Cimorene

I finally managed to find good information about getting rust off of a cast iron woodstove by using Marginalia Search Engine, a specialty search engine that is intended to resurface the "old web" of private websites and bulletin boards and stuff instead of SEO and corporate slop.

A few years ago in the winter when we were using the cast iron woodstove sometimes, someone (me) uhmmmmm absent-mindedly left some candle holders sitting on top of it with candles in them and those included ones carved out of solid blocks of pink rock salt (hideous, they belonged to my MIL, who was addicted to candles. Why didn't we just get rid of them? We hated them. Natural aversion to throwing things away. We have since thrown them out). So it turns out that ummm the candles completely liquefy if you do that and then light a fire in the stove, and they like cause the salt to run and melt onto the surface of the wood stove and salt is bad for cast iron. So. Big rust spots.

And the rust spots have got worse with time, because when it first happened and we tried to get them off, we tried with normal google and duckduckgo searches and got no better advice than sandpaper and steel wool. We only managed to get a tiny bit of the rust off and determined that getting it all off would have taken about 5000 hours of hand-sanding. Since that was not a worthwhile proposition, we left it that way for another year.

So anyway, I tried Marginalia a month ago or something, and it only took a few minutes to unearth a thread about restoring cast iron woodstoves on an old-fashioned bulletin board on "finishing.com, the home of the finishing industry". It's straight out of the internet 20 years ago. And the information was MUCH better!

• WD-40 softens rust


• wire brushes, not sandpaper or sandblasting (although industrial, like, having the stove ripped out and taking it to someone who will sandblast it is the nuclear option if it's completely covered in rust everywhere)


• wire brush attachments for power drills

That was all the info we needed! WD-40 never seemed stinky to me when I was using it on door hinges and stuff, but when you spray it over the visible rust on a wood stove it is noticeable, though not TERRIBLE; it smells kinda like you're in an auto shop, but not in the middle of the car part. Like by the entrance.

You can get visible change on small rust spots with a handheld wire brush. A few hours on two days with the drill attachment has seemed to do the majority of it. It's very hard to work in eye protection goggles and a high filtration mask though. I have to stop, lift the glasses to look, then lower them and start again every minute or so. We are not planning to repaint the spots that have been taken back to the silvery iron, according again to the advice on this bulletin board. Apparently lighting a fire after the WD-40 is already going to be stinky enough and the paint would be worse. You can get protective stove polishes of some kind apparently.

This stove is a Jøtul 3 Classic cast iron woodstove, in a traditional 19th century style. It's completely inappropriate for this 1950 modern-style house. The expected stove in the livingroom is (and no doubt was) a masonry stove, which is much better at heating an area because the ceramic conserves heat and releases it gradually. The form of masonry stoves, which are of course built on-site, was typically streamlined in the years after this house was built. Nowadays you can't build them yourself anymore and that makes them more expensive, so somebody probably replaced the original one when it failed with this cast iron stove perhaps in the 1980s, which was the last time this model was made. But crucially, although a woodstove is completely inappropriate to the house and less functional, there were and are woodstoves that are more minimal and modern in form and they could've just got one of those. But nope.

Anyway, we can't afford a masonry stove like, ever, but our ambition is to replace this woodstove with a Porin Matti, a cheaper alternative to a masonry stove that is still slightly better at retaining heat than a cast iron stove, and which also (a) was in popular use in 1950 and (b) looks similar to the style of masonry stoves typically found in our type of house. These only cost about 2500€ (not counting labor), in contrast to masonry stoves which are typically over 8000€ not counting labor (and requiring much more labor because the mason has to build it on site out of blocks and tiles). We would've been able to buy one this year probably if we hadn't had this broken sewage pipe issue, which ended up costing around 10k. (We had previously earmarked that money, an inheritance from my great-uncle who died recently, for restoring the outer front door and maybe a stove; but the last of it got used on the plumbing instead.)

We hung the curtain rod!

The curtains are floor to ceiling length and the old rod was hung just under the crown, but that's not accurate for the house's period - midcentury curtains in Finland were hung above the window, often with a solid wooden valance. So I suggested we should put the new rod there.

I don't have a sewing machine right now, though (it's time to check back with the repairman if he has time to look at it though - he said to try him again in November). I already hemmed these curtains up to about six inches above the floor just a couple years ago (after several years dragging on the floor collecting dust), and now they're even more ridiculous. There's so much pooled on the floor that they look like they've dragged the rod down from the ceiling with their weight.

ETA: The act of typing up this post made me decide it was too ridiculous to stay like that, so I removed the curtains and folded them up until the sewing machine is fixed. The substitute curtains are a pair of dark brown cotton paisley duvet covers - they don't block the light as well but I don't mind too much. They are about the perfect length and they weigh much less. I'm afraid once we have hemmed the curtains we may have to adjust the brackets in order to mount the third one just to handle the weight, because the regular curtains are velvet (the cotton velvet "Sanela" line from Ikea, about ten years old, with big metal grommet holes in the top instead of a pocket like the newer Sanela curtains. I am also going to cut those off and hem the top because they look too modern).

