I would have given anything to walk into Norm’s Rare Guitars right then. Maybe not for the same reasons as most other folks. I’m not in the market for a guitar or anything. My appetite for tasty licks is somewhat limited. I just would have loved to go over to the guitar wall behind sofa, pulled down a strat or something, plugged it in to any old amp, and started playing Stairway to Heaven, really loud, and slightly out of tune.
The laughs would have been epic. Right before the beating started.
When we were finished demolishing everything and cleaning up, I discovered something piquant, at least to my tortured mind. Look at that circle around the electrical box where the porch light used to hold court.
Yup, it’s green. It’s very old, and discolored, but it’s a nice shade of green. Some former denizens painted around the jelly jar light and left me an older paint sample.
When we moved here, the house was painted a dreadful blue color. That scheme was fairly recent. It was white before that. It’s a Queen Anne house. There are two colors that Queen Annes don’t favor: blue, and white. We selected a color scheme with an olive color, a tawny yellow trim color, and a brick red for doors and sashes. It’s the best Victorian color scheme I’ve ever come up with. And now I’ve finally found some evidence that somewhere along the line, some former owners weren’t daft, and favored about the same color green I like, at least on part of the house.
What about the white? We have a picture of the house in the 1960s, courtesy of our neighbor, who is courteous indeed, and it was white in the pictures. I’ve found coats of a tawny yellow on the trim here and there. But if you’ve ever wondered why every house of every style was painted white with black shutters, for a good, long while, I can clue you in. It was the Centennial.
No, not the Bicentennial. I was alive for that one, in 1976. We decided to celebrate the 200-year anniversary of the founding of the country by electing a peanut farmer to the presidency, taking off our Whip Inflation Now buttons, listening to Peter Frampton records, and waving some flags. That’s about all I can remember. But a hundred years before that, they threw a proper whoop-de-doo, and decided to spruce up the whole country. The Daughters of the American Revolution and similar organizations got even more organized and they did some things on a big scale.
They had the first official world’s fair, in Philadelphia. It was a humdinger. They had the first working telephone there, with Alexander Graham Bell hisself on the other end of the line (and the exhibition hall) if you wanted to try it out. They had the first Remington typewriter. It was the first place in the country you could eat Heinz ketchup on your fries, if they had fries back then, and wash it down with that newfangled Hires root beer. On a less amusing note, someone got the bright idea to import some kudzu plants, and hand them out. They said it was handy for erosion control. I’ll leave it to my southern readers to decide if kudzu or Carter caused more trouble down there after being introduced. Other countries sent stuff. France sent the right arm of the Statue of Liberty. Germany exhibited enormous Krupp artillery pieces. I see a pattern developing there.
So everything colonial was the rage in 1876, and a lot of the towns in America went nuts turning their downtowns into colonial reproductions. I forget who made the joke, but they said they were afraid to go to the bathroom just then, because someone might paint their pecker white and hang black shutters on either side of it. They did it to everything. Including my house, even though it was built 25 years later, I’ll bet, because it became traditional.
Well, the white has got to go. First, we’ll fix the light. There’s an old rule in house carpentry that everything that sticks out of the house should have a block behind it. Hose bibb, doorbell, light fixture, whatever. I believe in that rule, so we fitted a wood block into the clapboards, and bought a new jelly jar light to paint around.
The window was painted shut, of course, but it’s easy to bash a 4″ broad knife along the seams and free it up. If you’ve never fixed a window with iron sash weights, pulleys, and sash cord (rope), it’s kinda fun. The apparatus is as simple as an Erector set. You can figure out how to fix it just by looking at it, generally. We got the sash working well again, scraped the errant paint off the glass, marveled at the perfect BB bullet hole in the glass, made by a BB heading out, of all things, replaced the loose putty, and painted it Mayflower Red.
I gave the kid a crack at painting the siding. He done good. Remember folks, top down, inside out. The underside of the clapboards is the in, and the face is the down.
As you can see in the pictures, this room was outside for many years, until it became an inside joke. We’ll turn it into something useful, I promise.
[To be continued. Thanks for reading and commenting. To support this site, tell your internet friends about Sippican Cottage]
Well, we certainly detailed our kitchen remodel to a fare-thee-well. But we kinda glossed over the porch just outside the kitchen door. So before anybody calls me on it, I’ll show you what we did out there.
The porch used to be connected by a catwalk to the front of the house. It collapsed long before we bought the place, and took a bunch of the eaves with it when it went. Way back when, I think it was an open porch with a roof over it. Later on, someone got their hands on some barn sashes, and inelegantly hinged them in all the openings. Here’s what we found when we moved in:
That door had a fifteen-foot drop to your death outside it. I screwed that red piece of wood over the frame when we moved in. Before that, whoopee! As you can see, the ceiling is sagging, with a hole in it and mildew stains all over it. It turns out there were about four hundred flying squirrels living up there. Up until now, I’ve never found a talking moose up there. But you never know.
Looking the other direction is where the view is. There’s a road, and some mountains, a grass airfield, some other fields, and a big river, currently slumbering under a thick layer of ice.
I pulled on the ceiling, and the whole thing came down on my head. The last photo is when we had almost finished cleaning up. We were up to our knees in leaf litter and pine needles. The squirrels made a giant futon out of the ceiling. They dragged all sorts of things up there. We found a bunch of McD’s happy meal toys in the rubble. I’m glad someone, er, something got some use out of them.
