Barrels: If a barrel is made properly, it doesn't need any nails to hold the hoops on. They (the hoops) were usually put on hot, like a wagon tire, knocked down (put in place,) and cooled quickly by pouring water on them. Wine or liquor barrels do not want nails protruding into the wood as it will contaminate the wine. Even if the nail only penetrates three fourths of the way, the wine will soak into the wood and draw out the contaminate.

Hoop nails were used on shipping barrels and kegs (as used in shipping dishes and stuff by freight wagon or river boat.) These nails held the hoops in place during the rough handling of the shipping and travel. The nails had a one sided head somewhat like a railroad spike, only much smaller.

****HINT***To make little hoop nails, file three sides off a small brass nail and flatten the head a bit. Push it in so the one side of the head fits over the hoop. If using brass nails, blacken them with some sort of blacken. I find the stuff you get from a stained glass shop works quite well and in the long run much cheaper than the hobby or model RR stuff.

***HINT ***A nice touch.Make your barrel and install the hoops. Stain it, then remove one or two end hoops and shorten them or make them longer so they do not fit back in same place. This will show the unstained area which will look as if the hoops had been reset on the barrel. Some times if a barrel was not used for a while, it would dry out and a hoop would loosen up. To make the barrel useable again, the hoop needed to be reset. This was done by heating up the hoop and driving it back on.

Bill Hudson

Victorian paint jobs: I believe the actual Victorians tended to use muted colors, and were also limited by what paints were available. Somewhere around the late 30's they were all painted white, and it wasn't until the 60's that people began to color them again. With the recent (now defunct) economic boom, lots of houses have been repainted and the city has never been so beautiful.

Christine Sulewski

Rusticated wood: During a visit to George Washington's home at Mount Vernon, I spoke with a painter working on the property and he told me that the exterior was made of wooden boards that had been painted with white paint mixed with fine white VA. sand. Washington called it rusticated boards. The painter also said that in order to age exposed stone walls they painted them with butter milk which he said encouraged moss to grow, I tried the butter milk and nothing happened except it smelled bad for a time, Never tried the sand paint mixture but I don't see why it wouldn't make the wooden walls look like stone.

Orrin

Sculpture in Progress: I see that no one has mentioned the king of creating emerging sculpture from a block of marble or whatever...Rodin!!!! I have seen many many of his works with hands, faces or whatever just emerging from the stone - absolutely fantastic works of art! Whoever wanted the figure to emerge from the stone I say Go for it! Heck if Rodin could do it you can.

Ana

Memories of wainscoting: During the war we lived in an old house in London, England, and inherited the old decorating features. The dining room had brown lincrusta about 3 feet high all round. It was so old it was beginning to peel away from the wall. As kids, using this room as our playroom, we used to pick bits off the top as it came loose. Looked like the rats had got at it by the time my parents could redecorate.

Also had a huge table in that room covered with an old brocade-like tablecloth with long fringes all round. We used to knot and braid the fringes. Mother would discover this on the rare occasions she wanted to use the dining room to dine in, and we'd have to spend just as long undoing all the knots.

I'm doing my Phoenix and the Carpet roombox this way. Found some lincrusta-like paper at the scrapbook store. Now I'm looking for just the right fabric for the tablecloth. I plan to braid the fringes too!


Kay in Ottawa, Canada

Old Store Roomboxes: There was an old cave like store on Alameda (Jerry Callison's Five and Ten) where we used to prowl when my children were small. It dated back to a time when it was on the fringe of a cotton and farming area, and even in the 60's and early 70's a few remaining cotton fields were still intermixed with businesses and apartment complexes.

His customers were a diverse lot; the store smelled of baby chicks, metal, old cardboard and dust, and held everything from galvanized wash tubs and blades for windmills to garden equipment and tools of all kinds. I bought a small metal toolbox there to use for my sewing supplies that would probably survive an explosion today.

Instead of a stairway, there was an aisle that sloped rather steeply up to the dry goods section. It was lined with row after row of every kind and size of old-fashioned crockery - from huge round jars like the ones my grandfather used to make hominy and sauerkraut, to little lidded ones for matches, as well as all sizes of pitchers and jugs.

