Not to worry-I'm back out on the road next week, with Christmas after that, and the bosses at work seem to think we're superpeople-January and February are almost impossibly busy. It's all good, though, cause in March we are packing up the Saab and heading to Florida-we have WORLD FUCKING CHAMPIONS spring training to attend and LOTS of visiting to do.
But back to the library-
The light for the picture is not very good, but I think you get the idea. All the cases are the same size; built for comfort, not for speed or ktoches (sp). Mark's original idea was to build bump-outs in the middle to make it a bit fancier, but I wanted the whole thing flush-better to drag my ladder around. I think he also thought I might want some fancy doors or other extraneous bullshit, but I told him he's been hanging around those rich bitches' houses too long. I am so thrilled to finally have my wall of cases that sometimes I just come in here and stare at them. LOL.
So-the old house mystery. OK, I was getting to that. You may notice that the wall is papered in an innocuous flowered paper. It is the ONLY wall in the entire house that is anything other than beadboard paneling-the real wood paneling circa when the house was built. (Luckily this place is like Prague after the Hapsburgs left-the inhabitants too poor over the years to tear anything down, so all the layers survive).
We've always been curious about why this wall, and this wall only, was papered, but a little apprehensive to find out, because this house has been subject to sheer neglect and abuse over the years, so there's no telling what could be behind the paper.
We finally found out, quite by accident. When Mark went to affix the case to the wall on the right side of the photo above, he realized that there was nothing there, just the wallpaper and some flimsy paneling that was clearly not the original wall. The shape of the opening (there was solid wood at the top of the wall, above where a door would fit) was exactly like a door! This discovery put a new twist on the house's history. The other side of the wall
is the back of our great room, which is open for the entire width of the house.
This is defininely not a door, at least not for a long time. This house was originally a boathouse; you probably know that we sit completely over the water-the boats would come in under the house, whether on the side or the back we're not sure. Our best guess is that they came in the side, because the outside wall downstairs (if you could call it that LOL) is different on that side than the rest of the back of the first floor (the original boathouse part of the house).
We always thought that our great room, which sits over the boathouse part, was here from the beginning-the wood seems to be as old as the rest of the house, but the door in the library could very well have led to a staircase down to the boathouse part-actually the opening for the boats is right there below the door! So it looks like the great room post dates the rest of the house; maybe it was a deck or porch over the boathouse part and someone decided to close it in. They did a nice job with it-it's well appointed with picture rails, gorgeous wood everywhere, and a gas fireplace (we have gas jets all over the place), and clearly made for relaxing and entertaining. (The funny thing is that the original kitchen and dining room where downstairs in the front of the first floor. This place has more lives than we ever imagined!) What a mystery-another layer revealed, the discovery answering one question but posing so many others!
So humor me a bit-could this door be the entrance for the booze during Prohibition-offloaded from the boats and right into the speakeasy? Who knows? Atlantic City was quite the party town in those days; from what I've read it was the hotbed of debauchery. Something to ponder....
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