Dust, Floors, and introducing...Artifacts!

Well, if not for the pandemic, we would have been returning from our honeymoon on Wednesday of this past week. Nathan would have spent the month of April in England at a cabinetry school; we would have met in London and traveled on to Vienna to visit Nathan's aunt, then to Berlin to see friends, and finally to Greece to stay in the family home of another dear friend. 

While we are grieving this postponed trip -- made all the more present by the google calendar events that auto-populated on my calendar to mark our various flights (apparently these automatic calendar events don't delete themselves when a flight is cancelled...) --  it's wild to think that if we had been able to go on our trip, we would only just be beginning our work on the house. As it is, we not only got an early start, but also benefited several weeks when we were able to completely dedicate ourselves to the house project. That all being the case, we are looking forward to rescheduling our trip when it is safe to travel!

Since our last post, we've mainly been cleaning up from the plaster demolition. Even after the dumpsters were picked up with the large debris, there was still plaster dust everywhere, blanketing every horizontal surface (floors, stairs, windowsills, window trim, railings, horizontal beams...) and drifting in the air. After lots of sweeping and lots of vacuuming, and after setting up an air draw through the house with strategically placed box fans supplemented by an air scrubber, we are nearing a "clean" house. We're not quite there yet, but we're looking forward to a day sometime soon where the air is clean enough that we don't need to wear respirators. Soon! 

I have busied myself with pulling hundreds of nails that remained in the studs when we pulled out the lath (not glamorous work, but must be done), and Nathan is working on removing the hardwood floors (still not glamorous, but slightly cooler than pulling nails).  The decision to remove the old wood floors was a hard one, as they are beautiful, and are likely original to the house. The floor planks connect using a "tongue and groove" joint so that each piece slots neatly into the next piece. However, since the floor has been sanded down and refinished over time, the top bit of each "groove" is extremely thin and prone to splintering -- not great for little feet that we hope to bring into this home! The floor probably would have lasted another 5-10 years before technically needing to be replaced, but we decided that it's much easier to replace the floor while we're not yet living there. Both out of guilt (from pulling up a beautiful floor) and out of hope (that there might be another use for the wood planks in the future), we're pulling out the nails and saving much of the wood, bundling pieces of similar lengths with duct tape. 

We are getting all of our ducts in a row (HA that's a construction joke) for some upcoming work in the basement -- some inter-related projects related to the sewer lateral line, replacing some structural columns, and removing old radiator pipes wrapped in asbestos insulation. The sewer lateral relates to some plumbing decisions that we are making in the rest of the house -- namely, the location of the kitchen/kitchen sink (which we are moving to the other side of the house, converting what used to be a large dining room into a joint kitchen-dining area), and the location of additional bathrooms that we are adding. More on this later.

In the meantime, we've been holding out on you! During the plaster demolition process, we found loads of newspapers, little toys, matchbooks, and other knick-knacks tucked behind trim, stashed in the walls, and stuffed into stud cavities. At the advice of our friends Katie and Paul, we are going to share these at a "slow drip" to give each one a bit of a spotlight (and to serve as filler, in case we don't have much to report!) 

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One of the first artifacts we found had fallen behind some trim in the dining room -- a campaign business card from a 1926 aldermanic race, and a recipe cutting for quick nut bread (let us know if you try the recipe...). This was a rare case where we photographed something "in situ" (Nathan's early training working in the Northwestern archives clearly did not take), but we'll do our best to describe where we found things!

As you may recall, the house has a turret above the front porch. During demolition, we opened up the turret from the inside of the second bedroom, hoping that we might be able to finish out the inside of the turret to make a little reading nook (we think we can!). But, when we opened up the turret and peered inside, we saw what looked like a piece of furniture inside the turret. Perplexed, we reached in and pulled it out, discovering what looked like two pivoting mirror stands that might have sat on top of a dresser. My Grandma Barbara had several dressers with mirrors like these. We can't imagine why someone might have put these inside of the turret -- it wasn't exactly a convenient storage area, even if it hadn't been walled off (which it had). I like to imagine that they were stolen and hidden here for safe keeping...