Room 101 (The Pink Parlor), Wall D, Photo by John Butler

On Friday, Scott finished removing the trim from the Pink Parlor, pictured above.  I had eagerly anticipated the joinery surrounding the fireplace, given our recent work on another fireplace surround.  The displaced surround, turned upside-down, is below:

Pink Parlor Surround Turned Upside Down

When I think about the era in which this house was built, in a relatively new country, with newly earned independence, it can feel very foreign to me.  I struggle to understand the mindset of these post-colonial carpenters.  But when I see the joinery detail below, and a fireplace surround constructed nearly the same way I’d construct it today, I feel much closer and more connected with our region’s history.   I realize that we are still a young country, and in the context of the rest of the world, this is a pretty young house.  The importance of preservation is emphasized not simply because the house is “old,” but because so much hard work went into constructing it.

Mid Rail and Stile Joinery

Oh, and the stiles were buried deep, just like in the Blue Room.

Buried Stile

For more photos of last week’s progress, click on the slideshow, below:

Dan and Pete washing the Pink Parlor floor

On Tuesday, Dan was removing southern yellow pine flooring in a room we’ve dubbed “the Pink Parlor.”  As an earlier layer of flooring was uncovered, he detected beneath the scrim of sand and dust a pattern in the mottled finish.  A little washing revealed a fine stenciling.

Stenciling Detail

Scott had also been working on dismantling the Pink Parlor, and discovered some craftsmanship that has made me re-think a hasty declaration about the best way to field panels

Fielded Wall Panel

The crisp beveled edges of these raised panels are beautiful.  It’s hard to believe that this was the back face, appreciated by the carpenter alone.  Large panels need to have a certain amount of thickness for stability, but their edges must be narrow in order to fit into a groove that runs along the inner edges of the stiles and rails.  At O’Kane, we have discovered a variety of techniques for relieving that edge, each one more impressive than the last.

Wall Panel Detail

When we were first assessing the room, and removing the plaster, many of us thought that the wall beneath the chair rail was finished in plaster, because the wall section was so wide, and smooth.  In our day and age, it is hard to believe that a 24 inch, 17 foot wall section could be composed of a single, clear board, but in this building’s day and age, that was entirely possible.

Scott removing nails from wainscot panel

The wainscot that Scott removed was 24 1/2 inches wide, tightly grained, and completely free of knots and defects.  Lain upon the horses, in the strafing light, the scallops left by the joiner’s plane were obvious.

Wainscot Panels

This is a limited selection of what we’ve revealed in the past week.  For more, see the slideshow below:

Wall 105.A, Outlined. Photo by John Butler

This is post about a persnickety process:

After a piece of trim is removed from an O’Kane wall, it is taken over to a photograph of that wall and traced with a fine tip marker.  The dis-assembler then writes a description of the piece on the item list for that wall and assigns it an item number.  The room number, wall letter and item number are written on a piece of masking tape, which is affixed to the upper left, backhand corner of the piece.  The piece is carefully de-nailed, and then a final “acquisition” number is etched into a patch of white shellac using a Dremel tool.  The piece is wrapped in shrink wrap  with his cohorts, and tightly stacked in an assiduously organized, and mapped trailer.  I have just finished re-tracing all the photographs of those walls which have been completely denuded.  The results, below:

Blue Parlor Fireplace, photo by John Butler

Before it was dismantled, the fireplace in O’Kane’s Blue Parlor got a lot of attention.  It is a simple-looking surround, with a single large panel above and an applied mantle, but it’s a good representation of the vernacular style from its era.  Aside from a little bit of backband added in a Greek Revival-era renovation, the surround was intact, and allowed a visitor to feel transported in time.  While I found the piece pleasing aesthetically, I didn’t fully appreciate the workmanship until it was dismantled, revealing another chapter in the story of this building.

After Scott removed the adjacent paneling, and had cut or pulled the wrought nails attaching it to the wooden lintels, we realized that removing the surround wouldn’t be so easy.  The stiles on either side of the panel and fireplace opening extended past the first layer of brick, but we could never have guessed just how deeply.  After removing a piece of subfloor and digging into crumbled clay mortar, we found that the stiles extended below the surface of the subfloor by 8 inches.  Eight Inches!

