New Babies and Old Houses

I am sorry for taking such a long hiatus between posts! It’s been more than two weeks now, and when I started this blog, I intended to make a post once a week. There has been a change to my family which makes this a bit more understandable. Eleven days ago, my second son wriggled his way into the world, and ever since then he and his brother have kept my wife and I both very busy and rather exhausted! It seems that newborns don’t believe in keeping predictable sleep schedules and toddlers don’t believe in sleeping past 6:15 even if their brother happens to still be asleep. 

On top of all that, I have embarked on another project, and had actually begun before the wee one came on the scene. You see, my wife and I had closed on our first house a week before he was born, and since we are a young couple, and my dad and I are fairly handy, it is a house with a ton of potential… but not much in the way of modern updates. It is a small colonial house built by a Gloucester sailmaker in the early 1850s, so it had great bones, but no insulation and a fair amount of crumbling plaster. I started to work on it the afternoon after closing, and have been doing careful demolition ever since. 

My first surprise came after my first night taking down the plaster in a ceiling, when I found that instead of being a typical stick-frame house, it was actually post-and-beam construction! I was all but jumping up and down with excitement (this is because when I was young, I helped my dad with a lot of the joinery that went into building our own post-and-beam home). That made the house a slightly unusual house for the era in which it was built, but not so unusual as to put it in a different era. 

My second surprise came when my brother and I were taking the plaster out of one of the exterior walls in the first floor, and he started pulling out what we thought was a simple squirrel nest. He called me over when he found something hard, and we started to be a little more careful about removing the items that were stashed in the wall. We were both surprised when the hard thing turned out to be a concealed shoe! (you can learn more about concealed shoes here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concealed_shoes) He continued to dig, and found four more shoes, ranging from a toddlers’ shoe to a grown ladies’ shoe, as well as a three foot long saw-blade, a stick that turned out to be part of a parasol handle, some children’s toys (one of which turned out to be a miniature of a whale oil lamp refiller), and some newspaper articles that dated back to 1846! 

I invited a couple of friends to come see the house, since they are both good friends and huge history buffs. I knew they would be excited to see what I had found. They were able to tell me that the shoes I had found did indeed date back to the 1840s, as did everything else. I was very interested to learn that these articles stashed in the wall were not actually put there by a pilfering squirrel or rat, but were actually part of an ancient tradition among carpenters and house builders meant to bring good fortune to those living in the house. 

I am excited to see what else this old house has to teach me as I bring it back from its abandoned state, to a home for a young and growing family, much as it was when it was originally built.