The Upstairs Hallway

We've been really busy the last several days, and I've been too tired to blog at the end of the day.

Michael, the poet who installed our attic fan last month, freed up some time for us this week. So we've got him fixing the hole on the second floor where the chimney used to be. We love Mike and hope he will have time to do many other projects for us. But first, the New Linen Closet.

Here is the progression: Last April, we had an over-crowded linen-closet and a wall in the upstairs hallway. The plan is to have, by next week, two gently filled linen closets in the upstairs hallway, side-by-side, looking as if they had been there all along.

In the meantime, if you recall, we removed the chimney behind that narrow space of blank wall. We sawed through the lathe-and-plaster wall, exposing the chimney and a large hole. You can see, in several of these photos, the back of lathe-and-plaster walls around the sides and back of the hole, and a gap that has been considered useful for running electric lines. The whole second floor is electrified by five wires that run from the fuse box in the basement, up this hole along the chimney, into the attic, across and then back down between the walls of the second-storey rooms. Some of this electricity is original knob-and-tube, which actually is in pretty good shape. About half is a slapdash job from the remodeling done in the 1950s.

By the way, also run up the hole from basement to the floor of the second-storey are the water pipes for the upstairs bathroom. That is, water comes in through an underground pipe into the basement on one side of the house, across to the middle of the house, up the chimney hole, and then, between the ceiling of the first-storey and the floor of the second-storey, back across the house again to exactly above where the water enters the house.

This talk about electricity and plumbing will become relevant in future blog entries, when I talk about the work going on in the attic and the kitchen.

We took down the chimney bricks in April, and since then, the hallway has been an over-crowded linen closet and a drafty hole extending from attic to basement. For seven months, we've had a large plastic sheet roughly taped over the hole in the wall, but really there's been nothing to prevent a boisterous child from jumping/falling/being pushed from the second floor down to the hard concrete floor of the basement. In fact, for a while there, towels were being dropped (but they fell into an area almost impossible to reach behind tables and bookshelves and things, so that was discouraged).

Anyway, there's nothing like getting things done. Mike took measurements Monday, started building yesterday, and except for waiting for glue to dry and painting, will be done tomorrow, I think. He started by closing in the box with plywood yesterday, and today he did the frame and molding that will decorate both old and new closets, so they look like a set. Tonight, the glue holding together the grid decoration (false panels) for one new door is drying; tomorrow the other will be set. HomoDomi and I scrounged through piles of antique and junk hinges today at Rejuvenation House in order to find four hinges that exactly match the original hardware (nothing so grand as shown online, which have been cleaned up). I just realized, writing this, that we forgot to pick up a latch. Darn, another trip to one of our favorite stores that we'll be forced to take.

We asked Mike to leave the holes to the other floors -- both the ceiling up to the attic, which we will block from above, and the gap downward. You can sort of see his shop vacuum blocking the hole in the floor in the last photo. One of the projects coming up will be installation of a proper laundry chute down to the basement -- complicated because it passes through the kitchen, and we haven't finally decided where exactly it should be located yet (wiggle room of two feet or so).