We spent most of the day Sunday sanding and cleaning up the powdered mess that was spackle. Again my husband worked on the ceiling. That sure saves my neck and back.

My husband sanding the ceiling. Note the ceiling fixture What is that?

We took down the light fixtures and cleaned them up and filled any cracks. I have always wondered about the ceiling light fixture. There is a matching one in the kitchen entrance (only smaller.) They looked Eames era to me but what do I know. After taking them down and cleaning them we saw the label on the fixture. (See photos below) The patent number was a little confusing. I looked it up on the date charts and it is between 1941 and 1942. That seems to early for this design. The D in front of the number may indicate it is a design patent. But the numbers don’t go that high on the design charts. That makes me think it must be from 1941-42. Whatever they are, they do not fit in this house. When other necessities get done, we’ll replace them with something more appropriate. For now, they are a conversation piece,

Little matching light.

No, we aren’t done with the kitchen and we spent all weekend and Monday evening working on it.

My last post I told how I had used the non-sandable spackling in error. That product is nothing more than white caulking. I managed to fix it by using a fairly new (and thus sharp) hand plane and shaved the high spots off and put the sandable caulking over it and feather it out. Those hand planes weigh a ton when you hold them and reach over your head to the ceiling.

Last week my husband said he was going to help me on the weekend. I was a bit skeptical. This is sweaty, dirty, and just plain boring work to fill in the cracks and sand it smooth.

My husband came through with flying colors, though, as he spackled most of the cracks in the ceiling and I helped on the walls. We accomplished a lot but things slowed our progress. We came across the vent grate and should we or should we not remove it from the wall? He unscrewed the two screws holding the vent cover to the wall. Four more screws held the louvers to the vent cover and we were lucky we took the correct screws out or the louver would have fallen down the vent chute to no-man’s land (actually to the basement.)  We bet this is the first time it was off the wall since it was built. They needed a good soak in ammonia.

The chute’s purpose is not really known to us. We were told it was a laundry chute when we bought the house. Its too small for that, your clothes would get stuck and why would there be vent louvers in the kitchen? It wasn’t a heat register, though, because the house always had a boiler with radiator heat. The chute ends in the attic where the chute suddenly tapers to a small opening and stops. I did come across something when searching on the internet about Ventilators. I’ll look further into our mystery at a later date. But when additional baseboard radiator heating and rewiring upstairs was done they ran that stuff through the chute as you can see in the second photo.  I also use it to run our ethernet cord and cables from the second story computer to the basement computer. It has really come in handy.

It was fun (though it took a lot of time) to take the grate off and determine the different colors it had been painted over the years. I first put Peel Away 6 on it for a short time and scraped away the top layer to reveal a yellow color. Then a darker green and then a gold or copper color. We decided we will paint it the original color before we put it back up. The louvers had a patent date of 1907, though our house was built in 1917. The same product can be made for years under the same patent.

Saturday ended and we hadn’t even finished repairing all the cracks, let alone paint.

After all my complaining about taking that baseboard off, I got rewarded. I’m so into local history in general and the history of our house. I was sanding the floor with my orbital sander along the edge where the baseboards were and a little piece of paper came flying up through the air and landed in front of me. It was about an inch square and dirty. I picked it up and took a good look at it but couldn’t tell what it was. I took out the magnifying glass but still couldn’t read it very good. Next I put it on the flatbed scanner and scanned it at 1200 dpi and enlarged it.

It was a 1933 canceled stamp from Chicago celebrating 1833 to 1933, Century of Progress, Fort Dearborn . These are little treasures that make all the work a little easier to deal with. I also found a little scrap of wallpaper that I hadn’t previously known was on the wall. It is a light tan color with a tiny cream-colored heart on it. It’s a small piece so I don’t know what the rest of the pattern was.

