The Good Old Days Weren't Necessarily So Good

This weird wistfulness for the past should come to an end. This may make me a heretic in the hipster event-horizon we call East Atlanta, but it's one of those things everyone knows and no one will admit.  Partially because it is really difficult to remove tattoos of flames and skulls.

I used to know a girl who practically lived in the 40's. Or maybe 30's. Whenever it was that a "flapper" was a kind of dress and a "Lindy Hop" was a dance*, "consumption" was something that might kill half of your siblings before they were old enough for you to resent for being smarter than you, and "asbestos" was what the inside of your oven was lined with and most of your house was made of.

She had a tattoo of a skull with flames around it, so you probably know exactly whom I'm talking about.

*You know, Lindy Hop would be a killer name for a beer. You can use it. I don't mind - I'm an idea factory. Just make sure you use lead-based inks when you print the label.

This girl used to go buy antique furniture all the time. Antique is another word for "missing a few parts" and since I am something of a woodworker and doer of mechanical things, I would inevitably be voluntold to get the hinge working right or make the slidey part smoother. This would almost always start with my trying to find some extinct wood species or custom made brass fitting and end with stainless steel Ball bearing drawer slides and wood filler.

"But that's not vintage", she'd whine.

"I know. You know how you can tell? It works."

I feel like a semi-hypocrite bashing old furniture. All of the furniture I build is craftsman/Greene & Greene style and I never use metal screws or nails - just dovetails and tenons and stuff. But that is like building a house based on Frank Lloyd Wright's plans - it's timeless.

Speaking of houses, my friends tried to talk me into buying an old house because they have so much character and there's no reason to have more than one bathroom with four bedrooms and who needs closets anyway and they don't build them like they used to. Oh, and all of Atlanta's best neighborhoods are lousy with them, so it's easy to find the perfect combination of insurance claims waiting to happen.

If you know anything about how they used to build stuff, you're probably glad they don't build them that way anymore. I don't need stainless steel counter tops and a big weird water feature that glows a different color based on my resting heart rate as I lie in my maglev bed, but I do like a nice level floor with wood studs 16 inches on center.  I mean, as long as I'm paying $4,000 per square foot in property taxes...

I have done many home improvement projects with these sucker...er...friends of mine who bought the charming houses. As far as I can tell, "charm" is some combination of leaks, evidence of a haunting, nothing being straight, and the constant threat of an electrical fire. Give me a nice new house with 6" exterior walls packed full of Icynene foam.  I want that bad boy to have Cat 6 and 10-gauge speaker wire (run through conduit in case I want to pull even better cable at some point in the future) in every room.  I want my windows double hung and triple paned. When I slam the front door, I expect the toilets to flush.

I guess I just don't have the sense of adventure most people have when it comes to resurrecting the past. Call me old-fashioned.