September 28^th, 2002

My new home is close enough to downtown that I walk to run errands almost daily. The post office, bank, market, and other shops are all within 10 minutes walking distance from my home. Unfortunately I can no longer walk to work. At my old house my work was only a 15 minute walk so unless it was pouring down rain I always walked. It was funny the way my coworkers acted about it. When I first started at the job I think many of them thought I was destitute or something. After I worked there for about 4 months I drove to work the for the first time because it was raining and my boss said something like, “Hey you finally saved up enough to buy a car”. He was amazed to find out I had a car the whole time. Eureka used to have street cars like most cities in the US. I read that they ripped up all of the tracks and burned the street cars in a big bonfire as a way to show that the city was moving into the modern age with the automobile. What a waste.

I have officially removed all of the asbestos shingles (More than 5000 pounds of asbestos shingles!). It was really a lot of work but it feels good to have it done. I thought it would take me much longer but I’ve only been at it for 4 weeks. I get so many positive comments from people. Everybody walking down the sidewalk while I’m working wants to stop and talk. People stop in their cars while I’m up on the ladder and roll down their windows and yell up to me about how nice the home looks now.

Even though they are all off there is still a lot of work to be done. I’ll need to pull a lot of nails and fill the holes. I will also need to replace 6 sunbursts that were removed from over the downstairs windows. I’m going to go down next week to the Blue Ox Mill here in Eureka to see about having them reproduced. The Blue Ox Mill is part museum and part working mill. I’ve been told by a few people that they can do this sort of work. Fortunately, and for some strange reason, they left one of the sunbursts over one of the downstairs windows so I have an original to copy from (I think I told you that already).

My goal is to be painting this time next year. I thinking about several shades of green, along with yellow and white. Right now the house is a very dark brown. I’ve noticed on other houses with fish-scale shingles (or diamond, hexagon, notched, etc) that the shingles show up much better when they are painted a light color because each shingle throws a small shadow on the shingle below it.

My goal of painting a year from now might be too ambitious because I’m still not sure what to do about that two story addition. I am seriously leaning towards removing the top story. It just looks so out of place on the house because the top story of the addition is not shingled like the rest of the house. If I remove the top story and gable the roof it will look much better. I will then have a downstairs bathroom and a small enclosed porch or utility room, and the upstairs won’t have those odd little rooms that are obviously out of place. I think it is the best thing to do and if I do it now it will be great to just have that major thing out of the way. Not to mention, it is the addition that has the damage from the beetle infestation and that is not going to just go away. I should just bite the bullet and get it done.

I’m not entirely sure what a Butler’s Pantry is but I think this house may have one. One wall of the kitchen has floor to ceiling cabinets. The cabinets have glassed face doors on the front side (opening towards the kitchen) and on the other side are solid doors that open into a small room. Someone told me they are called “reach through cabinets” and that the small room on the other side of the cabinets is the Butler’s Pantry. It is actually a bathroom at this point. They probably converted it to a bathroom when they cut the house up into apartments. My question is, what would the Butler’s Pantry have been used for. One person said that it was for food preparation and another said it was for cleanup only. If the latter is true the main kitchen would have the stove and the Butler’s Pantry would have the sink. Does that sound right to you? Any insight you can give me would be helpful.