Windowsill Project

Another great illustration of my creative process in all of its clunk. This will be day nine of the project. I spent all summer procrastinating replacing this half-rotten exterior sill on the old part of the house, south side. My main fear was that the whole wall would be rotten and I'd never get it all patched up before the rains. When we got the sunny stretch I finally dove in.

It took two days to get the sill out, including a bit of online research and a tool survey. It had been a long time since I did anything resembling fine woodworking, so I had to drag out a lot of things to find my cats paw and blades for the reciprocal saw. The jigsaw was missing the set screw...a dumb mistake to let that thing drop without picking it up sometime in the last year or so. I do have a backup jigsaw. Most of my tools are leftover ones from exes who abandoned them, though I bought some Bosch. It didn't take me long to see that I did not have the proper tool to cut clapboards, but I got started, then went to BiMart.

I got a cheap flush cutter, but since you can't say that in public without some scary looks, I will have to find a better name than Multipurpose Oscillating Tool, perhaps Mabel. This turned out to be such a useful item I got some attachments and am quite fond of it already.With that and my reciprocal saw, I bravely cut around the edges of the sill and got it out in one piece. About a third of it was completely gone, but there was not much rot around it, if you don't count the missing end of the king stud with the termite damage. I convinced myself that the damage was old and there were no active bugs in my wall, as there are no other signs.

This does explain the questioning look I got from the window contractor about fifteen years ago when I told him to just put the window trim back on the way it was, without really taking a look at it myself. He pointed out a couple of the worst pieces. I remember making another window sill on the north side, and I know I made sills for the windows I installed in the new part, but I didn't do a great job on those and if you know anything about trim you can tell who made them.

This one is different. I know more now. I know to put a kerf in the underside to keep water from running back into the house, and I know to make sure the front surface goes a bit downhill. I know to use some kind of water barrier under the sill as overprotection. I saw that on This Old House and with some effort managed to get such a product at Home Despot, a place I don't enjoy but which is within biking distance of me. It is a nine-inch wide self-adhesive asphaltum product that smells extremely toxic but looks awesome in place if you don't see the wrinkles and folds. It's very sticky. I have a lot left over even though I installed it twice.

The good news is that now I don't need those cedar spacers I was going to use to fill in the inside gap...the vinyl tape does that job. I might have to cram the nicely fitted sill in since I made it to fit exactly. That is the problem for today. I did completely prime and paint the sill and it is ready to go in, but if I have to shave it a bit I will have to repaint, possibly. We'll see. I'm refusing to work on it until the fog lifts each day, because I work for myself and I am suffering enough being tied to this project for over a week already. It's sort of suffering...I do hate sanding and I am focusing intently on this thing, standing on concrete, for hours each day, so I'm not riding my bike or taking walks or the many other things I am supposed to be keeping up with.

I don't have a table saw. To get the 2x8 board to resemble a sill, I had to remove some wood in some tricky ways. I decided this was the perfect opportunity to polish my skills with hand tools, the kind that use elbow grease for power. I used a backsaw, two planes, some rasps and scrapers, Mabel and the Skilsaw, and lots of straight edges and clamps. I did things wrong, but I can do that just fine when no one is watching. I got the plane to sound right as it turned out pretty shaving curls. I figured out ways to make the edge straight without the table saw and make angled cuts with the skilsaw without losing any appendages. I wasted some hours, but the sun was out and the sky glorious against the amazing colored trees and early on I had decided to enjoy the project above all.

My fall-back was that if I messed up this blank that I made from a leftover board, I could use it for a pattern to make one out of a new, nicer piece. I might have saved myself a lot of work, but the old board turned out to be a solid beauty and I am proud I saved it from the wood rack, where a squirrel is trying to nest and chewing up the ends of all of my wood. (Evicted, at least temporarily.)

So the front edge is still a tiny bit wambly. I worked on it for hours and hours but a bad start makes for a bad finish. There are probably fifteen table saws in my neighborhood and it would have saved days if I had asked to use one to make the initial cuts. I didn't though. It looks slightly handmade still, even all shiny with white enamel.

