Nobleseal

This weekend starts with a visit to a demolition sale in Ocean City. All along the South Jersey shore there is a steady stream of demolition sales. The bulk are in Stone Harbor and Avalon where at this point we’re seeing homes built in the late 1990s/early 2000s torn down. These tear downs I don’t care about because the modern homes never have anything of interest, but sometimes I do go to gawk as someone tears down a 2 million dollar house with custom fireplaces and Viking appliances all going in the dumpster to put up a 4 million dollar house. The ones that hurt are in the other towns which are also rapidly converting to McMansions where you see an old Victorian or a 1920s bungalow torn down.

For this one we had a beautiful Victorian home that was in overall decent shape. I asked the person running the sale what was wrong with the house and she said “Have you ever owned a Victorian? They are a lot of work. The owners are tearing down and building new. The old house is too much work.”

Way too much work for this house. It must be destroyed and replaced with new construction which I assume will be 0 maintenance?

I didn’t see any major issues with the house and I find it amusing that the excuse is the maintenance since any house - old or new- needs maintenance. If your goal is not having to deal with home maintenance then you should sell the house and buy into a condo or get an apartment with a property manager. Not destroy a beautiful house because you don’t want to deal with upkeep.

There’s nothing in the house we purchase. The bathrooms have a nice look with a cute corner sink and bead board, but I’m going with a wall sink and the height of the bead board is too low so I can’t use them.

Vintage corner sink.

Back at my house where I’m in way deeper than just maintenance, I do another pass of plaster on the built-in.

First pass of plaster and starting sanding of built-in.

After plastering, I start doing some sanding of the wood to see if I can get some of the black marks and other defects out. It’s not looking promising and I’m thinking that I’ll need to go a little darker on the stain to hide the imperfections.

Second pass of plaster and starting sanding.

Not too much work to do on the molding except for a sanding and then washing of the window molding with boiled linseed oil soap. These are the same steps I completed on the door molding last week, so now the door thoroughly dried, I apply a coat of boiled linseed oil mixed with turpentine at about a 30% oil/70% turps ratio. My hope this will be a way to rejuvenate the wood and prepare it to get a light stain followed by shellac and varnish.

After applying the BLO/turpentine.

The rest of the time is spent measuring and cutting the NobleSeal TS membrane I purchased for tiling. I read about using membranes in a Fine Homebuilding tiling book. To do tile old-school way involves making a sand mortar bed for the tiles to rest on. This seems tricky and skilled so I saw that tiling mats have been on the market to simplify this process by allowing you to adhesive a mat to plywood and then tile on top of the mat. At first I was looking at the Ditra mat, but it is not suitable for tiles under 2” so that rules out my use with 1” hex. Then I found a mat from RedGuard that was made with natural recycled materials. The problem was that I couldn’t find any distributor who carried the mat and the support staff at RedGuard were unhelpful in finding a distributor. If a company isn’t going to make purchasing their product easy then off to the next company. Finally ended up choosing NobleSeal who seem to be well-respected. Since I already have plywood, my goal is to re-use that rather than putting down cement backer board. The problem is that if you have plywood, it’s not appropriate to tile directly against it. An uncoupling mat is a modern solution that emulates the shifting found in a traditional sand mortar bed. Karen helps with most of the measuring and cutting to get the membrane sized for installation.

Careful measurements before cutting.

Cutting around the pipes.

A preview of where we’re headed.

The last thing of concern is that some of the floor has dips in it and there are some loose sections of plywood. Next weekend I will try using a leveling patch and drive some screws into the plywood to reduce any movement from the old nails coming loose.