Jarrett House North

The last time I left Seattle (after my summer internship), I wrote a post about things I would miss upon returning to Boston. This time I held off; everything moved too fast to pause for reflection, and I didn’t know what would show up on the “most missed” list.

Then tonight I was in the grocery store and I had a full-on Proustian moment. I was going to pick up a chicken to make one of our favorites, a fricassee with rosemary, garlic, and white wine, when I thought, “Guess I need to buy rosemary.” And just like that, it came to me in a rush: I miss my herb garden.

Obviously rosemary in particular is important to me. But I really miss that whole garden bed. Out of the six raised beds in the back, we only kept one going consistently. As I described when I dug it, I put in a full bouquet garni of herbs, and then some: a border of different thymes, of which the standard English and variegated lemon varieties did quite well; sage, which froze in the winter but bounced back and thrived after; marjoram and savory, which hung in quite well; basil and parsley, which needed seasonal replacement but some of which hung on for the next year; oregano, which may well have taken over the whole box by now. And what ended up being two rosemary bushes, one of which was three feet tall when we left. I never had to buy herbs, except cilantro and parsley (we consumed far more than we could grow). I could always walk out back and grab a handful of stuff and improvise.

This house has no established garden area. We’re going to have to work quite hard to carve one out of the back yard, which is shadowed by three overgrown maples and blanketed with weeds. So it will be a while before I get my herb-fu back.

As it turns out, I wasn’t quite ready to have our fridge would fit in our kitchen. When Lisa and I measured the fridge cubby in the kitchen, we forgot to take into account the width of the baseboard molding. So after ripping down the cabinet, and after the fridge was delivered, I had one last piece of demolition to do.

Ripping out floor trim can be tricky if it was put in before the most recent floor was laid. In our kitchen, there was a layer of linoleum and other flooring material that obscured the base of the trim. So instead of being able to get a prybar under the base of the trim, I had to work in stages—first splitting the trim in half along the line of the bottom trim nails, then removing the top half, then pulling the bottom trim nails, then levering the bottom half of the trim out.

After this last piece of demolition on the right hand side trim, the fridge fit back about three-quarters of the way into the nook. Maybe tomorrow while the remnants of Hurricane Charlie dump rain on us, I’ll remove a little trim on the left hand side so it can slide the rest of the way back.

In the meantime: we have a fridge!!!

There was one last piece of demolition to do before the fridge could fit in the kitchen. For some reason, the cabinet over the refrigerator cupboard was about two inches closer to the floor than needed for the fridge to fit. Solution? Rip that sucker down!

This turns out to be a stupid demolition to do by yourself. Most wooden kitchen wall cabinets are attached or otherwise connected to the wall by the following means:

1. screws
2. molding
3. paint

And that’s about it. So if you break the paint seal with a putty knife, pry the top molding loose, and then start removing screws, there’s a very good chance the thing is going to drop on your fool head. Or foot. Or make a big hole in the kitchen floor.

Fortunately for me, our cabinet was held in as well by d. friction. So when I removed the last screw, it still stayed wedged in place, even when I foolishly tugged on the front of the cabinet. I ended up bracing the front of the cabinet with one arm and using the prybar to lever the cabinet away from the back wall. It obligingly rotated itself around an axis formed by the topmost front contact points and the wall cavity, where I could get both hands under it and gently tug it free.

And what a wonderland of joy lay revealed! Unpainted walls, and big holes in the plaster ceiling where someone had done some quick work on the upstairs plumbing. Guess I need to learn to patch fist-sized holes (and bigger!) in plaster ceilings now. But hey, our fridge is going to fit! If it ever gets here (ETA: 12:45 to 2:45 PM today.)

Special bonus! By popular request following the original story, before, during and after pictures from the doorjamb removal.

Sitting in the Northeast, I probably shouldn’t complain about the 83° weather; after all, it’s 105 in Vegas. But right now it feels like I’ve been walking through soup for the last few hours. I note with grim irony that Georgia is actually cooler than Boston right now, though I’m sure that being in the middle of an approaching hurricane has something to do with it.

Productive afternoon anyway: unpacked my CDs, got bookshelves set up, found our china. Our refrigerator comes tomorrow and we’ll be paying a plumber approximately an arm and a leg to run new pipes in the utility room for our washing machine on Monday (we have a sink, but the house never had a washing machine so we have to have the hookups created from scratch).

One of these days I’ll have to take a vacation that doesn’t involve our move.

On today’s Highlights® for Home Improvement Geeks™, we have the story of Goofus and Gallant and the Undersized Doorway! Read along:

• Gallant starts with detailed plans for his (and her) charming bungalow renovation.
• Goofus buys not one, but two refrigerators that won’t fit through the $#!@#$ kitchen door!
• Gallant strips an entire floor down to bare wood to lay it out the way he and she want it.
• Goofus rips out a door jamb using a prybar and a brand-new reciprocating saw so that the smallest kitchen door opening goes from 27″ to 30.5″—hopefully enough for a new fridge.

In all seriousness, here’s how it went down. As I laid out in my last update, the plan was to remove a little trim from the doorway to widen the opening. The way this normally goes is: use a putty knife or razor blade to cut the paint away from the joint between the stop molding (the strips of wood that the door rests against when it’s closed) and then slip a prybar in to strip the stop molding out.

Had this been a normal house, that’s how it would have gone.

Instead, we have Überhaus. Built way beyond contemporary standards by a highly responsible builder in 1941. In this case, this means the stop molding wasn’t a strip tacked in place but was actually part of the doorjamb. What this meant was we had to rip out the whole doorjamb to gain any width.

To remove a door jamb, here’s what you do:

1. First, remove the casing—the molding around the outside of the doorjamb. To do this, I used a rubber mallet to tap a putty knife into the joint between the molding and adjacent pieces of wood to break the paint seal, then used a prybar to pull the molding away. In some cases, I had to slip a chisel in to widen the gap enough to get the prybar in.
2. In our case, the casing had two parts: some raised trim around the edges (what I like to think of as “crown molding for the doorway”) and three flat boards surrounding the actual door opening. I thus had to start with the raised trim, walk that all the way around (where I could—the door was butted against a wall, so I had to leave some trim until later), then remove the flat boards.
3. Once I did that and caught my breath, I had to repeat the process on the other side of the doorway.
4. Finally, I removed the jamb. Usually the instructions for this read “pry out the jamb and use a reciprocating saw to cut through any stubborn nails.” In my case, I wasn’t able to get leverage to get any of the three pieces of the jamb out, so I cheated. I made a cut about a foot from the top of the left upright piece with the reciprocating saw, pried out the bottom piece, removed the top piece, the top part of the jamb, then the right part of the jamb.

Easy as pie. It only took one whole day.

So what’s next? Well, in our immediate future, we have a 30.5″ hole through which we can fit a fridge. Once we find a reliable carpenter, we’ll have him make a mirror of the arch that leads into the same hallway. Beats having a narrow doorjamb where there’s no need for an actual door.

Incidentally, shout out to JM and A for recommending the Sawzall, which was our reciprocating saw of choice for this operation. Best home improvement tool I ever had. Maybe even better than the crowbar.