Well, I figured I might as well show some shots of the basement, it isn't really pretty, but it's basically original, with dirt floors in all but the central room which had some concrete. Plaster on the walkway down has Victorian paint still, never repainted.
This one is very pic-heavy.
I've since removed all the plastic and insulation over the windows.
Also included are a few more pics of the newspapers around the various parts of the basement that I didn't include last time.
A few other antique grates (not sure where those came from) on beadboard shelves
I really hate the decision to cut the corner of this door
A little room in the basement under the foyer with clapboards on it.
The door leading out to the cellar doors. Interesting how the panels are a different color than the rest of the door, someone had spraypainted Hi on it at some point unfortunately, probably vandalism.
More of the old newspapers
Some unused stair balusters and divided windows, unstained and unfinished.
The view under the grand staircase
Not sure what this material is on the "walls". I'd like to go there and explore it in person but I haven't actually crawled under there, just popped my head in with a camera and flashlight.
Mold... :\
Some older light bulb
A door off it's hinges, I believe this one went as an internal door in the basement between that door with "Hi" spray painted on it and the main part of the basement
Has bead and cove molding around the glass
For some reason, the glass is cleanly split and the gap held in place with a bit of Styrofoam I have no idea what that is about.
C20 Rim lock
An aforementioned unused baluster
The house's original massive shutters.
A little single paneled door that got turned into a tool rack, another item I have no idea where it originally came from
An ancient roll of black tape on a nail
The way out of the basement, unfortunately there's a total POS modern deck built over it and I can't use this door, tearing off that deck which is actually rotting is on my to do list.
Above is a shot of the room underneath the parlor, the floor of it is covered in wood ash.
Our back door features a transom window, which has been painted over and painted shut. The hardware aslo won't move from all the paint buildup (3-4 layers).
It also has a sheet of plywood with siding over it from the outside, so in essence, covered over.
There was also so much paint over the screws that I coudln't even get a screwdiver in there! I had to use chemical stripper over the screws to even be able to remove the hardware
I applied methylene chloride paint stripper to the glass, it was frankly the easiest paint I've ever stripped. 2 layers, one oil layer and a latex layer. (nail polish remover test)
A lot of it came away easy but like all paint stripping jobs, required repeat coats to get all the missed areas.
After a lot of scraping with a plastic putty knife and a hot soapy sponge with dawn to remove the white film left after the paint was removed, I ended up with this. 99% of the paint removed, there's still little bits I plan to carefully remove when the glass is out (don't want to put too much pressure on the glass when it's not on a flat surface) as I'm going to completely strip, restore and reglaze the transom and it's window/door frame.
I had to force a metal putty knife between the cracks and tap on it to force it in to break the paint seal. At last, this transom finally opens for the first time in.... how long?
The bits of newspaper I found stuffed between the transom window after liberating it should shed some light on that question!
But first a shot of the other side of the transom, still painted black like it originally was (in our town, all the Victorian homes originally had black windows) - the white is spillover from other ways they attempted to seal the transom. There was also glazing compound in the crack between the transom and it's frame as well as tissue paper in addition to the newspapers in there, the white is from the paint that they painted over that aforementioned mass... Which no surprise, didn't stay together well.
Cobweb city has been uncovered!
All the putty is out of the bottom of the transom, which means rain water would just pour inside, possibly a reason they decided to seal it up since the knowledge the fix these things seems to be lost on most folk.
The plywood over the transom is nailed onto several shim boards they nailed into the transom's inner frame, so it's not nailed into the window or anything like that thankfully. That was another factor in why I wanted to remove the paint off the glass before attempting to remove the transom in case it was nailed into the window itself.
Now, onto those newspapers! They were all scrunched up like this, I carefully unfurled them the best I could without destroying them.
The first headline: U.S. Bombers Given Unusual Jolts on Raid
What have we here? Nov 6, 1944! So to answer the above question, this is the first time that transom has moved in almost 70 years! wow. I had figured the transom was sealed in the 60s by the PO before us. This places it back by 2 decades.
Some more shots of the newspapers for those interested in such things!
More on this in another blog post, since there was so much discovery, I decided to post this all now.
Well, in various parts of the basement, usually above bulkheads and around the windows under the living room, there were bits of old newspapers from between 1911 and 1925 and some as recent as 1950 or so.
I photographed many of these newspapers including closeups of various sections, I thought they might make for an interesting blog post.
I also noticed most of the newspapers are from around late December 1924 to new years 1925, I did some digging and found that in our area they were experiencing -25°F temperatures around that time! With December 28, 1924 (a date on of one of the papers in my pics had a record low of -24°F) Mystery solved as to why they decided after a quarter of a century to try to seal up the windows, not counting the single newspaper from 1911.
Most are from the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, which is a defunct newspaper outlet. Has quite a few interesting/pretty advertisements, more than a few for teeth pulling or some sort of tooth creams.
Unfortunately, some like the window below (which has the OLDEST of the bunch, from 1911) are over windows which I have to take out and re putty and I really don't want to destroy these newspapers to do it. They're so delicate (from the moisture) that if you touch them, they fall apart (the one pictured below I found in that state) Unless I can manage to properly reglaze them in situ.
The latest one, from around 1950, no date was spotted but on the reverse was an ad for a 1949 truck.
