to scrape the dust and excess paint off every single key and seal each up with a clear coat. After all that, the black didn’t really darken them. I still have a few keys with brown showing through. So frustrating. At least they’re all nice and shiny now.

Replacing 88 keys was much more time-consuming than I expected. I worked hard to keep them all in order, but separating black and white and moving them from house to garage to table to floor to piano lent itself to a little shuffling. No worries, though, the builders were helpful enough to label each key.

But, I guess they let the new guy do that. . .

Finding Felt

In the deep Olympic woods we found a house; a little house next to a big house beside an even littler shop. Inside that shop was a beautiful grand piano. The piano was missing its lid and its keys—they were gently laid off to the side. The shop’s perimeter barely enveloped the vast piano and its necessary tools and boxes, leaving just enough room for a few people to stand around on a wet night and pick out felt. 

That’s exactly what we did. I’ve been calling around to all the piano technicians in the South Sound area searching for some front punchings. The original ones in my great-grandmother’s piano were quite worn and some disintegrated during the cleaning. Not a single shop was helpful, however—they each, in turn, lectured about the necessity of a professional and how I could never possibly be able to figure out how to replace front punchings on my own. Not that I’m downplaying the value of piano technicians. I can figure out a few things, but the more I figure out the more complex pianos become! But punchings are just nickel-sized doughnuts made out of the felt. They slide on and off a stick. What can be so difficult about felt and sticks? This is like kindergarten stuff. 

So all these experts kept giving me the runaround, except for one: Anderson Pianos. A fantastic gentlemen who lives in the mossy woods and fixes pianos. He was happy to sell me some felt--and much more than that!

Mr. Anderson adored our little girl and compared pictures to his own grandson. He absolutely wouldn’t let us buy his felt without meeting her. He gave me much free advice on how to remove and replace not only the front punchings but the middle ones and the long strip in the back under the action as well. He taught us about the painstaking process of “leveling” pianos using bits of paper to raise each individual key to just the right height so the hammer hits the string with perfect strength—and how on some of the hundred-year-old pianos he finds paper punchings stamped out of old newsprints and his desire to put the pieces together to read old newspapers. And the history of piano companies and the hundreds that existed at the turn of the century and how they merged during the Depression and the war and who came out on top and who fell away. And all this he taught us in cheerful tone and eye-lit sparkle despite the late hour and despite the wet night.

So maybe the connoisseurs were correct. Maybe I am a bit in over my head. But, how grateful I am to a classy old hippie who couldn’t but help a fellow tinkerer on a quest for antique wood revival.

 

P.S. He invited me to the next piano technicians convention… 

New House New Project

Apparently I can’t stand life without a major project sullying my house.  I made a point of finding a new home in Washington that wouldn’t require TLC and to a point succeeded (it needs a few paint touchups). Despite these efforts, I’ve fallen into a project (thankfully) smaller than a house, but definitely bigger than a scrap book: my great-grandmother’s piano.

It’s been sitting at my uncle’s house for some 30 years and has hardly been touched, except by the dogs that gnawed on a few corners.

It was born in California (I’m still trying to find the exact year), moved to Wyoming, then Colorado, and has made its way back to the west coast and into my little living room. It’s at least 75 yrs. old.

 

It was a bit of a mess when we settled it in our new place. My first task was to clean the exterior, which I did with a little vinegar, olive oil, and all of my lemon essential oil. Dear mom, please send more. 

Then, after watching a hundred YouTube videos and conferencing with my dad a few times, I took it apart.

Lift lid, unscrew music holder

Loosen bolts and carefully lift action out

Order hardware and don't lose any!

Eight tiny screws to loosen the fall board

No wonder these keys weren't working

Wiggle each key out individually

Keep them in order!

And I thought the outside was dirty! So glad dad lent me his shop vac!

Bad news, though, I had the filter on wrong and it blew basically all of this dust/dirt/birdseed into my living room. Add a few days to clean up time.

Gross. I love my grandpa's birds, but they shouldn't eat and play piano at the same time!

Three generations of dust, dirt, and skin cells!

The knee board actually just snaps in

Treasure!

I took the action and the keys out to the garage to dust them off. Crazy! There are so many little parts in that action! And so many little spaces that are still filthy—there was just no way to clean them out. 

Finally, a much cleaner piano:

But a much more dusty house!