The plumber and the digger have left after tamping the dirt back down and pouring some new gravel where the car parks! The septic tanks have been removed and the separate rainwater drainage is in place!

The sewers from the tenant side do not empty into the tank under the garage anymore (that's still there though, but it shouldn't be able to give us any trouble unless we get like a month of flooding rains and a leak)!

It's all brown dirt and gray gravel again now, but here's a few pictures Wax took of the excavation earlier.


We have lost a few bushes and possibly some hostas, as well as a little flat cement pad that we didn't want, to the piles of dirt and digging. We will need to buy a few baby bushes (rhododendron maybe?) and a bunch of clover seed which hopefully might manage to outcompete the grass. And set the cement paver path back in place. All that has to be done during the autumn, before the frost, so... here's hoping. Also a city tree on the corner of the lot had a lot of its roots cut off and unfortunately a lot more on the other side last winter when the city dug up the street to fix the pipes. It's probably not gonna survive that, I guess.

I have been feeling full of anxiety and suspense when actually a lot of things are going well. This stupid open septic tank issue has been oppressing and terrifying us for a year. Monday and Tuesday are my last driving lessons and then I take the test (tons of anxiety) but my teacher and I agreed I've been doing pretty well. Wax and I have managed to cook together a bit more often, even.

And he came and spray painted on the ground! He says that the digger dude who was never returning his calls in the spring should be less busy right now. Idk, but I hope he's right.

We might not have to have the open septic tanks for another winter!!

It's taken five years to caulk the seam between the two pieces of butcher block on our counter, so I had to dig a bunch of breadcrumbs out of it first with a fruit knife (it's right in front of the toaster). We also re-caulked the seam between the butcher block and the stainless part of the counter by the sink. (The sink is only a few cm from the edge of it, which is very bad design, and the edge of the butcher block there has inevitably suffered and swollen, as the caulk was never going to be adequate; there was no easy way to get the whole counter in stainless, but we should have figured it out anyway. Or alternately, just called up the companies that make tiles and fireplaces out of Finnish soapstone until we found one that would sell us a counter, even though none of them make counters.)

We also oiled the hinge of the bathroom door - the one modern, new door in the house - which has been squeaking for years (unlike all the other doors, which are from 1950 and work flawlessly). And then we glued the aluminum threshold down over the tile floor at that door - it was already loose when the contractors left because the initial adhesive they had used wasn't in contact with the front face of the cement under the tiles, because the tile sticks out a few mm proud of the subfloor. I scraped a layer of gummy glue off the back of the threshold (glue which had never stuck to the tile and instead became impregnated with dust and dirt), then applied some construction adhesive. It's extremely stinky upstairs now as it dries, even with the windows open.

But anyway, all that didn't even take all day. We've done a bunch of laundry and sat on the sofa cuddling cats in between. Can't believe it took us five years.

Our plumber hasn't been able to pin down the local digger contractor yet. Now besides the digging they'll have to break the new asphalt up and then repave when they're done!

And there was great rejoicing!

Status: the digger guy never called him back so it got backburnered. He is trying again.

A few days ago I had one of those sore knot spots in the middle of my back and it annoyed me enough that I actually went and got the plastic massage stick, which I hardly ever touch because I can't be bothered. And it felt good at first, but I guess I irritated it too much or... whatever, I'm not clear on the mechanism, but it turned into an inflammation, like a little bruise, and now it's been annoying me even more constantly for two days. So I only want to be lying or sitting with a hot pack pressed next to my spine but I also would really like to be standing up and doing things, just not enough to stay away from the hotpack for long. I did take ibuprofen. I can still FEEL it there, being not exactly painful but just really ANNOYING, and I hate it. Also annoying that a hotpack on your spine tends to make you very warm.

I have been gradually accumulating a little bit more energy each day - hence the desire to be standing up or doing things, which I didn't have all winter until the middle of February - but it still doesn't feel springy enough to enjoy being outside. There aren't any flowers up anywhere. The sun isn't out every day. Our tenants were out there raking leaves (which we didn't do at all last fall) with their smallest child yesterday afternoon. They are embarrassingly much more together about... house... maintenance... stuff and they keep doing like twice or three times as much yardwork and stuff on their side of the house as we ever get around to. Last fall they even had a new load of gravel put down in the driveway on their side (there's a drive into the garage - which only they use - and then another one, which still has 0% visible gravel left, on the other side leading to our front door). I just every time want to cry and be like AHHH I'M SORRY FOR BEING SUCH BAD LANDLORDS!!!! WE ARE TEMPERAMENTALLY UNSUITED TO BEING LANDLORDS!!!!! We haven't done that. It wouldn't be professional. Also they asked us if they could get a dog, and obviously yes. They aren't decided yet apparently, but the children are campaigning. Wouldn't that be nice?

