Our New Old House

Today I started removing the paint from the woodwork in the front bedroom. With the heat gun the paint just LEAPED off the wood. I swear I heard it whimpering, “I surrender!” on its way to the floor.

After I removed the paint in the bedroom, I went downstairs to spray some paint onto the metal I stripped last month. I chose a hammered bronze finish.

Here are before pictures:

I’m sure you all remember my super flattering shot with my gas mask:

Here are after pictures:

Baby steps…

[tags]bedroom, paint, photos, woodwork, heat gun, stripping paint, registers, fixtures, doorknobs, spray paint, Rustoleum[/tags]

This discovery of pieces of clothing belonging to some previous owners of my house prompted me to look up which family was living here during the 1930s and 40s.

According to my research (available in PDF form here and here) the family living here at that time was Louis A. Halden, his wife Delta, and their daughter Judy. Their son Hal may or may not have been born yet. Louis started and ran the Capitol Coal Company in Des Moines and according to the city directory, the family lived in my house from 1941 to 1944 or 45. (1945 directory was missing at the time I stopped in the library.) So I’m guessing the jeans belonged to Louis, the slips, red dress, and apron belonged to Delta, and the little girl clothes belonged to Judy.

Louis’ obituary lists Judy by her married name and living in a small town in Michigan. I looked her up on whitepages.com and sure enough, there she was, still living in that same town. I copied down her address and wrote her a letter. In the letter I explained that I found clothes in the house that might have belonged to her family, and asked if she might have any photos of the house she’d be willing to share with me. I hope she writes back!

Meanwhile, I spent some time cleaning up the clothes and taking photos of them. I don’t think I’ll hang onto them long term. There’s not much left of them but rags. I might cut some squares of the fabric to keep as a souvenir. I’ll share my photos of the clothing with you though. (Just a reminder, if you click on any of my photos, they’ll take you to my Flickr page where you can see a larger version. You may be able to see more detail in larger versions for the pictures I took with the macro setting.)

Turns out we DID have a frozen pipe inside the house, and boy do I feel silly for not having found it!  Brandon had someone from the water company come test our pressure at the meter.  They said the meter was fine, so we must have a frozen pipe inside the house.  When I took the heat gun to the pipes last night, I did the whole section of pipe that runs near the front of the house close to the foundation, but that didn’t seem to fix it.  I was specifically avoiding about a 6 inch section behind a beam because it’s a very old wooden beam and it’s covered in coal dust so I didn’t want to risk setting it on fire with the heat gun.  Well, turns out that’s exactly where the pipe was frozen!  Brandon tried again with the heat gun this morning and sure enough, the pipes cleared.  I guess when those previous owners 60 years ago wrapped that pipe and stuffed all those clothes into the crack between the front porch crawl space and the water pipe, this was exactly what they had in mind. 

Consider me newly educated in hindsight.

I’m a big fan of the website Timothy McSweeney: Curses With Pox, Not Plague. It’s a creative writing website.

My friend Dan the Librarian told me about an entry on the site called, “An Open Letter to the Man Who Installed the Carpet in 1974 for the Previous Owners of the Home We Just Bought.”

I’ve thought of making a Previous Owners Hitlist, composed of the infuriating, confusing, and just plain bad decisions previous owners have made about “improving” their houses.

Have you ever composed an open letter to a previous owner? If you feel so inclined, leave me a comment on this post or send me an email with your open letter to a previous owner of your house. I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts on this.

I’m cranky.  This morning we woke up to find we have no water running to the house.  We heard from the water company that there was a main break somewhere on the east side and that the water should be back on in a couple hours.  Many hours later it was not.  I called the water company again and the nice lady informed me that the break had been fixed hours ago and asked if I thought my pipes might be frozen.

I checked the pipes.  The basement was cold, but not cold enough to freeze the pipes inside the house.  They must be frozen outside the house.  She put in a ticket to have someone come check our pipes tomorrow morning.

Meanwhile, on a whim, I tried using my heat gun to heat the pipes inside, just to make sure.  Nope, still no water.

So I need a shower.  It’s about 2am as I’m writing this and I’m looking at having to take a shower at my mom’s house before work if our water’s not back on in the morning.

Anybody have any words of wisdom that might help me out with frozen pipes possibly frozen outside my house?  Pretty much inaccessible to me?  Am I going to come home from work tomorrow to find my front yard dug up?

As I go to sleep tonight I have visions of impending expensive disaster.

Somebody please cheer me up.