BOX GREENERY WINDOW 5 



the dining room door was so adjusted that they could come and go 

 at will. 



The Keeping Room. 



It had long been our ambition to have an old-fashioned keeping 

 room, and we tried it in the farm house. It was equipped with 

 the usual urn-crowned corner cupboards, in the main peopled with 

 mementoes and reminders of Revolutionary days. The wainscoting 

 came from an old Colonial house we had ruthlessly torn from its two 

 hundred year old anchorage. That wainscot had never clashed with 

 a paint brush, and frequent holy-stonings by gude dame and house- 

 maid had effected a satin polish. 



A double floor in two and one-half inch widths was laid on the 

 first story for warmth. Less width, less shrinkage. 



Inexpensive chair rails and picture moldings prevented injury 

 to plastered walls and served as members in the dado and frieze scheme 

 in dining room and library. 



A low ceiling (high ceilings do not necessarily mean pure air, 

 location of air inlet and outlet is the essential) made a short climb, 

 but the crooked, cramped turn in the stairway forced ungainly fur- 

 niture to travel through a window. 



We planned a first floor bedroom for which convenience calls in 

 most farm houses, and altered the conventional parlor into a studio-den. 



A monastery sawbuck table with ebonized oak plank top har- 

 monized with the long narrow dining room, and was easily dis- 

 mantled when additional space was needed for dances or games. 



Chimney breasts in several rooms we cemented, and while yet 

 moist imprinted with a butter mold, perpetrating the same radical- 

 ism in the den, the effect rendered more startling by sprinkling the 

 design while still wet with a mixture of gold, silver, and bronze 

 powder. To balance the roof line and save a gable window on the 

 second story a chimney was supported on trolley irons which crossed 

 attic floor beams. A fireplace outside a chimney breast was thus 

 carried. 



Upstairs we again gleefully lapsed to the antique. The original 

 wide floor boards, kiln dried by Father Time for full two centuries, 

 were firmly nailed down, old tacks removed, cracks and nail holes 

 either calked, white-leaded, or puttied, and the beautiful grain of 

 wood brought out by sand-papering, filling, waxing and polishing. 

 When that second floor was furnished with round and elliptical rugs 

 (with rubber bands sewed on the under side to keep them from slip- 

 ping), high posters with canopied testers, bed steps, lowboys, and 

 eagle-crowned gilt mirrors, our ennuied city guest slept in another 

 and far more restful world. 



Box Greenery Window. 



Plants were banished from all sleeping rooms, but a bay in the 

 morning room made a bower of bloom, and in the south sewing room, 



