We unloaded everything from the truck into the garage. There was a lot of snow on the ground and I had to shovel a path from the garage to the house. Then we carried most of the stuff into the house.
A dresser for Allison's room
We brought an old solid wood dresser and moved it into Allison's room. We replaced the wood knobs with fancy glass ones.
Old desk
Carolyn and I carried the desk from the garage into the "grandma" room.
Allison's door
Also in the truck was the door to Allison's room. We took it home with us on the last trip in order to paint the door and strip layers and layers of old paint from the hardware.
Stripped lock
I stripped all the paint from the lock and the porcelain knobs.
Starting the backsplash
The main purpose of this trip was to work on the kitchen. We brought with us four boxes of glass tiles and a diamond tile saw. On Saturday morning I started tiling the backsplash around the kitchen counters. Carolyn helped me setup the tile saw on saw horses in the garage.
Carolyn peeling off the old paper backing
Carolyn worked ahead of me with a razor blade peeling the old paper off the wall so the mortar would have something solid to stick to.
Scraping the corners
While I was tiling, Carolyn used a sharp scraper to scrape down the corners where the floor sander couldn't reach.
Removing the cabinet doors
Then she removed all the cabinet doors. We're planning to take them back to Redmond where we can paint them white at our leisure, rather than at the frenetic pace during the limited time in Wallace.
Finished tiling and grouting
We took a break and went to our favorite sandwich shop in Vintage Games for lunch. In the afternoon we tiled this wall. Normally you have to wait a day or two for the mortar to dry before applying grout. However, we used quick-drying mortar that was ready to grout after four hours. While waiting for the tiles to dry we drove to Kellogg for groceries. By 7:30pm we were ready to start grouting. We brought with us a two-part epoxy-based grout that is supposed to be stain proof. Reading the instructions, we discovered we needed white vinegar to use to wipe the excess grout off the tiles. By now it was snowing like crazy. We walked to the grocery store in Wallace, hoping it was still open. It was and while the town seemed deserted, the grocery store was packed and still open for another 15 minutes. With the vinegar in hand, we walked home. For some reason, that night walk in the snow was one of our favorite memories of the trip. Back home we mixed the grout and had 45 minutes to get it all installed before the two-part epoxy was so hard to be rendered useless. We had the exact amount of grout for the job, not a speck left over. By 10pm the job was finished and we were wiped out.
Another view of the backsplash
Before we left, I sealed the counter to backsplash joint with white silicone.
Sunday's snow
We woke up Sunday morning to 8" of fresh wet snow. I shoveled off our walkway and those of my neighbors (they've been shoveling our sidewalk when we're not there). My nice next door neighbor used his snowblower to clear the snow from his garage door and mine behind our houses. Carolyn and I got ready for church and pulled into the church parking lot at 10am. The lot was empty except for our truck. I checked the schedule online and we were there at the correct time. I figured church was cancelled because of the snow - it might be too dangerous for all the little old ladies to drive down snow laden canyons and gulches. Carolyn disagreed. "This is Idaho. It snows all the time. It must be stake conference." The stake center is an hour away in Hayden Lake over Fourth of July Pass. We never found out and drove back to Wallace.
Al's Little Store
The father of our house used to own a store a block away called, "Al's Little Store." I found someone's recent blog entry:
"Al's Little Store: Convenience stores, humbug! We had a real one in Wallace long before there was a Circle K or a 7-11 or a Mini Mouse Mart, or any other mart. Yes, we had the real deal, and there is nothing like it now days. I did a lot of bike riding in the summer in Wallace, and the best place to go to get a nice cool pop after a hot summer ride was, you got it, Al's Little Store. Now, Al's was special for a lot of reasons. First of all, he was open until 10:00 PM, which was unheard of in those days. He cut his own meats, (imagine that in a convenience store in this day and age) and he loved the kids coming into his store to buy pop, candy, ice cream, and chips. Gosh darn, there was an ice cream bar called a "Nickel Stick", and seriously, it only cost a nickel to buy. Pop was ten cents, and a small bag of chips was only about ten cents. Al's was the place to go after basketball practice since it was only a block from the gym. Many nights during my sophomore year, the last year I played, we would stop by Al's and load up on pop and chips, or maybe pop and Twinkies. Ah those were the good old days. I did a lot of bike riding in the summer in Wallace, and the best place to go to get a nice cool pop after a hot summer ride was, you got it, Al's Little Store."
In the basement on a shelf I found this ordering book for Al's Little Store from 1963. Al's Little Store was torn down at some point and is now just a parking lot.
