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.