Under the Floorboards

If you’ve been around here for long enough, you know the story about how my grandma went to an auction sale to buy a buggy and accidentally bought a whole house for $500 instead. Or, as well, rather. You know that she was 80 at the time and didn’t know what to do with the house, which was a 1000 square foot, 100-year-old Eaton’s catalogue Foursquare farmhouse and a real fixer-upper. You know that she sent my mom a text that said, Oh! I just bought a house! And you know that my mom drove to Gravelbourg to see the house, fell in love with it, and promptly began the arduous, painstaking process of renovating it, top to bottom. 

You can read that whole story here, and see progress pics here.

I realized recently that I haven’t added newer progress pictures here in a long time—like, since 2018! I’ve done a little updating on Instagram, but not here. I’ll rectify this, I will, but FIRST. 

First.

Ask me what my mom found under the floorboards in the attic.

…

I’m so tempted to just end this blog post here and wait for a few days so you don’t get to know the answer to the question right away. I’m a sucker for a good cliff-hanger. I love making people wait, letting them wonder. I’m doing it right now! Isn’t it fun? 

(I’m getting the vibe from you, all the way from the other side of the computer screen and from back here in the past while I’m writing this to you, who will read it later today, that the whole making you wait and wonder is more fun for me than it is for you, and I’m sorry.) 

Okay, I'll tell you; I'll start at the beginning:

As I said, my mom and dad have been hard at work over the course of the past decade, fully renovating the first and second floors of the house. They've done the basement too, and they’ve landscaped the yard and planted a massive garden and built a garage. It is gorgeous. It is almost finished. There's just the attic left, which is going to become the master bedroom. 

So, it's often true, especially when it comes to very old houses, that before you can construct something, you have to take stuff apart a little. And it's also true, especially when it comes to very old houses, that when you take stuff apart, you might uncover...secrets. You might find things very purposefully tucked under floorboards. You might find, as my parents did, a letter from 1929, which begins, "Dear Ethel, I was so glad to hear from you and also to know that you arrived safely from prison to your home. We are all very well except that Lena Scottie is in the hospital sick with Diptheria."

The letter, which I will link to below, is five pages long, and in it, the sender implores Ethel to become a Catholic, and tells her that "all the Mothers and Children" miss her and talk about her a lot. The return address on the letter is St Agnes Priory School in Manitoba, a place where 'delinquent girls' were sent to be reformed (delinquent in the 1920s could mean anything from "has engaged in criminal activity" to "is a single mother" or "is neurodivergent"). It's not an overly juicy letter, other than the mention of prison or the fact that it was sent by one of the other "delinquent girls" at St. Agnes, but that almost makes it more interesting, doesn't it? Why hide a letter like that? Or, if you didn't want it to be discovered, why not rip it up, or burn it? 

My mom is not the kind of person to say, "Oh, a letter addressed to someone else; not my circus! Not my monkeys!" Which is good, because I'm really nosy and would like to know why Ethel hid the letter, and why Ethel was in jail, and also what happened to Ethel, period. 

So Mom called up one of the family members of the original person who built the house. She said, "Hey, I've got a letter here for the person who lived in this house who went to prison." 

And they were like, "Prison?!"

And she was like, "Yeah, the letter was hidden."

And they were like, "Much like the fact that we had a relative who went to prison!"

Luckily, this person is kind of like my mom and me; they are also not a not-my-circus-not-my-monkeys type. They immediately launched into a full-scale investigation, interviewing other family members, driving to grave yards, even calling the office of St. Agnes, asking for intake records. You can read all of their findings, as well as the full letter, here and an update here. 

It's wild, isn't it, to think about old houses, about how some secrets stay hidden and some make themselves known? It's wild to think about this woman, Ethel, who hid this letter instead of destroying it. Did it cross her mind that someday someone might find it and care enough to uncover her story, that members of her family might get to know her that way where previously she was kept a secret? I always think about how important it is to us, as humans, to be known and understood, and in reading Ethel's story, I don't get the sense that she was (I mean, one of the things this family member dug up was a newspaper clipping that told the story about how the Phillipsons came to Canada from England. It talked about all seven of their children, where they ended up, who they married, where they worked, but when it got to Ethel, all it said was, "Ethel, died young").

