Is there any kind of kit — maybe a test or a calculator you buy at a hardware store — that will help you figure out if the house you’ve claimed is a historic grand old dame really is just a clunker with wood siding? By which I mean a shoddy old dump from the past that is likely to fall down on your head. Sure, it looks cute and quaint from the outside — a piece of Americana — but you can get tetanus from the wood, splinters from the metal and no telling what from everything else.I don’t know what has changed the past few months. I’ve always loved my house — that old Florida feel with the tall ceilings, the big windows, the airiness, the heart pine everywhere and the raccoons in the trees that tell you about how it used to be in the old days.
I still love my old house. It’s nearly 100 years old, is downtown and has a nice big front porch where you can sit and enjoy the squadrons of mosquitoes who like to launch swarming raids on your ankles.
But maybe it’s the new child that makes me think differently now, or wanting to finish projects and add new, modern things I never found important before. No matter what it is, it seems the blinders have come off and I see it through a new light.
All of this was running through my mind one day as I stood shin-deep in the original hardwood floors, my house literally trying to devour my leg like a starved great white. I had been clearing books from a shelf, stepped on a creaky floorboard, and it gave way under my weight. Because back then people didn’t believe in things like sub-floors, my foot took the express train downtown and if not for my jungle cat reflexes, I might have been really hurt– instead of just stuck in the floor where I got to ponder my house.
“Now that’s unusual,” I remember thinking to myself as I looked down at my half-swallowed leg and the floorboard that had given way. When you live in an old house, these things don’t really spark much of a reaction. “Eh, did I tell you about the time the fireplace fell on my head?” is a common refrain from oldhousers.
By the time my wife came home, I had extracted my foot and gone about my business. “Might not want to step over there,” I told her casually while flipping through the mail. “The house has developed something of a sinkhole.”
She looked at the hole in the floor and shrugged. She’s an oldhouser, too.
When we bought it back in 1997, it had potential and not much else literally. There was no heat or air, unless you considered a pot belly stove in the dining room that was clogged with ash. The kitchen sink was sitting on 2 x 4s and there were little heat lamps under shelves in the living room that people told us dated from days when the house served time growing pot.
To this day, I still worry I will climb into the attic to find a field of marijuana growing up out of the insulation. How would you explain that one to the police?
Over the years, I did all of the renovation work, and it has served us fine and looked great. But things that were supposed to be temporary stayed year after year.
Maybe it’s a life transition we’re going through. It happened after college when I stopped eating Ramen noodles and using milk crates for bookshelves. Is this another turning point that has us looking at new kitchen cabinets, granite counter tops and stainless steal appliances? Part of the maturing process that comes with the next stage of life?
Could be. Or it also could mean I’m just sick of falling through the floor. Either way, this house will never be the same.