Old house has its quirks

“What was that noise?” I said.

“What noise?” said my wife.

“That noise,” I said.

We live in an old house, a really old house.

It began its days as a horse barn for the house my Haynes grandparents built about 1900. Somewhere around 1920, it was remodeled into a small bungalow for my great-grandmother. And then — more than 50 years ago — it was added onto. And then, about 30 years ago, we added onto it again.

Because it started as a barn, it has no basement. (There was in the 1920s a small cellar complete with coal chute, but that was filled in during one of the many expansions.)

The result is a foundation that is essentially a maze.

It also has hot water heat, and that was the source of the noise I was complaining about.

The noise reached its peak roughly between the AFC and NFC championship football games in the NFL. It was a Sunday, and we were focused on the football. So we let it go.

After all, old houses have their own noises.

Trouble is, this one didn’t stop.

It wasn’t loud, but it was there. I could hear it when I rolled over in bed at night.

And by the time we woke up, two things were evident: The noise was louder. And the house was cold.

It was also getting colder.

My wife made a call to the folks who service our boiler and radiators and got a quick, sympathetic response.

(I figured it would be more effective to have a woman call for help. If I had called, they might just have told me to put on another sweater and tough it out.)

The service people promised a quick response and also told us about a switch we could flip that would stop the noise. It didn’t make things any warmer, but it did stop the noise.

Clueless about the intricacies of our heating system, we had breakfast and pondered as we waited for a skilled repairman.

The system, I knew, had only a few basic components: The boiler, the pipes and radiators, thermostats and a pump that moved hot water through the system.

Based upon that, guided by the technical knowledge that comes with a bachelor’s degree in English literature, I figured it was the pump. When I shared that diagnosis with the repair guy, he did not seem to be particularly impressed.

Then he asked what proved to be a critical question: “How do I get access to the crawl space?”

At this point, I need to interject that I am not a fan of crawl space. I’ll stick my head in to take a look, but the thought of crawling around with the soil beneath me and a house above my head does not give me comfort. Instead, it freaks me out. I’m simply too doggoned big to get into that space.

At this point, caffeinated and getting chilly as the temperature in the house kept dropping, my wife and I sprung into action.

We actually have two indoor access points for the crawl space. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that both were in closets fuller than they should have been.

We set to work.

The coat closet under the stairs in the hallway was addressed first. Coats, jackets, backpacks, storm windows, a bunch of flashlights and lanterns, a fire safe for our passports, boots and more were hauled out and dumped in the living room.

Then it was a closet in the utility room, which provided a different menu of bounty: Coolers, thermos bottles, trash bags, paper towels, small paint cans from forgotten projects, tins that once held Christmas cookies and an extraordinary collection of materials to polish and protect shoes and boots.

All of that went into my study, which doubles as a guest room.

Then the guy who knew what the heck he was doing dove into the crawl space.

And found a problem.

Turns out that heat wasn’t our only issue. A copper soil pipe had decided to leak, creating a shallow puddle of poop-like material that the repairman wasn’t enthusiastic about crawling through.

Time to call the plumbers.

At one point that day, we had two plumbers under the house in the crawl space, replacing copper pipe with PVC and two guys bringing back the heat.

The plumbing work went quickly. The heating work was more complicated. Turns out that the English major in me didn’t know about one other component: The auto-fill system.

That’s what had failed.

By about 7 p.m., the work was done. The house was warming up. And our toes were beginning to return to normal.

What can I say? We live in an old, old house.

But we love it.

Now we have to get rid of some of that junk that was in our closets.