So, I don't know, I guess I'm glad for all of this, is what I'm saying. Glad for Ethel and her family. Glad for my mom, too—who among us has not dreamed of the day we might find a secret letter hidden under the floorboards in the attic of a 100-year-old house?

Just me? I think not.

That Christmas When

Christmas 2017 was one for the books, and I basically blame it on my little sister. Because apparently, on the way to my parents' place, she said to her husband, "Everyone else seems to have a 'That Christmas When...' story. I don't have one of those."

So, by way of jinx, we now have one. We have That Christmas When Everyone Got Violently Ill.

(All except two of us. I was not one of the lucky two.)

But, I mean, if you're going to catch a stomach bug like the one we caught (which I would actually be more likely to refer to as a stomach piranha, or a stomach crocodile, or a stomach something else that lives in the Amazon and conjures up images of knife-like teeth tearing into one's abdomen, not by way of hyperbole but, rather, accuracy), and you have other people to look after but you can't even look after yourself, what better place to do that than your parents' house? 

I guess it was lovely in its own way.

Plus, we finally got to spend our first night in the Foursquare.

In case you're new here, a quick recap: A couple of years ago, my grandma accidentally purchased an old farmhouse at an auction sale for $500 (full story in this post here). She wasn't in need of an old farmhouse, particularly one that needed so much TLC, so she gave it to my mom and dad as an anniversary present. My parents, who are obsessed with antiques and old houses and hardwood flooring and all that, were delighted, and immediately sold their farm (where they've lived since before I was born). They bought a $500 lot in Frontier, moved the house there, and got to work restoring it—and you can find pictures of that process here.

There is still a lot of work to be done, but they were able to move into the house in September. There are two functional bathrooms, and they just recently got all of the hardwood on the main floor refinished. The living room and dining room are so close to being completed (they just need to install the picture rail around the tops of the rooms), and it's exciting to be able to see their vision for the house more clearly. Next up, they're installing cabinetry in the kitchen. My mom's stoked about that.

Want to see just a couple of before and currentlys? Yes, I know you do.

This is the dining room, looking into the front sitting room.
BEFORE:

CURRENTLY: (Again, it's almost finished but there will be a picture rail across the top of the room there where the two different colours of paint meet.)

This is the hallway between the kitchen and dining room, leading to the front entrance.
BEFORE:

CURRENTLY: (Not quite an AFTER yet, but it's getting there!)

And another shot of this ridiculously beautiful staircase, for good measure:

I think the next time we go home, I'll be able to snap some pictures of the kitchen (no pressure, mom).

Anyway. As of Thursday, everyone is back to full health. We're back home and being very lounge-y and lazy in the name of Keeping This Bug To Ourselves. How was your Christmas? Very boring and unmemorable, I hope.

Sickness and Attic Floorboards, Basically

Sickness has struck our household.

We made it this far though, so that's something. We skipped the communal sickness in October, missed the round in November, sailed through December (despite the fact that Sully licked everything in Vegas, barf), and made it halfway through January.

AND THEN.

On Saturday, I said the unmagic words: "We've made it through this whole season without getting sick!"

Mom Jinx. It is lurking. It will not have mercy. Even as I was saying the words, I knew. And sure enough.

Yesterday, Sullivan coughed so hard he puked. And then he walked through the puke to get to me and puked again. And then he walked through that puke to get to me and puked again--literally the saddest thing I've ever seen.

The last two nights he's been in bed with us, and I've been having dreams about being repeatedly shot in the face (only to wake up and realize that it's a hacking cough, not gunshots).

So, of course we've been inside. Outside, it's a balmy, tropical, beach-worthy +1. Last week, when we were healthy, it was -54. What are you, mom jinx? And why do you loathe me so?

