Li'l Buggers

By Kathleen Fisher

I try to avert my eyes. Sometimes this works. More often, they're like the itch you know you shouldn't scratch or the funny bump in your mouth that your tongue just has to explore.

A house of any age has them: Those odd little imperfections that loom out of all proportion to their actual size, those missing parts that could dance on the head of a pin yet yawn like the Grand Canyon in terms of the time and energy it will take to actually deal with them. But old houses have oh so many more. That's because the manufacturer of that one missing switch plate closed its doors in 1931, or the window stop that was destroyed by inserting an air conditioning unit had been carefully shaped with a hand plane. My own weekend projectÑa 1924 farmhouseÑis a virtual cakewalk compared to an intricate Queen Anne with seven bedrooms and two parlors. Yet it harbors a healthy enough collection of examples, many of which have haunted me since our purchase more than (gasp!) nine years ago.

As befits a simple building, it boasts few fanciful flourishes. One exception is the dining room ceiling light, a three-tiered confection of a glass globe and an inverted bowl that appears to have begun life as an oil lamp, trimmed in copper lace and dripping with 38 crystals. The problem is that it should have about 50 crystals, and the additional eight are missing in rows that make it look like a dowager with no dental plan.

Now these are not rare crystals. A year or so ago I plucked an exact match from among discarded vodka bottles and other detritus in an urban park. Yet when I happen upon crystals in an antiques shop they're invariably of another shape and size. (I dimly recall entire Saturdays of wandering among Louis XV armoires and Shaker hutches just to while away the time. Today, when there are pressing and practical needsÑepoxy to halt railing rot or a gasket to make a noisy toilet pipe down, so to speakÑa 10-minute sprint through a flea market is a rare treat.) In an upstairs bedroom is another chandelier a bit out of character with this sober-sided structure. In perfect condition when we took over, it lost a bobeche one evening when a fierce rainstorm unleashed a fire-hydrantlike torrent into a window and my well-meaning son, then 11, ran in swinging a heavy towel. The only bobeches I've found since have a hole too big and hooks for one dangling crystal too many.

And so it goes. We took down two brass bells from the front and back porches in order to paint, and when it came time to put them back up, the bracket for one was missing. In repositioning the upstairs commode so it was more than an inch away from the outside wall we created a 6? hole in the otherwise salvageable flooring, which is far narrower and much thinner than anything made today, except perhaps for Cheez-Its.

I know what you may be thinking: I work at Old-House Journal. Surely I can find anything! It's not so much that these things aren't out thereÑit's the hassle factor. We all have much bigger fish to fry, like entire kitchens to gut, collapsing porches to resurrect, slate roofs to replace. And perhaps also jobs, families, and occasional dirty clothes to wash. In my case, I spend a certain amount of time wringing my hands over our readers' dilemmas: Can you help me replace my mechanical doorbell? My 1895 wood stove is missing its feet, my 1908 Hoosier cabinet is missing its head. I feel your pain.

This phenomenon deserves a name. Like The Mushroom FactorÑcoined by OHJ two decades ago to describe the way a seemingly modest repair quickly balloons into something all-encompassing and monstrously expensiveÑit seems to beg for a catchy buzzword that let's us communicate our angst in shorthand. The Pinhole Problem? The Molehill Menace? Both of these imply something that grows or even threatens. My gap-toothed chandelier, on the otherhand, just hangs thereÑsilently, endlessly, mocking me over Sunday brunch. I keep my eyes positioned on my soft-boiled egg.


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