Tuesday, October 26, 2010
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. […]
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Yesterday the Providence Journal ran a fine, reflective commentary piece by editor Edward Achorn, “A little cemetery and the people who made America,” about his recent visit to the Allin family burying ground, down on Bay Spring Avenue, and the role the Allin brothers, General Thomas and Captain Matthew, and Thomas’s freedman, Scipio, played in […]
Well, the new hearth is in — all eight feet across — and the marvellous new-old-stock bricks from Wickford don’t stink! Contrast to last week’s gaping hearth pit:
Saturday, August 21, 2010
From the Huffington Post today comes something which has apparently been circulating since February: a children’s playground built within the graveyard of the Dutch Reformed Church of Rhinebeck, New York, with gravestones interspersed among the play areas & structures. It’s getting some blog mileage in the creepy humor department, notably a fine sequence of dark […]
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 […]
I meant to showcase this peculiar item earlier, but with the removal of the fireplace surround I finally have decent photographs of it. It is a slab of sorts, bearing the initials and (presumed or approximate) date of the attributed builder of our house, set into the left wall of the firebox of our kitchen […]
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. […]
The problem of the fireplace stink came alongside other aesthetic and practical questions as we renovate. The fireplace is truly an enigma. I’ve already commented on the enigma of the two baking ovens. Our architect has measured and sketched the chimney system, and believes the original kitchen fireplace would have opened for the full eight-foot […]
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! […]
Earlier I wrote about a 260-year-old will, signed and sealed by one of my ancestral uncles, which made its way into my possession, as an ‘instant heirloom’, through an extremely narrow form of directed marketing: a dealer in old manuscripts had researched the author of this will online, which led him to my book on […]
