Still Life with Floor

Okay, nothing to see here. I just took a quick shot of our "new" kitchen floor, now that it's all finished.

We've used the kitchen for a grand total of about a week now, and everything seems to be in order. We're glad it's over.

It's Beginning To Look...

...a lot like Christmas.

This is a quick-and dirty iPhone photo of the house. Sorry I can't manage f-stops and exposures like a pro. I'm sure it could look nice.

We wanted to string lights on the top floor, too, but we couldn't reach it. A friend tipped us to a company that strings lights professionally, but they wanted $750! I could buy a pretty nice ladder for that (and hire a guy from the Home Depot parking lot to do the work). So we got another quote from another company; they wanted $1100 and wouldn't do the top floor at all. Sheesh. So we did what we could with the equipment (and talent) that we had.

In case you're wondering, they're all "cool white" LED lights, and even with 3500+ of 'em burning, they use less combined electricity than a single 100-watt bulb. Amazing.

Sailor's Horn Pipe

This is an odd bit of hardware we found lurking in the kitchen wall.

Kathy calls it Captain Cook's Stovepipe and we think it's part of a boiler flue or vent. It's up high on the wall of the ground floor, and weighs a ton. It looks like simple galvanized metal tubing in the photo, but that's actually covering a very thick and heavy ceramic pipe inside. The inside wall of the ceramic pipe was pretty dirty and sooty, suggesting that it was the flue from a wood- or coal-burning boiler or furnace.

This big ugly thing was mounted up high, as you can see. It makes a 90-degree bend, pointing up (to the second floor) and sideways (into the ground-floor kitchen). Our guess is that the boiler/furnace was installed where the ladies' room is now, and it vented over the kitchen ceiling to the outside.

I thought it'd be easy to remove -- it's just a bit of sheet metal, right? -- but that was before I got up on the ladder. My first clue was the quarter-inch steel plate holding it up. And the six-inch nails holding that in. And the fact the nails were spaced just an inch apart. And the doubled studs. Hmmm, maybe this thing needs a lot of bracing...

Anyway, down it came. It's going in the "weird stuff" box in the garage where we keep everything that's historically or architecturally interesting. We're up to several boxes now. We'll need another house to store all the house stuff!