A Visit to the Scrap Yard

I would like to state for the record that I looked cute yesterday. Navy slacks, navy blouse, black high-heeled boots. I looked professional and mature and real cute. Then I decided to visit the scrap yard with Jon at lunchtime.

I can not say my outfit served me well.

Jon and I were hunting for something to make gates for our back fence project. We need two pieces, both 6 feet tall, but one 5 feet wide and the other only 4 feet wide.

So on a rainy afternoon, we climbed through piles of steel and aluminum. We looked at old McDonald's doors, satellite dishes, a phone booth, highway signs and mailboxes, before we found a stack of steel punch-out sheets- industrial scrap. They were gloriously heavy and rusted. They were also the coolest.

The guys at the scrap yard graciously carved a path through the metal to get to the exact two pieces we had picked out. They even let us attach the chains to the metal sheets ourselves. Then we got to watch as the huge dinosaur-like machine moved our gates into the back of Jon's truck.

We hauled them back to the property and now they await our welder buddy, who will help us attach them to the fence to complete our project.

For those of you who have never visited Arcata Scrap and Salvage, might I suggest a visit? It is the best place of post-apocalyptic scavenger hunting in town. Even in heels.

Demo, Reinforcement, and Redwood Style

After the success of the interior barn doors and our fence contractor friend's schedule filling up - Amy and I decided to tackle the back fence on our own.

We agreed on Redwood and scheduled our contractor (Jason from Configurations) to come out and reinforce the awning.  He replacing the rotted wood with new plywood and pressure-treated 4x4's.  

Step 1: Measure the fence and go to the resale lumber yard to buy the wood and have them cut it.  Amy is supervising the cutting in the picture to the right.

Step 2:   Load the wood, how pretty!

Step 3:  Bring Amy to the airport for her wedding shower and second bachelorette party.  Yes, second one.

Step 4: Go to Redwoods and Rivers and lead a adventure park and zip line training.  The picture to the right is a zip line conscious rescue drill.  For more info look at North Coast Adventure Centers.

Step 5: Build the fence on Monday morning and night before and after work.

Step 6: Pick up Amy from the airport, schedule a dump run, then design and build gates!

Thanks for reading,

Jon

Labor of Love

I woke up on Saturday morning eager to demolish some bathrooms. I donned my (now) usual gear of respirator and safety goggles and set to work pulling up broken tile and filling bags with debris and garbage. Demolition is a blunt instrument. You don't have to be smart or careful. You just have to be a workhorse.

The mindless, repetitive movements of scraping, pulling, and bagging lulled me into a meditative state. I meant to spend an hour or so doing this, but the sun moved steadily across the sky as I lost track of time.

At 3 PM, Jon called me downstairs to help him with some carpentry. This annoyed me.

I don't like leaving a job unfinished and I don't like carpentry. I don't like the precision and focus it requires. I don't like the tools involved. I don't like that it's complicated and hard and usually ends with me feeling frustrated and disappointed.

But I love Jon and I like to think I'm a good sport so I headed down to the front of the building, where Jon was building a barn door. For real. Actually, he was building three barn doors. Enormous doors to be built from cedar planks and hung from steel runners on the ceiling.

Some people build raised beds as a weekend carpentry projects. Jon decides to build some barn doors.

For the rest of the night and into the next day, Jon and I measured, sawed, drilled, re-measured, re-drilled, and hung three beautiful, heavy cedar doors in the our storefront. During that time, I felt frustrated more than a few times. Carpentry is NOT meditative.

Fortunately, I was working with Jon. While I was cursing myself for sawing crooked and cursing Jon for making me do this stupid project that I wasn't any good at and keeping me from my bathroom demo, Jon was a sight to behold.
He was patient and focused. He moved quickly, even gracefully. When the barn door hardware didn't roll smoothly through heavy steel rails (that he had hauled up a ladder and painstakingly drilled into the ceiling), he didn't panic. He didn't curse himself or get disappointed and decide he hated carpentry because it never worked out the way you wanted it to.

He fixed it. He found a shim in the basement and he wedged it between into the rails until they were flush and held the roller hardware perfectly. He solved dozens of problems last night and woke up at dawn this morning to solve some more.

