Archaeology

The excavated window seat. The overburden upholstery has been removed (yellow carpet on the floor), and the front of the box has been penetrated with an exploratory aperture.

In addition to the large scale projects I am undertaking, there are some minor changes to make.  The bedroom is small, which is ok– a place to sleep and sometimes to languish, apart from the other active and public areas of the house– but it does need to accommodate my clothing and storage needs.

Including a chest of drawers, a garage sale treasure from years ago, stripped and lovingly restored to its original mahogany splendor.  Unfortunately there is no obvious place for it, but there is a window seat in the bedroom, unused and unlikely to be used, which could be removed and the space recovered as a bay to park my dresser.

So this was the plan:  attack the window seat with my demolition tools, patch the wall, touchup the floor and whatever else, and move the chest into the space.  It was a simple plan, and I set about the first phase of it today.

The window seat was essentially a box, upholstered in 1980’s vintage carpet.  Really upholstered.  A nail every inch.  A pry bar and 2-pound hammer were applied until the substrate plywood was exposed, but the box was still unyielding.  Attacking the sheet rock from the front created a small penetration.  I peered into the hidden space newly exposed to the light of day after all these years.  I felt a little like Howard Carter, shining a candle into King Tut’s tomb and discovering “things, wonderful things”.

In my case, the wondrous things included two lamps and a magazine of gay pornography.

Peering into the window seat cavity reveals treasures of a previous era.

Not exactly treasures of the imagination: stashed money, rare books, artifacts, or Apple stock certificates, but still, a little history of This Odd House, revealed.  I wonder how this set of items became entombed there.

Also under the window seat, a section reserved for conducting the heating pipes to the second floor.  The overdesigned foundation (16-inches of concrete) forced the vertical avenue to be well inside the inside walls of the room.  This box provided cover for the intruding pipes.

So now I don’t have a window seat, and I don’t have a space for my furniture.  I will need to review my options.

Pipes that must come up through the floor ten inches into the room, then bend back into the wall to make their way to the second floor. This end of the window seat covered the plumber’s tracks.