The Farm House Journal

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August 6, 2004—I generally try to be sparing with the pictures, because I want to keep loading times down. Moreover, having more image area than text area creates layout problems in Hypertext Markup Language. Nevertheless, I can't help but feel that a more extensive use of images is necessary to support the text of this entry. I hope you will forgive the indulgence, and all the empty space.

I’m rehabilitating the existing windows now, and while they are in remarkable shape for 118-year-old windows, I must admit that now that I’m getting a close look at them, I can see that my original assessment of their condition was overly optimistic. Well, as they say, love is blind.

By the time the Farm House was built, windows were prefabricated in factories and installed as units on site, as they are today, and anyone who’s lived in a pre-World War II house would find the construction of the Farm House windows familiar. They are double-hung (most of them, that is), with sash weights, pulleys, and cords, made of pine—all quite standard.

A closer look, however, reveals some interesting differences. The joints are mostly pegged through-mortises. The peg serves to draw the tenon fully into the mortise, then keep it there even if the glue fails. We saw a lot of pegged mortises in the timber-framed colonial houses of Concord and Lexington on our honeymoon. Well, we saw it in Salem too, in the House of the Seven Gables. Come to think of it, the Farm House has seven gables as well, No, wait, we added one over the new rear entrance. So we’re one better! The pegged mortise is a quaint thing today, but it’s undoubtedly contributed to the windows’ longevity; after all, those Colonial houses were older than the Farm House is today when the Farm House was built. The sash (the moving parts that hold the glass) are quite narrow in profile compared to more modern windows, giving them an elegantly sleek appearance and allowing in more light. The sash pulleys are cast iron, not pressed steel.


Curiously, in the upstairs windows, on the upper rail of the inner sash, the glass is carried not in a rabbet (L-shaped notch), as is nearly universal, but in a narrow dado (U-shaped slot). This will be a challenge to glaze.


Most significantly for our situation, the window casings (the wood frames surrounding the window openings inside and out) are an integral part of the window’s structure—not mere trim pieces covering an internal frame, as became the norm by the turn of the century—so that if one were to remove the casings, the window would simply fall out, frame and all. This feature is proving to be quite a complication, for some of the frames are loose, and a few are even cracked, and to tighten these frames back up and bring everything back into proper alignment without being able to remove the casing boards can be a bit tricky, especially considering that some of the exterior boards are heavily weathered, dry and brittle.


Having said this, some of the sash on the second floor (again, the moving parts that hold the glass) are unsalvageable. The wood, while not rotten, is so weathered in many cases that the lignin, the stuff that binds the wood fibers together, seems completely gone. As a result, the wood will not bear working. It turns to splinters and dust under the pressure of a scraper. For these windows, we are having new sash custom-built to replicate the original, which will go into the existing frames. A few of these frames are in such bad repair that it will take more than mere epoxy and screws to repair them; it will take the kind of carpentry skills that only our able foreman can provide.


But the rest of the window-salvation task is mine. Happily, this is a task at which I have some solid experience; I like windows that work, and I’ve lived in enough places with windows that didn’t to have had ample opportunity to learn how to fix them. Of course, I’ve never had to deal with cracked and loose frames, but our foreman has given me some simple but invaluable guidance on this front. I would have undoubtedly arrived at some Rube Goldbergesque, over-engineered solution, but he advised me that the most effective method was to epoxy the cracks, clamp everything into alignment, drive screws through the outside casings into solid framing members, then let the epoxy cure. As has proven consistently true with the Farm House, the simplest, most elegant solution is the best. It’s the Victorian way.


Yes, it’s quite a blessing to have a guy like our foreman around. He loves his work, he’s good at it, and he cares just as much about doing right by the Farm House as we do Best of all, we communicate very well. For example, the subject came up one day at the house of how to treat the casing around the medicine cabinet in the new bathroom. All I had to tell him was, “Case it like a window,” and the next morning, he had built it to match the precise mental picture in my head. I didn’t have to mention scaling down the proportions or the fact that the stool should be flush with the bottom of the cabinet opening. This he knew. Anyone who’s ever dealt with a contractor knows how precious this level of communication (to say nothing of this level of knowledge, skill or speed) is.


In other news, Lydia and I are caught up with the priming for now, thanks to another weekend session with the trim boards. We learned an interesting phenomenon: 1-by-4-inch trim boards take as long to paint as 9-inch wide shiplap per foot of length. It’s because one must use a smaller brush. Here, a disbelieving Lydia learns this for herself while I take surveillance photos.


We caught up just in time, for the primed boards are being put to use. The garage and addition are now getting their skin, and the transformation is amazing. The structures have been up for months now, and I’m in and around them most every day, but while I’ve appreciated them on an intellectual level, in my mind they’ve been mere shells of plywood to me, nothing more than the sum of their various parts. Now that they’re getting their cladding, although they are not yet complete, suddenly my mind perceives them as something quite different—as organic, unitary entities. Andrew Jackson Downing would understand completely [see Vol. 1].


The tile in the downstairs bathroom is done, and I couldn’t be happier. I'm very picky about tile, but I can't find one tile out of place, one grout joint out of line. Simply put, the job is perfect. It'’s a sublime feeling to carry a mental image around for years, then see it made real before your eyes.


After years at the effort, I’ve finally gotten the grass in the median strip (between the sidewalk and the curb) looking like a lawn, weed-free and as green as any lawn on the block. I’ve even got the plumbing cuts pretty much filled in. There remain a few stubborn bare and brown spots, but they’re slowly yielding. I’ve done this as sort of a token of good faith to the neighborhood, an indication of things to come, but until we got water on the property my efforts were confined to rear-guard actions against the seasonal onslaughts of weeds. Once we got water, I was able to put down some pre-emergent herbicide, and this gave the Bermuda grass a leg up. This is all Bermuda grass needs, that and some water and a little fertilizer. Bermuda grass has a bad rap, because it is so invasive, but where it is wanted and can be contained, for my money there is no better warm-season grass. It is wear-resistant, fine-textured, and mown high (2 ½ inches, not the ½ inch usually prescribed) it looks better than anything one can grow well here in full sun. Now, my brother Jon in North Carolina works wonders with Kentucky bluegrass, getting it so green that in fact does start to head a bit towards blue, but that species does not do well in LA inland of the coastal regions. I do plan to use creeping red fescue elsewhere in the yard, because it has a wonderful meadow-like look, and is far more tolerant than the constant shade under the tall trees. One does not even really need to mow it. One does have to mow Bermuda very frequently when it is in full growth, which is a definite consideration here, considering that the area of just this median strip is the same as the entire front lawn at our Culver City house.


Speaking of neighbors, I just last week made friends with a particularly delightful neighbor to the rear of the lot. I think we’ll get along famously, but I can’t speak for everyone in the family.