Fantastic Voyage

There are a bunch of descriptive words that real estate agents and contractors use to sell houses; "original" hardwood floors are the best, but "reclaimed" from another, presumably old place is also pretty good.  A "vintage" sink means it's special-old, though maybe a little worn, and "antique" is another standby that tells you that it might not work but it looks great.  I'm clearly a sucker for these buzzwords, and always have been; people like me are looking for an "authentic" old house.  It's been important to me in doing this expansion that all of the new parts of the house fit with the old parts of the house, so I keep using words like "authentic" and phrases like "in keeping with" the old house.  To be honest, though, I HAD an authentic old house.  I also washed in authentic cold water and authentically feared that the old wiring was going to cause a fire.  That wasn't for me, so I'm putting in all new stuff, and I'm mostly okay with that.  I can see that it doesn't necessarily make sense to want stuff to be old and not old at the same time, but maybe it's not so strange to want a house that looks nice and feels homey but works like it's supposed to?  Maybe I only think about this stuff because I was a teenager in the 90's when the worst thing you could be was a poser (or poseur?) and I'm still much too worried about being "real" (Shall I stop with the quotes? Nah. I have an English degree. Quotation marks are my jam).  Anyway, explore some authentic stuff with me.

We've been making some decisions about the detail work on the outside of the house.  You've seen how we decided to use Hardie siding on some parts of the house because it's practical, and pressure-treated wood siding on other parts because it looks like the original siding. It's nearly all on now, and I think the combination looks nice.

It doesn't look original, if it's even believable in the first place that a house in this size and shape could be "original" to the time the front of the house was built (I don't think it is), but the shape of the roof, the brackets, and the trim work that echoes the original house all work to make it look "authentic."  It looks like someone took his time with it; it looks pretty.  That's what's authentic about an old house to me.  

And someone did take his time with it, for sure.  They designed these little soffit vents to let air in and out of the attic:

Each one of those little rectangles is a piece of coated metal, framed with lumber, hand cut and hand assembled, fitted perfectly to the space between the walls and the roof.  They even added them to the old part of the house, and since every thing there is kind of wonky with oldness, our guy had to measure each individual space and then cut and make a vent to size.  We used to have some little tacked on metal vents that fit so poorly we had to constantly stuff steel wool and expanding foam around them to prevent squirrels from having a party in the attic.  This kind of perfect craftsmanship, especially in contrast to what it replaces, blows my mind; I don't have the character for that kind of detail work (but I'll write you a poem about it once it's done!).  So there's another detail that's not original or vintage but shrieks of being authentic to me.

Here's another side of this issue:

This is the wood roof-y bits on the front of our house (I think the real name is the fly rafter).  See that little circular notch in the end?  Our architect thinks that our house probably had a detail on each end that a lot of other houses in our neighborhood have, so he included it on the other fly rafters elsewhere on the house:

It looks really cool, right?  That's the kind of little detail that makes a bungalow a bungalow, and that defines the whole Craftsman design.  It's pretty, simple, and deliberate, and it's definitely authentic to the style and probably the history of the house.  

He offered that we could replace the fly rafters on the front with new fly rafters that match these, and I think that would look pretty awesome.  But I refused, and I know my thinking here is convoluted.  The detail on the rafters is probably original; the house used to have something like that there, and at some point, some one cut it off because it wasn't fashionable or was in the way of gutters or it rotted off.  If we put the new rafters on, we'd be restoring the original look of the house.  BUT we'd have to remove the actual original pieces of wood to restore the original appearance, and I just couldn't feel right about that.  Is that too first-world problem for anyone else to follow?  Are you appalled that I just wrote a zillion words about the tiniest dilemma in the world?  I am, a little, but maybe it's interesting to you--is the original more authentic, or is a replacement actually original?  Anyway.  Detail work.  I like it.

And here's a little bonus teaser for something I'm excited about:

My seats for the island came in from Chicago!  They're not original to the house or even authentic style elements from our era of houses, but they are authentically old!  I ordered two cast-iron and wood swing-out seats from old industrial cafeteria-style tables, and we're going to attach them to the island for seating.  I'm excited that they're old and awesome-looking, and I'm super excited that I'll never have to move stools to sweep or trip over stools because they're in the walking path after my children have gotten up and run off--these puppies will never touch the floor, but just swing coolly out to be a seat then tuck back in when they're done.  Hopefully they'll look even awesomer when you see them in all their glory.