Three years on, the Manse is a cozy, happy place

Our living room, filled with warmth and nice things, where we spend a lot of time. It’s something happy to reflect on as Raymond and I mark the third anniversary of owning this great old house. And yes, the vintage curtains – the ones that hung here in my childhood – are still there!

Well, people, here we are: three years and counting. Three years of Manse ownership, that is; it was on this very day three years ago (Jan. 30, 2012) that Raymond and I became the owners of this great old house in beautiful little Queensborough, the house that happens to be the one that I grew up in. Today is also the third anniversary of Meanwhile at the Manse; our first day of ownership was also the day of my very first post. And you can read that post – which explains how we got here, and kicks off the 940 (yikes!) and counting other posts that were to follow it – right here.

On the first anniversary of our Manse acquisition, I used my post (which is here) to speculate about whether the subsequent 12 months would see the start of our much-discussed but not-yet-started renovations of the house. (They didn’t, by the way.)

On the second anniversary (the post is here), I was busy ruminating on my non-buyer’s remorse for failing to snap up a vintage telephone table at a bargain price. That’s kind of funny, actually, because non-buyer’s remorse is a recurring theme at Meanwhile, at the Manse, and I was going on about it again just the other night, in a post about vintage cheesy but endearing paintings of big-eyed urchins that you can read here. (Also, by the way, I did eventually get a great telephone table, which I told you about here.)

As I thought about what I would write tonight, to mark the end of Year 3 and the start of Year 4, I decided there would be nothing better than to reflect on what a cozy and happy place the Manse has become, unrenovated though it may be.

That 1970s carpeting! It’s got to go. Sometime.

Yes, it’s still a little rustic. Our bathroom is, while very clean, alarming in many other ways; pieces of the flooring are torn up in various places; sections of the walls are missing wallpaper and showing crumbling plaster underneath; there is still horrendous early-1970s wood panelling in one of the guest bedrooms; and that orange-and-yellow broadloom on the front staircase just won’t quit.

And I didn’t even mention the tiny pantry kitchen with the Harvest Gold stove and the washing machine – the washing machine! – conveniently (not) located in its far-too-constricted space. Oh, well, I guess I have mentioned it.

But despite all of these imperfections and jobs waiting to be done, the Manse is a cozy and a happy place. At the end of every day, when I return home from work as a professor of journalism at Loyalist College, and Raymond sets aside his duties as editorial consultant for the National Newspaper Awards, and we’ve cooked a nice dinner in that tiny kitchen, we make ourselves comfortable in our living room. Often we watch a television program (there’s only ever time for one before my early bedtime), but sometimes we read or do more work on our laptops. (For one thing, there’s always a Meanwhile, at the Manse post that needs writing.)

Our electric fireplace might someday be replaced by a real wood fireplace, but its cheerful red colour and warmth make us happy on a cold winter night.

And let me tell you, that room is just the nicest, happiest place you can imagine. Warmth radiates from the cranberry-red electric fireplace in the corner; there are books, including a lot of volumes of local history, in the bookcase and all over the room; there are framed photos of Raymond’s lovely grandson Henry; there is vintage furniture, and a vintage floor lamp, and there are vintage knick-knacks, every one of which has a story behind it; there are kerosene lamps in case the power goes out; there are artworks, one old and one new, featuring the Manse; and there are the very curtains that hung in that same room in the 1960s and ’70s when I was a kid growing up here. Yes, people, the curtains are still there.

Sieste the cat, on her bed (or should I call it her throne?) in the Manse’s living room.

And best of all, there is Sieste the cat, who loves to sit with us and watch whatever’s going on, making the occasional comment – whenever she’s not doing the hard work of catching up on her beauty sleep.

We love our cozy living room. We love our Manse. We love our cat. We love each other. And: we love those curtains.

So happy third anniversary to us!

So NOW he tells me.

A corner of our very humble (though large) bathroom at the Manse – for which, I discovered when it was probably too late, Raymond had a vision of an amazing vintage-themed breakfast nook.

