a genealogist’s sketchbook

This week the attic floor has finally been relaid — a big swath of it having been torn up weeks ago to run plumbing vent lines through the floor.

This is a vast expanse of untouched hand-planed 18th-century pine floor, nominally 1100 square feet (minus the chimney in the middle) — never sanded, never oiled. This west end, where the floor had been taken up, was the garret laid out to the use of widow Allin in 1802; the plank walls and ceiling were carefully whitewashed (the ghosting of later lath on the gable-end wall at left and the horizontal furring under the rafters behind Amelia is quite striking). This garrett could also be called the ‘Hah Club’, as that is what the Hoseason girls dubbed it in the late 1970s, as you can see from the crayon graffiti on the board-and-batten door beside Amelia. This picture celebrates the ‘Hah Club’ and the restoration of the beautiful floor! (Continued)

During work in the attic a couple of the papers which are pasted to the vertical plank walls have become dislodged, just as several of the planks themselves have also been dislodged. Our foreman had found a very small fragment of the 1758 farm accounts loose on the attic floor; I tucked it into my small bound notebook for safekeeping.

Imagine my distress this morning to find that my one-year-old son had despoiled the notebook, which lay on the floor, open, the fragment nowhere to be found.

A little while later I thought of another place to look. Like most one-year-olds, he is none too fastidious, but is at times fascinated with the waste process. Sure enough, I found it crumpled in the kitchen garbage. The notebook has flattened it out again:

We arrived for a visit on Saturday just as the new old bricks were being unloaded. Our builder has offered us these never-used 18th-century bricks, which he had found stacked in the basement of a colonial house in Wickford. A size and color match for the old work. Laying them will begin tomorrow or Tuesday. So for now, there are two piles of bricks in our driveway. Here, the neatly stacked new old bricks from Wickford:

And here, the still-malodorous salvage (Continued)

Friday afternoon I arrived at the house and backed carefully up to the garage to disgorge two enormous, ponderous eight-foot slabs of beech countertops from Ikea. After wrestling them into the garage, I was greeted by a familiar smell but out of place, coming from the dumpster in the driveway: the smell of the kitchen! I knew with looking that the hearth bricks had been pulled up and put in the dumpster. I had been smelling it since April but only recently realized that the kitchen fireplace stank of urine — apparently a previous owner had many, many animals and the fireplace was a latrine. Since we took off six layers of flooring in the kitchen to get down to the original 18th-century pine, the hearth bricks were now about 3 inches proud — the hearth floor had been raised at some point to accommodate the many extra floors. The dumpster showed an astonishing broken up layer of reinforced concrete, unusual (and completely unnecessary) which had been under the hearth bricks. Unfortunately the bricks — a mixture of original 18th-century bricks and newer ones, of different sizes — were pretty firmly set in the concrete, and had to be broken up.

Or fortunately, really. Out of a sense of duty I sifted through the malodorous dumpster for an hour and rescued a few dozen bricks of various vintages. Only a half dozen fire-blackened 18th-century bricks survived intact, and thankfully they smell the least. The newer bricks will sojourn in the backyard for a year or so, for use somewhere else — if they ever stop stinking.

And the kitchen, with the hearth gone, suddenly smells clean!