Present Joys

Because it was inconvenient, I never covered up the foyer chimney breast with drywall when I did a few others this summer. This was becoming a real pain in the butt, since I couldn’t begin installing the cornice in the room until I had the wall surface finalized. Earlier this month, I decided to bite the bullet and get it done! I still haven’t even sanded the mud, but you can see I’m far enough along to get moving with the trim. (I’ve got to get as much of this stuff installed as I can before winter!)

Today I had the pleasure of meeting Nancy, 91 years old, who lived in the upstairs half of Bonebrake in the late 1930s through the end of World War 2. Her mother rented what was then a four-bedroom upstairs apartment and subleased three of the bedrooms to single male tenants. Her father served in the war, so Nancy and her mother slept in the remaining bedroom (which is now the nursery/sitting room), and her brother slept on a pull-out couch in the living room (which is now the master bedroom). She had many memories of growing up in the house, including sneaking through a tenant’s room to play on the second-floor porch during the day while he was at work, and hearing her mother call to her on the street through a front-door intercom that communicated with the upstairs apartment at that time. She recalled having an icebox that sat on the fire escape outside the kitchen (which is now the master closet and bathroom), and seeing the iceman deliver chunks of ice to it. Because it was a separate apartment at the time she lived there, Nancy didn’t have anything to tell me about the first floor of Bonebrake. In fact, she’d never set foot there! After touring the upstairs, we sat in the parlor downstairs and she said impishly “So now I’m in the other lady’s apartment!”

Her recollections about the home confirmed many of the deductions I’ve already made. This house was already an up-and-down duplex by the 1930s, one of the first on the street, at a time well before the neighborhood started experiencing economic decline. By that time, the mantelpieces, cornices, and many other Victorian details were already gone. Several bedroom doors have large cut-outs where deadbolts used to be. It’s incredible to think those holes have been there for at least 80 years!

I should mention how I met Nancy in the first place, because it’s such a remarkable story! She still lives in Columbus, and apparently she and her daughter like to drive past this house about once a year just to look at the outside of it. When she drove past last week, Karen went over and asked what they were doing, assuming they were just being creepy. So we were able to make a connection and schedule this visit. It was such a rare treat to talk with Nancy and I’m so glad she was willing to make the climb up and down my stairs.

This afternoon we received delivery of about 3000 lineal feet of poplar moldings for our ceilings from Hiland. I have bit off more than I can chew, but there are some efficiencies in ordering in bulk. This delivery includes everything I’ll need for the boxed cornices in my parlors and foyer, coffered ceiling in my dining room, and crown moldings in four bedrooms. All of these rooms will also feature a picture molding approximately 18 inches below the ceiling, which I ordered, and the principal (first-floor) rooms will have a dado molding (“chair rail”) about 28 inches above the floor.

(photoset…)

I haven’t regularly posted in over a decade, but as time passes, I realize more and more how much I enjoy documentation. I’ve got a lot going on, but I think it’s worth taking the time to write. It’s a good time to start again.

I had such a great time on Tumblr back in the day, but the community is long gone, and I wanted some more control over my data. So (for the very few who are interested:) I’ve migrated my old Tumblr blog to my own web server. Everything has been moved over to the fantastic Kirby CMS through a painstaking process of web scraping, Perl scripting, and many regex operations. I’m pretty proud of how I’ve been able to transfer my old posts in a way that maintains their original spirit—and even more proud that old hyperlinks should all still work. As you might imagine, I have plenty of things I could have posted about over the past handful of years, and I plan to add some of that content and backdate it, just for purposes of organization.

We had an absolutely dreamy ten years in our home in Clintonville, but for the past few years we’d grown increasingly squeezed-in. After pursuing an expansion project in the form of building a second story on our detached garage and hitting a dead end, last summer we determined a move was necessary. So we ended up with a new house in Columbus’ historic Olde Towne East neighborhood.

Bonebrake is the project of a lifetime. In the posts that follow, I’ll attempt to keep track of what we are doing with it—things small and large. The work never stops.