Usually Raymond serves as my editor and proofreader before I put up posts here at Meanwhile, at the Manse, but occasionally he’s not around or is busy with other things so I just go ahead and merrily send my deathless prose (not) out to the internet without his two cents’ worth. Such was the case with last night’s post about the amazing midcentury turquoise dining booth that we decided not to buy when we finally saw it in person. Should you have not seen that post, or want a refresher on what that remarkable article of furniture, discovered in a Haliburton County antique barn, looks like, here it is, one more time:

So anyway, a short while after I’d announced to you all last night that we had decided we could live without that very cool piece of furniture (and perhaps could find better uses for the substantial amount of money it would have cost us), Raymond did read my post.

And kind of said, “Oh! Well, I’d been thinking about that, actually.” (Buying the turquoise dining booth, I mean.)

Uh-oh, says I to myself. Am I going to have non-buyer’s remorse after all?

Here’s what Raymond had been thinking, without thinking to mention what he was thinking.

Raymond making dinner this evening in our ridiculously small pantry/cooking area, which might better serve as a bathroom.

He’d been thinking that a suggestion I had casually made a while back about remodelling the kitchen area of the Manse was quite a good one. (Raymond thinking that one of my design ideas is a good one is a first, by the way.) That idea was this: that we transform the house’s one and only bathroom – which, as I’ve written before, is wildly oversized and idiosyncratically located immediately inside the front door on the ground floor – into an extension of the kitchen area; and that we transform the current small pantry, where the trusty vintage Harvest Gold stove and (weirdly) the washing machine reside – along with the kitchen sink and the sum total of all our kitchen-cupboard and counter space – into a downstairs bathroom. (With at least one more bathroom upstairs, because as we all know, you can never have too many bathrooms.)

So yeah, Raymond had been mulling this plan, thinking it was quite a good one, and – get this – had worked the turquoise dining booth into it! As he proceeded to show me, he envisioned its short end along the wall where the vanity (and Harvest Gold sink) now stand in the bathroom, and the long part against the back wall. Take a look at my photo at the top of this post and you should be able to picture it yourself; the long part of the turquoise bench would be facing you with the short part along the wall to your left. With the nice big window that’s in the left foreground of the photo opened to let in the sunlight (as opposed to shuttered to the front porch as it currently is, the room being a bathroom and all), this would make a brilliant breakfast nook, he suggested.

And you know, it would.

But I’ve probably gone and blown our chances of making that happen by revealing to the world where this treasure is being offered for sale; for all I know, it’s already been snapped up. Should Raymond have mentioned this idea to me a little earlier? Well, you can be the judge of that.

Still, I can console myself with the fact that we’re nowhere near ready to start ripping up and renovating the bathroom or the pantry, which means that if the Turquoise Marvel were ours, we’d have to find someplace to put it. Which would probably be right smack in the middle of the kitchen floor; which in turn would be crazily inconvenient.

Also: I still feel kind of rich as a result of not having laid out the money for it.

But regrets? Yeah, I now have a few. Is it too late to change my mind?

As the days grow shorter, I am dreaming of beautiful lights

I love this turquoise pendant lamp, and I am pretty sure I need it for the Manse. And in a slightly roundabout way, I have a reader to thank for steering me to it! (Photo – and lamp – from Schoolhouse Electric & Supply Co.)

Tonight I owe a big vote of thanks to reader Catri, who wrote in today to offer some seriously sensible advice on making a purchase offer on the retro turquoise bench of my dreams. Raymond and I are going to do exactly what she (I think Catri is a she) suggests, which you can see in her comment here. But I owe Catri thanks for another reason: because her name rang a good-design bell in my overcrowded and overtired head, and after doing a tiny bit of exploring in the back pages of Meanwhile, at the Manse, I came across a company she’d brought to my attention (thanks to one of her comments, on a post here about turquoise kitchen appliances) that sells the most gorgeous lighting fixtures. As a result I’ve spent more time than I should have today thinking about gorgeous lighting fixtures, but hey, that’s a fun thing to think about!

The company in question is called Schoolhouse Electric & Supply Co., and I believe it is based in Portland, Ore. Its website is here, and I just dare you not to drool when you go there. While I was looking primarily at lamps (as is attested to by the photo at the top of this post), I got sidetracked by some great metal stools that I am now highly desirous of for the Manse’s kitchen…

Industrial-style stools in a shade called Sergeant, from Schoolhouse Electric & Supply Co.

… and also by something utterly whimsical, keychains done in retro-motel style:

Great for people such as myself who have a hard time keeping track of keys! (Photo from Schoolhouse Electric & Supply Co.)

