This Old House - Part II The Fireplace

Time and tide wait for no man, I've been told. With the winter weather swirling around, threatening to chill us - should we dare to venture outside - indoor projects become more interesting.

Ron has been wanting to "zoosh" up the fireplace since I offered up an off-hand question about it possibly looking better painted white. He's generally not one to let moss grow on him and we went on a jaunt to our local Kent store to see what could be done. An hour later, we left with trim, paint and a couple of odds and sods. (Side note: we love Kent. The staff are always helpful, they've given us tons of advice (and parts - but that's a whole other story) for free! Use them, if they're in your 'hood. It's a good Canadian company.)

Original fireplace

Probably the funniest thing about this endeavour is that we don't have a car. Add to that the fact that lunch had long passed and we hadn't eaten...well, you have the makings for odd circumstances. We marched (dubiously, I confess) into a local restaurant called Kelsey's Roadhouse. (It's a chain, not surprisingly, but we weren't convinced, just by the clientele seated in the window...it reminded us of the mushy-vegetable restaurant in Courtenay, in the Comox Valley.) Be that as it may, we ventured in, and were met by very friendly staff. No one seemed non-plussed about our 8 foot lengths of trim and other accoutrements. They treated us very well and made sure that everything was top notch. We were pleased with the service and the food, no mushy vegetables to be found.

Some of the lumber in question

The bus driver was more dubious, as we boarded the #51 Greenline to head home. Of course we promised not to accost anyone with our decorative trim and behaved like this happened all the time. The trip was unremarkable, no heads were coshed.

Anyhow, a few days after Christmas, Ron decided it was time to tackle our next improvement project.

Chair rail molding

He added trim around the upper mantle, columns and medallions and then sanded the wood. I tack ragged, filled nail holes and helped to paint. 

Embellishments are important

Of course, we're quite pleased with the result. We feel that it just looks more finished and like is was meant to be there, instead of added as an afterthought. Some people might be horrified that we covered up the natural wood, but with so much wood floor, we figured it wasn't an unpardonable sin.

Almost finished product

 

A bit of the details

What's next? Maybe painting the kitchen, or our master bedroom, or even the guest bedroom. There should be enough to keep us busy over the winter.

This Old House

I gotta tell you...Ron gets a bee in his bonnet quite frequently. He's a bit like a British Bulldog that's bitten something and doesn't want to let go. He did it with the paneling on the sun porch, he's done it with numerous other things in the past.

I'll give him his due: it almost always pans out. The paneling came off the sun porch fairly easily and only a small part of the wood siding underneath needed repair. The porch looks so much better now that it's the same colour as the exterior of the house.

His newest "project" was to strip off the paint from the hinges, door knobs and locks that we have in the house. We noticed that they seem to be engraved or had some sort of filigree, but the detail was buried under 100 years of paint. He found a video that said all we really had to do was simmer the pieces in hot water and baking soda to get the majority of the paint off.

It can't be that simple, right? Well, actually it was. Sure we needed to pick out some tight spots and brush and scrub a bit, but the majority of the paint lifted right off. We're left with some pretty amazing hinges that strangely don't match...one side has one style and the other side has another. Quirky.

The set on our dining room door is stamped April 3 1877, Pat B. (Patent reference, or manufacturer? Not clear, but patents usually have a number assigned, no?) So, a bit of scrubbing with steel wool, sanding and rubbing with alcohol, some goo gone and a bit of mineral oil later and we have clean hinges of indeterminate metal type. We're pleased, and really, that's the payoff, right?

It's been a pretty cool exercise and no one else might notice, but we love the hardware!

Could I be a "Karen"? Holiday Edtion Ponderings

I fully admit to being of the "me" generation. The tacky, riotous, cocaine infused 80's that gave rise to Neo-liberalism, austerity measures and trickle down economics. The world of Thatcher, Reagan and Mulroney, to name a few of the conservative politicians of the time. 

This, painfully, leads me to the conclusion that I could also be a "Karen", described in the Urban Dictionary (at least the most popular definition) as: "mother of three. blonde. owns a volvo. annoying as hell. wears acrylics 24/7. currently at your workplace speaking to your manager." Confessedly, I'm neither blonde nor own a Volvo. I don't wear acrylic nails and rarely ask for a manager, but be that as it may, I can see how Millenials would see me as such.

The 80's seem like a lifetime ago in many ways. 50 percent debauchery, 50 percent innocence; it was a confusing time.

As we near the holiday season, I've started hearing "Do They Know It's Christmas?", that definitive 80's Christmas classic featuring the artists of the day, some great, some lost in obscurity now. This song, I find, clearly represents the clueless ethnocentricity of day. In many ways it encapsulates how sheltered we were in so many ways, despite the fact that the song was a charity effort to feed the starving in Africa. (That sounds pretty noble, right?)

Do They Know It's Christmas Video

When I really listen to the lyrics, I can feel myself cringe. The title alone is an example of how "woke" (or un-woke, depending on your definition) we were. Sure, there are a lot of Christians in Africa, but there are also Muslims, Buddhists, Atheists, Pagans, Hindus and (more randomly) Baha'is, etc. Less than half of the population has an affiliation with any Christian religion, so no, many don't know (or care) that it's Christmas.

They tried and that's what counts, right?

The line "there won't be snow in Africa this Christmas time" is also, plainly, ridiculous. Africa is mostly in the southern hemisphere, meaning that what is traditionally the Christmas season, is during there summer. (Ask an Australian...snow a Christmas? Hah.)
Okay, so maybe I'm making a bit light, but this is the era I grew up in. I was a child under threat of the hair brush or wooden spoon. Parents didn't mess around back then. There wasn't any of this "no" is a damaging word stuff. There was John Hughes with his anthology of cliched movies "Pretty in Pink", "The Breakfast Club", "Sixteen Candles" and "Ferris Bueller's Day Off". We were inundated with stereotypes. (Have you seen "9 to 5", a movie trying to point out how wrong sexism is by using complete stereotyped female characters?)

I guess what I'm trying to say is that it isn't completely our fault that the Boomers ran away with the environment or that we rode the wave of "all about me".  For the most part, we honestly didn't know better. We thought that rinsing tin cans out to recycle and buying crap was actually helping. We know better now. Okay, I'm way less likely to TikTok about "OK, Boomer" than Millenials, because that boomer was my wooden spoon wielding Mother and sass wasn't acceptable. So, maybe I'm a Karen. (Ouch!)

I will say one thing. One day, Millenials, many years from now (which will still come sooner than you expect), you will find yourself on the receiving end of derision from the younger generation, not just the the older. This is how it works. Your kids will rolls their eyes at you and find a phrase, that you find incomprehensible, to describe just how out of touch you are. You might even find yourself being protective about what you've achieved in your life and considering ways to maintain and protect your way of life that baffles the next generation. I hope not.

As to: "Do They Know It's Christmas", as cringe worthy as it may be to a modern being, I still feel a tug at the old heart strings when I hear the opening chords. Sentimentality is a powerful thing. Finally, one of the things my corporal punishment loving mother tried to teach me was to be kind. (I did mention it was confusing times, yes?) So be kind to one another, we're all doing our best.