Today, I did not burn down the house

I was working outside on the dining-room window frames, stripping paint with a heat gun, and a rotten part of one sill caught fire and began to smolder.  Fortunately, I had a fire extinguisher right at hand, which I’d put there in case this very thing happened, so I dumped the extinguisher into the hole smoke was coming from, ran and got the garden hose with the spray nozzle and shot a lot of water into it as well, and called the fire department, who came in just a couple of minutes (having the fire station only seven blocks away is nice).  Not only did the local pumper company show up, the hazmat unit and a battalion chief came as well; I suppose they were afraid of something really nasty, trying to fight a fire in an old house.  The firemen felt all over the wall (which turned out to be cool, indicating the fire hadn’t got down into the wall), pried off the piece of sill that had been afire, showed me the place the sill had caught, which was as dry and rotten as punk (matter of fact, punk is just about what it had turned into), looked through their infrared viewer to see if there was a hot spot they’d missed (they didn’t find one), and decided I’d already put it out before they arrived.  Then they complimented me on having done all the right things (I thanked them and replied that I was a volunteer fireman’s son, and he’d taught me the right things to do), and went away again.

I was not delighted, though, to find that, as I’d suspected before, a section of the joist and clapboards under the asbestos shingles in that area has rotted away, and the siding is now held up mostly by the grace of God.  At some point not too far off I’m going to have to have someone take those shingles off, determine the extent of the rot, and replace the rotten wood with new—and I’m not going to let whoever does the work put plywood under there and nail up the shingles again; I might want to take the siding off one day, and if that happens, I don’t want an ugly sheet of plywood let into the side of the house.

And speaking of plywood, I’m almost through with rebuilding the overhang over the north door; I only have to put one more coat of paint on the quarter-round trim before I can re-hang the Romex cables that were stapled up there before, rather than having them droop and hang all over in front of the door, which is what they’ve been doing while I fixed the overhang.

In the meantime, I’ve got to go out and take measurements for new lumber to replace the rotten and burnt stuff.  This, I think, is tomorrow’s project—I’ve had enough excitement for one day.

Mrs. Malaprop went to Angola to carve the World Ash Tree.  Fnord.