The owner was always dabbling in politics and running for one office or another, and never seemed too interested in bringing his stock up to date. On the upper level, I bought a box of Margaret O'Brien (remember the child star of the 40's?) dusting powder and bubble bath that had never been opened; found it at the back of a shelf between Midnight in Paris cologne and Coty face powder. Still have it.

Along with some current clothing, fabrics and notions, he had original sewing patterns for suits with peplums and Joan Crawford-type shoulders. Many of the dresses hanging nearby had the faded-at-the-shoulder look of something that's hung in the closet for too long; I swear many were carbons of dresses my mother wore when I was a little girl.

My kids were always finding interesting little trinkets there. My daughter ran over to me in great excitement once. "Oh, Mama," she said. "Come look at the jewels!" There was a shallow tray of rings that glittered in the dim light - an eerie likeness of the rings that I lusted after in the Woolworth's in Oklahoma when I was her age. We each got our birthstone that day. They turned our fingers green, but we loved them anyway. My son bought a bag of marbles that he played with for years; I still have them in a glass jar on the shelf next to some of their other old toys.

Wanna in El Paso

Servant Bells: Our current home (built 1824) still has the servants' bells, most of which work. It is Beloved's aim to make them all work (just who the hell he thinks is going to scamper to his call, she snarled..), it is my aim to needlepoint them all bell pulls. How they work is devastatingly simple. One pulls the bell pull in the relevant room, which is connected to wires, which pull on the bells that are in a row in the kitchen. The wires disappear into walls and run under floorboards - it is most neat, and dainty in its structure. Each wire is attached to a large flat metal coil, on which reposes the bell, when the wire is pulled, the coil jiggles (hence ringing the bell). Although we can tell by the tone of the bell which bell pull is being yanked, one assumes there were labels of some sort, as in a busy kitchen, trying to ascertain which bell was which by sound alone would be tough. Maybe it was a visual thing, checking which bell was moving? This brings me neatly onto an electrified system which dated from 1900 in my MIL's London house. This had been very new and swanky when installed. The rooms had buzzers. Pushing the buzzer activated discs of card set in a glass panel in the kitchen, all neatly labeled. So say the Man of the House in his Study pressed his bell when he wanted his evening cocoa, in the kitchen a buzzer would sound, and the disc of card behind the porthole of clear glass above the word 'Study' would jiggle. Thus the servant had both an aural call of being wanted, then a visual stimulation of where she was wanted. Hop to it!


Helen, York, England

Call Bells: For several years I was curator of a museum built in 1893-95, the late Victorian era you asked about. The rooms have electric buzzers to call servants. They are simple black buttons on rectangular brass mounts. When pressed, the buzzers sounded in the basement where there are two enunciators, glass-fronted wood boxes containing labels for every room. As the buzzer sounded, a little gizmo (sorry for the technical language) popped up to indicate the room where service was desired. This house also has speaking tubes in every room.


Margaret in Texas

I wrote to a Victorian Architectural group and asked if they could tell me where Victorian Door Bells were located and this is the answer I received:

-- vintrest {vintrest1@msn.com} wrote: Victorian doorbells come in several configurations. The two most common are the twist-type and the pull- lever type. The pull types seem to be slightly older,(1860's-1890) but that is just based on my experience, not on documented proof. The twist type(like she described) seem to be more common from about 1880 and later only to be replaced increasingly by the electric doorbell in the 1890's.

As for placement, the most common locations are on the door framing- to the right of the door (like on my home)or, in the middle of the center panel of a door, below the glass, if the door had glass. The height also seems to be a bit lower than we are accustomed to today so that a young child could reach the doorbell, about 36" from the bottom of the door or less. Hope this will help. John "

Sherry in Arlington, TX

I grew up next door to a Victorian house with one of these round doorbells. The front door was huge, about 10 feet tall with wavy-glassed double Gothic arch windows that took up about two-thirds of it, and two pairs of wood panels below the windows, separated by moldings. Looked a lot like the door on the Arthur kit! The round doorbell was set into the molding between the two upper wood panels, which set it slightly below the doorknob.

It could be installed on the door instead of the jamb because it was mechanical, not electrical. Turning the key wound a spring that operated a striker like the ones in grandfather clocks that hit the round bell on the inside surface of the door.

Loretta.Sniarowski