We haven’t found anything like this elsewhere in the building, and, based on the adjacent wall paneling, which went no deeper than the first layer of flooring, there is no reason to think that the original floor was eight inches lower.  My theory is this: while the frame was being fit, joiners were cutting this and the other frame & panel walls (joinery shots, below). As soon as the frame was erected and sheathed, joiners installed this surround first so that this hearth could warm and feed the carpenters as they finished the rest of the house.

After digging out the stiles, we carefully laid the surround onto a specialized piece of preservation equipment called a Trash Can, and then we discovered something AWESOME.

A Pulvinated Panel!  I have a thing for pulvinated, or “breasted” panels (would an analyst draw some connection between my interest and being a woman in a male-dominated field?)  I have loved them ever since I first encountered them at Hancock Shaker Village on a NBSS class trip.  At Hancock, the technique is seen on the front of the panel, and elsewhere, it seems to refer largely to friezes.  I just think it is The Number One Most Elegant Way to field a panel, and ought to be used more often,  and visibly.  It is appealing to me how present the crafts-person is in this method of shaping a panel.  The curve is shaped by his eye and hand, rather than a combination square.  To me, the process is nearer to the construction of a chair than that of the austere wall panel.

Pulvinated Panel at Hancock Shaker Village

Given that the back of the panel we found was mostly rough, and totally invisible, the gently curved backside was not really where this crafts-person showed his stuff.  That was in the triple stub tenon we found in the wide bottom rail, and the double tenon up top.  The joinery involved is partly what leads us to believe that the surround may have been made ahead of time, off-site.

To see more photos of our process click on the slideshow, below

Blue Parlor Wall, Dismantled. Photo by John Butler

One of the first treasures we uncovered at O’Kane was a wall of horizontal featheredge sheathing painted in bright yellow.  It was hidden behind plaster in the Blue Parlor, and had shadow lines delineating where once there were shelves.  Where the boards terminate, on the left side, we think there was originally a wall, creating three rooms in the back half of the house.  Two smaller rooms flanked the Blue Parlor with its large central hearth.  The yellow paneling probably turned the corner, creating a pantry in what was originally the kitchen, given the large fireplace.  Throughout the house, we have continued to find boards and shards in the same chrome yellow, used as padding and strapping.  This helps to the date those walls, and solve the mystery of the house’s original layout.

Pictured above is the paneled wall that we uncovered in the room directly above the Blue Parlor.  The right portion of the paneled wall is original, and you can make out the hinges from the original door opening on the second panel from the right.  The door opening was filled with one wide, nondescript board and a board with the same chrome yellow paint and shadow lines.  During one period of renovation, this yellow pantry board was probably taken from the partition wall downstairs and installed upstairs to create what became a UNH student’s bedroom.

We have found other pieces of this doorway elsewhere in that upstairs bedroom.  In the closet, the head casing was being used as a shelf cleat, allowing us to determine the width of the original door.  Time and again during the dismantling process, we are reminded to be thankful for that Yankee thrift.

We’ve been using softwood wedges, made from 2x stock, to carefully remove delicate moldings and wide wall panels.  Either the wedges loosen the nails completely, or they provide use with enough room to slip a sawblade behind to cut the nail.  Like ziploc tupperware, they can be reused, but eventually the edges get grungy, and need to be thrown away.  Using a sled on the tablesaw, I can safely make buckets of fine, sharp wedges.

Some of the wedge templates are pictured above.  The larger wedges, 15″ x 1 1/2″, and 12″ x 1″, are used for flooring , and wide wall panels.  Smaller wedges in 5″, 7″ and 9″ by 1/2″ sizes help with smaller, more delicate moldings.

