House & Yard

{sigh} Couple weeks ago, one of my mother’s Conant Ball chairs, which she bought in San Francisco when we came back to the States from the Middle East in the late 1950s, broke. A piece of wood that supported the legs dried out and finally gave way.

It and its partner needed some work, anyway. Not knowing how much she must have spent on the stuff, my father decided to make the dining set they belonged to into outdoor furniture. The house they moved into in Sun City didn’t have room to accommodate a dining-room set and a television, and my father certainly could not be expected to live without his TV. So he covered the solid birch table and six chairs with layer on layer on layer of polyurethane. Then he stuck them out on the screened-in porch, where they resided for the rest of my mother’s life — about 15 years.

To give you a clue to the enormity of this act, Thomas Moser makes chairs that look very much like them:

$1,075 for the side chair on the left.

$1,225. That’s right: apiece.

Admittedly, the Moser chairs are made of cherry and ash, not birch. But they look very much like the chairs my mother bought in San Francisco, back in 1957. They’re almost identical, except that my mother’s side chairs had padded seat cushions.

After my mother died, my father moved to an old-folkerie and gave me the set. A friend stripped the polyurethane off the table and the side chairs and I refinished them with Watco’s lightly stained Danish oil. This looked OK. A helluva lot better than yellow varnish, anyway. But Friend tired of the job before he finished the captain’s chairs, so they stayed covered in polyurethane.

Obviously, I can’t afford to replace them. Not even at the 15 percent discount Thos. Moser is offering just this moment.

So, I took the occasion of the busted leg to ask the furniture repair guys I’d found through Angie’s list not only to repair the leg assembly but also to strip and refinish the both captain’s chairs, and while they were at it, to strip and refinish the scratched-up Ethan Allen coffee table I’d never been very satisfied with. So they carted it off the end of last month.

They delivered the finished job today.

I didn’t expect perfection. The chairs are very old, and 15 years out in the heat, the dust, and the rain couldn’t have helped them, embalmed in polyurethane or not. And the table is just a mass-produced thing not designed for a hand-rubbed oil finish. But the chairs’ cirrhosis-yellow varnish and the scratched-up shiny surface of the table have annoyed me for years. So I figured nothing ventured, nothing gained.

And perfection is decidedly not what I got.

I can’t imagine what they did to remove the table’s finish, but it looks like they scraped at it with some sort of tool like a spackling knife. The surface has patches of small abrasions — doesn’t look like sandpaper marks, at least not from a circular sander (which one would hope they’d know better than to use). Overall they did a nice job of sanding — all three pieces are satin-smooth to the touch. It’s possible, in fact, that they oversanded: if you sand with too fine a grade of sandpaper and steel wool, Danish oil won’t soak in the way it’s supposed to.

At any rate, it looked mighty sad after they’d plopped it down in the living room. Yet, interestingly, they’d done an amazingly good job of imitating the color and finish of the Stickley table that lives next to the couch.

The chairs are pretty pale and wan: looks like they only applied one coat of Watco. To do the job right requires several coats. But it’s just as well, because I think they used a walnut color, which is decidedly not what was on the other chairs. Watco’s “cherry” version would come fairly close to the oil I used in the 70s to refinish the side chairs and table. If they’d done the job right, the result would have been way too dark.

Studied the table for a while. Then decided to try a coat of butcher’s wax, which I happened to have lurking in a closet. Applied three coats.

This helped a little, but not enough. Waxing brought out several splotches where it looked like the wood might have gotten wet after they’d stripped it. We’ve had a lot of rain, and it sure could be that their roof leaked or someone walked past it dripping water. Whatever, this was annoying.

Once the wax was dry and polished as well as it was going to be polished — which wasn’t very — I applied some furniture oil. Put on a couple of coats of English oil, which helped more than I expected. Then I came across an old bottle of Weiman’s lemon oil in the cleaning closet. Weiman’s is a superior product, so I figured, why not? Applied another coat of that oil.