I finally got a response from the Finnish tax agency - after I think almost an entire year - for how much the tax will be for the money left me by my great-uncle. Finally, we know how much is left for plumbing (etc)! And at this point I fear we may have to call the plumber, even though in the first week of the year he told us he would call us, because it HAS been 2 months. On the other hand, maybe the ground was too cold to have done any of the digging yet.

I was asked to talk some more about wallpaper, and I love to talk about wallpaper!

I grew up prejudiced against wallpaper, because ( Read more... )

But when we bought our 1950 wooden house in 2019 and dove into researching it we learned that wallpaper was the most common, expected wall treatment for it. I wasn't even willing to consider moving in without changing the wall surface treatments of every single room in the house, on initial walkthrough. (waxjism agreed that things were mostly ugly, but she would totally have been willing to live with some of it for a while, and some of it forever, and my mother-in-law didn't see anything wrong with some of the wallpapers, but was just ¯_(ツ)_/¯ about my aesthetic preferences.) When we bought the house, the existing wallpapers and wall treatments were as follows: ( Read more... ).

The downstairs walls of our house are actually made out of stretched cardboard, a common and inexpensive wall material at that time that was sold on giant rolls, soaked to soften it, then stretched out evenly in all directions and nailed to the framing timbers on all four sides. This construction method was designed to be wallpapered over. We learned that we could also paint the walls as long as the paint wasn't a vapor barrier (no plastic content: traditional oil paints or distemper, tempera, or mineral paints), and we were very attached to my idee fixe that paint is cheaper and better than wallpaper; so we actually did this. We regret it! Wallpaper was the style- and period-appropriate choice and the better choice for our wall type, more forgiving of errors. The distemper-painted walls in our dining room look fine, but distemper is vulnerable to physical wear. The 0-VOC linseed-based eco paint we used in the living room took me like two weeks and like six coats because we chose a medium green and it wasn't opaque in any less. This paint also takes a long time to cure to full hardness, and as a result has various dings in it. We could've papered this room in a similar shade of solid green paper for about a third the cost and a tenth the effort, but again... we were not wise yet.

A primary consideration for us was choosing period-appropriate wallpaper and curtains that would fit the architecture and feel of the house.

Kitchen.
waxjism and I have both posted before about how we later spotted our kitchen wallpaper, by the Swedish Boråstapeter, in The Queen's Gambit (I know now that they filmed it in Europe in order to work with my idol, German production designer Uli Hanisch, so it makes a lot more sense to find the paper there...). (Illustrative screencap in an old post of Wax's here; product page here.) We fell in love with this paper when we saw a sample in a rack by the door at a wallpaper shop in Turku, actually, but we had already bought the backsplash tiles you can see here behind Sipuli from a local guy on Finland's equivalent of Craigslist (tori.fi).( Read more... )

Curved entryway wall.
There's a picture of this up above in its current wallpaper, Sanderson Hampton Trellis. (A couple more are available in this old post about my beloved rainbow ball coatrack.) I fell for this kelly-green paper with its large-scale white geometric trellis print early in house research and so did waxjism. We knew immediately that we needed a bold contrast treatment for this curved feature wall, but we didn't decide on this paper immediately because it's by far the most expensive wallpaper we bought for the house. I spent like a year looking for an alternative that we liked even slightly as much that cost less, and we could never find one that we could be happy with. You had to visualize the size of the curved wall and its place in the room, and it needed to be a bold pattern of a certain scale with a strong contrast in it, and it turned out that most of the alternatives I could find weren't available in bold enough colors or in the right scale. It isn't 1950s, but there was a trend of chinoiserie (of which this sort of trellis wallpaper is an outgrowth) and also a trend of trellis wallpapers specifically during the 1960s (and the bathroom itself, and hence the curved wall, were added to the house around 1960 - our house and all its DIY clones from the same plans are designed to be built in stages, initially without plumbing, with bathrooms and kitchen sinks etc added later when the family could afford it). This doesn't really look quite like the 60s ones I've seen, but the connection is enough to satisfy me. The kelly green harmonizes nicely with the muted blue-green shades that dominate in the kitchen. I liked a few Pihlgren & Ritola alternatives that all weren't quite right for some reason, like Snowflake (black and white is bold but we prefer colorful!) and Pinecone (same, but mainly the scale was just too small... I really love this print and I love foresty wallpapers), Pro Finlandia (the scale is bold but the color contrast isn't! 1970s art nouveau revival vibes, a little late for us but still in the window of possibility), Paradise (60s-70s folklore/primitivism, nice bold colors and large scale, but as you see in the wall shots, the lozenges tile together into a rather even print even in the really bright colors? And we weren't SUPER into any of the color combinations.)

