The Joy of Discovery
Pulling up the old flooring revealed newspapers from 1924.
Starry eyed optimism quickly fades the moment our hands pick up the tools and go to work. The thrill is gone, as B.B. King said. But the thrill of unfulfilled love gives way to the real work of long suffering satisfying labor. And it is this labor that leads to the joy of discovery.
The best definition of work I’ve heard is bringing order out of chaos. And with this old house built in 1888, there is a lot of chaos. This is mostly due to the years of neglect and disrespect by previous generations of owners. The deferred maintenance has piled up. But we refuse to kick the can down the road any longer. But that means we have problems to deal with—chaotic problems. And so we are bearing down on bringing order out of the chaos.
Our work has revealed some problems that we must address. For example, while we were pulling up old flooring, and tossing it out a second floor window, some of it caught a first story window sill. And good thing that it did. The sill broke clean away from the house. This exposed an insect infestation. Around the damp bottom side of some of our windows we found carpenter ants eating away at the sheathing. If I hadn’t dropped that piece of carpet onto the house, who knows how long those ants would have gone undiscovered. And so we make the call to the local pest guy. Because there is only room for one carpenter around this house. (I had to let that dad joke fly. I am a dad after all.)
Another problem that I discovered was a buckled floor. The floor in what will be our office has been water damaged over the years. This has caused the 132 year old tongue and groove oak to warp and rise. Along the seams it leaps off the subfloor. And so I used a chisel, a hammer, a pry bar, and a knife to remove the old boards, while trying not to break apart the adjacent brittle boards.
The next thing we addressed was the cause for the majority of the water damage in the office. The room above was used as a laundry room. But before it was a laundry room it was probably some type of servants wash room. I could tell that there has always been a water line servicing the room, probably for a sink. And the closet has a built in that is more utilitarian. Years ago this may have been were the servants and hired help came to use as a utility room. But we caped the lines so that there would be no chance of water leakage as we renovate.
The interesting thing about work is that the discoveries are never black and white. That’s the thing with joyful work. There is always a mingling of happy accidents and heartbreaking problems. The roses we cultivate usually have thorns surrounding them. If they didn’t than they wouldn’t call it hard work. And if it was easy everyone would do it.
The basement of this old house is exactly this. There is deep decay and neglect. But there is also happy surprises. For example, this basement has been locked up, put out of site and out of mind. It has water problems due to the grading issues of the ground around the foundation. And the dampness in the basement has been persistent for a very long time.
At some point in this houses history the basement was treated like a frat house basement. There was a pool table, remnants of a ping pong table, and a nasty old bar that was furnished with a lovely puke green shag carpet. Needless to say, all of that met the dumpster. But when I started peeling stuff back, I discovered that the basement windows actually let in a massive amount of natural light. And we all know how magical sunlight is. So along with spraying bleach on mold and opening the cellar door to some fresh air, this basement is now feasting on the sunlight it was built to let in—sunlight that it has been starved of for a generation or more.
The cellar door to the basement. Decades of water damage has crumbled the stairs.
Another thing I love about old basements is that they give you the absolute naked truth about the house. Since it’s the part of the house that escapes most of our guests eyes, it usually doesn’t get the glossy treatment the other parts of the house get. It’s a good reminder just how much paint and drywall can cover up. And in this basement there is visible water damage everywhere. Some of that water damage looks like flood damage. And the flood damage is very present on almost all visible surfaces. This makes sense to me. This house is only a couple blocks from the Mississippi river. That means that every time this great river has broken it’s banks since 1888 the basement would have flooded. And you can tell. One of the greatest floods of all time was in 1965. Many houses with the proximity to the river like this one had their basements fill to the floor joists. The flood damage has not compromised the structural integrity of the house. But it has left its marks. It’s a good reminder that some floods wash away problems. But some floods bring them, and their memory lingers like a stain.
But it’s not all doom and gloom over here. One of the coolest things we found so far during the demo and clean up phase is an upstairs floor covered in newspapers nearly 100 years old. From the old social columns explaining what community members went on vacation that week, to the old stories of fascists taking power across Europe, these papers act like a time capsule to a time long gone. As someone who is passionate about local and national history, I made sure to save these newspapers. I also got a kick out of the advertisements for work shirts selling for 45 cents. They never would have imagined a Duluth Trading Co.
Just because it is true that hard work leads to the joy of discovery doesn’t make it any easier. And just because I can identify the poetry of this work doesn’t mean I haven’t also cussed out “the guy who did that.” I’m honestly a little overwhelmed at times with the sheer magnitude of some of these problems. But it has been worth it so far. Little by little, room by room, problem by problem, we are making this old river stained house a home.