Secrets of This Old House

I think we have a pretty house. It's not really fancy, but it's inviting and colorful and can look pretty fancy when we get everything cleaned up and sort of staged for company. Here's how it looks then.

And now, for the rest of the story

Electrical outlets are always an issue in old houses. It's entertaining when we have a rehearsal here and we have cords and lamps dragged all over the living room. We have the old knob and tube wiring, which is really quite safe as long as animals don't chew on it and you don't get too fancy interrupting the old stuff. So this basically means, you can't go around the room putting in a lot of electrical outlets which you might like to have for modern life. This is a picture of just one of our many lovely outlets.

With the advent of digital TV we of course got one, since the television is the most important piece of furniture in our house. But as the last people on earth not to have cable, we have used a variety of of indoor and outdoor antennas to get reception, both pre-and postdigital. Since digital started, the picture is better, when we get it, but the antenna thing is really quite adorable. This picture shows the channel 6 position, which is the cord hanging over the top of the tv. Most of the other stations are more or less okay with the cord in a reasonable place, like say, the floor.


The bathroom is the place where we have the most of these half-assed things. So we're back to the electrical issues. In many rooms of the house, overhead lights have pull chains. However, when we decided that we wanted a brighter light in the bathroom -- and this one is so bright that you could do surgery in there -- it also needed a chain. But this light fixture is sort of like a flying saucer (we're going for an Art Deco look) and you can pull the string straight down, so you have to pull it sideways. So when we have company, I have to put a sign on the string so nobody will pull it straight down and then not be able to turn it off again.

This is my favorite half-assed "repair". Now the thing is, the bathtub is old so instead of tearing the bathroom apart and removing the tub and everything, there's an aftermarket thing where they come to your house and put a kind of a paint finish on it and bake it. It looks pretty good but you can't let it stay wet, because in the final analysis, it's just paint. So, from time to time the shower head leaks and then the bathtub is wet 24 hours a day. So I discovered that if I tied this string onto the shower head that the water would run down the string and into the drain without keeping the tub wet.

Then there's just this little tiny leak under the sink, it leaks only about a half inch in the bottom of this margarine tub in about a month. Unless you don't put the tub there, and then in awhile the tile on the floor is all white from the hard water. It's one of those things that we could get a plumber out here to fix it, but it's just old plumbing and when you fix one thing, another one goes bad.

Well, now that I've finished this, I realize I have a bunch more stuff, so maybe I'll put a few more in next week or so.