Now Life is Giving me Bats?

I was getting ready to make some lunch and glanced over into the dining room. It's dim in there even with the lights on and for a moment I was wondering what the boys had stuck to the ceiling and why...because there's been a long history of random things taped up in places. 

Then I took a closer look...from a safe distance because if that was what I thought it might be I didn't want to startle it.

I can't blame the boys for this one.

So when there's a bat on the porch, you don't go out that door and you keep the kids away until night falls and your new little friend  flies away. When there's a bat on the ceiling of your dining room...what do you do?

In our case, we called the local wildlife hospital to confirm that my plan wasn't stupid. Then we put a box up under the bat and used a thin sheet of cardboard to knock her down into the box and moved her out to the barn. She'll have a cool dark place to get through the rest of the day and that's probably where she came from in the first place.

A couple of years ago, life was giving me spiders to blog about. This time it was something a lot bigger and maybe a little more stressful. 

Old Kitchen Cabinets

My kitchen has running water. I know...probably everyone reading this has running water and if you don't, I'm so so sorry. We didn't have running water last month because the well ran dry again and the pump burnt out and at this point having water come out of the faucet every time I turn it on is such an amazingly wonderful thing that I can ignore everything that's wrong with the room. 

I've spent a lot of time wondering what the original kitchen in this house was like. I know that the current cabinets ( the ones with the scary red crackle interior) aren't what the house started out with...and I question whether the room that's the kitchen now was the original kitchen and if  the house had electricity when it was first built and just a ton of other things. 

On Thursday, I posted about a metal Youngstown Kitchen cabinet I'd spotted at an estate sale. It was completely rusted out and beyond repair, but that didn't stop me from falling in love. Melanie left a comment that she had something just like it in her garage and that made me remember that there's an old metal cabinet in our barn....

If I'd remembered that it was brown, I wouldn't have bothered to put on my shoes and go outside and that would have been a mistake, because look....

It's from Youngstown Kitchens! If we're going to be honest, this cabinet style is the last thing I'd want in my house. But it's a vintage steel kitchen cabinet and it's mine and of all of the ridiculous random crap that the previous owners left behind when they sold us the house, this one actually makes me happy.

I took the pictures, locked  everything up and came back inside...and then I started trying to remember what the other cabinets out there were made of. So I went out and checked -- they're wood. The benches in the shop are also wood and I can't think of anyplace else on our property another mystery cabinet might be hiding.

My Sewing Room Chair

I don't think I've ever showed you the chair from my sewing room. It's probably appeared in the background of a few pictures over the years but it's intriguing enough to deserve a post of its own.  

The thing came with the house and it's ridiculously heavy so the sewing room was where I found it and the sewing room is where it stayed until I dragged it outside to take some pictures where the light was better. 

Someone obviously made it and that someone obviously had the same "that's good enough" attitude that occasionally allows me to do things like lop off the corner of a quilt because the backing wasn't quite the right size.

The back is bolted in place and there were notches cut to fit the slats. It looks like this thing started with a plan and some idea of craftsmanship... I don't know what happened to make bending down nails with the hammer seem like the right thing to do.

And I don't know why that shelf underneath needed to be two boards thick. But it does make a nice place to stack quilting books.

Maybe, given the blood thinners, I should see if Hubby can remove the worse of the protruding nail ends. I've managed to go ten years without cutting myself on one, but these days tin foil makes me a danger to myself.

The Green Door to Nowhere is Open!

A couple of summers ago, I showed your our green door to nowhere.  Last summer, our well went dry and Hubby decided that it would be much easier to do the repairs if we went through the green door instead of the one in the opposite corner of the building. 

Now that we've got the door open, I'm more confused than ever about why it was nailed shut in the first place. It's a very useful door! And it wasn't hard at all to rig up a secure way to close it from the inside. Things are locked up just as tightly as ever...with the bonus that we can use the door when we want to.

I love that our old house still has some pleasant surprises. I'd never seen what was on the back side of the doorknob. All of the house's interior doors have been "upgraded" (if you want to call it that), so this may be the only original knob left on the property.

it's red...and crackly...and it scares me...

Why would a woman do this to the insides of her kitchen cabinets?

