Comfort from the miracles of time - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston

Making breakfast on a dull day last weekend, I reached over and flicked on the kitchen light. The room was suddenly made bright by the five-light chandelier in the middle of the kitchen ceiling.

 

I suddenly thought how different this was to the lives people lived in our century-plus home before electricity was brought to the farm around the time I was born. Residents back then would have to decide if it was dark enough that they needed extra light. If it was, they’d need to get down the coal-oil lamps, perhaps polish the glass chimneys, then light and trim the lights. Still, they’d only have a fraction of the light I had. If they had lived a long time they might remember the era before lamps when people used candles.

 

Living in our old house, I often think of the days before our modern conveniences. We moved here in 1975. The people before us had partially modernized the house. There was, for instance, a new oil furnace in the basement and a hot-water heater.
One of the first projects we undertook was to pull up the old linoleum on the kitchen floor, where we discovered that the builders of the house had installed maple hardwood floors. We decided we liked the hardwood and rented a sander. It was then we discovered burn marks on the floor where hot coals had dropped from the kitchen wood stove that cooked the meals and heated the house. We can still see the burn marks decades later.

 

In the attic of the full two-storey house, we discovered the previous owners had installed a TV aerial in the days when you could only get a few channels to watch. Today, we have satellite TV with a choice of dozens of channels.

 

When we moved here, there was still a back kitchen and woodshed attached to the back of our two-storey brick home. The kitchen, sometimes called a summer kitchen, was used to replace the regular kitchen and help keep the brick house liveable in those days of cooking with wood.

 

About 25 years ago, we had Blyth architect John Rutledge design a new addition to replace the old summer kitchen/woodshed. The old addition was torn off and a new design, on the same footprint, replaced it.

 

Old houses tend to have few windows because windows lose heat. Under our instruction, John designed a room surrounded by modern, heat-saving windows. Today, this is our favourite part of the house. I’m writing this column in that room.

 

The design opened up the entire west side of the house, which had no windows previously. Through those windows, we’ve been watching Indigo Buntings and Gold Finches at a dry-seed feeder and Baltimore Orioles at a liquid feeder designed precisely for them. We see squirrels in the trees and chipmunks on the west porch. Through the back windows we see deer nibbling on apples in the orchard, rabbits scampering by and the odd fox rushing northward.

 

A decade after that addition so improved our life here, we realized the “new” roof was no longer new and had to be replaced. Realizing the shingles would be old enough to be replaced again while we still lived here, we paid a roofing company to install steel shingles. It was about twice the cost, but is good for at least 50 years.

 

Over the years, we had someone remove the plaster walls in various rooms, had insulation blown into the interior space, and drywall replaced. At one point I made a trip to Durham to South Bruce Flooring to get hardwood to cover the pine flooring in two of our upstairs bedrooms, which had vents in the floorboards to allow heat to rise from the stove in the kitchen below.

 

Way back in the 1970s when James Roy oversaw the installation of air conditioning in Blyth Memorial Hall, the company that installed it put in heat pumps. I remember saying to Cliff Mann, who worked for the company at that time, that if they could take heat out of the air to help heat Memorial Hall in winter, that there should be even more heat available in the ground.

 

Years later, after he started his own plumbing company, Cliff started advertising ground source heating in The Rural Voice. About 15 years ago, we borrowed enough money to have him install a ground-source system, requiring many feet of trenching for the burying of pipe to take up the heat from the earth and bring it to the house where a special furnace concentrates the heat and warms the house. We have no heating bill, only a slightly larger electrical bill. The system has long since paid for the installation costs.

 

The people who lived here in 1950 couldn’t imagine the life of comfort we enjoy today. We have gained so much from the imagination and hard work of the inventors of the last 75 years.