Be Yourself...Unless You Get A Chance To Be Batman

My husband got a chance to be Batman, and he took it.

Not, you know, the Dark Knight...that guy's got a screw loose anyway. Don't be that Batman. But if you get a chance to be a hero to a bat, do it.

A few nights ago, I got up in the wee hours to check on my kiln (I'm a potter.) My husband Doug was kneeling beside the low flame of the burners, with what looked like a wet black washcloth cupped in his hands. As I watched, the washcloth extended one leathery wing.

It was a wet little bat! Well, technically, it was a wet big bat - Maine has Little Brown Bats & Big Brown Bats, and this one was the "big" variety, although clearly that's a relative term as it was only about 4" long. It had gotten in the house somehow, and then had the misfortune to land in the soapy water in the sink. At some point in the night Doug got up & discovered it struggling, and scooped it out of the water. He held it near the burner flame until it had dried off enough to fly.

I'm greatly relieved that it did, because I could see him gearing himself up to ask if we could bring it inside & nurse it back to health. I'm a big bat fan, as it happens, and I think we should encourage their population...in the wild. Bats charm me less in the house! But that proved unnecessary, as this little (big!) guy eventually made his way to the eves of out garage, and was gone by morning. Hopefully it's now busy eating mosquitos!

Batty McFly

For the third time this month we've entertained a bat visitor, in our living space. We're not sure how they are getting in, but it's an old house and most likely they are living in the attic and squeezing through some tiny hole into the living room. I like bats. I think they are cute - look at Batty McFly's hilariously fierce little face! In actuality he is not trying to intimidate, he was making those echolocation squeaks that bats use to get around.

I did a little reading and discovered that McFly is probably a Big Brown Bat, as opposed to a Little Brown Bat. "Big" is a relative term, and he (she?) was not at all a large animal. Both kinds are found in Maine. Big Brown Bats have longer fur and are more likely to be living in barns and attics.
Big Brown Bats are born in June, and the ones we are finding may well be the young of year, attempting to venture outside for the first time. Bad luck for them that they find themselves in the House of Many Cats, although none has been killed yet.
I captured McFly (and our earlier visitors) by putting on my work gloves ( I doubt they would bite but why take the chance?) and placing a wastepaper basket over them, then closing up the end with a bit of cardboard, and bring the lot outside. McFly seems tuckered out, because he didn't fly away right off the...bat, but hung out 😄for a while - long enough for me to snap this photo.

Like Little Brown Bats, Big Brown Bats can be infected with White Nose Syndrome, although their populations are not crashing like their smaller cousins.

An Amazing Thing Happened on the Way to Project Kitchen Island

To refresh your memory, yesterday I started a new project: transform Maine's Ugliest Dresser into a kitchen island. I had to empty the drawers to get started.

Imagine my surprise when I discover this:

That's right, a gift card...a wedding gift card, to be exact. From twelve years ago. For almost enough to cover the project! I checked it out to make sure it was still valid, and yes indeed it is! In fact I already used part of it to buy some tongue & groove bead board for the facing of the island.

The rest of my materials list looks like this:

• ¾" plywood, for top
• Ardex Feather Finish, a skim-coat concrete surface. 
• Dex-o-tex 2-part epoxy sealer
• Primer (already have!)
• Antique White paint (I think my sister & her boyfriend have some left over from a project)
• Corbels, to support the wider countertop, so stools can fit under. 

I think that's all! This is going to be easier than I thought...and it paid for itself! Almost.

This Old House: New Numbers!

I've been meaning to replace my house numbers for like 11 years now. It's been on the list. It's a pretty long list, and included This Old Staircase, but I am knocking a few items off it, one at a time.

My old address numbers were just the ugly plastic ones you get from the hardware store. They were so old and faded the numbers were hard to read from any distance, so needed to be replaced, but since I had it in my head to make the new numbers out of stoneware, I kept putting off replacing them.

This project, like so many others, refused to do itself.

The old numbers

Making the stoneware numbers was not at all difficult. I am a potter in real life, all the materials - not to mention the kiln - were readily available to me. As you can see in the photo, I broke one of the numbers in transport; I went ahead and used it anyway. I had already waited 11 years for these numbers, I didn't want to wait one more firing cycle.


I am thinking of taking orders for these! $10 per number, choice of purple, yellow, blue or black...whaddaya think?

This Old Staircase: Final Steps, Probably

Ooops, I arted

In the last installment of This Old Staircase, I was deciding whether the stairs needed a pop of color - scarlet maybe, or gold .Those of you who know me will be unsurprised to learn that the answer was yes, both.

Several people suggested that I paint the rail and balusters to match the treads, and while I don't disagree that the project might look better as a whole, I couldn't bring myself to paint over the patina of 100-year-old wood. The stairs were different - they'd already been painted, and the wood underneath was badly scarred and discolored. I might spiffy up the surface of the balustrade a bit, but the natural wood color stays.

I didn't know when I painted them, but the posies are stylized Egyptian Star Flowers. Or, wait, perhaps they are Asiatic Lilies. Yes, that's it. I'm ready to put down my brushes (and stencils, and paint pens) now, until the next painting project, which is threatening to be: These Old Cabinets.

