Treasures From Another Time

And here the house is in colour, the tree was cut down and has regrown! Everytime we have a high wind storm we worry it is going to come down on the house.

Almost every room has been renovated, insulted and painted. Peter is painting the 3rd bedroom as I type. As we have done with all the rooms we have documented the process and the treasures we have found. This room is no different.

A piece of newspaper

Where the old trap door for the “back” stairs once was. They were taken out in the 1970’s

The old lineoleum made to look like carpet! Under that was newspaper and on top was carpet. We will paint the floor.

Peter carefully cleaned out between the floorboards, vacumming many years worth of dust and dirt as he went along. He showed me these treasures, two long needles and a button. I could tell the button had writing on it so I searched on Google by typing in the words “Ne Plus Ultra” + button. In a second came the answer, the quote means “of finest quality”! These buttons were known to be “underwear” buttons from 1820-1880. He found many pins and needles but we will just keep these!

A Shoe in the Wall

Have you ever heard of finding an old shoe in the wall of an old house? I had heard of it before but we have never encountered it until this week when we found this shoe in the wall of our bedroom. It looks to be a man's show, it is about 12" in length and made of leather. Legends vary but I like the one that says it is for good luck and it will keep the witches away!

The sole of the shoe had been repaired several times by hand with tiny stitches and tiny nails.

Where we found it, buried in the wood chips. We put it back and it is now encased in foam! May the luck continue!

I of course couldn't resist, I had to ask Google about old shoes concealed in walls. Turns out there is a museum in England that has a database of where in the world people have found shoes in walls of old houses. Who knew!  Northampton Museum is the place to go! Soon I will send them the details of our show!

Another Reno Project

We have had some time off from any major projects so it was time to get going again. The crack in the sloped wall of our master bedroom had gotten worse over the winter. The time had come to do something about it, the plaster is the original about 160+ years old, like other walls in the house it had horsehair in it as a binder. We decided to remove the sloped wall and the ceiling, have it drywalled then Peter will paint. The ceiling had embossed wallpaper on it, under that were acoustic ceiling tiles, under that we didn't know. We soon discovered there were more bad plaster, lots of cracks but it was being held up with strapping so that was good, the drywall can go right on top.

While we (that's the "royal we"!) were at it we decided to remove the old insulation which was very old, dry wood chips (an R value of 0-1!) and have the sloped wall spray foamed for insulation.

The cracks in the ceiling.

Some of the 10 plus bags of wood chips!