Posts from — January 2009

So, our house was built in 1956 and really soon afterwards, a kitchen was added on where the back door used to be. The basement is sort of walk-out, so the kitchen is way higher than ground level out back, so they stuck a little cement-block room underneath it with a cement floor. It’s mostly used for storage, and we’ll be putting shelves in there to use it as a root cellar for storing canned foods.

Anyway, last night Kevin was organizing bikes in there (he and his family are crazy bike people, have I mentioned that before?), and he noticed that the room was set up in a weird way. The floor to it is a full foot higher than the floor to the rest of the basement, and it was poured by somebody who didn’t know what they were doing. Instead of just floating the cement inside the block walls, they built a form on top of something else and poured it on top.

So, there’s a step to go up into the room, and I made Kevin pry up one of the boards. We found a layer of plastic sheeting under the cement floor.

Maybe I’ve watched too many episodes of Law & Order: SVU/Criminal Intent. Okay, I definitely know that I’ve watched too many episodes of them. And maybe it didn’t help that we had just watched Stir of Echoes the night before. But our first reaction was, “OMG, there’s a body under there!” If you look at the picture, along the far wall you can see how far up the floor was built above the ground, too. The bottom of the concrete slab isn’t even flush with the bottoms of the concrete blocks that make up the walls.

There’s also the fact that Kevin’s brother is convinced that we’ve got a ghost because the cats (and his old cat, from when he lived here as a kid/teenager) would often freak out in the basement for no good reason and tear through the house. I’ve witnessed this behavior. IT HAPPENS.

I suppose that another option is that somebody buried some treasure under there, but honestly? I’m wondering if we should call in one of those cadaver-sniffing dogs.

Kevin and I have been slowly working on getting the house squared away. He’s mostly been concentrating on getting the basement in order and the pool table put together, and I’ve mostly been working on keeping the dishes clean and the making the most of the living room. After moving our IKEA Expedit bookcase out of the way of the front door and into the actual sitting area, we decided that its placement just didn’t work but weren’t ready to decide where to move it, which meant I was not busying myself figuring out what would be going on all the shelves. Last night, we finally got it moved to where I think it is going to stay, which is in the middle of the large expanse of wall at the far end of the living room. Now, I can get busy putting things away!

We spent some time shopping over the weekend, and got some items for the house, so I’m going to call that productive. One of the things we picked up was a table and chairs for the kitchen.

The table is perfect because it’s large when you use the leaves, but they can both be lowered to take up less room when it’s not in use. This is perfect for the little nook in the kitchen under the glass-doored shelves. The chairs are kinda gross, but we’re going to de-grease them and use them until some time in the future when we’ll recover them with something cuter.

At the same time, I picked up a lovely little Zenith bakelite clock radio for $15. I love it.

Kevin has done some fabulous work in the basement. I’m really amazed at how wonderful it looks.

Compare those photos to this and this, which are basically taken from the same angles when we were working on cleaning it out.

Today we traveled to Wellman, Iowa to pick up our brand new old 50s kitchen. It had snowed overnight, so the roads weren’t the greatest in our borrowed Ford Ranger pickup, but we managed to make it there in one piece.

The kitchen we were driving out to pick up was found in an 1880s farm house on about 8 acres that had been bought by the new owner at auction. Apparently, it had been a bachelor pad for about 10 years before it went to auction, and it was not very well taken care of. This kitchen was really easy for Kevin to dismantle, and he was able to take it apart in about a half an hour, after a bunch of unscrewing of 50 year old screws.

While Kevin was busy in the kitchen, I decided to take a look around the rest of the house. While my heart lies in the interior design of the 50s-70s, seeing turn of the century homes allowed to rot and decay hurts my feelings a little, and this was a really sad example of that.

It had your standard 12ft. ceilings, some of the original light fixtures (at least original to whenever electricity came to this neck of the woods, which I’m sure was long after 1900), incredibly tall baseboards, windows that reached almost floor to ceiling, and even some wonderful push-button light switches:

I could have even sworn that I could see the plaster patchwork that was done behind the plain white wallpaper to cover up transom windows. Sigh.

I was happy, at least, that we were able to salvage a gorgeously molded front door with a somewhat peculiar glass window encased in it, featuring a ship on a stormy sea. It also featured one of those awesome turn-knob door ringers.

You can’t see the detail in my crappy cell phone pictures, but the center pane is surrounded by very intricately etched panes. One of the previous owners of the house decided to put siding up about 40 years ago, and while doing the job they decided that they didn’t want to use this as the front door anymore, so they plugged a bunch of insulation into the door frame and sided right over it. We pried it out of the frame and took it with us for a very reasonable price. We actually managed to pack the kitchen and the door up and made it all the way back to Iowa City without hurting any of it. We stowed the cabinets and sink at Kevin’s shop and made it a block away when one of the panes of the door’s window shattered. Kevin was pretty heartbroken, but it was one of the lower corner panes, which happens to be the least intricate, so I’m thinking we’ll be able to copy the pattern and etch it into a new pane of glass.

Wish us luck!