One Year, Eight Months, and an Adorable Baby Later…

…we finished the kitchen! Why we didn’t do these last few projects earlier, I have no idea. Oh, actually, we really wanted a sanitary bathroom, that’s why. Oh well. At last, the hierarchy of renovations has led us to the cabinets and the countertop, which desperately needed attention.

starting point

I actually started the cabinets months ago. Jaron and I went round and round on how to most frugally update them. Replacement was a bit out of reach, and we thought sanding and staining was impossible due to the plastic sides. So, we ended up using a Rust-Oleum Kit; a paint/stain process with WAY too many steps involved. I’ve probably spent over 30 hours on these babies alone. It didn’t help that I timed the project over Kara’s break (thinking I might squeeze some work out of her too), but we just played the whole time. Thanks Kara.

They certainly turned out more orange than I anticipated. Oops. It’s a fabulous fall combination with the green walls, but I’m not sure what to do about the other seasons. I should probably take an interior design class before I head any more color-pairing tasks.

Overall, they’re not as perfect or lovely as I was hoping they would be, but they are an improvement from original, 20-year-old worn look that we had going on.

 

Jaron also had a little break from school (hallelujah!). So, he took on the countertops. Note: be sure to have a table saw handy if you want to cut your own counters. We did not. Thus we spent an innumerate amount of time sanding the crooked edges.

We started this on Labor Day. Jaron headed the calculating task of measuring, marking, and cutting the new counters that had been sitting in our garage since July 15^th, when I bought them with my Lowe’s coupon that expired that day.

Watching Jaron calculate is actually really boring, so I got started disconnecting the pipes under the sink. I know enough to crank hard on the shut-off valves under the sink and did so to the hot, cold, and the dishwasher. Check. I took a few pictures of how it all was supposed to look before taking to unscrewing what looked to be the right rings. The cold pipe and faucet disconnected nicely from their coppers. The disposal was likewise simple, after referencing a few YouTube videos. But the blasted hot water pipe kept spraying me whenever I tried to loosen its sink connector! I cranked the hot water valve a few more times just to make sure it was in the shut-off position, which it was. But I was still soaking myself, the cupboard, and all my tools with really hot water…

So I called for the calculator.

He didn’t know what to do either, but when he completely unscrewed the pipe and it blasted everyone and everything within 10 feet, he finally ran downstairs and shut off all hot water to the house. That was fun.

O.k.  So, then our soggy pants heaved and hurked the sink out and only broke one drain seal while doing so. Yay! We Set that aside, cut through all the existing caulk, unscrewed the anchors, and popped the countertops off their mounts. Demolition’s always the best part.

Then we started the tedious job of cutting the new tops according to Jaron’s careful marking. Unfortunately our skill saw couldn’t reach the few inches where the backsplash meets the counter—that 90-degree turn? And the jigsaw wasn’t long enough to reach it either. So Jaron had to carefully cut from underneath and hope that the different lines from different saws matched up. They didn’t really—I mean, he got very close—but that’s when our hours of sanding came in.

Attempts to un-warp the mismatched seam

After cutting, we had to assemble the corner pieces while they were still in the garage, because an idiot designed cabinetry that prevented us from accessing the corner from underneath once set in place. Four or five trips to Lowe’s, sticky glue fingers, and lots of mosquito bites later, we finally carried the newly connected pieces inside and set them in place. They didn’t quite fit. The short end butted REALLY tightly up against the stove and we hadn’t even put the endcaps on yet. More sanding. What’s more, a couple of months sitting in humid and miserably hot weather warped the countertops, making our angles uneven and leaving gaps between the wall and backsplash. Thank goodness for colored caulk!

yes, that is a car jack...

At this point it was 9 o’clock at night. So, we just reinstalled the sink and called it a night. Despite what we anticipated, all things plumbing went back in their places neatly. That broken drain seal required only some plumbing putty and that was it, so we called it a day.

The next day was my favorite because we had our stove pulled out, sawdust everywhere, our kitchen drawers still sprawled out in the living room, and Jaron’s mission buddy and his five-year-old girl moved in with us. Thankfully they were understanding and quite helpful. And, they only stayed one night. It was quite the scene, though.

Jaron and he finished the sanding and filing the endcaps; did you know those things are iron-on?! The boys also installed the last little piece of countertop. On Wednesday we put our drawers and the cabinet doors back in place. Finally on Thursday, after another coat of gloss on the cabinets, caulking, painting, and a thorough ridding of all sawdust, we took lots of pictures of our fancy new kitchen.

Meanwhile, Eliza grew a few inches…actually pounds, not inches.