And that did make a big difference. It looks much, much better. Not perfect. But perfection clearly is not attainable here.

By the light of an incandescent lamp, it actually looks pretty good. (As usual, you’re gonna have to click on the image to get anything resembling resolution out of WordPress…) But view it by sunlight from an angle, and the effect is somewhat cloudy and blotchy.

Oh well.

Now, as for the chairs…what to do?

While I was out replenishing the larder yesterday, I dropped by the Home Depot and picked up a can of Watco oil laced with “cherry” stain.

Before applying that, though, I’ve got to figure out what our boys did in their refinishing effort. If they applied wax, I’ll have to get that off before rubbing in another three, four, or five coats of Watco. The chairs don’t smell of paste wax. But the guys called me about a week ago asking to deliver them; I put this off until today, because I wanted to push the payment into a new AMEX billing cycle, so as to be able to cover it out of cash flow rather than having to raid savings. The odor of wax could have dissipated by now.

It is going to take for-fucking-EVER to do the job right on those chairs, with all those damn spindles. This project will have to wait until I finish a dog-and-pony show I have to write and trick out in PowerPoint for a webinar a local writer’s & self-publisher’s group asked me to do. I’m not getting paid, but we could pick up some work — I doubt it, though, because my experience with these folks is that they don’t have the money to pay professional rates.

At any rate, though my heart’s not exactly broken, neither am I pleased. This job cost $800, and so I’d just as soon not have to do it over myself to get it right.

On the other hand, just to replace the two captain’s chairs (to say nothing of the table) would cost three times that much. To extract the coffee table from Thos. Moser would cost another $1,250. So if I can get all three pieces to look acceptable, I suppose I can’t complain.

You get what you pay for…

With no Honey around the house (except a cute little dog), the only person to do the various small handyperson chores here at the Funny Farm is moi. Quite a few things have stacked up over the months…now that there’s time as well as energy to do them, w00t! Some of them are actually getting done!

One little improvement I’d like to make to the house, whenever I have a few extra dollars again, is to ask Dave the Electrician to install several electric outlets at waist level.

The custom of installing outlets down near the floor is something I’ve never been able to figure out. Even when your back doesn’t hurt every time you bend down, who wants to hunker on the floor to plug in the vacuum (over and over, if you have a big house!), the iron, the heating pad, the laptop? Ideally, I’d like to have at least one waist-height outlet in every room, but of course I can’t afford that. So I’ll have to make do with a few — one next to the bed, two in the office, one or two in the TV room, one in the living room.

At any rate, it’ll be awhile before this project gets done. In the meantime, I had a great idea: outlet strips!

Yeah! Some outlet strips have little holes in the the back that you can use to hang them up. Well, I don’t happen to have enough countersinks to do the  job right, with screws. But each outlet strip has four such slots for hang-up screws, so I tacked a bunch of sturdy nails into the drywall — or to the side of the old desk — and stuck the things up there.

In the office, alas, this entailed having to untangle the spaghetti of computer cables, lamp cords, telephone and Ethernet cables, speaker wires, and wires of unknown provenance that’s been growing like fungus under the furniture. Back in the day, I had them pretty well organized, having installed a row of cuphooks under the tabletop’s rim and strung the infrastructure under there. But when the Three Stooges were here screwing up the paint, they yanked out my tidy arrangement and made hash of it. Then they just shoved the desk and table, which are too heavy for me to move, back against the wall.

So it was an unbelievable mess under there. The dog would lose her ball in the briar patch and refuse to dig it out, so tangled were the wires, cords, and cables. Some of those wires, BTW, seemed to have no function…if they ever attached to anything, whatever it was apparently has dissolved into a dust bunny and been vacuumed away.

In the process, I finally figured out why the antique stereo in the office never worked after M’hijito reattached the wires: the Stooges had yanked its antenna out and then wound it up and jammed it back in behind the components in there. Ah! So obvious! Why did I never guess?

