this old house

I've been painting my bathroom, a task that SHOULD have been a snap but turned into an ordeal. If I knew how to drywall, OR knew someone who would put up drywall for me for cheap, I could have solved a lot of my problems.

However: that is not to be.

My house is 100 years old this year. The property info I have lists it as being built in 1910 - thus, the centennial celebration of my little old house.

My dad recently came across some historical information about drywall and its precursors (don't even ask. we're a family of nerds). And, after doing a bit more research, he informs me that what I have in my house is almost certainly a pre-drywall called Sackettboard, which became gypsum board, then became drywall.

Sackett board is an alternative to the lathe-and-plaster mode of wall construction, which was costly and time-consuming. It's made of layers of plaster and a kind of felty cardboard, and is installed much like drywall. It has unfinished edges and is quite, quite heavy, which made it hard to work with (thus the refinements of gypsum board and drywall).

Sackettboard was only around and in use for maybe 10-15 years, before the other, better kinds of boards were devised. My house falls smack in the tail end of that period, but almost certainly before gypsum board made its appearance. And my walls - the ones I've exposed, anyway - are a weird kind of felty cardboard . With plastery stuff underneath. Sackettboard didn't take paint or wallpaper very well, evidently, but the fellow who built my house (referred to in the property listing simply as Dad, and called Dad by me and my family) slapped up wallpaper, and then - when things needed refreshing - he just painted over the paper.

Which meant that, to repaint the bathroom, I had to peel off the paper (the paint was chipping, the paper was bubbling). Down to the felty cardboard.

So my walls are lumpy and bumpy and funny looking.

Part of me wishes I had the financial wherewithal to have nice, new, smooth drywall installed. The room would be polished and tidy and clean - all white, with a black-and-white floor, with a nice vintage feel. But another part of me thinks it's amazing - amazing! -  that the walls in my bathroom are the originals from 100 years ago. The chips and scores and bumps are the history of the walls, the history of the house. Same with the wood trim around the doors and windows - there are bumps and bruises where Dad clearly missed the head of the nail and just knocked a circle into the wood.

There's a weird, scratched-together feel about my house, which sometimes makes me feel awkward. But I love the quirkiness of it, and the age. I live in a house from 1910 - 1910!!!!!  with original walls and woodwork. chipped and scarred, yes, but one hundred years old and still standing and quite, quite functional.

I LIKE old cracked and chipped peeling paint. I LIKE outmoded countertops and tiling and no granite anything, anywhere. I like the weird faux-wood graining on the wood trim. I like how my house sometimes feels like the cabin of a ship, and sometimes feels like the weirdest little dollhouse cottage in the world. Sometimes, in summer, it feels like a treehouse.

so my bumpy, funny-looking walls don't bother me that much. They need another coat of paint, probably, to be finished, but they'll still show their age.

And for a 100-year-old house, I'd say this one's doing all right.

i can't get out!

Those are the stairs I need to go down to the alley I have to walk through to get to my car. I - wisely, maybe? - parked on the street below my house, rather than be truly stranded forever by parking in my garage (my hilly dirt road is not plowed regularly, and can be treacherous even when plowed if still icy/snowy).

The snow is drifted and piled up to at least my knee.

I cannot even see the street - Venture Street - on which I am parked. I can't tell if it's been cleared. I don't know how I'd get to my car.

I am not eager to risk my life on those stairs. I've fallen down them twice - I have this sort of...habit... of falling down stairs, it seems, and it's always incredibly painful.

The snow is piled to the sashes of my diningroom windows.  This looks a little more dramatic than it really is, since my dining room is technically below ground, built into the hillside itself. The windows are therefor at sloping ground level. But it's still cavelike and snowy in my small igloo-cottage.       

I'm not minding being snowbound. It's a little bit dreamy, kind of peaceful and pleasant. It's a bit lonely, for sure - there are no sounds AT ALL from the surrounding neighborhoods (not that I can usually hear much, but there's always a distant low rumble from the highway, the occasional car door, shouting neighbor, shrieking child). The incredible stillness of a world covered in snow is both glorious and eerie. A little bit like landing on another planet. 

The weather doesn't seem likely to warm up enough to melt any of this snow anytime soon, which leaves me perplexed about my situation. I have a bad shoulder, which makes sustained amounts of shoveling - not impossible, but extraordinarily difficult and pain-inducing.  if I had a little sled, the little plastic sleds of my childhood, i could coast down the hillside to my car - but getting back UP the hill to the house would be a nightmare.

I think I will just have to wait this one out, for awhile, and see what happens.

the snowy day

snowbound.

it's absolutely beautiful and absolutely mind-blowing. It's been years since I've seen this much snow.
I'm lucky - all my utilities are working just fine. 


I will not be leaving my house today, and possibly tomorrow.  the whole world seems quiet and white and closed.

Dylan Thomas has some beautiful words on the subject of snow:

Our snow was not only shaken from white wash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees