Well winter is upon us once again,
and once again, I and all our animals descend upon the
old summer kitchen - now the warmest, and coziest part
of our home.
When my wife and I first toured
the house 14 years ago, the former summer kitchen was
described as "with potential." As its name implies, the
room had originally served as a summer kitchen on what
had been a tenant house on the old Zacharias Farm.
Measuring approximately 14 by 12 feet and with a ceiling
of 7 feet, it chief feature was a six foot wide, five
foot high red-brick fireplace.
Some years back, the summer
kitchen was attached to the house with the connector
serving as a mud room. Around this same time, the
interior of the summer kitchen was redone, to make it a
true 'room'. The fire place was blocked off and a wood
burning stove installed. The concrete floor was covered
with linoleum and the old pine boards that had made up
the walls and ceiling were covered by cheap paneling and
square ceiling tiles. On either side of the fireplace
were closets, formed by dirty curtains that had been
haphazardly hung.
While probably never really
handsome in its time, years of neglect took even a
further toll on the appearance of the room. By the time
we purchased the farm the flooring under the linoleum
had long since developed severe buckles, the paneling
had grown dark and dingy, and the ceiling tiles had
begun to fall. In short, it was dark, dirty and dingy.
When guests entered our home, its door was always
conspicuously closed. The only thing that gave it any
worth was the fireplace, and even that soon lost it
luster. Especially since the fire place refused to bow
to my engineering prowess and work.
Having bought the house in
winter, I was in a hurry to have my first fire. Scrap
wood from around the farm was quickly collected and
pilled in the fireplace, and a match put to it. Within
minutes, the room was full of smoke. In desperation, I
open of the room’s two windows, but that achieved
nothing. After half an hour of futile attempts to make
the fire place draw, I capitulated and hurled the
burning boards out the window into the snow and spent
the remained of the night trying to convince my wife
that I indeed did have half a brain ...
Every time I lit a fire, the
room immediately filled with smoke. Back in the days
when it was used as a summer kitchen, no one cared if
the room filled with smoke - and if it did you had
yourself a smoke house at no extra cost! But attached to
the main house as it was now, a smoke-filled room had
severe drawbacks.
Perplexed, I began to read every
book and manual on fireplace operations I could get my
hands, some dating back as far as 1800's. As I soon
discovered, because the fire place was built without a
damper, and the 12 by 18-inch unlined flue was way too
large to heat up effectively, the chimney was never
going to draw. While every book offered a fix, each met
the same result: a smoke-filled room and one very upset
wife.
Eventually I resigned myself to
the reality I had bought a house without a working
fireplace and with a million other projects to do, I
closed the door to the room and turned my attention
elsewhere. With Yet even with the door closed, the room
still managed to draw the heat out of the main part of
the house, and every winter, we froze.
Every year I found reasons to
procrastinate on ‘fixing’ the room. My wife, having long
since recognized that only my hatred of spending money
could drive me to do something, eventually bought two
electric oil heaters for the room. Ineffective in their
ability to heat the room, or stemming the heat loss from
the rest of the house, they still nevertheless managed
to double our monthly electric bill.
While the outrageous electric
bills go my attention, it was my every growing
collection of old book, and its need to find them a
permanent home, that finally drove me in the depths of a
winter night, to finally do something with the room. And
like most of my projects, this effort quickly grew all
out of proportion.
My original goal was to merely
tear down the curtain closets and build a wood bookcase
on either side of the fireplace. While doing so, I
decided that the room’s sagging ceiling tiles had to go
also. I would have considered keeping them, had they all
been of one style, but no two appeared the same, as if
someone had collected 'throw aways' from construction
trash bins.
With the ceiling tiles removed,
the original tongue-and-groove ceiling was once again
revealed. Unfortunately, the multiple layers of paint
that coated its surface made refinishing it to its
original condition out of the question. Drywall soon
replaced the tiles, as it soon did the room’s dark wall
paneling, however not before I pried away some of the
original wall boards where I discovered a treasure trove
of stories placed there by its original owner, a very,
very long ago.
While brighter in color, the
room seemed colder. While the walls and ceiling were now
straight and smooth, they lacked any distinguishing
character. The room need something, and that something
was real paneling. I began to cast about the farm for
old wood to create the paneling. Eventually my search
led me to the crawl space above the ceiling of the
summer kitchen, whose floor was of twelve to
sixteen-inch wide, fourteen feet long pine boards.
The boards, cut from old growth
pine, had breathtaking grain patterns, which had gone
unappreciated when they were laid in the dark,
generations ago. Cut to waist high in height, each board
soon found its place. Soon the room boasted, from the
floor to one’s waist, solid wood paneling, that could be
found nowhere else.
A wooden floor, new moldings
added to the room’s lure. A wood burning stove chased
away the room’s cold. Having by now begun to realize the
scope of our farm’s history I set out to build a mantle
with a story worth telling. For as long as current
memory can recall, horses have been part of our farm,
and with them, a board fence. So I planed down the
oldest fence boards and molded a pattern in each one.
Stacked and glued together, they formed a mantel as
unique as the room’s paneling, or the room’s history, or
the very farm it’s self.
But it was the installation of
the bookcases however, my original object itself, that
was crowning event. Made from the old boards that had
been hidden for over a century from the light, they were
perfect for showcasing treasured works of antiquity,
themselves, too long hidden from sight.
On the night of the first frost,
as we have done ever since, we lit a great first fire
and basked in its warmth, reading books written by
authors, who had breathed their last breath long before
the first settlers had set foot in the valley were our
now farm sits.
One learns more, and feels
closer to the source, when one read their words of
wisdom, and insights of life, just as had they might: In
the bright light of a fire, in a room warmly finished,
on cold windy winter night.