Speaking of things electronic, while vacuuming I happened to push the TV rabbit ears, which resided atop a wooden stool next to the TV armoire because they’re too tall to fit on top of it, back against the wall. Idly wondering what that would do to the reception, which has been touchy ever since Big Brother kindly made most broadcast TV stations inaccessible to the hoi polloi who can’t afford cable TV and wouldn’t pay for it even if they could. Turned on the boob tube, and lo! PBS came in bright, clear, and undistorted!

Naaahhh…. Couldn’t be.

Channel 12? Perfect!

How about 10? 3? 15? 5? All of them: clear, HD-ish, and free of snow, ghosts, and pixelation!

This was with the vacuum cleaner sitting there and me moving around the room, both such vast obstacles to modern-day reception as, in theory, to make viewing next to impossible.

Interesting.

I wondered what would happen if the antenna was directly behind the television, stashed behind the armoire. Had to pull the thing out from the wall a couple of inches, which was a trick with a trashed back. It must weigh 200 pounds.

Still worked, but not as well. Four stations were still good, but Channel 12 was scrambled and PBS disappeared. Then, as in one of those murky Magic Eight-Balls, two words surfaced:

aluminum

foil

Wrapped the southerly rabbit ear with tinfoil. Channel 12 came in; Channel 8 was still dark.

Wrapped the northerly rabbit ear in tinfoil. Channel 8 came in, clear as a bell.

EVERY station is now true HD — I mean, you can actually SEE the images! — and none of them break up when the dog runs past with Ball in her mouth. And the hideous contraption is hidden behind the furniture, no longer annoyingly visible to the naked eye.

This evening a cop helicopter was buzzing the neighborhood, and even that didn’t break up the picture. Amazing!

All of this evolved into a hell of a job for me. I hate handyman stuff…it always entails 87 gerjillion trips out to the garage to dig out and haul in tool after tool after tool. Had to break out the Gorilla Tape (a kind of duct tape on steroids) to secure a strange little black box (purpose: unknown; wires: connected to something) to the underside of the work table. Had to fool around interminably to get an old outlet strip to hang horizontally instead of vertically along the side of the desk. Straightening out the mess of wires was another time-consuming headache.

But ta-DAA! Now there are no wires on the floor! I can vacuum under the desk and table. Cassie is not lying in a nest of electric wires. I can plug in a heating pad next to the bed without having to crawl under the nightstand and tip over the lamp onto my head. And I’ll be able to plug in the recharging cables and the iron without having to dig through wires, dog hair, and dust to get at an outlet — and without having to climb around the floor for the privilege.

Much better. 🙂

Drat! They no longer make this handy over-the-sink dish rack, something I’ve used every day since I bought it six or eight years ago.

This has been one of the most convenient and frequently used gadgets in the kitchen. It holds any number of little pieces of junk, keeps them out of the way and out of the left-hand sink, and often serves as de facto storage.

Over time, though, it’s begun to wear out. The rubbery plastic coating has eroded away along a series of small joints:

The wire underneath it is rusting and eventually will break. {sob!} That’s because I do this to it:

Every time I use one of my good kitchen knives, I wash it and drop it to dry into one of those handy-dandy slots along the side of the thing. Evidently, this has not been good for it! Not very good for my knives anymore, either.

Thanks to the cleanliness & tidiness kick, I thought the mini-drainer should be replaced. Lo these many years ago, I bought it either at Albertson’s or Linens ‘n’ Things. The Albertson’s no longer carries its old array of products like this, and Linens ‘n’ Things went out of business years ago (actually, its spirit haunts the ether in the form of an online store). Bed, Bath, & Beyond, now the only game in town in the freestanding brick-and-mortar household miscellany department, doesn’t carry this object. Neither does Target. Neither does Home Depot. Neither does Lowe’s. Neither does Amazon. The latter has a flimsier thing that’s wider and will take up too much space out of the rest of the sink, which I use to drain larger items, and one that’s allegedly stainless but, as we know, “stainless steel” made in China means “rusty steel.” Neither the size nor the cheesiness will meet my needs.

