Vampire Furnishings

Photo courtesy Flickr

Some things in a collection are more trouble than they’re worth. They devour attention, time, and cash. Home furnishings are passive appliances. They are supposed to work, to care, to educate, and to entertain.

Take the table: anyone who’s camped knows how much exercise it saves to be able to work standing at a clean surface. Whether a table is serviceable or not is an easy call, but skilled workmanship and rare wood can blind one to the reality of an energy sump that is a rickety, fragile, ill-conceived relic of a previous time.

Old flatware often presents the illusion of service while actually threatening health. The silver strike in Virginia City, Nevada, created the huge nineteenth-century market for plated knives, forks, and spoons. The first stainless steel flatware had been developed in Germany around the same time, but distribution was limited. Until the Fifties, everyday flatware was usually plate. The base metal that showed through at points of wear contained lead, not the best choice for an eating tool.

The sentimental value of old flatware can reasonably override the price it might bring. Continuity is in short supply. The local commercial silversmith runs specials in July, and I have found it’s a small matter to bring a beloved aunt’s tabletop back to life with the help of Mr. Z’s plating vat. Memories of family meals notwithstanding, good quality stainless flatware has displaced plate at the ordinary table. Buy all the serving pieces, and you can cook with the same pattern that you dine with. A pattern matching service will let your kids keep the set working into the distant future.

Plate is counterfeit, but back in the day it was a reasonable alternative to steel flatware and the risk of eating with something rusty. Sterling is sterling, and every item in the house should be sterling in its way, disposable, or recyclable. Every thing that’s made has a CO2 penalty attached to it. Global warming is a good argument for conserving the best of the past and considering the shape of the future when going out to shop. Whatever choices I make, I try to factor in the carbon emissions of shipping.

It can be difficult to decide how to get rid of an old piece that’s a burden. My first choice is to offer it to a cousin. Mr. Z took in an orphan set of unusable silver plate years ago. Collectors are a good choice, followed by antique dealers, Craig’s list, the ramp behind the garage on Saturday morning, the recycling bin, or toxins permitting, the solid fuel bin.

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Radical Housework

The Index: 2009.10.26-10.28

Architecture: 2009.10.28
Aviation: 2009.10.27
Ayurvedic medicine: 2009.10.26
Clarke, Arthur: 2009.10.27
Cold war: 2009.10.27
Computer desks: 2009.10.28
Efficiency: 2009.10.28
Energy conservation: 2009.10.26
Fitness: 2009.10.26
Flax seed: 2009.10.26
Fuller, Buckminster: 2009.10.27
Furniture: 2009.10.28
Gates, Jr., Bill: 2009.10.27
Guy style: 2009.10.28
Hall space: 2009.10.28
Hawken, Paul:2009.10.27
Heinlein, Robert A.:2009.10.27
Hiking: 2009.10.27
Housekeeping: 2009.10.28, 2009.10.28, 2009.10.27
Improvising: 2009.10.28
Interior design: 2009.10.28, 2009.10.27
Joy of Cooking: 2009.10.26
Laundry: 2009.10.28, 2009.10.26
Ley, Willy: 2009.10.27
Moon landing: 2009.10.27
National parks:2009.10.27
Natural resources:2009.10.27
Nutrition: 2009.10.26
Organizing: 2009.10.28
Recycling: 2009.10.28
Refrigeration: 2009.10.26
Rocketdyne: 2009.10.27
Science fiction: 2009.10.27
Sierra Club: 2009.10.27
Snail mail: 2009.10.28
Space: 2009.10.28, 2009.10.27
Sugar: 2009.10.26
Survival: 2009.10.27
Ultralight culture: 2009.10.27
Vegetables: 2009.10.26 More after the jump.

The Hall Works

Photo courtesy Flickr

Growing up in twentieth-century suburban houses left me ignorant of the several basic functions of the hall. It is not just a passage. In the Fifties, the generous halls of nineteenth-century buildings were seen as wasted space. New buildings constricted their passages to the point that the volume of the hall became invisible.

Reading about historic houses taught me that a hall can be a social area or work space. It was routine when maintaining a nineteenth-century room to clear furnishings into the passage to be able work freely. Space permitting, the inner entry hall of an old house is meant to be a small sitting area where residents and guests can rest and chat. I have found that setting up my modest entry with a couple of chairs and a small bench focusses the main floor. The rest area calms the rush from here to there.

