House Dreams

Last night, in between my dream that will end up a YA novel if I have my way, I had a dream about my house. I was steaming wallpaper off one of the walls upstairs, when I came across some words scratched into the plaster. Unfortunately, in the light of morning I can't remember the names and dates, but I do remember that according to the writing on the wall, my house was a lot older than we had suspected. Like, Civil War instead of turn of the century. Like, one of the articles was about how Grant (That's Ulysses) had spent the night in my house. (He lived in my town when he was a child, so that's not impossible in the dreamworld, I guess.)

Also on the wall were newspaper clippings that someone had decoupaged under the layers of wallpaper. They all concerned my house, or, rather, the house I thought it was in the dream. (I'm pretty sure my house was never a carnival attraction, for example, but I guess you never know.) And as I read them, or skimmed them, of course I found myself drifting back through time until I was in the past.

I'm pretty sure my house never had a dome on top of it, too, so it wasn't really my house that I was dreaming about. But even though the details aren't cooperating and letting me remember them, it was an interesting dream.

I'm going to blame it on my missing closet. :)

Closets

Unlike most old houses, my house--at least upstairs--has closets. It also has built-in wardrobes in two bedrooms. One bedroom is even lucky enough to have a closet and a built-in wardrobe.

But the weird thing is that my bedroom doesn't have an original closet. Or, at least, not one that I've been able to find evidence of. Instead, I get a whopping huge built-in wardrobe and nothing else.

So why doesn't my bedroom have a closet if the other three do?

My bedroom is part of the 'addition', somewhere between 1912 and 1920. And that would make sense if my office was also closetless, but the POs combined the closet from the bedroom that adjoins my office to make a secret passageway closet that joins both rooms.

In between my bedroom and my office is the upstairs bathroom, but as far as we can tell, it's the original bathroom to the house. (Or, at least to that part of the house; there was an outhouse too.) Since I'm assuming that all three rooms were added at the same time (that makes sense, after all) then it doesn't make sense to think that the bathroom--or a portion of it--was once my room's closet.

Any suggestions as to why my bedroom wouldn't have a closet?

The Honeysuckle Vine from Hell... is GONE!

April 2006:


Two weeks ago:

Today:



Okay, that's not the best picture in the world, but you get the idea. It's supposed to rain tomorrow, so I thought I'd do it now while it was sunny, despite the fact that it's still cold outside. Still, I'd rather be out in 28 degree weather than 6 degree weather!

If it wants to grow back, that's fine, but the majority was dead and it needed to be cut down.

Mom's Brilliant Idea

So on Sunday, after the 6 1/2 inches of snow earlier in the week, Mom and I went to Kroger. On our way, I told her about the low humidity in the house--something that hadn't happened last year. We were hovering right around 25%, our sinuses were screaming, and the amount of static in the house was truly terrifying (to the cats.)

I thought it was weird because I have hot water heat, and usually that takes care of the humidity. But not this time. So Mom had a great idea to up the humidity a bit by putting teapots full of water on the radiators; they will warm up and evaporate, and voila! More humidity.

I just happened to have enough metal teapots for most of the radiators, too. (That way if the cats happen to knock them down, they won't break.) And so far so good; we're hovering at 40% at the moment. Of course the humidity is higher outside too, but still. I think it didn't hurt to put the teapots on the radiator anyway. :)

There's a hole in my ceiling, dear liza, dear liza

Well, a crack, at least, and quite a large one.

See, in my formal dining room there was a leak at one point where the water blew up under the flashing of the front porch and onto the bay window. (I'll try to take pictures tomorrow.) This leaked once last winter--my Dad cleaned out my downspout and the gutter and all has been well since then.

Tonight, on a quest for a roll of tape (which I thought I had left in the dining room), I walked in to chaos. My Night-Blooming Cereus was on the floor and one of the ceiling tiles was beneath it.

The strange thing is that the Cereus is on the other end of the conservatory portion of the dining room, away from those particular ceiling tiles. Weird.

Luckily, it didn't end up with much damage; I'll have to cut off and plant the pieces that snapped. But the ceiling tile split in half, and was wet as well, although the ceiling itself and the ceiling tiles around it were dry. So I'm hoping the leak hasn't returned, and the wetness on the rug and the ceiling tile was from the plant. We'll see.

I'm not sure when it happened, since I haven't been in the dining room since Monday. But I would have thought we would have heard the crash--it had to be loud!

So I got my ladder, felt the ceiling tiles, felt no wetness at all, then decided that I might as well pull a couple more down while I was at it. And I found out I was right--when they put the 'dropped' ceiling in, they didn't really drop the ceiling. It's about an inch lower than the regular ceiling, which is painted that pussywillow purple color that used to be so popular way back when. There are boards stretched across the whole thing, which much have taken forever to put up. And everything is screwed in, too. It looks so lovely. (NOT!)

So anyway, I guess I'll have to clean up tomorrow, since I'm not going to clean it up tonight. Just what I wanted to do! *sigh*

Leaky windows, Leaky doors, Leaky everything, Leaky floors...

When the weather first started changing, I got the idea to put those air-filled packing thingys into the cavity of the transom window over the front door. The PO had a nice piece of plexiglass stapled to the outside of the window (which kind of defeated the purpose of having the window open) and I removed that as soon as I could.

Last winter, I put styrofoam in the cavity, which wasn't much better and blocked what light comes in that window. But this year, I thought the air-filled thingys would work just fine.

And they did, until a really strong gust of wind blew the window open in December, leaving the hallway littered with air-filled thingys and the cats spooked. I always meant to re-install them with a bit of packing tape holding them together, but even though heat is an expensive commodity around here, I've been wasting it since then.

Today I decided enough was enough. When you walk down the stairs, you get hit with a wall of cold air, and the temperature difference between upstairs and downstairs is like, oh, walking from a warm room into a freezer. A large part of the problem is the front door and transom window.

So I gathered up the millions of air-filled thingys that I have collected from work, taped them together to make a transom-sized air-filled pillow, and shoved them into the cavity. Then I slammed the window closed, and used a bit of packing tape to block the last of the air coming through. (You can't even see it! Honest!)

Then I felt all the cold air coming through the door. Argh. At least it's not really that much cold air; it's warmer when you go down the stairs already. But it's 70 degrees up in my hallway, which is a bit ridiculous, since I like to sleep cold anyway, and I have the house set at 65 while we're home and 62 during the day.

(I love hot water radiator heat!) However, it does seem I'm going to have to get some weather-stripping stuff for the front door, at least.