The things we carry along with us

"Moving", such as it were, has begun. The children and FemmeDommi are at a family reunion up north, so those of us left behind are taking advantage of their absence to pack (if asked, every crayon would be needed -- this way, we can filter out a lot of the broken and less-played-with stuff). They return on Thursday. On Friday, we will load the rented moving van, and on Saturday morning, early, the AffinitusDommus will set out on their new adventures in a new house, a new city, a new state. (I shall have to find a new name for them, as well, because they will be living in a complete absence of cats; pets are not allowed by the landlord.)

In the meantime, I am emptying my storage unit. With only two people in this house, we will have room in the cellar for my stuff, and room in the studio for FemmeDommi's office furniture. Also, AffinitusDommus will need a deal of kitchen furnishings at their rented house, so I'm pulling out my own, for the Texan and me to use here. We have borrowed a friend's truck, and I am single-handedly moving all my things. That is, I'm moving all the boxes and liftable furniture -- the couch, some desks and a large bureau will have to wait for Thursday when we'll have friends helping us.

Sooooo, today and yesterday I moved 34 boxes from the storage unit to the basement, as well as five pieces of light-weight furniture. All of those were carried downstairs individually, so I reckon I've climbed at least 350 steps up (and down) today, carrying weights (yeah glutes! Frankly, I ache all over). The unit, 9 feet by 11 feet by 20 feet high, is about half empty.

So, what have I been paying to store since September 2005 (and which I also paid to bring out to Oregon in late 2006)? About a third of the boxes are books. Some of these books I have missed -- an entire box devoted to multiple copies of Dorothy Dunnett novels (some of which I've had to buy additional copies of, in the intervening years). Or my copy of Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, which I purchased again to read again last year. Or my hard cover edition of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which I have prevented myself from purchasing several times because, for Pete's sake, I have the hard-cover version in storage! Sadly, this also means I have not yet read that novel. Presumably it is packed away in the large, leaden, box marked, Books I Do Still Intend To Read. Someday.

Others I have not missed -- what could be in the preposterously heavy box labeled, Books - #3 - Living Room? I'm guessing that holds the picture books -- a history of rally cars (with early Mini Coopers) and I dimly recall a photographic chronology of World War I. These and a few others, although outside my usual interests, were too fascinating not to buy for Less Than $9.99 on the Bargain Table in the entrance to Borders Book Store. And maybe that box has the exhibition books accompanying the show I saw at the Uffizi in 2003? I will enjoy looking at them again, but I didn't miss not having them.

About half the boxes are kitchen stuff. Some of that is because kitchen stuff is large, and thus fills a lot of boxes. But have I needed to store twenty (nice quality) Rubbermaid food storage boxes for four years? What about the cheap pots and pans -- cast offs and filler pieces when I got them? They will be handy now, but I'm noticing the scratches in the teflon, and the permanent stains -- should I just buy some new, less toxic pans? I've got spatulas and wooden spoons and mixing bowls and three sets of measuring cups. Did I really need to keep all this?

Did I really need to own all this in the first place? But I felt a rush of pleasure to rediscover my ivory wire fruit bowl, and my Italian tea towels. Doesn't that rush -- especially when it is sustained over four years -- justify the cost? (That is, the cost of purchase and the cost and hassle of storage.) The Rubbermaid containers elicited a feeling of familiarity, but no rush. Yet, frankly food storage containers are something I use -- a lot more frequently than linen tea towels. Instead of storing them, should I have discarded the containers, necessitating a new purchase now? Is it more wasteful to have had them in the first place, when they are not something I cherish?

What about things that are of no practical use, nor are they lovely? Should I be storing the suitcases, long outdated and mostly worn out, given to me by my parents when I went to Cambridge U. in 1983? I carried the little one across Europe for three months, but it is sagging, tattered and torn, and I doubt I'll use it again. Is the sentimental value of that well-traveled gray case worth keeping it in the basement for another six months?