Finding the little stamp put a halt to my day’s work and put me into search mode. I took a needle-nose pliers and a tweezers to pick up stuff that was down in the cracks at the end of the floorboards that was previously hidden by the baseboards. Lots of lint debris, a hairpin, a stick pin, some blue paint chips, a tiny piece of newspaper that read, 1924, and a partial piece of what looks like part of a greeting card.

Because of the delays I’m not even going to try and finish the living-room floor before Christmas. What does it matter if I’m a week later, it’s still going to get done. The floor is totally ready to finish (sanded and vacuumed) but I don’t want the smell in the house for Christmas. So tomorrow will just be putting my tools and supplies away, cleaning the house from all the dust I created again and wrapping presents.

Wallpaper should come right off using the special products (like DIF) out there today.  I used them, I serrated the wallpaper with that round gizmo.  I sprayed it, soaked it and when that didn’t work, I made my own product from recipes I found on the internet , some including fabric softener.  There was no getting around it.  I had to chip it away, layer by layer.  What in the world did they use for wallpaper paste?  I think maybe it was real glue, like hide glue, or maybe even the glue you make using flour.  It wasn’t affected by the products meant to remove the wallpaper of today.  I ended up gouging a lot of my real plaster walls.  But I did get it off eventually. I saved the layers I could just for posterity’s sake. I didn’t  know about the wallpaper steamers, perhaps that would have helped to rent one of those. If you have every had to remove wallpaper you will know what it is like and then times it by 5 or 6 times with the different layers.

I scanned the remnants of the wallpaper on my flatbed scanner as you can see below.  The color isn’t really right.  I’m missing two of the layers but they are somewhere in this house hiding in a save-forever box… somewhere.  The Greek key pattern is more blue.  I didn’t like the look of the Greek key at all.  I wonder how anyone could live with such a busy pattern.  I don’t care for the last one either as the pattern was so BIG.  I have done a little bit of research on the different patterns of wallpaper and tried to date the ones I had on the wall.  See photos by clicking “read the rest of this entry.” Read the rest of this entry »

Here are a few more items that we found behind our mantel in our 1917 house when we removed the mantel to refinish it and repair the wall.
These rulers are probably 70 to 80 years old. This is my guess from the age of the women that lived in our house all their lives until we bought it. They were about elementary age in the 20s and high school in the 30s. We also found some of their homework behind the mantel. I love the color of the aged wood. The wood is embossed with the metric marks and numbers on the middle ruler which is pretty neat and gives it an old-fashioned, quality look when you see it with a raking light. Doesn’t it bring back memories of your old school days long ago? At least two of these rulers were made by well-known pencil companies with long, interesting histories.

One of the most exciting things I found when working on my house was a name printed under some drawers. A little research revealed it was the name of the builder of our house back in 1917. We also found the name on the back of the original beveled bathroom mirror. It reads Fred P Munch, Erie PA. I didn’t know they used PA back then because mostly you see penna. But the research indeed showed the house was built by Fred Munch. Read the rest of this entry »

Between project posts about my house I will post about Erie’s history or “old” things I find interesting that would fit into the theme of “This Old Erie House.” This post would fit in about my house, too, because I found this photo behind the baseboards. It’s a very small photo, just a couple of inches big. I scanned it and blew it up to see it better. Read the rest of this entry »

These items I got pretty excited about finding when we took the baseboards off and removed the mantle. You can see others in one of the previous posts. This is half the excitement of owning an old house.  You never know what you will find. Read the rest of this entry »

This bathroom was remodelled in 1957 according to the dates on the fixtures. So I didn’t mind changing things a bit as it wasn’t original anyway. Read the rest of this entry »

Wide baseboards, as much as I like them, just make for more work. I’m still working on them. Mine are 7-inch wide white oak. I have some baseboards that are all one piece that run the whole length of the room. At the time I started them, I had good knees. But after a year of working on the stairs, floor, stripping the floors by hand, my knees turned to putty and I needed to take the baseboards off of the wall and put them up on a work table. Read the rest of this entry »