This Old House
We live in an old house..over 100 years old. Sure
it's not old by European standards. I read a lot of novels that take place in
Europe..they've got castles on every corner with cute little thatched roofed
cottages in between that landlords are always throwing torches at and burning
down at the slightest hint of a famine, blight or plague. Those peasants could
have learned a thing or two from the three little pigs. Landlords could throw
all kinds of torches at a brick house and it'd take quite a while for it to burn
down. They'd at least have time to get the kids and the livestock out of the
house.
Well, it might not be old if you put it in the
context of total history but by American history it is..they don't call us The
New World for nothing. When you live in an old house, there are just some things
you have to accept. One is that nothing's straight. I don't know if they had
wonky levels back then, if they just eyeballed it or if it's just due to settling but if your the kind of
person that can't stand a slightly crooked picture, you'd probably hate a
crooked room. Another is that they tend to be drafty. You can do something about
the insulation but unless you're willing to replace the seeded glass windows,
I'm not, I love my windows so much I'm offended when a window salesman knocks on
my door, you just have to learn to live with it.
One of the biggest things you need to accept is
that if you need to replace something, and do it right, you can't just run down
to the local hardware. Our local hardware's got tons of stuff in aged yellow
packaging from the 70's but you'd be hard pressed to find parts from the 1870's,
no matter how old the guy who owns it seems to be. So, what do you do? Well,
for things like trim and molding, you can usually find something similar to the
original, though always smaller, like 2x4's which were actually 2x4 when they
built our house, everything, besides square footage, as seemed to shrink over
the years. Or you can shop at salvage stores if you're independently wealthy..we
are not.
What we do is go without until we can fix the
original piece..which brings me to my point (about time!). We've never had a
door knob on our bedroom door. The previous owners must have hated door knobs
and door locks because they removed three of the five from the doors upstairs.
DeWitte finally found enough pieces and parts to replace the original lock
because Nathan was getting a little suspicious of our "Oops! That plank of
wood fell down from behind the dresser and blocked the door again!" on weekend
mornings.
Now we've got a knob and a lock that looks like
this but painted white, with brown handles. (It would have cost $350 to replace it. Yikes!)
However, my new door knob came with a list of
instructions from DeWitte about what to do if I lock myself in, I lock myself out, the door
jams, the handle pushes in, the handle pushes out and where to find an extra
knob if it falls off all together. So many instructions I'm afraid to close the
door.
Maybe I was better off with my plank of wood, I could work that without worrying about anything but some questions from Nathan.
Maybe I was better off with my plank of wood, I could work that without worrying about anything but some questions from Nathan.
Comments
I love old houses! I bet yours is full of all sorts of neat things.