This is a photo of the template after it has been screwed to the tablesaw sled.  I added a fence (pine, left) whose top is co-planar with the top of the stock to be ripped (pine, right).  Then I screw a cap onto the fence which covers the stock and holds it down as it is pushed through the blade.  This allows me to cut the wedge safely, my fingers far from the blade.  The sled is then retracted, the wedge popped out from beneath the cap, and the next blank squeezed in.

Jig with the cap screwed in place, above.

Profile view of jig, devoid of stock.

I know that some people use a bandsaw to make wedges.  That method has the benefit of a thinner kerf and less waste, but for us, this method was safe, speedy and accurate.

Over the past week, we have been using up our supply of softwood wedges at the O’Kane House.  In the effort to gently remove the delicate, hand-planed moldings, we tap narrow wedges in along the paint lines, crushing the wedges with repeated use (and saving the edges of the trim).  It is a slow, thoughtful process and along the way, we speculate about what the original carpenters of 1790 might have been thinking.

There is strong evidence that the trim carpenter who finished the front hall and the upstairs bedrooms was thinking, “OMG, Can’t get enuf of this sweet, new reeding plane!”  The pattern of five 3/16 inch half round “reeds” is used to create a variety of decorations around the room.  So far, all of this molding has been hung with wrought nails.  The accordian lath behind it was hung with a combination of cut and wrought nails.  This was typical for the time period, according to A Building History of Northern New England, by James Garvin.  Cut nails broke more, but were less expensive to make, so a few wrought nails were used to hold the lath in place, and then the field was filled in with cut nails.  It makes sense to me that the carpenter wouldn’t risk breaking a cut nail as he hung his precious, hand-milled moldings.  It was worth it to stick with the more trusted technology, the wrought nail.

He used it in multiple runs adjacent one another to adorn the echinus of the pilasters next to the front door.

And he ran multiple passes on one 6 or 7 inch board that he then cut on the diagonal and reassembled to dress up the simple fireplace surround.

We get sort of excited when we see mistakes like this one.  When we turned the board over, we saw the knot that caused the plane to go off-track.  I like to imagine commiserating with the post-colonial carpenter around the horse trough.  It’s evidence like this that will remind the client that he lives in a wholly handmade house.  There are some moldings that we may have to reproduce, and for short sections, it is easier to do by hand. If anyone out there has seen a plane like this one, please let us know.

For more photos on the process, check out the photos below, updated regularly with our daily finds.

Tools for Dismantling

We’ve begun in earnest the dismantling of the O’Kane House, in Durham, NH.  It began with a training day with John Butler, a photographer and carpenter who has worked with us on a number of museum de-installations.  He showed us how to remove trim without damaging the surface using a variety of softwood wedges, and other specialty tools.  He has also been working with us to develop a streamlined process for labeling and documenting all of the parts we will remove.

As we dismantle the house, I hope to keep the blog up to date with a series of posts and pictures of the neat stuff we find.  Consider the following the first:

Look at that enormous Chimney Girt!

The interior door jambs were rabbeted into the casing.  Those dadoes and rabbets were all plowed by hand!

When the carpenter who milled this piece of baseboard ran into some squirelly grain, or screwed up and ran off the edge of the board, he just flipped the piece over, and ran the molding on the opposite edge of the opposite face.  We revel in connecting to other carpenters in this way.  We all make mistakes, it’s the good carpenters who know how to fix them.

]]> http://www.preservationtimberframing.com/okane-notebook-i/feed/ 0 http://www.preservationtimberframing.com/yours-gluely/ http://www.preservationtimberframing.com/yours-gluely/#comments Tue, 27 Mar 2012 14:57:25 +0000 Jessica MilNeil http://www.preservationtimberframing.com/?p=872 Continue reading →]]>

Hill Fireplace

The Hill fireplace is nearing completion.  From the outset, this project has been among our most rewarding.   We designed the panelled wall using HABS drawings from a house built by the father of the builder of this house.  Knowing that the design is grounded in historical precedent lends the project a sense of purpose greater than that of simply filling in the space around a fireplace.

