corners of my home: front hall

view from vestibule 1, originally uploaded by aoneko.

I have a few motivations in doing this. One is motivation itself: to write, to photograph, to document, to create. All impulses I've always had and which I want to resuscitate before they get completely buried under the loads of laundry, piles of work, and other responsibilities I always put first. Maybe there is a way not only to make time and space for the creative life, but to integrate it all so that it IS the creative life. Or maybe that's a lot to ask, but it's worth a try.

Another motivation is to make our little life here more immediate to our many friends and family who don't live close by. I got my feet wet on Flickr, where I started out posting photos for my family to share and before long found myself posting pictures of the stuff of my life to groups of like-minded strangers. One of my favorites is the Corners of My Home group that Amanda set up. Whenever I'd post a picture to it, I'd want to say more than a caption's worth about it. So, today I'll dive in by writing about a corner of my home.

This is what you see when you walk from the front porch through the vestibule into our front hall. This is what we saw the first time we walked in with our realtor, and it was love at first sight even though....

We bought our house from the estate of an old woman who had not had the wherewithal to maintain it for about forty years. The downside of this was that the place needed not only paint and polish but a new furnace, new appliances, new sinks and toilets, everything. The upside was that the house had quietly survived the gut-rehab brutality of the 1960s and 70s. Its original woodwork, inlaid hardwood floors, and stained glass were intact. The only things missing were most of the mantels, presumably sold for cash at some point.

Aside from painting the walls and sanding the floors, there’s another significant home improvement in this picture that you can’t see. When we bought the house, the old furnace was kaput, and forced air is no good anyway as a method for heating an old house. So instead of replacing the heating system we had, J installed hot water heat, including a radiant floor on the first floor. Tubes of hot water threaded between the floor joists keep the floor warm, and since heat rises, the warmth radiates upwards and heats the room. It is lovely to walk on warm floors all winter.

More corners here.