Followed closely by This Gross Peeling Countertop, and then This Laughably Dated Backsplash.

Stay tuned.

This Old Staircase: Am I Done?

I kind of want to be done. This project is entertaining but I've got other stuff to do, you know? Doug thinks it's done. But...

But, damn it...my aesthetic intuition says it is not yet done. Specifically, the contrast between the white stencil and the teal of the riser is too stark, and needs either a balancing contrast - some accents in gold, maybe, or scarlet - or to be stencilled over, in kind of a double-exposure effect, with one of the lighter teals already a part of the design.

In any case I am done for today. I'll sleep on it and look at it fresh tomorrow.

This Old Staircase: Progress!

The chocolate & teal are dry now, and looking pretty fabulous if I do say so myself.

Of course they make the walls & baseboards around them look shabby, so I foresee more painting projects in my future! Still have the best part to go on this one, though: the decorating! I did get a start, so here's a preview:

As you can see from the close pic, the wood is pretty rough and scarred, which is why I went with paint rather than stain. Shabby chic, right?

This Old Staircase - A Learning Experience

There are a lot of edges & borders in a set of stairs. A lot of taping, if you are painting them in two or more colors. What, I asked myself, is a more efficient way to handle this?

Do all the taping at once, I answered me. Then paint. Like so:

Oh, I thought I was sooooooo smart! But, yeahno...don't do this.

I taped all of the edges just before knocking off for the day, thinking it would be all ready to go and I could hit the ground running in the morning. It was, and I did. And then....

Turns out there is a right way to use painter's tape, and where there is a right way, there is - you guessed it - a wrong way. The right way is to tape only the area you are immediately going to paint, paint it, and remove the tape, before the paint is even fully dry. Otherwise the painter's tape sticks to the paint or primer underneath and removes some of it when you take it off.

So, wait...what even is the point of painter's tape, again? That's pretty much what regular tape would do. It's quite a hassle to do it the correct way; you have to keep interrupting your flow to tape, and then removing the tape while the paint is wet without smearing it creates a whole new set of challenges.

So, I had to sand and repair the primer, then let that dry, before I could move on to the fun part: the colors!

The second coats are drying now. I settled on a dark chocolate for the tread, and teal for the riser. So far they look good, although the dark steps show every cat hair - and we have plenty of those. Still need to go back with a tiny brush and touch up edges - in old houses, nothing is a straight, clean line, and there are lots of little bumps and divots that challenge the steadiest hand. And actually, mine is not the steadiest hand, but I am pretty good with a brush, due to my profession.

And then comes my favorite part: the grace notes. Little additions - stencils, decoupage, free brush designs - that charm and engage the user. I tend to plan on a light hand with these but sometimes they take on a life of their own. We'll see! Photos when I have them.

This Old Staircase

My blessing and my curse is that I can see what things could be more easily than I can see what they are; so when I bought my century house more than ten years ago, I saw what I would make of it, overlaying and obscuring the reality of it.

As I say, this is a blessing and a curse. The house was and is perfectly livable, and I got it for super cheap; but the grand dame I imagined still awaits behind a miles-thick layer of hard work and expense. I've been chipping away at it here and there; did some external painting, painted a guest room & added a wallpaper frieze at the ceiling level. The biggest projects, however remained untouched. My kitchen is a horror show of dirty-looking dark yellow cabinets, a cracking, curling lino tile counter, and a hideous, hokey backsplash. Each of these things seems to require fixing the others simultaneously - no point putting a new counter on cabinets you hate, right? So the job remains too huge; there's nowhere to begin.

Partway between "pecking at the edges" and "impossibly daunting" lie my front hall stairs. They are badly scuffed and chipped, in a gray more suited to a cellar floor than an entryway. For more than ten years I have looked at them thinking they need an update, and, finally, this week I set about making it happen.

First that awful old paint had to go. There were many layers, and someone had already painted over chips and peels and divots. There was just nothing to do but take it off. So: paint stripper.

Paint stripping is nasty work. The chemicals are caustic and smell like the fumes alone ought to kill you. I had to close up the kitties in bedrooms, for fear they would step into the stripper and burn their little pads or worse, poison themselves trying to clean it off!

I discovered the wood underneath was discolored and unlovely, which meant I would be repainting rather than staining. Nevertheless, I tried to strip off nearly all of it before sanding - in an old house like this, there's a good possibility of lead paint, and I'd rather not have that dust flying around. Since I would be painting over it, there was no need to remove ever speck of old paint, though: it just needed to be smooth and clean, to take the layer of primer.

Here's where I left off yesterday, with three stairs left to sand. Should be easy to complete this step today, along with all the taping; tomorrow I start painting, primer first, of course. I am still considering my color options: I am thinking a dark chocolate brown for the stair, and either a teal or some version of spring green for the riser.

I'm excited to finally be making the changes I envisioned eleven years ago, and it marks a change for me as well: Do the thing. The thing won't do itself.