Our New Old House

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.)

This weekend, one of my new friends, Dan, came over to help work on the house. Dan’s a librarian (as I hope to be someday!) and appreciates learning about history through learning about my house. We actually got some work done while Dan was here, but once I started on a project in the basement, we got a little sidetracked. I’ll come back to that.

I can’t believe I’m still working on that first door I started stripping, but I am, and I know how to do it more efficiently the next time around. I didn’t get all the paint off the carved edges with the heat gun so I asked Dan to apply some CitriStrip to the areas where there was still paint around the edges. While he did that, Brandon installed our new gas dryer. The heating element went out on the one my uncle gave us and the belt broke on the one that was in the house when we bought it, so rather than pay just about the same amount to repair either one of those, we bought a new one at Sears. I can’t believe how quiet it is! Brandon did a great job, even getting creative with duct tape to make a different sized vent tube fit the existing vent hole. Red Green would be proud.

Meanwhile, I started work on another round of insulating the basement walls. If you remember at the beginning of winter I put some foam insulation around the cracks in windows and spaces in the foundation. There was a large amount of cloth stuffed into an area of the coal room that I just assumed was to keep the coal dust from traveling into other parts of the house. Well, I was wrong about that (and it was really an assumption made out of laziness. I didn’t want to have to deal with pulling down those rags.) The rags were actually put there originally to keep out drafts. When my sister’s boyfriend came over last weekend, he laughed and pointed out a bad gap in the foundation. “Why would you go to all the trouble of putting foam around the window when you’ve got daylight coming in over the foundation?” Well, that’s what comes of having tall people around to give me better perspective. From his point of view he was seeing a gap several inches wide that was leading directly out to the front yard.

Pretty embarrassing. So this weekend I added to my list another round of insulating.

Here are the rags stuffed into the crack.

As I started pulling them down one by one I realized that these were mostly whole pieces of clothing. They had rips and tears, but were pretty much intact. The first couple of pieces turned out to be a woman’s slips that she’d wear under a dress. I tried to guess from the cut of the slips when they were from. They had that beautiful “on the bias” shape and so I figured they must be from the 30s or 40s. The next pieces I pulled down were baby clothes: a felt jacket with a safety pin still attached, a little girl’s dress sized for a two year old, and a pair of button-up pajamas with an elastic flap in the back for using the toilet. There was a large wrap-around summer dress in a bright red floral print that must have belonged to the mother of the family, and a dirty old pair of jeans that must have been the father’s.

Dirty old jeans:

Mother’s apron (top right) and baby’s felt jacket:

Little girl’s dress:

Little girl’s pajamas:

Father’s boxer shorts:

After I got the clothing down, I unwrapped a water pipe that had been bound in denim and newspaper. To my delight, the newspaper was in excellent condition and was largely intact. There were two dates on the newspaper: 1934 and 1942.

Dan caught me taking a few minutes to read the news from 1934.

After all the fun we had in the basement, we went upstairs to work in slightly warmer conditions. Dan and Brandon scraped wallpaper in the hallway while I wet sanded some of the plaster in the front bedroom.

Also, I scraped another little section of the dining room floor. Inch by inch, we’re getting this house done!

Brandon and I did a few things to winterize the house today.

First, we filled some gaps in the basement that were letting cold air into the house.

By the way, maybe I’m a dork for this, but I think insulating foam is one of the most fun and entertaining substances ever created. Not only does it make an awesome gurgling sound when it comes out of the tube, but it also looks like whipped cream when it comes out. Plus, watching it expand and bubble out of the cracks is really fun. The coolest thing though, is that you can let loose a little glob of it on your brick basement wall and it will slowly roll down the wall like those slimy toys we used to get from Nickelodeon when we were kids. Anyway, I had fun. Here are some pictures:

One big hole was around the exhaust pipe for the gas furnace. There was a half an inch of open space around the pipe. I filled it with foam.

Here it is before foaming:

Here it is mid-foam:

Fully foamed:

One basement window was really drafty so I filled all the gaps around it with foam.

Here’s the window before:

And the foaming process:

The coal chute was letting in a lot of cold air. So guess what I did. You got it! FOOOOAAAMMMM!!!!

And for good measure, I also got a few gaps that opened up as the foundation settled.

Next we put up some plastic sheeting over our drafty windows. Brandon is a master plastic sheet putter-upper. I mostly just assisted but he let me do the fun part of shrinking the plastic with a hair dryer! (I love him so much!)

Now we just need to get some wood for the stove and we’ll be all ready for winter! Ooh wait, I need some more fall first. Winter can wait!

P.S. I also got on a very high ladder today and cleaned out the gutters on the other side of the house today. Phew! I’m exhausted!