Plugging Away at the Cellar

Here's another thing we did today (besides getting rid of some tires), or, rather, here's something that Tara noodled away on while I watched (since I've been feeling a bit poorly lately): work on the cellar. It's really an ongoing project, and has been for years, but that's okay. Here's what the south end of the cellar looks like, and it is of course much cleaner than it used to be, O dear God trust me. (Tara the archivist may well have a picture of it when it was even more full of crap).





I mean right now you can actually walk through it. (Well, kind of.)

Poking around we found the usual sorts of crap—old (used, and rinsed out) paper coffee cups from Building #19 full of mis-matched screws, a can of knife handles without the blades, scary-looking wirey things that were once extension cords, rusty hinges, brackets, and pulley bits, cheap hacksaw blades still in the package, old saved fuses (we've had circuit breakers for years now), a tin of table saw blades labelled 'okay/dull', an old drill that made a fair amount of sparks whilst smelling of ozone, several really impressively rusty knives/potential murder weapons (if the stab wound doesn't kill you, the tetanus will in time), and stuff like this:



As you can see, however, it was labelled incorrectly, as it was in fact Chock full o' Bolts:



And then there were these. They'd almost be cool, in a vintagy sort of way, except for the fact that some of them have probably been sitting there since they were new. That, and who knows what carcinogenic-type chemicals, long since banned by the EPA, are in those cans and jars.

The Sterling Elastic Marine Seam Compound can was sticky when I picked it up. And what the Hel is 'parafin oil?'

The center bottom picture is (was) I think a couple of catalogs, though they are half-disintegrated with the damp and the rot. I suspect that if the guy on the white catalog cover were to encounter one of those hopped-up-on-Little-Yellow-Pills 1950s housewives who just LOVED! TO! CLEAN! it would be True Love. Don't you think?