Enough complaining. A thing to be thankful for is that we're sick now and will hopefully be over it by the second half of the week. It's going to be a full one and I want to be all there for it.

In the meantime, I wanted to post a couple of pictures of the old farm house. We dropped by there this Christmas when we went home.

It's kind of in limbo at this point and the progress is hard to see because it's all so nitpicky; they're waiting on electrical and furnace stuff before they can "giv'r on the insulation" (- dad). It's hard to work in a house in Canadian winter with no heating, but they're pressing on. They've put in all new windows and are currently working in the attic, which is eventually going to be the master bedroom with an ensuite. They've ripped up all the floorboards so they can clean and plane them and put them back down, and at present it looks like this:

After the electrical, plumbing, and furnace stuff happens (which is all completely out of their control), I think we'll begin to see some really big, fun changes. Barclay and I are heading down in February to help out, so I'll have a bunch of updates then. Get excited, Internet.

Progress!

We went to visit my parents this past weekend, so of course we popped out to the farmhouse to see where things were at there. The first thing we noticed was the roof: new shingles!

My mother, just so you know, is either the most meticulous, artful, patient person in all of the known universe (she did raise me, so) or she's completely off her rocker (again, she did raise me, so).

She's still in the process of stripping every bit of ancient paint from that house - so far she's been at it since May 1 and she's done all the door and window headers, plate rails, window sill plates, baseboard quarter rounds and half of the doors themselves. I'll show you some pictures of the piles of stuff she's been working through so you can fully appreciate the gargantuan nature of this task.

It's a bittersweet thing. The paint job in there was kind of amazing - pastel yellows and minty greens and bubblegum pinks everywhere you looked. Maybe not everybody's taste, but pretty adorable. For example, these are the door headers from a few of the different rooms (they all have matching radiators!):

But paint doesn't last forever, so my mom loaded up a trailer with everything she could pry from the walls, took it all home, and is carefully stripping it. She's done so much that her thumb no longer bends. Like, actually. It's frozen straight from overuse. You could say she's invested in this project.

Here's a lovely picture of the gunk she's scraping off this wood:

Isn't that nice?

But underneath the chipping, old paint and all of that gunky stuff? This:

Beautiful, right?

One of my favourite little transformations is the front door.

Before:

After:

Slowly but surely, she's working her way through that whole house. Some of the wood will be repainted - there's a little girl in Frontier who has laid claim to one of the second-floor bedrooms, and everyone has started referring to it as her room. Mom wants to paint it and wallpaper it similarly to how it looked back in the day. Pink and flowers and all that. She's on the lookout for vintage light fixtures and pretty rugs and wallpaper. The goal, as I understand it, is restoration, not so much remodelling.

Her other little pet project this month, when she wasn't stripping paint, was restringing a vintage chandelier for the entryway. She got it second-hand for $40. Probably because no one else in the world (again, patient, meticulous, maybe crazy) wanted it. Did I mention it was in a million pieces when she bought it?

Here are the first few pictures she sent me, along with a witty caption about her new 'puzzle':

Yikes.

However, I can attest to the fact that she finished it; I'll save the after pictures for when it's hanging in its place.

That's that for now; this was a lot of pictures to scroll through. Dad sent me home with a bunch of the moving pictures though, and I'll upload those later. The process of moving a 100-year-old house 228 km is actually pretty fascinating.

Until then, here's an adorable picture of my adorable parents:

Farmhouse Update #1

I went to the farm a couple of weekends ago and Mom took me to see what she's been up to on that old farmhouse. It's slow work right now; she's currently stripping the white-yellow paint off all of that beautiful old wood. Can you say 'tedious?' (I don't doubt you can, you bright young thing.)

She's already done the bannisters on the staircase and the doorway between the living room and the dining room. Next: baseboards.

Want to see some before and afters?

BEFORE:

AFTER:

And the staircase... BEFORE:



AFTER: