a thousand furnished rooms

We bought the house from a young guy who only owned it for a couple of years. Prior to him had been a colorful (read:crazy) owner, and prior to that an artist. By the time we moved in, there was little to find. We did find an old milk bottle once when we were putting an addition on the back of the house; it bore the name of a local but now defunct farm, but the bottle somehow didn't survive the construction. We have a few scraps of china, old nails, and a small nondescript bottle, but that is almost it.

This beautiful old house had a bizarre feature when we moved in. One of the owners--I believe the crazy one--had sealed off the small older closets in several of the bedrooms and had instead built these shoddy, wall-length closets from 2 by 4's and paneling. Over the paneling he had tacked dark-green velour. The result is even uglier than you could imagine.

We have tackled one major project after another in this house. Most recently, we finally opened up the last long-sealed-off closet. Amid great expectation, it yielded precisely one thing: a bland black and white photo of what looks like a laboratory, circa 1960. It's so dull as to not even be worth scanning for this blog.

We then tackled the last remaining ubercloset. We will actually be keeping the frame of it intact, but dismantling the rest of it has been several days of work. Imagine my delight, then, when my wife told me of a find during this process. A 1913 Buffalo nickel. I am not truly a coin collector, though I have some. Buffalo nickels have always had a place in my heart though. There is something in that man's look, something I understood better as a child than I seem to now.