Hi, I'm Bob Vila.
Welcome to the show here in Melrose, Massachusetts.
Where we're remodeling a little 85 year old house.
Last week we were showing you the basement rumpus room we've been creating and today we're doing a lot of improvements to the exterior of the house.
Putting in lots of western red cedar trim, including a new porch ceiling.
We're also putting in a brand new front door and we're repairing one of the old Stucco columns by stuffing it full of concrete.
Lots to do, stick around it's good to have you with us.
Alright, so we're back at our little remodeling project here in Melrose, Massachusetts on our 1921 Dutch Cambrell style.
house.
And this a house that has, you know, sheltered families and seeing a lot of people through here but it never has had a real face lift on the outside.
So some of the things that we've been dealing with includes of the really important components of the house; the trim , the porch ceiling, the porch decking and the windows in particular.
We've already replaced many of the windows on the house house with a product made locally by Harvey Industries which is a wood double hung stash with aluminum platting on the outside, but here from the front of the house we've got a couple of projecting bay windows, or oriels as they're often called.
This is a three sash bay and there's another one just like it on the other side.
And the big problems that we had here was cold air and filtration not just from where the windows were, but from the whole structure or frame of this little projecting bay.
So we've had to look at, you know, how best to repair that.
In fact, what we did was, we had some of the local carpentry fellows, the contractors called A&E here in Malden, who came out, essentially took it all apart, found a way to insulate and restructure all that.
And then of course the next problem that we had was, how do re-trim when you can't find the kinds of moldings that they had 85 years ago.
And for that we turn to our friends from Forester who have essentially come out and reproduced the moldings that we had here.
Take a look.
Well , the problem is on this older house, moldings like this, you can't find them in a lumber yard today.
So what they have to, what we have to do is re-manufacture this piece.
And the way to do that is I use this, this needle gauge, and I press it up against the board like this and get the profile.
Very carefully press it in.
The next step is I take the needle gauge, and I lay it down on a piece of graph paper.
And I take the, take my pencil and trace it out.
Till I get, get the profile pretty good.
And fill it in a little bit and try to get the dimensions as to the thickness and the width of the piece.
And the next step from there is we'll take this piece and run it through our catalog and see if we have anything that matches it.
If we don't have anything that matches the next thing is, we will scan this into the computer and the guys will match, will trace this out and will make a knife and the knife goes in the machine, one pass it comes out and it's all done.
Just nail it up.
Paul Mackey is joining us now from the Western Red Cedar Lumber Association to give us a few explanations about why it's such a good idea to use Red Cedar.
It's a Native American wood and it's sustainably right?
That's absolute correct Bob, and comes from the Providence of British Columbia, Washington State, and a little bit in Idaho.
So we're still getting it from the upper northwestern states and from Canada.
That's correct.
What are some of the qualities of the wood that make it such a good product for outside use?
Well other than its natural beauty, which you can see in the ceiling, it's naturally durable, which means it's rot and decay resistant.
And it's also is insect resistant.
What is it in the wood that, that makes it resistant to insects and rot?
It has ingrown preservatives that are called cannons and extractives that naturally occur in the heartwood of the species.
So, when you're buying it, do you have to worry about ordering just heartwood and excluding any sapwood?
The good thing about western red cedar is there's very little sapwood in the tree.
The tree only contains about three-quarters of an inch of sapwood in the entire tree.
Yeah, we were looking around the whole ceiling.
There's only a couple of little places like up,up there and over in the corner over there, where you can see that it's a lighter shade, it is almost white.
That's correct.
And that indicates the sap wood, which is the outer part.
It's the wood just under the bark.
That's absolutely right.
Yeah.
We've got a lot of work going on in this neighborhood.
But let's look at some of the different uses that we are making of the Western Red Cedar.
Sure.
The one-by-eight board that you see here, obviously, is its simplest form.
And we're using that to replace some of the fascia boards along the top edge here where the gutter is attached.
And then of course the ceiling was specially milled for us with that profile, the bead if you will, and it's tongued and grooved so that we've got an installation there that's not going to go anywhere for a long time.
That's absolutely correct.
We got another local carpenter crew to come and remove the decrepit old ceiling and replace it with this beautiful new ceiling of Western Red Cedar.
The bead board matches the original exactly, and it's going to be beautiful.
Ed Collard and his crew are a local franchise of the House Doctors.
We found them online, and they cover a lot of territory here in the North Shore of Massachusetts.
We're staggering the starting point of each course on the ceiling.
Generally, for cosmetics, it really doesn't look very good when you have lots of joints in a row.
If you stagger the joints, it gives you a much better finished appearance.
The crown molding was a custom job as well, and it came out beautifully.
Paul, what are some of the other attributes of western red cedar?
Well, Bob, its naturally lightweight and very easy to work with.
Yeah.
And it' s the best sub-straight for primer and paint.
It takes a good coat of paint.
I always like to specify a stainless steel nail or screw when you're fastening.
That's the best fastener to use with western red cedar.
Thanks Paul.
