This Screwed-Up House - Back to Introduction.
No, you are not looking at the remains of some ancient civilization. What you are actually looking at is the result of Mr. Bullfeather's most ambitious home-business adventure that involved filling every inch of free space in the house with heavy plaster molds intended for ceramics. Rumor has it that there are over 16,000 of these things in all shapes and sizes. (As of 3/1/06, we've hand-moved about 1,800 of them to the newly-constructed storage barn.)
How Mr. Bullfeathers was planning to organize and run an effective business with so many molds is beyond me...Yes, he may have had a rare mold from 1963, but could he find it?
Near as I can tell, bragging about having 16,000 molds was the main point of it all when he filled the house with them about eight years ago. I might add that even two years after his death, this "business investment" is still being paid for while most of these molds have never been touched. Mr. Bullfeathers liked to brag about all his toys and how he was bigger and better than anyone else. Unfortunately for everyone involved in this renovation project, bragging was the only thing he put any effort into doing.
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This is the dining room, one of the first rooms on my list
to clear. In the background you can see some shelves that go
floor-to-ceiling where molds are being stored.
This room is also home to a huge cage that contains a large scarlet Macaw parrot named Scarlet...another of Mr. Bullfeather's bragging toys that he abandoned shortly after obtaining. Scarlet will probably be mentioned a lot because she is a near-constant source of both comedy and agony while we're working in the house. If you know anything about Macaws, you'll know that they are wonderful mimics. Scarlet now imitates power tools and asks us how we are doing every few minutes. Macaws are also prone to screaming their heads off at least twice a day. We've found that music seems to keep her occupied. This room was also home to about a dozen spiders that I dislike so much. |
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Speaking of spiders, we started a campaign against them, complete with a score board that is tacked up in the kitchen to mark down every spider we destroy. As of 3/1/06, we have forty of the little buggers. (A good many of them being the dangerous kind.) Technically, we've gotten many more than that, but we didn't start recording our kills until the beginning of February. I think the spiders are getting the hint though, since we haven't seen a single one over the last weekend of February when we cleared out the Recreation Room. |
| This, by the way, is the Recreation Room. A huge mountain of
jumbled molds that towered high with only a small foot-wide walkway running
across the room. This room saw many avalanches over the last weekend in
February as we took these molds out. On the final count, there were about
860 molds in this room, half of which weighed at least 30 pounds each and
some exceeding well over 60 pounds. Amazingly, the ceramic tile floor underneath was not damaged by the weight of so many tons of molds on it all these years. We've already encountered one cracked and sunken floor in one of the bathrooms, a story I will tell later on. Just to give you an idea of the process of removing molds - each mold has to be recorded (number, manufacturer, and type) before it is hauled out to the back of the truck, driven to the barn, then restacked in the ever-growing pile there. The average truckload is between 40-60 molds, and an eight-hour day generally gets about 3 truckloads before we lose daylight. It's a slow process. Fortunately, my brother was kind enough to come down and lend a hand for tackling this particular room, so we were able to clear it in about three days. |
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This is the Florida Room, by far the most damaged room we've
seen to date. At one time, before the molds arrived, Mr. Bullfeathers decided to make this room into a recreational area to impress guests, complete with hot tub and bar. Unfortunately, he used untreated wood for the bar which meant it was quick to rot in the humid Florida climate that was further encouraged by a lot of hot water nearby. The tub itself had fallen into severe disrepair by the time we came in. The dirty, standing water was breeding countless generations of flying insects, and the whole side of the wall was literally rotting away. The deck outside was completely destroyed. Moving the molds out of this room was a true peril. Asides from the numerous spiders that made their homes here, there was also the danger of falling through the floor that was rotting away. The 2004 hurricanes had done further damage to an already falling apart roof that made it all the more dangerous to work in here. Once the molds were moved from here, there was no saving this room. A bulldozer took it out a few days later. We plan to rebuild and restore it to its former glory... using the correct materials. |
| Aren't you impressed with Mr. Bullfeathers? And just
think, this is only one of the many get-rich-quick-in-home-business schemes
that he had going on. The thing that really gets my goat about all this is that we are doing EXACTLY what he wanted. We are getting all these organized and put away. He never intended to move and organize all these himself - that would involve physical labor! His plan was to get other people to do it for him, and these molds would just lay around the house until someone did something about them. I'm just glad he's dead and can't gloat over how his master plan was working in regards to organizing this monstrous mess. Know anyone who's into ceramics? I'm going to be selling all these molds (and a few kilns) off as soon as I get everything organized.
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This Screwed-Up House - Back to Introduction.