Living room.
As mentioned above, I painted this room a medium green with an oil-based ecological paint, chosen over distemper because the final surface can be washed with soap and water or scrubbed. We love a medium green! We love this shade! ( Read more... ) For these reasons we will not be repapering this room until after both of our bunnies have died, so it will probably be a few years, but I have looked repeatedly:( Read more... )

Dining room.
The dining room is currently distempered with a beautiful light bluey aqua, really on the edge of off white, but it's got holes ripped in it by Anubis and spots worn out from my shoulders when sitting up in bed. We can't paint and wallpaper that room (it has a huge built-in cabinet and three small closet doors that need to be repainted in our trim color as well) until Cat Divorce is over, but we have looked and looked at wallpapers. ( Read more... )

Powder room.
The downstairs bathroom, or half-bath, or powder room, or WC, the one that was put in about 1960 and fully renovated before we moved in, contains the washing machine as well as sink and toilet, and because it doesn't have a shower, we didn't have to tile all the way up the walls. The wall covering should still be basically water-resistant in case of splashing of course, and there's all that construction waterproofing under the finish so the normal considerations about non-plastic wallcoverings in an old wood house no longer apply. We started with the floor tiles, which are a dark cobalt blue with a lot of color variation, again, leftovers from some local guy on Finnish Craigslist, and we got enough of them to do both our bathrooms. The upstairs is a little shower room, so the walls are tiled all the way up to the ceiling, and we chose white, so I thought the downstairs should have dark walls that blend into the floor to differentiate it. What I really wanted was this underwater wallpaper with swimming koi carp, Derwent by Osborne & Little, or Cole & Son's Acquario which has puffer fish, but I didn't consider them because of price. I was also into similar designs of blue sky dotted with birds like Daydream by Julia Rothman for Hygge & West. In the end we painted with a color matched from the tiles and then I did this undersea mural with white Posca markers and a spray-on acrylic waterproofing coat (there's a picture of it here - maybe I've never posted 360 photos of it).

Landing.
The landing is mostly painted a light sea green, but there is an alcove with this single roll of Pihlgren & Ritola Atom in a discontinued groovy lime green (here). The wall opposite the alcove is still the off-white of the stairwell panels, which we will repaint eventually I guess, but they will still be white. This wallpaper is also inside on the back wall of the wardrobe Wax built. The rest of the library is made of wood fiber panels with a finger gap, which makes it unsuitable for wallpaper. It is painted a very bright light aqua with mineral paint. We love this color, which is an outlier in terms of our palette, but the room always feels very light and bright.

Bedroom.
The bedroom was wallpapered before, and we stripped it, put up a layer of paintable brown paper and painted that with a sort of light khaki green clay paint. Love it! But in retrospect I think I would paper the room in a floral paper in a similar shade of green like Duro Vilhelmina or Boråstapeter Borosan 21 8618. Or if price were no object, Lim & Handtryck's Tjolöholm Slott.

I love William Morris's patterns so I'm happy that Morris wallpapers have increased in popularity in recent years and I'm spotting them everywhere. A local shop even carries them here in Pargas, a town of less than 20,000 people.

But on the other hand they are kind of a problem in historical 19th century production design, because it was a period when nearly everything was wallpapered (except for wooden panelling), and not all the wallpaper looked quite like Morris & Co, importantly because even then it was unusually pricey, and yet it is disastrously overrepresented in set design representing interiors of the period on film, even interiors representing this period in other countries, where the likelihood of Morris & Co wallpaper appearing at the time were probably quite low.

It's like if historical films set in the 1900s costumed 75% of the characters in recognizable iconic couture pieces. (In filmmakers' defense, filming on location increases the likelihood that the historic building you've chosen comes with Morris & Co preinstalled, and in that case there's not really anything they could have done.)

Wax and I put a great deal of research into renovating our house, which is a wooden house built in 1950. It had to be completely replumbed and rewired before we could move in and the walls of all the rooms had to consequently be resurfaced, and in the course of a million hours of research I bookmarked several domestic/regional stores specializing in renovation materials for historical houses: Rakennusapteekki, Domus Classica, Sekelskifte, and a bunch of wallpaper shops that carry paper wallpapers. And in all of these Morris wallpapers are front and center - usually they are one of only two or three brands carried by the shop, although in point of fact there are a large number of manufacturers that make a few paper wallpapers alongside their normal ("non woven" and vinyl) selections (Seinäruusu has a large selection). (William Morris's designs are my favorite wallpapers EVER, but they are minimum forty years too old for our house, and in completely the wrong style - our house is a minimalist, strongly functionalist-influenced, humble traditional cottage. So I would never have considered them anyway, but they are also at least twice as expensive as the most expensive wallpaper we bought.)