Fireplace Return Panel

The paneled wall is composed of three frames, joined by mortise and tenon.  One, that surrounds the fireplace opening itself, contains a large panel approximately 3′ x 6′.  Its 8′ stiles extend past the panel to the floor, and the joint between the flat panel and the stile is covered by a bolection molding developed from the John Cram HABS drawings.  The same bolection molding will cover the joint between the lower half of the stile and the masonry.

Adjacent the right side of the large panel is an open frame that will enclose a bookshelf, and perpendicular to the left edge is a third frame with a panel in its lower half, and a bookshelf above.

Pilaster Layout Close Up

The front wall plane will be adorned with three pilasters, designed from the Cram drawings, which handily obscure the joint between the two front frames, and their edges.  The pilasters are not only decorative, as their obfuscation allows the front frames an expansion joint, that will move with the weather.

When I first approached this job, I was sure that the many mortise and tenon joints would pose the greatest challenge.  And while they were a lot of fun, they came together with relative ease, and the glue ups were the most interesting aspect of the first phase of the process.  Years ago, I used to wonder whether there was a word for glue-up phobias, because I clearly had it.  The idea of the glue dripping and drying as I scrambled to fit the swelled joinery once filled me with dread, but over time I’ve borrowed tips here and there to develop a stress-free system that results in remarkably flat panels.

The larger of the two panels was 6′ x 3′.  Historically, a plane of this size would have been broken up by a stile or rail to accomodate panels composed of single boards, some of which were over 2′ in width.  However, the client has a specific painting that she wants to hang over the fireplace, and we thought it an appropriate compromise to create the panel by gluing together four boards.  We’ve seen wide glued up panels in houses of a similar age, such as in the O’Kane House, in Durham, NH.

Half Glue Up

The biggest challenge when gluing together a wide panel is keep the whole assemblage flat. My contemporaries would recommending gluing together narrower pieces to keep it stable, but we wanted to use wider boards to better approximate the panel that may have originally been; so we used four,  9 1/2″ wide, eastern white pine boards.  Tom and I started by jointing a face (flattening the face on a jointer), and then running the board through the thickness planer to create a parallel face, and then jointing an edge, and using our new SawStop to create a parallel edge.  I then laid the boards out with their best faces up, arranging and rearranging to achieve the tightest joints and flattest initial surface.  I then drew marriage marks across each of the joints, and used the marks to reference the biscuit jointer.  A biscuit jointer adds to the prep time for glue ups, but I think that it has been the most important changes in my path towards glue-up enlightenment.  After the glue is applied, no longer do the boards twist and slide past one another like Jamiroquai and his couch in the Virtual Insanity video.  As the pipe clamp is tightened, the biscuits help to hold unruly boards to their better behaved brothers.  They allow you more time to arrange your pipe clamps and cauls.

Panel, half scraped, see its shine?

I glued the panels in two pairs, and then glued the pairs together.  I then used a cabinet scraper to remove some of the larger globs that had squeezed from the joint, and followed it with a random orbital sander.  I tend to be snobby about sandpaper, thinking it a lesser method of smoothing and flattening, but for taking down the glue between joints (if it has hardened too long) I have found nothing better.  Sandpaper abrades the surface of the wood, always leaving a slightly fuzzy surface, while planes and cabinet scrapers cut the fibers, leaving a smoother, shiny surface.  In most cases, a plane is also faster.  But I couldn’t risk the tear out that might occur if the flat-sawn boards had adjacent grains that run in the opposite direction.  I was still able to achieve a traditional finish by following the sander with a cabinet scraper and extremely sharp block plane.

Raising Panel

After the panel was smoothed, I relieved the backside, creating a raised panel.  Because the client wanted a flat panel on which to hang her painting, the work will never be seen, but like a lot of traditional forms, the fielding serves a purpose.  It relieves the edge so that it will fit in a dado (groove) that runs in the edge of the stiles and rails, but allows the center of the panel to remain at a full 3/4 inch thickness, which increases its stability.

I transported the frames and panels to Hampton Falls, where they were assembled, and pinned.  Tom and I spent the last week installing the frames, and adding the pilasters and trim.  Please peruse the installation photos below, and check back for final shots of the completed work.