New, meet old. ✨

While so much of this little old house is being rebuilt with new materials to meet modern framing standards, I’m trying my hardest to salvage as many materials and fixtures second-hand as I can; to make our home feel as old as its original build year (1903), but also to keep items out of the landfill and contribute just a little less towards the vicious cycle of consumerism. There is SO much in the world that already exists. Before jumping to an online store that sells only new items, check out Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, OfferUp, eBay, Buy Nothing, estate sales, or your local salvage yards. Here in Seattle we have at least three (@secondusebuildingmaterials, @ballard_reuse, and @earthwisesalvage) that I regularly frequent.

Out of our 2.5 bathrooms, only one medicine cabinet, our tub faucet/surround, shower system, and tile will be bought new. Everything else is salvage or being reused from our home. I fully recognize we contributed a lot to the landfill by gutting the house (we recycled as much of our construction debris as possible but not everything is recyclable); but I’m hoping to make up for some of that by attempting to buy second-hand first.

I made another shadow box! This time with the assortment of razor blades I found behind the bathroom wall upstairs, nestled amongst clouds of blown-in insulation. These date back to the 1920s-1940s and were presumably dropped into the wall through a long-gone medicine cabinet. It just goes to show well-curated trash can become treasure! I will eventually hang this in our bathroom on the same wall where the medicine cabinet would have originally been.

This isn’t the final location for this little shadow box but I’m too impatient to wait to share it. These items—Luden’s cough drop box, wooden spool, and pink squeaky cat toy—were found in the old heat register during our duplex renovation in 2013 (along with a lot of other balls and cat toys). I’ve roughly dated them to the ’70s based on Google searches and information from Instagram followers. For years I’ve been planning on making a shadow box to display them in the entryway of the duplex. Last night, I received some shadow boxes from my Buy Nothing group and decided to finally assemble it! The mouse is a bit squished beneath the glass but overall I’m really pleased with how it came out! Next I’ll be making a card to display next to it explaining the items, their dates, and when/where they were found, just like a museum because I’m a huge nerd. 🤓

Rear wall framing is officially up! I feel so, so grateful to get to work with this duo on our project. They’re smart, fun, skilled, patient, and willing to entertain all my wacky ideas and problem-solve with me on the fly. They also enable my hoarding ways and save as many old-growth timbers as they can for me, much to Trevor’s chagrin. 😅 If you’re in the Seattle area and looking for help with a project, I’m happy to share their info.

Brasso is pretty magical stuff! On the right is before-Brasso and on the left is after-Brasso. I received these light fixtures and Brasso from neighbors in my Buy Nothing group. The lights came out of a 1910s/20s house on Queen Anne. Since I’m already wearing my respirator inside due to all the wildfire smoke, I figured it would be a good time to do a stinky task like polishing up these fixtures (Brasso is ammonia-based). An old toothbrush became my most effective tool in this cleaning process. Now on to the next two fixtures!

It may not look like much, but this little wall absolutely made my day yesterday. It’s the first step towards creating the rest of the building envelope. The foundation going in was the first major milestone. Trevor and I finishing demo was the second. Now, it’s framing.

I worked with our two crew members yesterday on figuring out the window placement since I didn’t provide elevation drawings, only floorplans (sorry, guys!). But they were flexible and placed the window headers as high as they could go so I’d have wiggle room for figuring out the height of the future window trim and sconce placement.

The bottom of the rough opening was determined based on my desire for a long shelf across this wall, sitting at about the height of where the window stool would go, adjusted to take into account the height of our vintage stove’s console (where all the buttons are).

The kitchen—the far half of this space—is going to be quite small, but will have overflow into the mud room—the closer half of this space—which will act like a butler’s pantry, combining additional cabinetry, food storage, laundry, a utility sink, a floor hatch to the crawl space (“root cellar”), and a powder room all into one highly-efficient space. It’s hard to imagine now, but just you wait…

Finally, something non-destructive in our feed! The garden is going so well and I’m still in such disbelief that everything is growing and remaining fairly healthy. This morning I harvested chamomile to make tea. I typically avoid caffeine because it makes me feel terrible, so I’m thrilled to now have a regular source of herbal tea from the garden. I also have some ricola mint from a neighbor that I’ve been meaning to experiment with. Does anyone else grow things for tea in their garden?

We’ve been spending a lot of time at our duplex over the last week, cleaning things up between tenants. This has been one of the more “involved” turns we’ve ever done, including tackling the wildly overgrown yard and repainting the entire unit. As we were leaving the duplex late last night, I walked into the living room to discover the street lamp casting this haunting shadow through the window: the prior tenants had written their support on the front window with glass markers and hadn’t cleaned it off before they left. While we’ll clean everything else in the unit, I don’t think I can bring myself to remove such a critical message.

Certainly not nearly as ✨historic✨ as the newspaper we found this past weekend, but this evening I found this nearly-full pack of cigarettes in a stud cavity under the stairs while cleaning out insulation. They likely date back to 1954 when the house went through its first gut renovation (stripping the house of all its original character 😭).
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Trevor stacked this alongside an errant ’40s razor blade and all the ceramic knobs and tubes I’ve been hoarding and started making fun of me by singing, 🎵”Look at this stuff, isn’t it neat? Wouldn’t you say my collection’s complete?”🎵 from The Little Mermaid. Hey, what can I say, I love my trash treasures. 😅

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We’ve been away from IG. Instead, we’ve been talking a lot, reading and listening to content by black activists, signing petitions, and making donations to organizations fighting to end racism. We’ve been reflecting on our own privilege and discussing ways to utilize that privilege to be actively anti-racist.
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We’ll be back with our regular old house content soon. We really have missed everyone here. We’ve just felt we’ve needed to step away and address these higher priorities. The work is never done. #blm