These thoughts dogged me today. I would park the truck next to our rose bushes, so the scent of roses overwhelmed the dust that puffed up from the boxes as I unloaded them onto the dolly. In groups of two and three, I wheeled them up the steep driveway, past the cats lying sprawled in the August sun to the side door of the house. There, each box was carried down the wooden stairs into the cellar, and stacked neatly according to label, kitchen, books, textiles, other.

These are only my things. These are all my things, the total. Every one of these things, in all of these boxes, is going to have to leave the dark, cool cellar, someday.

Shockingly icky work

I've discussed the electrical issues we've been facing, opened up by the removal of the chimney. We have live wires trailing from attic to basement in that open space, and they had to be tucked behind the linen closet on the second floor. More broadly, the causal chain is that we need to fix the electric wiring in the attic because:

• It would not be safe to lay floorboards over the current wiring, because some of them are bare exposed wire (50-80 years old)...
  
• We want floorboards in the attic, so we can store stuff currently in the basement...
• We want to store stuff in the attic, so we can use the basement as the temporary kitchen when we gut the kitchen...
• We want to gut the kitchen, so we can remodel the kitchen.

We also want to fix things up so that we can put proper, or at least improved, insulation in the attic. What's there now is a lung-filling dusty mess of 4+ inches of grey material, like old packing material, or the stuffing from chairs you find abandoned at the back of sleepy antique stores. We aren't sure what the R-value is of this stuff, or even how old it is -- when did people start insulating? It looks a little like the bolts of stuff friends gave us after insulating their house a few years ago (they had extra), which is about R-7 for 4 inches -- which is about the same as 4-inches of the fiberglass pink stuff you buy in huge fluffy rolls. (We should be aiming for R-38 in our climate, but old houses, unless you fill the attic to the brim with insulation, are lucky to get to R-30.) At any rate, we want to slow the rate of heat loss now that wilder weather and expensive heating oil is here.

The third reason we need to fix the attic wiring is to free up some circuits to add light and power to the new kitchen. The garbage disposal and (I believe) the dishwasher will each need dedicated circuits. In addition, we will be going from a current total of two ceiling lights and three outlets to:

• two hanging lights,
  
• a stove vent,
  
• a recharging station for all our mobile phones, iPods and batteries (a kitchen for the 21st century!),
  
• a handful of task lights,
  
• another handful of electric outlets for appliances, and, if I get my way...
  
• a series of small white LEDs accentuating the tops of all the cabinets.

For all these reasons, we are working on the attic. It's icky work. You can't stand up; you have to wear a mask. Even with the mask (and safety glasses) you get insulation fluff embedded in your hair and clothes and eyes. There is, ironically, no power to the attic itself, it merely supplies power to the floor beneath it, so we working in the dark except for a headlamp like a coal miner.

The wiring itself has -- some of it -- been patched together poorly (with wires spliced together and then spliced again, and again, for chains of 6 or 7 splits; with no to-code junction boxes, only electrical tape wrapped around the splice like a temporary bandage). Some of it is in good shape -- some original knob and tube work from 1915 is still safe and better left alone than "fixed". We don't yet have those floorboards installed, so HomoDomi has to balance on the edges of 2x4s, whilst avoiding those occasionally live wires and the holes in the middle -- one left by the chimney (under the hammer in the center of this photo) and the entryway to the attic (out of which I am poking my head).

HomoDomi has done it all -- I have been quite willing to be the runner, from top of the ladder on the second floor down to the far end of the basement to turn on and off circuits, or to pick out some screws, or to grab a newly recharged battery. And back again (58 steps plus 10 ladder rungs plus two crossings of the house laterally. Who needs a Stairmaster?). I have an odd fear of heights: I have enjoyed the landscape view out, and down, from the Seattle Needle, the Sears Tower in Chicago, the top of The Arch in St. Louis, or the tip of Köln Cathedral -- but I do not care for internal holes, surrounded on all sides by building but empty for many feet directly underneath you. Perhaps it's not heights I'm afraid of, but depths. Long empty depths of space, below.

