Archaeology and evidence

Well, went back today for a short tour with my mom - she's helping us buy this place, and I inherited my love of old things that need repair from her. Someday, I'll blog her current mania, the Wolfe-Tucker house, built in 1857. But that's another story, and a long one :)

What we mostly did was to take photos. This is but a small sampling, and I'll add narration between them. The rest are here. One of the things that really gets me going when working on an old house is the archaeology factor - there are always surprises, and sometimes, hey are even good ones. These are mostly good ones.




This really doesn't look very interesting, but it is probably the original olive color in the kitchen. I was thrilled to find it so easily.




This was lurking in the closet, and had been recycled as a closet hanger rod from the original bath or the kitchen (both were olive). It's an original towel bar, and will be going back into the bath.



Not much to say here, except: LOOK! spare original floorboards! There are actually 4 - one is in the car, in case we need to match them.




Here's what I promised pics of a couple of days ago - the small fragment of original paper in the dining room. It survived by virtue of having been papered over and then plastered over when the bay was put on the house in the 20's. Thank God for old, bad DIY sometimes. I'm going to try to excavate more of the pattern - there's a good half a square foot of plaster roughcoat that overlaps probable wallpaper remains. Mom is farily sure that's a WWI era paper. Once I've chipped enough away, I'll reconstruct it in Adobe Illustrator and post an image here. The inks are bronze and sliver iridescent on a cream paper, and they are still reflective after 90 years and being buried under plaster. Amazing.




This doesn't look very interesting either, but it's a closeup of the probably 1920's siver&grey paper over the earliest layer - an ochre yellow, very Arts & Crafts.

The small bedroom was originally a bright cerise, probably because the family that built it had a little girl - it was from her that the PO's parents bought it in 1950. That makes us the third family to live in it, and all three were young families with a kid or two. Oh, another cool thing - the family who built the place? They were related to the family that built my mom's place.

This just keeps getting cooler and cooler.

Tomorrow: Escrow closes! WooHOO!