No shortage of interesting things behind the walls of LJH. The most interesting thing we were surprised to see was an entry door that had been sided over on the outside, plastered over on the inside, and left in place all the way down to the doorknob. In the background research we had done on the house at the
Mary Riley Styles Library, there was a mention of a entrance that was no longer used but we had thought it might be the existing door that was painted shut.
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| Voila! |
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| With Plaster |
The door itself is located behind the stairwell leading to the second floor in what we are calling the library. It is also in a place that explains the presence of a concrete "walkway to nowhere" on the outside of the house, along with a patch in the foundation that might have once been attached to steps of some sort.
As you can see from the before and after pictures, the door was behind plaster and wainscot, with a picture hanging over the place where the door is behind the wall. We don't see a great reason to remove it, so we plan to put wallboard right back over it.
An interesting architectural feature present in the house was a coved ceiling in the master bedroom, added when the first addition was put on. This was leveled in the current house, meaning the cove had been spanned by drywall that made the ceiling appear flat and parallel to the floor. This is not a feature that we will expose in the finished house because it is essentially where the hall bathroom and laundry rooms sit. Given the simple construction of the original house, this was an interesting feature to find.
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| Framing for the Original Cove Ceiling |
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| Chimney on 2nd Floor |
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| Chimney in Dining Room |
The original house as it was constructed did not have a kitchen, which is a topic for a subsequent post. However, when the first addition was put on a kitchen was created in the basement with a fireplace for cooking. The chimney for that fireplace ran up the back of the exterior of the house at that time, and through the dining room and master bedroom created above it with the coved ceiling. Each room above the kitchen had a (likely) coal-burning stove for heat. The chimney served three heat sources and had flues at each level.
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| Historic Bees |
A not-so-pleasant find was the lack of headers above any of the doors or windows. The house was essentially being supported by trim and the doors and windows themselves. The trim above every window is bowed downward from the pressure of the framing above. It is amazing that this flaw didn't eventually break all the windows and result in binding the doors on their hinges. We found the same to be the case over the arch that frames the entrance to the library. Several of the studs aren't even't touching the arch. This will require some carpentry work to retrofit every opening with structural support.
Finally, we were amused to find the remains of 2 or 3 ancient beehives in the foyer ceiling at the bottom of the stairs. These were on the exterior wall adjacent to the porch roof. Soundproofing between floors will usher these out.