Our house has a lot of interesting quirks, but this is the one I have the hardest time wrapping my head around. The scary linoleum in the boys' room must've looked good when it was first installed. The beer can flashing up on the roof probably made sense when the man of the house decided to take that particular shortcut.  But someone spend time and money to make the insides of my kitchen cabinets crackly blood red.

WHY?!

When we bought the house, the kitchen walls and cabinets were pink. The first thing we did was paint them -- and that's when we found out about the lovely red crackle effect that was hiding under the pink, waiting to come through. The woman even crackled the insides of the drawers red.

I didn't realize until this week that it goes all the way up into unreachable top shelves. This is, apparently, the original color scheme.   I don't see the appeal. 

 Anyone know how I can get rid of this lovely effect without spending a lot of money on extra supplies when we repaint the kitchen?

Another of our house's interesting quirks...

I would love to know what this house looked like back in the day. Now and then, I catch a tempting glimpse of its past. Remember that horrifying floor I uncovered in the boys' room?

I don't spend a whole lot of time in the back of Teenage Daughter's closet. I knew she had neat old wallpaper, but until I went in there to take some pictures, I'd forgotten how stinkin' cute it was!

 

 

 

She's got a beret! We can't seem to decide what this little creature actually is -- any guesses?

And they've got little gas pumps -- squee!

 

It's in poor condition and I know most people would have painted over it as soon as they moved in, but it's survived for so many decades I just can't bring myself to do that, especially since it's tucked away from everyday sight.

This post is linked to Time Travel Thursday, Treasure Hunt Thursday, Vintage Thingie Thursday, Share Your Cup, and Ivy and Elephants.

my door to nowhere

I love living in a house with quirks, even if it takes me a long time to notice them.

See our green door? It doesn't go anywhere at all. Inside the garage, the door is boarded shut and blocked by a built in workbench.

Part of me wonders why the previous owners didn't do away with the door entirely when they resided the house a few years before we bought it. And part of me is glad that it's still here, adding to the puzzles of our house. I love old doorknobs.

The house has other quirks -- Hubby tells me that the odd jog in the wall of the front room has an old chimney hidden behind it. Ventilation from the original kitchen, maybe? I'm not crawling up across the attic to check it out for myself. He also says that part of the original foundation is stone. I'm not going under the house, either. Not even if it might help me guess at which rooms are original and which were added on later!

Our last house had sealed off windows in the carport. Again, I've got to wonder who did it and why. The laundry room on the other side would have been so much nicer with some natural light -- even from windows overlooking Hubby's old truck. 

I love the little mysteries of why people did what they did, but boy I'd like some answers to some of them!

Are you as horrified by this as I am?

I would cut this print into little pieces for a scrap quilt. I might even use it as a backing.

Too bad it's not a piece of fabric. It's the floor in one of our bedrooms. Let that sink in for just a second....this is a floor. In my house.

Are you as horrified and fascinated by this old linoleum as I am?

I grew up in a house that was built in the mid-70s. I thought I'd seen scary floors. But this...this one just boggles my mind. Mostly because it's on my very own floor and I get to decide what to do about it.

When we moved into this house seven years ago, the carpet in the boys' room had a small paint stain. It didn't make sense to replace the carpet then, since it was in pretty decent shape and I wasn't about to put brand new carpet in the boys' room. (If your young children would be perfectly respectful of new carpet, good for you. Mine would take it as a personal challenge.)

My first hint of this flooring came a couple of months ago when I was cleaning out the boys' closet. It was carpeted when we first moved in, but somewhere along the line the carpet vanished and scary linoleum appeared. I was too busy trying to figure out where my carpet had gone to really worry about the new floor.

And it never occurred to me that it was more than a random scrap the previous owners had put down in the closet. I always assumed that there was hardwood under the rest of the carpet, which is what we've got in the other two bedrooms, or that the original wood floors had been replaced with newer wood flooring.

But I'm lucky. I apparently have a whole room full of this gorgeous stuff. I haven't pulled back all of the carpet, because I'm not that courageous.

So do I keep the carpet, or scar my boys for life by making them sleep in a room with flowered linoleum? And, while I'm asking questions, can anyone imagine choosing this as their bedroom floor?

This post is linked to Finding the Funny at My Life and Kids.