A Bit Salty

October 12

In yesterday’s post you got a glimpse of just how bad the house was, when we started demo. Even though the foundation was rotten, it’s pretty impressive the house was still standing strong on its ORIGINAL foundation. I remember someone saying “how is this house still standing?” My answer was “the Hand of God.” 

Look at how well preserved this wallpaper is! It has been hidden behind the walls. all these years. I wonder what kind of stories it would tell, if it could talk. 

If you blow the pic up, you can see the wire net that was behind the wallpaper.

Another piece of wallpaper. You can see the bug holes in this one. All of this is in the master bedroom. 

A shot of one of the old tacks that was used back in the day to hang wallpaper. 

Original sawmill lumber from the late 1800s

The original bead board around the dining room fireplace. Apparently, when they wanted to change something, they just built over top of the original structure. 

This wall is in the dining room. The door closest to the exposed strip of wood used to be the original entry door into the house. The other door is the bathroom door. 

Well what do you know, there is a second layer of wallpaper beneath what we at first thought was the original wallpaper. Turns out, this is the original wallpaper. 

More wallpaper found in the master bedroom

The salvageable beams, from the foundation. That poor front porch! Everybody always thought it was so beautiful, from the road or in pictures, until we moved all the shrubbery.

I’m going to walk away and pretend I don’t see the terrible shape this wall is in.

Oh my goodness! That late 1800s hand hewn sawmill lumber!! Is any of it salvageable? Can we save some of it? Time will tell…

I always thought this room was in pretty good shape, until they started ripping into things to see what they were working with. I knew this area around the vent was bad, but the rest of the room seemed pretty sturdy. Boy was I wrong in my thinking! That’s why I’m not a professional contractor. 

Different angles doesn’t make it look any better, either. There is no sugar coating this mess. 

There will be a better pic of this in tomorrow’s post. This is kitchen floor, found beneath the kitchen floor. There were : floors built on top of each other. The kitchen floor was the only floor in the house that was actually sturdy.  Now, we know why.

 It’s a good thing, too because Abbie was constantly cooking and baking. Until her health started declining, she was amongst the best bakers and cooks in the county. I truly owe the vast majority of my kitchen skills to her. 

The doorway into the pantry, from the kitchen. At some point, someone built.a wall and closed the pantry off. It was only accessible via tbe enclosed back porch area. They used it to store junk, farm implements, etc. 

There’s Larry’s lights again - I’ll do a post on those, later.

The dining room is starting to look very different. 

Hard to believe this was once a kitchen.

Gosh, growing up, we ate Sunday lunches as a family. Abbie cooked the entire meal. We would go to church, come home, change clothes and head over to the house to eat. Abbie would start cooking on Saturday. 

When I was little, she would stand me in a chair, put the mixing bowl on the washing machine and let me mix the cakes. She would actually put the ingredients in the bowl, but it was my job to mix.If flour had to be sifted or nuts had to be chopped, she would let me do that, at the table, before we started mixing. I used to love baking with her.

 When we would get done, then came the best part. I got to lick the beaters and the bowl. By the way, I’m still alive and didn’t ever get sick and that was a weekly thing. I may or may not still lick the bowl and smile while doing it. Some things just give you the warm and fuzzies. Baking does that for me. It makes me feel close to my grandma, even though she’s gone on to her Heavenly Home.

Fun Fact: Abbie never and I mean never put the lid back on anything. She would just sit the lid on top. Well, she had a pretty nice sized salt shaker and she always measured the salt for the cakes, out of it.  One day we were baking a cake and she broke the cardinal rule. Never pour and measure anything over the batter. She attempted to measure the salt over the batter. The lid flew off and she dumped all the salt into the cake batter. The 4 letter words started flying and she marched to the back door, opened it and slung the pan out. I mixed 2 cakes that day. I only licked the pan once, though! 

I love those big windows! They aren’t perfect, but they are staying. 

A shot of the dining room at the end of the day. So many changes in so little time!

The guys found this Ball mason jar in the walls. I looked it up and I think I remember correctly that this jar was made around 1932 or 1933. Don’t hold me to that! As I said, I’m relying on memory and don’t have the facts in front of me. 

Anyway, that would make this a canning jar that belonged to my great grandmother. Nanny was kind of intimidating. She just wasn’t an affectionate sort of lady. I wasn’t scared of her. We just didn’t spend time together like I did with my grandparents.

I remember she had a holly bush planted at the end of the porch. She didn’t like when I pulled the berries off. I guess I was elementary school aged, maybe younger. One day I pulled a handful of those holly berries and I threw them at her, one by one. She was sitting in the rocking chair, on the front porch. I mean what was she going to do to me? She was an old lady. Chase me off the porch with a switch, is what she did to me!

“We all carry inside us, people who came before us.”