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, lights. So there is the one at the top of the post, which of course caught my eye because it comes in turquoise – though you can also get the shades for the lights in other great colours (like red), you can have different finishes (i.e. not brass, which I am not crazy about) on the hardware, and you can get a version that has three lights:

(Photo from Schoolhouse Electric & Supply Co.)

And then there is this pendant lamp…

… which I adore because I like industrial style (as I’ve mentioned before, notably here and here) and also because it is perhaps a more reasonable (and reasonably priced) version of the fancy-pants lights (with crystal bulbs, if you can believe it!) that I wrote about here. The Schoolhouse bare-bulb light (its official name is Apartment Pendant) is deliberately retro-industrial style, right down to the braided cord and the Bakelite plug. People, I am in love with this light. I need half a dozen of them. Hanging over the counter in our beautiful renovated Manse kitchen. Lighting up the spot where guests, sitting on those Sergeant-green industrials stools (and admiring my industrial Westclox clock) will be sipping apéritifs while Raymond and I bustle around preparing a wonderful dinner.

Ah, renovations. And the things that go with them, like beautiful pendant lights. The stuff of Friday-night dreams, here at the Manse.

Old, Harvest Gold – and built to last

I have gained a new respect for our old Harvest Gold stove. (Though I still rather wish the vintage white washing machine that you see just to the left of it were located somewhere other than the Manse’s tiny pantry, but we’ll get there.) Hey, are you by any chance asking yourself what that curious object is on the windowsill to the right of the golden stove? Read tomorrow night’s Meanwhile, at the Manse post!

Yes, I’ve poked gentle fun at the Manse kitchen’s elderly Harvest Gold stove several times in the course of this blog’s life. I mean, the very fact that it is Harvest Gold means it has to be old, because that colour was considered the bee’s knees, the apex of home decor (second only to Avocado Green), back in the early 1970s. (I know this because I remember those days. Which you can probably tell from the fact that I used the phrase “the bee’s knees” just now.) It was one of the appliances that the previous owners of the Manse – the trustees of St. Andrew’s United Church in Queensborough – were good enough to leave in the house for Raymond and me when we bought it. We knew those appliances were old, and didn’t expect to keep them very long, but we were grateful for the fact that they’d be useful until we did renovations and bought new ones. (Yeah, well, those renovations have been a while getting started. But I digress.)

What I want to tell you tonight is this: Once upon a time, appliances were built to last.

If you read my post this past Tuesday, you’ll know that the oven on our Harvest Gold stove suddenly quit working that night just as I put a meat loaf in it to cook. We pretty much figured it was the end of the line for the old stove. Not so fast, Raymond and Katherine!

Yesterday Raymond made contact with Tough’s Appliance Repair in Madoc – a business that several people have recommended highly to us – and this morning a repairman from Tough’s, a nice chap named Charles, came around to the Manse to tackle our stove. Long story short: thanks to Charles, the Harvest Gold stove is working perfectly, and will probably give us quite a few more years of service. And the cost? Let’s just say it was a lot less than we would have paid for a replacement stove, even if the replacement had been a used one from Smitty’s (a Hastings County appliance dealer that everyone knows thanks to its ubiquitous signs).

Here’s the amazing thing: Charles said that the last year General Electric Harvest Gold stoves were manufactured was 1979. So that means ours is, at a minimum, 35 years old. He also told us that parts were of higher quality back in those days, and pointed to the burners on the top of the stove – they are the originals, and they are in fine shape. (Which is just as well; they couldn’t be replaced, because they’re just not made any more.) The very fact that there are no fancy electronics or computer-type operations in old stoves like ours – just switches, wires and elements – makes them simple to repair. Which means they can have a nice long life of service to us.

So the old Harvest Gold stove that I’ve been mocking? No more mocking. I have a newfound respect for that baby, even as it approaches its fourth decade. Yes, respect and appreciation: for our old stove, for a knowledgeable and helpful repairman – and for a time when appliances were built to last.

Layers and layers of floor

What we found under the kitchen floor: the floor before that, and then the floor before that. And finally, hardwood.