Dining Room Project: Prologue (Demolishing the Chimney)

Today was spent more in preparation than in projects, Andrew working on PTA now, rather than in a rush when he gets back in September. However, there's always lots to say.

A few people have written that they are looking forward to hearing about (and seeing) the Dining Room Project. Always one to stretch the suspense, let me back up to last April, when we discovered there was potential for a Dining Room Project.

It all started when we decided to take out the original furnace chimney. This is a large brick chimney extending from basement through roof, positioned in the exact center of the house. The old furnace had plugged into it for air outflow, but the new furnace has a simple pipe to the outdoors, so the chimney hasn't been used for 2 years. You see the chimney in the photo here, next to the pantry in the kitchen, masked by a slip of gray concrete.

[Historical note: the two red bricks in the chimney, visible near the ceiling: those are a really rough blocking job -- badly cemented in bits of brick. We are pretty sure the original kitchen had a large oil-powered range, with a small chimney that fed into the main one through this hole.The Baptists must have blocked the hole during the renovation in the 1950s -- no need to be tidy about the blockage, since it would be behind drywall. Other evidence of the large original range -- the floor in front of the door to the dining room (installed in the 50's) is a patch. There originally was a pipe to the oil tank in the basement, that fed the range. I found exactly this arrangement in a couple of books about Stickley and Arts and Crafts houses from the 19-teens.]

We knocked a hole in the basement part of the chimney about 2 feet from the floor (sorry for the blurry photo). Andrew constructed a "door" of plywood for the hole, and then we started demolition.

Andrew began by climbing on the roof and knocking bricks down the chimney. They rattled and bumped all the way down to the basement, and hit bottom with a carcinogenic mushroom cloud of ash, soot, brick dust and mortar. The "door" helped reduce the dust somewhat (we faced it with a layer of insulation to make a soft pad), but even so, there was a large puff of dust when the door was opened. I would reach in and remove the bricks (8 in a layer) and pile them in a bucket. Then slam closed the door, leaning against it so it would remain tight against the brick wall of the chimney, yell up that no hands were in the passageway, and Andrew would knock out the next layer of bricks. Periodically, Mel would carry a bucket to the window where we would pass them out (at our chest level) to William (at his feet), who would pile them up outside.

In this way, we removed the chimney, Andrew progressing slowly down from roof, through attic, through second floor (in the photo, he's at the top of the chimney where it passed through the upstairs hall, just below the attic), kitchen and finally joining us in the basement.

Mel and I switched jobs occasionally, but Andrew always got the fun and easy job of pushing bricks over. He was precariously balanced on a ladder for much of the time, but otherwise, it was surprisingly easy. The mortar had almost completely dried out -- the chimney was standing because it was held up by the house around it, and the weight of the bricks above it. He genuinely merely had to push the bricks over, most of the time. Our job, however, was wretchedly dusty. We were encrusted, everything in the basement and much of the house was covered in a fine red-gray dry mist. We had laid protective plastic over everything in my room, and created a little airlock around the chimney itself (like the government-quarantines-the-house scene in "E.T."), but it seemed to make little difference for the amount of dirt and dust everywhere.

However...imagine the moment when Andy was standing on the ladder, leaning into the chimney at the top of the kitchen wall. Suddenly he yells out -- "There's a hole in the wall behind the chimney, into the dining room!" But of course, there is no hole in the wall of the dining room, so we knew this was into a false ceiling space. It was like discovering a false bottom in the antique trunk your great-great-grandfather used when he lived in Germany and was a copywriter for Beethoven. What could be hidden behind the secret door? The photo doesn't show what we saw, which was only a sense of open space broken up by red beams of wood.

More on the Dining Room Project later...