What to do about this conundrum?

Well, I remembered having heard, some years ago, about a product people can paint on dishwasher racks when the rubbery stuff wears off of those. My dishwasher has solid nylon racks, so that annoyance is a thing of the past. But what’s happening to the little over-the-sink dish drainer is comparable, eh? So when I passed a Home Depot yesterday, I darted in and found this:

It was in the dishwasher department, not in Hardware, interestingly enough. We’ll see if it works.

Probably will take all day to apply the stuff. You have to paint on “multiple” coats. Damn, but I wish people would quit using that irritating bit of jargon! “Multiple”: many? a few? a couple? Say what you mean!!!!

What? Oh.

Anyway, you paint it on, wait a half hour, and then apply another coat. Unless it’s radically goopy, I think I’d like to apply three, four, maybe even five coats — try to fill it in the worn-off spots to where the surface comes back up and blends into the undamaged white coating. At a half-hour per coat, it could take two or three hours to accomplish that. Then you have to wait 24 hours before you can use the repaired rack.

I was going to title this post, cutely, “Necessity, the Child of Frugality.” But that’s not really the case. It’s not that I’m too cheap to replace the rack with a new one. If an adequate rack were still being manufactured, I’d buy it in an instant. I do have better things to do with my time than play with goop that emanates toxic fumes. But the truth is, as formerly quality products are being replaced with flimsy, second-rate junk produced overseas factories with minimal quality control, consumers have to try to extract as much life from their old, better-quality products as possible. Amid all this illusory plenty, we have to make it do and make it last.

Once this thing wears out, I guess, the only option will be to buy a Rubbermaid drainboard-sized drainer and drop it in the bottom of that big sink. Which is going to be a nuisance…if I wanted one of those, I’d have one of those.

Sure would help if stuff were made in America.

P.S.: Hold the phone! Just found the thing on Amazon, about six pages in to the search. They want THIRTY DOLLARS for it!!!! I’m dead sure I didn’t pay that much for mine, because I wouldn’t have…too cheap. But there it is. “Eligible for free super save shipping.” Yeah. Well, it sure should be, at that price.

It looks like our annual second spring is here early. The heat has broken, a good month sooner than normal. We still could get another blast or two, but the longer it stays cool, the less likely that is. The frazzled plants have decided it’s safe to blossom again. One of the fricaseed roses managed to put out a small, tentative flower:

Not bad, considering how fried this poor shrub has been. I’ve had water bills pushing $150 trying to keep the plantings alive…and that’s with no grass!

Don’t know what this thing is, but isn’t it interesting?

It has strappy leaves like a garlic chive, but there’s no scent. I think it’s some kind of bulb that finally decided to come up…I’m always sticking bulbs in the ground and forgetting about them. WhatEVER. Cassie likes it…

Actually, what she’s liking here is pestering the human to throw the ball. Bossy little dog!

Even the cacti are happy with the cooler weather! Look at this amazing thing that appeared in the front yard…

You need to click on the image to get the full effect.

Not to be outdone, the Easter lily cactus in back put out three of these:

The little garden I planted next to the pool, in the dead of summer, survived the brutal heat and is now showing its appreciation for milder temps:

Zinnias and salvias: 99 cents for a pack of six! I thought they were going to die when they were little, especially the salvia. But they managed to make it, mostly by dint of being flooded with hose water once or twice a day. Pretty little things, aren’t they? Not spectacular, but they do the job of allaying one’s general depression.

The pool, which has been very well behaved in the absence of the Devil Pod Tree, is fast getting too cool for swimming. Now that only a few days of swimming time remain, I’ve taken down the privacy screen I jury-rigged out of a couple of old wooden trellises and some shade screen (they really DID look white-trash!), which should increase the amount of light the new hop-bush plants are striving for. You  may remember that all four of these plants were about two feet high when I planted them.