So we shoveled and bagged the mess, and took stock of what remained.
That’s some funky framing, y’all. The carpenters who built the house used rough and ready lumber back in the day. You can see a lot of wane, another name for barked edges on boards. For reasons that escape me some people enjoy dining tables and countertops with wane edges these days, although they call them “live edge.” Wane is considered a defect, people. I advise you to get off the euphemism train and buy a better table. Then again, if you listen to me too much, you might end up in a derelict house in an arctic wasteland. I did, and I often listen to myself.
If you inspect that last photo closely, you can see knob and tube wiring lying on top of the boards. Whatever fixture they served is long gone, and the insulation is nibbled off. It was all still live when I discovered it. For all I know, flying squirrel MDs had been using the two wires as a defibrillator for fellow rodents with hinky tickers. The wires were attached to the overhead lights in the kitchen. Right at this moment was when I decided to kill all the knob and tube wiring in the house dead, dead, dead, before I was. We didn’t have a single working overhead light in the house for a long time after.
Looking the other way, you can see daylight. Squirrels give themselves more easy outs than a T-ball team. I patched the molding on the outside, and put spray foam all along the inside of the soffits to seal out varmints and bees and drafts.
Let’s see if we can make something useful out of this place.
That’s 1977. The Montreux Jazz Festival. That’s in Switzerland. I still confuse it with the Montreal Jazz Festival. I’m never attending either, so you can stamp my visa any which way you like. If you’ve forgotten (or never knew) what seventies fur-bearing musician critters looked like, here’s exhibit A. Their polyester outfits must have made it impossible to sit down. They’d just slither onto the floor from the lack of friction.
I’ve played (badly) many of the instruments you see in the video. I’m a little impressed by the bass player. He’s playing hiccuping funk bass lines while singing. That’s hard, man. I found it vanishingly easy to play the drums while singing, even though I could barely play the drums. The guitar is pretty easy too, because your right hand is just a piston, generally. But playing syncopated almost-melodies on the bass while yelling into a microphone required more cortex than I possess, I guess. I think it would be even harder to sing and play the saxophone at the same time, but I never tried it. Only playing cello in a marching band would be harder.
People have differing, somewhat angry opinions about generational tastes in music. Millennials hate dad-rock, and hate the dads that rock. They’re sick of listening to Rolling Stones clips in between plays at the football stadium, and Bee Gees while they’re shopping at Whole Foods. They don’t see the appeal of sixties and seventies music. I suspect they really do see the appeal, and decide to hate it anyway. This leads to internet wags pointing out that Duran Duran was better than the Beatles. Okey dokey then. You really should find a more intelligent way to gin up enough courage to stand up to your parents, kids.
In many ways, I’m more in tune with generations who came before and after mine. Seventies dad-rock did seep into every nook and cranny of the world’s collective ear, and set up shop there. Rock and roll swallowed everything that came before it, and it’s still swallowing everything that came after it, too. Hell, Deep Purple played at Montreux. I’ve always lived in a nether world of music and other culture that didn’t rely on a time and place. Giuseppe Verdi is the same as Patsy Cline to me. You either suck, or you don’t.
There is a demarcation line I’m noticing in this video of the Average White Band, though. They were harmless fun coming out of the radio back in the day. I’m sure harmless fun comes out of the radio now, too, but how would I know? I’m listening to Verdi and Cline, remember? But a huge gulf opened up in the music industry when you no longer had to know how to actually sing or play your instruments. If you’re old enough, you can find it on your memory calendar the first time you went to someone’s wedding and there was a guy playing records instead of a band.
Live music used to be everywhere. I know, I used to make it. My kids did, too. I watched it withering on the vine for years, until covid panics killed the whole thing dead. I figure it’s the reason you still hear somebody else’s favorite song coming out of the ceiling in the convenience store. No one’s making anything fresh, so they have to play yacht rock standards while you shop for day old donuts. You can’t beat something with nothing. And man, those white faux-silk outfits were something.
Well, here we be. We’ve painted the old scullery to a fare-thee-well, so there’s nothing left to show you but before and after pictures. First, we get some Glamor Shots by Deb of the whole room. My wife says the first photo is her favorite, because it has peonies from our garden on the table. She spends a lot of time in there, and we try to brighten it up every chance we get.
Here’s the view from the dining room. There’s a pantry closet behind that dark cocoa curtain. The curtain hides clutter without getting in the way very much. There’s room for an ironing board and mops and things on the right hand side.
Turn to your left, and you see the baking center thingie. Open shelves speed things up.
Keep turning counterclockwise, and you can see the stove wall, and the reefer nearby, across from the dishwasher. It’s a testament to how big the rooms in a Victorian are. You can have the door of the dishwasher open, and the reefer door open, and still walk in between them. The trash/recycle cabinet can also stand open without getting in the way.
Here’s the sink wall. The kids bought their mother a bluetooth soundbar, which you can see mounted under the left-hand cabinet. Ya gotta listen to Italian Secret Service records while you’re cooking. It’s like a law or rule or something.
Here’s what the profile on the woodwork looks like. That’s the opening to the dining room and the cabinet over the fridge, under the soffit that has the plumbing from the second floor in it.
And here are some before and after shots for your dining and dancing pleasure:
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I think my spare heir was smiling in that last picture, because he didn’t yet realize he was going to have to help me.
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