Busy

I feel bad for posting so seldom, but we haven't been doing too much house-related work lately; Adam has been working almost nonstop as a volunteer coordinator for the upcoming election, and the rest of our time has been taken up by two new additions to the household:



Said additions will be ten weeks old on Wednesday, and will have been with us for about a month tomorrow. This was one of the perks of homeownership we couldn't wait to benefit from; none of the apartments we've lived in have allowed pets.

We really enjoyed our first Halloween in the house, and we got to meet some of our neighbors from around the Run. We also got about twice as many trick-or-treaters as we ever did in Squirrel Hill, despite the fact that this neighborhood is so much smaller.

In the spirit of the season (no pun intended, really...), I've been haunted by a strange sort of phantom lately. I've recently become fixated on the notion that there are pocket doors sealed in the wall between the living and dining rooms. It's not just that I think they would look very nice there (although they would). My glimmerings of hope are based on the fact that the wall between the rooms seems unusually thick--six inches or more, I think--and that the border between the dining room's hardwood floors and the living room's carpeting seems to be strangely off-center. The carpet extends further into the dining room than I would expect it to, and I wonder if it covers up the remnants of tracks. There's no sign of tracks on the top of the doorway, but it and the sides look like they've been plastered recently. That's another thing: the inside surfaces of the doorway are plaster or drywall, not wooden trim.

I don't have a great picture of it, since our camera's currently broken, but here's one from the inspection that sort of shows what I mean (please ignore the inspector and the haggard-looking prospective homebuyer in the picture.) ;-P



It shows how the carpet extends to the very edge of the dining room, and how strange (at least to me) the doorway itself looks. Maybe I'm just engaging in wishful thinking because of hearing about other housebloggers who have found pocket doors sealed in their walls, but I feel like there's reason enough for vague hope. Unfortunately, I can't think of a good way to find out beyond cutting a hole in the wall, so it's going to have to remain a mystery for now.

Win Some, Lose Some

Okay, so we've been having pretty awesome luck with finding cool old stuff in our house. Yes, we have a hidden room full of early twentieth-century artifacts. Yes, there are statues of saints in our foundation. Yes, a sealed-up closet awaits us when we remove the fake wood paneling (henceforth FWP) from our bedroom. Yes, it looks like there's some beautiful hardwood flooring (of a different kind of wood than the dining room) under the living room carpet. Yes, we just found an old staircase to a street that no longer exists on the hill behind our house. I guess with that kind of track record, it's inevitable that we would eventually come across something that's not cool.



Last night my curiosity got the best of me, and I managed to pry the summer cover (also a cool antique thing) partway off the living room fireplace. We'd been thinking of eventually making it a working one again, and I figured, no time like the beginning of cool weather to do some reconnaissance. We weren't able to get the cover all the way off, but it soon became clear that it didn't matter much. What met our eyes instead of a scary, cobwebby hole in the wall was...more wall.

Gah! Someone bricked it up! Probably 70 years ago, so we can't even get upset at the previous previous (etc.) owners for doing it without disrespecting the dead! Adam tried to look on the bright side and pointed out that 1) that was why we weren't getting a draft down the chimney, and 2) it was probably better that it didn't work given that the chimney needs to be repaired, but still--I would have preferred to find the scary, cobwebby hole in the wall. At least we could have cleaned it out and put a screen or some candles in it for Christmas.

I'm not entirely sure how to proceed with it, not that it's a project we'll get to anytime soon. It would be nice to open it back up again, but if we had to start bashing out bricks, would it damage the tiles around them? They're not in the best of shape as it is; one of them is already missing, and the picture doesn't show it well, but some of them are damaged. I don't even know if it's possible to buy replacement tiles for the ones that are already broken, much less any we might injure in the reopening process.

::sigh:: It is only a little setback in a multitude of awesome things, though. The fireplace itself is very pretty; it just doesn't work. Maybe we'll figure out how to get it functional, and maybe we won't. I guess that for old-house-related disappointments, this is an okay one to have. At least it's attractive on the outside, unlike the dropped ceilings and the FWP.