But I love that about it. Every part of this house looks handmade. I call it my first draft house. I plan to get to the edits with about the same efficiency of the original builders who put it here around the turn of the twentieth century. Houses are really not finished products in the last-century mode in which I live. To my thinking it would feel tragic to throw up a new, finished house in a few months at the huge expense of materials and cash necessary for that modern type of construction. I relish the lifetime project I am involved in with my tiny property and its two tiny dwellings.

I am having a problem with the prospect of aging and diminishing abilities to do things like the roofing I considered and then scheduled for next summer. It might be my last big project, or not. I fantasize about a lot of mostly decorative improvements and things I really do want to finish from my last few edits. For instance, after three replacements I might just decide wooden front steps are not practical, at least as presently designed. Winter is almost here, and most of the things I would like to do will not get done now, but in the next few years, the next decade, I might just do a lot of projects, or delegate them, or leave them for the next owners.

But that's fine with me. I found that the expected rot was not so invasive and terrible as I feared, and that is probably true throughout the houses. I am on a slow time scale, the time scale of a house that is already almost a century old by almost all accounts. This house time


is slower than the human time scale, but tied to a lifetime. The Vaughans are gone from the property, but still tied to me, and every piece of work I do on this old pile of carefully arranged fir connects me with the pioneers and my town's history.

I'm in love with the mystery and extension of it, in both ways. I picture my son practicing his hand-tool skills on replacing some of my work, maybe living in the houses with his own kids deflecting their demands for skylights and balconies and secret cubbies. He will shake his head and marvel at some of my stupid mistakes, and make a few of his own perhaps. I will definitely document the history of the house with and without me, have a story to seal up in the walls for the future, or in the library for the community, or just to enjoy the process of building the documentation as I have built up the property.

Every time I garden, building the soil or nurturing the trees I rescued, every time I fix something or add an improvement, I am participating in a sacred, fulfilling and basic quest for shelter that is comfortable, durable, and beautiful. It has been a lot more than a windowsill project this week. Maybe I am taking my time with it because I can, but it feels intentional. I love looking inside that old wall.

I must remember these emotions next summer when it is roof time. It is fun. This is my kind of fun.

Monday Mornings

Mondays are odd when you work Saturdays...for me it can be kind of a day off, or a launch into a crowded week, and today I am starting slow. My house is cold, so I worked out on the stationary bike a bit while I read some essays from a library book that has to be returned. It's a big motivator for the bike that I can ride it while reading, or watching TV, or just for a few minutes here and there. The scenery does sometimes lack interest.

My living room is full of projects that are in progress: redoing my Holiday Market displays, getting my tote bag design pinned down, looking at some old art I pulled out of the files to see if I can use it again. During the late 80's I did some really precise and well-crafted art, between four- and six-color designs of flowers and birds stuck in pockets printed on the shirts...the pocket concept got a bit forced but there is a little group of orchids and a lovely rose, and quite a few birds, so I am thinking I could use parts of them for some little bags I got from Mike's garage sale. As with the tote bag design, I have to get things out in view and look at them for a few days while I visualize the details and get a fully realized plan. I love how my creative process works itself while I do other things. The big drawback is that I have so many things in various stages that it gets messy fast.

All of these art projects are just piled upon my house research which has slowed, and I really have to clear the table again and get back to the book. Maybe my window of opportunity has closed a bit with the approaching holiday sales season. Maybe just saying window will get me closer to my window sill project which I am so reluctant to dive into.

It's just a rotten window sill but it involves removing siding from the south wall, the original south wall, so I don't know what I will find and possibly destroy in the process. One of my theories is that these present windows were larger than the originals but I don't know how I would find evidence of that. I know I don't have even a single piece of the siding left, as I used every scrap to connect the remodeled part back to the original, and even had to use a different type on the back wall where no one will notice, plus some T-1-11 that is hidden behind the wood rack and will need to be replaced someday too. So when I put it back together with the new sill I will somehow manufacture, I will also have to patch in some siding that will fit. The kind I have is pretty obscure and doesn't even show up in my research of clapboard types. I'd go to Bring to look for it but that will take a strong will so that I will not come home with more projects. I find old stuff irresistible so a trip to Bring can be dangerous.