At 3 PM today, our barn doors were in place. They glide across the width of the storefront. They hide our tenant's furniture storage from the street and create a small, day-lit workspace for Jon.

We didn't get to gut a bathroom this weekend. Instead, we made something beautiful.

The Facade Project

One of the many obstacles we ran into when trying to purchase the Coat Shop building was that it was..er...ugly. Words that the banks used to describe it includes "blighted" "neglected" and "deteriorated." Ouch.

We knew when we bought the property that one of the first things we needed to rehab was the outside. The rehab tasks include:

• Recreating the original Coat Room sign
• Replacing the broken storefront windows with safety glass
• Rehanging the entry door
• Adding reclaimed wood framing to the windows a la the Hopkins-Finley House (below)

Our friend Mark came out to give us some advice on the wood framing project, and proceeded to sigh and grimace and

bust out the frown lines. Fortunately, we're getting used to this reaction when people first see the Coat Shop. They seem to be saying (or in some cases, are actually saying) "Holy crap. I don't even know where to begin."

We're getting pretty good at responding, "Here. Start right here."

Once we got through that phase of our conversation with Mark, he made a very astute observation. While he liked our idea of adding reclaimed beams, he pointed out the difficulties in creating a waterproof seal and affixing the beams to the exterior frame. Then he said, "ou know the framing you have right now is redwood. Under all that beige/salmon paint is probably some really nice wood." Brilliant!

Gentle readers, as you may have read in previous entries, there are are many things I do not understand about this whole rehab process. But one thing I DO know how to do is strip paint. It's painstaking and gross, but it's not rocket science and it's very satisfying. I'm thinking of getting started on Sunday. I'm planning on using chemical strippers. I've heard great things about using heat, but our local tool rental shop doesn't rent heat guns and I'm not quite ready to invest in my very own. But we'll see what the hardware store guys have to say about that.

If anyone out there has any thoughts on this, I'm all ears.

-Amy

Victorious!

Our variance application was unanimously approved by the Eureka Planning Commission, meaning we can officially live in the Coat Shop Building.  One of the Commissioners even name checked our blog during the proceedings.  Word.

-Amy

Dressing the Part

Here is our contractor, Jason of Configurations Building.  This was just before we climbed into the attic to measure the height of the ceiling to figure out how much headroom we can get out of the building.  Amy and I love rough industrial unfinished looks so keeping the space as bare as possible is key for us.

We also have fire repellant on the walls, which has asbestos in it, so we are being real careful not to disturb that area while wearing masks.  Jason went full HASMAT on us!  He looked real professional and safe.  We completed the measurements in one hour.

After seeing Jason in his suit, Amy and I thought that we should have suits too.  She dug up coveralls, I bought a used pair, and we went to town on a second demo night.  The picture here is grainy because there is a lot of dust in the air from our drywall demo.

Amy and I are gearing up for a MAY pizza, beer (keg), and work party day that will highlight:

- roof demo

- installing plywood sheets supporting basement walls

- exterior paint stripping

- sanding | stripping

- dump runs

And finally, just as we were ready to leave we decided to test the structural integrity of the ceiling beams by me hanging on them.  Amy took pictures and, from the look of it, ghosts of Coat Room past were whirling around.

Thanks for reading,

Jon + Amy

Demolition Derby

Location: Back Room. Second Story.

Ingredients: Crowbar. Hammers. Shovel. Respirators. Coveralls. Beer.

Time: 2 hours

Experience: Joyous

Last night I discovered the intense satisfaction of the destructive process. After work, we ripped away layers of crappy drywall and green shag carpet, revealing beautiful redwood walls and cedar floors. There is really nothing like wielding a corwbar, working the angles to get the best leverage possible so that the drywall rips from the wall in glorious sheets instead of a thousand plaster cloudbursts.

The room is beginning to open up as we strip it down; we can begin to see what we're working with. The phrase "gut" now makes sense to me- the process of stripping a building down, layer by layer, until you can get into its guts and operate on the ciritcal systems like wiring and plumbing. It is so satisfying to be working towards the guts, to be slowly liberating our bulding from years of poor upkeep and half-assed handiwork so that it can breathe again.

-Amy