Older and Hotter Than Me

The same family owned and lived in the House of 42 Doors for 82 years.  The original builders/owners lived here from 1921 to 1941. Two of their children lived here from 1941 to 1978. And a grandchild lived here from 1978 to 2003. In all that time, the house acquired a lot of "stuff".  When the last owner moved away, he moved overseas, leaving behind either a trove of archaeological curiosities, or a lot of junk, depending on your view point.

I spent many evenings the first year looking through what we had purchased; every box, every envelope, every letter and every news clipping. For anyone that has done historical family research, you'll understand the allure of discovering or deducing intimate and personal stories from primary source material. But this was a bit different.  It also had a voyeuristic bent.  These people weren't my family, and even though the stuff in the house did become ours when we bought it, some of the items were personal in nature.

When I came across those items that had potential family value (correspondence, photos, birth certificates, stock certificates, etc.), I set them aside. I was able to contact a sister of the previous owner and gave all of those items to her. But there were other pieces of the house that were simply left over from past days - a ringer style wash tub, a cast iron pressure tank, a porcelain sink, a swinging bench, a cistern pump, a Morris reclining chair, the Nazi chair, etc.  Most of these were broken beyond repair, or saved by people who lived through the Depression, or saved perhaps because of nostalgia for days gone by.  Some of the items we threw out, some we repaired, and some we've held onto - including this.

I think this is the original 1921 water heater, but it might also have been the original boiler used to heat the water for radiators.  It's quite small, only 33 inches tall, and Ms. Huis has been after me for years to get rid of it. I have become irrationally attached to it, and I have no idea why. It is impossibly heavy - too heavy to lift. Thirteen years ago I was in good enough shape to lift it out of the basement - I doubt I could do that now.  It sits in our garage, tucked into a corner while I try to find a better use for it other than scrap iron.

I spent the last 13 years with our current water heater, and I rarely gave it a thought.  Perhaps a few times a year I'd think, "I don't like where it is" or "I wish it was gas instead of electric" or "I wonder what we'll do when it fails?" The original water heater on the other hand would have required daily care and feeding of placing coal in, and ashes out. There may have been a temperature gauge for the water, but the only regulator would have been how much coal was shoveled in.  A water heater in 1921 would have been a wonderful luxury. Hot water on demand! Straight from the tap! The original owners of the house were born in 1864, so much of their life would have been carrying water from a pump and heating it on a stove. But their 1921 water heater compared to the one I just replaced is positively archaic.

And so the march of progress continues forward.

P.S. Anyone have any ideas of what to do with a Richardson No. 600 boiler/water heater?

And Not a Drop to Drink

It has occurred to me on more than one occasion that if you own an old house, you had better enjoy fixing things.  That can mean replacing, rebuilding or redesigning; but if you choose to do nothing, you can be assured that the house will fall apart around you.  Things are going to break or wear out. Sure - this happens with all houses, but around here it seems that for every thing we fix, at least one more breaks.

Sometimes it feels like it is impossible to keep up with the flood of constant care required to keep an old house in shape.

Speaking of floods, last November Ms. Huis said to me one morning, "Mr. Kluges you need to come to the basement." She had that tone. We all know that tone. One that portends bad news. I didn't ask on the way down. Sometimes it's just better to get the experience first hand. This is what I saw.

It really wasn't a surprise. We've been in the house now for 13 years, and the water heater was not new when we moved in so I knew it was going to go at some time. But 13 years of experience has also taught me that sometimes when a picture is crooked, we end up deciding to remodel a bathroom.  Okay, so maybe that exact example didn't happen, but one thing always seems to lead to another.

The good news was that we still had hot water, and that the water was only leaking, not gushing. I mean, at least the bottom hadn't fallen out. After so many years of dealing with leaky roofs and gutters, 90 year old knob and tube electrical wiring, clogged pipes, tornado damage, collapsed sewer lines, and numerous non-domesticated mammals, a minor leak on an unfinished basement floor was a "meh" event. We'll get it fixed.

We're on the back side of this now, but just like every other project in this house it was not as easy as it could have been.

A Sweet Surprise

My wife was kind enough to bring me an unexpected present on Sunday.  I was cleaning up the kitchen after lunch when she came in with a whole frame of capped honey from our bees.  She's been having a few problems with one of the hives and needed to move a frame of eggs from one hive to another, which meant she needed to remove a frame.  And if you're going to remove a frame, why not remove a frame of honey!

