Builders Share

A Board Too Short

Another Saturday rolls around and I'm back on task to completing the upstairs bathroom.  When I walked away from this project a couple weeks ago, I still had about 8 lineal feet of wainscoting to install, along with baseboards and door casings, and a bathtub to paint and install as well.

Today I hoped to finish up the wainscoting but ran into a few snags.  The first problem came at the very start.

When I started installing the wainscoting back in August, I started my first board at the south east corner of the room. It was important to keep the wainscoting plumb, and since the east wall is not plumb (after 150 years) I couldn't place the first board flush to the wall.  I don't know what I was thinking at the time, but I decided to simply leave a gap to be dealt with later, and later was today.

It would have been better if when starting the wainscoting I had trimmed a piece that could go flush with the "unplumb" wall on the left while maintaining "plumbness" on the right. Now I had a small gap to deal with which meant cutting a narrow, odd-shaped piece and hoping that it didn't come out looking ugly.

Filling that little gap took a lot more time than if I had taken care of the oddity at the start, but with some fancy table saw cuts, a compass, perseverance, and cursing, I got it done.

The next problem came at the same corner where I had installed the baseboard on the south wall leaving a gap to account for the wainscoting that would be installed on the east wall.  Again, I don't know what I was thinking back in August, or whether I just wasn't, but I had left too large a gap.  This meant another narrow odd-shaped piece of material to make up the difference.

I have to give myself some slack because this is the first time I've ever installed wainscoting and my finish carpentry experience doesn't go much further than what's been described here.  The end product is far from being a disaster.  If anyone wants to go sniffing around the corners of my bathroom looking for errors, I suppose the deserve everything they encounter.

The other two mistakes of the day were the more pedestrian kind. (1) I ran out of wainscoting and had to take a trip to the building supply store for more, and (2) I wasted some baseboard stock by cutting a piece too short.

The latter mistake came about by measuring without taking account of the floor not being level--another old-house anomaly.

Tomorrow I'll be back behind the saw finishing up what I started today and be one more step on my way to completing the bathroom.

handyman

~!@#$%^&

Painting started in earnest just a day or two after I plastered my last wall.  I was hoping to maintain as much of the textured look of the plaster and simply tint it with a color wash but I don't have any experience in that area.  I asked the folks at the paint store and a friend of mine who's been a painter for a long time and they both suggested priming the plaster to insure that any other color added to it would adhere well.

I'm disappointed by how much the primer "homogenized" the surface and I'm kicking myself more than a little for not experimenting with a color wash.  I've already primed the two bedrooms upstairs so the only walls left to experiment are the ones in the hallway. (The bathroom should be primed to prevent mildew from forming on the plaster and to provide a washable surface.)

The error comes from rushing to get it all done.  I just didn't feel like I had time to experiment, having set myself a deadline to move upstairs by June 1st.  Unfortunately, there's no going back from this mistake short of skim coating the walls again which would probably qualify me for institutionalization.

This is really a hard one to swallow, but it's only an aesthetic issue and we're practically sick of using only half of our house.

handyman

Mistakes Were Made

Sometimes it feels like I'm involved in two renovation projects simultaneously: one where everything is done incorrectly, and the other where I've learned from my mistakes.  The times where I've built something only to have to dismantle it and rebuild it are too numerous to catalogue here, but there are a couple of errors I've made recently that are worth sharing for an important lesson they provide.

While working on the door jambs, there were a few instances where the door and jamb were much smaller than the rough opening.  The reason for this was that at the time the rough opening was built, I wasn't certain what size door was going to end up there.  I had a variety of old doors that had come out of the house and others I'd picked up at salvage dealers.

In my zest to get the door jambs installed, more than once I began mounting them on the hinge side before bringing the rough opening more in line with the size of the jamb.  This meant I had to add lumber to fill the gap on the lock side or on the top while working around the newly mounted jamb.  It meant driving nails into studs at angles while avoiding the finish material of the jamb.  It can be especially difficult to hold a piece of lumber that's wedged loosely behind another while at the same time swinging a hammer with a fair degree of accuracy.  It would have been much easier to size up the new jamb in the opening and decide if and where I might need to add lumber to fill a gap, before I started mounting the jamb.

Another mistake I made recently was building the jamb for an interior window.  This window is designed to allow more light into an otherwise windowless hallway.  When I built the jamb, I built it three-sided in the same way I was building the door jambs.  It was more difficult later to create a snug opening for the window by adding the sill after the side and top jambs were already mounted than if I had entirely encased the window before mounting the jamb.

Both these situations presented a problem that you're not going to encounter often.  Most interior doors are of a standard size, and the rough opening is built to that spec.  You probably won't come across that many interior windows, and when you do, they're more often than not going to include their jambs and sill as part of the whole package.  So there's not much of a lesson in saying "next time I mount a custom jamb in a rough opening that's too large..."  Luckily I was able to work through these mistakes without wasting materials or a lot of time.  What I did lose, briefly however, was my patience, and that's where the lesson lies.

There is no more valuable thing, when embarking on a project like this, than having patience with yourself when you screw up.  That may seem like a no-brainer to some, but not all of us respond well to failure whether big or small.  The wrong response to a mistake can quickly compound the error.  Be willing to walk away from a problem, if only for 10 minutes.  To keep pounding away at that misbehaving 2x4 may seem cathartic but it's more likely to end up causing expensive damage or worse an injury.

Discouragement can also be debilitating.  I've been working at this project for over two years, and sometimes I just want it to be over.  The excitement of acquiring an antique house and the honeymoon of Great Possibility is long past but there's still much work to be done.  When things aren't going right, the self-doubt creeps in and the urge to give up rises.  I could, after all, just pick up the phone and find a contractor.  That might free me from the trouble of trial and error in rebuilding my home, but it would also rob me of a keen satisfaction that comes from problem solving, perseverance, and hard work.

handyman