Twenty Days In the Cooler!

Ever heard of a California Cooler?

No, it's not a wine drink. Or a type of Styrofoam chest. A California Cooler was an early kitchen appliance, the predecessor to the refrigerator. If you lived near the ocean around the turn of the century you kept your meat, cheese, and eggs in the California Cooler. And this house had one.

The principle is pretty simple. The cooler was basically a tall, narrow closet built on an exterior wall. The top and bottom of the closet vented to the outside through small holes in the wall. The idea was that cool sea breezes (of which we have an abundance) would blow in through the vents, forcing air to circulate through the inside of the closet. By making the box tall and narrow, like a broom closet, you could encourage the relatively warm air to rise out of the top, pulling more cool air in at the bottom.

It probably wasn't great, but it beats leaving food out on the counter to spoil.

At any rate, we found the telltale vents on the outside of the house when it was being painted. We'd already suspected they'd be there, since we'd spotted what looked like the insides of the vent holes when the kitchen was remodeled back in 2011. Finding the outside vents confirmed it.

One of the vents got covered up long ago, but the other was still exposed to the outside. At some point, somebody nailed a piece of metal over the hole in a halfhearted attempt to seal it, as you can see here. It's not very weatherproof, and now that the rainy season is upon us, it was time to permanently close off the last of the old vent.

We shrewdly kept some spare cedar shingles when the house was repainted, and one of them was pressed into service today. After a bit of cutting and trimming, the replacement shingle fits neatly over the rectangular hole left by the cooler. After a few coats of primer and paint, it pretty much disappears amidst all the other shingles. Mission accomplished. Time for a cold drink.


 

Out of the Closet

And lo, on the 1,675th day* there was, upon the land of the Hart Mansion, a new closet. And it was good.

Well, good-ish. You see, there's a small space in between the two downstairs restrooms. It's kind of like a hallway, but smaller. More of a passage. Or a wide spot between the walls. You take one or two steps into this "hallway" before turning left for the men's room or right for the ladies' room, but that's about it. Forgettable, in other words.

Which is fine, except that it's also fairly deep, with very high ceilings, and all that space is wasted. And we don't have a lot of space to waste in our 1890s-era kitchen. So Kathy had the bright idea of putting a storage closet in there. Nothing fancy; just something that could sit against the back wall and make it useful.

Trouble is, none of the standard home-store closets fit in the space. Of course. We would've been happy with generic knock-together storage units, but they were all either too wide to fit or so small that they wasted most of the space.

So we built our own out of the same type of white melamine-laminated particleboard that flat-packed ones use. So we've got that whole cheap Swedish look going.

It took a few days, but now we've got a custom-built cabinet that perfectly fits the space. It's secured directly to the walls, not free standing, so it's solidly in place. The sides, top, and shelves are melamine, and the kick space down by the floor encloses the heating vent we added last year.

The doors are pine with bead board inserts. I detailed the doors a bit using the router, just like the doors up in the third-floor bathroom. Some day, future inhabitants may remark on how nice it is that the doors all match. In reality, those are the only router bits I have, so yeah, they're all going to look pretty much the same.

*True. That's the number of days since we first moved in.