“Please, let’s keep them, we can store 'em in
the basement.”
I was pleading a little. A group of
men stood in a circle in the parking lot, listening.
“Look, I’ve restored houses, sat on
a committee that loaned money to restore historic properties and been a Realtor
selling hundreds of historic homes, so trust me, I've learned this: people do work on
historic properties convinced their project is the final word – that no one
will ever want to change their perfect remodel. But that’s almost never true!”
The Presbyterian Church was being
restored. I was begging the construction committee to put the weathered, original
1893, quartersawn white oak doors in storage rather than throw them away. The
committee chair was a good man. He gave it a solid think, then shook his head
and said, “Throw them in the dumpster.”
So I hauled the doors to my garage, a block away, stored them on-edge against a wall. I spent years trying to find them a home,
banging my car door against them a couple times a week.
 |
| The back & sides of the new island, under construction in my garage. |
I’m a windows open guy. For years my
family’s Sunday mornings have been anchored by the ringing of that church’s
bell. When my middle son, Jack was an acolyte, he donned a robe and took his
turns ringing the bell to announce the start of services.
When the island is installed, you’ll
be able to cook or sit at it and look out toward the church bell
tower.
When I first moved to town, my ex
and I rented the first floor of a big, late 1890s home a block and a half down
the back alley from here. There, our first baby, Cal, had textbook colic. He’d start
crying at about 5:00 each afternoon and shriek like he was on fire until around
11:00. Nothing calmed him.
Nothing that is, but music.
The old house had a built-in, 10-foot long
white oak bookcase we'd filled with books, albums, CDs, and a sound system. I’d sit beside
those honey-colored shelves with baby Cal laid facedown across my lap, drinking a beer and
patting his little back as he cried, listening to R.E.M., Ella Fitzgerald or
Crash Test Dummies, soon discovering that his crying would stop for 20 or 30
seconds at the start of a new song and it's fresh sound or rhythm. So I slid my chair close to the bookshelves, pulled
down it's little raised panel cabinet door to rest my beer upon it, and I changed the track on the CD the moment he started
to cry. His sobs would stop in a sputter, his body pulling inward, as
if clutching the sound against his stomach, and he was silent for half a minute – like the gears
were turning in his tiny head, puzzling over the wonder of the compelling rhythmic
noises. Then he’d start screaming again. I’d advance the track. He’d fall
silent again. And on this went.
 |
| At lower left, the raised panel door from the old rental down the alley. |
When Cal was a teenager, long after
we moved to this house, the city was demolishing that grand old rental for a
parking lot. A friend and I went in and did the salvage. As I was pulling the
planks of that bookcase apart, Cal appeared in the doorway and spent an hour
exploring the place.
The cabinet framework and little raised-panel door on the kitchen island I’m building came from the bookcase where I once
worked for an hour or two each night trying to quiet that troubled baby.
Cal got a degree in Japanese, teaches
English just outside Tokyo, and married a brilliant and beautiful Japanese
woman. Visiting with them last October, many nights Cal and I drank beers around
their kitchen table playing songs we liked for each other on our phones or
youTube: “Have you heard this one?”
Twenty years ago I'd walk my youngest, a daughter named
Sally in a stroller around the neighborhood. One evening we
passed down an alley and found 3 old table leaves leaned up against a trashcan.
The stain was dark and the finish dirty, but I could see they were white oak. I struggled to keep them tucked under
an arm while pushing Sally home.
Those table leaves make up the
drawer fronts on the new kitchen island.
 |
| The 7 layers of floor that were on top of the original artificially-grained kit- chen floor. The top left, yellow/tan was the first added layer. Lower right is an 1926 newspaper stuck to the floor beneath the oldest layer. |
There are new children from a 2nd
marriage in this house now and we’re totally renovating the kitchen. Stripping
up 2 solid inches of flooring, we counted 8 floors– an 1890s
artificially-grained poplar floor covered with 7 later layers of linoleum and
vinyl and 2 added layers of sub floor. Beneath those floors, the timber-frame,
barn-like joints of the original 1870 incarnation of the house were revealed,
attached to the “high-tech” balloon framing of the 1895 additions. The new island, this “Frankenstein island,”
made up of pieces and parts of ancient virgin forests that were timbered and
milled into lumber that outfitted this neighborhood 120+ years ago, will
straddle the confluence of the various eras of this house.
Nothing here is one thing. It is not
just the existing neighborhood you see, nor one house or one marriage or one
family, it is many generations and more than a century of architectural styles
and interior décor fashions, pulled apart and pushed back together, the
gloriously loved and beautifully fucked-up DNA of our old house, embodied in a brand new kitchen island.
 |
| This late 1890s photo of boys playing with tops beside Noblesville's Presbyterian Church shows (top/center) one of the doors I used for the side panels of my kitchen island. |
“A broken man, an abandoned house, and a lonely woman—all the makings for a beautiful, haunting tale of loss, forgiveness, and redemption. The Salvage Man is a lovely, bitter sweet story you won’t soon forget. I loved it!”
Sherri Wood Emmons, author of The Seventh Mother
“Meyer turns the pages of history with gentle care and a warm heart, creating a story I’ll remember forever. Thank you Kurt Meyer for opening a door to my beloved town’s past and allowing me to travel the streets and meet the people of Noblesville 1893.”
Susan Crandall, Author of Whistling Past the Graveyard
