By: Selina Pedi-Smith, Pellere Foundation
I missed last week’s column. Life has been moving at a fairly ridiculous pace, and somewhere between work, family, construction projects and the usual assortment of small fires, last Thursday arrived without an article attached to it.
This week isn’t looking much calmer. But I wanted to stop long enough to say hello, because some pretty cool things have been happening at 403 W Second Street. We held three open houses there this summer. You may remember me talking about the one in June, when neighbors and other community members poured through the doors to see what Pellere was doing with this big ol’ house. During the July and August events, we had the chance to meet even more folks and tackle more work projects.
And… can I be real? It was fun! Exhausting, dirty, and so, so fulfilling. So we’ve decided to keep the work parties going – one Saturday near the end of each month until the project is finished. The next work party will be September 26, and if spending a Saturday inside a 160-year-old house with good people and unpredictable projects sounds like your kind of thing, you’ll fit right in.
“Unpredictable” is perhaps the key word. One of my favorite images from this summer is of Isaias lying flat on his back on a salvaged roll of industrial bubble wrap, wedged into the tightest part of the crawl space beneath the house. He was trying to determine which plumbing lines went where, which is… not as simple as it sounds.
The house was built in the 1860s, when its original residents would have relied on gas lighting and a coal-fired system to heat the radiators. Over the following century and a half, generations of owners, plumbers, electricians and ambitious do-it-yourselfers added, replaced, abandoned and occasionally rerouted things. And then, of course, the poor house got stripped of its copper at some point. The result is less of a utility system and more of an archaeological site. Gas lines cross water lines. Old electrical wires disappear into walls. Newer wires emerge somewhere unexpected. Pipes begin with apparent purpose, then wander off into the darkness.
So there was Isaias, lying on bubble wrap beneath a Victorian house, patiently trying to make sense of more than a century’s worth of other people’s decisions. Nearby, we found a wine glass. We don’t know how it got into the crawl space. Perhaps someone dropped it through an opening years ago. Perhaps a previous homeowner stored things down there. Or perhaps some long-ago plumber studied the maze of pipes, considered the task before him and decided the situation called for a drink.
Either way, Isaias eventually sorted through enough of the mystery to get the plumbing connected. We now have running water, a working kitchen sink and a functional powder room. Next up: heat.
We’ll let you know whether that requires more bubble wrap… or wine.
Roots & Renewal is where the Pellere Foundation shares the people, projects and occasional mud behind our work. Read along here, check out the podcast on YouTube or Spotify, or find us at pellere.org.
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