The most robust of the hopseed bushes is now almost up to the top of that six-foot wall. By next summer, they should do  just fine to block the view from the sidewalk and the neighbors’ front windows into my yard.

That orange jubilee in the foreground, contrary to the nurseryman’s opinion, did not appreciate 115-degree days. It barely made it through the summer, again, by dint of my pouring vast quantities of water on the thing. Once established, though, a plant like this can get quite large. It could easily top that ugly shed.

The shed itself is not as obtrusive in real life as it appears in this photo. From most parts of the yard, it’s barely visible, and I think when these plants fill out, it should become even less prominent. Thought about putting up a trellis and training a jasmine or two up there, but that sounds a great deal like more trouble than it’s worth.

Best thing I’ve done for myself in this house was to take out the accursed Devil Pod Tree that occupied that corner. In the absence of the bushels and bushels of strappy leaves and equipment-clogging, plaster-staining pods, the pool has run almost trouble-free all summer long. We have had a few windy, dirty monsoons, but none required me to get out there and haul pounds of debris off the bottom of the pool. Matter of fact, the pool has been virtually trouble-free. Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner has easily handled what little stuff has fallen into the drink, and I’ve only had to shock-treat once. That alone represents a large savings.

Part of the savings came from dumping Leslie’s and hiring a local pool company. I’ve had that guy out here once, count it, once, since the heat came up. Oh…except for the time the pump pot lid worked itself loose. What I thought would be a $300 to $600 repair job cost me $60. And he gave me a new lid for free. You can bet that Leslie’s would have taken me to the cleaners over that misadventure.

The Devil Pod Tree is undead, though. It keeps pushing up suckers, trying to rise from the grave:

I’ve found these sprouts fifty feet away from the trunk! The accursed tree had shot its roots under the patio all the way over to the far side of the yard, heaving the concrete in the process. The only thing that will kill these things is straight, undiluted Round-up.

Whatever could have possessed Satan and Proserpine to plant such a thing? Stupidity, I guess…they stuck some other mighty dumb things in the ground, too. They were pretty good with interior remodeling, but landscaping was just not their thing.

There’s another Devil Pod Tree on the west side of the house. It’s now as tall as the forty-year-old palm trees some other hapless homeowner put next to the pool. Since the arborist only charged $300 to take down the Undead One, I’m thinking I may have him take that one out, too. Several trees need some pruning this winter, and so we might as well be rid of the other mess-maker while his crew is here. In addition to dropping large quantities of mess all over the place, this one is dangerously close to the house. Willow acacias are as brittle as eucalyptus, and this one now has big branches that could break off and crash onto my house or my neighbor Terri’s. And of course Satan planted the thing right next to the wall, which the tree is threatening to heave. I’d just as soon get rid of the tree now than have to get someone in here to rebuild that wall in a few years. The emerald paloverde now provides all the shade that’s needed to protect the west side of the house from the broiling afternoon sun.

Darn! It’s already 5:30…have to start to run to get all the stuff done so as to race out the door to get to class by 7:30 a.m. Oh…they’re in the computer commons today. Good: I won’t have to talk to them. The Tuesday-Thursday class, the one that soaks up three of my most productive hours in the middle of the day, is in the library on Thursday, so I’m relieved of having to entertain them this week. Only two days this week to fill with lecture and busywork. This is Week Five. Just eleven weeks left of this impossible routine!

It’s going to be made a lot worse this week and next: I agreed to substitute for a colleague who’s going in for some surgery. So on Tuesdays and Thursdays I won’t get out of class until 4:30 in the afternoon! Then I’ll have to drive home through the rush-hour traffic. Meanwhile three projects for a client are sitting on my desk…how the hell I’m supposed to do those while I’m wrestling with students four days a week, I do not know. Fortunately, he’s just as overworked as I am, and so distracted he doesn’t realize I’m not moving forward on his work at anything more than a stately pace.

Welp…off and running!