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The anticpation begins to burn …
And somebody is about to exit this world …
Somebody went berserk in our side yard last night and attacked 3 of the 5 trees we’ve been growing to shade the south side of the house. They were snapped in half—all in the same way in the same spot on their poor, young trunks.
The ones on the ends are/were birches that my dad raised. And the one in the middle is/was the hornbeam I searched high and low for last year.
I was able to order another hornbeam, though of course we’ll be starting all over in trying to convince the plant take on this new job. We’re trying to figure out how to make sure this destruction doesn’t happen again. And, well, there’s really no way to do so. We live in the city off a major street near the alley, and our side yard is an unusual, inviting spot for anyone looking to duck away from attention momentarily. One night the cops came ringing the doorbell just after midnight asking if they could look in our back yard because they’d seen someone come running out of this area; they suspected the kid had tossed something illegal over the fence separating the side yard and the back yard. So I guess we could fence it all in, but I’m resisting taking this route because I think it would change the nature of the property and the neighborhood. But what if the neighborhood has changed already? Of course, kids swipe my flowers all the time, and that irks a little, but it’s probably because mine is one of the few houses on the street with flowers. And there was the baluster-kicking. Sigh. We’re planning now to put up a security light, but it’s a trick to make sure it doesn’t bother our neighbor. It just makes me so sad that people can be so pointlessly mean. Most likely it was just a thoughtless strike from an inconsiderate person with too many problems to think about others. But oh, poor trees.
As summer sinks below the horizon and the cold times begin their sneaky but inescapable creep, I’ve really got to figure out what to do about the front door surround. Figuring out how to replace the missing door itself is simply too much, so I’m putting that off for some distant future. But I’ve been moving ever so slowly through trying to restore what the front door region once looked like. This is what’s been facing the street for many years now:
Obviously, that’s a replacement door, and the right side is a cover-up.
Looking at the inside, I had a naive hope that the cover-up hid a narrow door that could be opened sometimes and latched other times. Though really, that’s not what the inside suggests. I guess I hoped that middle piece of wood was added later. But the alligatoring of the shellac is consistent with the rest of the wood trim.
When we started removing the aluminum cover-up outside, here’s what we found, which indicates it was not two doors but a door and a stationary light—and also something chopped off above:
After removing all the aluminum, we have this:
So some detail was chopped off at the top and the bottom of the wood divider.
Having worked on an old house with old paint and old problems for 8 years now, I understand the urge to cover it up and have everything seem nice. But why oh why couldn’t they have simply covered up? Wasn’t it more difficult to chop off than to cover up? I mean, was it ornate and huge in profile? I really doubt it, considering the rest of the house. Now I need to figure out what’s appropriate for the area and determine how I can add it. Any ideas? I need to dig through my 1910 Sears catalog.
So I’ve stripped off all the old paint and found oak underneath:
It took a few weeks to strip all the paint. It was kind of easy because the bottom coat seems to have been shellac. But also kind of hard because the finish was very weathered and had been painted over with brown paint and several coats of other colors, some of them very resistant to removal. Now I am working on how to showcase and preserve the oak for Chicago weather.
And I still have to pry off all the old caulk. But wow it’s going to look so much better when I’m done—in 7 years or so …
Check out this great Chicago Reader article about a fabulous idea—deconstructing old houses and selling the parts at a reasonable price rather than demolishing them and trashing all the beautiful old parts. Sure, I’d rather old houses were being restored rather than removed in any way. But if someone’s going to get rid of a house for some stupid reason, it’s certainly better that the old-growth wood and wavy glass get saved.
On Saturday night, we had our first grilling session of the season—hot, smokey bliss. Later in the night, we saw a flash out of the side of our eyes and found another sort of flame ruling the night.
In the foreground you see the Charles Joly lilac rising above the lattice privacy fence that shields us from the alley; on the right is the gutter angling off the garage. In the background are the flames consuming the 2 flat behind and one up from us.
I have a visceral, personal reaction to housefires. Ever since 1990, when my new apartment in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y., was decimated on Christmas Day while I was at work, I have been painfully aware of every siren and truck that flashes by. So I went out into the alley and gawked at this, along with neighbors and passers-by. I should go on and say that it doesn’t appear that anyone was in the structure, that maybe it was abandoned and this an insurance job—but even that rationale doesn’t contain my internal reaction.