Payment is starting to come due on the lick-and-a-promise decisions I made when trying to finish the project enough to get us moved in back in 2005 or whenever that was. There were some things I did that I can't really understand at this point, unless I just ascribe them to ignorance. I knew so little about houses and wood back then that now there are glaring awkwardnesses and projects that involve tearing things out and replacing them. All of my outlets are upside down because I saw one done that way and thought it was correct. I followed right down the path of someone else's ignorance without doing the simple research of asking one dumb question. I did that more than once, sad to say.

Houses just don't really last very long, as they are such a collection of details and components with lives of their own. I guess I will be working on this house for the rest of my life, if I'm lucky. That's a relief in a way, since I can put things off for next summer knowing they will just rest here and wait for me, like the back door of the shop which has needed replacement for a decade now. Yes, it's getting worse, and no, it's not going to fix itself, but the urgency isn't really there. I can take the time to do a better job than I would if I were in a hurry. Somehow I have learned that I want to do a better job. I suppose that is a form of maturity that I am happy to have gotten a glimpse of at my age. It sort of balances out the other urge that takes the form of "I just don't care," and "that's good enough." Might be good enough for the short term but those long terms are a much different proposition.

It's hard to know what is really important. Maybe nothing, maybe everything. Some of the tiniest things persist and linger and over time smell worse and bigger, and it's a mystery why they don't just fall between the cracks like so many other tiny crumbs. I've tried to slow down and be more careful just in case the tiny detail I am concerned with becomes one of the persistent ones. Obsessing over tiny details is not the way to get a lot of big things finished, though.

Today my goal is to finish one project in the living room so I can get my sewing machine out, in order to finish a few more. I'll either pick the biggest or the smallest, or if the sun comes out I might switch goals and tear into that windowsill. Although it is cold and this northwest wind isn't helping, I'm running out of chances to work outside. I have almost dug up the last of the Bishop's Weed for this season, a very opportunistic weed I have been trying to eradicate for most of the time I have lived here. I'm right on top of it now that I have two good feet and my back is behaving well. My Mom reports that the ivy I grubbed out of her yard a few years ago has remained grubbed out. She occasionally has to pull some, but the great majority is gone. If that impossible task succeeded, my Bishop's Weed one can too. Persistence is a virtue I seem to have taken in.

So I will persist in mixing my day off with my crowded week and see what I can get crossed off my list today. Maybe I will start with this lovely bowl of figs I just got from one of my favorite farmers. First I will put them in the living room so it will count for my finished project if none of the others qualify. Not really cheating, but still repeating a really time-wasting habit of those who live in small places...moving things from one place to another. I do a lot of that. Sometimes I call it organizing, sometimes cleaning, and sometimes it just makes me laugh.

At least with the figs I will have something to show for it at the end. Hope your day is productive!

Weather Rules Now

I just hate to be cold, so fall isn't fun for me, with the winter coming on...but usually we get a terrific warm October so I'm still hoping. I brought in all the green tomatoes, though, and will patiently wait for them to redden and then can or dry them. The shortage of sun does make it all the more delightful when it does come out. I don't have a clothes dryer, so it creates timing challenges, but I'm used to watching the skies and predicting. I have a few things out this morning that will be swiftly brought in under the eaves if we get a shower. I got the west side painted and it looks all clean and new, and I evicted the squirrel from a nest on my old wooden Market booth that for some reason I am keeping. South side will have to wait unless we get a long stretch of sun. I have a young Flicker coming to my suet and keeping the starlings intimidated. The bushtits don't seem afraid of the Flicker, and the birds seem to know which ones I am fond of and which I am not.

This photo is from late July when I set up across from a flower seller at the Tuesday Market. She saw me admiring the glads and gave me the whole bunch at the end of the day. Sweet. Tuesday Market was fun while it lasted but I had a hard time keeping my body going twice a week like that. Market is a very physically demanding day, as most of you know.

Trying to wrangle a bunch of details like windshield wipers, fixing flats, finishing the caulking. It's endless, the maintenance, and I'm trying to take comfort in it rather than finding it discouraging. Everything needs attention periodically, and a few things have gotten away from me. But I cleaned the attic a bit (of things I had hidden up there to reduce my clutter) and am working on the project room. I got out so much stuff for the wedding prep in June, and now have to get it all back into the filing system that is my space.
I am a visual learner and like a lot of stimulus to be creative, so I have a lot of what other people call clutter. I know it is my job for the remainder of my life to de-accumulate and change my habits, and I've started on that.