Wasting no time, I opted to get it processed immediately.  There are a few ways to extract honey from honeycomb, and if all of the right equipment is available, it can be relatively easy with minor impact to the honeycomb.  It takes a lot of energy for bees to make the wax that they store their honey in.  I've read several books which state that for every pound of wax the bees make, they are consuming about eight pounds of honey.  I like beeswax, but I'd rather have the honey.  So ideally, we'd get the honey out of the comb and then return it to the bees with a little note saying, "More Please!"

But we did not have the right equipment, which meant brutalizing the honey comb. And I did. It wasn't pretty; honey on the counter, honey on the floor and my hands shiny with it, from wrist to finger tip. In small amounts, fresh honey is sticky, but in large amounts (really large) its actually slippery, which makes it hard to grab things.


In the end, one full frame of capped honey held 5 pounds of honey, which is between a third and a half of a gallon of honey. The spring honey this year is to die for, light colored, sweet and very floral.  Much better than last year's honey whose smell reminded my of freshly trimmed tartarian honeysuckle bushes.  I'm hoping we'll have a good harvest this year.  It's hard to say how much honey we'll get out of the two hives we have, but an average year should see us net 100 pounds of honey.  Ms. Huis may be in this for the bees, but I'm in it for the honey.

Some Things Never Change

Scott was supposed to be on site yesterday at about 2:00 pm to do some initial wiring. Scot was a no show, with no call to tell me he'd be a no show.  I can only assume, based on my experiences and on performance of 80%+ of the contractors that I've engaged with that this is normal. And it drives me crazy.

Scott called me early today to say that with all the rain we've been having, he wouldn't be able to plow in the electrical cable from the house to the garage, and would it be fine to wait a week for the ground to dry out.  Naturally I agreed, as I'm not really on a tight schedule with this project.

A Little Heat

Winter is cold in the House of 42 Doors.  It wouldn't have to be.  We could turn the thermostat up to 68 or 70, like most people who live in modern houses, but as my wife reminds me, we can buy a lot sweaters for what the increase in our heating bill would be.  So we drink a lot of tea, wear a lot of sweaters and take hot showers.  But then there is the garage.

The last few years I've started woodworking projects in October.  At that time of year, the days are getting shorter, the outside work is essentially wrapped up and I'm still brimming with energy from the flip side of seasonal affective disorder.  Because the wood projects are done on weekends or evenings, they can take six to twelve weeks to complete, which means I'm working in my unattached garage into November, December and even the beginning of January.  And its cold, really really cold, too cold to work without gloves. Then when its January, February and even the beginning of March, I have nothing to do except dream about Spring and summer.

That's going to change this year.  I've taken one stall of my three car garage and put up a dividing wall.  Today an electrician is coming out to wire in a 60 amp circuit for a new heater and the future option of an electric car plug in.  Its the first time I've dealt with contractors in a few years, so we'll see how he does.  It happens to be the same company that rewired our house back in 2007 and 2008 and they were very good, but this is a different guy.

I am very much looking forward to a heated, tidy workshop and hoping for an electrician who thinks like I do.

I'll name you Beatrice, you're Beulah, and you can be Bea... I'm gonna need more 'B' names...

We've been thinking about doing this for a while and Mr. Kluges finally talked me into it last September.  We ordered our equipment, put it together, and today, picked up the final and most necessary component to our new endeavor...

That'd be a box full of bees, folks!

We are now beekeepers!  

Mr. Kluges and the girls watched from the back roof/balcony while I installed them into their hive.  To start we got a "nuc," which is basically 4 frames out of the middle of a hive.  They should have an active/laying queen and a bunch of her daughter bees along with eggs/pupa/larvae in various stages, and honey and pollen, too.  All I had to do was carefully remove them from the cardboard box they're in and put them into their prepared permanent home.  I looked for the queen, but didn't see her, which isn't too unusual considering my lack of experience. :)  I'm not too worried (well, not too worried), but I'll look again in a few days and see if I can find her then, or at least eggs, which would mean she's there & doing fine.

Here are some photos of the process.

This is the nuc of bees riding home in the trunk of the car.

After I took the first frame out of the nuc, I showed it to my 3 observers. There are bees everywhere on that thing!

Taking a look at a frame of bees to see if I can spot the queen, observing the capped brood, looking for eggs, etc.

Adding 3 new frames to each side of the hive for the bees to fill with pollen and honey for themselves.

