Baby Prep

The books I've been reading all tell me that I'll probably spend the weeks before baby arrives getting ready by going around the house and "baby-proofing." You know: putting breakable things above waist height, plugging plasitic thingamabobs into all the outlets, and covering sharp furniture corners with...well, corner protectors. I guess they should be called "head protectors." Yeah. That's what all the BOOKS say. Me? I prefer to spend my days elbow-deep in Zip-Strip, filling my lungs (and eyes, and ears, and nose...) with lead paint dust.

See, that's what I do in my "off time," that time I spend NOT being a musician. I renovate and restore and refinish (although I usually reSTART first...thanks George Carlin). I spent summers during college learning from my mother - at her century-old farmhouse - how to demo lath & plaster, how to run new wiring and insulate, how to hang & mud drywall, and all the rest of the stuff that goes with major home renovation. Now that I live in my OWN century-plus house, I've tackled many of the same projects. When Tess & I moved in, we had knob-&-tube wiring; now the whole house is up to code with modern, 12- and 14-2 grounded wire. We've renovated our dining room (tearing out the crumbling ceiling in the process) and made the kitchen an actual livabale space. Now, this summer, I have a few "last" projects (except they never REALLY end, not when you're an "old house guy") to do in preparation for Roslyn's arrival in mid-July...and Odin save us if she's early!

So. Here are some of the particulars. Her room is already pretty much ready to go...

as that was the renovation project from LAST summer. (Back when we thought we were creating a studio for ourselves!) But, her bedroom door was a mess of multiple layers of gooey paint (some milk paint, others no doubt lead-based) and I've been dutifully stripping ALL of our interior doors so that they are returned to their simple, heart-pine glory. Problem is, to do this MYSELF takes about 1) $80 worth of stripper, 2) $30 worth of other sundry supplies, like rubber gloves, steel wool, and the like, 3) and about 30 hours of my time. Yeesh! I discovered that the furniture restoration place here in town, The Wooden Nickel, would charge me $140 to strip the door down to bare wood. YES! So, we end up with a bedroom door for her room that looks like this...

and all that's left for ME to do is the much more simple job of sanding it and applying polyeurethane. Oh, and I have to strip the hardware, but that's totally worth it because it's all original. What you get then is something that looks like this...

add in a healthy portion of stripper and elbow grease...

and you get a finished product that looks like THIS!

Awesome. BUT, this is really the "easy" job, because once the door is hung back in place I need to tackle the much larger job in the stairway and small upstairs hallway. The stairway is really a desolate-looking place...

with altogether too much paint-covered wallpaper peeling away every time we flip the switch.

Plus, I KNOW that underneath the crusty nastiness of this hallway wall...

is something that looks like THIS! (This is the opposite side, in our closet.)

In addition to all the normal wallpaper-stripping and plaster-patching that needs doing, all of the stair "treads" (which aren't really treads at all, but simply 1x stock) need to be taken up and replaced with much thicker material. So, there's lots to be done. But it'll all be worth it, because there are only 8 weeks left until what's in HERE...

can be put into this cradle my mother built.

Nevertheless, with all of the pounding and banging and moving-around-of-stuff going on, someone is a bit worried that there's big change comin' soon! How right she is.