The most horrible and haunting thing is that even after the firefighters had poured on enough water to quench the hate and hacked the hell out of the roof of the back section of the house, they continued breaking out every window in the place. That produced a ringing, stinging, hideous cacophony of destruction that I still replay in my mind. As I absorbed it, I kept calculating: OK, my house is brick; maybe a smaller likelihood of being felled by flame? Upstairs windows are that hideous vinyl; it wouldn’t matter if they destroyed those. They’re not going to crash out my restorations, are they? How could they? Wouldn’t they see that wavey glass and stop!?!?!
Ugh.
I was honored last week to learn that my colleagues consider me their go-to girl for junk. A friend encouraged me—nay, implored me—to go home and round up odds-and-ends for a schoolgirl’s art project. And boy did I come through: baluster ends, hex tiles, decommissioned keys, samples of metal ceiling tiles and fabric wall coverings, springs, a dead clock, the face and wiring from a quartz heater that we ripped apart to make our infrared paint remover, wire bits, knobs, pipes, bulbs including a spent bubble light, a squished metal eyeglasses case, a dangly bit from a lamp I found in a parking lot …
I just have this phonecam photo of a little edge of the pre-art pile.
But the girl has been instructed to cough up a photo of the finished piece—so stay tuned!
On my trudge from the bus stop to the front steps, I saw this from 100 paces away.
This would be the balustrade we installed in the fall, er, early winter. OK, I’m looking back in the blog and noticing we never did post when we put it in. But it’s new, dagnabbit! The man of the house says it’s his mischievous youth catching up with him in the guise of the neighborhood kids because the obvious way to do this is to kick it out.
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. We give great candy on Halloween, dammit.
As well as aging this year, I had high hopes of nailing up the tin ceiling that’s been waiting to be installed in the living room. Well, perhaps wisdom is wending its way toward me because I realized that was much too big a project to tackle along with the hiking and eating and cavorting that the weekend called for. So instead we took out a chunk of wall to fashion a book nook out of the dead space that was built into the house. It’s almost 15 inches deep!
I carved that squiqqly shape out of the wall months ago when I was still trying to decide whether it should become a dumbwaiter or a phone nook or a curved nook or …
Here it is with everything out except the studs and blocking. It’s not a load-bearing wall, but we’re going to put a header in, using the old wood from the stud.
The plan is to surround the book nook with the same casings the doors have. That clever, tool-using monkey had the idea to use floorboards from the attic to find appropriate-looking old wood. Cuz the pine they have these days? Featherweight!
Our Xmas visits were happy and indulgent, and we’re looking forward to more for New Year’s—but here at home today I am having a very hard time. I finally checked on the four sashes I’d stowed in the back bedroom while the glazing dried in the hope that I could paint and install them finally. And …
One of the pieces of glass I installed—the best, waviest one from the original stock—is cracked. I don’t know why. I don’t know when. And there’s nothing I can do but cry over it. And install new stuff and hope it wasn’t something I did that made it crack. I’m just crushed.
And then, because it was a sunny day at last, I went out to do the yard cleanup I never did because of my surgery. And I found this:
The biggest tree—the middle tree—in the row of birches we planted in the spring to shade the house. Cracked at the base. Now there were very high winds over the weekend while we were out of town. But … this was the one we’d been saving in the back lot for years in anticipation of this project.
Now I just don’t have the heart to go ahead with anything. Wake me up in May.
Our house has lost many doors over time. Most notably, its front doors. It has also lost four interior doors; and, OK, I’ll admit that having six doors in one kitchen wasn’t a brilliant plan to begin with—but why oh why couldn’t they have tucked those spares into a corner somewhere?
So I’ve become a crazy door lady. My tolerant sidekick and I carried home half-a-dozen old doors this year, just from the alleys near our house. One I gave to another old house owner via Freecycle. And the others I’m hoarding for the time being on my side of the garage with the straw for gardening and the 1972 BMW motorcycle that has been become an house-restoration widow.
One of these is the front door from a 1910 house nearby; another is the front door of a 20s house. And several of the interior doors have the same hardware as what’s in my house—in better shape than some of mine, with the original finish still fairly clear. Alas, several of them have joint compound spots all over, and frankly I bet that’s why they got tossed—too much trouble for the busy, busy people of today. 
