Another Day, Another Find

While cleaning up outside around the house this past weekend we noticed the bottom of a bottle poking out of the ground.  After a few minutes of digging we pulled out this cool milk bottle from the Richmond Dairy Company.  Who knows how old it is, but this was back when milk was still delivered to your door and is another reminder of the history of our area.  There must be so much that lies buried around the house, so hopefully we'll uncover some more things as the renovation continues out into the back yard.

Here it is after removing the dirt and grime.  The glass must be at least 1/4" thick.

And here's where it came from, the Richmond Dairy has now been converted to loft apartments I think. You can see it's the exact same shape and logo as the little bottle.


We've been doing a lot of other things around the house that are relatively low cost, mostly painting.  So far the front is done except for the porch, the back area around the kitchen and the new window is painted and about half of one side.


A couple weekends ago we finally got down to the task of rebuilding one of the hearths upstairs which had busted up bricks that were uneven, and a gap about 4 inches between the bricks and mantle...so in short it looked terrible!  We removed all the bricks and cleaned the ones that were salvageable, and then removed all the sand that was beneath them (including a 1926 Mercury dime).  Since the fireplace will not be used again, and since the house has settled a bit unevenly, we decided to not replace the sand but to build up the cavity under the bricks with scrap wood.  This let us fairly easily correct the unevenness and provide a nice even brick reveal all around.

This shows how much the floors have settled...this cavity was filled with sand and then the bricks on top.

A 1926 Mercury dime was buried in the sand.  It seems old but our house had already been around for 30+ years.  It's also close to the year of the clawfoot tub (1928), so it makes you wonder if some remodelling was done on the house around this time.

It took quite a bit of work to get the platform all nice and even around each side, but eventually we got a nice 1/2" reveal all around.  The gap between the mantle and bricks, which used to be about 4 inches, is now much smaller.  Best tool of the day: Rubber Mallet

Even though we really liked the look of the natural brick, we decided to paint them.  The hearth in the other room had been painted in the past, and to make everything match we painted everything the same dark brown color (we also used this color to paint the stair hand rail)

It's hard to believe it all looked like this just a few months ago.