In a very early post, I mentioned the new kitchen floor that my mother, Lorna, so wanted back in the ’60s, and how happy she was when the church’s Manse Committee finally decided that said floor was warranted. The turquoise and white linoleum that was there when we moved in was therefore covered with a vinyl floor that was supposed to look like red brick. My mum loved it because she thought it “wouldn’t show the dirt.” (A key consideration when there were four kids running around.)

A scrap of our c. 1969 "new" kitchen floor, newly excavated.

Sometime after 1975, when we moved away, that faux-brick floor was covered up by yet another one, an unexciting cream-coloured number. But this week we excavated our “new” floor – and not only it, but also the turquoise and while linoleum below it. We discovered that each floor had been installed on top of the previous one, with a layer of plywood nailed down first. So the original hardwood was beneath three layers of linoleum/vinyl floor and three layers of plywood. We dug deep.

For the moment the plan is to sand down the hardwood, and doubtless it will look beautiful. Still, I’d like to look into whether turquoise-and-white foot-square linoleum-type floor tiles might be available somewhere. It think they’d look both retro and beautiful together with the newly uncovered turquoise-painted plaster wall. (Here are some stunning photos of how nice turquoise-and-white rooms look, courtesy of the very cool House of Turquoise blog.) And besides, the folks at the Armstrong flooring powerhouse say that linoleum is environmentally friendly:

Linoleum flooring is made from natural materials like linseed oil, recycled wood flour, cork dust and limestone. Linoleum is naturally anti-bacterial and biodegradable. If you are looking for a “green” floor for your home, linoleum is one of the best choices!

And also, is hardwood a good surface for a kitchen floor? Thoughts, anyone?

The colour of the kitchen walls, c. 1964: It is inviting.

Our prime mission at the Manse this week was to find out what was behind and under various surface coverings: the old wood panelling, linoleum and ceiling tiles. Fortunately much of the interior hasn’t been covered by anything more than paint or wallpaper or easily-pulled-up broadloom; the original plaster walls, for instance, are there and in pretty good shape in many places. Same with the plaster ceilings in some rooms.

But the surfaces in the kitchen, the largest and (to Raymond and me) the most important room, had been covered extensively. And for that, the Sedgwicks have no one to blame but ourselves: it all started while we lived there. The turquoise-and-white floor linoleum was covered with a new vinyl floor; the plaster ceiling was covered with acoustic tiles; and the walls, including the plaster above and the wooden wainscotting below – and don’t get me started on how brilliant and beautiful I now consider wainscotting to be – were covered with hideous (to a 2012 eye) “wood” panelling. Panelling that had, sometime between our family moving away in 1975 and now, been painted an off-white colour, I assume because at some point both the resident minister and the Manse Committee realized that wood panelling was not exactly fashionable (or even tolerable) any more.

So we had to get behind it to see what remained. My brother John, forewarning us with something along the lines of “Renovation has to begin with a bit of destruction” went after the first panel in the wall – right behind where the woodbox for our old wood stove had been – with a hammer, a miniature crowbar (doubtless that tool has a technical name, but I don’t know what it is), and a vengeance.

It took a while, but as you can see from the video, he got it. And as you can hear from the video, I was thrilled when the plaster wall that was there when we moved in in 1964, when I was four years old, was suddenly revealed – for the first time in more than 40 years. Full of nail holes from the panelling installation, but salvageable. And what a funky colour! And the wainscotting was there too, though the chair rail that was at the top of it had been yanked off so that the panelling could be installed. Happily, John tells me it won’t be a big deal to replace it.

The following morning, Raymond and I were in the Rashotte Home Building Centre in Tweed – highly recommended; excellent stuff and excellent staff – and I gravitated over to the paint chips, looking for something close to the colour of Queensborough Manse Kitchen Wall Circa 1964. I picked out three, and when we got back to the Manse we tried them out. One was remarkably close. It’s called “Sea Inspired” and its adjective on the paint chip is “inviting.” Nice! And if Home Hardware (are you listening, Home Hardware?) didn’t insist that its paint-colours download be in Microsoft Windows (which my sleek and lovely Mac does not like), I could show it to you. Suffice to say it’s kind of a sea-foam colour. Or, as they said back in the day, turquoise.

Here’s my mother, Lorna, circa 1969, wishing aloud for fashionable wood panelling in the Manse kitchen:

“I hate turquoise.”