83 Durant Mysteries, Continued

This post is part of an ongoing series exploring the mysteries of 83 Durant. You may remember previous posts, like WHHHHHHAAAT part 1, part 2, and part 3. Whenever we take on a project, we always uncover new mysteries about the house.

The recent work in the pink room has raised some questions. Readers, we'd love to hear from you -- explanations, scientific or humorous -- are always most welcome.

Without further delay, answer me these questions three:

Question 1:
What kind of plug is the one on the left?


Question 2 (same as 1, but different picture):
What kind of plug is the one on the left here? I think it looks like cable, but there's no actual cable coming out of it. There are two of these in this room.


Question 3:
Have we made a serious mistake in covering up the box that's photographed here?
This is a mystery box that was in the wall, a little bit below where the doorbell is attached to the wall. It seemed to have no wires in it. Why is it here/what does (did) it do, and now that it's covered by drywall, are we in trouble?


Bonus Question:
What's up with this door?


I know, trick question. There are many things wrong with this door. First, there's the pink accent, which is not our fault. Then there's the red accent on that top section, which is our fault, because we were trying out a color that we thought we might be able to just paint over the pink (no dice).

If you look at that door, you may notice that something besides the color is off-kilter. It's just not-quite-right that there are three rectangles -- it just seems like they're not spaced appropriately, right? Yeah, now that you mention it, it does look kind of off.

That's because this door apparently is not an original door for this spot. If you look at the bottom, you will see that this door has been made larger with an extra couple pieces of wood attached to make the bottom 4 inches or so. This door was originally meant for a doorway that was shorter. Also, it's pretty clear that it's not really supposed to be an exterior door. It's not nearly as thick or sturdy as the other exterior doors in the house. This has me wondering what happened to the original door.

That's all for today. Hope you're having a lovely weekend. It's hot and rainy here. Sigh.

Appliance Death-Watch: Stove

We've had some trouble with our stove. You may remember our troubles with the door (and the bungee-cord solution) or the time it stopped working, but Jake fixed it. Recently, it's been on the fritz a little more frequently. A couple of time the oven pilot light has gone out, and we had another incident like the previous one, where it seems that the sensor was dirty (but Jake was able to fix it again). All this has us thinking that perhaps we should get a new stove before this one kicks it and we're left with a raw turkey on Thanksgiving, or some other such ill-timed demise.

There are some truly awesome things about our stove. The first is that since it doesn't have an electric ignition, even if the power goes out, we can use the stove and oven. This is a nice feature. There is also a heater in the stove. We don't particularly need the heater, but apparently, this particular model of stove is very popular here in New England, especially for small apartments and beach cottages, where the stove can also serve as a heater for a small space. We've been told that we should sell it, since it will be in demand. If you know anyone in the market for a McGee, let us know!

Meanwhile, we're on the hunt for a new stove. We're also hoping that when we get it hooked up, we'll also get a real hood. The current one just blows the greasy/smokey air right back into the kitchen. The stove is up against a chimney, so we're hoping we can vent such a hood right out of the chimney. Currently, the chimney is only used to vent the stove, but, as we understand it, the new model stoves don't need an outside vent. We're still looking into this, but, again, for all our mechanically-inclined and general home-knowledge-inclined, we'd love to hear your advice on whether such a venting via the chimney is possible/safe.

The room formerly known as the Pink Room

You may recall that we live in a house that has a BRIGHT PINK room. You may also recall hearing me say that I saw the PINK ROOM in the photos of the house way before we bought it, before we had even seen the house, and I said "I can't live in a house with a pink room." We bought the house anyway, and I figured we'd change it immediately. But for numerous reasons, we had not gotten around to doing anything about the pink room. For one thing, it's right in the middle of the house, making it a bit of a hassle to take care of such a project. For another, the room is old horsehair plaster with wallpaper, and then paint over wallpaper, and then a wallpaper border over that. It was going to be a project. A big one. And today, that project began.

Here are a few before shots. I'm not putting a whole lot of them up here, since I think most of our readers are well-acquainted with the pink-ness in question. If you're not, take a gander at some of the older posts (like this one or this one) or at our flickr pages, where you're sure to see shots of the pinkness in action.




If you're wondering about the wallpaper that was under the hot pink you can check out a small patch here:


Last night we emptied the room of all its worldly possessions.


Every other room in our house is now over-stuffed, and things are a bit nuts, but the pink room was empty, and ready for the arrival (at 7 am today) of our plastering team.

We're very happy with the work Brian Daly and his two workers did for us today. He was recommended to us by our good friend Matt, who's quite an expert carpenter and house restoration expert. The coolest part of the job was the fact that two of the guys wore stilts to do the job.

Our ceilings are 10 feet high, so this was kind of necessary. Lucy was fascinated by the stilts. I think she would have preferred to stay home from daycare today to just watch them working.

Here's a mid-project shot:


The drywall (before it was covered with plaster) was this dark blue-gray color, and we actually liked the way it looked. We're thinking of a dark slate blue as a possible color for the room (but we really have no idea what we're going to do color-wise).

The last time we did a drywalling project was for Lucy's room, but back then, we actually demolished the plaster. That was an incredibly dirty and trash-producing job, and we swore then we would never do such a thing again. This time, we sensibly decided to just put the drywall right over the plaster, making it an easier job for us. It did make things a bit tricky though, since the wallboard had to go on top of the bottom molding. We could have removed the molding, but this too would have been quite a project, and quite possibly would have ruined some of the molding. We think it turned out pretty well.

We're especially pleased with the ceiling, which had a lot of cracks in the plaster and is now nice and smooth:

Here you can see some of our nice, sharp corners:


As you can see, there are still some PINK spots, as illustrated here on the medallion. We're hoping to be able to paint over them. The guys did a nice job of trimming the drywall around the medallion, and bringing the edge right up to it. A few pieces broke off, so the guys suggest that we spray paint it, since it's in pretty delicate shape.

The room is filled with dust and smells funny, but we're pleased with the job. We have to wait at least a week, and probably two, for the plaster to completely dry before we can paint it. So we have a pretty much empty room in the middle of the house, which Lucy is really enjoying.

Do you have a color you'd like to suggest for the room formerly known as the pink room? Do you have a new name we can call the pink room, besides "the room formerly known as the pink room"? We look forward to hearing from our devoted readers!

By the way, I wrote most of this post on Tuesday, but didn't have a chance to get it finished. So all the "todays" here refer to Tuesday, June 23rd, for those of you documenting and keeping track of such things.