Order page for candy
Al would apparently mark his order for each item directly on the order book's pages. A clerk in the supply company would have to turn every page looking for ordered quantities. It's hard to imagine how all of this was managed and updated before computers were in use for things like this. I sent these two pictures of the order book to the writer of the Al's Little Store blog entry and he got a real kick out of it.
Monday's lunch
On Monday morning I got up early and used an 8" sanding disc to reach under the kitchen cabinets toe-kick area to sand off the mastic we couldn't reach with the regular floor drum sander. Then using the drum sander and edge sander, I sanded the floor with 60, 80, and 100 grit. Carolyn vacuumed up all the dust and we applied the first coat of amber floor sealer. By now it was lunch time and our kitchen was out of commission so we walked downtown to find something to eat. We tried a new place, half restaurant, half bar. I got a burger and Carolyn got some sort of sandwich. She said this was her favorite meal of the trip. Back home, we applied a second coat of sealer. We let that dry a few hours and then applied the first coat of catalyzed two-part floor finish. After a few more hours of drying we applied the second coat of finish. I'm sure we were tired that night.
1955 Capehart-Farnsworth high fidelity phonograph
One of the items Dan gave us was this 1955 hi-fi in very nice condition. Mechanically, it worked but electronically, there was a bad hum that overwhelmed the sound. In addition, all of the volume and equalizer controls were very scratchy.
Amp removed from the case
Before coming to Wallace, I removed the amp from the phono cabinet.
Original tubes
It looks like the tubes are original and still working after 57 years. The amp is a pretty standard design: a 12ax7 preamp powers a 12ax7 driver to a phase inverter driving two 6v6 amp tubes in push-pull. An output transformer powers two 12" woofers and two 5" tweeters.
Old electrolytic and wax capacitors underneath the chassis
It took me about an hour to replace all the old electrolytic and wax capacitors with modern equivalents of equal values. I applied De-oxit to all the potentiometers and reinstalled the amp in the phono cabinet.
Here's a video of the phonograph in action playing a 78 record of Beethoven.
Apartment building
It's now Tuesday morning and we're actually ahead of what I thought we could accomplish, but we still had a lot of work to go. Carolyn decided which kitchen walls would be white and which ones would be light blue. I masked the walls for white and painted two coats. While waiting for them to dry, we went on a walk through our neighborhood. We passed an apartment building I had never noticed before. Carolyn said she recognized it from an old photograph in the Barnard collection.
McGrath Apartments taken February 14, 1917
After our walk, Carolyn quickly found online an old photo of the apartment. It really hasn't changed at all in nearly a hundred years.
View from High Bank Street
We walked up High Bank Street and took a photo of the residential part of Wallace.
Vintage Sno-Cat
We walked by one house with a cool old Sno-Cat in the side yard.
Another Sno-Cat!
Behind the building that houses the mine tour, there's another vintage Sno-Cat in even better condition than the first. I'd love to go for a ride up Placer Creek in this thing.
Room next to Allison's room
Still waiting for the painted walls to dry, Carolyn and I walked to the hardware store and bought a can of paint stripper. I removed the door from our bedroom and all of the painted coated hardware. I dumped the hardware in a can with stripper and repainted the door.
Stripped hinges
I didn't get all of the paint out of the old hinges, but they do look considerably better.
Cleaned up lock
I stripped many layers of paint off of the lock mechanism. On Tuesday evening I masked the freshly painted white walls and painted two coats of light blue on the other sections. I reinstalled the door, but had to plane down the edge in order for the door to close smoothly. How is that possible? What could have changed dimensions?
Sink clips
Now it's Wednesday morning and our last day in Wallace. We brought our ski gear with us to Wallace with the plan to go skiing between coats on the floor. However, the floor dried faster than we expected and we never went skiing. The first thing I did was install longer sink clips to hold down the sink to the thicker wood counters. Then I used silicone caulk to run a bead around various backsplash edges.
Painting the ceiling
This is the only picture of the finished floor. In this picture I've masked the ceiling and am just getting ready to paint two coats of white. I masked the baseboards and the four doors in the kitchen and Carolyn painted two coats on the woodwork. After that we cleaned up the house, packed up the truck, turned off the house, and left for home at 2:30pm.
Near Cle Elum, WA we passed a highway message sign that said that 10 miles ahead, the highway was closing at 8pm for an hour for avalanche control. The clock in the truck read 7:53. With 10 miles to go, I gassed it even though it was snowing and the highway was covered with snow. At 8pm we were stopped by snowplows blocking the highway. If we had only arrived seconds earlier we wouldn't have been stopped. Fortunately we were only stopped for 20 minutes before traffic was allowed to resume. We arrived home around 9:30pm and unloaded the truck. It was a fun and busy trip to Wallace.
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