Portal

It is perhaps some indication of the task ahead of us that only one door in five works. There are five doors to the outside: the front door; the back door to the "milk porch;" the Dutch door in the downstairs kitchen; the door from the downstairs utility room to the backyard; and directly above it, the door from the upstairs laundry room to the back stairs.

We always go in and out the front door because it's the only one that works.

The back door onto the milk porch (so called because I imagine that's where milk bottles were delivered in decades past) is only an exit; you can't come back in that way. It's got one of those push-to-open bars on the inside so that restaurant patrons could get out in an emergency, but once outside there's no handle or lock to get back in. If we go out the back door and it slams shut behind us, it means walking around to the front of the house, up the steps, and in the front door. I keep the keys in my pocket all the time.

As an aside, all five exterior doors open outward, which is a bit odd. Front doors normally swing inward. Presumably that's a carryover from when this was a restaurant. (Except for banks and tightly packed Bangkok nightclubs, doors in public buildings always swing outward for safety.)

As far as the Dutch door in the kitchen, it's never worked all that well. For starters, the doorknob keeps coming off in my hand. We learned after the first few weeks to just leave it alone. And really, we don't spend much time in the downstairs kitchen anyway.

The rear utility-room door gets a lot of use--or it would, if we could get back in that way. Like the other back door, it's only good for going outside, not getting back in. The door's all weather-beaten and the hinges and latch are in bad shape. It looks like it's about to fall apart, and you can see daylight around the edges. We leave this door open whenever the contractors are working outside so they can get into the downstairs bathroom. Apart from that, we ignore it.

Finally, there's the one door upstairs that leads to the back stairs. Or it did, until I demolished those stairs in a fit of unrestrained enthusiasm (see March 8, 2011). We now have no direct path in or out of our main kitchen or laundry room. Groceries go up the front steps, through the front door, up the main staircase, and across the dining room. The long way around, in other words. Eventually, these stairs will get rebuilt, and this will become one of our main paths into the house. The door itself is fine (I patched it up in March) but for now I've nailed a couple of 2x4's across the doorway for safety. Wouldn't want someone stepping out into the void.

Ironically, we have keys to the inaccessible upstairs door, but not to any of the three downstairs doors. For now they'll remain merely decorative. It's only been a year.

Christmas in June

Well, this was a surprise.

Yesterday we found a small envelope on the front porch. Evidently someone had stopped by and dropped it off while we weren't looking. It had no stamp, so it wasn't mailed; just a small hand-written return address with a phone number.

Inside was this photograph. It's from around Christmastime, 2010, or about six months ago. I called the number on the envelope and talked to a very nice man, Dennis Huey, who took the picture. He and his wife had snapped a few photos when they were visiting, and he makes it his policy to always provide a copy whenever he photographs someone's house, a habit that I very much admire. He also gave us permission to post the picture here, so voila!

We can't count the number of times people have photographed our house or the one next door. Almost every night of the week we see flashbulbs outside, and on most sunny days if we happen to look out to the street we spy someone lining up a shot. And that's just when we're looking; who knows how many quick shots we've missed.We often wonder, how did the picture come out?, but this is the first time we've actually seen the result. Thanks, Dennis.