I will probably take the time to create a new blog for my house research and book project. I got all my research organized and took it in to the Lane County Historical Museum to see what they could tell me. I had a lot more details on my people (I'm researching the Davis, Huddleston and Vaughan families, mostly) than they did, and some might help them date some of their other materials. The researcher found me some wonderful items, though, including a journal by one of the other sons of William Tyler Vaughan describing their trip west, and a photo of Samantha Huddleston's house, built in 1853. I'm not positive, but I think it is still there, dressed up to look newer than that. I had walked by the location on 8th St., 356 W. 8th, the day before, and it was next to a house that looked old enough, but now I can take another look and see if I can find the bones underneath the modernity. It has two front doors and is now a duplex, but I think James Huddleston might have built it with Samantha's mother Catharine Davis in mind. She was a milliner for a time after her husband died, and one half of the house could have been for her to do her sewing and receive clients. Catharine lived for 40 years after Benjamin Davis died in 1858, only 8 years after they had arrived here and taken a land grant out on River Road. Samantha outlived her husband by 37 years, and the two women had a lot in common, and were both powerful in our history. The photo is of Catharine near the end of her life. I have a photo that may be Samantha and Iantha with their mother, but I can't prove it. Yet.

I have just about enough information on Samantha Davis Huddleston now to write an article about her, though of course much of it will be speculation amid the few documented facts. I know my land was part of the original Huddleston Donation Land Grant, which was the piece that is now circumscribed by 8th, Jefferson, Chambers, and either the Amazon or some line across around 16th or 17th streets. That is most of the west side neighborhood, but Samantha platted and sold off most of it beginning around 1900.
I can trace my particular little piece to a sale to the Vaughan family in 1908, but I had hoped to prove there were buildings on it earlier than that, and couldn't find any indication on the few maps from that time.

The Museum had a wonderful map show (extended through this week) including some excellent hand-drawn maps from around 1900. The photo shows a little piece labeled F.G. Vaughan, and it seems to say it is 48.63 acres, but the map isn't precisely dated.  I'm still chasing down a couple of details about that. Eugene is shown as a blank inside it's limits, as this map is about the unincorporated areas. I was lucky enough to get there on Tuesday morning before they had put that map away. It is too fragile to keep on display, so it went back into its wrappings.

One thing fascinating about history like this is that so much is continually lost because no one wrote it down, or there were no descendents, as in the case of the Huddlestons. Samatha's son Henry lived with her his whole life, and died a year before she did in 1926. And that was the end, except for other Davises whom I may not have found yet. I know one of her sisters married a photographer, and if I could find his collection of ambrotypes, she would surely have been pictured in some. Unfortunately he lived in CA and Iantha Jane died there, so I don't think the UO has any. That research is never-ending, though, and I can't really do it all right now.
I'm trying to bring my focus back into my house and write the book, because I will distract myself endlessly with these small details. It's all so very intriguing. We're so lucky in Eugene to have so much physical evidence left, houses and trees and artifacts. Our history is really still quite new.

My organizations are having Annual Meetings and elections and politics is a crazy mess, and I love the quiet of my living room with my research spread out and all my photos available to ponder. I'm still learning from the demolition photos, now that everything is covered up again. My theories are refined, adjusted, reflected upon, and some I'm still sticking to even when they seem unlikely. This is the good side of winter and I suppose we need the inside time when it is too wet to garden or build. Balance is a goal.
And winter brings bean soup and steamy kitchens and flannel sheets, and more books. I hope to survive it. I will miss the lovely, stretched out warmth and the evenings on the deck. I hope next summer comes before too long. I'm going to have a few projects left over for it.
And now that we have had two rainy Saturdays in a row, and thrived nonetheless, I can do this fall Market thing. I got new tires on my bike (after a flat on my trailer at the end of Market last week) and I have the full rain suit and shoes covered. I'm not going to worry about it. I will try to enjoy everything that comes.
Not really much else to do about it, but grin. And read. And write!