Putting on the inner cover.

Since they're just getting established, I put an empty box on top of the inner cover, then a container of sugar-water for the bees to help feed them until they get going finding nectar sources.

Finally I put on the outer cover and a big ol' rock.  The empty nuc box was placed in front of the opening so the couple of dozen bees still in it could find their way out in their own time.

I retrieved the camera from Mr. Kluges while I was still geared up and took a few pictures.  This circled bee is sticking her rear in the air and giving off the homing pheromone, to help the other bees find the opening and realize that this is now home.

I've already been out to look at the hive quite a few times today because it's just so dang cool.  I even saw a bee returning to the hive with the pollen baskets on her legs packed full of bright yellow pollen (dandelion?) less than an hour after I'd installed them.  The bees seem to have settled in fine, but I'm looking forward to continued observations.  Yay for honey bees!

Cross-posted to Musings & Mutterings

An Unexpected Early-Morning Wake-up Crash

Not that I mean to only write when we've had something bad occur with the house, but this happened...

About 10 days ago, while Mr. Kluges was in Ireland on a business trip, Mother Nature decided that what this extended late winter, is-spring-ever-coming season needed was an ice storm.  A BIG ice storm spiced up with just a little bit of wind.  Yay.

About 5:30 am, I was woken by the sound of some small branches breaking off the tree outside my window.  I didn't think too much of it, as it's a weak tree that often loses a small branch or two in any sort of wind or ice. I lay there, listening to the tap of the freezing rain on my window, and the occasional tinkle of a small branch breaking off and making its way through its brothers to the ground.  Then there was a sudden HUMONGOUS snapping, loud and extended crashing, and a giant, house-shaking BOOM!  I knew right away one of the main branches on one of our neighbor's trees on the property line to the south had come down and definitely hit our house. I tore out of bed into Penguin's room, sure I was going to see branches poking through her window and an hysterical child in bed.  Fortunately, and unbelievably to me at the time, the window was unbroken and Penguin remained asleep.

But I could see out her window that it was more than just that one branch, big as it was.  I then raced over to Pumpkin's room 'cuz the branches obviously went that far - she was awake & asked what that big thunder was.  I told her it was a tree hitting the house, then threw on some clothes, grabbed a flashlight & went out to see what I could see. 

Turns out I was wrong - it wasn't the one large branch we'd always thought would eventually give way and hit our sun porch.  Instead it looked like the entire tree itself had broken off right at the ground and hit our sun porch, with at least some branches hitting the top roof, and it was resting mostly on our sun porch roof, which was obviously damaged and partially crushed.  I couldn't see very much because it was still so dark, but after determining that apparently none of the tree had gone through walls or windows, I went in and messaged Mr. Kluges, who was, with the 6 hour time different, awake and at work.

Once it got light, I went out and snapped some photos so Mr. Kluges could get a better sense of the damage and what had happened.  Here's how it looked.

The red arrow is the base of the tree, where it broke off from its roots. The yellow arrow shows branches coming completely over the top of the sun porch roof, and the blue one shows branches hitting the top roof.

Our side yard

The poor smashed sun porch roof

The reach of the tree up onto the top roof

Penguin's window, the original one I'd expected to be broken out

Pumpkin's window view, with roof completely covered with branches

The view from the backyard

This WAS the gate to the backyard.

Once the girls were off to school, I contacted the insurance company, and then our tree guy, who wasn't able to come out that day because, gosh, he was really busy and we didn't have any branches actually breaking INTO our house (thank God!).  Later that morning, one of our other neighbors called to say she was sending her husband (and his chainsaw) over about 1pm when he got home from work.  They showed up, and between the three of us and his chainsaw and some ropes, managed to get the tree off of the house.  It got easier to see some of the damage then.

Of course, the branches did a number on our custom gutters!

Since then the insurance adjustor has been out, and so has our contractor.  We're waiting for progress with that.  Mr. Kluges and the neighbor whose tree it was decided to take care of the rest of the tree themselves, so it's now all chopped up and off our yard.  The sun porch roof is going to need significant work, the main roof might need some (thankfully we have some of our special shingles around!), and the gutters are obviously in need of repair.  Surprisingly, it looks like just the gate took the brunt of the tree, but the rest of the fence looks ok.  Somehow, no windows were broken and nothing came through the roof or walls!!!!  I'm counting my blessings on that one!

(Cross-posted to Musings & Mutterings.)