The Cross House

Five days ago I did a post about a large white quartz slab. The slab is the east-side wainscoting of the first-floor bathroom of the Cross House. Because I have no original floor plans of the first-floor (drat!), and a lot of the plaster has been removed in the bathroom, and the original floor has…

  I THINK there was a marble vanity to the left. I THINK there was a high-tank toilet to the right. I THINK each rested upon marble slabs. The rest of the flooring was (and still is) porcelain geometric tiles by the American Encaustic Tiling Company. I DON’T KNOW if the vanity had an marble…

          I have two ideas: The pair of 3 holes right/left held a soap dish and water glass. The center 3 held a ring, which held a beaded chain for a sink stopper. Or maybe not. As I sat on the floor and stared and stared and stared at this bedeviling…

                      See the small hole at the bottom? I have no idea what that was for. The two holes above it were obviously the hot/cold lines. The two larger holes below were drain lines. MYSTERY QUESTION #1: But why two drain lines? Was one for…

                This got me to thinking. What if my suspected 1894 plan was correct? And what if the vanity and toilet did sit on marble slabs (a detail I have long adored)? If so, then the current floor (part tile, part cement) would make sense. For, in squeezing…

            Although the stained-glass panels are now restored, the wood sashes now need restoring, and the panels then to to be bedded and glazed. So, it will be a bit before the colorful glories return to their nest. The long bedroom will be mine, and it will be fun waking…

Since starting this blog, I have written many times that the Cross House has forty stained-glass windows. Oops. There are forty-TWO. I overlooked the two stained-glass transom windows in the main vestibule. Originally though, there were forty-THREE stained-glass windows, but one went missing…                        …

        SIDEBAR: I wish life could be like this. Something bad happens. And, later, the bad can be magically undone. Sigh.      

MORNING           AFTERNOON           DAMN GRASS Another project this afternoon was mowing the grass. For weeks it has been blistering hot, but today it “cooled” to just really hot. But really hot (and humid) is only fractionally better than blistering hot. This is SO not conducive to…

          But why? Why remove the narrow door, make it wider, and install it in a location which already had a door? Or…maybe there never WAS a door to the bedroom???????? Hummm. This got me to thinking. And so I looked at the door stop trim around the ‘extended” door (a…