Other Cool Things

              There are a lot more images here. The house haunts me. It is incredibly gorgeous inside and the exterior, restored, would no doubt be an eye-popper. Yet it sits. Unsold. With but a price of $25K. The location of the house, and its condition, would terrify 99.9% of…

On Friday, I was in Topeka, and went to the museum of the Kansas Historical Society. It was fabulous and fascinating. I wandered from exhibit to exhibit, and saw, for the first time in my life, actual Indian teepees. Wow. Then I turned a corner…and gasped. Gasped! Wanna see? Scroll way down.      …

      You can tell that New Kitty has a really tough life.    

        In short, the road trip involved a select gathering of insane-people-who-own crazy-big-old-houses. I was in heaven. Squee!!!!!!!! The reason for the trip was for me to help Doug with the process of installing period-correct lighting in his 1902 house. Doug, and his wife Diana, purchased the house in 1983, when it was…

From Wikipedia: The Torre Argentina Cat Sanctuary is a cat shelter in Rome, Italy, that makes use of the ancient ruins of Largo di Torre Argentina by providing a home within them for around 150 cats. After the excavation of the temple ruins in 1929, feral cats moved into the area, sheltered by roman pillars and…

The 1886 Haas-Lilienthal House is a historic house museum in San Fransisco. It is quite the stunner and for many years looked like this:     Wanna see? Scroll way down. In 2018, a multi-million dollar restoration was completed. The original colors were ascertained and the results are both startling and unexpected.      …

  Brad mentioned that they had the original drawings. This information made me salivate, and I looked at Brad with pleading eyes and said: “Please, sir, can I see the drawings? Please? Please?” And then two hours vanished in a flash as Susan and Brad and I, like kids let loose in a candy store,…

I was born in Detroit. This was an article I wrote in 2003, and published in The Town Paper:   The Detroit that I knew, in the mid-1960s, still looks the same in my mind, as I have not seen it since 1970. Downtown was an hour drive from the suburban development where I lived:…

There is a FABULOUS 1880s house in Wichita. It had been restored in the 1980s. And then declined. And declined. And declined. This is not, sadly, an uncommon story with old houses. By 2018, the house looked terrible, and was listed for sale, cheap. So cheap that my friend, Carl, worried that it would be…

The incomparable Kelly, of Old House Dreams, regularly features houses for less than the price of a new car. Such houses are, obviously, not in mint condition. Or normally in an ideal neighborhood. But almost all such houses are, to me, well worth it as they could be beauties once again. Magnificent and remarkable and…

Yesterday morning, I opened my side door. And received a shock. Then the next two hours of my life took an unexpected, and all-consuming turn.   On the porch was a sorta stray cat I call Tiny. She is small, and with long fur. I say sorta stray because she, I think, actually belongs to…