So it's been a while since our last post & mostly that's because we've been up to our eyeballs getting things in order to get contractors going...Last week we were literally up to our eyeballs with bricks. Check this out... Once upon a time the house had 3 chimneys running up through the building. A quick glance from the outside and it's clear that only one remains. What happened to the others? Well that was a mystery that we solved when cleaning out the attic...I was just innocently crawling around with my head lamp on sweeping up petrified squirrel droppings and assorted scraps of rubble and I look over into a corner and do a double take...is that a giant pile of bricks? I crawl over to investigate...who decided that putting a brick pile in the attic was a good idea I wonder? And has it had an effect on structural things? I figure out where on the third floor the bricks are and low and behold that part of the ceiling has totally been sagging... Now in all fairness...most of the 3rd floor ceiling was sagging and falling apart, but generally this was happening from water damage. In Room #7, where the brick pile was stacked above, the was actually no water damage...all of the warpy weird ceiling was caused by, you know, stacking a ton of bricks onto plaster and lathe. The long and short of it is, that it's kind of a miracle that no one got knocked out by a rain of bricks, and it was a good lesson that not all contractors do things the "right" way...by right I mean, not creating the potential for skull crushing type hazardous situation. We took the bricks out one by one and are currently moving them downstairs. Bricks have varied greatly over the years in terms of how much they each weigh, so we're not certain if our approximately 400 attic bricks add up to quite a literal ton...but we think it's close. Also for the record, we did totally nerd out and research the history of
19th century brick production in RI, and the report is that most RI bricks were made in
Barrington...