In the illustration, you can see the evolution of the medieval house. Originally, the hall was the whole structure, with a fire pit in its center. It was very much like a Northwest Indian long house. When the chimney was invented, the hearth was moved to an outer wall. The family moved its sleeping quarters upstairs.

My small upstairs hall houses a standing height work top with recycling, laundry, and solid waste bins underneath. It’s a small matter to process mail and complete petty chores on the way to bigger things in other places. It’s easy to improvise this arrangement: place an office table with folding legs on bed risers, cover it with an interesting textile, and let that hide utilitarian containers underneath.

Any hall is a hub. The narrowest passage can house a drop-front wall-mounted computer desk or narrow shelf on brackets. Even a six-inch wide shelf will work hard keeping the flow of paper, coffee cups, and errands moving slowly toward their destinations.








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Going Light

Bamboo screen shorn of cords and hardware

Inadvertently, I set the course of my life when I joined the Outing Club in college. My best friend in high school was a climber, so it was inevitable that the two of us would hang out with the piton crowd. Towards the end of freshperson year, I planned my first hike, borrowing a copy of the Sierra Club’s Going Light with Backpack or Burro and learning the critical concept for the future of the planet: how much does it weigh?

The futurist Buckminster Fuller asked that question first. In an early Fifities children’s book, science fiction writer Robert Heinlein introduced me to the notion of limiting baggage to thirty pounds, just as airlines did at the time. That was and is the maximum I care to tote. Some days my sidebag approaches that limit. Fortunately, it has wheels. Bill Gates noted that a computer can carry extra information without adding extra weight. A musician clued me to the metabolic link between heavy and bitter. Economist/mail order guru Paul Hawken explained the advantage of substituting intelligence for mass in things.

When guys were walking on the moon for the first time, Heinlein and Arthur Clarke were sitting in the nosebleed section of Rocketdyne’s California auditorium watching the first video from space. As we toddled into history, the camera panned to the old men laughing their seats off.

The kids grew up and did it. If this part of history interests you, look at Willy Ley.

That first hike taught me I can carry everything I need to survive. The Cold War taught me to remember that I might have to. Every year, the load gets lighter with advances in technology like space’s Mylar blankets and the recycling of the Russian titanium stockpile into flyweight cooking pots. My granddad used to head into the woods with less, just blankets, matches, ammunition, salt, and flour, but that was before the Olympic Mountains were declared a park. If no one’s around making demands on resources, it’s not absolutely necessary to carry anything but a knife.

Having learned to keep house for myself on a trail, it was natural to organize a first apartment around a down sleeping bag, suitably encased in a duvet cover, the lightweight cooking gear I had carried along, my Swiss Army knife, and the telescoping candle lantern that is still a faithful friend. All the rest of domestic life is an add-on, serving social and economic purposes.

A life lived close to the field is calm, simple, and productive.

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More after the jump.

Washday: Eat Your Way to Cleaner Clothes

Photo courtesy Flickr

No kidding, if you are careful about what you ingest, clothes and bedding stay fresh longer. That’s the immediate indicator of what food does to metabolism. To get the idea, avoid sugar for a while and then eat a piece of cake. If it’s hard to avoid sugar, that’s telling. Sugar is known to one historian as the cocaine of the eighteenth century. Keep it in proportion to the rest of the diet.

The East Indian ayurvedic medical community recommends paying attention to the quality of the paste that passes through the gut. That’s a good feedback mechanism for deciding what to eat. Be sure to include a teaspoon or two of flax seed a day. I like to add it to oatmeal. It’s good on salad, too. Flax seed eases the passage of food while it supplies valuable nutrients.

Eventually, a gentle shift towards vegetables, fruit, and whole grains and away from deep-fried dishes will rebuild the foundation of your life. The genuinely wholesome values of late nineteenth century cuisine were obscured by twentieth century advances in technology. Look to early editions of The Joy of Cooking for examples of the dominant rural cuisine that preceded refrigeration.

Watching diet and innards this way is an old-fashioned American way to attend to health. My great-aunt Beth, a nurse, used to monitor the children in the family, and my ma, oriented toward scientific rationalism, snickered at her obsolete ways. She was particularly amused by the section in Beth’s 1920s cookbook that listed the medicinal uses of common foods. Aunt Beth was right, but it took a bunch of hippies visiting India to get the point across.


More after the jump.